Fine, I promised. And hoping to keep my dinner down.
We followed my grandfather toward the barrier. He stopped a few feet away, gestured to a brunette in a classic black suit. She was handsomely pretty, with strong features and a wide mouth, her hair waving over her shoulders. Midthirties, I’d have guessed, with hard eyes unmistakably belonging to a cop.
“Detective Bernadette Stowe,” my grandfather said. “Ethan Sullivan, Merit, Jonah.”
She nodded, held up gloved hands. “I’d shake, but I’m already prepped. You’re our vampire experts?”
“No one better,” my grandfather said. I wasn’t sure about that, but we certainly had the practical expertise.
We reached the barrier and Stowe pushed it aside, allowing us to enter. I went in last, taking a final glance around the courtyard, making sure I didn’t recognize the driver among the men and women who surveyed the scene.
Catcher already stood inside the plastic, looking down at Brett Jacobs, who lay on the new spring grass. He nodded at us, moved aside to let us enter.
Brett’s hair was short and dark, and his eyes were deeply brown and stared up, empty. He wore jeans and a navy T-shirt, but his feet were bare, and there was a blue mark on the back of one hand, a small, square cross. Beneath it, his dark skin had a gray cast: the pallor of death.
His body was posed as if he’d been crucified: arms outstretched, his palms flat on the grass, legs straight. His careful positioning was strange, but that’s not why they’d called us.
Blood made a dark stain on his shirt and stained the ground beneath him. Two gently curved and gleaming katanas had been plunged into his abdomen like horrible skewers, crossing each other below his breastbone like an “X.”
That was why they’d called us. Because they were katanas, and we were vampires, the only supernaturals that used them.
I’d seen death before, but that didn’t make the sight of it any easier to stomach. I glanced away, closing my eyes for a moment until the world stopped spinning.
“Brett was twenty-five,” Stowe quietly said. “Graduated from Columbia College three years ago, has a bachelor’s in music. Plays violin for a string quartet that does weddings, events, and works at a restaurant in the Loop. Shares an apartment with a friend in Wrigleyville. No girlfriend. No sheet. By all accounts, lived a clean life.”
“This should not be the reward for someone who lived clean,” my grandfather said.
“No,” Stowe quietly said. “It is not. And I’m sorry for it. And for Arthur.”
“When did he die?” I quietly asked.
Stowe checked a delicate silver watch. “We’re waiting for the coroner yet, but our preliminary estimate is about four hours ago. Custodian found him.”
“Witnesses?” Ethan asked.
“None that have come forward,” she said. “The fountain shields the body from the passageway and the street, and you’d have to walk over here to see it. Not many tourists doing that at night in early March.”
Ethan turned his gaze to Stowe. “You’ve asked us here because of the swords.”
She nodded. “Vampires use swords, fight with them. It’s well-known Detective Jacobs has worked with you before.”
“We’re not suggesting you were involved in this,” my grandfather said, stepping forward and drawing Ethan’s ice-cold gaze to him. “But we don’t have much else to go on.”
Since Catcher’s magical expertise was in weaponry, he must have been stumped.
Ethan looked at him. “Your impression?”
Catcher crouched, gestured to the swords. “They’re replicas. Good replicas, but replicas all the same. The arc of the blade looks correct. The tsuba’s circular, engraved. Leather cord braided around the handle. All that’s right . . . but the steel’s wrong.”
I tilted my head to glance at it, noted how shiny the metal was. “It’s not folded,” I said, and Catcher nodded, obviously pleased.
Catcher looked up at Stowe and my grandfather. “Vampires fight with traditional katanas—high-carbon steel weapons, usually tamahagane, steel that’s folded repeatedly. The folding creates a pattern in the steel that looks like wood grain. This isn’t carbon steel.” He pointed at the blade, to a mark stamped into the metal.
“Looks like ‘440,’” Stowe said.
Catcher inclined his head. “That’s a grade of stainless steel—which they might use in replicas.”
Jonah nodded. “A midgrade replica, at that.” He pulled a mini flashlight from his pocket, pointed it at the tsuba. There were minuscule daubs of a clear substance in the hairsbreadth space between guard and blade.
“Probably silicone,” Jonah said. “Not a horribly sloppy job, but not an authentic construction method. And nothing a vampire would use.”
“Damn,” Stowe quietly said, crouching beside Jonah, careful not to touch the blood or disturb the body. “Good eye.”
“That’s why we called them,” Chuck said with an approving nod. Even Ethan looked impressed.
Stowe looked at Jonah, then Catcher. “You think vampires wouldn’t use replicas?”
“No,” Catcher said without hesitation.
“In case you aren’t familiar,” I said, “vampires are particular.”
Stowe glanced back at Brett Jacobs. “Surely it’s possible some vampire who didn’t have an authentic katana or access to one grabbed a replica, used it.”
“Not all vampires fight,” Ethan said. “Those who do fight—and who consciously choose to use katanas instead of guns, knives, Tasers, or any number of other weapons which are easier to hide, carry, and use—use authentic katanas. It’s our way.”
“That’s where I get stuck,” Catcher said. “The use of the weapons has a vampire ring to it. It hints that a vampire committed the crime. But anybody who knew anything about vampires would know that a vampire isn’t going to use a replica like that.”
“Chuck?” Stowe asked, immediately rising in my estimation in that she’d look to my grandfather for his thoughts, his take.
“I’d tend to agree. You can’t rule out the possibility a vampire was the perpetrator. But vampires, finicky as they are—no offense—”
“None taken,” the three of us put in.
“—are not likely to do something like this. If they want the world to know that they’ve killed a human, and the son of a cop, using their own preferred weapon, they’re going to do it full out, as the kids say.”
“I don’t know that the kids say that,” Stowe said lightly, “but I appreciate your candor. Vampires or not, someone had to buy these replicas. What about a source?”
“You can buy pretty much anything on the Internet these days,” Jonah said, still crouched as he surveyed the swords up close. “But even if the construction’s not fantastic, they’re still pretty solid. See the designs here on the tsubas?” he asked, pointing.
Stowe leaned in. “Looks like fish around a pond, with some symbols. They’re very detailed for something so small.”
“They are,” Jonah agreed, gesturing with his pinkie. “There’s some colored enameling, even. Tsuba designs are specific to the maker. I don’t know the artist of these motifs, specifically, but that’s how we identify him or her. If I can take pictures, that would probably help.”
Stowe looked at Chuck, who nodded. “They won’t go any farther than they need to,” he assured her.
“Then go ahead,” Stowe said, rising again while Jonah pulled out his phone and snapped shots. She peeled the gloves from her carefully manicured fingers and stuffed them into a ball, then walked around Brett’s body, surveying it, eyes tracking from one body part to another, then following the curve of the katana blades.
“What about the placement of the swords?” she asked, without lifting her gaze to us. “Their location in the body, the fact that they’re crossed, form an ‘X’?”
“I don’t recognize it from swordcraft canon,” Catcher said, glancing at Ethan and Jonah.
“Using two katanas is a high-level skill for vampires,” Ethan said. “It’s more often found among guards, those who soldier, than the average Novitiates. But as to the crossed swords, the placement in the chest . . .” He stood up and took a step back, head canted as he surveyed the scene. “It’s not familiar to me. Jonah?”
Jonah shook his head. “It’s unfamiliar because it’s not a thing. Not to vampires, anyway. There’s no specific ritual or kata associated with plunging two katanas in the chest, much less leaving two katanas in the body. A swordsman or woman, someone who trained with his or her katana, isn’t going to leave one, much less two of them, and just walk away. It’d be like leaving a friend behind in battle.”
“Another fact that leans against a vampire perp,” my grandfather said.
“Could this”—Stowe waved her hand in a circle around the upthrust handles—“be done in a fight? Just a lucky strike of some kind? A final blow?”
Jonah moved closer. “Could have been,” Jonah said. “But it probably wasn’t here.”
I caught the buzz of interest in her expression. “Why not?”
“Each type of bladed weapon has a purpose. Foils are for probing—for direct thrusts. Broadswords, big ancient weapons, were for hacking. Katanas, generally, are for slicing. But the body doesn’t show any signs of slicing. Or anything else.”
I walked incrementally closer. “He’s right. There aren’t any cuts on Brett’s body. No bruises. If this had been an honest-to-God fight, he’d have been scraped up. There would be injuries other than the obvious one. But I don’t see anything at all. It looks like the perp just walked up and plunged them in.”
“A vampire certainly would have had the strength to do that,” Jonah said. “But why wouldn’t anyone angry enough to do this get in a few shots first? And why didn’t Brett fight back?”
Before Stowe could ask her next question, a new voice intruded.
“There are a lot of people around my body.”
We glanced back. A man had moved into the plastic enclosure and stood behind us in a black jumpsuit with CORONER across the front in white block letters. His hair was short and dark, his eyes slightly tilted, his body compact but obviously muscled. He carried a black plastic box, probably a field kit, in his right hand.
“Grant Lin,” Stowe said. “He’s with the medical examiner’s office. And tonight, he’s late.”
“Good to see you, too, Detective. Unfortunately, Mr. Jacobs isn’t the first gentleman on my agenda tonight.” He glanced at the body, then at us. “Friends of the dearly departed?”
“Weapons consultants,” Stowe said.
“Never thought I’d see the day when vampires were consulting for the CPD.”
“That’s because immortality would put you out of a job, Grant. We take our experts as we find them. We’ll get out of your way. We’d appreciate knowing TOD and cause as soon as you’ve got it.”
Lin grunted and moved toward the body as we stepped back. He inspected the wounds, and with the help of an assistant gently tilted Brett’s body, surveying the ground beneath him.
“Volume of blood loss suggests the insult occurred before death,” Lin said. “That blood loss could have been the cause, but the body will tell us that.”
“We’d appreciate knowing your findings as soon as possible,” my grandfather said.
“Jacobs is a good man,” Lin said. “You’ll get them.”
“He’s very good at his work,” Stowe quietly said when we’d followed her out of the barrier and into the courtyard again. “Kind of an ass, but good at his work.” She glanced at me. “You were saying you didn’t think this looked like a fight.”
I nodded. “But I doubt Brett just let himself be used to make a statement—or let the perp just plunge the swords into him. Who just stands there and lets it happen?”
“Maybe he wasn’t just standing here,” Ethan said, hands on his hips. “He could have been drugged, intoxicated. Magicked, although that seems unlikely.”
“Why?” Stowe asked.
“Because there’s no magic here,” Catcher said. “Magic would have left a trace.”
Her eyes widened incrementally. She must not have dealt with many supernaturals. “Which you could feel?”
We all nodded.
“So there’s no magic, and there’s no evidence of a fight,” Stowe said, brows knitted as she surveyed the scene. “No evidence Brett was injured other than the obvious insult. But that insult is grandiose. Not just one sword, but two. And not just left for dead, but displayed in the middle of a church courtyard.”
“It’s a message,” Jonah said, tucking his phone away again.
“Then who’s the audience?” my grandfather asked.
“Vampires are the obvious target,” I said. “We’re the supernaturals who use katanas.”
“That was our concern,” my grandfather said, caterpillar eyebrows bunched in as he looked at me.
“So the perp is trying to send a message to us, or he’s trying to put the blame on us?” I asked.
“Hard to say without more information,” Ethan said.
“We’ll handle the forensics, canvass the neighborhood, speak to his friends,” Stowe said. “But if you can get any additional information about the origin of the swords, we’d appreciate it.”