Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (5 page)

“But the animator has to be there to give the orders,” Manning said.

“I don’t think that was Dominga’s idea. I believe she meant to do what I do for clients sometimes: You put them inside the circle and bind the zombie to them so it’ll do what they say, and I go on to my next client. We’ll make an appointment for them to bring the zombie back and I’ll lay it to rest then, but I can’t babysit every zombie I raise in a night.”

“How many can you raise in a night?” Brent asked.

“It depends on the age of the zombie. The longer it’s been dead, the more energy it takes to raise it from the grave. If it’s a really old one then maybe only that zombie gets raised in a night, but if it’s the newly dead, five or six in a night, maybe more if the travel time works out, but that’s rare.”

“Why is it rare?” Manning asked.

“I don’t raise zombies without a good reason, and it’s not cheap. The times when I’ve had more than five or six clients in one night in one geographic area are really rare. Sometimes I’ll travel and do multiple zombies in a distant area, because I’m going to be in town, but most out-of-town trips are just one client who’s willing to pay for me to come to them.”

“So why is this animator in the room ordering the zombie around?” she asked.

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to give control of a zombie over to someone else. It wasn’t how I was taught. You stayed at the graveside and put the zombie back after the questions had been asked, or the last good-byes said. Even now it’s rare for me to let anyone take a zombie off-site.”

“Why?” Manning asked.

“One, some clients won’t bring them back. Remember, it looks like their loved one, and I’m powerful enough that my zombies look and act alive, or enough so that if you want to believe Mom or Dad is back for good, you could. Well, for a while.”

“Define
a while
.”

“Until the body starts to rot. Eventually all zombies decay, Agent Manning, even mine.”

“The Catholic Church claims that all animators are trampling on Jesus’ territory by raising the dead.”

“Yeah, that’s what got us all excommunicated unless we agreed to stop doing it. What the Church doesn’t understand is that for some of us it’s a psychic gift, which means if we don’t use it on purpose it comes out in other ways.”

“Like untrained telepaths who go crazy because they can’t block everyone else’s thoughts,” Brent said.

“Yeah, except for me it was roadkill following me home, or my first dog that died and came back.”

Zerbrowski gave me wide eyes; apparently I’d never shared that with him.

“That sounds pretty awful,” Manning said.

“It was, and my dad and stepmom were not amused.”

“I bet,” Brent said.

“Would you need a human sacrifice to do this?” Manning asked.

“You mean to capture the soul, or put the soul back in the zombies?”

“Either, both.”

“The priest would be able to answer the question about the soul-capture thing better than I could, but I don’t believe so, and if the zombies are the recently dead then you wouldn’t need a death that big.”

“Define
big
,” she said.

“Most of us use chickens as the blood sacrifice for a normal zombie raising, but if it’s an older body we move up to goats, sometimes sheep, but mostly goats. After that you get into cows.”

“So it’s literally physically larger, not smarter?” Manning said.

That was a good question, maybe a great question. “You know, I’ve never thought about it like that. Traditionally, I was taught that bigger sacrifice meant literally bigger, so theoretically an elephant could raise more, but we jump from cow to human sacrifice, and people are smaller than most full-grown cattle.” I thought about it. “I guess there’s just not a reasonable way to kill something bigger than a cow, or maybe horse, though I don’t know anyone in this country who uses horses for sacrifice. I know some people use doves or pigeons instead of chickens, but the jump to human is considered the biggest sacrifice possible.”

“Pigs are smarter than goats or cows; would their death be bigger?” Brent asked.

“I’ve never known anyone who used a pig; maybe a baby pig, but not a grown one.”

“Why?” Manning asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know, but I was raised in farm country, and pigs will eat people; cows and chickens, even goats, won’t.”

“Pigs don’t really eat people unless a serial killer feeds them the pieces,” Brent said.

“Feral hogs used to drag off babies left at the edge of fields and eat them.”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale,” Brent said.

“No, it’s not,” I said, “and if you’re hurt enough that you can’t get back out of the pigpen some breeds will fucking eat you.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“My dad is a veterinarian. He used to take me on his rounds sometimes; trust me, some pigs will eat you.”

“But would killing a chimpanzee or a dolphin be a bigger death than a cow, but less than a human?” he asked.

I thought about it, and finally said, “Maybe, but an adult male chimpanzee can tear a normal human being’s arm out of its socket, and I can’t even wrap my head around trying to get a dolphin alive to a grave site just to slit its throat to raise a zombie.”

“So looking for missing persons being used as human sacrifices won’t help us find these creeps?” Manning asked.

“I don’t think so; in fact, I’m pretty sure not.”

“How do we catch them, then?”

“Dominga’s plan was to give the zombies in as fresh a condition as possible to her buyers as perpetual sex slaves, but she didn’t see the possibility of porn online. I’m assuming that there must be customers paying for this stuff.”

“Technically it’s not illegal in most states, because the necrophilia laws have been modified so that if the corpse is moving and capable of giving consent it’s consensual sex, not necrophilia, and that’s a misdemeanor anyway,” Manning said.

“I know some states had to change their laws once vampires were considered legal citizens, because the way the law was written, sex with them was still an arrestable offense,” I said.

“Some police in certain areas made a hobby of arresting the spouses of vampires in their communities,” Manning said.

I nodded. “Yeah, the early days just after the law changed were interesting.”

“You can say that again,” Zerbrowski said.

I looked at him.

“Hey, I was a cop when it changed. One day we could kill a vampire on sight and the next day they were legal citizens with all the protection the law offered. It was a very weird moment in law enforcement.”

“It was my senior year of college when it changed. I guess I hadn’t thought what I’d missed,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “I keep forgetting you’re just a baby.”

“You’re only ten years older than me.”

“Thirteen years older, thank you very much.”

I grinned at him. “Oh, yeah, three years is so much more.”

“You seem to think so, sometimes.”

I gave him narrow eyes, because my attitude about some of my younger lovers was personal and we’d left personal behind.

Zerbrowski covered. “I’m just the old man to your young pup.”

“Don’t feel bad, Sergeant; you’re not the oldest person in the room, though it is by less than three years.” She smiled when she said it.

He offered her a fist bump and after a bemused moment, she took it.

I glanced at Brent, who was being unusually quiet, for him. “When you’re the youngest person in a room of detectives or agents, you just learn to keep your mouth shut about it.”

I smiled at him. “Been there, done that.”

“I’ll bet; you don’t look anywhere near thirty.”

I shrugged. “Good genetics.” It was, but there was the possibility that being Jean-Claude’s human servant, as well as fiancée, meant that I wasn’t aging, that I might stay just like this forever. I looked at Zerbrowski’s hair, grayer than when we’d met. Was I going to have to watch him age while I didn’t? I didn’t know, but the thought made me sad. On the heels of that thought was another one, that if he were a vampire he wouldn’t age. I’d never looked at one of my friends and thought that before. I wasn’t sure how I felt about thinking it now. It wasn’t a good feeling, whatever it was.

“You okay, Anita?” Zerbrowski asked.

I nodded. “Sure, just thinking too hard.”

He grinned. “Thinking about your tall, pale, and handsome fiancé?”

“No, why would you even ask that?”

“Because you only overthink your personal life; crime busting makes you kind of peaceful.”

I let my face show exactly how unpeaceful I felt about this case. “This case isn’t going to make me feel peaceful, Zerbrowski.”

“I’m sorry, you’re right. This one’s going to hurt.”

“What do you mean by that?” Manning asked.

He looked at her, and his brown eyes showed that there was a shrewd thinker behind all the messy clothes and teasing. “Some cases leave a mark on your soul even after you solve it.”

She studied his face and nodded. “As long as we solve it.”

“You’re afraid we won’t,” I said.

“We’re here because our own resident animator Kirkland, and the most revered voodoo, vaudun, priest in the country, plus all the witches and psychics working with and for the FBI couldn’t help us find these guys.”

“What do your computer techs say?” Zerbrowski asked.

She nodded again. “They say that whoever is doing the tech for these creeps is really, really good.”

Brent added, “They are still working on tracing to a location, but the ability to hide the computer trail is always just a little ahead of our ability to trace it, until we catch up.”

“And then the bad techies figure out a new way to pull ahead of the good guys,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Our tech people will crack this, or trace it, eventually,” Manning said, “but I don’t understand their part of the investigation enough to help, so I’m here trying an angle that I can understand more. I can look at you, talk to you, ask you questions. I don’t speak enough computer to do the same for that part of the investigation.”

“I just recently learned how to change the ring tones on my smart phone, so I hear you on the whole mysterious-computer thing,” I said.

She gave me a weak smile. “Thank you for that, but there’s usually an age line about such things. You’re young to be on the wrong side of it.”

“Hey, I love my smart phone,” Zerbrowski said. “The wife and kids send me pics and texts all day. Helps me keep in touch when the hours are long.”

“And you’re over the age line, of course.” Manning looked from one to the other of us. “The two of you balance each other somehow like good partners do.”

We looked at each other, then both shrugged almost in unison and said, “We try.”

She narrowed her eyes at us. Brent laughed.

If civilians could have seen us laughing and smiling with that horror still frozen on the computer behind us, they’d have thought we were cold-blooded, or worse. But if you couldn’t keep your sense of humor in the midst of the nightmares you went crazy, or changed jobs, or ate your gun. We were all career cops, in it for the long haul, and that meant we whistled in the dark, sang on the way to our execution, joked at the door to hell—pick your metaphor. We did it. We survived. We didn’t go too crazy. We did our jobs. We caught the bad guys. I glanced behind at the frozen image on the screen. The zombie, person, whatever she was with her soul trapped in there, was staring out at the screen in a mute plea. We had to find her first, but when we did I’d find a way to free her soul and lay her to final rest. This would stop. We would make it stop. The people who’d raised the zombie and were abusing her hadn’t done anything to earn a warrant of execution, not legally, so I couldn’t just go in there with guns blazing like normal when I was chasing monsters. They hadn’t killed anyone, hell, I wasn’t even sure what laws they’d broken, but morally—they needed to suffer. Was that judgmental of me? Hell yes, but sometimes you just gotta go with that part of yourself that says,
This is morally wrong and I will stop you
. Judge not, lest ye be judged, but in this case I was pretty sure God would be on my side.

I
HAD ONE
person I trusted who had known Dominga Salvador well, but I couldn’t take Zerbrowski or the FBI with me, because my friend had done some really bad things when he’d been part of Dominga’s crew. I needed an excuse to ditch the other badges, without seeming like I was ditching them. My text tone went off on my phone and I had the perfect excuse.

Out loud I said, “Crap.”

“What’s wrong?” Manning asked.

Zerbrowski was watching me a little too closely, as if something about that “crap” hadn’t fooled him at all. Maybe I should have said “shit”?

“I have another appointment. Normally I’d ignore it, but do we actually have any leads to follow?”

“What appointment?” Zerbrowski asked, smiling, but his eyes let me know I wasn’t fooling him much.

I held the text up so he could read it. “Remember 8:00PM meeting with jeweler.
Je t’aime, ma petite
.” It had a tiny picture of Jean-Claude beside it.

“Jeweler, ooh, ooh, you’re trying on rings tonight.” He grinned, because he’d said too much out loud, and I was pretty sure why he’d done it. He wanted to see what Manning would do.

The grim-faced agent suddenly smiled at me. It was a good smile that seemed to erase the lines and years that the horrors on the screen had added. She was suddenly attractive, eyes all a-sparkle. Earlier I would have gotten grumpy again, but now I understood why she might have gone all girly about my engagement; she needed something to distract her from the job. As a police officer, or a first responder of any kind, you need things outside work that put the smile back on your face, because if you don’t have something you’ll either crawl into a bottle, burn out early, or decide to be too up close and friendly with your gun one dark night. Did Manning follow romances in the news? Did she enjoy tabloid relationship gossip? Read romance novels in her spare time? And here I was right in the middle of a public romance that seemed to fall right out of one of those books—how could she resist, and why would she want to?