There was something poetic about the way the blood was splattered all over the bathroom wall. Like a Rorschach entrance exam to an art school. I kept my face blank and my head tilted to one side because I knew it made me look as unreal as the vampires around me. When you were a tiny woman in a strange city, you had to make your reputation count.

"They said you were a vampire hunter."

The detective sounded like a puppy whose tail had been stepped on. I had to turn around just to see the look on his face. "I am a vampire hunter."

"Then how come you look like one of them?"

Maybe I'd done my little act too well. Oops. "Do I look like the walking undead to you?" Jean Claude would have a hissy-fit if he knew how badly I was alienating both the clientele and the management of this little club. Well, Jean-Claude wasn't here, and I'd come out of my jurisdiction for my expertise as a vampire hunter and because this area didn't usually have the kind of trouble I was looking at.

The vampires, the local pard, even the werewolves all had a pretty good working relationship with the local constabulary. I didn't know why this city, out of the whole Blue Ridge area, was a haven of peace and goodwill but I wanted to put it down to the fact that everyone in the downtown area acted like they were getting over a bout of the hippies. Vegetarian coffeehouses coexisted along with steak bars for the meat eaters and there were open air concerts every weekend evening. Humans could walk safe neck and neck with the predators. It made my head hurt.

But it was also the place one of my old running buddies had chosen to get married and settle down. So here I was, staring at a wall of blood blots, trying to puzzle out a murder. I couldn't even take a vacation anymore.

"Are you going to stare at it all night or are you going to go after it?" His voice was crawling up into nails on a chalkboard range.

I took a couple steps closer to the wall. "You've got the club sealed off, right?"

"Yeah."

"Then he's not going anywhere, whoever he is. Relax." Rorschach tests. What did this remind me of? "If he's already gone, he's gotten as far out of the area as he's going to get. If he's still here..."

I didn't finish that sentence. No need to spook the detectives. Especially not when the unis were already filling the doorways and whispering worse than a knitting circle.

"You think he's still here?"

Way to go, detective. I revised my estimate of his age down by five years. He had to have made detective in the last year if he was letting it out, how rattled he was.

"I think anyone who's making this much of a mess is either doing it to make a point or play a game, or can't control himself. If he can't control himself, we'd know if he was still here."

"And if he's playing a game?"

I dragged my eyes off the walls and knelt down by the body. "Then I'd like to call the FBI in, cause chances are it's only going to get worse from here on in."

There was something funny about the way the body was laying. At first I thought it was the way the person had fallen, but it was just laying there, like a puppet with its strings cut. Not a person anymore, just a thing. A body with its throat ripped open was one of the less horrific things I'd seen in the last twelve months. Did that say something about the way my life was turning out? Nah.

"You didn't let anyone move the body, did you?"

"I know how to handle a crime scene, Blake." Now he was saving face by giving me a hard time, acting like a hard detective. I did the kid a favor and didn't laugh.

Or maybe I really had been hanging around the walking undead too long. Here I was, calling a man with ten years or more on me a kid.

"This isn't right." I stood up and backed away again before I could get any more fascinated by the way the throat was slashed.

"What isn't right? Apart from the fact that it's a dead body in a night-club bathroom."

"The way the body's lying. It's not right." I pointed at the wall. "If something had ripped his throat out, and I still don't think it was a vampire, the spray should be triangular."

He came up behind me and squinted at the walls. "You've been watching too many of them cop shows."

I sighed. "I'm a vampire hunter. What do vampires do? They kill people, sometimes messily. There's a lot of blood involved, a lot of blood spray. I don't need Hollywood to tell me what arterial spray looks like coming off a neck wound." And I didn't want to think about how I knew what it looked like, either. Sometimes there was nothing to do except keep your face blank and your feet pointing forward.

"All right, so someone moved the body. What does that have to do with the price of rice in China?"

"If someone moved the body..."

Rorschach tests. Ink blots. This scene was telling me something and it was on the tip of my mind. Something Jean-Claude had said about showmanship.

I was looking out over a crowd of very nervous people. Most of them had just come out for a good time, maybe to meet someone, maybe to get away from someone. One person's night was about to take a turn for the much, much worse.

"Someone moved the body. Someone's selling this too much, making it look like one of the monsters did it, but I'll bet you that someone's as human as you or I."

He looked at me. For a second I was waiting for him to argue my humanity, and it wasn't a fight I wanted to have. I came out here to get away from that debate, not to get into it with a homicide detective from a weird hippie town who I barely knew. Thankfully, he decided to let it go.

"What's your theory, then?" He seemed happier thinking it was just a homicide gone a little weird.

"My guess is that someone knew this place was a hangout for the, let's say, other than human, and took advantage of it. Maybe they didn't mean to kill the victim. Maybe they didn't even mean it to get violent, but it did, and now someone's dead. They don't want it to be them. They don't want to be a murderer. So they have to think fast. They can't hide the body in the bathroom..."

Why was I narrating the crime? I sounded like a bad Mike Hammer novel. But it was getting the desired effect from at least one of the patrons. He was inching for the door, and all I had to do to get the detective's attention was step on his foot.

"So where do they hide it?" He played along. Hey, maybe he liked those books.

"They don't. They leave it out where someone can stumble across it. Only they hide their involvement in the mess. They rip up the throat. It probably takes a few tries to do it, enough blood gets loose that they can paint the walls with it. Make it look like someone got violent. But it wasn't one of the monsters. It was just a guy. A guy who got a little too upset about something, his wife was cheating on him, his girlfriend threatened to tell his wife, something stupid that's going to mess him up for the rest of his life. A blonde guy with thinning hair and a cheap blue suit..."

Who was scurrying towards the door right about now. Excellent.

Werewolves and vampires aren't the only things that can smell fear. When it comes to a very bad murderer running for the nearest exit, detectives can too. The whole club had gone quiet by the time I'd said the word 'suit' so that his last few footsteps sounded loud and echoing.

He got arrested. I got ignored. It wasn't a vampire, it wasn't even a non-human, so I didn't get anything worse or better than my night interrupted and a couple of free drinks off the detective in charge. I got back to my hotel room at four in the morning wondering if I could skip the bachelor party the next day and if I was ever going to have a normal vacation anymore.

Probably not. But hey, that was my life.

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