Fiona Frost: Order of the Black Moon (12 page)

“They live on Copper
Street by Silver Springs Marina,
”
he informed, t
aking a bite from his hamburger as a sliced tomato slid out from the bottom and onto his plate.

“
O
ver by the trailer park,” Lauren added, grabbing the ketchup and squirting an enormo
us amount over her French fries
to
cover them
thoroughly
.
I
pondered
how she
would
eat them without covering her fingers in ketchup.
Then, she grabbed
a fork and stabbed one.

Agent Bronson
had eyed
Lauren’s ritual with the ketchup
, giving
me a playful wide-eyed smile before he shook his head and
returned
to his newspaper.

“Those houses are not very nice, by the way,” Maddie said
grimly
.

An
awkward
silence
followed
as everybody
dove into their lunch for the next few minutes.

“Let’s get to the evidence as it stands,” Detective Chase
suggested
before taking
a
huge
bite of his hamburger, the peach-colored
sauce
drippin
g
down his chin.

He
arranged the document
s in front of him as he chewed
, wiping his face
and the table
with his napkin.
He took a
big
swig of water
, and addressed
us with the evidence.

“This is interesting.
The victim has an odd double stripe tattoo on
the
middle finger o
f
her right hand.
An officer at the station remembers seeing a few people at the jail having the same tattoo over the years
,
so he is working on the etiology of this
finger
tattoo.
In the meantime, we’re focusing on the rest of the case such as fingerprints we discovered on the sword
—I
outlined
in
results
to you yesterday, Fiona.”

“Got it, Detective.”

He
continued, “
We’re still looking for the person to match the unknown print
.
Obviously,
it is somebody who isn’t in the
I
A
F
IS database
,
so they’ve never been in trouble before.
We did locate a
blood sample at the scene and made a match to deer blood.
We interrogated the suspects, and Damien Lee reported he recently discovered a deer on the road, hit by a car, dying.
He stated
he, along with the other cult members,
took the deer to the
altar
in Dracul’s Den
and
sacrificed
it, but did so because it was the humane thing to do.”

“Okay, right.
Great story.
They’re sick animal killers,” Maddie blurted as she swished her long black hair onto her back to keep it from
traipsing across
her plate.

“Well, we will take his word on it until we can prove otherwise, Mad
ison
,”
he
countered bluntly.

“What about the autopsy report, Detective
.
Did you finish it yet
?
”
I inquired
politely
, taking a
massive
drink of my soda through an over-sized straw.

“Yes, actually I was getting to that.
I found bite marks on the victim’s shoulder and right arm.
They do
n’t appear
fresh.
I
estimate
they were
inflicted
about
twenty-four
hours or so prior to the victim’s death.”

“We
need dental records from all suspects
,
and we can get a match to at least who bit her, right?”

“Yes, that is in the works, Fiona.
I also found
chloroform was used to subdue the victim prior to death
,
and the abrasions found on the back of her legs indicate she was dragged for a distance to the
altar
.
She also has bruises in her armpits where the murderer had a hold of her body.
”

A young
boy
, probably about three
-
years
-
old,
who
had recently sat down at the table behind us with his parents,
stood up in his seat,
tu
rned around,
peering
at us over
the detective’
s shoulder
.
For no apparent reason and without warning, he screamed as loud as his lungs would allow, his face turning a purplish hue
.
The detective
cringed, shrinking his head downward into his shoulders.
The boy’s
parents quickly wrestled with him to get back into his seat and scolded him for the next few minutes.
I swore at that moment I’d never have kids.

“Wow,” I sarcastically said.
I could tell everybody at my table was taking a moment to recover from the young screamer.

“
We
ll, I guess I
’ll
continue,”
he said with a chuckle
, “I c
hecked out the claims by Emily Vance who said she was also a
ttacked by somebody from behind
and made to inhale a substance
causing
her to
fall asleep
.
Her story checks out
;
we found
trace evidence of it in her blood
the morning of the murder.

Emily stated
the victim
, whom she doesn’t know,
showed up at the cave
where she lived
. Upon
her arrival, she was immediately knocked out from behind
. W
hen she woke
up;
she r
ushed around the cave to
see what
had happened.
That is when she
witnessed
the vampire group
running out of the c
ave.
Emily s
ai
d she
investigated the cave
and found the victim
in
Dracul’s Den
. The body was on the altar. Dead.
”

“
S
omebody came into the cave
,
knocked them out,
killing
the victim but not Emily?
”
I mused openly, taking a bite of my hamburger.

“It seems that way for now,”
he
added.
“I also analyzed the stomach contents of the victim
.
S
he
consumed
a meal
an
hour
before she was murdered
.
We analyzed the contents and found pumpkin
,
fermented tofu
, and
noodles.
We’re checking all restaurants in town to see if a
nybody serves that combination.
We
didn’t find any of the
ingredients in
her
trailer.
In fact, the only thing we found in her trailer
was a
nearly empty bottle of ketchup and moldy unidentifiable food
in a Styrofoam container
in the fridge.”

“Sick!
”
Lauren spoke through her teeth.

“Health hazard, I swear!
”
Willow mocked, pushing up her suit jacket sleeves.

My phone vibrated in my pocket
,
and I grabbed it
, a text message. My mother.
Janice was getting worse and
they were
headed to the hospital
—she warned she wouldn’t be home when I got there.
Bowing my head in silence,
I collected my thoughts
, fighting a
n impending
wave of
sadness.

M
y world was crumbling down around me no matter what I did.
I glanced at
Agent Bronson
for another reminder of the drama in my life.
I swallowed
, my throat constricting, and nodded
at Detective Chase to continue.

“A few more
things.
We have bloody fingerprints on Damien Lee’s 1975 Buick Regal door handle.
A
match to Damien.
We have made a match to the bloody shoe print in the marble tunnel of the cave
,
which
matches
Camber Johnson
’s
pair of
yellow
Chuck Taylors,
women’s
size
eight
.
The same shoe was placed via a partial print on the back seat carpet of the floor of Damien’s car.
”

My blood began to boil upon hearing Camber was
officially
placed at the crime scene
with blood on her shoes
.
She had lied to Wolfe
,
and he had believed her.
Her parents had
fibbed
to the police.

“
We
found
a fabric transfer of blood from a pair of jeans belonging to Victoria Newsted on Damien Lee’s passenger side door.”

“Well,
how can they deny being in the cave
, Detective
?
”
Lauren hissed
.

“Duh, Lauren
.
They were in the cave,
obviously
.
They are liars,” Willow said sardonically, tossing a French fry into her mouth.

“
This
proves
they were in the cave at some point
either during or
immediately
after the murder
.
If they are not guilty, maybe they’re just scared to admit
they were there?
Oh, and o
ne more thing
—
t
he graffiti on the side of the
altar
says the words
—
Cosmar Armata
.”

“What the heck does that mean
?
”
Maddie blurted.

“It is Romanian for Nightmare Army.
This links th
e
cult to the
altar
and gives a very strong motive for the suspects as far as the circumstantial evidence is concerned,” Detective Chase noted before taking a swig of his water.

The little boy
at
the table behind us stood up again and turned around, a
chewed-on
chicken nugget
in his hands.
After about two seconds, he was pulled down abruptly by his father and a
momentary fit of whining ensued.

“Do their little black vampire
guideline
books say anything about sacrificing people
?
”
I asked
curtly, still fuming
in the recesses of my mind
about Wolfe defending Camber
.

“We’re looking into it.
We’ve got the document analyst at Silver Springs working on it and translating the sections of it that are not in English.”

The rest of our lunch meeting was spent discussing the various aspects of the case
.
We all agreed on the surface, it was an
easy
case against the cult members
, even though three of them denied being there
.
Emily Vance
put the
teens ru
n
ning
out of the cave
after the murder, and that was critical
.