Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  His voice was brisk, almost normal, “Anita?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, cupping the phone with my hand. It wasn’t like every cop in the place, which was most of the guests, wasn’t wondering who I was talking to, and why.

  “Got a body for you to look at.”

  “Now?” I made it a question.

  “The ceremony is over, right? I didn’t call in the middle of it.”

  “It’s over. I’m at the reception.”

  “Then I need you here.”

  “Where’s here?” I asked.

  He told me.

  “I know the strip club area across the river, but I’m not familiar with the club name.”

  “You won’t be able to miss it,” he said, “it’ll be the only club with it’s own police escort.”

  It took me a second to realize that he had made a joke. Dolph didn’t make jokes at murder scenes, ever. I opened my mouth to remark on it, but the phone was dead in my hand. Dolph never had been much for good-byes.

  Detective Arnet leaned in, and asked, “Was that Lieutenant Storr?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, “murder scene, gotta run.”

  She opened her mouth, as if she was going to say something else, but I was already moving up the table. I was going to give my apologies to Larry and Tammy, then go look at a body. I was sorry to miss the rest of the reception and all, but I had a murder scene to go to. Not only would I get away from Arnet’s questions, but I wouldn’t have to dance with Micah, or Nathaniel, or anybody. The night was looking up. I felt a little guilty, but I was glad somebody was dead.

  3

  STARING DOWN AT the dead woman, it was impossible to be glad. Guilty, maybe, but not glad. Guilty that even for a second I’d found the idea of someone’s death an escape from an uncomfortable social situation. I wasn’t a child. Surely, to God, I could have handled Jessica Arnet and her questions without hiding behind a murder. The fact that I was more comfortable here staring down at a corpse than at the head table at a wedding said something about me and my life. I wasn’t sure exactly what it said, or meant. Something I probably didn’t want to look at too closely, though. But, wait, we had a body to look at, a crime to solve, all the sticky personal stuff could wait. Had to wait. Yeah, sure.

  The body was a pale glimpse of flesh between two Dumpsters in the parking lot. There was something almost ghostlike about that shining bit of flesh, like, if I blinked, it would vanish into the October night. Maybe it was the time of year, or the wedding scene I’d just left, but there was something unnerving about the way she’d been left. They’d stuffed the body behind the Dumpsters to hide it, then the black wool coat she wore had been opened around her almost naked body, so that you caught that gleam of pale flesh in the bright halogen lights of the parking lot. Why hide her, then do something to draw such attention to her? It made no sense. Of course, it may have made perfect sense to the people who killed her. Maybe.

  I stood there, tugging my leather jacket around me. It wasn’t that cold. Cold enough for the jacket, but not enough to put the lining in it. I had my hands plunged into the pockets, the zipper all the way up, my shoulders hunched. But leather couldn’t help against the cold I was fighting. I stared at that pallid glimpse of death, and felt nothing. Nothing. Not pity. Not sickness. Nothing. Somehow that bothered me more than the woman being dead.

  I made myself move forward. Made myself go see what there was to see and leave my worries about my moral decay for another time. Business, first.

  I had to come to the far end of the right-hand Dumpster to see the spill of her yellow hair, like a bright exclamation point on the black pavement. Staring down at her, I could see how tiny she was. My size, or smaller. She lay on her back, the coat spread under her, still securely on her arms. But the cloth had been spread wide, folded under on the side nearest the parked cars, so that she could be seen by a customer walking out to his car. Her hair, too, had been pulled back, combed out. If she’d been taller, that, too, would have been visible from the parking lot—just a peek of bright yellow around the Dumpster. I looked down the line of her body and found the reason that someone had thought she was taller—clear plastic stilettos, at least five inches high. Lying down she lost the height. Her head had been pressed to the right, exposing bite marks on her long neck. Vampire bite marks.

  On the mound of her small breast was another pair of bite marks, with two thin lines of blood trickling from them. There was no blood at the neck wound. I was going to have to move the Dumpsters to get back there. I was also going to have to move the body around to look for more bite marks, more signs of violence. There’d been a time when the police only called me in after all the other experts had finished with a scene, but that was a while ago. I had to make sure I didn’t fuck up the scene. Which meant I needed to find the man in charge.

  Lt. Rudolph Storr wasn’t hard to spot. He’s 6' 8" and built like pro wrestlers used to be built before they all started looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dolph was in shape, but he didn’t go for the weight lifting. He didn’t have time. Too many crimes to solve. His black hair was cut so short it left his ears exposed and somehow stranded on the sides of his head. Which always meant he’d gotten a haircut, recently. He always had it cut shorter than he liked it, so it would be longer between haircuts. His tan trench coat was perfectly pressed. His shoes shined in the parking lot lights. He didn’t care what he looked like, as long as he was neat and tidy. Dolph was all about the neat and tidy. I think it was one of the reasons that murder pissed him off, it was always so messy.

  I nodded at the uniformed policeman whose only job seemed to be watching the body and making sure it didn’t get messed with by anyone that wasn’t allowed to touch it. He nodded back and went back to staring at the corpse. Something about how wide his eyes were made me wonder if this was his first vampire kill. Was he worried that the victim would rise and try to munch on him? I could have calmed his fears, because I knew this one would never rise. She’d been drained to death by a group of vamps. That won’t make you one of them. In fact, the act is guaranteed to give the vamps their fun and not to make the vic one of them. I’d seen this once before. I hoped like hell it wasn’t another master vampire gone rogue. The last one had purposely left vics where we could find them, in an attempt to get the new laws that gave vampires legal rights repealed. Mr. Oliver had believed that vampires were monsters, and if they were given legal rights, they’d spread too fast, eventually turning the entire human race into vampires. Then who would everybody feed off of? Yeah, it would take hundreds of years for vampirism to spread to that degree, but the really old vampires take the long view. They can afford to, they’ve got the time.

  I knew it wasn’t Mr. Oliver again, because I’d killed him. I’d crushed his heart, and no matter how many times Dracula might rise in old movies, Oliver was well and truly dead. I could guarantee it. Which meant we had a new group of nuts on our hands, and they could have an entirely new motive for killing. Hell, maybe it was personal. Vampires were legal citizens now, which meant they could have grudges just like humans.

  But somehow it didn’t feel personal. Don’t ask me to explain it, but it didn’t.

  Dolph saw me coming toward him. He didn’t smile, or say hi, because one, it was Dolph, and two, he wasn’t completely happy with me. He wasn’t happy with the monsters lately, which rubbed off on me because I was way too intimate with the monsters.

  Still, convincing his son not to become a vampire had earned me brownie points. The fact that Dolph had just gotten off of a leave without pay, with an informal warning that if he didn’t shape up, he’d be suspended, had also mellowed him out. Frankly, I’d take whatever I could get. Dolph and I were friends, or I’d thought we were. We were both a little unsure where we stood right now.

  “I need to move the Dumpsters to look at the body. I also need to move the body around to look for more bite marks, or whatever. Can I do that without screwing the crime scene up?”

  He looked at me
, and there was something in his face that said, clearly, he was not happy to have me here. He started to say something, glanced around at the other detectives, the uniforms, the crime-scene techs, and beyond that to the waiting ambulance, shook his head, and motioned me off to one side. I could feel people’s gazes follow us as we moved away. All of the detectives there knew that Dolph had dragged me up a flight of stairs at a crime scene. When I said manhandled, I wasn’t exaggerating. God knows what the stories said now, probably that he’d hit me, which he hadn’t, but what he’d done had been bad enough. Bad enough I could have pressed charges and won.

  He leaned over and spoke low. “I don’t like you being here.”

  “You called me,” I said. God, I did not want to fight with him tonight.

  He nodded. “I called, but I need to know that you don’t have a conflict of interest here.”

  I frowned up at him. “What do you mean? What conflict of interest?”

  “If it’s a vamp kill, then it was someone that belongs to your boyfriend.”

  “It’s nice that you said if it’s a vamp kill, but if you mean Jean-Claude, then it might not be his people at all.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you got two vampire boyfriends now.” His voice was ugly.

  “You want to fight each other, or fight crime? Your choice,” I said.

  He made a visible effort to control himself. Hands in fists at his sides, eyes closed, deep breaths. He’d been forced to go through anger management training. I watched him use his newfound skills. Then he opened his eyes—cold cop eyes—and said, “You’re defending the vamps already.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not a vamp kill. All I said was that it might not be Jean-Claude’s people. That’s all.”

  “But you’re defending your boyfriend and his people already. You haven’t even looked at the vic completely, and already you say it can’t be your lover boy.”

  I felt my eyes grow cold and said, “I’m not saying it couldn’t have been Jean-Claude’s vampires. I’m saying it’s unlikely. Thanks to the Church of Eternal Life, St. Louis has a lot of bloodsuckers that don’t owe allegiance to the Master of the City.”

  “The church’s members are more straitlaced than right-wing Christians,” he said.

  I shrugged. “They do come off as sanctimonious, I’ll grant you that. Most true believers do, but that’s not why I say it was them, or strangers, instead of the vampires I know best.”

  “Why, then?” he asked.

  My only excuse for telling the absolute truth is that I was pissed and tired of Dolph being mad at me. “Because if any of Jean-Claude’s people did this, they’re dead. Either he’ll turn them in to the law himself, or have me do it, or they’ll just be killed.”

  “You’re admitting that your boyfriend is a murderer?”

  I took in a deep breath and let it out slow. “You know, Dolph, this is getting old. Yeah, I’m fucking a vampire or two, get over it.”

  He looked away. “I don’t know how.”

  “Then learn,” I said. “But stop letting your personal shit rain all over the crime scene. We’ve wasted time arguing, when I could have been looking at the body. I want these people caught.”

  “People, plural?” he asked.

  “I’ve only seen two bite marks, but they both have a slightly different pattern to them. The one on the chest is smaller, less space between the fangs. So, yeah, at least two, but I’m betting more.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because they bled her out. There’s almost no blood anywhere. Two vamps couldn’t drain an adult human being without leaving a mess. They’d need more mouths to hold that much blood.”

  “Maybe she was killed somewhere else.”

  I frowned at him. “It’s October, she’s outside wearing five-inch plastic stilettos, an inexpensive wool coat, and not much else.” I motioned at the building behind us. “We’re in the parking lot of a strip club. Hmm, let me see, five-inch plastic stilettos, naked woman . . . could this be a clue that she worked here, stepped out for a smoke, or something?”

  Dolph reached into his pocket and got out his ever-present notebook. “She’s been identified as one Charlene Morresey, twenty-two, works as a stripper—worked, as a stripper. Yes, she did smoke, but she told one of the other girls she was going outside for a breath of fresh air.”

  “We know she probably didn’t know the vamps.”

  “How so?”

  “She came out to get some air, not to visit.”

  He nodded and made a note. “There’s no sign of a struggle, yet. It’s like she came out here for air and just walked over there with them. She wouldn’t do that for strangers.”

  “If she was under mind control, she would.”

  “So one of our vamps is an old one.” Dolph was still making notes.

  “Not necessarily old, but powerful, and that usually means old.” I thought about it. “Someone with good mind control powers—that I’m sure of—age,” I shrugged, “I don’t know, yet.”

  He was still writing in his notebook.

  “Now, can I move the Dumpster and move the body around, or do you still need the techies to get back in there and do their thing first?”

  “I had them wait for you,” he said without looking up from his writing.

  I looked at him, tried to learn something from his face, but he was all concentration and business. It was a step up that he’d had the techs wait for me. And that he’d called me at all. Before his time off, he’d tried to get me barred from crime scenes. It was a step up, so why was I still wondering if Dolph was capable of letting his personal life go long enough to solve this case? Because, once you’ve seen someone you trusted lose it completely, you never truly trust them again, not completely.

  4

  THERE WAS A matching set of bite marks on the other side of her neck. They were so close to the same size as the ones on the left-hand side, that I wondered if the same vamp had bitten twice. I didn’t have my ruler with me. Hell, I didn’t have most of my equipment with me. I’d been planning on a wedding tonight, not a crime scene.

  I asked if anyone had something to measure bite radius. One of the techs offered to measure for me. Fine with me. She had a pair of calipers—I’d never used a pair of them before.

  Measurements do not lie. It wasn’t the same vamp. Nor was it the same vamp at each of her inner thighs or her wrists. Counting the bite mark on her chest, that made seven. Seven vampires. Enough to drain an adult human being dry and leave very little blood behind.

  There was no obvious evidence of sexual assault, according to a CSU technician. Glad to hear it. I did not bother explaining that the bite alone can be orgasmic both for the vic and the killer. Not always, but often, especially if the vampire is good at fogging the mind. A vampire with enough juice can make someone enjoy being killed. Scary, but true.

  After I’d seen every inch of the dead woman, when I knew that her pale flesh might dance through my dreams in their plastic shoes, Dolph wanted to talk.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  I knew what he wanted. “Seven vamps. One has to be good enough at mind control to have made the vic enjoy what was happening, or at least not mind it. Someone would have heard her screams otherwise.”

  “Have you walked into the club?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Music is loud, lots of people inside,” he said.

  “So they might not have heard her, even if she did scream?”

  He nodded.

  I sighed. “There’s no sign of a struggle. They’ll look at her nails, but there won’t be any sign of a fight. The vic didn’t even know what was happening, or at least not until it was way too late.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  I thought for a second or two. “No, I’m not sure. It’s my best educated guess, but maybe she’s one of those people that doesn’t fight back. Maybe once seven vampires surrounded her, she just gave up. I don’t know. What kind of person was Charlene Morresey?
Was she a fighter?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Dolph said.

  “If she was a fighter, then vampire mind tricks were used. If she wasn’t, if she was real docile, then maybe not. Maybe we’re looking for a bunch of young vamps.” I shook my head. “But I’d say not. I’d say at least one, maybe more, were old, and good at doing at this.”

  “They hid the body,” he said.

  I finished the thought for him, “And then exposed it, so that someone would find it.”

  He nodded. “That’s been bothering me, too. If they had just closed her coat over her body, not messed with the hair, no one would have found her tonight.”

  “They’d have missed her in the club,” I said, “or was she done for the night?”

  “She wasn’t done, and, yeah, they would have missed her.”

  I glanced back at the body. “But would they have found her?”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but not this quick.”

  “Yeah, she’s still fresh, cool to the touch, but not long gone.”

  He checked his notes. “Less than two hours since she was on stage.”

  I looked around us, at the bright halogen lights. There was no good place to hide in this parking lot, except behind the Dumpsters. “Did they do her behind the Dumpsters?”

  “Or a car,” he said.

  “Or van,” I said.

  “The serial killer’s best friend,” Dolph said.