How to Elude a Vampire (VRC Vampire Related Crimes #2) - Alice Winters Page 0,13
tell me how long that’ll take? Like maybe five minutes? Ten at the most?”
She smiles at me like I’m crazy. “Give us two to four days.”
I eye her like she’s batshit insane. “I… have to leave this precious thing in a cage for days? I’m a homicide detective. Like… people trust me with human lives. I think that should give me a free pass.”
She continues to smile. “Two to four days.”
I’m convinced she’s joking. Did Marcus put her up to this? “Like… I took training courses. I know basic medical knowledge that will keep a human alive that could be suffering from bullet wounds, trauma—”
“Two to four days.”
You have to be shitting me.
“Yes, yes, continue to harass the lady who makes the decision whether or not you get the dog,” Marcus says with an evil look.
I glare at him before taking the dog and giving her a gentle hug. She responds by trying to chew off my glove. “Why do you like my glove so much? Watson would be really mad if he knew I was letting you chew on my fingers. I’ll be back for you, I promise.”
Marcus basically has to drag me away from her, which breaks my heart, but he doesn’t seem too concerned about it as he coldheartedly forces me into the car.
“Now look into Artemus’s eyes and tell him you’re trying to replace him with a yappy, ugly pocket pet.”
I turn in my seat and grab Artie’s face between my hands. “Daddy’s going to get you a baby sissy,” I coo.
He seems excited, much to Marcus’s annoyance.
Chapter Four
FINN
We walk into the morgue where the body of the drowned victim has been taken. The medical examiner greets us with a head nod as we walk in. I know him far too well from my work as a homicide detective, but I haven’t seen him much since transferring to VRC.
“Morning, detectives,” Eric says. “I heard you two found the body?”
Marcus nods. “With help, of course. We’re lucky we’ve already been able to identify her. Her name has matched up with a missing person report sent in just this morning by a roommate who said she never made it home from class the night before.”
After confirmation, we learned that her name was Tonya Everest and she was a college student attending the nearby university. Her fingerprints had already been in the system because she’d been apprehended by the police when she was caught breaking and entering a home with friends back when she was fifteen. She was eventually let off with some light community service, but her fingerprints stayed in the system.
“It’s a good thing her roommate reported her missing this morning so we didn’t have to wait long for confirmation,” Marcus says. “We’ll be meeting with the roommate after we’re done here.”
“Perfect. Come on over, I wanted to show you some details that stand out.”
Eric leads us over to the body before pulling on some gloves. “As the report said, she died from exsanguination, most likely from the vampire draining her.” He pushes her hair back to emphasize the bite mark on her throat. “We can see that there was no water in her lungs, so she wasn’t thrown into the water until after death. She lost her finger before death but the holes in her hands were postmortem. Whatever was used to sever the finger was sharp and left a clean cut.”
“At this point, we can only speculate why the finger was lost,” Marcus says.
My eyes drop to the cut on her hand. “It could be a memento to remember his victims or even a ‘trademark.’ We’ll have Karsyn run it through the system and see if we have any matches,” I suggest.
Marcus nods. “There could be other reasons such as religious or gang-related as well. There’s no telling at this point. Do you believe someone else removed it?”
“From the angle of the cut, I do, but what’s strange is that it either happened quickly or she wasn’t coherent for it. Why I say that is because there is no scraping of the skin like she pulled away. Even if someone did something like this to themselves, their immediate reaction would be to pull away from the pain, creating a tear or scrape from the knife.”
“What if he’d already drained her or bitten her? Sometimes bites can make a human’s mind dull or unresponsive for a few moments. It could have happened at that point,” I say.