Raphael caught the officer on the way down and set him against the wall with reasonable care, adjusting the angle until the man's weight was distributed well enough to hold.
The hand-strike method had a short window. Ten seconds at most before awareness started returning. He'd planned for that.
He produced a small vial from his jacket, high-concentration anesthetic, the volatile kind that worked through inhalation rather than contact.
He'd used it extensively during Black Gloves operations, usually on guards who needed to stay down longer than instinct allowed.
Previously he'd needed a mask to avoid dosing himself. The arcane reserves he was carrying now rendered that precaution unnecessary.
He broke the seal and left it near the officer's face.
Then he walked to the corner where he'd stashed the sword, unwrapped it from its cloth cover, and slung it across his back.
He ducked under the police tape and moved into the cordoned area.
The ground here had been packed but not surfaced, underlying soil exposed, softened by recent rain. His first step sank slightly. He lifted his foot and checked the sole.
Dark mud. And a clear, shallow impression of his boot left behind.
"Interesting."
He looked at the space around the body. The ground was exactly the kind that would record any significant movement across it, consistent moisture, no gravel cover, nothing to obscure pressure.
But the area immediately surrounding the victim showed no comparable marks. No paw prints. No weight impressions from something approaching or withdrawing.
"The killer understood what it was leaving behind. It managed the scene." He filed the observation. "Not a mindless Demon. Something with sufficient cognition to consider evidence."
In the days since joining the Red Gloves he'd spent free time working through the system's reference materials on supernatural entities. The threshold for meaningful intelligence in Demons generally started around Lv3.
He'd killed a Lv4 Flesh Bishop, yes, but that had been a sustained fight with Evelyn covering his flank and the element of a truck as a tactical resource.
Alone against a Lv3 with the advantage of unknown terrain, a clean outcome was not guaranteed.
He didn't intend to find out the hard way if he could avoid it.
He drew the revolver and held it at his side as he approached the sheet.
The sword stirred against his back. Not significantly, a low, intermittent vibration, the kind that suggested the sword was detecting something rather than responding to something immediate.
Arcane residue. Very faint. Almost gone, more like an echo than a presence.
He crouched and lifted the sheet.
Martina looked as the file had described and worse in person. Her clothing had been pulled open in multiple directions, the tears suggesting force applied from close range.
The skin was the particular white of advanced blood loss. Her left arm was absent below the shoulder. Her right leg was missing from mid-calf.
He called up the Profiler ability and let it run in the background as he worked.
"The wound patterning, multiple parallel tracks, deep, consistent with claws. But the spacing is wrong for anything in the standard reference.
The gap between strikes implies something with a hand substantially larger than mine in Blood Frenzy."
He looked at the arc of the cuts. "Height estimate around two-fifty centimeters if the limb proportions are typical."
He examined the wound edges more closely.
"Clean margins. No saw-tooth tearing. The claws are sharp but they're not the piercing type, this is a raking motion, not a stabbing one. Shorter nails, probably. Wide fingers. This Demon grabs rather than impales."
The wounds weren't uniform in their purpose. More than half of them weren't located near anything vital, positioned on the torso, the thighs, the upper arms, in patterns that suggested accumulation rather than efficiency.
The timing wasn't uniform either. The wounds nearest the vital areas had progressed furthest toward decomposition, while the peripheral damage was only beginning to discolor.
"The killing strikes landed first. The rest came after." He sat with that for a moment. "It kept working after she was dead. It was angry, not hunting. Whatever this Demon's operational logic is, this woman made it personal somehow."
He keyed the concealed earpiece.
"Evelyn. First finding: victim appears to have had a prior relationship with the attacker. Significant emotional charge behind the killing.
Suggest you look for connection between the victim and anything unusual in her personal or professional life. You're better positioned to ask those questions."
He moved to the abdomen.
The fabric had been pulled aside, and what was underneath confirmed what the file had only implied. The abdominal cavity was largely empty. The organs were gone.
"Consumed the viscera." He frowned. "But the behavior profile doesn't match a predator. This Demon isn't hunting for nutrition." He paused. "So why take the organs specifically?"
He leaned closer to the edge of the wounds and identified a second smell beneath the blood and the beginnings of protein decay.
Something cold and specific, the particular damp of confined drainage spaces, the smell of water that had been sitting underground for a long time.
"Sewer access. This Demon has been moving through the drainage system. That's my thread."
The limb sites last.
The left arm's stump showed something distinct from what he'd expected. The bone was intact, clean, unbroken.
But the surrounding tissue had been stretched in a way that biological tearing didn't produce naturally. The skin had extended before giving way.
Not bitten. Not cut.
Pulled. Using considerable force, and probably after the victim was already dead.
"This is different from a feeding behavior. This is destruction for its own sake, anger working itself out on a body that couldn't respond anymore."
He looked at the margins. "Strength comparable to or exceeding vampire-level output. And a temper that didn't stop when the target did."
The right leg told a different story.
The bone here was fractured and splintered, not cleanly separated. And around the break point, gnawing marks. Shallow, irregular, the radius of the bites small relative to the force applied.
The edges had progressed into a different kind of decay from the rest of the body, a localized process more consistent with bacterial introduction through saliva than with standard postmortem progression.
Raphael sat back on his heels.
A scavenger. Not the primary attacker, something that had come after, in the window between the killing and the body's discovery. Urban environment ruled out the obvious candidates. No hyenas, no vultures.
Something that moved in dark spaces and found bodies that had already been made available.
Something that lives in the drainage system.
He exhaled slowly.
"Two Demons at minimum. The primary, large, strong, intelligent enough to manage a crime scene, emotionally connected to this victim in some negative way.
The secondary, scavenger, small enough to move through sewer infrastructure, gnawing dentition rather than shearing."
The picture was coming together.
Whatever had killed Martina wasn't operating alone, and it hadn't chosen her at random. The anger written across her body was too specific for that. There was a history here, something that had accumulated until it overflowed.
He was still processing the conclusion when the sword moved against his back.
Not a residue-tremor this time. Stronger. Purposeful.
A shadow crossed the edge of his peripheral vision, fast, low, staying close to the wall, and dropped into a drainage grate set into the pavement near the green strip. The cover rattled once as it pulled shut.
Something had been watching him work.
And now it was underground.