He nodded. 'I'm beginning to understand that.'

Edward came out to join us. Hatfield trailed after him. Lisandro and Seamus came last. Seamus was tall, dark, and handsome, and very African, which made his name jarring. Someone who looked like he should have been hunting lions with a spear shouldn't have been named the Irish equivalent of James. He blinked rich, brown eyes at me. If hyenas hadn't had slit pupils, more like you think a reptile would have, you could have mistaken the eyes for human, but the pupils were wrong and the color was odd. It wasn't coppery red like the werebear Goran, but it wasn't human brown either. I wasn't sure I could explain the difference, but I was beginning to know it when I saw it.

I'd been informed that the vampire, Jane, that he called master had made him his animal to call hundreds of years ago and had forced him into animal form at one point until his eyes had never changed back. They, like Micah's, were stuck. It just seemed worse that Seamus's master had done it. I'd helped Micah escape from Chimera by killing him. There was no escape for Seamus, because if his master died, very likely he'd die, too. He wouldn't have been my choice for rounding out our little party of crime busters. It wasn't his fighting skills I questioned, because I'd seen him in the practice ring. He was eerily graceful for such a tall, long-limbed man. Fredo had described him as 'dark water,' because of how liquidly he moved. The nickname had stuck and some of the guards called him Water. He didn't seem to mind. He didn't seem to mind anything. He was a big, dark, graceful killing machine who seemed to have fewer emotions than all the other sociopaths.

Hatfield watched him out of the corner of her eye, her hand moving toward her duty weapon without her really thinking about it. He was just so big, so self-contained, and so neutral that it was actually unnerving. It was nice to see that I wasn't the only one who thought it was unsettling.

If there had been more strangers with us, Nicky and I wouldn't have kept hugging each other, but Hatfield was going to have to either get used to it or tag along with someone else. I needed the cuddles.

'What the hell happened here?' she asked.

'The nice older couple got eaten alive by zombies,' I said.

She gave a small shudder. 'I know that, but why is the table in front of the door and the broken window covered? I mean ... shouldn't that have kept the zombies out?'

The fact that she had figured out the puzzling part made me like her even more. 'Yes, it should have.'

'Even if there was a reason for them to put the table and dresser back in place, that would have trapped them in the house, and they weren't trapped in the house. They ate the victims and then they left,' Edward said.

'So how did they get out?' I asked.

'Did you see the corkboard with all the keys in a row?' Lisandro asked.

We all nodded or said, 'Yes.'

'Want to see if the house key is there?'

'They'll have a spare,' I said. 'They're just that kind of people.'

'Okay, then let's check and see if their keys are here. Personal keys have stuff on them, they aren't just bare keys,' he said.

'Did anyone see the lady's purse?' I asked.

No one had.

'Let's find her purse,' Edward said.

I didn't want to go back in the house with the smell and the happy parade of pictures. Nicky didn't want to go back in either. For once even Edward looked a little worn around the edges. The only one who seemed unmoved by it all was Seamus. I would have asked Nicky if he found the other man's lack of emotional affect bothersome, but he'd have said no.

The other two houses that we'd seen had held the remains of dead bodies; they'd been broken into, but they hadn't been barricaded. As attacks by killer zombies went, the other two houses had been normal. The only puzzle was this one, so we went back inside to figure it out, because that was what we did when we weren't shooting things or setting them on fire.

CHAPTER 60

We couldn't find her current purse. Hatfield suggested that not every woman carried a purse, but we couldn't find her wallet, a change purse, any form of identification. We found her husband's wallet with his ID, money, and credit cards all intact on the bedside table, where it looked like he put it every night.

'There are three purses in the closet, but they're dressier, or older. She should have a purse,' Hatfield said.

I knew what she meant. The female victim I had to do my best to think of her as just that. Where was the woman's purse?

'Zombies don't take purses,' I said.

'What if they're made of leather?' Seamus asked; his voice was as deep as you expected it to be.

'Flesh-eating zombies only eat fresh kill or fresh-ish carrion. Treated leather, even the most expensive, would still be too dead for them to eat it.'

'A ghoul would eat it,' Edward said.

I agreed. 'But if ghouls did this, they'd have eaten the man's belt and a lot of other stuff in the house. They live on carrion and garbage.'

'I thought ghouls wouldn't leave the cemetery where they spawn?' Hatfield said.

'They don't normally,' I said.

'There's no cemetery for miles and miles,' she said.

Edward and I looked at each other. We both remembered a case where ghouls followed a necromancer who had accidentally raised them. 'I don't think it's ghouls,' I said, to that look in his eyes.

'No,' he said.

'If the zombies didn't take the purse, who did?' Nicky asked.

'Maybe somebody broke in after they were dead and took the purse,' Lisandro said.

'Then why not take the man's wallet? There's over a hundred dollars in it, and a full set of credit cards,' I said.

'If it wasn't robbery, then why take the purse?' Hatfield asked.

'If it was robbery, why not take more stuff?' Lisandro asked.

'So it wasn't robbery,' I said.

'There were vampires with the zombies in the mountains; was this a mixed group, too?' asked Nicky.

'Maybe,' I said.

'Why would a vampire take some nice old lady's purse?' I asked.

'What was in the purse that wasn't in the wallet?' Edward asked.

Lisandro, Nicky, and I all said, 'Keys.'

'They didn't get in the window or the door. The couple barricaded themselves in, but then for some reason they opened the front door.'