Shaking off the memories, Jace kept his eyes on Lyra’s back as they entered the house. She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a half smile. He nodded at her in response.
Every since they had met, Lyra could always sense his moods. If the forensic team was a family, Lyra would be his little sister. They never missed a chance to rib each other, but when it came down to it, he knew he could always count on her to be there for him.
More cops were standing around as they moved through the run-down house. Jace hoped they hadn’t contaminated the scene and that they were just there for a show. He hated when the cops traipsed through evidence without realizing what they were doing. It was a tough enough job collecting the primary evidence without having to pick through all the irrelevant stuff left by clueless law-enforcement personnel.
The smell hit him like a sledgehammer in the face when he followed the rest of the team into what would’ve been the living room of the gutted house. Blood. Death. Despair. And something else that he found odd. Sulfur. It was faint, but it was there.
Spotlights had been set up around the room in a triangle. All the light pointed in one direction, up, toward the center of the room. Jace heard Lyra’s gasp and knew she had looked at the primary crime scene at the same time he had.
The victim, a young woman, was suspended from the ceiling by a rope wrapped around her ankles. Her slender arms hung lifeless, the tips of her long, blond hair skimmed the wooden floor. Her throat had been slit. Magical symbols adorned her na**d torso. No blood pooled on the floor beneath her. It had obviously been drained from her and taken away. Just like in their last case.
Jace stepped in closer to the scene and stood next to Lyra. They were waiting to get the go ahead from Caine to examine the scene. The chief was talking to another man, a human. It was Captain Morales from the San Antonio crime lab. He had been Eve’s boss when she worked for the humans.
Behind him stood a couple of uniformed cops. The stoic expressions on their faces radiated a sense of rivalry and territoriality. Something Jace knew quite well.
Caine shook Morales’s hand. “Good to see you, Hector.”
“You, too, Caine.” He turned to Eve. Smiling, he shook her hand. “You look good, Eve. I wish it were under different circumstances, seeing you again.”
“I think we all do, Hector,” she answered.
Hector turned toward the crime scene. “Does this look the same?”
Caine nodded. “Except for the elevation. Our guy siphoned the blood with rubber tubing for quicker results. Draining the blood this way would’ve taken a little longer. A couple of hours, I’d say.”
“Well, he would’ve had it. This neighborhood is mostly abandoned. A few residents live in the apartment complex across the street. But none that would speak up even if they did hear anything.”
“Any ID?” Caine asked.
“No. Nothing on her. We’ll run her prints at the lab.”
“How was she discovered?”
Hector sighed. “Some young girl came in here to smoke up, must’ve seen the body and run out screaming. A patrol car almost hit her, a block over, when she jumped out in front of it waving her arms and sobbing.”
“Where’s the girl now?” Eve asked.
“At the hospital. The patrolman said she went into shock.”
“I’ll go to the hospital to see if she’s talking,” Eve suggested.
Caine nodded. “Good idea.”
“Do you have someone that can take me, Hector?”
Captain Morales nodded, and then glanced behind him to a female officer. “Officer Sanchez, take Eve with you to the hospital.”
Jace could hear the officer mumbling under her breath. It was in Spanish, but he didn’t need to know the language to understand the meaning. He glanced over at the others to see if they could hear her. Caine’s steely eyed gaze convinced Jace that he had heard her loud and clear.
Before Eve could take two steps, Caine grabbed her arm and pulled her to him. He hugged her tight and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Jace knew he did it as a show of possession. Showing everyone in the room that if anything happened to Eve someone would pay dearly.
It was a purely lycan thing to do. Jace had always wondered how much of him, if any, had rubbed off on Caine. Obviously, some had over the years.
Eve followed the reluctant cop out of the room. Before she passed through the doorway, she looked back and nodded to Jace and Lyra. “Good luck.”
Lyra raised her hand to wave. Jace just nodded back, the sounds and smells swirling around him too intense to do much else. He wanted to get at the body. The urgency to do his job sent pulses like electricity through him.
“Do we have a TOD?” Caine asked.