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“Well?” Dolph said.

“Does she look different to you?” I asked.

He frowned. “What?”

“The corpse; does it look different to you?”

He stared down at the pale body. “Now that you mention it. It looks like she’s asleep.” He shook his head. “We’re going to have to call an ambulance and have a doctor pronounce her dead.”

“She’s not breathing.”

“Would you want the fact that you weren’t breathing to be the only criterion?”

I thought about that for a minute. “No, I guess not.”

Dolph leafed through his notebook. “You said a person who dies of multiple vampire bites can’t rise from the dead as a vampire.” He was reading my own words back at me. I was hoist with my petard.

“That’s true in most cases.”

He stared down at the woman. “But not in this one.”

“Unfortunately, no,” I said.

“Explain this, Anita.” He didn’t sound happy. I didn’t blame him.

“Sometimes even one bite can make a corpse rise as a vampire. I’ve only read a couple of articles about it. A very powerful master vamp can sometimes contaminate every corpse it touches.”

“Where’d you read the articles?”

“The Vampire Quarterly.”

“Never heard of it,” he said.

I shrugged. “I have a degree in preternatural biology; I must be on someone’s list for stuff like that.” A thought came to me that wasn’t pleasant at all. “Dolph.”

“Yeah.”

“The man, the first corpse, this is its third night.”

“It didn’t glow in the dark,” Dolph said.

“The woman’s corpse didn’t look bad until full dark.”

“You think the man’s going to rise?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Shit,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said.

He shook his head. “Wait a minute. He can still tell us who killed him.”

“He won’t come back as a normal vamp,” I said. “He died of multiple wounds, Dolph; he’ll come back as more animal than human.”

“Explain that.”

“If they took the body to St. Louis City Hospital, then it’s safe behind reinforced steel, but if they listened to me, then it’s at the regular morgue. Call the morgue and tell them to evacuate the building.”

“You’re serious,” he said.

“Absolutely.”

He didn’t even argue with me. I was his preternatural expert, and what I said was pretty much gospel until proven otherwise. Dolph didn’t ask for your opinion unless he was prepared to act upon it. He was a good boss.

He slipped into his car, nearest to the murder scene of course, and called the morgue.

He leaned out the open car door. “The body was sent to St. Louis City Hospital, routine for all vampire victims. Even ones our preternatural expert tells us are safe.” He smiled at me when he said it.

“Call St. Louis City and make sure they’ve got the body in the vault room.”

“Why would they transport the body to the vampire morgue and not put the body in the vault room?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I’ll feel better after you call them.”

He took a deep breath and let it go. “Okay.” He got back on the phone and dialed the number from memory. Shows what kind of year Dolph’s been having.

I stood at the open car door and listened. There wasn’t much to hear. No one answered.

Dolph sat there listening to the distant ring of the phone. He stared up at me. His eyes asked the question.

“Somebody should be there,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“The man will rise like a beast,” I said. “It’ll slaughter everything in its path unless the master that made it comes back to pick it up, or until it’s really dead. They’re called animalistic vampires. There’s no colloquial term for them. They’re too rare for that.”

Dolph hung up the phone and surged out of the car, yelling, “Zerbrowski!”

“Here, Sarge.” Zerbrowski came at a trot. When Dolph yelled, you came running, or else. “How’s it going, Blake?”

What was I supposed to say, terrible? I shrugged and said, “Fine.”

My beeper went off again. “Dammit, Bert!”

“Talk to your boss,” Dolph said. “Tell him to leave you the fuck alone.”

Sounded good to me.

Dolph went off yelling orders. The men scrambled to obey. I slid into Dolph’s car and called Bert.

He answered on the first ring; not a good sign. “This better