just disappear? The woods aren’t that thick. We’ll just run into the river here before long.”
“It concerns me that he found something and then the line just went dead. Something happened and it was bad enough to put a vampire down. Are we being watched—” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “I smell blood.”
He makes a call to the others before veering off the path to the right. I follow him as he starts moving through the trees slowly, tracking the smell, but careful to not disrupt or miss anything. That’s when I see a glint of something off to the right.
I jog off toward it, my gun firmly in my hand in case something goes wrong.
“Hey, don’t leave me,” Marcus says.
“I’m not, I see something.” I slow when I realize that it’s a cell phone. I don’t want to disrupt the area around it, so I don’t get too close. I honestly don’t have to in order to see that it’s one of the work-issued phones. “His phone’s here.”
“Shit,” Marcus says as he gets close and looks down at the phone that’s clearly been crushed. “The smell of blood is definitely thickest over here.” He moves away from the phone that we leave undisturbed. I make sure I ingrain the area in my mind before following him.
I don’t need vampire-like senses to notice the blood splashed upon the ground as we reach a small incline. It doesn’t take much to know that a person, vampire or not, should never have lost this much blood. And as we round the top of the incline, I glance down at the bottom where I see Perez, lying facedown in the brush. Marcus reaches him first, but he doesn’t have to even touch him before telling me what I already know.
“He’s dead.”
“Fuck,” I whisper as I walk over to him and kneel.
I didn’t know Perez very well and have only worked with him on this case, but the loss of life, of any life, is such a horrible thing to have to deal with. I’m not sure this job will ever get any easier, but there is slight satisfaction when we’re given the opportunity to find these people who think it’s all right to hurt others and make sure they can never hurt anyone ever again.
“No… no…”
I turn to the source of the devastated voice and see Miller looking down at his partner. He rushes down, but Marcus grabs him first.
“He’s gone. I’m sorry. But you need to be careful. Someone out here did this. It’s not safe yet and we can’t let our guards down.”
Miller lets out a sob, but he nods. DeGray steps forward to comfort him as I send a call out to Briar, knowing the top priority is to keep everyone safe when we clearly have someone who is targeting us. Marcus’s entire body is tense, and I want to go over to him and squeeze his hand or say something to comfort him, but I know we need to remain professional. So instead, I have to stand by his side as he sends people out to search for who did this.
“Hey, Marcus, Karsyn and I have this. More will be here shortly if you’d like to help search the area,” I say.
Marcus shakes his head. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“I can’t keep up with you, Marcus. If there’s a chance you can catch the guy responsible for this, you’re better off without me. This,” I wave at the scene, “is what I’m good at. This is what I do and have spent many years doing. I can protect myself and Karsyn is like a little guard dog.”
Marcus hesitates, but I know he’s aware that I’m right, so he gives me a nod. “Okay. Call me if you need anything.”
“Of course.”
And he’s off. I head over to Karsyn who is photographing the scene.
“This person has to have some balls to do this,” I say. “Broad fucking daylight surrounded by the VRC.”
“He must have been watching. Or maybe he messed up something and came back for it.”
“That would make the most sense,” I tell Karsyn. “Perez did say he found something. The killer was probably watching and when he noticed Perez find something that could lead to his arrest, he decided to silence him.”
Karsyn nods. “It looks like Perez was in that general area, then dragged back over here where he was killed. You can see the scattering of the leaves,” he says as he points.
I kneel and look