Blood Secrets - By Jeannie Holmes Page 0,31

the trunk’s interior with a digital camera. He glanced up as they approached. The green tinge to his skin let Alex know whatever the trunk held was far worse than she was imagining.

She tried to set aside the nauseating smell of decomposition and search for other clues. The wind carried the metallic bite of rust mixed with the earthy scents of various animals. A faint but pungent strand of garlic made her nose wrinkle.

“What have you got, Tony?” Varik asked, bringing Alex out of her musings as they stopped.

“A goddamn mess,” the forensics tech responded. “Best I can tell is that we have a Caucasian female with red hair. Anything beyond that will have to be left for the medical examiner to sort out.”

Beside her, Varik hissed in disgust.

Alex forced herself to look into the trunk and struggled to make sense of what she saw. She fixated on a cluster of swollen black protrusions. A few of the misshapen lumps sported strange jagged lavender tips, but all rose from a sea of fine coppery threads that were matted and stained with a dark substance. It wasn’t until her mind recognized the black masses as fingers and the threads as hair that the gruesome scene fell into place like a macabre jigsaw puzzle.

“Who or what could have done this to a human being?” Tasha asked softly.

Varik moved in for a closer look. “It’s hard to say with this level of decomp but it looks almost like some kind of animal.”

“An animal?” Tony echoed. “How could an animal do that much damage to a person?”

“We have no way of knowing if it’s an animal or something else,” Alex answered, moving away from the gruesome sight. She worked her way alongside the car, searching for anything that seemed out of place. “Until Doc Hancock gets her on the table, we won’t even know who she is. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions until we have more facts.”

“She’s right,” Varik said. “Let’s just stick to what we see here and save the speculation for later.”

Tony and Tasha mumbled their agreement, and Varik began directing where Tony should concentrate his photos. Tasha stood back and watched, hands on hips and her expression unreadable, but her eyes followed Alex.

Alex ignored Tasha’s unusual amount of scrutiny and continued to circle the car. She traced the dents in her mind but avoided touching them until the exterior could be properly examined for prints. A pattern began to form and a sickening realization crept into her thoughts. She focused on the windshield and its spider-webbing cracks.

“Find something?” Varik asked as he joined her.

“Look at this.” She pointed to the double impacts from which the cracks radiated. “See the dark spots in the center?”

He leaned forward and after a moment nodded.

“I’ll bet a week’s pay when Freddy tests those stains it will come back as vampire blood.”

“What makes you think it’s vampire?” Tasha asked from the opposite side of the car. “Could be from a deer.”

Alex shook her head. “A deer is possible but unlikely. I’ve seen this kind of damage before. Look at the dent pattern.” She swept her arms over the crumpled hood. “It’s as though something attacked the car, rather than hit it by accident.”

“But why attack the car itself?”

“It held something the attacker wanted. Add in the condition of the body, and I think we’re looking at a vampire hyped on Midnight.”

Midnight was possibly the deadliest drug on the black market. A potent mixture of the human street drug Ecstasy, garlic, aspirin, and animal blood, it was highly addictive for vampires. The garlic and aspirin thinned the vampire’s blood, allowing the Ecstasy to have a greater hallucinogenic effect.

Animal blood, however, was the real danger. Vampires fed on the residual psychic energy in blood, rather than the blood itself. Animal blood carried a more primitive psychic signature, which in turn caused any vampire who consumed the drug to revert to a more animalistic state, and deaths—both vampire and human—were all too common.

“Shit,” Varik murmured. “There goes my theory.”

“An attack by a Midnight vampire makes sense but at the same time it doesn’t.” Alex placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. “If that body is Mindy Johnson, what the hell was she doing to run afoul of a Midnighter?”

“Mindy is a registered donor with a private recipient waiver,” Tasha said. “Maybe her recipient can answer that question.”

“Did her parents know who she was donating to?” Varik asked.

“No.”

“Even if we find her recipient, we still have the