Dead and Gone ss(v-9 Page 6

  I didn’t have the slightest idea how to react. All I could do was fetch a Kleenex from the box in my car and shove it in his hand. I hadn’t seen Jason cry in years. Had he even cried when Gran had died? Maybe he really had loved Crystal. Maybe it hadn’t been solely wounded pride that had caused him to set up her exposure as an adulteress. He’d fixed it so both her uncle Calvin and I would catch her in the act. I’d been so disgusted and furious with being forced to be a witness—and with the consequences—that I’d avoided Jason for weeks. Crystal’s death had shunted aside that anger, at least for the moment.

  “She’s beyond that now,” I said.

  Calvin’s battered truck pulled up on the other side of my car. Quicker than my eye could track, he stood in front of me, while Tanya Grissom scrambled out the other side. A stranger looked out of Calvin’s eyes. Normally a peculiar yellowish color, those eyes were now almost golden, and the irises were so large that there was almost no visible white. His pupils had elongated. He was not even wearing a light jacket. It made me cold to look at him in more ways than one.

  I held up my hands. “I’m so sorry, Calvin,” I said. “You need to know Jason didnot do this.” I looked up, not too far, to meet his eerie eyes. Calvin was a little grayer now than he’d been when I’d first met him several years ago, and a little stockier. He still looked solid and dependable and tough.

  “I need to smell her,” he said, ignoring my words. “They have to let me back there to smell her. I’ll know.”

  “Come on then; we’ll go tell them that,” I said, because not only was that a good idea, but also I wanted to keep him away from Jason. At least Jason was smart enough to stay on the far side of my car. I took Calvin’s arm and we began to walk around the building, only to be stopped by the crime scene tape.

  Bud Dearborn moved over to the other side of the tape when he saw us. “Calvin, I know you’re rattled, and I’m real sorry about your niece,” he began, and with a flash of claw Calvin ripped down the tape and began walking over to the cross.

  Before he’d gotten three steps, the two FBI agents moved to intercept him. Suddenly they were on the ground. There was a lot of shouting and tumult, and then Calvin was being held back by Bud, Andy, and Alcee, with Lattesta and Weiss trying to assist from their undignified positions.

  “Calvin,” Bud Dearborn wheezed. Bud was not a young man, and it was clear that holding Calvin back was taking every bit of strength he possessed. “You gotta stay away, Calvin. Any evidence we collect is gonna be tainted if you don’t stay away from the body.” I was astonished at Bud’s restraint. I would have expected him to crack Calvin in the head with his baton or a flashlight. Instead, he seemed as sympathetic as a strained and taxed man could be. For the first time, I understood that I wasn’t the only one who’d known about the secret of the Hotshot community. Bud’s wrinkled hand patted Calvin’s arm in a gesture of consolation. Bud took care to avoid touching Calvin’s claws. Special Agent Lattesta noticed them, and he drew in a harsh breath, making an incoherent warning noise.

  “Bud,” Calvin said, and his voice came out in a growl, “if you can’t let me over there now, I have to smell her when they take her down. I’m trying to catch the scent of the ones who did this.”

  “I’ll see if you can do that,” Bud said steadily. “For right now, buddy, we got to get you out of here because they gotta pick up all this evidence around here, evidence that’ll stand up in court. You got to stay away from her. Okay?”

  Bud had never cared for me, nor I for him, but at that moment I sure thought well of him.

  After a long moment, Calvin nodded. Some of the tension went out of his shoulders. Everyone who was holding on to him eased up on their grip.

  Bud said, “You stay out front; we’ll call you. You got my word.”

  “All right,” Calvin said. The law enforcement crowd let go. Calvin let me put my arm around him. Together, we turned to make for the front parking lot. Tanya was waiting for him, tension in every line of her body. She’d had the same expectations I’d had: that Calvin was going to get a good beating.

  “Jason didn’t do this,” I said again.

  “I don’t care about your brother,” he said, turning those strange eyes on me. “He doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think he killed her.”

  It was clear that he thought my anxiety about Jason was blocking my concern about the real problem, the death of his niece. It was clear he didn’t appreciate that. I had to respect his feelings, so I shut my mouth.

  Tanya took his hands, claws and all. “Will they let you go over her?” she asked. Her eyes never left Calvin’s face. I might as well not have been there.

  “When they take the body down,” he said.

  It would be so great if Calvin could identify the culprit. Thank God the werecreatures had come out. But . . . that might have been why Crystal had been killed.

  “You think you’ll be able to get a scent?” Tanya said. Her voice was quiet, intent. She was more serious than I’d ever seen her in our spotty acquaintance. She put her arms around Calvin, and though he was not a tall man, she only reached his upper sternum. She looked up at him.

  “I’ll get a score of scents after all these folks have touched her. I can only try to match them all. I wish I’d been here first.” He held Tanya as if he needed to lean on someone.

  Jason was standing a yard away, waiting for Calvin to notice him. His back was stiff, his face frozen. There was an awful moment of silence when Calvin looked over Tanya’s shoulder and noted Jason’s presence.

  I don’t know how Tanya reacted, but every muscle in my body twanged from the tension. Slowly Calvin held out a hand to Jason. Though it was a human hand again, it was obviously battered. The skin was freshly scarred and one of the fingers was slightly bent.

  I had done that. I’d stood up for Jason at his wedding, and Calvin had stood up for Crystal. After Jason had made us witness Crystal’s infidelity, we’d had to stand in for them when the penalty had been pronounced: the maiming of a hand or paw. I’d had to bring a brick down on my friend’s hand. I hadn’t felt the same about Jason since then.

  Jason bent and licked the back of the hand, emphasizing how subservient he was. He did it awkwardly, because he was still new to the ritual. I held my breath. Jason’s eyes were rolled up to keep Calvin’s face in sight. When Calvin nodded, we all relaxed. Calvin accepted Jason’s obeisance.

  “You’ll be in at the kill,” Calvin said, as if Jason had asked him something.

  “Thanks,” Jason said, and then backed away. He stopped when he’d gone a couple of feet. “I want to bury her,” he said.

  “We’ll all bury her,” Calvin said. “When they let us have her back.” There was not a particle of concession in his voice.

  Jason hesitated a moment and then nodded.

  Calvin and Tanya got back in Calvin’s truck. They settled in. Clearly they planned to wait there until the body was brought down from the cross. Jason said, “I’m going home. I can’t stay here.” He seemed almost dazed.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Are you . . . do you plan on staying here?”

  “Yes, I’m in charge of the bar while Sam is gone.”

  “That’s a lot of trust he has in you,” Jason said.

  I nodded. I should feel honored. I did feel honored.

  “Is it true his stepdad shot his mom? That’s what I heard at the Bayou last night.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He didn’t know that Sam’s mom was, you know, a shapeshifter.”

  Jason shook his head. “This coming-out thing,” he said. “I don’t know that’s it been such a good idea after all. Sam’s mom got shot. Crystal is dead. Someone who knew what she was put her up there, Sookie. Maybe they’ll come after me next. Or Calvin. Or Tray Dawson. Or Alcide. Maybe they’ll try to kill us all.”

  I started to say that couldn’t happen, that the people I knew wouldn’t turn on their friends and neighbors because of an accident of birth. But in the end, I didn’t say
that, because I wondered if it was the truth.

  “Maybe they will,” I said, feeling an icy tingle run down my back. I took a deep breath. “But since they didn’t go after the vampires—for the most part—I’m thinking they’ll be able to accept weres of all sorts. At least, I hope so.”

  Mel, wearing the slacks and sports shirt he wore daily at the auto parts place, got out of his car and walked over. I noticed that he was carefully not looking at Calvin, though Jason was still standing right beside the panther’s pickup. “It’s true, then,” Mel said.

  Jason said, “She’s dead, Mel.”

  Mel patted Jason’s shoulder in the awkward way men have when they have to comfort other men. “Come on, Jason. You don’t need to be around here. Let’s go to your house. We’ll have a drink, buddy.”

  Jason nodded, looking dazed. “Okay, let’s go.” After Jason left for home with Mel following right behind, I climbed back in my own vehicle and fished the newspapers for the past few days from the backseat. I often picked them up from the driveway when I came out to go to work, tossed them in the back, and tried to read at least the front page within a reasonable length of time. What with Sam leaving and my business with the bar, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of the news since the weres went public.

  I arranged the papers in order and began to read.

  The public reaction had ranged from the panicked to the calm. Many people claimed they’d had a suspicion that the world contained more than humans and vampires. The vampires themselves were 100 percent behind their furry brethren, at least in public. In my experience, the two major supernatural groups had had a very bumpy relationship. The shifters and Weres mocked the vampires, and the vampires jeered right back. But it looked like the supernaturals had agreed to present a united front, at least for a while.

  The reactions of governments varied wildly. I think the U.S. policy had been formed by werewolves in place within the system, because it was overwhelmingly favorable. There was a huge tendency to accept the weres as if they were completely human, to keep their rights as Americans exactly on a par with their previous status when no one knew they were two-natured. The vampires couldn’t be too pleased about that, because they hadn’t yet obtained full rights and privileges under the law. Legal marriage and inheritance of property were still forbidden in a few states, and vampires were barred from owning certain businesses. The human casino lobby had been successful in banning the vamps from direct ownership of gambling establishments, which I still couldn’t understand, and though vampires could be police officers and firefighters, vampire doctors were not accepted in any field that included treating patients with open wounds. Vampires weren’t allowed in competition sports, either. That I could understand; they were too strong. But there were already lots of athletes whose ancestry included full- and part-weres, because sports were a natural bent for them. The military ranks, too, were filled with men and women whose grandparents had bayed under the full moon. There were even some full-blooded Weres in the armed services, though it was a very tricky occupation for people who had to find somewhere private to be three nights a month.

  The sports pages were full of pictures of some part- and whole-weres who’d become famous. A running back for the New England Patriots, a fielder for the Cardinals, a marathon runner . . . they’d all confessed to being wereanimals of one kind or another. An Olympic champion swimmer had just discovered that his dad was a wereseal, and the number-one ranked women’s tennis player in Britain had gone on record as saying that her mother was a wereleopard. The sports world hadn’t been in such a tumult since the last drug scandal. Did these athletes’ heritage give them an unfair advantage over other players? Should their trophies be taken away from them? Should their records be allowed to stand? Another day, I might enjoy debating this with someone, but right now I just didn’t care.

  I began to see an overall picture. The outing of the two-natured was a much different revelation than the vampires’ announcement. The vampires had been completely off the human grid, except in legend and lore. They’d lived apart. Since they could subsist on the Japanese synthetic blood, they had presented themselves as absolutely nonthreatening. But wereanimals had been living among us all the time, integrated into our society yet maintaining their secret lives and alliances. Sometimes even their children (those who weren’t firstborn and therefore not weres) didn’t know what their parents were, especially if they were not wolves.

  “I feel betrayed,” one woman was quoted as saying. “My granddad turns into a lynx every month. He runs around and kills things. My beautician, I’ve been going to her for fifteen years, and she’s a coyote. I didn’t know! I feel I’ve been deceived in an ugly way.”

  Some people thought it was fascinating. “Our principal is a werewolf,” said a kid in Springfield, Missouri. “How cool is that?”

  The very fact of the existence of wereanimals frightened some people. “I’m scared I’ll shoot my neighbor by accident if I see him trotting down the road,” said a farmer in Kansas. “What if he gets after my chickens?”

  Various churches were thrashing out their policy on weres. “We don’t know what to think,” a Vatican official confessed. “They’re alive, they’re among us, they must have souls. Even some priests are wereanimals.” The fundamentalists were equally stymied. “We were worried about Adam and Steve,” a Baptist minister said. “Should we have been more worried about Rover and Fluffy?”

  While my head had been in the sand, all hell had broken loose.

  Suddenly it was easier to see how my werepanther sister-in-law had ended up on a cross at a bar owned by a shifter.

  Chapter 6

  The moment the nails came out of her hands and feet, Crystal’s body reverted to looking completely human. I watched from behind the crime scene tape. This process drew the horrified attention of everyone on the site. Even Alcee Beck flinched back. I’d been waiting for hours by then; I’d read all the newspapers twice, found a paperback in the glove compartment and gotten about a third of the way through it, and had a limp conversation with Tanya about Sam’s mother. After we’d rehashed that news, she mostly talked about Calvin. I gathered that she had moved in with him. She’d gotten a part-time job at Norcross in the main office, doing something clerical. She loved the regular hours. “And I don’t have to stand up all day,” she said.

  “Sounds good,” I said politely, though I’d hate that kind of job. Working with the same people every day? I’d get to know them all too well. I wouldn’t be able to stay out of their thoughts, and I’d reach the point of wanting to get away from them because I knew too much about them. At the bar, there were always different people coming in to keep me distracted.

  “How’d the Great Reveal go for you?” I asked.

  “I told ’em at Norcross the next day,” she said. “When they found out I was a werefox, they thought that was funny.” She looked disgusted. “Why do the big animals get all the press? Calvin got huge respect out in the plant from his crew. I get jokes about bushy tails.”

  “Not fair,” I agreed, trying not to smile.

  “Calvin is completely wiped out about Crystal,” Tanya said abruptly. “She was his favorite niece. He felt awful bad for her when it turned out she was such a poor shifter. And about the babies.” Crystal, the product of a lot of inbreeding, had taken forever to change into her panther form and had had a hard time reversing the process when she wanted to become a human again. She’d miscarried several times, too. The only reason she’d been allowed to marry Jason was that it had become obvious she would probably never carry a pureblood baby to term.

  “Could be this baby was lost before the murder, or she aborted during the murder,” I said. “Maybe the—whoever did this—didn’t know.”

  “She was showing, but not a whole lot,” Tanya said, nodding. “She was real picky about her food, ’cause she was determined to keep her figure.” She shook her head, her face bitter. “But really, Sookie, does it really make any difference if the killer knew
or not? The end is the same. The baby is dead, and so is Crystal, and she died afraid and alone.”

  Tanya was absolutely right.

  “Do you think Calvin can track whoever did this from the smell?” I asked.

  Tanya looked uneasy. “There were lots of scents,” she said. “I don’t know how he can tell which one’sthe scent. And look, they’re all touching her. Some of ’em are wearing rubber gloves, but those have an odor, you know. See, there’s Mitch Norris helping take her down, and he’s one of us. So how will Calvin know?”

  “Besides, it might be one of them,” I said, nodding toward the group gathered around the dead woman. Tanya looked at me sharply.

  “You mean law enforcement might be in on it?” she said. “Do you know something?”

  “No,” I said, sorry I’d opened my big mouth. “It’s just . . . we don’t know anything for sure. I guess I was thinking about Dove Beck.”

  “He’s the one she was in bed with that day?”

  I nodded. “That big guy, there—the black guy in the suit? That’s his cousin Alcee.”

  “Think he might have had something to do with it?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I was just . . . speculating.”

  “I’ll bet Calvin’s thought of that, too,” she said. “Calvin’s very sharp.”

  I nodded. There was nothing flashy about Calvin, and he hadn’t managed to go to college (I hadn’t either), but there was nothing wrong with his brain.

  Bud beckoned to Calvin then, and he got out of his truck and went over to the body, which had been laid on a gurney spread with an open body bag. Calvin approached the body carefully, his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t touch Crystal.

  We all watched, some with loathing and distaste, some with indifference or interest, until he’d finished.

  He straightened, turned, and walked back in the direction of his truck. Tanya got out of my car to meet him. She put her arms around him and looked up at him. He shook his head. I’d lowered my window so I could hear. “I couldn’t make out much on the rest of her,” he said. “Too many other smells. She just smelled like a dead panther.”