Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,52

serious tomboy and tried to keep up with Bobby even though he was a couple of years older.”

I looked at the picture with her reclining against Bobby’s leopard. She looked like a slightly darker version of her mother, which meant she was beautiful. There was an unfinished look to her face that only age and experience would cure, but from the bone structure to the curve of her mouth and the big, dark eyes, she had everything she needed to be devastatingly gorgeous.

I turned so I’d be where the office chair was. The chair was so out of place that I didn’t have to move it to stand close to the main desk. I’d have rolled it over and sat in it so I could have the actual view that Ray Marchand had when he was working, but in case this turned into an actual murder case with evidence gathering like with a normal crime, I didn’t want to contaminate anything. I was wearing booties and gloves, not a full-on coverall, so no sitting or leaning.

“He set this room up so that he could see anything that came through the door,” I said.

“So whoever came through the door to kill him was someone he trusted,” Newman said.

“Statistically it usually is,” I said.

“If I believed all the stats on violent crime, I’d be a hermit in the woods and avoid all humans,” Newman said.

“Look up the stats on death by household accidents. Even living alone is dangerous,” I said, but I was looking out from the desk toward the door as I said it. I’d noticed that detectives did that at crime scenes, talking without looking at you, as if the conversation wasn’t as important as what they were looking at and thinking in their heads. When I started helping the police, I thought it was weird, but now I understood that the conversation was like background music to help your brain work on the niggling idea that’s almost a clue if you can just drag it out into the front of your head. But it’s like the things you see out of the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they vanish.

“Did you look through the drawers yet?” I asked.

“No, I mean . . . this was someone I knew.” The tone in his voice made me look at him so I could see the embarrassment on his face.

“It’s okay, Newman. Was this the first time you’ve seen someone you know dead from violence?”

He shook his head. “My first was one of the officers that helped train me. He was the first person I saw killed by a wereanimal.” His eyes had closed down, face grim with remembering.

“Is that why you wanted to become a marshal with our branch?”

He nodded, face still bleak. That’s the best word I have for his expression. Victims and first responders can look haunted sometimes, but there’s a certain look that only people in uniform who have seen the big bad get in their eyes. Bleak is the closest word I’ve found to what it looks like, even in a mirror.

“You never forget the first time you see the amount of damage that supernatural strength can do,” I said.

“Which is one of the things wrong with the way Ray was killed,” he said. The bleakness in his eyes began to fade to something closer to depressed anger or angry depression. You stay on the job long enough, you have your own version of it.

“I’ve seen the crime scene photos,” I said, “and the murder was bloody and awful, but it didn’t take superstrength to do it.”

“I admit that when I first saw Ray lying there, all I saw was the blood and the damage to the body. It wasn’t until we started taking pictures to help us get the warrant that I realized the blood wasn’t hiding more damage. Usually there’re pieces torn off, eaten. The victim is savaged, so when they start picking it up to wrap it up for transport, I expect bits to fall off the body.”

“Yeah, sometimes the damage isn’t obvious until you start trying to move it,” I said.

“The body was too intact, Blake. It was too . . . whole. I told that to Duke, and he told me I was crazy. Wasn’t Ray’s throat being torn open enough damage?”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. I’ve never seen a wereanimal kill that was that clean. Vampire yes, but not a shapeshifter.”

“Exactly,” Newman said.

“The sheriff says he’s seen