Definitely Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #6)(26)
Author: Charlaine Harris

The police station was much like I expected it to be. Though there’s a lot to be said for Shreveport, it has more than its fair share of crime. We didn’t excite much attention at all, until officers who’d been on the scene put their heads together with police in the building, and then there were a few stolen glances at Quinn, some surreptitious evaluations. He was formidable-looking enough for them to credit ordinary strength as the source of his defeat of the two muggers. But there was just enough strangeness about the incident, enough peculiar touches in the eyewitness reports… and then my eye caught a familiar weathered face. Uh-oh.

"Detective Coughlin," I said, remembering now why the name had sounded familiar.

"Miss Stackhouse," he responded, with about as much enthusiasm as I had shown. "What you been up to?"

"We got mugged," I explained.

"Last time I saw you, you were engaged to Alcide Herveaux, and you’d just found one of the most sickening corpses I’ve ever seen," he said easily. His belly seemed to have gotten even bigger in the few months since I’d met him at a murder scene here in Shreveport. Like many men with a disproportionate belly, he wore his khaki pants buttoned underneath the overhang, so to speak. Since his shirt had broad blue and white stripes, the effect was that of a tent overhanging packed dirt.

I just nodded. There was really nothing to say.

"Mr. Herveaux doing okay after the loss of his father?" Jackson Herveaux’s body had been found half-in, half-out of a feed tank filled with water on an old farm belonging to the family. Though the newspaper had tap-danced around some of the injuries, it was clear wild animals had chewed at some of the bones. The theory was that the older Herveaux had fallen into the tank and broken his leg when he hit the bottom. He had managed to get to the edge and haul himself halfway out, but at that point he had passed out. Since no one knew he’d visited the farm, no one came to his rescue, the theory went, and he’d died all by himself.

Actually, a large crowd had witnessed Jackson’s demise, among them the man beside me.

"I haven’t talked to Alcide since his dad was found," I said truthfully.

"My goodness, I’m sure sorry that didn’t work out," Detective Coughlin said, pretending he didn’t see that I was standing with my date for the evening. "You two sure made a nice-looking couple."

"Sookie is pretty no matter who she’s with," Quinn said.

I smiled up at him, and he smiled back. He was sure making all the right moves.

"So if you’ll come with me for a minute, Miss Stackhouse, we’ll get your story down on paper and you can leave."

Quinn’s hand tightened on mine. He was warning me. Wait a minute, who was the mind reader around here? I squeezed right back. I was perfectly aware that Detective Coughlin thought I must be guilty of something, and he’d do his best to discover what. But in fact, I was not guilty.

We had been the targets, I’d picked that from the attackers’ brains. But why?

Detective Coughlin led me to a desk in a roomful of desks, and he fished a form out of a drawer. The business of the room continued; some of the desks were unoccupied and had that "closed for the night" look, but others showed signs of work in progress. There were a few people coming in and out of the room, and two desks away, a younger detective with short white-blond hair was busily typing on his computer. I was being very careful, and I’d opened my mind, so I knew he was looking at me when I was looking in another direction, and I knew he’d been positioned there by Detective Coughlin, or at least prodded to get a good hard look at me while I was in the room.

I met his eyes squarely. The shock of recognition was mutual. I’d seen him at the packmaster contest. He was a Were. He’d acted as Patrick Furnan’s second in the duel. I’d caught him cheating. Maria-Star had told me his punishment had been having his head shaved. Though his candidate won, this punishment had been exacted, and his hair was just now growing in. He hated me with the passion of the guilty. He half rose from his chair, his first instinct being to come over to me and beat the crap out of me, but when he absorbed the fact that someone had already tried to do that, he smirked.

"Is that your partner?" I asked Detective Coughlin.

"What?" He’d been peering at the computer through reading glasses, and he glanced over at the younger man, then back at me. "Yeah, that’s my new partner. The guy I was with at the last crime scene I saw you at, he retired last month."

"What’s his name? Your new partner?"

"Why, you going after him next? You can’t seem to settle on one man, can you, Miss Stackhouse?"

If I’d been a vampire, I could have made him answer me, and if I were really skilled, he wouldn’t even know he’d done it.

"It’s more like they cant settle on me, Detective Coughlin," I said, and he gave me a curious look. He waved a finger toward the blond detective.

"That’s Cal. Cal Myers." He seemed to have called up the right form, because he began to take me through the incident once again, and I answered his questions with genuine indifference. For once, I had very little to hide.

"I did wonder," I said, when we’d concluded, "if they’d taken drugs."

"You know much about drugs, Miss Stackhouse?" His little eyes went over me again.

"Not firsthand, but of course, from time to time someone comes into the bar who’s taken something they shouldn’t. These young men definitely seemed… influenced by something."

"Well, the hospital will take their blood, and we’ll know."

"Will I have to come back?"

"To testify against them? Sure."

No way out of it. "Okay," I said, as firmly and neutrally as I could. "We through here?"

"I guess we are." He met my eyes, his own little brown eyes full of suspicion. There was no point in my resenting it; he was absolutely right, there was something fishy about me, something he didn’t know. Coughlin was doing his best to be a good cop. I felt suddenly sorry for him, floundering through a world he only knew the half of.

"Don’t trust your partner," I whispered, and I expected him to blow up and call Cal Myers over and ridicule me to him. But something in my eyes or my voice arrested that impulse. My words spoke to a warning that had been sounding surreptitiously in his brain, maybe from the moment he’d met the Were.

He didn’t say anything, not one word. His mind was full of fear, fear and loathing… but he believed I was telling him the truth. After a second, I got up and left the squad room. To my utter relief, Quinn was waiting for me in the lobby.

A patrolman – not Boling – took us back to Quinn’s car, and we were silent during the drive. Quinn’s car was sitting in solitary splendor in the parking lot across from the Strand, which was closed and dark. He pulled out his keys and hit the keypad to open the doors, and we got in slowly and wearily.