The Blood Born Tales (Book 1): Blood Collector Read online

  BLOOD COLLECTOR

  BY

  T.C. ELOFSON

  This manuscript is a work of fiction. This novel takes place in Seattle, Washington. Beyond that, nothing else is true. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  I dedicate this work to my wife, who has always been behind me.

  It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

  (Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV)

  Chapter 1

  7:00 a.m., November 23

  My name is Sergeant Tim Anderson. I’m 6′1′′ and a twenty-year veteran detective for the Seattle Police Department. I’m overworked and underappreciated and today is not shaping up to be my best day. This Thanksgiving week started with a roar of police sirens and a flood of TV crews in the city of Seattle.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning when I finally returned to my Ballard home and to my daughter asleep on the couch, the television buzzing away in the background. I had her every Saturday, and she knew I worked late. From past visits, she understood not to answer the phone, which had just begun to ring as I walked in the door.

  “Good morning, honey,” I said as I laid down a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter.

  “The phone has been ringing this morning, Dad.”

  “I’m playing hooky. Let’s have some breakfast,” I said smiling, as I tried to ignore the voice of my partner intruding upon my morning with my daughter. The machine beeped and I almost cringed as the familiar voice filled the house.

  “Hey, Tim. You home? Your cell’s off…”

  Oh Christ, I thought as I broke four eggs into a mixing bowl. Seattle Detective Kenny Johnson had been on the street since three o’clock in the morning. He was supposed to be on his way to Lake Washington for some time off and I was looking forward to taking my daughter, Merric, to a movie today.

  “I’m heading out, man. But I need you down here to take over. It’s bad…” The New York accent of my partner practically echoed throughout my house.

  Kenny’s voice sounded urgent as I snatched up the receiver in my hand.

  “Kenny, I have Merric.”

  “I’m sorry, man. Bad news. We got a crime scene and it’s bad. On Pike Street, just behind West Lake. Agent Jack Mitchell just got a hold of me…”

  “How many?” I interrupted, and I knew I would have to take Merric back home.

  “Four dead. White males from twenty to thirty years of age. The FBI is screaming for you to get down here.”

  “Same injuries?” I inquired, trying to sound casual.

  “Man, it appears so. A trooper found them this morning and called it in about an hour ago. Jack’s on his way.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be in sometime tomorrow, he said.”

  “I’m on my way,” I told him. Merric was not in the kitchen with me but she had heard every word, I felt like crap to have to tell her that I needed to leave again. I hung up the phone and stood motionless in my cold feeling kitchen for an instant. I looked around all the expensive cookware that I never had a chance to use and it seemed to be judging me somehow. The indifferent and empty granite counter tops seemed sadder to me now. Oh, how I hated to live alone, and always more so when Merric would leave.

  Merric was young—twelve years old—but very mature for her age, all things considered… It often seemed like she was being raised by a television instead of a parent. Of course, I had tried everything I could to show her that there is a great, big world outside. She had a very difficult time finding friends and I know that was due to not having enough social interaction in her life. But, at times, I felt as at fault as my ex-wife for not being around as much. Even though most of the time I didn’t approve of the way Sara was raising her, a father could not have been prouder of his child or loved her more.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” she said, before I even got to say a word.

  “Let’s go.” I sighed and grabbed up my coat. I could feel a familiar guilt coursing through my body. As the door of my truck closed and Merric buckled herself in, I began to worry if I would ever catch a break in this case.

  There were two other bodies so far. Each had been found with two tiny holes in the upper neck, the bodies drained of blood. The cases, unfairly labeled by the media as the “vampire killings”, were definitely mystifying. No one seemed to have a clue as to what had happened to these people. None of the victims had yet been identified. Each victim had a ten print card taken at the scene, and all the prints that were recovered had come up without a single hit from any database anywhere.

  Ten print cards are the prints taken from an individual—one print for each finger—and all prints are displayed on a card, hence the name. Rolled Ten-print impressions are the ten prints taken from fingers dipped in ink and rolled from nail to nail. It is your basic print card that every law enforcement agency in the country uses in running down felons and finding missing persons.

  However, not even the FBI and their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP, could find a match. VICAP utilized a database run on an artificial intelligence computer. The computer was capable of linking missing persons with unidentified bodies and linking several crimes all across the United States, but no matches for the previous two victims had been found. After the first body was discovered in Seattle more than two months ago, a VICAP Seattle team was formed. This team was comprised of FBI Special Agent Jack Mitchell, Detective Kenny Johnson, and me.

  Agent Jack Mitchell would not be rushing here unless he already knew things had just gotten a lot worse. I wondered why he hadn’t told Kenny or me his reason for joining the team. I had never really trusted him, or the FBI for that matter, since this whole infuriating case began. The FBI was not in the habit of sharing information of course, and I felt that we were being led blind and dumb into something much bigger. I had not totally made up my mind about Agent Mitchell. He could have been a tool being used by someone else, someone higher up (that is how it always seemed to work in law enforcement), but maybe he had a different perspective to offer us.

  After dropping Merric off at a friend’s house, I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket and called Marty Colleens, the forensic pathologist of Seattle who worked down at the city morgue. She was a woman of about thirty, married with two kids, and the best forensic pathologist in the city. We had worked together for about two years, so it’s safe to say that this case had taken its toll on her as much as it had on me.

  “City morgue,” she announced on the first ring.

  “Marty,” I said. “We have another one.”

  “Oh Tim, goddamn it. All right, I’m leaving now. Where exactly should I meet you?”

  “Thank you, Marty. West Lake Center on Pike. Call me if you find anything this time, okay?”

  “Alright.”

  Turning off the radio, I passed over the Ballard Bridge and picked up speed on 15 Avenue as I headed into downtown. These kinds of cases had been very hard for me to handle. Every detective has some mysteries in their career that are never solved, but I had never had so many that seemed to be connected somehow. It was hard for me to deal with. In fact, this kind of frustrating enigma was a first for me.

  I rolled down my window to get some fresh air, but my mood was unchanged by the depressing weather. It was well into fall now; the leaves of the planted trees along the sidewalk had changed to their yellow and gold a month before. Fall in Seattle was, at one point, my favorite time of year. Spring and fall had always been intoxicating to me.

  The mountains and the great hills of Ballard always came to life in the springtime. Wal
ls of flowering trees and plants seemed to hum with color and sing to the coming sun every morning, and I would not change it for the world. But I was unable to see the beauty of the city just then. A blanket of discouragement and melancholy had settled over me lately. Too much death. I needed a change, and it was times like this that I longed for Europe, Italy especially. I wanted to get away so badly and I had always wanted to see Italy. It had always been a place of my dreams. My family had always talked of Italy and the wonder of the culture and the amazing art that came from that land, but I had never had a chance to see it. There was never a place I wanted to see more.

  As I pulled my green truck to a stop at the crime scene, I was greeted by an officer in a blue and grey uniform. He stood cold and unsmiling and was attempting to keep people back from the yellow police tape. For a moment, he moved to stop me but then realized who I was.

  “Oh, Detective Anderson, good to see you again. It’s just over there, sir,” he said, directing me to several bodies covered with black tarps. They were laid out on the sidewalk almost 200 feet away from me, three grouped together on one side of the street and one body directly across from them. The police had taped off the whole block.

  I followed a brick walkway and rounded the building, passed under the Monorail tracks, and was greeted by several more police cars. There were at least a dozen officers and men in plain clothes working the scene. I looked around and my eyes jumped from person to person. I did not see my partner; he must have had to go somewhere since he was off duty now.

  I approached one of the men I knew as Officer Post. He was a thin man, blond and wearing a dark pair of Ray Bans which he fixed onto me for a moment before he spoke. He looked like any other officer that was fresh out of the academy, all business and full of nervous tension. He seemed like the type that wears sunglasses all year round to give him the look of a tough cop. Too many movies, I suspected.

  “Detective, here’s what we know so far.” He began to look around as if what he was about to tell me was top secret. “The bodies were discovered by one of the officers early this morning. There is evidence of violence on the three bodies on this side of the street. However the fourth body, over there, fits your killer.” He pointed across Pike Street to a single body under a tarp in front of the mall.

  I cringed as I knelt down next to the body of a twenty-something man lying face down in the shadow of a darkened building just off of Pike. There were three other dead victims laying only about forty feet from the man, all displaying massive trauma. The last of the four men was the sixth victim of what I was beginning to finally believe were the strangest killings in all my twenty years on the force.

  I pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket in my black jacket, snapped one onto my right hand, and, with two fingers, pulled down the collar of the victim’s shirt.

  Not again, I thought. Two puncture wounds in the neck—the calling card of my killer. I closed my eyes and took a long, cleansing breath as I got to my feet, pulled the glove off, and ran my fingers through my short black hair.

  I looked around as my colleagues argued amongst themselves, pontificating with zealous attitudes over some nonsense about dog bites or claw marks. They stood next to the yellow police tape holding back the press, which itched to get a shot for the morning news. A detective on the scene said, “God, I hate to start the day like this.” He was right, but my days didn’t seem to end anymore.

  Last night, before I was called away to work, I was on my porch overlooking the water in my Ballard neighborhood home, drinking lemonade and watching my little girl play jump rope in my driveway. I sat there trying for only a moment to forget about the killings and spend some time with my daughter. It didn’t last long—only until I had the file on these cases open and I was looking at homicide photos in my lap. This suspect had plagued my thoughts. In theory, she had killed six people and the only thing I knew about her was that she was a woman. A small footprint of a woman’s-sized dress shoe was found at the second crime scene. The foot impression was very light, and unless the killer was a really short man dressed in women’s clothing, we were pretty sure the killer was female.

  Nothing ever added up in this case; every print we found seemed to lead nowhere. We ran them through every known database we could, without finding one single match. It’s as if these people had never existed at all. Every child born in this country is printed at birth, and most children in private schools are printed once more, but that only accounts for maybe five percent of the population in a major city. Many jobs print as part of a screening process, like government and city jobs, so finding no matches at all was rather disconcerting. Either the victims were from outside the country or they had managed to get themselves erased from the system, which is a whole different story all together.

  Suddenly, a voice I had come to recognize and loathe broke the chilly silence of the morning. The voice belonged to a man in his late thirties, a reporter for the local Channel Five News. This was none other than Hart Hammaned, a relentless man who didn’t really care about truth so much as getting his story any way that he could. A legend in his own mind, Hammaned stood right behind the yellow tape, wearing an ugly blue blazer and clenching a microphone in his hands, hungry for any clue in a big-breaking news story.

  “Detective! Detective, is this another one of your Vampire Killings?”

  “Oh, grow up, Hart. I haven’t believed in vampires since I was a kid and neither should you. Now I have no comment on this scene or any others, so let me get back to work.” I turned from him, praying there would be no more stupid questions from him. Naturally, I was wrong.

  “Does it bother you, Detective, that this killer has murdered all over our city and the Seattle PD is not one step closer to arresting someone than they were a month ago?”

  I said nothing to that question of his, but it did bother me, in fact. Everything about these murders bothered me. I had worked nonstop on this case, every waking moment without a break. Kenny and I were utterly exhausted.

  It had been raining all night and I was not hopeful about finding any new evidence near the bodies, but our guys are pretty good. If there was anything to find, they would find it. However, I told them not to touch one piece of evidence until the medical examiner had given her consent.

  As I climbed into my faded green Ford F150, I noticed the Crime Scene Unit, or CSU as most officers called it, had begun to survey the area. Dozens of people in dark blue coveralls meticulously scavenged the block. They slowly made their way over concrete and dirt with tiny footsteps, looking for evidence that could give us any clues to what had happened. I was noticing a trend in this mystery. There would be plenty of evidence of the crime, always lots of violence, but no evidence would lead to our killer. At least it hadn’t thus far. The CSU would find nothing as they had always found nothing these past two months.

  Normally at a scene such as this I would stay around to examine all the evidence myself and then try to hunt down witnesses, but I knew what to expect: nothing. I wasn’t about to waste my time. This case was nothing if not unusual. Killers always left some kind of evidence behind and the more they killed the sloppier they became. But not this one. She was a clean freak and it was starting to piss me off.

  Chapter 2

  7:45 a.m., November 23

  The hour of death had come.

  A female vampire sat in the darkness recalling her latest kill. It was a good kill and one that gave her much power. She could feel its strength surging throughout her body. She enjoyed replaying all the images in her mind—the story of that early morning before the sun had taken over the sky and she was forced into hiding for one more day.

  The cold night had reluctantly given up its bold azure color to complete, inky darkness. It was raining in a relentless downpour in Seattle. Small rivers and ponds came to life in the streets all over the city. The sound of drumming water resonated around the slated rooftops and the night laid a blanket of murky obscurity over downtown. A white face, a vampire, s
tood above the rain-streaked glass of darkened windows. She was immortal, hidden by mystery, and she quietly relished her feeling of independence.

  Then the vampire winced suddenly and momentarily. The dark clouds reminded her of galloping horses crashing across the sky. The moon ducked in and out of them and sudden gusts of wind caught her long black hair. But she stood confidently just above the light of West Lake Center’s street lamp. The tall glass building was still and empty below her as rain beat down around the woman’s feet.

  The moon was high in the sky and threw shadows onto the back of a man, darkening the silent vampire and her prey. The rain was coming down hard now, but she cared little about such things. The vampire had found her victims. They were not as powerful as some, but they would do. They would serve her needs. She was silent as she moved off the rooftop high overhead in the downtown skyline of Seattle. A group of vampires were huddled together in the darkened street, the struggling lamplight failing to push back the night as she landed effortlessly in front of them. The vampires knew at once they were dead.

  Before any of them could move to stop her, she was on them. Her fangs sunk into vampire flesh as she wrapped her arms around them, crushing their bones, refusing to let them go. But one did go. One ran from the death and terror. He was powerful but still a coward. She would enjoy killing him. She reached out with her mind and froze his movements as she looked up to the wet night.

  “Are you some kind of monster!?” he had yelled at her.

  She had just left his men, the best of his fighters, a helpless mess in the wet street.

  “No more talk, vampire. I’ve come a long way to take your life.”

  She calmed herself and stared into his eyes. She could feel his power and she wanted it for her own.

  Her fangs had grown long as she ran across the street at him. His eyes widened in fear. The woman stared at him, her eyes gleaming with fearless primal cunning as he moved back towards the building of glass. His face hardened then, his eyes full of undisguised hate.