At high levels in the government, he was golden. But these cops were strictly low-level, and they didn’t know one damn thing about Paul’s secret brief and his secret powers.

He gazed down at the remains, almost willing them to speak. But they said nothing. The face was stretched so tight against the skull that it looked like something you might buy for Halloween.

“Turn him over,” he said. “I want to look at the back.”

Two of the cops obliged. Paul knew that the vampires used human skin for articles of clothing—gloves and such—because you found such things in their lairs. He’d thought maybe the back of this man would be as neatly skinned as his own father’s had been.

He’d held some of those gloves and purses in his hands for a long, long time. He’d wondered which of the creatures had worn garments made from his dad. Whenever he and his crew found these things, they collected them with reverence and they blessed them and they cremated them and made a little ritual of scattering the ashes.

Melodramatic? You could say so. Sentimental. Sure. But his crew were united on two things: Any human remains they located would be respected, and no vampire would be left alive. Scorched-earth policy. Absolute.

Think if they had to read Miranda warnings. Think if the vampires were allowed legal defense, say, in India, where the prisons leaked and it could take years before a case came to trial? What if they claimed murder as their natural right, and proved that they were created by God to prey upon the human being? Presumably, laws would then have to be written allowing them to take a certain number of humans as prey each year, much as we allow ourselves to take whales.

And what about the endangered-species acts in various countries, most especially Europe and the U.S.? If the vampire was declared an endangered species—and it was conceivable, given their comparative rarity—then Paul and his crew would be out of business altogether. Governments would end up in the business of encouraging the vampire to breed and protecting its habitat—the ghetto, the teeming slum, the homeless shelter.

A man with glasses approached Paul. “We understand that you will be able to inform us of the manner of death.”

“Death by misadventure.”

“Excuse me?”

“The man had a bad adventure, obviously. So that’s the conclusion—death by misadventure.”

“You are coming all the way from KL to tell us this—this nothing?”

“The corpse is U.S. property,” Paul said. “I’m going to remove it to the States.” He needed it. He needed any trace of nonhuman DNA he could find. The hair from Tokyo wasn’t enough. But two samples—that would end the human-animal controversy.

“Now, wait,” the colonel inspector said, “now —”