Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,11

it this way.

“Are you sure these are all the pictures I need?”

He nodded again but stared at the floor.

“Bobby,” I said, “what aren’t you telling me?”

He shook his head this time, still staring at the floor.

“Bobby, is there blood evidence somewhere else on your body?”

He went very still in the way that trauma victims can go deep inside themselves as if they believe that if they’re still enough, quiet enough, they won’t have to answer any more questions. If they go away in plain sight, then the worst thing won’t happen or won’t have to be shared. Everything about him screamed victim, not perpetrator. What the hell was going on here? What had happened to Bobby Marchand to make him react like this? I’d ask Newman later in private if Bobby was usually this quiet and withdrawn; if he was, then that usually indicated long-term abuse. If it wasn’t normal for him, then something bad had happened to him very recently, like yesterday recently. Maybe waking up covered in blood and being accused of murdering the only father you’ve ever known would be enough? Yeah, that sounded like enough. I was just used to looking for horrors, as if tragedy alone wasn’t enough.

“Bobby, we’re trying to help prove that you didn’t kill your uncle. Don’t you want us to prove that?” I asked softly, gently, the way you do with victims when you don’t want to spook them.

He answered, still staring at the floor, “If I killed Uncle Ray, I don’t want you to save me.”

“But if you didn’t kill your uncle Ray, then someone else did, Bobby. Don’t you want to catch them?”

He looked at me then, eyes startled, but trying to see me, really see me. He looked into my eyes—trying to see if I meant it, I think.

Sheriff Leduc said, “Don’t you go lying to him, Marshal. He did it, and he’s going to have to die for it. Giving him false hope is just . . . cruel.”

Bobby looked at Leduc. “You know I did it, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m truly sorry, but I know what I know. I know what I saw at your house.”

Bobby started to look down at the ground again, but I waved a hand in front of his face so close that he startled back from it. He frowned at me, a moment of anger flashing through his eyes. And with that anger came the faintest warmth of his beast, like the hint of heat when you walk too close to an oven. There’s no need to open the door to know it’ll burn you.

My own inner beast rose toward his. Oh, I knew the oven was on, but there was something sweet baking inside it, and my own inner leopard wanted to find out if it was cookies or cake. I had better control than that normally, but something about Bobby had unsettled me.

His eyes went wide with surprise. “How can you be . . .” he started to whisper, and then stopped himself, glancing toward the officers outside the bars. He thought I was a wereleopard like him, but he didn’t want to out me. It was still legal grounds for dismissal from most police forces or military. The preternatural branch was the exception, but Bobby didn’t know that. Just like he couldn’t have known that I carried multiple strands of lycanthropy inside me, but never changed form. The doctors thought that catching so many types of the disease so close together had made me a medical miracle, so I was a carrier but didn’t have a full-blown case of any of the inner beasts I carried.

I stared into his blue eyes in their mask of blood and said, “There’s more blood on you somewhere, isn’t there, Bobby?”

“Yes,” he whispered as he met my gaze.

“Show me, Bobby, please.”

“I don’t want everyone to see,” he whispered, voice even lower.

Newman said, “Can you give us some privacy, Duke, Frankie?”

“Privacy, what the hell do you need privacy for? We brought Bobby in here jaybird naked. We seen the show.”

Bobby flinched at that and went back to looking at the floor. What little animation had been in his face just drained away.

“Humor us, Sheriff,” I said.

“I won’t leave you in there alone with him unarmed, but we can turn our backs if that will help.”

“If that’s the most privacy we can get, then we’ll take it,” I said.

The sheriff turned his broad back first, thumbs in his duty belt. He had to