Blood Vice

  BLOOD VICE

  BLOOD VICE BOOK ONE

  Angela Roquet

  BLOOD VICE

  Copyright © 2017 by Angela Roquet

  All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  www.angelaroquet.com

  Cover Art by Rebecca Frank

  Edited by Chelle Olson of Literally Addicted to Detail

  For Paul and Xavier,

  who make my world go round.

  by Angela Roquet

  Blood Vice

  Blood Vice

  Blood and Thunder (August 2017)

  Lana Harvey, Reapers Inc.

  Graveyard Shift (FREE on Kindle)

  Pocket Full of Posies

  For the Birds

  Psychopomp

  Death Wish

  Ghost Market

  Hellfire and Brimstone

  Limbo City Lights (short story collection)

  The Illustrated Guide to Limbo City

  Spero Heights

  Blood Moon

  Death at First Sight

  other titles

  Crazy Ex-Ghoulfriend

  Backwoods Armageddon

  BLOOD VICE

  Chapter One

  As I lay dying on the floor of an abandoned warehouse basement in the bowels of St. Louis, I couldn’t help but question every choice I’d ever made. Which one of them had led to this moment? Was it just one? Maybe my entire life had been one poor decision after another. That seemed the most likely answer as I stared into the vacant eyes of my partner sprawled out on the concrete not ten feet away.

  Will Banks had definitely drawn the short straw when it came to being paired with me. At the time, it had seemed like divine intervention. His partner was transferring to a PD down in Florida, and I was finally getting the promotion I’d had my sights set on since day one. Will had been my mother’s partner ten years ago. Being paired with him felt like an omen from the universe. Like a sign from my mom even, that everything was unfolding as it should.

  What a joke.

  I thought of Will’s wife and daughter. He’d bragged about Serena to me just that morning, about the big scholarship she’d been awarded to go into the engineering program at MU. I could remember babysitting Serena the summer Will and Alicia had moved to St. Louis. I’d been sixteen, and she had just turned five. She was all bubblegum cheeks and beaded cornrows, full of exciting facts from her family’s recent trip to the Gateway Arch. That was twelve years ago. Had so much time really passed?

  I was finally able to think of something worse than dying in a warehouse basement—facing Will’s family. I wondered who would be tasked with delivering the news that he was dead. And that it was my fault.

  The suspect I’d chased down here was crouched over me, his face buried in the crook of my neck. Mewling, sucking noises filled my ears. Terror punched my heart until it felt like it would burst. My hand trembled around the gun pressed into the man’s stomach. I’d already squeezed off a dozen rounds, but I didn’t have the strength to empty the magazine. I’d lost too much blood.

  I could hardly keep my eyes open, but every time they refocused, I found myself looking at Will. In the moonlight slipping through the dusty basement windows, I almost couldn’t tell that it was blood oozing from his lips and spreading in a puddle under his face. I tried to pretend that we were back at the precinct. That he’d fallen asleep at his desk again. Maybe it was just drool. I’d give him hell when he woke up, and he’d joke for the hundredth time that he needed all the beauty sleep he could get, and that a young punk like me would know what he was talking about soon enough…

  But I’d never know, because I was dying. I’d been so eager to prove myself worthy of the vice squad, and now I would be nothing more than a cautionary tale to warn rookie detectives who got too big for their badges.

  Humiliation overpowered my pain, and I found the strength to squeeze off one last round. The creep gnawing on me barely grunted at my effort. Meth? PCP? Bath salts? It was the only explanation my aching brain could come up with. Human trafficking and drugs. God, this could have been a career-making bust. A massive launch pad for me, and a grand finale for Will. That’s what had been on my mind when I saw a flash of movement through the basement window. And look where it had gotten me.

  We’d been staking out the building all week. A lucky arrest had turned up a tip about a prostitution ring responsible for the recent surge of missing teens around the city. Will and I had parked our unmarked car in a dark alleyway between two buildings across the street. There was scarcely enough room to open our doors, but after four fruitless nights before this one, it seemed pretty clear that whoever was in charge had been tipped off and had abandoned the place.

  It was almost five in the morning. We were arguing about where to have breakfast when movement caught my eye. It was a stray dog, sniffing around the building’s foundation. That’s when I saw something flicker through a window, something shiny, reflecting the moonlight as it moved around the basement.

  I was out of the car with my gun in hand before I knew what I was doing. Will hissed at me to wait, to get back in the car. He said that we needed to call for backup. But my feet moved on their own. There were young girls being held captive, and we were going to find them. I was sure of it.

  The only thing I was sure of now, with a drug-addicted cannibal at my throat, was that I was a reckless idiot.

  A soft whimper drew my attention to a spot across the room, and for a moment, I could have sworn I saw a dog lurking in the corner. I was hallucinating. Great. At least that meant I wouldn’t have to endure this agony much longer. I was ready for my life to flash before my eyes and be done with this nightmare. I thought back as far as I could, trying to jumpstart the event.

  One of my earliest memories took place under a kitchen table. A pink, plastic stethoscope dangling between my blond pigtails, the business end pressed to the chest of my mother’s first partner, a beautiful German Shepherd named Maggie.

  My mother, Toni Skye, was what the department called a natural-born hero. She’d worked her way up from patrol to the K9 unit, and then she’d transferred to vice after we lost Maggie.

  Maggie had been my favorite patient. Doctors are not supposed to have favorites, I’d tell her at every appointment, but I knew she wouldn’t report me to the medical board.

  The memory pulled one corner of my mouth up in a lazy grin, even as the life drained from my body, and my skin grew cold and clammy. My muscles slowly unclenched. I couldn’t feel the gun in my hand anymore. I couldn’t even feel the teeth in my throat, though I could hear them working me over, a horrid gnashing sound that echoed in my skull.

  And then I saw her—a flash of dark fur darting through the moonlight. Maggie? Had she come to deliver me from evil?

  My vision warped, eyelids fluttering their last as I began to lose consciousness. I strained to keep them open, waiting to see if my mother would show next. She always arrived a moment behind Maggie. Why should it be any different in the afterlife?

  As if answering my silent request, the silhouette of a woman rose up before me, towering over the brute at my neck. My eyes watered as they rolled back in my head, and my heart strummed out a hopeful staccato.

&nb
sp; Then, it stopped.

  Chapter Two

  As a St. Louis cop, I was no stranger to the county morgue. Of course, I’d never seen it from this particular angle. Or while wearing less than a co-ed on spring break.

  Goosebumps spread from my shoulder blades to my ass, picking up again at my calves, all pressed against an ice-cold metal table positioned under an overhead light. My tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth, my muscles concrete encasing rebar bones. If I were dead, then this was surely rigor mortis.

  The pong of ammonia and disinfectant permeated the air, and as my focus sharpened, I heard a trickle of music cut through the ringing in my ears.

  “Don’t tell my heart, my achy, breaky heart,” someone sang along. I prayed for God to strike them dead.

  When my prayer went unanswered, I turned to get a better view of hell. That’s what this had to be. It was the very spot where my life had ended. The first time, anyway.

  I counted the cold chambers stacked against the wall to my left. Two down and three across. That’s where my mother’s body had remained until her autopsy was finished, and my sister and I were allowed to bury her. That was the last time I’d seen either of them.

  The music and the grating voice grew louder. I twisted my head to the right and found Vin Hart, the morgue’s new forensic pathologist, pulling on a pair of blue gloves. His eyebrows lifted, and he scrunched his face a few times as if trying to encourage his glasses to move farther up the bridge of his nose. Then he picked up a scalpel from a metal cart and turned toward me.

  “Vini, Vidi, Vici,” I croaked, the high school nickname sounding less teasing and more like a plea coming from my dry throat.

  Vin squealed—a full-on, being-eaten-alive-by-a-giant-tarantula squeal. He stumbled backward, knocking over the metal cart and scattering his horror film arsenal across the linoleum floor. Then he squealed again and tried to climb up onto the counter that spanned the wall behind him, dislodging a desk lamp and the small clock radio crooning suicidal country music. Because, apparently, this place wasn’t depressing enough.

  The scalpel was still clutched in Vin’s gloved hand. He pointed it at me as I moaned and sat upright on the autopsy table. My muscles and tendons protested, cramping agonizingly under my skin. I tried to stretch my neck from side to side, but that only made things worse.

  “Y-y-you’re dead!” Vin shrieked.

  I glared at him and covered my breasts with my arms. “Where are my clothes?”

  He squinted at me as if I’d asked a trick question. “I…uh… I had to cut them off. They were covered in blood anyway. You wouldn’t want them.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Well, Pervy McPervertson, think you could find something else for me to wear?”

  “You didn’t have a pulse. I swear!” Vin held up a gloved finger with his free hand. “This is not my fault. They delivered you in a body bag and everything.”

  With all the bizarre questions rattling around in my head, clothes should have been the least of my worries. But interrogations were hard enough when dressed. Nudity took things to a whole new level.

  I stared at Vin, watching his mental wheels turn as his pupils constricted until I could once again see the milk chocolate color of his irises. He glanced down at his hand holding the scalpel and quickly discarded the blade on the counter before peeling off his gloves.

  “I have some gym sweats in my car,” he said, easing his way around the perimeter of the room. It was as if he expected me to give chase. And here I thought our high school feud had zapped that delusion.

  Vin cleared his throat when he reached the exit. “Uh, I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere,” he added, closing the door behind him.

  “Right.” I snorted and hugged my chest tighter as a shiver shook my shoulders.

  There was a sour pit in my stomach, and it felt as if it were burning right through to my navel as I desperately tried not to think about the fact that Vin Hart had cut off my clothes while I lay unconscious on a metal table in a morgue. Nope. Nothing creepy about that.

  The room felt as if it were spinning around me. Slowly at first, but gaining momentum as I tried to recall how I’d ended up here. The basement, the crazed suspect, the dog… Will. The dots were all there. I just couldn’t connect them into anything that made sense. I closed my eyes and pressed a hand to my face, trying to swallow the bile building in the back of my throat.

  Something thudded against the door, and Vin’s clumsy return snapped my attention back to the here and now. His sneakers squeaked on the floor as he inched toward me, digging his hand down into a gray duffle bag.

  “Here.” He tossed a wadded bundle of clothes into my lap from a safe distance away.

  “Thanks,” I said, before realizing the clothes were damp from his most recent workout.

  “I’m so sorry, Jenna.” Vin’s eyes welled, and he turned his back without me having to ask.

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said, making a face at the ragged sweatpants he’d loaned me. I stuffed my shaky legs into them before easing off the table and jerking them up my thighs. They were too big, but I managed to tighten the drawstring enough until the waistband stayed around my hips.

  “I really am.” Vin sniffled. “I swear, you didn’t have a pulse. This is incredible. We need to call Captain Mathis—”

  “I’ll call him later,” I said, yanking his pit-stained tee shirt over my head. “I want a hot shower and some food first. Maybe a nap.”

  Vin ran a hand through his dark hair and let out a nervous laugh. “You’ve been in a locker since six this morning.” He glanced down at his watch. “That’s fourteen hours, Jenna. Can you imagine if you’d woken up in there?”

  I tried to remember what time Will and I had stormed the warehouse. Will.

  “Where’s my partner?” I asked, my eyes migrating back toward the cold chambers.

  “Your partner?” Vin stole a glance over his shoulder before deciding it was safe to look at me.

  “Detective Will Banks?”

  “Oh.” His eyes drooped at the corners as he pushed his glasses up his nose. “He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

  “Which one?” I took a step toward the cold chambers, trying to read the names on the doors. I spotted my own and swallowed. Fourteen hours. How was that possible?

  “Are you sure you want to do this right now? I mean, after everything you’ve—”

  “Which one?” I repeated, taking another step forward.

  “Here.” Vin circled the autopsy table and gave me a sidelong glance before he grasped the lever of a door next to my vacated chamber. At least I’d been in good company.

  The table slid out of its cubby with a sigh. And then Vin folded the sheet back, revealing Will’s ashen face and the swell of his shoulders. I begged my heart to turn to stone. I’d have myself a long, hard cry later, but not here. Not in front of Vin or over Will’s body. He deserved better than that from me. I thought of his family.

  “His wife…” I said, a lump welling in my throat before I could finish the question.

  “She was here this morning,” Vin said. “With their daughter.”

  I belonged in hell. It should have been Will who survived the basement. Not me. It had been my dumb mistake. And I didn’t have anyone waiting at home. No one depended on me. Hell, I didn’t even have a house cat to complain about my absence.

  A blossom of old scar tissue was nestled below Will’s exposed collarbone. He’d been shot there while making a drug bust with my mother. I remembered visiting him in the hospital the week before my high school graduation.

  “You’re smart for going to critter school, Jen,” he’d said to me, his thumb hovering over a morphine pump grasped in his free hand. “At least you’ll know when you’re working with an animal.” I should have heeded his warning and stayed in the vet program. But when my mother died later that year, I buried my dreams with her.

  I pressed a finger to the mound of scar tissue and heard Vin suck in a soft breath
. A lecture about not touching evidence was winding up. I could feel it. But Will wasn’t evidence. He was a lifeline that had kept my mother’s memory alive. That had kept me grounded once she was gone.

  My eyes trailed away from the familiar scar and up to Will’s neck. A jagged gash ran from behind his ear to the hollow of his throat. The skin had been folded back and in on itself, but I could see the depth of the wound where it gaped open here and there. My stomach roiled, and my hand went to my throat, feeling for the damage I knew I’d sustained.

  But there was nothing. Not even a scratch. My skin was perfectly intact and as cool and smooth as marble. That couldn’t be right. I covered my mouth and tried to think. Nothing made sense right now, and I couldn’t decide if I was delusional or just dehydrated. I need some water, I thought as my tongue scraped the roof of my mouth again.

  “What’d you put down on your initial report for my COD?”

  “Uh.” Vin cleared his throat. “I couldn’t find any injuries, despite the fact that you were covered in blood. I was thinking aneurysm or stroke perhaps.” I snorted, and his ears turned bright pink. “The autopsy would have been more conclusive. Obviously, that won’t be needed now.”

  “An aneurysm?” I folded my arms as Vin replaced the sheet over Will’s face and slid him back inside the cold chamber.

  “I don’t know.” He took a deep breath and frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe you saw the assault on Detective Banks, went into shock…and had a nosebleed?”

  “And it hit pause on my pulse for fourteen hours?”

  “It’s nothing short of a miracle.” Vin nodded, agreeing with my sarcastic assessment. “You should really be checked out by your regular MD. I’ve already gathered any evidence from, uh…your person—” He paused to clear his throat again, and his face flushed. “There were no defensive wounds. No signs of rape—”