Hector nodded. “The coroner pronounced time of death to be between 9:00 p.m. and midnight.”
“Are you sure we’re not stepping on your toes here?”
“Hey, this is way out of my league, Caine. The minute I saw her, I knew you had to come in on this. Don’t worry about stepping on anything, as long as we get this one solved.” Hector scratched his chin, a five-o’clock shadow was starting to sprout. “The sheriff has given me some leeway. I’ve managed to quadrant off a section of the lab for your team. You’ll have a couple of techs to do the grunt work, but you’ll also have plenty of privacy.”
“Thanks, Hector. I appreciate that.”
Hector nodded. “Also, one of the officers discovered a metal drum in the backyard. Looks like something was burned in there recently.”
“Okay. We’ll start with the body and work our way out back.”
Caine turned and glanced at Jace. He could sense Jace’s impatience. Caine nodded. That was all the acknowledgment Jace needed to start moving. Setting his kit on the floor, Jace took out gloves and plastic shoe covers.
Once he took a step forward, Lyra followed suit. She was outfitted in two seconds flat and went straight to the body.
“Can we bring the body down, please?” Lyra asked.
Already anticipating the request, one of the uniforms rolled a scaffold ladder toward the victim so he could lower her corpse to the ground.
Jace started his evidence collection around the body, in a circle. Burnt black candles made this direction easy to follow as they were placed two feet from each other in seemingly perfect symmetry.
Taking up the camera that had been around his neck, Jace snapped pictures of each candle as he walked around the scene. Sulfur came to his nose again. Maybe it was just the result of the matches used to light the candles. But for some reason, he didn’t think so. Matches did have a certain sulfurous scent, but not like this. Not this strong.
He glanced at Caine. “Do you smell that?”
“The sulfur?”
Jace nodded.
“From matches, maybe?”
“I don’t know.” Jace stepped back to his kit. “I wish we had something to collect the scent, an absorbent agent.”
“Your nose is good enough, Jace. I trust it.”
Once they had the corpse down, they moved it away from the actual crime scene and onto white sheeting they had placed on the floor a few feet away. Lyra took her pictures then raised her hands over the body and felt for a magical signature.
While Lyra was doing that, Jace bagged the candles one by one. When he picked one up on the northeast side of the circle, he found something imprinted on the floor in wax. He fixed his flashlight on it. It was a partial shoe print.
Setting a measuring card beside it, he snapped off a couple of pictures. “I got a shoe print.”
“Can you lift it?”
Jace shook his head. “I’ll have to cut out the floor and take it with us.”
Reaching into his kit, he took out a sharp pocket knife, opened it up with his thumb and cut a six-inch square around the wax imprint. He lifted the thin plywood and slid it into a paper evidence bag, labeling and sealing it.
“Good eyes, Jace,” Caine said from his perch beside the head of their victim. He was busy inspecting the neck wound. “There’s no evidence of bite marks. If this was a vampire’s work, he wasn’t thirsty.” He poked at the neck with his finger. “These look like slash marks.”
Jace’s head came up. “What?”
“Take a look.” Caine stood as Jace came around the body and crouched.
His stomach flipped over as he inspected the deep slash in the victim’s neck. It indeed looked like a claw mark, not a knife wound.
He cursed. “This looks bad, Chief.”
“I’ve got a signature,” Lyra said as she took a step away from the body and put her hands on her hips. “It’s the same.”