COME MORNING, Chaz felt a lot better. The phone call with Sully, plus the small amount of blackout sleep he got, were like an elixir that prepared him to deal again with the realities of Manitoba and this case. At seven thirty sharp, he came down to the lobby for the continental breakfast and ran into Declan already sitting at a table. His eggs were half-eaten, along with his toast, and his coffee mug was empty next to several used packets of sugar.
“Morning. Mind if I sit with you?” Chaz put down his coffee, which was the only thing he’d gotten so far. “The breakfast here looks good. What do you recommend?”
“Oh, anything. You check your phone, though?”
Chaz touched his breast pocket. After the call with Artie, he’d shut his work phone off. After he turned it on now, it buzzed like a bomb as dozens of messages came in.
“Oh no. What have I missed?”
“Well, other than the warrant coming in for the magazine and a preliminary search done by local PD—Jack messaged us about another body. Found in Toronto. Same necklace on him. But this time he was a vamp.”
“Oh God.” Chaz was floored by all the information at once. He skimmed through the messages about the magazine place—found nothing, all aboveboard on the surface, but to be sure, they’d need a forensic accountant to go over the records the owner had handed over—but the new body was what struck him the most. “Is it the pimp we’re looking for? Killed so fast?”
“Not likely since it still looks like he was killed by a vamp,” Declan said, sighing. “I know there’s a lot to go through, so let me give you some Cliff Notes: Jack is on the scene since both Detective Bhatnaghar and Jenkins called in sick. He thinks the vamp was killed around the same time as our guy, but his body was moved so it wasn’t found when our officers did a sweep at the dock.”
“Shit. How many more bodies are we expecting to get here?” Chaz dragged his teeth across his bottom lip. “Have they checked out local vampire dens yet? Could we have missed something there?”
“No point.”
“What do you mean?”
“This body was found in Chinatown. No idea how he got there, but it’s likely he was dragged there since the witches and alchemists who populate the area have protections against any kind of blood magic. They prefer smoke and mirrors. At least that’s what I’ve been able to put together during my morning coffee over all the files we have on vamps.”
“Huh.” Chaz ran a hand through his hair. All vamp dens were nothing more than abandoned warehouses where a bunch of vamps lived together. Kind of like dorm living in university but with a lot more fights over blood. Most vampires couldn’t get jobs beyond minimum wage, especially if they were out as vamps, so money was always tight. Accommodations were always lackluster. Even before he was Chip MacDonald of the Toronto police, he never liked the dens. But the Chinatown aversion was something new to him. Was there a rule among vamps that he’d never been privy to? It wasn’t like he’d been in the dens that long before he was arrested. He’d been to Chinatown since then, so the danger wasn’t actually real. A lore, superstition among vamps, maybe. But Chaz suddenly felt at a loss, missing sections of a history that had been foisted on him.
“Here’s a photo.” Declan twisted his phone around and showed the second body wedged between two vegetable carts in an alley close to a store Chaz soon recognized as one that sold tokens based on someone’s birth year. Dressed completely in black, the victim was older than the first one, but he looked small. Shriveled. Husks of lettuce and orange peel were tossed around him. Chaz struggled to tell the difference from the picture, but there appeared to be no garlic used to disable vamps. Figures. That’s all a myth anyway. At least I was around long enough to learn that.
Declan took back the photo before Chaz could see puncture wounds or the bruises on the body.
“Jack is there now getting the information, but we should go. He’s already booked tickets for us and we should arrive by the afternoon, in time for the autopsy.” Declan gathered the files he’d been reading and packed them away into his suitcase. “You can wrap up your eggs if you want…?”
“No, no. I’m fine. Relieved actually. I was getting sick of Manitoba anyway.”