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By Root 7144 0

like the last one. They’d both been strippers. They were both killed just outside the clubs that they worked in. This one was a blonde, and white, which was the same as the first one. There were a set of bite marks on either side of the neck, and one in the bend of her left arm, right wrist, and chest. To see if she had thigh bites I was going to have to kneel in the mud, and I didn’t want to. Simple as that, I didn’t want to. I promised myself I would never again be caught out, anywhere, without a pair of coveralls, and mud boots. I’d had to borrow gloves from Zerbrowski. I’d been thinking about my date, not about my job when I packed the Jeep earlier. Stupid me.

I stood up and debated on whether I could get away without crawling around in the mud and looking at all the bites. “She’s taller, by almost a foot than the last one. Blond hair but very short, the last one had long hair. Other than that, it looks damn similar.”

“The bite radiuses are the same.”

“Who took the measurements?” I asked.

He told me, and the name meant nothing to me. I was across the river, and I didn’t actually do a lot of crime scenes here. I killed vamps for Illinois, but I didn’t do much actual investigative work. I couldn’t let someone else do it, not if I didn’t know them. If even one bite radius was off, it would mean a change of players in our vampire group. We needed to know if we were looking for five, or six, or more.

I sighed and fetched my little tape measure out of the jacket pocket. That I’d started keeping in the glove compartment with the baby wipes. I measured the easy-to-get-to bites first and had Zerbrowski take notes. Then I planted my knee carefully in the mud, between her knees. The mud was cold. I spread her legs and found the inner thigh bites. I measured everything I could find. The bite radiuses matched, or ballparked. I was using a different instrument to do the measuring, which I shouldn’t have done. I shouldn’t have let the CSU technician let me use something I wouldn’t have with me next time. What you measured with could make a difference in the field. The field was not a laboratory.

I got up from the ground carefully, my goal was still not to slide on my ass in the mud. High-heeled boots were not the best thing to wear to guarantee that. So I was careful. “The Sapphire has security people walking their lot. At least one security guy at any given time. It’s the weekend, there should have been two. Did they see or hear anything?”

“One of them saw the girl come out with her coat on. She was headed home, done for the night. He saw her go toward her car”—he riffled back through his notebook—“then, she wasn’t there.”

I looked at him. “What did you say?”

“He said, she was walking toward her car, he waved at her, then something attracted his attention to the other side of the lot. He’s a little vague on what attracted his attention, but he swears he only glanced away, then when he looked back, she was gone.”

“Gone.”

“Yeah, why do you have that look on your face, like that means something?”

“Did he check her car right away?”

He nodded. “Yes, and when he didn’t find her at the car, he went back into the club to see if she’d gone back inside. When he couldn’t find her inside, he got the other security guy, and they started searching the area. They found her.”

“How long does he think he looked away for?”

“He says a few seconds.”

“Has anyone checked with anyone else inside, who might have seen her leave? I’d like to know what time she left the building, and how long he was really staring off in the other direction.”

“Let’s just get out of the hole and find someone who saw her leave and actually looked at a clock.”

He was riffling through his notebook again. The lights that they had directed down into the pit illuminated everything, in fact made it all a little stark, and pitiless, as if she needed to be covered up and not stared at anymore. Maudlin, I was getting positively maudlin.

“Actually, one of the ladies inside, a customer, had liked the blonde a lot, she and her husband. So she noticed the time when she