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I made myself move forward. Made myself go see what there was to see and leave my worries about my moral decay for another time. Business, first.

I had to come to the far end of the right-hand Dumpster to see the spill of her yellow hair, like a bright exclamation point on the black pavement. Staring down at her, I could see how tiny she was. My size, or smaller. She lay on her back, the coat spread under her, still securely on her arms. But the cloth had been spread wide, folded under on the side nearest the parked cars, so that she could be seen by a customer walking out to his car. Her hair, too, had been pulled back, combed out. If she’d been taller, that, too, would have been visible from the parking lot—just a peek of bright yellow around the Dumpster. I looked down the line of her body and found the reason that someone had thought she was taller—clear plastic stilettos, at least five inches high. Lying down she lost the height. Her head had been pressed to the right, exposing bite marks on her long neck. Vampire bite marks.

On the mound of her small breast was another pair of bite marks, with two thin lines of blood trickling from them. There was no blood at the neck wound. I was going to have to move the Dumpsters to get back there. I was also going to have to move the body around to look for more bite marks, more signs of violence. There’d been a time when the police only called me in after all the other experts had finished with a scene, but that was a while ago. I had to make sure I didn’t fuck up the scene. Which meant I needed to find the man in charge.

Lt. Rudolph Storr wasn’t hard to spot. He’s 6' 8" and built like pro wrestlers used to be built before they all started looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dolph was in shape, but he didn’t go for the weight lifting. He didn’t have time. Too many crimes to solve. His black hair was cut so short it left his ears exposed and somehow stranded on the sides of his head. Which always meant he’d gotten a haircut, recently. He always had it cut shorter than he liked it, so it would be longer between haircuts. His tan trench coat was perfectly pressed. His shoes shined in the parking lot lights. He didn’t care what he looked like, as long as he was neat and tidy. Dolph was all about the neat and tidy. I think it was one of the reasons that murder pissed him off, it was always so messy.

I nodded at the uniformed policeman whose only job seemed to be watching the body and making sure it didn’t get messed with by anyone that wasn’t allowed to touch it. He nodded back and went back to staring at the corpse. Something about how wide his eyes were made me wonder if this was his first vampire kill. Was he worried that the victim would rise and try to munch on him? I could have calmed his fears, because I knew this one would never rise. She’d been drained to death by a group of vamps. That won’t make you one of them. In fact, the act is guaranteed to give the vamps their fun and not to make the vic one of them. I’d seen this once before. I hoped like hell it wasn’t another master vampire gone rogue. The last one had purposely left vics where we could find them, in an attempt to get the new laws that gave vampires legal rights repealed. Mr. Oliver had believed that vampires were monsters, and if they were given legal rights, they’d spread too fast, eventually turning the entire human race into vampires. Then who would everybody feed off of? Yeah, it would take hundreds of years for vampirism to spread to that degree, but the really old vampires take the long view. They can afford to, they’ve got the time.

I knew it wasn’t Mr. Oliver again, because I’d killed him. I’d crushed his heart, and no matter how many times Dracula might rise in old movies, Oliver was well and truly dead. I could guarantee it. Which meant we had a new group of nuts on our hands, and they could have an entirely new motive for killing. Hell, maybe it was personal. Vampires were legal citizens now, which meant they could have grudges just like