Blood Moon (15 page)

“Mrs. Turner,” David began.

“Betty, please,” she interrupted, correcting
him as politely as possible. Her voice wavered a bit, but the last
few days hadn’t been easy, and she likely didn’t even realize
it.

Been there. Done that.

“Betty,” he amended. “Sorry.” A brief pause.
“I know our colleague, Detective O’Malley, came out to see you the
other day, but we just wanted to double check a few things with
you, if you don’t mind. Maybe take a look inside Samantha’s
apartment.”

“I thought the police had free access to her
apartment during the investigation?”

I turned around and offered Mrs. Turner a
warm smile. “We do, but I’d prefer to have your permission. Keep
you informed.”

Her eyes glistened with gratitude, her smile
widening as she placed a hand over her heart. “Thank you. And I
don’t mind at all, as long as you think it’ll help find the man
who…who…” Her strangled sob filled the room, and my heart clenched.
I empathized with her completely, because not too long ago, I had
been where she was now.

Out of respect, we waited for Mrs. Turner’s
ability to answer our questions. I crossed the room and sat next to
David on the couch, waiting for her to gather her composure. She
apologized—which wasn’t necessary—and asked what it was that we
wanted to know. We started by asking about the day Samantha died.
Apparently, she had been out celebrating a big win for the law firm
she interned for. Her mother and sisters had joined her and a few
of her colleagues for dinner and drinks before they went home for
the night while Samantha and her friends went to a new club they’d
heard about. That was the last she’d heard from her.

After learning that, the usual questions
were asked: What was the name of this club? Did Samantha have any
enemies? A scorned lover? Coworkers who were jealous of her
promotion? Turned out, her life was damned near perfect and
everyone loved her. As for the club, the mother had no idea, so
we’d have to make sure to ask anyone she associated with, if
O’Malley hadn’t already done so. I’d have to be sure to ask about
his progress back at the precinct.

My heart went out to this woman, because I
knew what it was like to lose someone close to you. When I thought
back to just after Bobby died, I regretted showing up here like
this. Having been through repeated police interviews regarding
Bobby’s lifestyle choices, I knew how counter-productive this was
to Mrs. Turner’s need to move past this event. She was grieving,
and the last thing she needed was to be reminded about her
daughter’s death. And worse, that we were no closer to solving her
case.

Even though the thought of putting her
through this made me a little queasy, what she didn’t realize was
that unless we found the person responsible for her daughter’s
death, she’d likely never find closure. Based on my own personal
experience, that is.

After speaking with Mrs. Turner for just
over an hour, I realized there was nothing more to learn that
O’Malley didn’t already report. I felt bad for taking up even more
of Mrs. Turner’s time and being no further ahead, and while any
information she was able to give us was appreciated, it wasn’t what
I was hoping for. Honestly, I couldn’t really be sure what I was
looking for other than a flashing neon sign pointing us in the
right direction.

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Turner,” I
said as she walked us to the door.

“Any time, dear,” she replied, her voice
soft and uneven. “If there’s anything else I can do, please, just
let me know.”

“We’ll be sure to do that,” I promised,
reaching out and giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

Once we were back in the car, David and I
talked about what little we learned, and how it was all information
that O’Malley already had. I really hoped we found something at the
victim’s apartment, otherwise I feared this case would never be
solved.

When we arrived, we found a written notice
from the police department was stuck on Miss Turner’s third-floor
apartment door, and the superintendent had to let us in. The minute
the door opened, I was met with the most unpleasant smell I’d ever
experienced. It was so pungent that I gagged slightly before
tucking my nose into the crook of my elbow.

“What’s wrong?” David asked, stepping into
the room behind me.

Trying not to inhale too deeply, I turned to
find him unfazed by whatever the cause of the god-awful stench was.
“Are you kidding? You don’t smell that?”

David sniffed the air, and then shook his
head. “It’s a little musty, I guess.”

Shocked, my mouth fell open slightly, and my
arm dropped to my side. I instantly regretted the reflexive action,
because not only could I smell it now, but it infiltrated my mouth.
I could
taste
the foulness on my tongue. It coated it like
oil, and I couldn’t shake it as it worked its way into every part
of me, making my skin crawl and prickle all over. It was
unsettling.

“It’s not just musty,” I informed him,
inhaling just a little this time to see if I could further identify
what it might be. A wave of nausea rolled in my stomach, but I
fought it down. Along with the overpowering smell, I picked up
subtle hints of jasmine—the victim’s fragrance of choice,
perhaps?—and something almost…chemical. I sniffed again,
recognizing that the air still held trace amounts of luminol. This
made sense given that, while I was holed up in the hospital,
O’Malley conducted a thorough check of the apartment, spraying it
on every surface imaginable. I looked around the main living space
and took another step in, the smell only slightly more potent.

David saw how repulsed I was, because he
watched me, concern written all over his face. “Are you sure,
sweetheart? I don’t smell anything.”

Even though the smell was almost too much to
bear, I knew I had to find a way to put up with it because I had a
job to do. “It must just be me,” I mumbled, moving toward the
coffee table to look at the scattered mail there. There was nothing
out of the ordinary—bills, flyers, various business cards to
several companies and one black one with a Phoenix address—so I
moved on to the kitchen after bagging it all. Just in case.

David remained two steps behind me, and the
instant we were in the kitchen, he groaned. “Well, I guess we found
the source of the smell,” he said, pointing toward the fruit bowl
on the counter. In it were a couple of bananas, three apples, and
an orange—all of which were more than a little overripe. Sure
enough, they smelled horrible, but they only added to the
increasingly foul combination of aromas in the apartment. They
weren’t the source.

As I continued to make my way through the
apartment, I found everything in pristine order—living room clean,
dishes done, fridge and cupboards stocked, bed made—there was no
sign of any struggle, which usually meant the murder never happened
here. The lack of any of her missing blood suggested this also.

In her bedroom, I was overwhelmed by the
potency of the smell again, and I fought the urge to wretch. My
entire body broke out in a sweat, and I trembled when, out of
nowhere, I made the connection: death. The apartment smelled like
death.

When David entered the room behind me, I
turned to him with watering eyes. “You still don’t smell that?” He
shook his head. “Seriously? David, it smells like somebody died in
here.”

“O’Malley and the CSU went over this place
with a fine-toothed comb, Brooke. There’s nothing here that
suggests this is our primary,” he reminded me. His expression
changed from confusion to sympathy, and he placed a hand on my
cheek, his brow furrowing with worry. “Sweetheart, you’re burning
up again. Maybe you’re overworked and tired and it’s throwing your
senses off?”

He was probably right. It seemed a little
odd, but, then again, nothing about this past week really screamed
“normal” for me. Instead of leaving right away, I was able to
convince David that we should finish looking around, but it wound
up to be a wasted effort. There was nothing here that hadn’t
already been documented, and I only grew more and more
frustrated.

It wasn’t like I expected O’Malley’s work to
only be sub-par—my father wouldn’t allow for any of that in his
precinct—but I was hoping that I’d be able to find…I don’t know,
something
. Why was there no evidence that would give us an
idea about what happened to her? Honestly, the more I thought about
it, the more I realized that if it hadn’t been for finding her
body, it might appear like this was all some kind of sick joke.
That Samantha Turner could very well just be on vacation.

But she wasn’t. We
did
find her body,
and the only thing I’d been able to dig up on this investigation
were more questions.

What exactly were we dealing with?

A
fter conducting my
own search of each victims’ home—or in the case of our tourist, his
hotel—David and I headed back to the precinct. It had been a couple
days since the last attack, and it seemed like everyone was just
waiting with baited breath for it to happen. It bothered me,
because that meant we were basically waiting for another body to
drop in our laps since we had nothing to help us predict his next
move. Another body that would probably leave us with as much
information as we had now. None.

Our behavioral analysts had been called in,
but they were unable to tell us anything conclusive. They said the
suspect could just be lying low, waiting to make his next move,
calculating. Their other theory was that he’d moved onto another
town.

Wouldn’t that be just fantastic? The
Scottsdale PD letting a lunatic slip through their fingers so he
could move onto the next unsuspecting city. Yeah, that was just
what we needed.

In all of our searching, we were unable to
find anything that could tie the four murders together, aside from
the C.O.D. I was beyond frustrated at this point and unable to
think of anything else this whole time. The way this case consumed
me was borderline obsessive-compulsive.

Every single one of the autopsy reports came
back inconclusive. We knew each one of them died of exsanguination,
and Dr. Hobbes seemed to think that the blood was drained from
their bodies through the wounds on their necks since there were no
other points of entry. Going with this theory—because it was the
only one we had—she checked the wounds to figure out what the
murder weapon could have been. When she found DNA, it was the most
excited I’d been in as long as I could remember. Unfortunately, the
DNA results showed nothing useful. It was neither human nor any
animal we could identify, and they were all from different sources.
My first thought was that maybe they were attacked by the same wolf
I was that night, but that didn’t explain the lack of blood in
their bodies.

Truthfully, every second that passed and
disproved one of our current theories frustrated us more and more.
Some of the guys tried to lighten the mood by joking about how the
victims were probably closet fetishists. Even though they were just
goofing around, the suggestion intrigued me, and I didn’t treat it
as a joke. I treated it as a possible lead. They tried to laugh me
off, but I pressed on, wondering what kind of fetishes could get
these people killed.

One word out of Keaton’s mouth, and I was
sorry I even asked: Vampires.

I tried to let it go, but something about it
niggled at me for the rest of the afternoon. In fact, the more I
obsessed about it, the more I started to think it kind of made
sense. Not so much that they were killed by a real vampire—because
that would be ridiculous—but there was something deep in the pit of
my stomach that told me to go with it. Call it instinct, but I
realized that the only real evidence we had to go by suggested this
could be a possibility. They were missing most of their blood,
after all.

Going with the flow, I decided to do a
little Internet search at home that night, and it turned out that
this was an actual thing. Apparently blood-sharing was something
these people practiced.
Gross.
People even had dental work
done to give themselves fangs, and they called their groups
“covens.” The more I dug into this secret lifestyle, the more
information I uprooted, and the more disturbed I grew. David was
the only one I told about my unconventional investigation, and
while he thought I was crazy at first, he started to see that this
was a very real possibility with every article I read aloud. True,
we never found anything that would tie our victims to this
lifestyle, but it was possible that they kept it hidden from their
families, friends, and colleagues for fear of being ridiculed and
shunned.

When I thought about how they all could have
kept this secret from their families, my mind wandered to Bobby. If
it turned out to be some illicit underground activity involving a
bunch of wannabe-vampires, was I going to be able to accept that
maybe my brother had been delving into the same waters? And, if he
was, how did I miss the signs?

I decided to deal with that when I got to
it, because I couldn’t have that clouding my judgment—not until I
knew for sure that this was what actually happened.

My research told me that there were a few
underground night clubs (literally) that catered to this
lifestyle
in Scottsdale alone, and while we couldn’t find
any ties to them in any of our victims’ financial records, my gut
told me we had to follow this lead. The feeling I had about this
potential lead was unsettling. While used to having moments of
clarity that lead me in the right direction, this felt almost…I
don’t know…angry? No…it was more than that. It was
vengeful
.
The only explanation I came up with for the unexpected emotion was
that Bobby’s own murder was clouding my thoughts, and I wanted
vengeance for him—I had for so long—and the thought that I could
get it after all this time made me deliriously happy.