Page 3 of Patrick’s Seduction (Scanguards Vampires #19)

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“ P atrick, you need to come down to the med center and see this,” Buffy said on the phone.

“Are you done with the autopsy already?”

Patrick rose to his feet and headed out the door from his office, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“No, just the prelim stuff, but you need to see this.”

“Alright, I’ll be down in a minute.”

Outside the office, he almost collided with Nicholas.

“Got a minute?” Nicholas asked.

“Walk with me. Buffy needs to see me.”

Nicholas joined him walking to the elevator, which opened a moment later.

As they stepped inside, Patrick asked, “Did you find anything?”

“Yes. I found footprints and drag marks on the ground near the crime scene. It looks like whoever attacked that guy dragged him off the path so that he wouldn’t immediately be found by other joggers. Guess the perp didn’t count on anyone letting their dog run off leash.”

“Makes sense,” Patrick agreed. “Did you speak to the dog owner who found the body?”

“Yeah, older woman who lives in the neighborhood. Nothing suspicious about her. Her dog found the body. There were paw prints too, but I’m not sure they were from her dog. She’s got one of those little yapping dogs, and the paw prints I found belong to a bigger animal. It’s possible that there were other dogs in the vicinity, but their owners never investigated what their dog was sniffing.”

“So, you think other dogs could have contaminated the crime scene?”

“Yeah, totally possible. Plus, there could have been strays too. Or coyotes.” Nicholas shrugged.

“Did you take impressions of the prints that were salvageable?”

“Yeah, pawprints and footprints. Just in case.”

“Good work,” Patrick praised.

The elevator doors opened, and they exited on one of the lower levels that housed Scanguards’ mini medical center.

“Did you find out who the victim is?” Nicholas asked.

“I was gonna call the team together to bring everybody up to speed just when Buffy called. But, yes, I got his identity. Malcolm Broadmore, 42 years old, from Cincinnati. He’s here for the jewelry convention.”

“You think theft might have been a motive?”

Patrick swiped his access card at the door to the morgue and pushed it open.

“That’s for us to find out,” he said as he and Nicholas entered.

Dressed in green hospital scrubs, Buffy stood over the body, which was laid out on a cold steel operating table, strong lights shining down on the naked corpse. By the looks of it, Buffy had started cleaning the dirt and blood off the body to reveal all wounds.

“Hey, guys,” Buffy said, letting a breath escape slowly through her nostrils.

“So, what did you want to show me?” Patrick asked.

Buffy grimaced. “Well, it’s not so much what I want to show you but what I can’t show you.”

Surprised at her cryptic remark, Patrick followed Buffy’s outstretched hand pointing to the victim’s chest cavity.

Patrick leaned in and noticed that Buffy had removed a lot of the blood and debris from the open wound and had used a rib stretcher to allow her to widen the opening for better access. He stared into the chest cavity. The stench of death wrapped around him, and for once, he wished that he didn’t have the superior sense of smell that all vampires and vampire hybrids were gifted with. However, there was nothing he could do about that, so he tried to ignore it, and instead, focused his eyes on the exposed organs. A few seconds later, he reared back, stunned.

“Oh my God.”

“What?” Nicholas asked, and squeezed past him to look into the dead man’s chest cavity. “Oh fuck! Somebody cut his heart out?”

Buffy instantly shook her head. “Not cut. The edges of the large blood vessels leading to and from the heart are jagged. It wasn’t cut out. It was ripped out. With bare hands.” She paused for a moment. “Or claws.”

“And the heart? Was it in there?” Patrick asked, even though he already guessed the answer.

“No.”

“It wasn’t near the body either,” Nicholas now added, “or I would have found it when I took impressions of the footprints.”

“Fuck!” Patrick cursed. He knew what this meant. “Only a vampire has the strength to rip somebody’s heart out with his bare hands.”

He glanced at Nicholas, who instantly lifted one hand. “We all know that.”

“Thanks to your father.”

“Huh?” Buffy asked. “Nicholas’s father? Zane?”

Nicholas nodded. “He once ripped a rapist’s beating heart out.” Then he looked at Patrick. “But my father had nothing to do with this.”

Patrick lifted his hands in a show of surrender. “Hey, I know that. What I’m trying to say is that the killer has to be a vampire. If a human had done this, he would have had to use a knife or a scalpel to cut out the heart.”

“But why take the heart with him?” Buffy asked. “It’s not like he could eat it. Maybe suck the blood out of it, yes.”

“Could be a fetish,” Patrick mused. “Could it be that the heart was torn out later, I mean once the guy was already dead? Is it possible that a coyote could have eaten the heart?”

At least that theory would suggest a less gruesome murder, not that it changed the outcome: a man was dead.

“Not sure yet. I’ll have to examine all the claw marks and other injuries on the body. I’ve also found hair and other tissue, which I still have to test to see whether it belongs to the victim or the killer. That’ll take a while.”

Patrick nodded. “Okay, we won’t take up more of your time. Call me when you have news.”

Buffy nodded. Patrick and Nicholas left the morgue.

“What now?” Nicholas asked.

Patrick contemplated his answer. He was the boss right now. He was supposed to have all the answers, yet he didn’t. Finding a killer who seemingly had no relationship to the victim was one of the most difficult crimes to solve.

“Let’s get some people out there to check whether there are any cameras in the area, both traffic cams and private ones. There are a lot of mansions on the street leading to the entrance of the park. Most of them will have outside security cameras. If we’re lucky, they captured somebody following our victim.”

“But the cameras don’t capture a vampire’s aura.”

“I know. But we can use facial recognition to see if it’s anybody in our vampire database.”

“That’s a long shot.”

Patrick grimaced. “I know. But that’s all we’ve got right now.”

Somewhere out there, a murderous vampire was roaming the city, perhaps already looking for his next victim. And all they had was the victim’s name and a missing heart. Well, to be precise: they didn’t have the heart.