He left the apartment and stood in the hall as he tried to figure out his next move. Who had killed Arnold, and where was the man’s body? Those questions might have nothing to do with Julie; the man might be dead in the park and his body hadn’t been discovered yet.
However, he didn’t think that was the case. There was something strange going on here, and he couldn’t rid himself of the certainty that solving this mystery would help him find Julie. Jasmine’s apartment was on the second floor, and he decided to take another look at it. There might be something he missed.
When he stepped off the stairs and into the hallway of the second floor, he detected an aroma that hadn’t been there last night. Sniffing the air, he caught a faint whiff of something rotten, but it wasn’t coming from this floor.
Dante hated to do it, but he shut down the connection linking him to Cassidy. It would upset her when she discovered it, but if what he suspected lay above did, then he preferred to tell her about it in person. He was determined to keep her out of this as much as possible.
He took the stairs to the third floor and then followed the aroma to the fourth. That was where the faint, sickly sweet smell of rotting meat was a little more potent, and so was the scent of lemons.
An uneasy feeling churned in his gut as he followed the aromas to an apartment. He’d been an officer for enough years to know that rotten smell. It might be hours, if not days before a human nose detected it, but his heightened vampire senses picked up the stench of a rotting body.
Was this where Arnold died? Had he fallen off a ladder and broken his neck while painting a bathroom or changing a lightbulb? But why hadn’t whoever resided here reported the accident?
With little hope of finding life on the other side of the door, he still lifted his hand and knocked on it. No one responded. Unlike Arnold’s apartment, when he grasped this knob and turned it, it didn’t move. Resting his shoulder against the door, he pushed his weight into it until the wood splintered, and the frame gave way.
He winced at the sound of fracturing wood, but none of the neighbors came to their doors. Judging by the mostly empty parking lot, he suspected most of them were at work, but if someone heard the noise and called the police, he had about ten minutes before they arrived. He shouldn’t require that much time.
The sickly sweet, rancid scent of a decaying body and lemons caused his nose to wrinkle. He’d been around more than a few dead bodies during his time on the force, but at least he’d had something to put under his nose to help block the scent. Now, he had nothing to protect him and the nose of a bloodhound.
Using the rag he’d taken from Arnold’s apartment, he wiped off anywhere he’d touched on the door before stepping inside. When he crossed the threshold without any resistance, he realized it wasn’t Arnold’s body he was smelling, but the person who used to live here.
This building was like an old episode of the Twilight Zone. People and creatures moved in, but they never came out again.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Dante closed the door the best he could, wiped it off, and was careful not to touch anything else as he followed his nose down a hallway and to a cracked open door. With the toe of his boot, he nudged the door open.
He swallowed the bile that rushed into his throat when he saw what lay within. A woman, with her wrists and ankles tied to the four bedposts, was laid out on the bed. Blood from her torn-out throat soaked her clothes and the mattress. On the floor next to the bed was the splayed body of a man he assumed was Arnold.
A toolbox lay next to Arnold’s outstretched right hand, and his throat was torn out, but there was less blood. Dante assumed this was because the vampire who killed them was hungry when they feasted on Arnold, but they were looking for the thrill of the kill when they attacked the woman.
Four of those aroma things were in the room. Two of them had turned off, but the other two were still spewing intermittent blasts of lemon mist into the air. A dozen lemon car fresheners also surrounded the bodies.
He recalled passing a carwash on the way here. Whoever did this probably went to the carwash and bought as many air fresheners as possible. He didn’t know why they decided on lemon and didn’t care.
For the rest of his life, whenever he smelled lemons, his stomach would turn.
Whatever happened here, happened recently. Otherwise, the stench would be so much worse. When he knelt beside Arnold to examine his wound more closely, he didn’t see any evidence of a vampire, but a vampire did this.
And since only one vampire lived in this building, he could imagine who it was. But what did this woman have to do with anything? And how did Arnold get involved?
He left the room and walked to the end of the hall. Wrapping the rag around his hand, Dante used it to open the door before reaching inside to find the light switch. When light flooded the room, he barely kept his jaw from dropping at the spectacle that greeted him.
Thick, gray padding covered the walls, floor, and ceiling. When he stepped inside, he discovered more padding on the back of the door, effectively soundproofing the room. A single bucket sat in the corner. He didn’t have to approach it to know it contained waste; he could smell it from here.
“What the fuck?” he muttered.
And then the hair on his nape rose as it dawned on him; this
