Keeper of the Night

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He looked a little abashed. “All right, Rhiannon, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. I’m learning, Tony. I can use all the help I can get.”

He lifted the files on his desk and riffled through them, then produced three and handed them to her. “John Does, all of them. We can’t get IDs on any of them.”

“Did you find anything on the bodies? Any DNA from the killer? What about the bites? Any saliva?” Rhiannon asked.

“You know as well as I do that if they were bitten by a vampire, there would be no DNA. Vampire DNA disintegrates almost instantly. But, beyond that, all the bodies were found submerged in water and massively decomposed.”

“No fibers, tickets, wallets, anything?”

“Totally empty pockets. All I know for sure is that they were bitten and exsanguinated.”

“Is that what you put on the death certificates?” Rhiannon asked him.

He shook his head, indicating the reports. “The bodies were drained of blood, but due to the condition in which they were found, I couldn’t determine an absolute cause of death. In fact, the really strange thing is that there was water in the lungs, so it’s a crapshoot as to whether they drowned or died from blood loss, but whatever happened probably happened in the water. Or maybe they were just this side of dead when the killer tossed them in the water. No way to know, really.”

“You’re sure you found puncture marks?” Rhiannon asked, flipping through the files. There was information the police had given the medical examiners, and there were outlines of the male bodies, with notations and drawings. She looked back up at him. “It looks like they were tiny…you’d think that they’d be obvious. Vampire marks aren’t usually as tiny as pinpricks.”

“The fact that the flesh was so swollen around would have compressed them and made them harder to see. Still, there’s nothing usual about these cases.”

“I’m assuming you have a contact in the department?” she said.

“I have a lot of police contacts, but I don’t think they’d appreciate my sharing their names. For now, you’ve got what you need to go on, so don’t go barging into the station, telling one and all that you’re the new vampire Keeper—especially since most of the bodies look like vampire victims.”

Rhiannon had never actually ever been in a morgue in her life; even coming into the reception area had seemed difficult. Now…

You’re at the morgue, she told herself. This is what you’re supposed to be doing, seeing the dead.

She rose and followed Tony, who led her to a chilly room holding what appeared to be massive file cabinets, except that she knew they weren’t. Each drawer contained one of the county’s dead—those who still needed an autopsy, and those who were waiting….

To be claimed? Or because they were unclaimed?

Either way, it was sad.

She slipped into the white gown, mask and gloves Tony handed her, despite the fact that she had no intention of touching the bodies. She tried to appear professional.

But, no matter what her resolve, she wasn’t ready for what she saw when he opened the first drawer.

The body was recognizable as human, but just barely.

“John Doe number one,” Tony said. “He’s our oldest, dead about a month. As you can see, the decomp is very bad. And, as you can also see, his fingers are missing.”

Rhiannon willed herself not to gag. Despite the mask and the chemical smells in the air, the scent of decomposition was overwhelming. The flesh appeared absolutely putrid. His eyeballs were missing, and the flesh of his face was so puffed up that she couldn’t have recognized anyone in such a state—even her own mother.

“The fingers…were they eaten by some creature? Or maybe they…rotted off?” she asked.

He shook his head. “There are telltale signs that a blade was used to remove them.”

“So no one could make an ID?” she asked.

“It certainly makes it impossible to search the fingerprint database,” he said.

She swallowed hard. “This seems like the work of a madman.”

Tony looked around, but they were alone. “Or a hungry vampire, breaking the rules, attacking humans and trying to remain anonymous by making sure we can’t ID the victims and connect them to him.”