stare into the water. The fresh rain and rushing water disrupts my senses horribly, so I don’t smell anything like death or decay, but there’s no way for me to be positive.
The divers look our way, so I wave them closer to where the girl had pointed. “She saw the body there initially. Maybe it was caught on something.”
One stays searching where they are and the other moves farther upstream.
“Can you think of anything else?” Finn asks.
She shakes her head. “I’m going to feel really stupid if I’m wrong.”
He smiles at her. “We’d rather you be wrong. But we’d also want to know so we can look just in case. Marcus, I’m going to reach out to the team and see if there’s been any missing people or incidents near the river in the past few weeks.”“I got something!” a diver shouts, stopping Finn in his tracks. He’s holding up a cloth, maybe a torn shirt—I can’t tell from here.
He swims over to us and I pull on some gloves before reaching out and taking it from him, careful to not get the dripping water on me.
“Looks like part of a pleated skirt,” Finn says.
I breathe in, pulling in any smell from it, but only one stands out. “It smells like decay. Alright, let’s get a bigger team in here and see what we can do,” I say as I leave Finn to bag up the evidence for now, in case we can get something off it.
Within half an hour we have a large dive team on location sweeping the river. Finn and I stand by until we hear a call about an hour after we arrived.
“I found her!” someone shouts from downstream. We head down to follow him and find a diver pulling the body out of the water. Another comes to help him and the two drag the body to the shore. She hasn’t been dead long, at least as much as I can tell since the water does different things to the body.
The forensics team is called, and we’ll have to wait for them to properly assess the body, but Finn and I can at least do some detective work while we wait.
I kneel down to look, curious if there’s a clear sign of death.
Finn points at her shoulder where her skin is colored differently. She must have been lying against that shoulder when she died. “She didn’t drown. She was dead before she hit the water, right?” he asks.
“Looks like it.” I tilt my head as I look at her throat where two clear fang marks stand out against her pale skin. “She was bitten.”
“Oh shit,” Finn says as he moves to my side of the body. “Huh. Someone could have fed on her and tossed her in the river thinking they’d hide the evidence that way. She’s missing a finger. Looks too clear of a cut to have happened on a rock or from an animal, but I’m sure the medical examiner will have a better idea.”
“What about this?” I ask as I point at her hand. There’s a clear hole that goes straight through her palm. It’s small, but it looks like it’d been done postmortem.
“The other hand too,” Finn says. “Just a hole… this is strange. What would make that? If it was just one hand, I would have said she slammed it on something that punctured the skin trying to escape or something, but both hands? That doesn’t seem right.”
“The autopsy could tell us more.”
The forensics team, as well as Karsyn and Briar, arrives and begins setting up the scene. So we leave them to it.
I step back and watch them work around the young woman with no ID as I try to piece together what might have happened to her.
Chapter Three
FINN
“This isn’t good,” Marcus says, as if any dead person could be good. Well… I suppose some could be good. But not this. Not like this at all. “Especially when things are finally beginning to calm down between the humans and the vampires, we now have this. A vampire has attacked and killed a human.”
“We’re not positive the vampire killed her,” I remind Marcus, even though I know it’s stupid to say. There are definite bite marks on her throat. Unless she had a partner that she allowed to bite her, it almost has to have been a vampire who killed her.
We’d spent the rest of the day combing the crime scene, but no one was able to retrieve anything else