"Laurell K. Hamilton - Anita Blake 05 - Bloody Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Laurell K)

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Laurell K. Hamilton
Bloody Bones

1
 It was St. Patrick's Day, and the only green I was wearing was a button
that read, "Pinch me and you're dead meat." I'd started work last night with a
green blouse on, but I'd gotten blood all over it from a beheaded chicken.
Larry Kirkland, zombie-raiser in training, had dropped the decapitated bird.
It did the little headless chicken dance and sprayed both of us with blood. I
finally caught the damn thing, but the blouse was ruined.
I had to run home and change. The only thing not ruined was the charcoal
grey suit jacket that had been in the car. I put it back on over a black
blouse, black skirt, dark hose, and black pumps. Bert, my boss, didn't like us
wearing black to work, but if I had to be at the office at seven o'clock
without any sleep at all, he would just have to live with it.
I huddled over my coffee mug, drinking it as black as I could swallow it.
It wasn't helping much. I stared at a series of 8-by-10 glossy blowups spread
across my desktop. The first picture was of a hill that had been scraped open,
probably by a bulldozer. A skeletal hand reached out of the raw earth. The
next photo showed that someone had tried to carefully scrape away the dirt,
showing the splintered coffin and bones to one side of the coffin. A new body.
The bulldozer had been brought in again. It had plowed up the red earth and
found a boneyard. Bones studded the earth like scattered flowers.
One skull spread its unhinged jaws in a silent scream. A scraggle of pale
hair still clung to the skull. The dark, stained cloth wrapped around the
corpse was the remnants of a dress. I spotted at least three femurs next to
the upper half of a skull. Unless the corpse had had three legs, we were
looking at a real mess.
The pictures were well done in a gruesome sort of way. The color made it
easier to differentiate the corpses, but the high gloss was a little much. It
looked like morgue photos done by a fashion photographer. There was probably
an art gallery in New York that would hang the damn things and serve cheese
and wine while people walked around saying, "Powerful, don't you think? Very
powerful."
They were powerful, and sad.
There was nothing but the photos. No explanation. Bert had said to come to
his office after I'd looked at them. He'd explain everything. Yeah, I believed
that. The Easter Bunny is a friend of mine, too.
I gathered the pictures up, slipped them into the envelope, picked my
coffee mug up in the other hand, and went for the door.
There was no one at the desk. Craig had gone home. Mary, our daytime
secretary, didn't get in until eight. There was a two-hour space of time when
the office was unmanned. That Bert had called me into the office when we were
the only ones there bothered me a lot. Why the secrecy?
Bert's office door was open. He sat behind his desk, drinking coffee,