by Martha Woods
I clear my throat again. “A likely story,” I say.
What? Where the hell did that come from? It’s like I want to sound like an awful cliché. And I have just informed a witness I don’t believe them. What am I doing?
The man, rather than being angry, just smiles. His eyes sparkle, and I see that they are in fact warm. I could easily get lost in those eyes. But I won’t, dammit.
“Joke,” I tell him. “Seriously, though, did you see anything on your way over here? Anyone who looked suspicious?”
He raises an eyebrow when I tell him it was a joke. Of course he does. Who makes jokes when a fresh corpse is within ten feet of the conversation?
“It’s L.A,” he shrugs. “Everyone looks suspicious.”
I have to give him that one.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Why? Are you going to ask me on a date?”
He’s so calm. So confident. And I get the distinct impression he’s playing with me. Probably because in comparison to him, I am a hot mess. I am an easy target. I don’t trust myself to speak, so instead, I fix the man with my most cutting glare.
“Damon,” he says after a moment. “Damon.”
“Well Damon,” I say, cringing again at my use of his full name. “Here’s my card. Please call me if you remember anything else.”
I hand him my card. He takes it, smiles and slips it into his pocket.
“And I thought the glare meant you didn’t want that date.”
With that, Damon turns and walks away, leaving me standing alone, my mouth hanging slightly open. A witty retort comes to me as he rounds the corner at the edge of the parking lot. Should I chase after him and tell him? Of course, not, I chastise myself. It’s a crime scene, not a bar crawl.
The thought reminds me why I’m there. I turn back to the body and make my way over. I push all thoughts of Damon from my mind as I do.
I wince at the sight of her and I feel my stomach clench slightly. Anyone who tells you that they don’t still feel something when they look at a mauled human being is one of two things. Lying or a psychopath.
I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies in my line of work. A lot of them have been beyond brutal. And it’s true you get used to it to the point where you don’t throw up every time and you no longer go home after work and cry for hours, but you never fully get used to it. It doesn’t matter how many bodies you see; these people were still human. Someone’s mother, daughter, sister, friend. And that still stings. Every time.
“What did he do to you?” I whisper.
I send up a silent thanks to Rob, not for the first time. Rob was my first real boyfriend. We had a real afterschool special going. He was my high school crush, from freshman year onward. My awkward flirting habits probably stem from him. I was a total disaster around him – running into lockers, knocking over garbage cans, spilling my lunch tray all over him once – the whole nine yards. But at least it had gotten him to notice me, and eventually fall for me. We finally started dating during our senior year, and even went to prom together. Talk about a cliché. We were in love, or at least I was. We swore to stay together even though we weren’t going to the same colleges. And for a while, it worked. The long distance was hard, but he was worth it. We were worth it. Until I turned up for a surprise visit and caught him in bed with someone else. I felt my first heart break at that moment.
I remember how humiliated I was in that moment, how worthless I felt. I thought I would hate Rob forever, but I got over it. After things ended with him, I realized I liked going on dates, despite my tendency to ruin them with my clumsiness. Especially if I wasn’t totally smitten with a guy, I liked the opportunity to flirt and be flirted with, to learn more about my personality, to date for fun instead of to find some non-existent Prince Charming, to get out in the world instead of sitting in a dorm room feeling guilty for a night out because some long distance boyfriend wasn’t with me. Rob’s cheating was certainly a slap in the face, and I won’t pretend it didn’t sting for a good long while, but I think I grew because of it.
Now, I find myself thanking him every time I see another woman crying over a man. He saved me from believing in the happily ever after. He saved me from dating a string of strangers looking for love. He saved me from being a victim.
I set my kit down on the ground beside me and bend down. I snap on a pair of latex gloves. Digging around, I pull out some evidence bags and a small pair of tweezers. It’s time to find that vital clue. The hair that isn’t the victim’s. The fingernail that has snapped off in the frenzied killing. Anything.
As I straighten back up, movement catches my eye. There is an alleyway opposite where I stand and I see a woman heading into it. She is young. Twentyish, at a quick estimation. She wears a beautiful red dress, her blonde curls cascading down her back.
What is she going in there for? I squint, trying to see into the shadows. I gasp when I spot a man’s outline deeper in the alley.
I open my mouth to call out to her, to warn her, then snap it shut. What if he is the killer and I warn him off and allow him to escape?
I feel a cold shiver go through me. Goosebumps run down my arms and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I glance over towards the dwindling number of officers but I can’t catch a single eye.
I debate running to them, telling them what I have seen, but it could be too late. With a deep breath, I run towards the alley.
As the buildings rise up on either side of me and the shadows begin to swallow me, I duck low and run at a crouch to the nearest dumpster. Squatting down behind it, I peer around the edge, hoping I am hidden. I feel a little silly, like some bumbling child playing at being an action hero. I’m not trained for this, and I know it isn’t safe. But adrenaline has taken hold of me, and all I can think about right now is helping this woman. Maybe I can do more for her than I can for the body lying broken behind me.
The woman has reached the man. His hand reaches out, and I tense, ready to spring from the shadows. His hand gently caresses her face, and I relax slightly. I can hear their low voices. They are too far away and talking too low for me to make out the words, but I can’t detect any menace in the man’s voice, nor any fear in the woman’s.
She gives a throaty laugh, and the man moves in closer. Their lips are connected, and I see the man’s hands run up and down her back, pulling her in tighter to him.
His head moves down to her neck, and the woman gives a low groan of pleasure.
I’m not saving her from a vicious killer, I am a peeping tom, watching this couple who couldn’t hold their passion for each other in long enough to make it home. I feel another shudder run through my body. This time, it is revulsion rather than fear.
There is a dead woman, not twenty feet away. A dead woman who could only speak through me now, and here I am, like a pervert at a peep show. I start to retreat back towards the street when I hear the woman’s pitch change. Her low moans of pleasure have become more primal. I hear three things in that sound – pain, fear, and pleasure. I push the last thought away. Pleasure? Unlikely. I spin around and take a step towards the couple. The man is still kissing the woman’s neck. I see a trickle of blood. He isn’t kissing her neck; he is biting it – hard. I feel adrenaline flood through me.
“Stop,” I shout, covering the distance between the couple and myself in six long strides. “Let her go. Right now.”
I have my service revolver trained on the couple. The man pulls his head up from the woman’s neck. The blood cascades down, soaking into her dress. But I am focusing on the man, trying to memorize his face. Maybe he’s got a prior. Maybe I can sit down with a sketch artist later.
His face is handsome, though extremely pale, and his body is muscular and broad. I nickname him Mister Muscles without even thinking about it. He smiles widely at me. And then he vanishes.
Just like that, he is gone. The woman’s knees buckle, and she falls to the ground. I drop to my knees beside her, pushing the thoughts of the vanishing man
to one side. I can’t have seen that. I can’t have.
“You’re ok now,” I tell the woman. “I’m with the LAPD. You’re going to be just fine.”
“What did you do?” the woman whispers, horrified.
Before I can formulate a response, I feel a hand on my shoulder. A strong force sweeps me to my feet and away from the woman, and a man’s gazing eyes stare straight into my soul.
“What did you see?” Mister Muscles demands. There is blood on his mouth and my stomach drops as if I’ve never seen any of the gruesome things I encounter daily in my line of work.
“Nothing,” My mind goes blank for a moment. “I swear, I didn’t see anything” I plead.
The man’s grip is forming bruises on my arms, I can tell. I struggle, but it is no use. He has me completely in his control.
“HEYYY! What are you doing over there?” a voice yells.
And in a blink of an eye, Mister Muscles is gone again. I breathe a sigh of relief. Rick or one of the officers must have noticed I was gone and has come looking for me.
I turn.
“She was….” My voice trails off as I look into the face of the woman’s attacker.
“Amy.” Mister Muscles smiles. The blood is all gone from around his mouth, as if he has just freshened up and come back to finish our conversation. This time, his smile is warm, charming. I feel a rush of fear, but underneath it, I’m ashamed to admit there is something else. A stirring of desire. “What exactly did you see?” He is not urgent like he was before. He’s speaking easily, as if we’re just having a casual conversation.
His eyes are fixed on mine, and I am floating in a sea of warmth. A reassuring strength radiates off the man, and I want to fall into it, fall into his arms. But with a force of will that surprises me, I force my eyes away from his.
“N…Nothing,” I stammer. “This woman, she fell, and she’s hurt.”
I indicate the woman behind me. The man’s neutral expression falters slightly. What is that? Confusion? A hint of fear?
I hear footsteps running towards the alley.
“Amy? Amy?” Rick’s voice yells.
“Here,” I call back, surprising myself with the strength in my voice.
The man in front of me vanishes again and I fall to my knees. Am I going crazy? Has all the time spent around dead bodies finally started to send me insane?
No, I think. I know exactly what I saw. That was no ordinary man.
Chapter 2
I lie on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, and sigh loudly. I can’t believe I am on leave. Leave in this case meaning “she’s gone crazy, get her out of the way.”
I’m trying hard not to be enraged by the situation. I’ve done good work for the LAPD, and Rick knows I take my job seriously. He knows I’m not nuts. Rick has known me since I was just starting out. He’s seen me at my worst, back before I knew how to control my emotions (and, I’ll admit it, my gag reflex) at a crime scene. Seeing a body is never an easy thing, no matter how much training and mental preparation you go through. And it doesn’t get easier with time. But you learn to push emotions aside, to concentrate on the job, because in the end that’s the best way to help a victim. At the beginning, though, staying calm and collected just isn’t in the cards. And I was no exception.
At my first crime scene, I managed to hold it together just long enough to excuse myself, round a corner, and vomit into a dumpster. Rick was the one who found me there in that alley, weeping, trying to regain enough control to face the other officers again. He handed me a breath mint and told me it was okay, that it happened to everyone. He was there to encourage me and make me feel like I could keep doing this job after that. I know that’s why he’s so protective of me. But right now, it doesn’t stop me from being furious with him.
A part of me knows that’s not fair. I put myself in Rick’s shoes for a moment. If a witness had told me that a man had attacked a woman and then vanished, reappeared, spoke to them and vanished again, I’d have written them off as crazy too.
But I’m not just a witness, dammit. I’m a respected forensic officer. I’m not prone to delusions or flights of fancy. I am known for being meticulous, getting the job done and spotting the little details other people might miss. And in this case, that little detail happens to be a man who vanishes and bites people’s necks. A vampire?
I snort out a bitter laugh. How can that not sound crazy? Maybe I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately. I have been putting in a lot of overtime given these serial murders. I don’t like not having answers. It’s not just that it makes me look bad professionally. It’s more than that. I’m a forensic scientist, and forensic science, however complicated, has hard and fast rules. It has logic. It has answers. It’s not like I’m a quantum physicist or something. I’m not used to problems I can’t solve. Maybe this whole vampire fantasy is just my over-exhausted brain’s way of explaining away the unexplainable.
Vampires. I try again to push the thought away – to convince myself that I imagined the whole thing, but I can’t. I know what I saw. And I know it was my duty to report it.
I think back to the moment, wondering if I could have done anything differently, made myself sound more believable, my story more plausible.
* * *
Rick rushed along the alley. He crouched down beside me.
“Are you ok?” he asked, his voice full of concern.
“I’m fine.” I nodded, pushing myself up. I saw my hands were trembling. “Just a bit shaken up.”
Rick stood up to his full height beside me.
“What happened?”
I opened my mouth to answer him when I remembered the woman. I turned and saw two uniformed officers attending to her. She was sitting up and looked ok. She was talking to the officers.
I turned back to Rick.
“I was examining the body when a woman, that woman” I indicated her with a nod of my head “caught my eye. She headed into the alley, and I was sure I saw the outline of a man in the shadows. I was worried that if I called to you, it would alert him and we’d lose him, so I followed her.”
Rick opened his mouth to interrupt me; no doubt to give me a lecture about placing myself in danger. I cut him off.
“I crouched behind the dumpster and watched. The man stepped out of the shadows, and she went to him. They started kissing and I thought I had been mistaken – they were just screwing. But then she cried out. It didn’t sound like pleasure.
“So I turned back and saw he was kissing her neck. Except he wasn’t. He was biting it, ripping into her throat with his teeth. I called out for him to stop and he looked straight at me and vanished.”
“Vanished how?” Rick asked.
“No idea,” I said. “And then …” I didn’t know why, but I hesitated then. It was as if something inside me didn’t want to talk about the man. He hadn’t killed the woman, after all. What was I saying? He probably would have if I had not intervened. And he had grabbed my arms so hard I had bruises in the impressions of his fingers. “Then he was back, just like that. He was right in front of me. He asked what I’d saw, and I lied. I said the woman had fallen and I wanted to help her. He seemed confused. Scared. And then you yelled to me, and he vanished again. Rick, I know how this sounds, but he vanished into thin air right in front of my face.”
Rick looked at me. His face wore a strange expression. The kind of expression you use when you’re dealing with a much-loved aunt who has gone a bit cuckoo. I didn’t like that expression one bit.
“Go ask the witness,” I snapped. “She must have seen some of it.”
Rick sighed and walked towards her. I was close on his heels.
“What happened?” he asked the nearest officer.
“The lady was taking a short cut home through the alley,” he saw. “She remembers tripping over, and then nothing until she woke up with us here. She must have hit her head.”
“No,” I said. “There was a man. He hurt her. He bit her neck.”
Rick and
the other officer looked at me. Rick’s expression was subtle, hard to read. The officer made no such courtesy. He looked at me like I was crazy.
I ignored him and crouched beside the woman. “It’s ok. You’re safe now,” I said. “You can tell us what actually happened. He can’t hurt you now.”
The woman looked at me through her long, mascara-laden lashes. “I…I don’t know what you mean. Was someone else here?”
The fear in her voice stopped me from pressing the issue. I didn’t want to upset her. Instead, I reached out my hand to her face. “May I?” I asked. She nodded, and I gently pushed her head to one side and looked at her neck. Nothing. There was no trace of any blood, no gaping wound. There wasn’t even a smudge or a bruise. I peered closer, determined to find pin-prick puncture wounds. I didn’t care that that made me think of a cheap horror flick.
Before I had a chance to really look, I felt a hand on my arm, pulling me up to my feet. I spun around and came face-to-face with Rick.
“Stop it. You’re frightening her,” he said.
“B…but,” I started.
“No buts. Amy, I’m sorry. You’re off the case. You’re stressed out, and you obviously need a break. I’m recommending you take a couple of weeks leave.”
“Leave?” I repeated, incredulous. “Look at what’s happening here. You can’t expect me to take leave. I need to get back to that body and find the evidence that she was attacked by the same man.”
Rick shook his head. “No. You’re off the case, Amy. Please don’t fight me on this.”
And I didn’t. I was too shocked, too humiliated, too betrayed to do anything but allow a junior officer to lead me back to my car. He sent someone to retrieve my kit. We stood awkwardly by my car until my kit was returned and then I drove home in a blur. I came straight upstairs and laid down in bed.
* * *
I still can’t believe I’ve found myself in this situation. I am angry that I wasn’t given a bit more credit. It’s more than that, though. I’m angry that Rick’s closed mind is going to hinder his investigation. It will lead to more deaths while he and his team chase their tails, looking for someone they are never going to find. And all the while, the victims will pile up. Well, their blood won’t be on my hands. I’ve done my part. I told Rick what I saw. The rest is on him. And all I have to do to feel better is find a way to make myself believe that.
