Blood Law (2 page)

She dropped the fangs back into the leather pouch and examined the ring. It was a plain golden band with no inscription or other identifying marks. She checked the corpse’s left hand and saw a clear delineation in the skin coloration of the third finger that matched the width of the band. “Our victim was married,” she said, and added the ring to the pouch.

“Interesting,” Tasha said. “Our last vic was single.”

Four days prior, Alex and Tasha had worked a similar scene across town. The body of Grant Williams, an employee of Phancy Photos Studio and Video, was discovered in a loading bay at Kellner Hardware. Williams had been positioned in the same manner, and the pouch draped over his cross-stake contained fangs, a blood-smeared photo of the victim and his girlfriend, and his driver’s license. A tattoo on his lower back had helped them confirm his identity.

However, Williams wasn’t the first body. Nine days before, a startled security guard at a rest stop north of town had found the body of an as-yet-unidentified vampire in one of the men’s room stalls.

Alex held the new license in her hand, turning it toward the light. “Eric Stromheimer, age ninety-seven,
address is four thirteen Cork Lane.” She glanced at Tasha. “He’s local, just like Williams.”

“You’ll notify the family?”

“I hate this shit.” Alex slipped the driver’s license back into the pouch. Notifying families that a loved one was dead was never easy, and when that loved one had been murdered, it was even worse. She stood and slowly began searching the ground around the body for anything that appeared out of place.

“Evening, ladies,” a young man pulling a gurney said as he approached.

“Hey, Jeff,” Alex replied without glancing up.

“May I be the first to say that the marshmallow-man look is not flattering on either of you?” Jeffery Stringer, assistant medical examiner for Nassau County, announced with a broad grin.

Tasha launched into a lecture about proper conduct at a crime scene, to which Jeff alternately smirked and chuckled, and Alex rolled her eyes. Twenty-three, long-limbed and skinny, and with delusions of being a ladies’ man bouncing in his head, she knew Jeff was more talk than action, and even though his comments often bordered on inappropriate, she just as often found he brought a much-needed levity to an otherwise gruesome occasion.

“Besides”—Tasha was wrapping up her lecture and glancing at her watch—“how can you possibly be so damn chipper standing in a graveyard on a weeknight?”

Jeff grinned as he laid out a black body bag next to their victim. “Caffeine, sugar, and sex. Not necessarily in that order.”

Tasha groaned and shook her head.

Alex snorted and paused in her search. “That’s more information than I needed, Jeff.”

He shrugged and worked a pair of latex gloves over his long fingers. “The lieutenant asked.”

Alex chuckled and resumed her search of the surrounding area. She circled the perimeter marked by the tape and on each subsequent pass moved closer to the center point—Eric Stromheimer’s headless body.

Jeff whistled softly as he squatted beside the headstone for a closer look. “Another decap for your collection, huh, Alex?”

“I’d prefer the collection to end with three, thank you.”

“So would Doc Hancock.” Jeff rose and grabbed a large case from the gurney. “By the way, I called him, and he’s not going to be happy if this interferes with his New Orleans plans this weekend.”

“Granddaughter’s wedding?” Tasha asked.

Jeff nodded. “He said if he misses seeing her walk down the aisle, then he was going on strike. In the meantime, he’d be able to take a look at your latest acquisition in the morning.”

“Great,” Alex muttered. “That means he should have the autopsy done by the time the cavalry arrives.”

“Cavalry?” Tasha faced her. “What cavalry?”

“I called FBPI headquarters after Doc Hancock gave his findings on our last victim. A couple of forensic techs and a mobile lab will be here tomorrow. Once they arrive, we’ll be able to process evidence quicker.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.” Irritation added a hard
edge to Tasha’s words. “As the liaison officer between the Bureau and local enforcement, I’d like to know these things in advance.”

Alex frowned at the detective. “Sorry, Tasha, but between notifying the Williams family, tracking suspects, and all the corpses piling up, I guess it slipped my mind.”

“You don’t have to be snarky. I’m asking for a little communication, that’s all.”

Alex could understand Tasha’s annoyance, but not telling her of the mobile lab’s arrival earlier had been an honest mistake. She’d been surprised by Chief Enforcer Damian Alberez’s willingness to send the lab to Jefferson. The Bureau had three mobile labs, and all were precious commodities, usually assigned to large or high-priority cases. The fact that he’d agreed to send one to Jefferson for only two bodies—now three—made her uneasy and left her wondering what Damian knew that she didn’t.

Her footsteps slowed and then stilled as something in the grass beside an adjacent tombstone caught her eye. She squatted beside the marker for a closer look and called to the others over her shoulder. “I need tweezers and a small evidence envelope.”

Tasha appeared at her shoulder. “Find something?”

Alex accepted a tiny manila envelope and a pair of long tweezers that looked more like small tongs from Jeff. Kneeling down, she pointed to a wad of paper and waited as he snapped a series of pictures with a digital camera before seizing the tiny ball with her tweezers.
She held it up for closer inspection. “Looks like a gum wrapper.”

“A gum wrapper isn’t that unusual,” Tasha said. “Considering we’re in a publicly accessible area, it could belong to anyone.”

Alex moved it below her nose and inhaled.

“Smell anything?”

“No, but this is the one thing close to the body that was also near the others.”

“Are you thinking the killer dropped it?”

“It may be nothing, and it may be just the thing we need to break the case.” She slipped the wad into the envelope, sealed and labeled it, and handed both to Jeff.

Alex stifled a yawn but was unable to avoid a full body stretch as she stood. Even though the night was young and dawn hours away, she could see the subtly shifting colors along the eastern skyline and feel the changes in the air.

Microcurrents swirled around her. Their molecules vibrated in response to the gradual changes in the sun’s and moon’s positions in the sky. Shadows faded from black to gray in tiny increments too faint for human eyes to detect.

One shadow danced along the edges of her vision, drifting against the slight breeze that caressed her cheek. The shadow elongated, seemed to take on more mass, then quiver and fade, becoming less distinct. It moved away from the floodlights, returning to the darkness.

Alex recognized the shadow as one of the unquiet spirits haunting the cemetery. Most were harmless and
unseen to human eyes. But she wasn’t human, and her own close encounter with death six years previously had heightened her awareness of the spirit realm. She often wondered if she’d be able to see them at all if it weren’t for her innate empathic abilities and her talent for psychometry—the ability to gain knowledge and visions of past events through physical contact with objects, including bodies such as the one she now left behind her—a gift she’d possessed since birth, and a rarity among vampires. More than once she’d wished for the ability to control her talents, to direct them and use them to aid in her work as an Enforcer. Unfortunately, control was something she lacked, and her visions of the past came at random and in disjointed fragments, leaving her to muddle through the interpretations.

She pushed all thoughts of the shadows aside, and watched Jeff as he placed paper bags over Eric Stromheimer’s hands to preserve any trace evidence that might be present. However, a cursory look earlier had shown no visible signs of trace under his fingernails. She could only hope that once the mobile lab arrived, the techs would be able to find something usable.

Alex rummaged through Jeff’s kit and found two small plastic evidence bags. Once again she opened the leather pouch that had been draped around the cross-stake and inserted Stromheimer’s driver’s license into one bag and his wedding ring into the other. The fangs remained in the pouch and would be sent on to the ME’s office with the body. As she labeled the bags to establish a chain of evidence, her stomach rumbled loudly and she sighed.

“Sounds like someone’s in need of a break.”

Jeff’s voice carried more than a hint of humor, and Alex blushed. “Yeah, I guess so.”

The wind shifted and carried the smell of blood to her. Her eyes found and lingered on the bloody stump that once supported a head, and she licked her lips. Her gaze shifted from the body to Jeff, locking onto the young man’s neck and the pulsing vein beneath the surface. Her stomach rumbled again.

“Whoa.” Tasha’s voice intruded into Alex’s mind as plainly as the woman’s hand now latched on to her arm. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

Alex focused on Tasha’s face. The detective’s caramel skin pulsed with life, and Alex’s eyes slid involuntarily to the woman’s neck. She pulled away, forcing herself to look at the ground. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“I’ll wrap things up here.”

Alex nodded, picked up the two plastic bags containing the driver’s license and ring, and headed for the yellow tape barrier. She removed her protective gear as she made the trek back to the scene’s entry point. She dropped the clothing items into a bag provided by the communications officer and signed out, indicating that she retained possession of the two items now nestled in the inner pocket of her leather jacket.

Human officers huddled in the strobing wash of blue and white lights, stealing furtive glances and whispering as she passed. Being the only Enforcer assigned to police Jefferson’s vampire population made her a minor celebrity, as if her name alone wasn’t enough.

She was the youngest child and only daughter of
Bernard Sabian, whose brutal murder in the spring of 1968 in Louisville, Kentucky, had led to vampires announcing their presence to humanity after centuries of secrecy. She’d been five when her father’s decapitated body was found with a wooden stake through his heart. Bernard Sabian had become an instant martyr to the vampires, and the community as a whole had taken up the rallying cry of “Never again.” They offered up Alex, along with her older brother and their mother, as the paramount image of lives shattered by violence, ignorance, and hatred.

But seven years later, the Braxton Bill, named for the senator who introduced it to Congress, passed and vampires became legally recognized citizens of the United States. Once the human government finally gave them equal protection under the law, the Sabians were forced out of the spotlight. Bernard Sabian and his family had served their purposes. The vampire community gave them pats on the back and quietly shuffled them off to relative obscurity, which suited the Sabians just fine. Seven years after Bernard’s death, his family had finally been allowed to grieve, but Alex’s father’s murder still haunted her.

She hurried past the final group of officers. The scent of fear and adrenaline drifted up from the crowd and spiked her oncoming blood-hunger. Holding her breath, she trotted the last few yards to her Jeep and climbed inside.

Her hands shook as she reached into the glove compartment. It’d been three days since she’d properly slaked her blood-hunger. If she didn’t do it soon, the
tremors would worsen. Her concentration would start to slip. The hunger would gnaw at her until it consumed her thoughts, and the spiral would deepen, drawing her down, down, down, into madness.

A triumphant cry escaped her lips when she shook the carton she’d pulled from the glove box and she heard the distinctive rattle within. She ripped open the carton and dumped the single vial into her hand.

Thick liquids—one clear and the other a pale pink—sloshed within the tube. She applied enough pressure to the tube to rupture the thin gelatin barrier between the liquids and shook it to combine them. The mixture turned a dark red, and the chemical reaction warmed the new compound until it matched her body’s temperature. She ripped the black stopper from the tube and greedily drank its contents.

The fluid coated her tongue and throat like oil. A metallic tang failed to completely cover the bitter taste of chemicals.

Alex sucked the last drop from the tube and then exhaled loudly, like a swimmer surfacing from a deep dive. She hated Vlad’s Tears, the synthetic blood product vampires used as a stopgap measure when a human donor was unavailable. It wouldn’t rid her of the blood-hunger, only delay it for a time. She shoved the drained tube back into its box. At least her hands had stopped trembling.

She cranked up her Jeep and rolled down her window, allowing the cool air to permeate the suddenly warm interior. The scent of pines, adrenaline, and blood
wafted to her on the night breeze, and she felt a sharp hunger pang in her belly.

“Damn it,” she muttered, and threw the SUV into gear. Only when she was out of the cemetery and away from humans did she allow herself to breathe freely.

Varik Baudelaire peered through the window inset in his Victorian-style home’s front door and swore softly before thumbing the latch on the dead bolt. The door swung open and he stared at the huge black mass standing on his porch. “What the hell do you want?”

“Nice to see you, too,” Damian Alberez, Chief Enforcer for the Federal Bureau of Preternatural Investigation, said in a rumbling bass voice. “You going to invite me in?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

Varik stepped back, holding the door wide, and gestured for the vampire to enter.

Damian ducked his bald head beneath the stained-glass transom and entered the foyer. Standing a few inches over seven feet with a barrel chest and biceps nearly as large as Varik’s thighs, he was an imposing figure long before he ever flashed his fangs. He tapped the edge of a file against one meaty palm. “We need to talk.”

“Well, I didn’t think you were here for milk and cookies.” Varik closed the door, slipped around his oldest friend, and passed through an open archway leading to the front parlor.