Authors: Jeannie Holmes
Morgan thrust out her bottom lip in a perfect pout. “What’s the matter, lover? Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“I’d rather have my fangs pulled.”
Alex tried to disguise her stifled snicker as an aborted sneeze and failed miserably.
Morgan pushed her designer sunglasses to the top of
her head. Her hazel eyes had shifted to a bright copper and blazed with contempt.
An approaching vehicle silenced any remark Morgan would’ve made. Alex watched as what appeared to be a four-wheel-drive golf cart sped through the chain-link fence surrounding the salvage yard and stopped in front of their group. The driver surveyed them with uncertainty before focusing on Varik.
“Are you Enforcer Baudelaire?” the man asked.
“Yes.” He moved away from Morgan and Alex fell into step with him. “You must be Buddy Coone.”
The man nodded. “Lieutenant Lockwood sent me to pick you up.” His eyes darted to Alex then to Damian and Morgan. He took in Morgan’s crisp white shirt, navy pencil skirt, and inappropriate high heels. “The terrain’s kind of rough in the yard, ma’am. It might be safer if you changed your shoes. Wouldn’t want you to twist an ankle.”
A quick image of Morgan stepping in a hole, falling to the ground, and breaking her neck flashed through Alex’s mind.
Varik hid a laugh in a cough.
Behave yourself
.
Alex glared at him.
I will if you explain where the hell Morgan gets off calling you her lover
.
“I’ll be fine,” Morgan responded, positioning herself beside Varik.
Buddy looked doubtful. “There are ruts, holes, rusted metal, all kinds of things to trip over. Ma’am, are you sure you can—”
“I assure you, Mr. Coone, I’m perfectly capable of navigating the terrain without injury.”
Buddy shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I’ll have to make two trips. I’ve only got room for two of you at a time.”
Varik climbed into the cart’s flatbed. When Morgan appeared as though she was going to commandeer the remaining spot, Alex pushed forward. She shoved Morgan
aside with a well-placed hip, grabbed the cart’s roll bar, and pulled herself on the bench seat beside Buddy Coone.
His startled yelp nearly drowned out Varik’s stifled laughter and Morgan’s curse.
Looking over her shoulder at Morgan, she feigned innocence. “Oh, I’m sorry, SI Dreyer. I thought you wanted to change your shoes.”
“Enforcer Sabian, I—”
The whine of the cart’s engine covered the rest of Morgan’s statement. Alex pointed at her ear and shook her head, shrugging.
Buddy directed the cart onto the path leading into the salvage yard.
Once they were out of sight, Varik’s explosion of laughter and pat on the shoulder combined with a surge of warmth over the bond.
I love it when you’re jealous
.
Alex sat up straighter and adjusted her sunglasses.
I’m not jealous
.
Oh, yes, you are
.
Envy filled the bond and she sighed.
All right. Maybe a little. But can you blame me after Morgan pulled that lover crap back there?
No, I suppose not
.
Are you going to explain it?
We’re on our way to a body dump. Now isn’t exactly the best time
.
The cart jounced down the side of a ditch and fought its way up the other side. Buddy swerved around a row of derelict minivans with clumps of brown weeds growing between them.
Alex noticed gray-black shadows darting among the wrecks and heard the unintelligible whisperings of the spirit world. She wasn’t surprised to find restless souls lingering in the salvage yard. After all, it was a cemetery of sorts and spirits often lingered near objects of
significance. Could anything be more significant than the vehicle of one’s demise?
The blood-bond shivered and a short pornographic film featuring her flashed through her mind.
She twisted in her seat to punch Varik’s arm, startling Buddy and causing him to nearly collide with the remains of a compact car. “Knock it off!”
Laughing, Varik flooded the bond with his thoughts.
You put the idea in my head
.
I did not!
Were you or were you not the one who suggested I push you up against a car and—
That was not a
suggestion,
and you know it
.
The bond shivered with the heat of his thoughts.
Perhaps not but it’s not a bad idea
.
We’re on our way to a body dump, as you pointed out. How can you possibly be thinking of sex?
I think the bond is affecting my judgment
.
Alex snorted.
I thought it was because you’re male and breathing
.
Varik chuckled behind her but didn’t respond.
As they neared an isolated corner of the salvage yard, Buddy slowed the cart and stopped behind a white van with the JPD’s logo and the words
CRIME SCENE RESPONSE UNIT
emblazoned on the side. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “The lieutenant is over there, other side of the van. Look for a dark blue Ford.”
Alex stepped from the cart and she heard Varik scrambling to exit the flatbed.
“I’ll go fetch the other two,” Buddy said. “Y’all be careful. There’s a lot of broken glass around here.”
The cart motored away and wind swept across the pasture. Alex breathed deep, instantly regretting it as the overwhelming smell of decay assaulted her. Gagging, she clamped her hand over her nose and mouth, trying in vain to block the odor.
She’d heard humans describe the smell of decomposition as akin to a Dumpster filled with rotting fruit—sickly sweet mixed with a slightly musty odor. To the heightened senses of vampires, the smell was that of both a fruit-filled Dumpster and an open sewage line.
Varik assumed a similar stance to hers. “No need to look for a fucking Ford. Just follow the damn smell.”
Tasha appeared from opposite the van. Her clothing was covered by a white Tyvek jumpsuit, plastic booties enveloped her shoes, and a paper cap protected her hair. The overall effect gave the lieutenant the appearance of a displeased Pillsbury Doughboy. “You’re going to want to suit up for this one.”
Alex and Varik moved to the rear of the van, where Tasha was pulling out matching jumpsuits for them.
“Tony’s with the body,” Tasha said while they stepped into the Tyvek suits. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
“Have you found any ID?” Varik asked, slipping plastic coverings over his boots.
“Not yet. Yard owner says the car isn’t part of his inventory. One of my guys is running the VIN number on the car now. Hopefully we can at least figure out the owner.”
Alex adjusted the paper cap to cover her hair. Cross-contamination of evidence was a huge risk at outdoor scenes. The protective gear they donned couldn’t prevent it with one hundred percent certainty but it did greatly reduce the odds. “How sure are you that it’s Mindy Johnson?”
“I’m not even sure it’s a person.”
Neither Alex nor Varik responded, allowing the severity of what they were about to see penetrate their minds. When they’d finished dressing in their protective gear, complete with latex gloves, Tasha led them toward a Ford Focus.
“Were you able to get anything from Mindy’s car?” she asked. “Anything that would lead us to suspect she’s still alive?”
“No, but I do have a working theory.” Varik offered a quick review of the morning’s events as the three slowly walked through the waist-high weeds.
“So you think this Dollmaker guy is here, in Jefferson?” Tasha asked. Suspicion and doubt weighted her words.
“It’s possible,” Varik said. “The similarities between what I saw in 1924 and today are too great for me to ignore and pass off as a coincidence or a copycat.”
“But you’re not ruling it out,” Tasha added.
“No, not yet.”
“If you’re correct, why would the Dollmaker come here? Everything you told me makes it sound like he prefers larger cities.”
“I don’t know why he’s here or if he even
is
here, Lieutenant. As I said, it’s a theory.”
Alex blocked out most of their argument in favor of stretching her senses to learn as much as possible about the scene around her. She focused on the battered Ford Focus. Large dents covered its exterior and the windshield was smashed. Mud caked the passenger’s side as though it’d been sprayed from the front wheel.
The trunk was open to its widest point, and Tony Maslan, JPD’s chief crime scene investigator, dressed in an identical Tyvek jumpsuit, snapped pictures of the trunk’s interior with a digital camera. He glanced up as they approached. The green tinge to his skin let Alex know whatever the trunk held was far worse than she was imagining.
She tried to set aside the nauseating smell of decomposition and search for other clues. The wind carried the metallic bite of rust mixed with the earthy scents of
various animals. A faint but pungent strand of garlic made her nose wrinkle.
“What have you got, Tony?” Varik asked, bringing Alex out of her musings as they stopped.
“A goddamn mess,” the forensics tech responded. “Best I can tell is that we have a Caucasian female with red hair. Anything beyond that will have to be left for the medical examiner to sort out.”
Beside her, Varik hissed in disgust.
Alex forced herself to look into the trunk and struggled to make sense of what she saw. She fixated on a cluster of swollen black protrusions. A few of the misshapen lumps sported strange jagged lavender tips, but all rose from a sea of fine coppery threads that were matted and stained with a dark substance. It wasn’t until her mind recognized the black masses as fingers and the threads as hair that the gruesome scene fell into place like a macabre jigsaw puzzle.
“Who or what could have done this to a human being?” Tasha asked softly.
Varik moved in for a closer look. “It’s hard to say with this level of decomp but it looks almost like some kind of animal.”
“An animal?” Tony echoed. “How could an animal do that much damage to a person?”
“We have no way of knowing if it’s an animal or something else,” Alex answered, moving away from the gruesome sight. She worked her way alongside the car, searching for anything that seemed out of place. “Until Doc Hancock gets her on the table, we won’t even know who she is. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions until we have more facts.”
“She’s right,” Varik said. “Let’s just stick to what we see here and save the speculation for later.”
Tony and Tasha mumbled their agreement, and Varik began directing where Tony should concentrate his
photos. Tasha stood back and watched, hands on hips and her expression unreadable, but her eyes followed Alex.
Alex ignored Tasha’s unusual amount of scrutiny and continued to circle the car. She traced the dents in her mind but avoided touching them until the exterior could be properly examined for prints. A pattern began to form and a sickening realization crept into her thoughts. She focused on the windshield and its spider-webbing cracks.
“Find something?” Varik asked as he joined her.
“Look at this.” She pointed to the double impacts from which the cracks radiated. “See the dark spots in the center?”
He leaned forward and after a moment nodded.
“I’ll bet a week’s pay when Freddy tests those stains it will come back as vampire blood.”
“What makes you think it’s vampire?” Tasha asked from the opposite side of the car. “Could be from a deer.”
Alex shook her head. “A deer is possible but unlikely. I’ve seen this kind of damage before. Look at the dent pattern.” She swept her arms over the crumpled hood. “It’s as though something attacked the car, rather than hit it by accident.”
“But why attack the car itself?”
“It held something the attacker wanted. Add in the condition of the body, and I think we’re looking at a vampire hyped on Midnight.”
Midnight was possibly the deadliest drug on the black market. A potent mixture of the human street drug Ecstasy, garlic, aspirin, and animal blood, it was highly addictive for vampires. The garlic and aspirin thinned the vampire’s blood, allowing the Ecstasy to have a greater hallucinogenic effect.
Animal blood, however, was the real danger. Vampires
fed on the residual psychic energy in blood, rather than the blood itself. Animal blood carried a more primitive psychic signature, which in turn caused any vampire who consumed the drug to revert to a more animalistic state, and deaths—both vampire and human—were all too common.
“Shit,” Varik murmured. “There goes my theory.”
“An attack by a Midnight vampire makes sense but at the same time it doesn’t.” Alex placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. “If that body
is
Mindy Johnson, what the hell was she doing to run afoul of a Midnighter?”
“Mindy is a registered donor with a private recipient waiver,” Tasha said. “Maybe her recipient can answer that question.”
“Did her parents know who she was donating to?” Varik asked.
“No.”
“Even if we find her recipient, we still have the issue of finding whoever ditched her car,” Alex interjected. “It’s unlikely a Midnighter would even remember attacking her much less have the sense to get rid of her car.”
“Plus her car wasn’t damaged,” Varik added. “This one, on the other hand, has been beaten to Hell and back.”
They stared at the battered car, lost in thought. The whir of an approaching motor signaled the return of Buddy Coone and the arrival of Damian and Morgan.
Alex’s loathing for the Special Investigator and her anxiety over being forced to perform for the Tribunal’s benefit spread over the bond to Varik.
He brushed against her, sliding his hand across her lower back, as he moved into position at the front of the car. The intimacy of his touch shivered up her spine
and made her gasp as a memory snapshot of their most recent lovemaking session flashed through her mind.
“Are you all right?” Tasha asked.
Alex nodded, chewing her bottom lip. She glanced at Varik from behind her dark shades and saw the knowing smirk on his face.
You did that on purpose, you bastard
.
His smirk turned to a grin.
“Is there something going on here I need to know about?” Tasha asked, annoyance evident in her tone.