“I wasn’t trying to offend your delicate male sensibilities. Of course you did all the work, but now that I know what to be prepared for, a little backup never hurt anyone, right?” She removed her finger, and he immediately missed the feeling of her touching him. A pang of guilt shot through him. He was the son of the man who had killed her father, and she didn’t even know it. If she did, she would probably hate him. And she was still his student and...and...and... The list of reasons why he should not have or want her went on and on. God, he was messed up.
Before he had the chance to contemplate for one more second how delicious the sweetness of her smooth, creamy skin would taste as he went down on her, he ran and grabbed his weapons bag from his room at full speed, and a few minutes later they said their goodbyes and left the apartment.
When they arrived at the crime scene, Damon had managed to pull off a miracle. The entire Rochester PD vacated, so they had the crime scene to themselves. To Shane’s amazement, not a single cop lingered near the scene. He wrote a mental note that Damon had connections in far higher places than he’d ever expected, and that if he stayed on Damon’s good side, favors of this magnitude might come his way more frequently. It would do his fellow hunters some good to learn that. The members of the crew were always butting heads with Damon, even though it was Damon’s job to protect all their asses from the wrath of headquarters. The man was scary and pissy for sure, but he was a good leader and could keep a pack of alpha males with egos the size of Texas in line better than most in his position would be able to manage.
Once Shane and Vera slipped under the yellow police tape into the apartment, they came face-to-face with what could be described no other way than as a bloodbath. Garnet blood painted the walls and stained the putrid-green carpet an awful color of brown. A small gasp escaped from Vera’s lips, and she clapped her hands over her mouth.
Shane had to admit to himself that, unfortunately, he’d seen worse carnage. He shuddered at the thought. But even though there was less blood here than he’d seen before, this was different. The blood took on a whole new level of meaning now that he was responsible for bringing the perpetrator to justice. Every drop of blood splashed across the walls and carpet was a reminder that he stood two steps behind the person responsible for these crimes, a reminder that he had no solid leads or any way to protect the victims, let alone identify them before they were attacked. Anger and frustration gripped him like a vise. On a new level, he understood the anger that was ever-present in his fellow hunters. He’d never truly understood why, when they worked cases this bloody and full of violence on a regular basis, they exuded anger from their pores in a way so palpable he sometimes felt as if he could bottle their rage and sell it. He had always thought the hunter’s role attracted men with a natural angry streak, but he’d been so wrong. So incredibly wrong. Anger wasn’t what drew them to the job. That was their overwhelming desire to protect the innocent. Their anger had everything to do with the helplessness they so often felt to save the victims, leaving them with nothing to do but avenge their deaths. He knew that now, because that same rage filled him. It was his fault more innocent blood had been shed. He hadn’t done enough, been dedicated enough. If only he’d somehow found a way...
No, allowing himself to go down that line of thinking would be a mistake. He needed to harness his anger, use it as fuel to make himself a better hunter, to make himself more vigilant, not allow it to debilitate him. Internally, he held on to that anger, gripping it and cementing it in place, rather than relinquishing control to it so it could consume him. This was his fuel. He would thrive on this. He used the energy to help him focus.
Though he was glad for Vera’s sake that the body had been removed several hours earlier, he would need a thorough autopsy report. He wrote a mental note to himself to request that from Damon. Stepping carefully so as to not disturb any of the blood-spatter patterns, he scanned the room as he recreated the scene in his mind. The newspaper article had stated that the victim, Nina Benson, a thirty-five-year-old single woman, had lived alone in this apartment. Unlike Mr. and Mrs. Foley, where the spousal connection was clear, Nina Benson had reportedly had no romantic connections, at least according to the article, which meant her raised-from-the-dead murderer could have been anyone in her life, or maybe even someone she didn’t know. The first thing he intended to do was create a list of anyone who’d been part of Nina Benson’s life during the past two years, the same length of time since Mrs. Foley’s death. Past boyfriends, lovers, friends, family, coworkers, you name it. He would research it all. If he had to, he would dig up the graves of every now-deceased person she’d known just to find which one was missing, because whoever it was, he needed to destroy them.
Them? It? Did reanimated corpses qualify for personhood?
He shelved that thought before turning back to the scene at hand. A bright lime-green yoga mat drenched in blood lay on top of the carpet. The police’s theory was that she’d been exercising when she’d been attacked. He pulled a pair of exam gloves from his bag and snapped them over his hands before lifting the edge of the mat. The spongy material had adhered to the drying blood, and now it peeled from the floor with a sound he hoped never to hear again.
“Ugh, gross.”
Shane glanced over his shoulder to see Vera waving her hands near her face as if she were fighting off a particularly persistent fly. Her features were scrunched together in a look of disgust. “Ew. That made an awful sound. I’ll never do yoga again,” she whimpered.
Oh, man, he tried, he really did try, to stave off the thought of Vera in those tight little pants that made a woman’s ass look so perfectly perky and round, lifting her long luscious legs up into the air, the way he could stretch her and bend her in bed like a pretzel. But try as he did, he couldn’t shake the thought. That, mixed with the adrenaline already pumping through his veins, meant Mr. Happy was...well, happy. Shit.
He was learning all sorts of new things today. Why his fellow hunters were so angry, why soldiers in the midst of adrenaline-filled battles often found themselves sporting a raging hard-on, despite the gore surrounding them. The male instinct to mate knew no bounds or social conventions.
And he was one hundred percent male and, unfortunately, not immune.
Damn, it was shameful.
Pushing aside the thoughts of Vera twisted into complicated sexual positions, he examined the bottom of the mat. No black-magic markings underneath as he’d hoped there might be. He scoured the apartment for any clue that would place the necromancer responsible for this in the apartment with the victim, or at least something to give him insight into the coven’s motivation and what they were attempting to accomplish by all this.
He wandered over to the TV directly across from the bloodied yoga mat. With a gloved finger, he pushed the eject button on her DVD player. A disc of what appeared to be a Rochester-based yoga master popped out from inside the drive. The studio’s name and address were printed in a bold, loopy font. Tribal Sensations. He noted the name of the studio and its location before returning the DVD to the player.
Shit. So far he was coming up with a whole lot of nothing.
“Maybe we should check the other rooms, rather than just where she was murdered,” Vera suggested. She let out a nervous laugh that was half what-I’m-about-to-say-scares-the-shit-out-of-me and half I’m-trying-to-keep-my-cool-by-making-a-joke. “I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous to venture elsewhere in the apartment, though. I don’t want a reanimated corpse jumping out at us and attacking again.”
Shane shook his head. “No need to worry about another reanimated corpse. The police have just been through, so the scene is clear. The corpse probably hasn’t had a chance to come back the way Mrs. Foley did. But you’re right. We should search the other rooms.”
There wasn’t much in this room other than bloodstains, not even an indication of exactly how Nina Benson had been murdered. Tha
t information wouldn’t be released until the autopsy report was complete. The Rochester PD hadn’t made any early statements.
Carefully stepping across the carpet, Shane made his way over to Vera. He dug in his pack, then handed her his spare nine millimeter, the one he’d used before Jace insisted he get his Walther PPK. “Unless I identify myself before walking out, you shoot, okay? And stay here, no matter what you hear. You’ll be safer that way.”
“I thought you said the apartment should be clear?” Her voice rose an octave, and her eyes grew wide.
“It should be, but extra caution never hurts.”
She nodded and took the gun from his hands.
Removing the PPK from his bag, he checked the magazine and cocked the gun to ensure a bullet was ready to go in the chamber. He held the gun steady as he slipped down the hallway before checking the single bedroom and the attached bathroom. To be certain they were alone, he checked the closet, and behind the pink, orange and yellow striped shower curtain, but there was nothing. No signs of any life, reanimated or not. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was thankful for that. If the reanimated corpse wasn’t here, that meant it was roaming elsewhere, endangering other lives in addition to the life it had already stolen from Nina Benson.
“All clear, Vera. You can come on back,” he yelled down the hallway.
She entered the very feminine bedroom a moment later. Handing the gun back to him, she looked around. “Wow. She had true girlie-girl tastes, didn’t she?”
Shane nodded. Girlie was the only way to describe it. Despite her age, Nina Benson’s room had been decorated head to toe in various shades of pink. A white and pink polka-dotted bedspread, a multicolored pink polka-dotted rug and an old-style princess phone on her nightstand, which had been covered in white faux fur, completed the look. It looked more like the room of a teenage drama queen than a thirty-five-year-old woman.
“I’ll admit, I peeked in the kitchen, and it was covered in cupcake decorations,” Vera added.
Shane’s lips compressed into a tight line as he eyed the room. “The only problem is, there are no signs of black magic in all this pink, and I refuse to leave this crime scene until I find something, anything, that will give us more information than the last scene. I’m not leaving empty-handed.”
“I understand. I’ll help you.” Vera reached into his bag without warning and pulled out her own pair of latex gloves.
Together, they turned over each item in the room, searching every nook and cranny for any possible indication that some sort of magical mayhem had taken place there. Just when Shane was nearly ready to pull his own hair out, an idea struck him. If he’d been in a cartoon, a lightbulb would have lit up over his head with a resounding bing. Throwing open Nina Benson’s closet doors, he parted her clothing like Moses parting the Red Sea.
Ding, ding, ding. Bingo!
“Oh, shit.” Vera cursed from behind him as she spotted what he’d found.
A series of black-magic symbols had been painted in now-dried blood across the white wall in the back of Nina’s closet. With them hidden by her clothes, she would have been none the wiser as to their presence. It didn’t take a genius, Shane thought, to realize exactly what those symbols meant. Whoever was casting these spells was upping the ante, attempting to manipulate the reanimated corpse to do his bidding, rather than just raising someone from the dead and returning them to their home only to hurt their living loved ones, as he theorized to be the case with Mrs. Foley. The mastermind behind this was escalating, and fast.
Pulling his phone from his pocket, Shane snapped a picture of the symbols. “I’m going to have someone from the division look over the rest of the apartment before they allow the cops back in here, but this will give me solid insight into the particular type of spells they’re using and hopefully some ideas as to why they’re doing this.” He pushed the clothes back together, hiding the symbols from view again.
After making sure they’d returned everything in the room to its proper place, they headed back to the living room. Shane took more pictures of the crime scene for future reference, just in case he needed them. Then he hit number two on his speed dial and rang his division leader.
“Go,” Damon said in place of the traditional hello.
“I need you to postpone the meeting for a few hours. I may have found something that will help me figure out a plan for preventing any more murders from happening.” Before Damon could respond he added, “I also need one of the other guys to double-check this apartment for any signs of black magic I may have missed, and I needed that autopsy report, like, five minutes ago. I know the coroner doesn’t usually get to it for at least twenty-four hours, but can you call in a favor with your PD contact?”
Damon let loose a colorful list of profanities. “You’re so lucky you’ve never asked for any favors until now,” he practically growled. “Call us when you’re ready for the meeting.”
That was what he wanted to hear. Turning off his phone, he signaled for Vera to follow him out of the apartment.
Twenty minutes later they were back at Shane’s grandmother’s apartment, photos of the crime scene spread across the living room coffee table after he’d suggested Mae take Grandma Grey out for a walk. He slammed the weight of his large and cherished occult reference onto the table and pored over its pages. Three hours later, when Damon emailed him the autopsy report through the secure server he’d set up for the division, the report combined with the online research he’d done in conjunction with his reading gave him enough to formulate a theory that quickly started looking less like speculation and more like pure fact.
As he’d worked, Vera had sat on the couch reading a worn copy of Pride and Prejudice she’d borrowed from his grandmother’s old bookshelf. He removed his glasses and dropped them onto the coffee table. He banged both hands onto the wooden surface with a resounding thud. “I’ve got it.”
Setting her book down, Vera offered him a brief round of applause. “So spill,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for hours to hear this.”
He was so ready to share his findings, the words gushed from his mouth like water from a broken pipe. “First off, I found a connection between the victims. It’s a thin one, but it’s there, and any connection between the two deaths seems like it might be a reason to pause. Listed in the obituaries from September of two years ago were Mrs. Jennifer Foley and none other than Lauren Seater, who was Nina Benson’s long-time yoga instructor and the original owner of the studio that made the DVD she was watching before she was murdered. That leads me to believe that maybe we’d better pay a visit to Lauren Seater’s grave to see if she’s the reanimated corpse who murdered Nina and is still on the loose. Considering I exhausted all other possible connections between them, if Lauren Seater is in fact reanimated, that means that most likely whoever is perpetrating these crimes is doing so by picking people randomly from the obituary section of a two-year-old newspaper.
“Now that I have a copy of that newspaper, we can anticipate who their next reanimated corpses will be and, with some luck, take precautions to ensure they stay dead. As for the recent victims, when I looked thoroughly into Mr. Foley’s and Nina Benson’s backgrounds, there was nothing to indicate that either one was involved in any sort of black magic. Everything we hunters know about necromancy indicates that while reanimated corpses aren’t sentient, they reenact things from their past lives in the way ghosts do, including strong emotions from their past lives. That would explain why when Mrs. Foley was attacking me, thinking I was her husband, she was screaming all sorts of resentments she felt about her marriage and had probably taken to the grave with her. I’m not sure how that same theory applies to Lauren Seater and Nina Benson, but my guess is that since Nina was such a regular attendee, maybe she was a big part of Lauren’s life. I have to look further into that potential connection obviously, since we still need to verify whether Lauren Seater
was, in fact, raised from the dead. As for Nina Benson’s cause of death, she was killed with a knife in the same way Mr. Foley was, which means the Rochester PD and the newspapers are going to have a field day talking about a serial killer being on the loose, which obviously isn’t inaccurate. It just won’t be the kind of serial killer they’re expecting.
“Also, from the symbols we found in the closet, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re attempting to figure out how to control the reanimated corpses to do their bidding, but thus far, they seem to be failing at getting the corpses to go after anyone they didn’t already know during their lifetime. The only major question left now is why bother reanimating corpses and learning to control them? And which black-magic coven is responsible for all this?”
Vera released a long huff of air and wiped a hand across her forehead as if battling away pretend sweat. “Wow. That’s a lot of info you managed to gather there. Seriously, the fact that you connected all that amazes me.”
He beamed with pride. He had to admit, it was a great feeling. Cracking a puzzle like that to potentially save lives...well, it just made a man feel good inside, important and worthy, as if maybe he hadn’t completely failed victims like Nina Benson, as if maybe he was doing his best and that was a damn fine job. For a moment he allowed himself to soak up that feeling before he removed his phone from his pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling my division. I’m going to have Ash pay a visit to Lauren Seater’s grave. He owes me a favor as it is. In the meantime, we’ll look around her old yoga studio, which is still in operation under a different owner, to see if we can find the connection between her and Nina Benson. There might be some leftover paperwork or maybe a group photo at the studio that tells us something. If what I anticipate is true and Ash finds Lauren missing from her grave, we’ll be ready for a meeting. I’ll need the Execution Underground’s resources to protect the potential pool of reanimated victims and their family members.”
Midnight Hunter (The Execution Underground Book 3) Page 10