He couldn't answer her at first because he was too busy trying to figure out what she had gotten her hands on. "What the fuck is that?" It was honest confusion, a hint of betrayal, that sharpened his words. He had assumed she had seen a newspaper article, maybe the one George had had months ago, or some film reel maybe, but God only knew why there would have been a film reel about that. The point was that he had never seen that book before in his life, and more than Sookie finding out, he was troubled by how.

(All she had found out, he told himself, was that people had died. There had been a brutal killing in a subway car. Unsolved. Inexplicable. Horrible. But she didn't know it was him.)

Who the fuck was making scrapbooks of this shit?

"I can't tell you what happened, Sookie. I've got no clue what you've got." It was a dirty trick, but the best one, the most sure. Because there was nothing, nothing linking him to the crime. No one could have caught them. If there was one thing vampires did well, it was kill. And hide their tracks. "What, you find some... some twisted pervert's scrapbook of a murder and just assume I have something to do with it? Twenty people died in Bristol. Must be related to Mitchell?"

The sad thing was that the disgust in his voice wasn't entirely feigned. It wasn't all show. Maybe he had done those things, but maybe he hadn't. Maybe it had just been island trickery and she had marched right up to his door, expecting to hear one thing. "It's a big city, Sookie. Bad things happen all the time. And I don't always have explanations for them."