Blood Lust: A Supernatural Horror (2 page)

“She's such a pretty little thing, Tack.
I don’t get it. What kind of monster would do this?”

I cringed.
That was what the press was calling this serial
kidnapper
, the ‘Midnight Monster’, because he always struck late at night.
Brushing
my fingers through my brown hair,
I
not
ed
that
m
y disposable gloves came away oily,
only
natural since I
had not
showered in two days
and nights
.
I resisted the urge to sniff my armpits
, but
I
probably
I
stunk
to high heaven. Lew probably
did
n’t
notice
al
though we had shared
stakeout duty on
the front seat of my
Acura for the past
two nights
.
Fat
lot of good it
had done
.
Now, a
nother young girl had gone missing less than four blocks from our stakeout.
I r
ipped
the
disposable
gloves from my sweaty hands and
tossed them
to
the floor
in a fit of rage
. L
e
t the lab boys yell about
cross-
contamination.
I didn’t care anymore.

“The world’s full of perverts, Lew
,” I
replied in answer to
my partner’s question
.
“
We’ve just got an exceptionally bitchy one on our hands.”

“Blood
everywhere but
no bodies. Your normal
pervert
wants them alive.
Why
hurt
them?
”

“Maybe he’s
into
necrophilia
,” I suggested.
The thought disgusted me.
I had seen dozens of naked bodies of dead women and none had
ever
excited me sexually
, only angered me
.
What type of sicko got off on dead bodies?
I still held out hope that the missing girls were that – missing
– but as
the hours
passed, it became less likely
.
In my mind, I was already considering them murder victims.
If so, we were dealing with a serial killer.

“Who knows
what motivates him
? What I want to know is how the hell he gets in and out of these windows.
” I examined the broken window, carefully avoiding the shattered glass
littering the carpet. “
It’s always a window
or
a
balcony. Hell, it wore me out
just
climbing three fl
ights
of stairs
. This guy hauls bodies out windows like he’s got wings.”

Lew
arched one
bushy
eyebrow
as he looked
at me
.

“Just a manner of speech, Lew,” I added. I
did
n’t
need my partner thinking I was punch drunk
from lack of sleep
, which I was
rapidly becoming
.

“Maybe it’s more than one person,” Lew suggested.

“
It
’s
a possibility
, but w
e
’ve
uncovered
no evidence one way or the other
.
It
’s hard
to imagine two depraved
maniacs
of this caliber developing a kinship with one another.
Most serial killers
are loners
. It
’s
a basic part of their character.
”
I shook my head
, picking up a bottle of perfume
from
her dresser
,
a delicate scent suited for a delicate woman. I set it back down
in its exact position
.
“God help us if you’re right,
Lew,
but I think we’re dealing with
single
kidnapper
.”

Lew nodded
his head slowly
. “Probably so
,
”
he said as he
gently
replaced the photo on the bedside table.
His eyes lingered on it for a moment as if he expected her to speak.
He turned to me. “You think they’re dead, don’t you?”

A
noise in the hallway
saved me from answering
his question
.
Dr. Munson, the forensics chief
,
walked through the door with his assistant, Melody
Steele
.
Munson’s
gray
hair was
unkempt
and he walked slightly stooped,
as if he carried the weight of the dead on his shoulders,
but his blue-green eyes were as sharp as ever. They missed nothing
as they swept the room
. The
first thing he noticed was my
discarded
glove
s
on the floor
. He shook his head, tsked silently, picked
them
up with a pair of tweezers and dropped
them
in a
plastic
baggy.

“I’ll label this
as
extraneous evidence, Hardin
,
”
he said
.

“That’s
Detective
Hardin to you, Doc,” I snapped
and regretted it immediately
.
I was on edge
from lack of sleep and lack of progress
but there was no need to take it out on
Munson
.
He had been working long hours along with the rest of us.
He couldn’t supply answers when there was no evidence.

One thing about Munson, he didn’t give an inch.
He looked
me up and down
co
o
l
l
y
over the rim of his glasses
.
“Don’t screw up my crime scene,
Detective
Hardin,” he returned with as much vigor as I had used. “Oh, by the way
,
I spotted three blood drops on the street outside the building. By the spatter pattern, they
fell
from a great height
, maybe thirty feet
.”
He cocked his head slightly and looked at me. “Mean anything
to you
?”

I
looked back
out
the window
down at the street
three stories below
and saw three yellow evidence markers at the edge of the s
idewalk
. How could a man
exiting
a window
carrying
a body get blood spatter on the street a good fifteen feet away?
The answer was he
could not
.
As I pulled my head back in the window,
I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye
on the roof above.
I looked up and saw a dark shadow
g
lide along the top of the wall. I blinked my eyes and it was gone.
Too damned tired
.
I rubbed my
burning
eyes
figuring t
hey were playing tricks on me.

“That doesn’t make s
ense
,” I
mumbled
, turning
my attention
back to Munson
.

He shrugged. “I’ll type it and run a DNA comparison, but dollars to doughnuts it’s the same as the victim
’s
.”

I cringed inside. He, too, thought the
Stewart
girl w
as dead.
While I pondered
his
enigmatic bit of information
about the
blood drops
, he and Melody set to work, methodically scouring the apartment from window to bathroom
for
fingerprints and
minute traces
of evidence
.
I suspected that, like the other crime scenes, they would come up empty.

Melody was a
piece of work
,
thirty-three,
long
blonde hair, green
on green
eyes and red luscious lips
.
At only
five feet, four inches, she only came up to about my chin
but she packed a lot of woman in her diminutive body
.
I watched
her
for a few minutes
to take my mind off the job
. Her
tight
skirt and blouse did little to hide
her
exquisite
figure. When she bent over, it was like
a Vegas
floorshow
.
I noticed
appreciatively
that s
he did not wear pantyhose,
which I detested,
but stockings and a garter belt
.
I knew she was single and
I
had tried to summon the courage to ask her out
on several occasions
, but each time I remembered my failed marriage
s
and
chickened out.
With my lousy track record with women, I didn’t need to get involved with a co-worker.
Lew cleared his throat to get my attention.
Reluctantly, I tore my gaze away
from Melody
.

“Focus on this,
Hardt
ack,” he said, pointing to the photo
of the girl
. I nodded
at
his
not so subtle reminder
.

I allow
ed
no one to call me by my given name, Thackery
, which I hated
. I
do
let
a
few people call me
its derivative,
Tack
, but o
nly Lew c
an
call me Hardtack
, the name of
a
dense,
chewy cracker
, a staple for
soldiers
during
the Civil War
.
God knows how he
discovered
the name
, but that’s Lew. He
thought I was a hard man
and deserved
a hard
nick
name
,
Hardtack
.
I didn’t object.
Lew had earned the right
to call me
Hardt
ack
though
luckily
he only used it
sparingly
. He had pulled my bacon out of the fire on more than one occasion. Of
course,
I had saved his sorry ass
a
few times as well. After
our
first year
as partners
, we stopped counting
coup
and just started counting on each other.

I shook my head to clear the cobwebs and
smacked
my fist into my open palm in frustration.
“There’s nothing more we can do here
, Lew
. Let’s grab a bite to eat and head home.
Maybe I can think better with some sleep.
”
Home sounded good
;
home and sleep.
Both were just dim memories.

To most people, the thought of food after
wading through
such a grisly scene would be unthinkable. I guess I have a cast iron stomach. I could eat sitting on
the
morgue
slab while
Munson
performed an autopsy. Once you g
e
t past a person being dead, the rest
d
oesn’t
really matter
, especially to them
.
The corpse
was no longer a person
, just flesh and bones
.
The thing
that had made them a person – soul, spirit,
life force,
Qi
,
Ka
,
whatever
–
had fled the empty shell
.
I wasn’t sure about heaven but
after all the carnage I had seen one human being inflict upon another
I suspected there was a
hell and I
wanted to send this
lunatic
there ASAP.