“It was definitely drawn in blood though. The vic’s, I bet.”
“Can you ascertain a magical signature from it?”
She scrunched up her face and cocked her head. “I’m trying but it’s nothing I’ve seen before.”
“Okay, just log it, and we’ll search the signature log when we get back to the lab.”
She nodded and went back to work on deciphering the symbols.
“I’ve got a set of bite marks on the neck,” Jace said from his kneeling position beside the woman’s head hanging over the edge of the bed.
“Are you sure?”
“Yup. The knife wound tries to mask it, but I can see a partial puncture into her carotid artery. There is no doubt that someone with fangs sucked on this girl’s neck.”
“Swab everything. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find some DNA on that partial puncture.
Hopefully our guy is a secretor.”
“Aren’t they all?” Mahina remarked.
Caine ignored her and continued to watch his team, observing them and the scene itself.
“At the lab, after we clean up the wound, we’ll try and get a bite radius. Maybe we’ll find a match in the computer log.”
Jace swabbed the victim’s neck, wound track and the blood spray on the wall. He glanced back at the body and ran a thick hand through his shaggy mop of dark-brown hair. “She was definitely bled out.”
Caine took a step toward the bed and stared down at the rug. “But where’s the blood?”
“Maybe the perp drank it all,” he suggested.
Caine shook his head. “No. The average vampire can only consume a pint of blood without getting sick or passing out. If our guy drank more than that, there would be vomit everywhere or he’d still be on the floor in a druglike coma.”
“Maybe he took it with him,” Mahina suggested from the sidelines.
Nodding, Caine had thought of that. The blood had to have gone somewhere. “That’s a lot of blood to carry out. He would’ve needed a couple of containers.”
“He used something from the room?” Jace proposed, as he glanced around the scene.
Caine also looked around the room. There was something out of place. He had noticed it on his initial perusal of the scene. Out of place, or something missing.
He moved toward the little vinyl-covered table in the corner and its matching red vinyl chair. The table was suspiciously clean and devoid of any items that most used hotel rooms had. Ice buckets, used glasses, wrappers or other food items. He looked down at the ground beside the table. And what was in the room that a hotel guest would use to dispose of some of these items? The garbage can.
He rushed into the adjoining bathroom, which was more like a little closet with a toilet in it. No garbage bin there either.
“Garbage cans. They’re missing,” he announced as he came out of the washroom.
“Someone check another room for the trash can.”
“I have the master key.” Mahina held up a key ring. “I’ll go check.”
Mahina came back into the room with a rectangular garbage pail under her arm.
Jace nodded then frowned. “How could one guy get two of those, full of blood, out of the room without anyone seeing him, and without him spilling it all over the place?”
“Maybe there were two of them,” Caine suggested, his stomach twisting at the implications of what he just said. One rogue vampire killing people was bad enough, but two? It seemed unlikely as vampires preferred to roam alone rather than in groups.
However, stranger things had happened.