Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,8

skin. Even a shower wouldn’t get it all now. I knew from experience that if you didn’t wear gloves when there was that much blood, it was a serious bitch to get it cleaned out from around your nails. Under your nails you could do, but the cuticles and the edges of the nails were the challenge. It was just his hands that were covered in dried blood; it didn’t go past either wrist. In that moment I believed that Bobby Marchand was being framed. Whoever had done the blood evidence on him hadn’t known that if someone plunged bare hands into a still living body, or even a freshly dead one, the blood wouldn’t stop neatly at the wrists. It would climb up the arms, and there would be blood spatter on the chest, not the thick coating that someone had painted on Bobby. It was all wrong, but unless you’d seen as many lycanthrope kills as I had, or waded through enough gory murder scenes, you wouldn’t think about the right things. You wouldn’t know where to put the blood.

“How am I supposed to be, Win? I killed Uncle Ray.”

“We’re not convinced of that, Bobby. I’m still gathering evidence,” Newman said.

Bobby turned those blue eyes in their gory mask to the sheriff. “Duke, you told me I did it. You told me I killed Uncle Ray.”

“I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m really sorry, but we found you covered in his blood, and you’re the only wereanimal in these parts.”

Bobby looked back at Newman. “Duke is right. If a wereanimal killed Uncle Ray, then it has to be me. There isn’t another shapeshifter for a hundred miles.”

“Let us worry about finding other suspects, Bobby. I just need to make sure you don’t do anything stupid while I’m out there trying to prove you’re innocent.”

“Now, Win,” Leduc said, “don’t get the boy’s hopes up like that.”

I debated on whether to remark on the blood evidence now, but I wanted to tell Newman in private first. He’d known the blood wasn’t right, but he didn’t have my field experience to say exactly why it was wrong. This was his warrant, his case, and, almost more important, his hometown, his friends. I didn’t want to undercut his authority here. I wanted to know only one thing: Had they photographed the blood patterns on the prisoner? I wasn’t besmirching Leduc and his people’s police work, but when you know a warrant of execution has been issued, sometimes even the best officers don’t collect evidence like they would in a regular murder case. I mean, what’s the point? There’s never going to be a trial.

“I don’t mean to get your hopes up, Bobby, but I believe there’s a chance you didn’t do this. That’s why I called in a more experienced marshal to look over your case.”

“It’s commendable that you want to be sure, Win, but you wasted Marshal Blake’s time getting her up here,” Leduc said.

Deputy Anthony and Bobby both said, “Blake,” at the same time. They looked at each other, then back at me as she said, “Anita Blake?” and he said, “Not Anita Blake?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” I was the scourge of the supernatural set, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that Bobby Marchand recognized my name, but I wasn’t always on the hit parade for nonmarshal local law enforcement, especially for local law enforcement, LEOs, in more rural areas.

“You’re here to kill me, because Win doesn’t want to have to do it,” Bobby said, and he seemed completely defeated. There wasn’t even any fear that I could detect, and there should have been. Even guilty people are afraid to die. The sheriff might be right about the suicide risk after all.

“How do the two of you know Marshal Blake?” Leduc asked.

“She’s our bogeyman. If you break the law, she’s who they send to kill you,” Bobby said, voice thick with sorrow, but still no nervousness, just a hopelessness as if it were already over.

“I’m just one marshal from the preternatural branch, not the only one,” I said.

Deputy Anthony said, “You still have the highest number of successful executions in the entire preternatural branch.”

“I was part of the old vampire hunter system years before I got grandfathered into the Marshals Service, so I had a head start.”

She shook her head. “Even Death doesn’t have as high a kill count as you do, and he started earlier than you did.”

If Marshal Ted (Edward) Forrester and I weren’t best friends and partners, it would probably bother him