The PowWow

Jacob's phone rang at 6:42 in the morning.

I know this because I was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with coffee I hadn't tasted yet, running the previous evening through my head for the fourth or fifth time looking for the thing I'd missed. The ring cut through the apartment like a verdict.

Jacob emerged from his room two minutes later, fully dressed, phone in hand, barefoot on the hardwood.

"Naomi," he said.

I looked at him over my cup. "Good morning to you too."

"She has a body."

For a moment I forgot about Rachel. Then it caught up with me—did Jacob just comment on Naomi’s body?

He was already moving toward the door. "She wants a perspective."

Of course he didn’t. "Her words or yours?"

He paused just slightly. "Hers."

I grabbed my jacket.

We didn't talk much on the drive over. Jacob sat with his hands loose on his knees, looking out the passenger window at the city waking up around us. Whatever the call had contained beyond what he'd relayed, he was keeping it inside where he kept most things.

"She call you often?" I asked.

"No."

"First time?"

A pause that was one beat longer than necessary.

"No."

Two answers, translated from Jacob, meant ‘None of your business.’

The morgue smelled exactly like it always did — antiseptic and cold air and something underneath both that no amount of either ever quite covered. The overhead lights were the particular shade of fluorescent that made everything look slightly more serious than it already was.

Naomi was at the far table when we came in. White coat. Red hair making its usual optimistic escape from whatever arrangement she'd started the day with. She looked up when the door opened.

At Jacob.

Then at me, briefly, in the way that people acknowledge the person they weren't expecting when they were focused on the person they were.

"You brought your brother," she said.

"He was awake," Jacob said.

"I'm very useful," I offered.

She almost smiled. Almost. Then she turned back to the table and her expression shifted into the focused, careful register I recognized from the Espinoza case — the look of someone who had seen something they couldn't file anywhere yet and didn't like the feeling.

"Here," she said.

We moved to the table.

The figure beneath the sheet was slight. Young. When Naomi pulled the sheet back I registered it immediately — late teens, early twenties at the outside. Dark clothing, even in death. Three rings on the left hand. The right hand had a chipped nail on the index finger, the polish cracked and grown out in the way that said it had been there a while and nobody had gotten around to fixing it.

I stilled.

I'd seen that detail somewhere. The chipped nail. I couldn't place it yet.

"Name?" Jacob asked.

"Not confirmed. No ID on the body, no phone. We're running prints." Naomi moved to the head of the table. "Female, approximately nineteen to twenty-two. Time of death between midnight and two a.m." She paused. "Cause of death is where I need your perspective."

Jacob looked at the body. Then at Naomi. "Show me."

She drew the collar aside.

I'd been in enough of these rooms to have developed a reasonable tolerance for what they contained. What I was looking at tested it.

Two marks on the neck. Clean, defined, spaced with a precision that felt deliberate rather than incidental. Not ragged. Not the result of struggle or accident or anything I had language for in the natural world.

"And the wrist," Naomi said.

Same marks. Same precision. Left wrist, inner surface.

The room was very quiet.

"She's exsanguinated," Naomi said. Her voice was professional but I caught the edge underneath it — the particular tension of a scientist whose framework isn't holding. "Virtually complete. The volume of blood loss is — " she paused, choosing the word, " — not consistent with the wound size. Not consistent with anything, frankly. There's no scene. No blood at the recovery location. No evidence of transfusion equipment or surgical intervention. There’s also no sign of struggle. No defensive trauma. Nothing to suggest she resisted."

It didn’t look like resistance had been overcome. It looked like it had never been there to begin with.

"Where was she found?" I asked.

"Alley off Merchant Street. Propped against a dumpster. Arranged." She let that word sit. "Not dumped. Placed."

Jacob hadn't moved. He was looking at the marks on the neck with the focused stillness he brought to things that required it.

"Jacob," Naomi said, and her voice shifted a register. Not professional. Personal. Quieter. "What am I looking at?"

He looked up at her then. The distance between them at the table was appropriate, clinical, exactly what it should have been. Except that Naomi had moved, slightly, without seeming to notice she'd done it, and the distance was no longer quite what it had been.

Jacob noticed. I watched him notice. Watched the small adjustment he made — not stepping back, because that would have been obvious — just a fractional reorientation, a subtle reclaiming of space that cost him something to execute.

"The marks," he said carefully, "are designed to suggest something."

“Vampires,” she said, and it sounded like she didn’t believe the word even as she said it.

"The marks, the exsanguination, the staging," I said. "It's a presentation. Someone wants this to read a specific way."

"Demons," Jacob said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

Naomi looked at him now. "I'm sorry?"

"The vampire mythology," Jacob said, "is a cultural corruption of something older. The thirst. The marks. The taking of blood." He kept his eyes on the body, which I understood was intentional. "Demonic influence expressed through human vessels. The blood isn't incidental."

I tried to remember the last time Jacob had used that many words in a row. I couldn’t.

Naomi was quiet for a moment. I watched her process it — the scientist in her assembling and rejecting and reassembling. What I also watched, because I was apparently the only person in the room doing so, was the way her hand had come to rest on the edge of the table approximately four inches from Jacob's.

Not touching. Just — there.

"The blood is being used," Jacob continued. "For something. The taking of it is not the point. It's a means."

"To what?" Naomi asked.

"I don't know yet."

She nodded slowly. Her eyes moved from the body to Jacob's face in the way they did when she was studying something she wanted to understand. Jacob kept his gaze forward. The effort was visible, if you knew what to look for.

I knew what to look for.

I looked away, back at the body, back at the chipped nail on the right hand, and the thing that had been sitting at the edge of my memory finally surfaced.

Rachel's files. The campaign complaint photos. The cluster of black clothing at the edge of the frame.

One of her friends with a chipped fingernail.

I didn't say it out loud. Not yet. My mind was moving now, assembling the shape of something that didn't have a name yet but was starting to have edges.

Behind me, I was dimly aware of Naomi asking Jacob something in a lower voice, and Jacob answering in the measured, careful way of a man who was paying very close attention to the distance between himself and someone else.

I filed that too.

But my mind was mostly on the nail.

And on Rachel, and the files, and the conversation that had ended wrong last night for reasons I still hadn't figured out.

The body on the table connected both of those things, and I didn't know yet whether that was clarifying or whether it was about to make everything considerably more complicated.

Probably both.

It usually was when things started to matter.