Dracul's Revenge 01: Dracul's Blood (2 page)

As he began walking towards the distant voices, he realised his blood-soaked clothing was weighing him down. The dripping suit jacket was shrugged from his shoulders, landing on the sidewalk with a splat. He left the thousand dollar piece of clothing where it landed and began to unbutton his shirt as he neared the voices.

They were talking about him, plotting. How many doctors had he seen, looking for the answers his aging body needed? Age wasn’t welcomed in the shark-infested corporate world.
They lied to me.
All along, the answers to his problems had been all around him.

Morgan flexed his arm, feeling the renewed strength in his muscles.
More.

By the time he reached the pub, he was nude from the waist up. He hid the poker behind his back upon entering the small establishment. The burly man, just inside the door, appeared to be full of the life-saving wine. It didn’t take long to subdue him. One mighty crack to the back of the head and the guy fell from his stool.

As he plunged the poker into the man’s neck, he heard shouting. Several patrons attempted to pull him off the vessel, but they were no match for his renewed vigour. Morgan sunk his teeth into the man’s flesh, trying to rip the surrounding skin to get at more of the life-saving elixir.

He felt something slam into his back but refused to let go of the vessel’s neck. Suddenly his lungs were unable to draw the oxygen needed to suck the wine. Finally releasing the man’s flesh, he sat up and placed a hand over his chest. He felt the open wound as he began gasping for air.

No. Not when I’ve finally discovered the secret…

DRACUL’S BLOOD

Carol Lynne and T.A. Chase

10

The strobe affect of the police cars lights lent a disco feel to the dark as Detective Bobby Marks arrived at the scene. He stepped from his car and cursed the sick s.o.b. who’d ruined his night. He’d been looking forward to going home, popping an old Charlie Chan movie into his DVD player and vegging out on the couch until he fell asleep. Didn’t look like that was going to happen now.

“What’ve we got, Hansen?” He approached the uniformed cop standing guard at the edge of the yellow caution tape.

The veteran police officer looked green around the gills. “We have a dead psycho and more blood than a Freddy Krueger movie.”

“Who’s Freddy Krueger?”

Hansen eyed him. “You’ve never seen any of the
Nightmare on Elm Street
movies?”

“Hell, Hansen, you know Marks doesn’t watch that shit.” Jablonsky, Bobby’s partner, strolled up, hands stuffed in his pockets and toothpick clenched between his teeth.

“I forget. You haven’t watched any movie made after nineteen-fifty.” Hansen shook his head. “You’ve missed some good films, man.”

“In your opinion. Now, are either of you going to tell me what’s going on here? Or will I have to go search out the Lieutenant?”

Both men stiffened. The Lieutenant was a petite, but hard-nosed lady from Alabama who didn’t put up with much from her officers. Bobby didn’t have a problem with her, mostly because he did his job and didn’t think that because she was a woman, she was soft.

He’d seen her take down a two hundred and fifty pound man all on her own. He wasn’t going to mess with her. The other officers were scared of her and she liked that.

Jablonsky lifted the tape for Bobby to duck under. “What we have here is a violent murder with several witnesses.”

“Aren’t all murders, by their very nature, violent?” Bobby hid his grin as his partner glared at him.

“Shut up, smart ass. What I’m saying is, this guy didn’t care that O’Malley’s was full DRACUL’S BLOOD

Carol Lynne and T.A. Chase

11

of people. He didn’t seem even to notice they were around. From what I’ve gotten so far, he walked into the pub, swung a fire poker at this big guy inside the door. Once the guy was down, he jabbed the sharp end into the guy’s neck and started drinking his blood.”

Bobby held up his hand to stop Jablonsky’s recitation. “Drinking his blood?”

His partner of five years shuddered. “I’ve seen a lot of murders go down, Bobby. You know that, but this one’s stranger than usual. Yeah, all the witnesses say he tore at the victim’s throat and was literally sucking the blood from the man’s neck.”

They entered O’Malley’s and Bobby got his first look at the crime scene. Sheets covered two bodies and a brass fire poker lay on the ground close to the smaller of the two mounds. The metallic scent of blood mingled with the smoke and sweat tainting the air around them. Uniformed cops gathered the patrons of the pub on the other side of the room while they questioned each one. There was one man separated from the others and another homicide detective was interviewing him.

He nodded towards the pair. “What’s the story with him?”

“He’s the man who shot our perp.” Jablonsky gestured to the nine millimetre handgun, resting on a near-by table. “Off-duty police officer stopped by for a drink before heading home. Fired one round into the man’s back, but not before the man killed the victim.”

“This one will haunt him,” Bobby murmured as he crouched next to the bigger lump and lifted the sheet.

While slipping on the latex gloves he kept tucked in his jacket pocket, he studied the victim.

“Pretty big guy. Be hard to kill without a fight, so the perp must have caught him by surprise. Hit him in the back of the head, knocking him off his stool?” He glanced up at Jablonsky.

The other detective nodded in the direction of a tipped-over stool. “That’s what the witnesses say.”

“When the guy hit the floor, the poker got jammed into his neck, opening the jugular.

Do you think that was on purpose, or just a lucky hit?”

The jagged hole in the victim’s neck was circled with blood, dark red and crusted.

Bobby didn’t disturb the wound, though he leant forward to check out the tears that looked like teeth marks in the flesh.

DRACUL’S BLOOD

Carol Lynne and T.A. Chase

12

“I don’t know, man. I was looking at it being a lucky hit, but, Bobby, this guy wasn’t his first victim.” Jablonsky swallowed, looking like he wanted to throw up.

“If you’re going to throw up, do it outside,” Bobby ordered, dropping the sheet over the burly victim and moving over to the other still form. “If this guy wasn’t his first, where are the others?”

“Take a look at this guy, then I’ll show you the trail.”

Trail? That didn’t sound promising. Moving to the second corpse, he steeled himself before lifting the sheet. It was hard at times to look at the face of a killer. Even after all the years Bobby had served as a cop, he kept expecting one of them to look like the monster they really were, but none ever did.

“Holy fuck,” Bobby whispered as he revealed the face of the attacker.

“Yeah. That might be one of the reasons why no one suspected him when he first walked in here.” Jablonsky nudged the brown Italian leather loafer on the right foot of the dead man.

“Morgan Thompson.”

Bobby would be the first to admit he didn’t pay much attention to the news or things like who was rich or not, but even he had heard of Morgan Thompson. The man was a billionaire and a recluse. It was a rare day when the older gentleman left his New York City mansion, yet there he lay, covered in blood and accused of a heinous crime.

“That isn’t all his or the victim’s, is it? There’s way too much blood.”

He pointed at Thompson’s body, covered almost from head to toe in blood and gore.

It had been forty minutes since the man had been shot, but the blood was still damp.

“No. It’s not all his.”

After dropping the sheet, Bobby stood and turned to face his lieutenant. Her usually expressionless face held a grimace of disgust as she stared down at the red-streaked sheet.

“Then who else died?”

“Detective Marks, Detective Jablonsky, come with me. The techs will process the scene, and the uniforms can finish up the preliminary interviews.” She turned briskly on one toe and headed out of the pub.

Bobby and his partner kept close to the lieutenant, but Bobby’s mind spun at the political minefield the case was going to be. Thompson might have been anti-social to the point of being a hermit, but he had a lot of powerful friends who were going to want DRACUL’S BLOOD

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13

answers. He scrubbed his hand over his short cut hair and sighed. Why did it have to be his and Jablonsky’s turn to catch a case?

The lieutenant stopped to talk to a K-9 unit standing to the side of the crowd of policemen. The German Shepherd danced around his handler’s feet, eager to do what he’d been trained to do.

“Officer Monaghan took his dog and backtracked where Thompson came from. It wasn’t as hard as you would think.” She tapped a dark streak on the pavement with her foot.

“Thompson didn’t hide.”

They followed the policeman and his dog down the sidewalk, and a few blocks away, they found another group of policemen, more caution tape, and another dead body.

“Seems to be the same M.O. He attacked with the poker, knocked the victim onto the ground, and stabbed him in the neck before drinking the man’s blood.”

A retching sound came from an alley; Bobby looked up to see a young uniformed cop doubled over.

“Rookie,” Jablonsky muttered under his breath.

Bobby nodded, sympathy for the younger man twisting his stomach into knots. He’d seen plenty of murders, some even more gruesome than these, but there seemed to be something terribly evil about what Thompson had done. Killing a person before drinking their blood or not even waiting until their heart stopped beating before sipping at their life’s essence like it was the finest wine.

“We have one witness who saw Thompson attack the jogger.” Waving a hand at the sobbing young woman, the lieutenant shook her head. “Poor thing will have nightmares for the rest of her life.”

“This is one of those cases that will dog a person for life, Lieutenant,” Bobby commented as they moved away from the second group towards a large house on the corner.

“Yeah, well, I was hoping I’d go my whole career without having one of those.”

Jablonsky exchanged his chewed up toothpick for a new one.

“This Thompson’s house?”

The lieutenant nodded and Bobby caught sight of more cops, more crime scene technicians, and more tape.

“He started here.”

There was no doubt in his mind Thompson’s killing spree started in his own house.

DRACUL’S BLOOD

Carol Lynne and T.A. Chase

14

Why? It was Bobby’s job to find that out since they couldn’t question Thompson about his motives.

“He killed his butler, housekeeper, and chauffer. Same M.O. as the others. It looks like the chauffer was the last, and when there wasn’t any blood left, he went hunting.

Unfortunately, he found more victims.”

She halted in the front entrance of the house. Lines of blood led up the curved staircase towards the back of the house where, Bobby assumed, the servants slept.

“This is your case, Marks and Jablonsky. Don’t screw it up. I’ve already got the Commissioner breathing down my neck, and I’ll need to be able to give him answers soon.

Seems the Mayor and Thompson were close enough buddies for Thompson to donate several thousands of dollars to his campaign.”

Bobby rolled his eyes. Just what he needed. When City Hall got involved, things became a political landmine. Thank God, he only had to deal with the facts. The lieutenant would have to find the polite way to tell the Commissioner and the Mayor that their friend was a nut.

“I want you in my office first thing tomorrow morning with a progress report.” She stalked out of the house, heading towards the bright lights of news cameras.

“Better her than me.” Jablonsky spoke Bobby’s thoughts aloud.

He silently agreed and climbed the stairs. He didn’t want to see the servants. As much blood as covered Thompson, he knew it wouldn’t be pretty. Training kicked in along with the lessons he learned from his father.

Cop work is unpleasant, Robert. If you want to be a detective, you have to man up and do your
job.

Bobby’s father would know all about how gruesome being a cop could be. He was a beat officer during the nineteen-seventies when David Berkowitz terrorized the city with his Son of Sam craziness, and saw the aftermath of the attacks.

Not willing to seem a coward, even to the memory of his father, Bobby took a deep breath and headed upstairs. One of the crime scene techs waved at him from the end of the hallway.

“The attacks started here.”

“How sure are you of that?”

Every piece of evidence and proof needed to be perfect in the smallest detail. He DRACUL’S BLOOD

Carol Lynne and T.A. Chase

15

didn’t want his case blown apart by sloppy police work. There was no doubt who the murderer was, but he didn’t want anyone to question the motive he came up with.

“Pretty sure, but we’ll have definitive answers after we take all the stuff back to the lab. The blood starts in this room. It doesn’t go beyond here and it doesn’t look from the pattern of splatter that he backtracked over it.” The lab girl seemed sure, and since the science of murder wasn’t Bobby’s expertise, he decided to believe her.

Standing in the doorway, he let his gaze wander, not settling on any one item. He’d learned his brain would notice if something was out of place if he didn’t force it.

“Whose room is this?”

The rustling of paper from behind informed him Jablonsky was getting notes from one of the uniformed cops.

“From what they’ve found in the room, it was a man named Thornton. Looks like he was Thompson’s butler.”

“How many of the staff lived here with the perp?”

More paper shifting.

“Three. His butler, housekeeper, and chauffer. They’d all been with him for decades.

Pretty lousy retirement package.”

He snorted and shook his head. “He killed Thornton first. Must have been rather quiet since the others didn’t react. They were all killed in their beds, right?”

The lab girl nodded, snapping more pictures that would end up on Bobby’s desk in the morning.