It was no good having a hysterical witness. Cassie put an arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders. She was always the one who did the comforting—Stone never touched a female witness if he could help it, though he had comforted Cassie herself on more than one occasion. Other than her, though, he seemed to want to keep his distance from women.
“Look, Miss…” she began.
“Hawthorn,” the girl sobbed. “I…I’m Amelia Hawthorn. And I’m going to be in so much trouble if my parents find out about this!”
Cassie didn’t have the heart to tell her she might be in even more trouble. Depending on how things had gone down, she might be an accessory to murder. But there would be time for that later.
“Just show us,” she said gently, giving the girl’s shoulders a squeeze. “We’ll take it from here. Where is she? And who is she?” she added. “Did you know her?”
Amelia shook her head.
“The Beast never said her name. He just kept calling her ‘sweetie’ and baby-doll’.”
“We will see if we can find any identification on the body,” Stone said grimly. “Where is the victim?”
“In there.” Amelia pointed with a shaking finger towards the interior of the house. “In…in the drawing room. That’s where they set up the scene they were filming.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows. The drawing room? Who the hell had a drawing room in their house anymore? It sounded like something out of a Jane Austen novel. But whatever.
“You stay here—we’ll have a look,” she told Amelia. Then she nodded at Stone and started in the direction the girl had pointed.
“Wait—let me go first.” Stone put a hand on her shoulder and pushed Cassie protectively behind him.
“Stone, come on…” Cassie couldn’t keep the exasperation out of her voice. Her partner was way overprotective at times.
Stone arched an eyebrow at her.
“She says the perpetrator is gone but what if she’s wrong?”
“Then you present a much bigger target than I do,” Cassie pointed out. “Not that I’m skinny but you’re massive, Stone.”
“I am Kindred and if the perpetrator is also Kindred, I need to be the one to confront him.”
Cassie sensed this wasn’t an argument she was going to win.
“Fine—go ahead. We’re wasting time.”
Stone nodded and went deeper into the house with Cassie following, feeling irritated. She appreciated that her partner wanted to keep her safe but honestly, sometimes he crossed the line from protective to aggravatingly male. After all, they both had guns. A bullet could take down a Kindred assailant, no matter how big he was. They—
“Merciful Goddess!”
Stone’s hoarse exclamation stopped Cassie in mid-thought. Her partner had apparently found the drawing room and he was standing there, blocking the doorway with his muscular bulk so that she couldn’t see a thing.
“Stone?” She pushed at his broad shoulder gently. “You wanna move and let me see, too?”
Wordlessly, he stepped aside, his eyes wide with horror. Cassie shot him a worried glance—Stone never reacted this way at crime scenes. He was always the three Cs—cool, calm, and collected. But the naked horror she saw on her partner’s face was soon explained when she looked into the drawing room.
It was even worse than she’d thought and the girl was most definitely dead.
Six
Stone stared in horror at the human female hanging suspended from a wooden contraption at the far end of the room. It was shaped like a giant letter X and her arms and legs were strapped to all four corners of it. She had been stripped naked and blood from multiple wounds was running down her arms and legs. Her head lolled limply to one side, her long black hair obscuring her face, like the petals of a flower with a broken stalk.
“Son of a bitch,” Cassandra whispered beside him. “I guess I can see why the witness didn’t call an ambulance.”
“This couldn’t have been done by a Kindred.” Stone could hear the horror in his own voice. “One of my people would never do this to a female. Gods, she’s been tortured.”
“If you mean all the cuts all over her, she wanted him to do that.”
Stone whipped around to see the female witness—Amelia, that was her name—standing behind him. Her face was still pale and pinched but she seemed better in control of her emotions now, which was a relief.
Though to be honest, Stone was feeling less than perfectly in control his own emotions right at the moment. He was vacillating between horror at what had been done to the victim and fury at whoever had done it.
“What do you mean?” Cassandra asked the girl. “You mean you saw him cut her?”
“I was hiding in the closet. I saw all of it.” She looked like she might start crying again, which caused Cassandra to put an arm around her shoulders once more.
“Okay, look, my partner and I need to check out the crime scene first but then you’re going to tell us everything you saw. All right?”
“All right.” The girl nodded rapidly.
“Good, now did you touch anything in here?” Cassandra asked. She was already pulling a pair of shoe protectors out of her pocket and slipping them over her shoes. Mechanically, Stone did the same. He was trying mentally to divorce himself from the scene—to remain calm and logical. But almost all the homicide victims he and Cassandra dealt with were males. To see a female in this position was…difficult. To say the least.
“I only touched the side of her neck, to see if she had a pulse,” Amelia said and sniffed. “I was pretty sure she wouldn’t, after the way he was choking her, but—”
Stone wished he didn’t have to hear this. He supposed he might become accustomed to seeing female homicide victims if he worked with the regular, human homicide team but with the HKR squad, it wasn’t something he had to get used to. And this victim…well, she looked bad. Really bad.
He approached the body carefully. There was blood splatter everywhere on the expensive-looking tan carpet and a partial footprint as well—a big one—that he avoided. There were also a number of other things scattered around—a black whip, a leather riding crop, and a few other implements that looked like they were good only for giving beatings. Finally he was close enough to touch the body—if he wanted to.
Stone studied it, looking for clues—for evidence. He hadn’t known this female but he wanted to get justice for her just the same.
He’d seen worse, he supposed—rapists with their throats ripped out in an animalistic fury or attackers with their genitals torn off or all of their limbs broken in multiple places. A few of the bodies he and Cassandra had examined had even been completely decapitated. But all those victims had been male—and all of them had gotten what was coming to them, in Stone’s opinion. If you caused a Kindred warrior to go into Rage by attacking his female, you had only yourself to blame when he ripped off your head.
This was worse somehow—much worse. Because it was clear that whoever had killed this girl had not been in Rage. The knife wounds weren’t random looking or even very deep. They formed a neat, precise pattern on the girl’s arms and legs—almost as though the attacker had been feeling artistic, Stone thought, feeling fury rise like bile in his throat.
He pulled on a pair of gloves and lifted her head. Something grated in her neck and her head wobbled loosely. Her long black hair reminded him of Cassandra’s—a thought he pushed away immediately.
“Well, there’s no ID anywhere that I can find, so right now she’s a Jane Doe. Broken neck?” Cassandra asked, coming up behind him and nodding at the girl.
“Apparently. And look.” Stone pointed at the livid bruises around the victim’s slender throat. They had been made by hands as big as his own.
Kindred hands, whispered a harsh little voice in his brain.
No! Stone pushed back against the idea. All female life was precious—sacred. No Kindred would have done this. There were human males as big as his people—not many but a few. Most of them were pro
fessional athletes but he supposed that there were also some who dabbled in human pornography.
“He worked her over, all right.” Cassandra’s sweet voice was grim. “And it looks like he enjoyed himself while he did.”
Stone looked where she was pointing and saw that the victim’s thighs were slick with something that looked like semen. There was a puddle between her spread legs as well, which was inconsistent with his hope that the perpetrator had been a human. Human males only ejaculated a teaspoon or so of sperm when they orgasmed. Kindred males made ten times that amount or more—the better to bond the female they were making love to, to them.
But somehow Stone doubted that bonding has been on the perp’s mind when he did this to the female victim.
“At least he was nice enough to leave us lots of DNA,” Cassandra remarked. “We can get some answers after the crime scene guys get a sample.” She cocked her head. “Listen—Amelia is letting them in now. Let’s go brief them on what we need and then sit down with her and find out what she saw.”
Stone nodded. “I want extra samples—some to send to the Mother Ship just in case…”
“In case the perp does turn out to be Kindred?” his partner asked gently.
Stone didn’t trust his voice—he only nodded. He cleared his throat.
“Let’s go.”
He had seen enough of this crime scene to last him a lifetime.
Seven
“Go back to the very beginning when you met this, uh—” Cassie raised her eyebrows and began tapping notes on her phone.
“Beast—The Kindred Beast. But he just went by The Beast for short,” Amelia said helpfully, leaning forward. They were in the kitchen of the mansion, which was bigger than Cassie’s entire house. It was set up for a professional home chef with a huge marble island in the center and expensive-looking copper pots hanging from racks all around.
“Where did you meet him?” Cassie asked again. Stone was just standing there, silently. He hadn’t said much of anything while they were examining the crime scene—but he hadn’t had to. Cassie could see how upset her partner was—she could tell by the tense set of his broad shoulders and the tightness of his mouth.
“I met him in a club in Ybor,” Amelia said. Ybor was Tampa’s historic district with lots of old buildings that used to be cigar rolling factories where Cuban immigrants had lived and worked. Now it was a tourist trap, home to trendy restaurants, tattoo parlors, novelty shops, and of course, plenty of bars and clubs.
“What club?” Cassie asked.
“I dunno.” Amelia squinted, furrowing her brow. “The Velvet Noose? Yeah, I think that was the one.”
“That’s a pretty dark place,” Cassie pointed out. It was also where a lot of the Kink community of Tampa Bay came to play. “What were you doing in a club like that?”
“I dunno,” Amelia said again, shrugging but her cheeks were definitely pink. “Just curious, I guess. Anyway, I was standing at the bar when I saw him—The Beast I mean. I had never seen a real live Kindred before up close, so I asked him if I could take a selfie with him, ya know?”
“You have a picture of the perpetrator?” Stone demanded, glaring at the girl. “Do you not think you could have told us this at once?”
“Oh, uh…” Amelia shrank back from him, her eyes going wide with fright. “Sorry. I…I didn’t think.”
“It’s all right.” Cassie put a hand on her partner’s arm. Ease down, the gesture said. Their witness was much more likely to talk if she wasn’t frightened half out of her mind, and Stone’s huge size and piercing gaze could be really intimidating. Cassie had seen him extract a confession from an assailant without even saying a word—all he had to do was turn that laser beam stare on people and they were suddenly babbling out all their secrets.
Still, that wasn’t the approach they wanted to take with Amelia. Cassie had the feeling the girl would tell them everything they wanted if they just let her talk.
“Let’s see the selfie,” she said to Amelia. “You still have it on your phone?”
“Oh, uh, yeah. Here…” The girl reached for her cell phone and tapped it a few times before displaying the screen.
Well, he certainly looks Kindred, Cassie thought, though she didn’t say it aloud to spare her partner’s feelings.
The man on the screen with Amelia had a heavy black beard, wild black hair, and the vivid golden eyes of a true Beast Kindred. He was wearing a black wife-beater t-shirt that showed his muscular arms and there was a strange-looking tattoo on his right arm. It looked like it might be some kind of a dragon but it was hard to tell because it was blurry—out of focus with the rest of the picture.
“What’s that?” she asked, tapping the screen with her nail to indicate the tattoo.
“Oh, that was one of the coolest things about him!” Amelia exclaimed. “He had a living tattoo—at least, that was what he called it. ‘My live ink’ was what he said. It doesn’t just stay on his arm—it goes all over his body—all over his skin, ya know?”
This was sounding stranger and stranger. Cassie looked up at Stone and raised one eyebrow.
“Live ink?”
“That’s a technique they use on Rigelis Four.” His deep voice was grimmer than ever. “The ink is actually a living creature that is injected under the skin. It feeds off the host’s sweat and can assume any form and appear anywhere on his or her body.”
“Wow,” Cassie muttered. “Well, so much for identifying marks. We can’t exactly put out an APB and say that the suspect has a tattoo that can look like anything and might appear anywhere on his body.”
“No,” Stone said shortly. “We cannot. Unless we want every male with a tattoo anywhere on his body to be brought in to the station.”
“Tell me more about this, uh, Beast,” Cassie said, turning back to Amelia. “Did he come on to you? Did you spend the night with him?”
“Oh, no!” Amelia looked shocked. “My mom and dad would have killed me! But I did invite him and his friend back here to party for a while.”
Cassie thought their witness was damn lucky she hadn’t ended up strapped to the St. Andrew’s Cross in the drawing room herself. But she only nodded and said, “So he had a friend? Was he Kindred, too?”
“Uh-uh.” Amelia shook her head. “He was a regular human. You know, like us.” She looked at Cassie and then shot an uncertain glance at Stone.
“Do you have pictures of him, too?”
“Sure. Here.” Amelia scrolled through the phone and showed them the screen. This time it showed a middle-aged human man with salt and pepper hair and brown eyes.
“He looks older than the rest of the crowd,” Cassie remarked.
“Oh, he was. See, Frank is The Beast’s manager—he was also the one who was bankrolling the, uh, movies they were making.”
“You mean the porn?” Cassie said bluntly.
Amelia blushed and nodded. Dropping her head, she murmured,
“I swear I didn’t know that was what it was going to be, or I never would have let them rent the house. But they said they only needed one room and that they wouldn’t mess anything up and that they had their own, uh, props.”
“Like the St. Andrew’s Cross?” Cassie asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The what?” Stone asked, frowning.
“The black X frame the victim is strapped to,” Cassie told him. She wondered if the Kindred ever got into the Kink scene or had their own form of BDSM. For that matter, did they even do porn? She didn’t know—the subject had never really come up with Stone. They talked about almost everything but somehow always managed to skirt around anything to do with sex.
Stone frowned at her but only nodded. If he had more questions about the St. Andrew’s Cross or the other BDSM paraphernalia scattered around the murder scene, he was clearly saving them for later.
“So you asked them to come party and they liked your house so much they asked if they could film a ‘movie’ here—right, so far?” Cassie asked Amelia, getting back to
the questioning.
She nodded.
“Right. And since my parents are out of town this week, it seemed like a great way to make some cash. And at first, it was.” She looked like she might cry again so Cassie hurried to ask more questions.
“So they filmed more than one scene?”
“They’ve been here for the past four days,” Amelia said, nodding. “Frank and The Beast and a bunch of different girls. Only today, it was only the Beast and the…the poor girl in the drawing room.” Her voice trembled.
“Did anyone else get hurt or killed?” Cassie asked steadily.
“No—never!” Amelia shook her head rapidly, her blonde hair flying with the force of her negation. “I mean, they did some kind of whipping and spanking things, but nothing that ever…” Her throat worked. “That ever drew blood.”
“How do you know? Did you always watch them work?” Stone demanded, frowning.
Amelia blushed.
“No! Or…not much, anyway. Once I realized what they were really doing, I wanted them to leave—to stop. But Frank had me sign this contract—”
“So there’s a contract, too?” Cassie couldn’t believe it. “With signatures and last names and everything?”
“Oh, uh—you want to see it?” Amelia asked uncertainly.
Could anyone really be this stupid—or this naïve—Cassie wondered? She nodded patiently.
“Yeah. That would be good. You have it around here, somewhere?”
“We did it Docu-sign—online,” Amelia said. “But I have a copy on my phone. Look.”
Taking the phone back again, she scrolled some more until she got to a long document. Taking it from her, Cassie scrolled to the end, enlarging the screen so she could see the signatures.
“Frank Yarrow, Amelia Hawthorn, and…The Kindred Beast,” she read, frowning. Crap, she’d been hoping for the perp’s real name. But she supposed this was much better than nothing. Also, there was an address under Yarrow’s name—that was helpful.
“You said they worked with different females every day,” Stone said, frowning as he read over Cassie’s shoulder. “Where are their signatures?”
Playing Their Parts: A Kindred Tales Novel Page 3
