I would like to thank Kalamazoo707 for all of her hard work editing this story. I would like to thank both Kalamazoo707 and Iread2relax for all of their help with this story. Both of these fine ladies have excellent stories posted. For everyone who is wondering Heritage is still being worked on and I hope to be posting the next chapter real soon. Thank you for taking a moment to read this little story and please vote and comment. Here is the story hop you enjoy it.
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Detective Andrew Martin had been in the homicide division of the Baltimore police force for twelve of his seventeen years in law enforcement. For the most part he loved his job except for the kind of cases that he was currently working on.
There was a string of unsolved murders the last count was ten that was driving him nuts. The problem was that the deaths had several things in common, they were all young healthy males, all of them had been drained of blood, and each of them had had a set of puncture marks that looked as if they were made by large bore needles that were surrounded by bright red lipstick.
The similarities didn't end there, all of the victims were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight and all of the deaths occurred around four AM after apparently having sex. There was also no evidence that any of them struggled and there was no evidence of a robbery. The first victim had about 500.00 in cash on him; even his credit cards were still in his wallet as were the cash and credit cards of each subsequent victim.
As it stood the murders were occurring every four to five nights and the bodies were always found in plain view of passersby in the inner-city although each of them had rented a hotel room the night before their death. This struck Andrew as odd because three of the men lived alone and wouldn't have needed to rent a hotel room.
There had been no witnesses to the murders or the body dumps and in the cases of the males who had been out with friends no one could recall when or with whom the male had left the club. In one case, the club video equipment had actually been working and caught the victim leaving the club. The odd thing was that it appeared as though he had his arm around someone but the image of the person was missing.
The frustrating thing was what Andrew considered to be the lack of evidence; there were a few long black hairs, the lipstick left on the skin which the lab guys said was custom made and the vaginal secretions of a female. The lab also said that there was some type of anticoagulant around puncture marks.
"We don't know what in the hell it is." Bill said, "I can tell you that it's even more potent than heparin but not only that, you know that we have samples of vaginal secretions and hair."
"Yeah and?"
"We can't get any DNA from any of it. I won't lie to you." Bill said, "In all of my years on the job I've never seen anything like it."
"Can you give me anything to go on?" Andrew asked.
"Well, your perp is female and your victims didn't struggle or fight her which begs the question how in the hell did was she able to subdue them enough to get those puncture marks in their necks and what did she do with the blood?"
Andrew left the lab with more questions than he walked in with. The last victim, Akili Adoyo a Johns Hopkins's University student was in the United States on a student visa was from Kenya. According to his professors and his roommate, he was a serious young man whose focus was on his studies.
"Akili on a date?" his roommate asked shocked, "Are we talking about the same guy? All he did was go to work, class, came home and then stayed in his room and studied."
They got the same reaction from other students and the professors who knew the unfortunate young man; it simply wasn't like him to be out on a date when he had a paper due amongst other things. It just didn't make sense. What Andrew did know was that he had to catch a break within the next four days or another man was going to die.
Through some basic profiling it was determined that the killer was indeed female although it was rare for a serial killer to be female, she was between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-five, Caucasian and that she would have a well above average intelligence. Andrew was finding himself very grateful that he took the classes that the department offered on profiling, it was proving to be worth the Saturdays spent in a classroom.
The list of questions about the perp were continuing to grow, added to the ones that he already had were these, how was the perp able to kill the men without them struggling? From what the coroner said there was no indication that the men resisted having their heads moved to the position needed to get to their jugular vein, in fact, he said it was almost as though they offered themselves to her.
Andrew's cell phone chirping interrupted his thoughts.
"Andrew? Bill here, can you come back to the lab?"
On his way to the lab Andrew wondered how long it would be before the press heard about the murders, he was actually surprised that they hadn't already and thanked God for big and small favors alike. He could only imagine the headlines. They would be screaming about the fact that the murders were kept from the public and that they had the right to know so on and so forth. Added to the mix would be the accusations of the department being inadequate and or not caring.
Andrew had requested FBI involvement when the body count reached three but had been refused. Now that it was ten, they couldn't get the Feds here fast enough. "Better late than never." Andrew grumbled under his breath as he pulled in front of the lab.
"Hey Bill what you got for me?" Andrew asked as he walked into the lab.
Bill looked up from what he was doing and grinned; he loved the challenge of the hard cases and had helped solve some of the hardest ones in Andrews's career as a homicide detective.
"You sure brought us a doozy!" he replied, "the anticoagulant that was used on the victims was a highly concentrated version of the one used by the vampire bat when it feeds."
"Vampire bat?" Andrew asked and began to laugh, "What the fuck are you saying? That I have some kind of giant bat running around killing people?"
Bill chuckled and then turned serious, "No, but I did talk to someone over at the zoo and what he said was that when the vampire bat bites, it's only a small opening and they lap the blood up with their tongues. It would appear that whoever killed your guys is using a pump of some kind to take the blood from the bodies.
Here's another thing, mixed in with the anticoagulant in the dried saliva was a paralytic/anesthetic solution, which would explain why there was no struggle. We're still trying to figure out exactly what it is but I can tell you this much, whatever it was... it worked almost instantly."
Andrew listened carefully as Bill talked, mulling the information over for a few minutes when Bill was done talking.
"Why do you say that she used a pump?" he asked.
"That's the only explanation that makes sense." Bill replied. "All of the victims were drained almost dry, what other answer could there be? I also talked to a few colleagues and they agree that's the only way that she could have done it but that begs another question."
"I'm listening." Andrew replied.
"Did she have her victims already picked out or is it random? And... did or does she have an accomplice? Just think about it, how could she have done all of that alone? I know that there are some relatively small pumps but still, it takes planning."
