Page 3 of Loving A Vampire Is Total Chaos

I snap my head up at the sound of my name, Captain Barnes pulling me out of my trance.

“Yes, Captain?” Shifting my weight and putting my hands on my hips I fully face him.

He scratches at his mustache. “I know this is your first case after getting promoted, but I have to say this isn’t uncommon. I feel like you should know that.”

Captain Barnes is a burly man with an imposing figure. His brown hair is shaved short to his scalp with dark eyes that convey a no-nonsense attitude that dares you to try to pull a fast one on him. It’s no wonder he has the highest clearance rate with that scrutinizing gaze. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of his wrath.

I’ve known the man since I was a child. My father was a detective too, so Captain Barnes has practically watched me grow up.

“Sir,” I reply in a deadpan tone. “You’re telling me you come across bloody smiley faces made from body parts often?” I try to breathe through my mouth, because the scent of blood and bile is stifling.

What kind of predicament have I gotten myself into? Maybe I should’ve stuck with being a patrol officer.

The captain shakes his head. “Unfortunately, yes. We’ve had murders that all end in these crass, grotesquely childish depictions for years now.”

I can swear I hear a disbelieving scoff of, “Childish?” but when I look around it’s just Captain Barnes and me on this side of the warehouse.

He places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “I know you weren’t fully briefed as we just promoted you, but you’re one of the most promising in the force. Your recent work has already been outstanding and we need to get to the bottom of this.” He runs a hand over his scalp. “I’ll understand if this is a bit much. I’ve lost a few good officers that couldn’t stomach this.” He gestures at the mess of blood and limbs.

So much blood. I’m not normally one to be squeamish but even I’m having a hard time not gagging.

I try to calculate how many bodies we’re looking at for there to be that much blood, but my brain can’t seem to compute beyonda lot.

“Okay,” I drag out the word, and look around the warehouse at the various corpses. “Thank you for your candidness, but I’ll be fine.”I think.“How many murders are we talking?”

Captain Barnes sighs and grabs a thick case file from a fellow detective who brings it over. Paging through, he counts out loudand lands on three identical crime scenes within the last month alone.

I gape. That’s unheard of.

“Can I have that?” I offer my hand, and he nods.

The pictures contained within the manila folder are disgustingly vivid and I can’t help my wince when I see human bodies manipulated in ways I didn’t know were possible. Three offenses in a month is beyond excessive, especially considering each one has a minimum of ten dead. Killingoneperson in this kind of manner is exhausting on the human body let alone so many. It makes no sense. It doesn’t seem possible.

“Always a gory mess and yet they have enough time to clean it up and leave a nice picture for us,” he says clean with quotation fingers. “They also leave a signature in blood each time.” Coming around to me he points at a bloody poorly drawn smiley face with—is that fangs?—found in each photo from the previous crime scenes. Walking over to our current massacre I delicately step over a dismembered torso to see the tell-tale ‘signature’ off to the side.

“What a bunch of psychos,” I mutter under my breath. “It has to be a group.”

There’s no way one person is responsible for this.

Captain Barnes huffs a laugh. “It’s like chasing a ghost. Never any DNA of any kind and anytime a shoe print has been left behind it’s always been the same size shoe. One perp doesn’t make sense and yet…” He trails off with a tired sigh. “Oh, and there’s one more important detail.” Barnes rubs the back of his neck and exhales. “The other common denominator between all these murders is that they’ve been deaths of criminals or complete annihilations of organizations we’ve been trying to take down for years.”

I whip around to face him fully. “All of them?” I’m flabbergasted as to who would be capable of such a thing, let alone be motivated to do it.

Like a real-life Dexter?

“Every single one.” The captain looks just as confused as I feel, and I know my work’s cut out for me. He takes in the scene and says, “I’ll only say this to you, but I’m kind of relieved at least someone is getting rid of the rapists, child predators, and traffickers. We don’t have enough manpower to take them all down.”

He walks away when his name is called by a squad member.

I sigh and brush soaking wet hair away from my face. I’m glad one of us has faith. This crime scene is like nothing I’ve ever seen or dealt with before. During training I saw all kinds of crazy shit and I do love a good horror movie, but this might take the cake.

Letting out a breath, the shift of a shadow above catches my eye. I look up but find nothing.

“Probably a fucking rat,” I mutter to myself. “I hate rats.”

Throwing my apartment keys into the dish on the stand in my entry I stand in silence. Crazy mass murderers who make art with intestines and only target bad guys? Not on my bingo card.

A furry head suddenly rubs itself along my calf and I look down to find Midnight, my inherited cat. I refuse to claim him as mine since I’m pretty sure he’d sell me for catnip if he could. His pitch-black fur in the darkness makes him look like a mass of shadows with no visible form save for bright yellow eyes.

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