Lover Beware

back and buttocks would be livid, but the undamaged part of his face, his shoulders, and his upper chest were waxy and pale. He looked cold beneath the thin sheet. And very dead.
    Lily’s lips tightened. She glanced at Rule. “The sheet—?”
    “I’ll need it off.”
    The attendant looked surprised, then upset as she removed the sheet. That puzzled Lily. Why would a morgue attendant be upset at being asked to remove a sheet from a body? The obvious assumption was that Rule was here to identify the victim and, given the condition of the dead man’s face, looking at the body made sense.
    Oh. Lily’s lips twitched. The young woman didn’t like the idea that Rule might be intimately familiar with another man’s body. Well, no one enjoyed having their dreams snuffed out. Even the brief, silly ones.
    Rule bent close to the ravaged throat and sniffed.
    “Hey!” The attendant grabbed his shoulder and tried to pull him back. She might have been tugging on a Buick, for all the effect she had. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
    “Exactly what he’s been asked to do.” Lily took the woman’s arm and firmly urged her back. “By Chief Delgado.”
    “He was asked to sniff a corpse?” she exclaimed, outraged.
    Lily lifted both eyebrows as if the question were absurd, rather than the action. “Yes.”
    The attendant looked as if she would have bolted from the room if regulations hadn’t called for her to remain. Lily didn’t much want to watch him, either, but perversity or pride kept her from looking away.
    He made a thorough job of it, smelling all up and down the body, paying close attention to the wounds and the cold, flaccid hands. He was intent, focused, and somehow still impossibly elegant. Not like a beast at all—more like a wine connoisseur about to deliver a verdict on the bouquets of various vintages.
    And that thought was both absurd and macabre. Lily bit her lip to keep from giggling like an idiot.
    At last he straightened, met her eyes, and shook his head slightly.
    “You couldn’t tell.”
    “He was killed by a lupus,” he said flatly. “Beyond that…” He shrugged. “Very little scent remains.”
    “We already knew the killer was a lupus.”
    “Perhaps you did. I didn’t until now. There are some who might want to fake the slaying of men by lupi.”
    Lily remembered their audience, a wide-eyed attendant who might talk to the wrong person, like a reporter. She jerked her head, indicating she wanted him to follow, and headed for the door.
    He thanked the attendant politely. She should have done that, she thought, upset and not knowing why. Had she counted so much on his sense of smell to give her a lead? That was foolish.
    He caught up with her at the door and took her elbow. “I want coffee. Something to get the taste of this place out of my mouth.”
    Before she stopped to think, she’d agreed. Together they left that cold, bright room with its neatly filed bodies.
     
    INSTINCT TOOK HER to Bennie’s Bar & Grill. Bennie’s was large, dark, and noisy, known for its cheeseburgers. As soon as she stepped inside, Lily sighed. Usually her instincts weren’t this lousy.
    Bennie’s was a cop hangout.
    It wasn’t crowded at this hour. She only spotted two faces she knew as they headed for the back, but everyone seemed to recognize the man with her. The looks she and Rule drew varied from startled to snarly. Cops were good with faces, and his was memorable.
    By the time they sat in a booth near the rest rooms, she was feeling self-conscious and prickly. “I wonder if this is how a white woman felt in Selma in 1960 if she went into a restaurant with a black man.”
    He shook his head slowly. “Our fellow customers aren’t going to take either of us out in the alley and beat us up for having dared to be seen in public together. The waitress won’t even refuse to serve me.”
    She grimaced. “I’m overreacting, you mean.”
    “There are parallels. If people hadn’t started refusing to sit at the back of the bus back then, measures like the Species Citizenship Bill wouldn’t be possible now. Have you given any thought to going out with me?”
    She blinked. “For a supposedly sophisticated man, you have lousy timing. I just watched you sniffing a corpse.”
    “It’s a subject that will keep coming up, good timing or not.”
    A waitress drifted up—young, blond, and pierced. There was a ring in her eyebrow, three studs on one ear, and another ring in the belly button