Page 49 of Fire in My Blood
I nod. “It’s okay. I want to find him and kill him, and I’ll do whatever needs to be done to make that happen.”
“Okay.” Lucas gives me a warm smile. “Let’s start with his appearance. What does he look like?” He opens a program I’m not familiar with on the computer and waits.
I swipe my tongue over my dry lips. “He’s tall and muscular, probably about six foot three, with cold blue eyes and black hair.”
Lucas enters the information into the computer while I talk, and a masculine form takes shape on the screen. The proportions look about right, but the face and hair are all wrong.
Shaking my head, I point at the screen. “His hair is straight and long, and it’s parted in the middle. He’s got high cheekbones and prominent eyebrows.”
Lucas enters the new information, and the face on the screen changes. But it still doesn’t resemble the vampire who attacked me.
Closing my eyes, I massage my temples as I try to remember his face from the other night. But it’s so difficult, almost like my brain doesn’t want to recall the details.
Letting out a frustrated sigh, I open my eyes and stare at the screen. “I’m having trouble remembering his face. The details seem to slip away whenever I get close. It’s like trying to grab a bar of soap in the bathtub.”
Lucas sits back in his chair and puts his large hand on my thigh. “Try to relax and let it come to you. Take your time.”
Closing my eyes again, I take a deep breath. I try to recall the first time I saw him in my apartment, when he was standing in the doorway to my kitchen. The image in my mind sends a shiver down my spine, and I suddenly feel cold.
Large warm hands close around my tight fists, and my eyes pop open. Lucas is right in front of me, his warm blue eyes filled with compassion. “I’m right here. You’re doing great. I’m bigger and stronger than he is. He’ll be dead before he can get within a hundred feet of you.”
I nod slowly. Pulling strength from Lucas’s comforting touch and words, I let my mind go back to the menacing vampire standing in my kitchen doorway. His cold eyes are light blue, and his lips are so thin they’re practically nonexistent. He has a pointed chin with a dimple in the middle, and his jawline is sharp.
Lucas listens intently when I describe the vampire to him in more detail. He enters it into the computer, and I watch as the face on the screen turns into the one from my dream last night.
I shudder. “That looks like him.” My voice is shaky. “Are you going to print it out so we can ask around about him tonight?”
Lucas smiles. “That’s a possibility, but there’s another way that’s faster. I know someone who’s a specialist in tracking people through the internet. Ron can check this drawing against surveillance camera footage and photos posted on social media. It’ll take a few hours, but hopefully, he’ll have something for us by sundown.”
Hope rushes through me, and I sit up straighter. “That would be perfect.”
Lucas rolls his chair over to the next desk and turns on the computer. “Why don’t you check the news to see if you can find anything relevant? Any reports of attacks similar to the one you suffered, anyone attacked by an animal, anyone with memory loss, or anything else you come across that seems strange.”
“Okay, I can do that.” I pull my chair up to the computer Lucas was previously using and start going through the news for the area where I live.
But I haven’t spent more than a minute searching when I suddenly remember the news story I watched on TV the other day. Searching the news for Queens where I used to live, I soon find the story of the young woman who was raped and murdered.
The body was discovered around 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning, and the estimated time of death was around an hour before. A photo shows the all-too-familiar alley, and an arrow points to the place where the woman’s body was found. It’s the exact spot where I was raped four years ago.
My stomach roils, and I take a few deep breaths to stop my breakfast from making a reappearance. I glance over at Lucas, but he’s busy on a Zoom call.
After my stomach settles, I skim through the news article to see if there are any details of how she was killed or the state of her body. Halfway through there’s a link to a follow-up article, and I click on it.
The man who discovered the body has given an interview. He’s a local politician, and the start of the article is all about the lack of police presence on the streets and how, if he’s elected, this will improve. Then, he offers his condolences and claims his thoughts are with her family, before he finally mentions a few interesting facts.
The woman was lying face down when he found her. Her pants were down around her knees, and her torn panties were lying next to her. She was wearing a thin short-sleeved top, and the only sign of trauma was what looked like a vicious bite on her shoulder close to her neck.
I return to the first news article and skim through the rest of it. The woman’s purse and what they assume is her jacket were found just a few feet away from her body. Her credit cards, cash, and phone were all still in her purse. The woman’s name was Angela Maureen Jackson, twenty-five years old.
I enter the woman’s name into the search engine. It’s possible that this is just a strange coincidence, and that her rape and murder have nothing to do with the attack on me. She might have been killed by a jealous ex-boyfriend, even if the bite doesn’t seem consistent with that theory.
I click on the first link on the list that comes up and gasp.
“What is it?” Lucas comes to stand behind me. “Do you have a sister?”
Shaking my head, I turn and look at him. My heart is racing in my chest, and I’m sure I look like a ghost. “I don’t have a sister. That woman was raped and killed the other day at the exact place where I was attacked four years ago. Her shoulder was torn up, but she wasn’t robbed.”
I swallow hard and turn back to stare at the picture on the screen. “It’s not a coincidence. Either the vampire thought she was me, or he has a thing for women who look like me. He didn’t mention it when he came to my apartment. If he wanted to use her murder to scare me, he would have said something about it.”