“Are you really accusing Marshal Blake of murder after coming to us for help?” Zerbrowski asked, and there was no joking in his tone now.
Manning rubbed her temples and shook her head. “I don’t know, yes, no, not really. Do I think that Blake killed her? Probably, but if someone sent a pack of killer zombies into my home to attack me . . . we’re allowed to defend ourselves from the monsters.”
She looked at me and her eyes weren’t just tired; they were haunted. “You haven’t seen all the videos. They raise two other women and they let them rot more than this before they put their souls back into their bodies. There’s a video of the moment that the second woman sees herself in the mirror. Half her face is rotted away, but she can still scream.” She covered her own face with her hands and made a sound that was half exasperated sound, half muffled words.
“Sorry, Agent Manning, didn’t quite catch that,” Zerbrowski said.
She lowered her hands and looked at him. “I said I’ve heard a lot of bad screams. An amazing number of these . . . evil bastards make video or audio of their victims. I thought I’d heard the worst screams, but that one was one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.” She turned to me. “If I thought you had done this I’d put the needle in you myself, but I’m just groping in the dark, Blake.”
“What do you want from me, Manning?”
“The report you gave when you helped get a warrant to search Salvador’s house talked about human sacrifice and mentioned her scheme to use zombies as sex slaves, but I feel like you left out things, because if you overexplain the magic theory too much most judges won’t sign off on things. What did you leave out? How are they doing this? One of the last zombies seems to rot, then stop, and then rot worse; why?”
“You think I know all this because I reported Salvador for abuse and malfeasance years ago?”
“That and our new agent Larry Kirkland says that if anyone knows how this is being done, it would be you. He says you’re the most powerful animator he’s ever met, and that you may know more about the undead than anyone alive today.”
“I bet that’s not how he said the last part,” I said.
She fidgeted in her chair. “I’m trying to keep it friendly after I had my little meltdown, Marshal Blake.”
“What did Agent Kirkland actually say?”
“Anita,” Zerbrowski said.
I looked at him.
“Let it go; Larry complimented your abilities, just let it go.”
I didn’t want to, because I was betting Larry had said something that implied my expertise came from being way more friendly with the undead than his God-fearing faith would allow him to be. Once Larry and I had been friends, hell, I’d trained him to raise the dead, but we’d stopped being friends when I stopped taking the morgue kills he felt morally bad about. Morgue executions were vampires chained to reinforced metal gurneys, holy objects all around, and the only legally accepted method of execution was a stake through the heart, then decapitation in most states. Have you ever tried to pound a hardened wooden stake through a piece of bone-in ham? Try it sometime; it’s not easy. Now imagine the “pig” is still alive and begging for its life. I’d had far too many morgue kills where they pressured me into killing the vamp after dark when it was awake, so that they didn’t have to risk it breaking free before dawn and hurting more people. Ah, for the idealism of youth when you believe every piece of crap someone tells you. I’d requested permission to use a shotgun at close range as a more humane method of execution, but had been refused, because silver-coated ammo is expensive and I could damage the very expensive reinforced gurneys that the vampires were chained to. Finally, I’d stopped doing morgue kills altogether when I realized most of the vampires chained to the tables for staking hadn’t ever hurt anyone. “Three strikes and you’re out” for vampires used to mean if you were convicted of three crimes of any kind, you got executed. Larry and I had been involved in the case that had helped give vampires a chance to go to jail for misdemeanors instead of just being killed. Good outcome, but that case had been a turning point in our friendship. After that he was like a born-again vegan who saw all meat as murder, and I was the carnivore.
“Okay, Zerbrowski, okay.”
He smiled and patted my hand. “Thanks.”
“What did you thank her for?” Brent asked.
“Listening to me,” Zerbrowski said.
“Blake does have a reputation for not listening to people,” Manning said.
I gave her a not entirely friendly look. “I’ve mellowed.”
She gave a little smile and shook her head. “Haven’t we all.”
I nodded. “You either mellow or find a new career.”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
Three of us nodded; Brent hadn’t been on the job long enough to understand. I felt all veteran-y.
“I can tell you how Dominga Salvador said she was doing it, but I never saw it done personally. She had two zombies like the ones in your videos; one was almost perfect and could have passed for human, but the other one was like you’re describing, more decayed. Both of them looked out of their eyes. They were in there just like this one is.”
“Our experts say it’s theoretically possible for someone trained in voodoo to capture the soul at death and keep it in a jar or other magical container, but they don’t know anyone who’s actually done it. It’s all ‘my great-great-grandfather’s uncle’s brother did it,’ or knew someone who had done it. We’ve followed up every rumor of a bad-ass voodoo priest or priestess, and they were either fake for the tourists, or law-abiding citizens who were horrified that their religion had been corrupted.”