Page 6 of Patrick’s Seduction

The elevator doors opened, and they exited on one of the lower levels that housed Scanguards’ mini medical center.

“Did you find out who the victim is?” Nicholas asked.

“I was gonna call the team together to bring everybody up to speed just when Buffy called. But, yes, I got his identity. Malcolm Broadmore, 42 years old, from Cincinnati. He’s here for the jewelry convention.”

“You think theft might have been a motive?”

Patrick swiped his access card at the door to the morgue and pushed it open.

“That’s for us to find out,” he said as he and Nicholas entered.

Dressed in green hospital scrubs, Buffy stood over the body, which was laid out on a cold steel operating table, strong lights shining down on the naked corpse. By the looks of it, Buffy had started cleaning the dirt and blood off the body to reveal all wounds.

“Hey, guys,” Buffy said, letting a breath escape slowly through her nostrils.

“So, what did you want to show me?” Patrick asked.

Buffy grimaced. “Well, it’s not so much what I want to show you but what I can’t show you.”

Surprised at her cryptic remark, Patrick followed Buffy’s outstretched hand pointing to the victim’s chest cavity.

Patrick leaned in and noticed that Buffy had removed a lot of the blood and debris from the open wound and had used a rib stretcher to allow her to widen the opening for better access. He stared into the chest cavity. The stench of death wrapped around him, and for once, he wished that he didn’t have the superior sense of smell that all vampires and vampire hybrids were gifted with. However, there was nothing he could do about that, so he tried to ignore it, and instead, focused his eyes on the exposed organs. A few seconds later, he reared back, stunned.

“Oh my God.”

“What?” Nicholas asked, and squeezed past him to look into the dead man’s chest cavity. “Oh fuck! Somebody cut his heart out?”

Buffy instantly shook her head. “Not cut. The edges of the large blood vessels leading to and from the heart are jagged. It wasn’t cut out. It was ripped out. With bare hands.” She paused for a moment. “Or claws.”

“And the heart? Was it in there?” Patrick asked, even though he already guessed the answer.

“No.”

“It wasn’t near the body either,” Nicholas now added, “or I would have found it when I took impressions of the footprints.”

“Fuck!” Patrick cursed. He knew what this meant. “Only a vampire has the strength to rip somebody’s heart out with his bare hands.”

He glanced at Nicholas, who instantly lifted one hand. “We all know that.”

“Thanks to your father.”

“Huh?” Buffy asked. “Nicholas’s father? Zane?”

Nicholas nodded. “He once ripped a rapist’s beating heart out.” Then he looked at Patrick. “But my father had nothing to do with this.”

Patrick lifted his hands in a show of surrender. “Hey, I know that. What I’m trying to say is that the killer has to be a vampire. If a human had done this, he would have had to use a knife or a scalpel to cut out the heart.”

“But why take the heart with him?” Buffy asked. “It’s not like he could eat it. Maybe suck the blood out of it, yes.”

“Could be a fetish,” Patrick mused. “Could it be that the heart was torn out later, I mean once the guy was already dead? Is it possible that a coyote could have eaten the heart?”

At least that theory would suggest a less gruesome murder, not that it changed the outcome: a man was dead.

“Not sure yet. I’ll have to examine all the claw marks and other injuries on the body. I’ve also found hair and other tissue, which I still have to test to see whether it belongs to the victim or the killer. That’ll take a while.”

Patrick nodded. “Okay, we won’t take up more of your time. Call me when you have news.”

Buffy nodded. Patrick and Nicholas left the morgue.