Deep Dark Secret

Since there was no warmth involved in what went on inside, nothing but the misery radiated onto the exterior surfaces. In the same way a plain building used for happier purposes, like a daycare or a charity headquarters, would look much warmer and more inviting.

Empathetic magic was a funny thing, something even the most mundane of humans were impacted by.

This building didn’t need any wards or magic spells to tell passersby it wasn’t a fun place. The structure screamed of pain and death. There were a lot of angry souls here, coming and going, waiting to be avenged. I wasn’t a big fan of ghosts, and I wasn’t thrilled about going somewhere we were almost sure to find them.

It was like being afraid of snakes and walking into the reptile house at a zoo.

But it wasn’t the ghosts I was here to see. I’d only ever met one who’d been of any use to me, and she was long gone. The rest of them were mute specters, glaring indignantly and rattling their proverbial chains. They gave me the willies. No, I was here for the bodies, not the spirits.

“Cheery place,” Nolan said.

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s not so bad,” Brigit chimed in, always trying to be the silver lining, no matter how black the cloud. “I mean…the…uh…” She screwed up her face and stared at the building, attempting to find the indefinable thing that might make it redeemable. Given enough time, she could find something nice to say about Mussolini, even if it was just that his name rhymed with fettuccine. “The doors are awfully pretty,” she concluded.

The doors were a nice touch. Big, dark wood, they were intricately carved with depictions of angels on one side and devils on another. Quite a fancy statement piece for a place where bodies got diced up into their component bits.

I sent Brigit in first so she could convince the desk clerk we were expected. Given my success with Gabriel earlier in the evening, I might have been able to do it myself, but Brigit could turn the thrall on and off like a light bulb. She’d been a vampire less than a year, and she was already proving to be a natural at being undead.

A few minutes later she stepped back through the doors and waved us in. The desk clerk smiled at us like we were old friends. He was a plump, blond man with patchy red skin, but his smile was the warmest I’d seen all night.

“Have fun, y’all.” His head bobbed like he was agreeing with his own statement.

Brigit patted him on the cheek as we passed and slipped his magnetic keycard out of his front pocket. My little ward, a grownup. Made my heart glow with a peculiar sort of pride.

Beside the elevator bay was a black board with white letters on it announcing which offices and departments were on which floor. The main autopsy bays and body storage, more politely called “Processing” and “Morgue”, were located on the second basement level. I knew a few morgues around town where they’d started storing bodies on the higher levels, in better-lit rooms. Those were favorites of the vampire council, because any dead vamps who ended up there turned to ash come daylight.

I wanted to see if there was anything on these girls that might indicate something otherworldly had killed them. Anything other than Gabriel. It wasn’t common for me to cross my fingers and hope a vampire had killed someone, but at least if that was the case, swift justice was at my disposal. I wouldn’t even need to make a phone call to issue the warrant. That power was mine now.

We rode the elevator down, and I tried to ignore Brigit and Nolan’s cutesy whispering and playful touching. I couldn’t wrap my head around the two of them as a couple. The door opened into a sterile white hallway that reeked of ammonia and bleach. Our shoes squeaked on the floor as we moved, it was so clean. There were four doors, one on each side of the elevator, and a matching one across the hall from those. Each was marked with a number and a chart on the door to indicate the bodies held within.

“We’re looking for Fitzpatrick, Keller and Ferris,” I informed them.

The three of us split up to check the doors for the corresponding names. I hit pay dirt on the last door. All three women and one Jane Doe were stored within. Brigit used her stolen keycard to provide us access to the room. Inside, the room temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than the hall outside.

All the better to keep your corpses fresh with, my dear.

Built into the back wall were six metal cabinets. In the middle of the floor was a table on wheels, a light stand and an empty instrument tray. On one side of the room were several glass-paneled storage units containing everything from cotton balls and rubber gloves to scalpels and bone saws. I knew what was in each cabinet because the doors contained a meticulous list of the contents.

The antiseptic smell was stronger in here than in the hall as well. I opened one of the storage cabinets and handed Nolan and Brigit each a pair of rubber surgical gloves before putting on my own. I didn’t need us leaving anything behind that might prove we’d been in this room. Fingerprints in the elevator and the exterior hall were one thing—anyone could get there and likely dozens of people a day touched those surfaces. A poorly placed fingerprint on a body, on the other hand, could lead to some unpleasant implications.

The middle two drawers on the back wall were unmarked, which led me to believe they must be empty. I started with Trish Keller, who was in the top left-hand drawer. Lucky for me and my stunted growth, the top drawer came out at chest height, so I didn’t need to find a stepladder to get a good look at the body.

She was sheathed in an opaque white bag, which I unzipped to reveal her naked, blue-gray body. Nolan made a small noise, but Brigit leaned over my shoulder to get a better view.

“Ew,” she said, summarizing my own feelings with perfect brevity.

“Just think, Bri, you could have looked like this too if I hadn’t intervened.”

“Thanks.”

I’d been teasing, but her gratitude sounded genuine. When she’d first been turned, she wanted to kill me for it. Now she seemed legitimately thankful.

“Nolan, can you find me the chart for Trish Keller?” I pointed to the door where several metal clipboards were sorted into their own divider slots next to the magnetic swipe pad. There were six slots and only four folders, confirming my suspicion about the empty drawers.

He came back and tried to hand me the clipboard, but I was too busy scanning Trish’s body for any sign of partially healed vampire bites or other supernatural residue.

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” he asked.

“See if there’s anything unusual in her blood work. Elevated levels of adrenaline. Higher than usual concentrations of hormones. A higher than usual amount of testosterone.” As I listed each telltale sign of shapeshifter blood, Nolan replied in the negative. Trish’s blood was clean, with the exception of high blood alcohol and traces of cocaine.

Maybe it was naive, but I figured girls at Ivy League schools were less likely to have hard drugs in their systems. College was certainly different than I gleaned from watching Animal House and Road Trip, if doing lines of blow was more common than doing keg stands. If Gabriel wasn’t responsible for Trish’s death, maybe her party lifestyle had contributed to her murder. It was definitely something to consider.

I zipped her bag and continued the search, next checking Angie Ferris, who was rooming downstairs from Trish. Same thing, no signs of bites or violence, nothing weird in her blood. By the time we’d pulled out Misty’s body I was giving up hope of finding proof that would clear Gabriel. These girls had died of something natural. Sure, it was still murder, but their killer didn’t appear to be anything more than a normal, messed-up human.

We stowed Misty’s body, and I was about to call it a night, when I looked at Jane Doe’s locker above Misty’s. Why was this girl in here with them? The other three made sense, because they were a part of an ongoing investigation, but what about the unknown?

“Nolan, grab Jane Doe’s chart for me, please.”

He didn’t ask any questions, just went to grab the clipboard as I opened the final cabinet and pulled the sliding tray out.

The first thing I noticed was potentially more disturbing than anything we’d seen with the other girls thus far. It wasn’t anything about the condition of her body—she looked like most dead girls do. You know…pasty, cold, generally corpsey. What creeped me out about Jane Doe was something much more mundane.

I knew her.

I didn’t know her name, but the mousy brown hair and the chubby roundness of her features came screaming back to me. We’d locked eyes across a dim office, right before she’d jumped out a third-floor window at the museum earlier that week. But I knew perfectly well the fall hadn’t killed her. I’d checked for a body.

Yet this was the same girl.

“Nothin’ in the blood,” Nolan told me before I asked.

“I don’t want to know about her blood.”

“Whatcha wanna know?”

“What’s her date of death?”

“Uhh.” He paged through the sheets until he found what he was looking for. “Says she died ‘bout two weeks ‘go.”

“No.” I shook my head and took the clipboard from him. “That can’t be right. I saw this girl a few days ago, and she was very alive then.” But he wasn’t mistaken. The Medical Examiner clearly believed her body had been dead for over two weeks. It had only been found the previous day, however.

“If she’s been dead for two weeks, shouldn’t she, like, be rotting or something?” Brigit queried.

She had a good point. There should be more decomposition happening, but the girl appeared to be well-preserved. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I remembered something else about her from the night we’d encountered one another.

Since Nolan was now the one standing closest to the body, I asked, “Can you unzip the bag so I can see her shoulder?”

He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose but didn’t argue with me.

If this was the same girl I’d encountered at the museum, she should show some sign of the gunshot I’d landed on her shoulder. I needed to know if it really was the same girl and not my mind playing tricks on me.