13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 47

Caxton sat in the morgue next to Deanna's body on a gurney. Dr. Prabinder and Clara were nowhere to be seen. She was all alone in the semi-darkened room, surrounded on every side by rolling partitions. How she'd gotten there she couldn't say. It was like she had blacked out, except she hadn't, at all. The trip from the fourth floor down to the basement was all there in her memory. It was just so immaterial she hadn't bothered to review the information.

There had been a complication, she remembered. She got up and walked around the gurney. She touched Deanna here and there. Twitched back the sheet that covered her. Deanna's face was calm, at least. Her eyes closed, her red hair clean. Her lips were pale but otherwise she didn't look so bad. Caxton moved the sheet back a little more, though, and wished she hadn't. Deanna's breasts pointed in the wrong directions. Her chest was open like a ravenous mouth, her ribs like teeth reaching for a piece of meat. Her lungs and her heart lay collapsed at the bottom of that wound like a lolling tongue.

There had been a complication. Deanna had lost so much blood when she broke the kitchen window that she had required five new units of blood, most of it in the form of plasma. They had given her some whole blood because she had started to show the signs of acute anemia-coldness in the extremities even while her trunk was warm, a lasting and dangerous shortness of breath.

There had been a complication. A blood clot had formed, perhaps from one of her wounds, possibly from a bad reaction to the transfused blood. Dr. Prabinder had refused to speculate. The clot had entered Deanna's blood stream and probably roamed around her body several times before it reached her left lung. There had been a complication. A pulmonary embolus, Dr. Prabinder had called it. When it was detected they had rushed her immediately into surgery, of course. They had tried to cut it out. And that was one complication too many.

"I really must insist, Ms. Caxton," the doctor said, pulling one of the partitions back. "You're not supposed to be here at all, and truly, it's not appropriate for the morgue technicians to let you see her in this condition-"

"That's Trooper Caxton," Clara announced. She held up her badge.

"Oh, I... I didn't know," Doctor Prabinder said.

"This is a homicide investigation, Doctor." Clara put her badge away. What she was doing was highly illegal. She was well outside of her jurisdiction. So was Caxton. Lying about a criminal investigation could get them put away for years. Caxton wouldn't tell, if Clara didn't. She pulled the sheet back up over Deanna's chest. Blood soaked through it almost instantly.

"When?" Caxton asked. She couldn't get any more of the sentence out.

"What was the official time of death?" Clara asked.

The doctor checked his PDA. "Last night, about four fifteen."

"Before dawn," Caxton said. While she had been fighting vampires in abandoned steel mills Deanna had been slowly dying and nobody had known. There would have been nobody with her. Perhaps if there had been it could have been avoided. Perhaps if Caxton had been there, listening to Deanna's ragged breathing, she might have noticed some change. She could have summoned the doctor. They could have gotten Deanna into surgery that much quicker.

At the very least she could have held her hand. "I wasn't here," she said.

"No, no, come on," Clara said.

"Ah, ladies, I know it is not my place to ask, but is it acceptable for this woman to investigate the death of someone so close? Is there not a conflict of interest?"

"She was alone," Caxton said, ignoring him.

"Was there anyone in her room last night? Any visitors at all?"

The doctor shook his head in incomprehension. "No, of course not. We don't let visitors in after seven and anyway she had posted a guard on the room." He pointed at Caxton with his PDA. "Did you not know about the guard?"

Clara glanced at her, then back at the doctor. "I was just brought in on this case. I'm still catching up."

"I... see." Doctor Prabinder straightened up and squared his shoulders. "Now let's get one thing clear. I wish to assist the police in any manner possible, of course. But this is my hospital, and-"

"Doctor," Caxton said, turning to face him for the first time. She gave him her best fisheye look. Caxton wasn't wearing her uniform, she didn't have a badge, and her weapon was still in the trunk of Clara's Volkswagen. It didn't matter. The look was what made you a cop. That perfectly uncaring, potentially violent look that could freeze most people in their tracks. "I need to know if anything unusual happened here last night. I need to know if anybody saw or heard anything weird or out of place. Anything at all."

"Of course, of course," he said. He looked down at his shoes. "But this is a hospital with a trauma ward in a major urban center. You must clarify for me, I have seen so many weird things..." He just sort of trailed off.

"I'm not talking about freak accidents. I'm talking about people with no faces being seen in the hallways. I'm talking about vampire activity."

"Vampires, here?" He muttered something in Hindi that sounded like a brief prayer. "I saw on the news that-I hear some things, yes, and the bodies that came in-but oh, my, no, nothing like that last night! I swear it."

"Good." Caxton reached down and took Deanna's hand. It was freezing cold but then so was hers. "Now I need someone to sew this woman up so I can bury her. Can you arrange that?"

Dr. Prabinder nodded and took out his cell phone. "There will be papers to sign, of course, if that is not too much."

"Of course," Caxton said. She took out her own phone. Deanna's brother Elvin was in her stored phonebook. Hopefully he would know his-and Dee's-mother's number. There were suddenly a lot of things she needed to do.

"I'm so, so sorry," Clara said, and reached for her, but Caxton shrugged her away.

"I can't feel anything right now," Caxton tried to explain. She didn't know if the grief was just too big and she was defending herself from it or if Reyes was in control of her emotions. To him Deanna's death was only regrettable in that all that blood was going to waste.

It helped. There were a lot of phone calls to make and a lot of questions to answer. Somebody had to be calm and in charge.

Elvin wasn't home. She left a message for him to call her back. Someone came and asked her about organ donation. She told them to take what they could. Deanna was wrapped up, taken away. They brought her back-her tissues weren't good candidates for donation. She'd been dead too long for the major organs to be useful and her skin and eyes weren't the right type. Caxton called Elvin again. Someone from the transplant center came down and demanded to know who she thought she was, offering up Deanna's body parts for donation, when she wasn't even a relative. That conversation took far too long. For perhaps the first time she actually wished she'd bothered to get a civil union. It wouldn't have given her any more rights but it might have forestalled a few of the less comfortable questions. She finally got hold of Elvin and he said he would come right away. He would bring Deanna's mother. Caxton flipped shut her phone and put it away. She turned around and there was Clara.

"How long have I been making phone calls?" she asked. She had a feeling a lot more time had passed than she was aware of. She was in a lounge, for one thing. Hadn't she just been in the morgue? Somehow she'd been moved to a well-heated lounge with a big window and comfortable chairs and lots of tattered magazines. Maybe Clara had brought her there.

"Well, I already went and had lunch. I got you a sandwich."

Caxton took the offered bag and opened it up. Tuna salad, white flesh in white mayonnaise on white bread. It didn't appeal to her at all. She wanted roast beef and felt almost childishly peevish about it-why couldn't Clara have gotten her roast beef? Why couldn't she go right now and get a big rare steak, all full of juice, of, of-of blood?

She clamped down on that thought immediately and started eating the tuna sandwich. She was not going to let the vampire live vicariously through her.

"Listen, there's something I haven't heard anyone mention, but I think it's important," Clara said. She frowned and pursed her lips and finally spat it out. "Do we need," she said, pronouncing each word separately, "to consider, well, cremation."

Caxton blinked rapidly. "You mean for Deanna?" she asked. "Of course you do. I mean, nobody else is dead right now. Yeah. Right. Cremation." She didn't so much think it through as let it come bubbling up in her head. "No."

"No," Clara repeated, tentatively.

"No. You saw all that blood. No vampire would leave so much blood on a body. It was just an accident, Clara. Just a stupid fucked-up accident, the kind that still happens, you know? Not everybody gets killed by monsters."

Clara nodded supportively, then opened her mouth to speak again. She stopped when the door behind her burst open. An enormous man with thin, straight red hair that fell past his shoulders came storming in. He wore a sheepskin coat and a look of absolute befuddlement. Behind him followed a woman with hair dyed to match his though it showed grey at the roots. Her face was a mess of red blotches as if she'd been crying, or drinking. Most likely both, Caxton knew.

"Who's this, your new girlfriend?" Deanna's mother asked.

"Hello, Roxie," Caxton tried. She glanced up at the big redheaded man and her heart beat for the first time in hours. "Oh, Elvin, I'm so sorry."

He nodded his massive head. "Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot," he said. He looked around as if unsure of where he was.

"I'm going to go now," Clara said.

"Jesus, don't leave on my account." Roxie Purfleet sneered at Caxton. "You work fast, huh? One of them's not even cold and you're on to the next."

Clara slipped past her without further comment. Caxton sat the Purfleets down and started to explain what had happened.