Detective William Hartzman reached for his cell phone on the nightstand beside his bed. He glanced at the time before answering the call. It was 5:17 a.m.
“Hartzman here,” he answered sleepily, rubbing his eyes with his free hand.
“Sorry to call at this hour, sir, but we need you down here at the corner of 9th and Ringwald. There’s been a murder—a pretty fucked up one, too!”
“I’ll be right there,” Hartzman replied.
**
The first rays of sunlight were just beginning to peek out from beneath the horizon as Detective Hartzman stepped out of his navy blue hatchback. As a homicide detective, he never looked forward to what he was going to find when he received a call like this one, but something in the deputy’s voice had made his stomach turn. He’d been fighting an ever-growing feeling of dread ever since his phone had rung.
“Whaddawe got?” he asked his subordinate, Deputy Allan Long, as he made his way past the bright yellow police lines and into the cluster of cruisers and blue and red flashing lights.
“Well, sir,” the Deputy cleared his throat before continuing. “Old Tom Hendricks claims that he had come out to his recycling yard early this morning and that’s when he found her.”
“Her?” Det. Hartzman repeated in a questioning tone, looking over at Deputy Long as he made his way toward the sheet-covered corpse lying just outside the front gate of the Hendricks Recycling Plant.
“Yes, sir. He said her body was just lying there in front of the locked gate as if someone had thrown her out like an old piece of garbage, sir.” Long’s voice was shaky and small beads of nervous sweat had formed along the edges of his forehead.
“Any ID on the body?” Hartzman asked. He knelt down beside the white sheet, deeply dreading what he was about to witness when he finally lifted it.
“Uhh—no, sir. But one of the other officers recognized her immediately, sir.”
Hartzman didn’t like the sound of that. He reached down and pulled back the sheet that was covering the body of the young woman’s corpse. What he saw made him glad that he hadn’t bothered to eat anything on his way over to the crime scene. He was certain that it would’ve come back up with a vengeance.
**
Detective Hartzman placed a menthol cigarette between his thin lips and pulled a red Zippo lighter out of his back pocket. Shielding it from the early morning breeze, he flicked his lighter and lit it quickly. He inhaled long and deep, allowing the menthol taste to completely fill his lungs.
“I’ve seen some pretty fucked up shit in my eighteen years on the force, but this—this takes the goddamned cake, by far,” he stated plainly, and then passed the cigarette over to Deputy Long.
The brown-haired deputy shook his head and took in a lengthy drag.
Detective Hartzman placed his hand to his forehead. He couldn’t stop his mind from going to the obvious explanation for this murder. He sure as hell hoped his mind was wrong though. If the inhabitants of Lexus were behind this then it would be a huge fucking violation of the truce.
Lexus was a community of ancient vampires who had agreed to a truce with the founders of the city of Mountain Crest over a hundred years ago. Only a select few city council members even knew of their existence, and they had agreed to keep the community a secret, allowing the vampires to live there peacefully—as long they never harmed a living human being.
Never in the past century had any of the vampire residents ever broken the truce. The humans were able to sleep at night simply because the extremely vast majority didn’t know about the potential danger that lived up the mountain.
“Write up the paperwork and have it on my desk before lunchtime, will ya, Deputy? I’ve got to go meet my daughter for breakfast and then I’m heading up to Lexus to question that clan leader of theirs—Vincent Veldassare, I think his name is.”
“Yeah, what’s he, like about a thousand years old, now? I think he’s been the leader up there since my granddad was a kid,” Deputy Long joked.
He chuckled at his own remark. Det. Hartzman shrugged off the comment. The deputy had no idea just how accurate that statement could be. Deputy Long flicked his cigarette butt onto the ground before climbing back into his vehicle and speeding off down the road.
As he made his way over to the Mountain Crest Diner, visions of what he’d just witnessed began to play over again in his head.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he’d seen when he’d pulled back that sheet. The naked, battered body of a young brunette was lying face up on the cool, hard ground. Her eyes were wide open and sunken, as if she’d been dead for more than a week. Her skin was wrinkled and pale and her mouth was frozen in a wide-open state of both shock and horror. Right away, Hartzman had notice the two deep puncture wounds at the base of the left side of her neck. Her body had been completely drained of its blood.
Hartzman wondered if he was going to be able to eat anything at the diner when he finally arrived.
**
“Hey, dad, over here!”
Hartzman looked up as the sound of his daughter’s voice reached his ears. She was seated at a booth near one of the windows of the diner and her right arm was in the air, swinging back and forth, commanding his attention.
Ava Hartman was William’s lovely, intelligent, and driven 25-year-old daughter who had arrived back in Mountain Crest just last week after accepting a position as a freelance writer for the Mountain Crest Journal the largest and most prominent newspaper in the city.
Hartzman hurried over and joined her in the mahogany-colored booth, sitting down across from her.
His daughter’s bright smile and fiery red hair never ceased to bring a grin of pride to his face. He was very proud of her and wanted her to know it. She had left Mountain Crest more than six years ago to pursue her Master’s degree in investigative journalism, and had just rented a small two-bedroom house on the East side of the city after being offered the job she‘d gladly accepted just over a week ago. He had helped her get settled in and they’d made this breakfast date only five days ago.
“Hello, angel!” he greeted her, forcing a half-smile.
“Hi, dad! How’s it going?’ she inquired enthusiastically.
She was clad in a strappy lavender sundress that dipped down into a U-shape just above her breasts and her thick, wavy red hair was pulled up into a neat bun. Shiny red locks hung down on either side of her oval-shaped face, falling just beneath her perfectly strong chin. Her eyes were a bright emerald-green color, accompanied by her high cheek bones, small, pointed nose and full, lavender gloss-covered lips.
She reminded Hartzman so much of her mother, who had died from acute leukemia when Ava had been in her second year of college. She’d taken a semester off to mourn, but had been more determined than ever to finish, feeling that it would’ve made her deceased mother proud. Now, as he stared into his vibrant daughter’s eyes, he tried to find the words to explain everything had happened early that morning.
Why did this shit have to happen the week after she returned? he wondered silently. What the fuck was going on in the once-quiet little city of Mountain Crest?
**
“Her name was Kelly Garrison,” he explained in soft, solemn voice. “She was a senior at Mountain Crest high who had just turned eighteen years old last month—a goddamned baby, for God’s sake.”
Ava looked over at him with horror in her pretty green eyes.
“Oh, my gosh! What kind of monster would drain all of the blood out of his victim?” Ava remarked rhetorically. To her, it sounded like something right out of a bad horror movie.
“Well, they questioned the boyfriend, but they don’t believe he’s a suspect,” Hartzman explained. “He claims that they were at a drive-in movie and that he went to get a bag of popcorn, and when he came back, she was just…gone.”
“Wow!” Ava exclaimed. “And no one saw anything?”
“Well, that’s what I’m gonna find out,” Hatzman replied.
He had drunk 3 cups of coffee while Ava had eaten French toast, turkey bacon, and a small fruit salad.
At least someone has an appetite, he thought dismally.
“I’m coming with you!” Ava said, suddenly. “This could be just the kind of story I need to catapult me to the top!”
That was his daughter; always thinking of a way to get ahead. He couldn’t help believing that she’d come by the trait honestly though. His wife had always been a perfectionist, always dead-set on reaching her professional goals.
Ava’s mother, Aurora Daniels-Hartzman, had been a reporter for the Channel Five news before she’d fallen ill and had eventually passed away. It never ceased to amaze him how Ava looked more and more like her with every passing day.
He also knew that there was no arguing with Ava, no matter how much he disapproved of her accompanying him to the vampire community. Ava was not yet aware of the existence of the ages-old bloodsuckers, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready for her to know about them—at least not just yet.
Well, regardless, he realized that he was now stuck with tag-a-long and that there was no changing her mind once she’d made it up about something—another trait she’d inherited from her late mother. Detective Hartzman raised his right hand to signal the diner waitress that he was ready for their breakfast bill.