Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,45

hoped she was willing to share that Duke had lost it, but in the end, I guess that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the state cops helped us delay long enough to either kill Bobby Marchand with a clear conscience or save him.

15

IF THE LIVING room was big, this room was cavernous. I’d never been in a regular house that had a room this large. Jean-Claude and I had looked at some wedding venues that had ballrooms, and even most of them weren’t as big as Ray Marchand’s study. It was big and dark, with only a handful of lamps around the room giving off golden pools that seemed to make more shadows rather than illuminate the darkness. Maybe the smells of blood and death in the air made the room feel grim. Maybe, but I’d have given a lot for an overhead light. There were chairs and a couch that looked like leather, more masculine versions of the living room furniture. There were two lamps: one beside the couch and the other, a reading lamp, curved over the back of the room’s comfiest and highest-backed chair, which was closest to the fireplace. That chair looked cozy. I shone my flashlight near it and found beside it a short stack of books on a table. Very cozy. I caught a shape at the edge of the light and had my gun out and pointed before I’d really shone the light full on it.

My heart was in my throat, beating so hard, it almost choked me as I stared into the eyes of a full-grown bobcat. Newman said, “Don’t shoot. It’s stuffed,” about the time I’d already decided that the yellow eyes staring at me were glass.

“Shit,” I said softly but with feeling.

“There’s a lot of taxidermy in here,” Newman said, and swept his flashlight up along the right side of the room to show a herd of animal heads on the wall.

I recognized water buffalo and more kinds of antelope, or maybe they were gazelles, than I could name, all silent and staring, their horns curving gracefully in the still air. The rhino head did not look graceful; it just looked big. There was a pair of lion heads—a big maned male and a lioness snarling beside him. She looked shorn next to her mate. My own inner lion flared to life just at a glimpse of amber eyes in the darkness of my mind or maybe my gut. I had a second of smelling the sun and heat on grass halfway around the world that I’d never smelled as a human being, and then it was gone. The leopard head didn’t seem to offend my inner one, because it didn’t react.

“Wait until you see what’s in the corner,” Newman said. I joined my flashlight beam to his, and we swept across animal heads from almost every continent, and then in the corner was the showstopper: a full-grown elephant. I mean a full-size bull elephant complete with tusks gleaming in the dark like huge white fangs.

“Well, fuck,” I said.

“Elegant as always,” Newman said. He was smiling when I glanced at him.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying the stuffed toys,” Leduc said, “but could you look at the blood and actual crime scene?”

He seemed offended that I’d ignored the signs of new death to goggle at the old. But I’d seen more wereanimal attacks than I could count now. I’d never seen this many taxidermied animals outside of a natural history museum. I mean, who has a stuffed adult African elephant in their house? It was u-fucking-nique.

But I dutifully moved toward him in the plastic booties that we were all wearing so we wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. If it had been a normal warrant of execution, we might not even have bothered, because what did it matter if we contaminated everything if we were just going to shoot someone and leave?

The blood was beside a huge wooden desk that dominated the center of the room. The desk was obviously an antique. It had that rich, much-loved patina to it that only time and care will give to wood, like the banister on this side of the house. The wooden printer stands were nice but modern. The wooden file cabinets were a mix of old and new. They formed a half wall behind the big leather office chair. It was a complete office in the middle of the room; its “floor” was differentiated by a large square Persian or Oriental, or whatever