The Blood Lust

By Lucy Park Hunter

In Book I of the Deor series, we meet Dr. Andrea Arnett, Ph.D. – a whip-smart, hard-drinking New York City forensic anthropologist with punky, flame-red hair, lots of tattoos, and a penchant for dive bars and indie rock music. For Drea, murder and mayhem are business-as-usual, and dealing with the dead is all in a day’s work.
Dealing with the un-dead, however, is a different story. When a mysterious stranger enters her life, and people start falling victim to a gruesome serial killer who just may be a vampire, Drea learns that truth can be stranger than fiction. And when she finds herself falling in love and grappling with the Blood Lust, she starts taking matters into her own hands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucy Park Hunter
• Release date: Jan 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301223237

Lucy Park Hunter

Hello, friends- I'm Lucy Park Hunter, a long-time forensic anthropologist and first-time novelist. I'm pleased to introduce The Blood Lust. The book combines all of my favorite things: forensic science, fantasy, vampires, and (of course ;) romance! I'm so excited to share my fantastical forensic world with you. So sample, download, read, and enjoy! xoxo, L.P.H.

Book preview

Chapter 1.

The summer the Vampire Murders began was a turning point for me. It was the summer I turned thirty. The summer I finally paid off my grad school loans. The summer I fell in love–really in love–for the first time. The summer my career really took off.

And it was the summer I became a vampire.

I’m Dr. Andrea Arnett, Ph.D., but just about everyone calls me Drea–and the few who don’t tend to create massively annoying nicknames for me, such as Dr. Dre (which is just plain perverse) or AA (which is only slightly better). I’m a forensic anthropologist at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Insiders call it the OCME. The summer the Murders started, I was the OCME FNG, the fuckin’ new guy: a newly minted Ph.D. fresh from a two-year stint at a supremely badass anthropology laboratory affiliated with the military and tasked with the unique mission of recovering the remains of our country’s dead heroes, bringing them back to American soil, identifying them, and returning them to their loved ones. That lab is like Indiana Jones meets Call of Duty, on steroids. It’s high pressure, high profile, and otherwise pretty flippin’ sweet. And, did I mention that it’s located in Honolulu, HI?

Let me put it to you straight: I rolled with the U.S. military. I lived in paradise. And I cut my teeth at what is basically the best forensic anthropology laboratory in the world.

So naturally, when I arrived in New York City from Honolulu, I thought I was pretty hot shit. Yeah right. My boss took one look at my young, cocky, tattooed ass and assigned me to the graveyard shift.

Yup, the graveyard shift. At the morgue. Hah.

Yeah, I know–I didn’t think it was too funny either.

But, when Bill Fox Forester says jump, forensic anthros have no choice but to ask how high. At least, not if they want to continue working in the field. He’s kind of a big deal. And a big douche. Sometimes, when he’s on a particularly fiery rant, I like to imagine him as the old-timey archetype of a scenery-chewing Hollywood studio exec, proclaiming over a three-martini lunch that you’ll never work in this town again! Or, I picture him kicking people the hell out of Dodge like an Old West sheriff. Only, like, a sheriff of forensic anthropology.

But I digress.

First off, allow me to dispel a few myths about forensic anthropologists. We are pretty cool, I must admit: we’re specialists at interpreting the remains of the dead. From just a few scraps of bone, we can tell a person’s sex, their age, their ancestry, and what trauma they might have suffered before death. But that’s where it ends. Yes, dear reader, despite what you see on television, we are scientists, not crime fighters. Our macabre domain includes the laboratory, the fume hood, and the dissection table, not the passenger seat in a cop car or the talk-down end of a telephone line during a hostage situation. As a group, we are far less attractive than the photogenic types who grace the laboratories of the small screen. We wear less Prada and more plastic personal protective gear. We’re less Brad Pitt and more Steve Buscemi. And honey, let me tell you: there is nothing sexy about decomp. Oh my God, and for chrissakes, we do not place itty bitty unrecognizable fragments of bone into giant whirring machines that generate fully fleshed holographic images of deceased individuals, so stop frickin’ asking or I swear to God I’m gonna kill somebody. No, really. I could.

Speaking of, please also allow me to dispel a few myths about vampires. Like forensic anthropologists, we’re pretty damn cool. But let’s just get one thing straight: make no mistake about it, we are monsters. Literally. We came about back in the day for a sole purpose, and that purpose was bloodshed–mayhem, carnage, battle. None of this Ooooh, I’m so sexy, and I don’t even like the taste of human blood! I don’t really have to sleep underground! Look at me sparkle in the sunlight! crap. No. The sleeping in the dirt thing is for real. The blood lust is for real. And the abominations of which my people are capable can’t even be imagined, let alone described.

But that being said, when you think back on history–the history of both your people and mine–I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an instance of truly ghastly human depravity (I mean the real biggies: the Inquisition, the slave trade, the so-called conquest of the Americas, the World Wars) in which vampires played the leading role. For all of that real dark shit, dear mortals, you only have yourselves to thank.

I knew none of this, of course, until the summer of the Murders. Just like you, I thought–no, I knew–that vampires were myth. Hocus pocus. Hollywood. The creation of superstitious human minds in a bygone, unenlightened era that we modern folks resurrected, sexed up, and became obsessed with because we just didn’t have anything better to do.

The Vampire Murders changed all that.

That summer came early to the poor, sardine-packed people of NYC. April was already hot, May was a scorcher, and June was worse. Every day, the Times would report another death–usually an elderly man or woman who just couldn’t afford to keep the AC running, or were too afraid of their rough neighborhoods to open their windows. Or both. People were literally dying because of the heat.

They were dying for other reasons, too.

The first decedent to arrive at the OCME with puncture wounds on her neck was a 24-year-old female. Brunette, Caucasian, slender, attractive. Bit of a party girl, which is why when her stoner boyfriend came home to find her sprawled on the bed face down and dead to the world, he didn’t worry about it until the next morning, when he realized she was still dead to the world. And just plain dead. He was so freaked out, he didn’t even notice the puncture wounds. But the cops did. And someone must have talked to the press, because by the time the NYPD had finished processing the crime scene, questioning the boyfriend, and prepping the decedent for transport to the OCME, most of New York City knew there was a dead girl up in Queens with bloody fang marks on her neck. That colorful (though inaccurate) description came to the good people of NYC courtesy of the Post, a glorified tabloid masquerading as a newspaper that rushed out a characteristically tawdry article in honor of the event. There was a typo in the second sentence. God, I hate stupid people.

Anyway, when the ice truck dropped off the body at the back door of the OCME, there was a horde of photographers waiting to greet it. A few cops and a couple of our orderlies tried shooing them away, but they displayed tenacity and fortitude of the kind usually reserved for the bodies of A-list movie stars and aging rockers who accidentally OD. It was early morning, and my night shift was just ending. I was folding my labcoat and logging off my computer when my WBF burst into the office we share with two other forensic anthropologists. My WBF (that’s Work Best Friend, for you nongovernment-employee types who aren’t programmed to think in acronyms) is Landis Taylor, an old grad school friend of mine who squanders his utter adorableness on the male half of humanity. Totally tragic. But, in addition to earning my forever-respect for his excellent taste in indie rock music and gratuitously sexy HBO shows, Taylor deserves mad props for being an openly gay man in a profession still totally dominated by good old boys. That can’t be easy. Then again, though, neither is being a woman.

Tay Tay and I can banter with the best of them. And we do, loudly and pretty much unceasingly–to the annoyance of everyone else working the OCME’s night shift. Somehow, he always seems to know the gossip. Typically, our post-work conversations center around finding a bar that’s open at 7 am and willing to serve two exhausted forensic anthropologists who reek of decomp and want to stack the jukebox with Neko Case tunes. But today was different.

Taylor looked like he was about to explode. Drea, oh my God, there you are. You better sit down right now, because I am about to blow your fucking mind. Guess what just came into the morgue!

I fixed him with a withering glare. Um…a body? I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. Don’t play this game with me, Tay Tay. Mama needs whiskey.

Taylor blocked my way with an outstretched arm and an epic eye roll. Yeah, a body, genius. But get this– I silenced him with an eye roll of my own and pushed past his arm, too hard, on purpose. He let me get about ten paces down the hall before dropping the bomb: "Cause of death: vampire bite."

Excuse me? I stopped dead in my tracks for a second before bursting out laughing. "Oh my God, you have got to be shitting me. Wait a minute…don’t tell me you killed her. All those nights in Knoxville you spent watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I bet you have mad blood-sucking skills."

I do have mad sucking skills. But she’s not my type. He sprinted to catch up with me. "Anyway, the whole city has already decided that whoever did kill her sports a serious set of fangs. The Post has already dubbed it ‘the Vampire Murder’, and Rosie from the day shift just told me that when she stopped to get a coffee on her shift break, the bodega owner was complaining that he’d already sold out of garlic."

Oh my God, I shook my head, That is too funny. People are so dumb. Probably the chick was having kinky sex with some goth dude who hasn’t noticed that the 1990’s ended in 1999, and things got out of hand. Probably bit her with his fake fangs or whatever and hit her jugular.

Yeah, but I haven’t told you the best part. We exited the building and crossed the street past a crowd of photographers vying for a good shot of our singularly unphotogenic work place. She’s got two Nosferatu marks on her neck, right? But the cop that brought her in told one of the pathologists that there was no blood at the scene. N-O-N-E.

I gave my WBF a long hard look. Have you seen the body? He shook his head. Have you talked to the cops? Another head shake. "Then how do you know all this? How do you always know everything, like, the minute shit happens?"

Taylor smiled mysteriously. Wouldn’t you like to know?

I would, actually. I’d also like to stick around to hear the results of the autopsy, but whiskey calls, my friend. I’m sure it’ll end up being heart failure. An OD or something.

Probs. One of the things I love most about Taylor is his propensity to condense words into as few syllables as possible. "Hey, I think I’ve still got that Buffy seven-disc set. I don’t know about you, but I could really go for a good old-fashioned blood-athon."

Oh my God! Yes! Complete with bottom-shelf-vodka-and-maraschino-cherry-juice shots and red wine straight from the box?

Just like the bad old days, Dr. Dre. He crooked his arm, elbow toward me.

Don’t call me that, dipshit. I hooked my elbow into his.

Chapter 2.

All the intricacies of the ups and downs of the tide of U.S. public opinion can be charted by walking through a New York City subway station. America’s fears, doubts, and preoccupations are reflected in the headlines of newspapers tucked under the arms of commuters. The billboard-style ads on the station walls project in larger-than-life, super-saturated color all the hot trends in popular culture–from movies and television shows to boutique liquors and athletic gear. Fashion dos and don’ts are easily identified on the bodies in motion of the thronging masses of New York City’s humanity.

That summer, all of the subway’s pop-cultural indicators pointed toward one trend: the undead. The billboard ads proclaimed the release of the latest string of smutty television dramas about sexy vampires battling sexy wizards for the love of sexy women. The train platforms were littered with women reading trashy chick lit about good-hearted (and good-looking) vampires who had really great personalities and just wanted to be understood. And now, every newspaper discarded on the train tracks bore sensational headlines about the so-called Vampire Murder. I began the pilgrimage from Taylor’s apartment to mine at around 2 pm. It’s always a surreal experience weaving drunkenly home in broad daylight, exhausted after a hard day’s work and a hard night’s drink, while the rest of the city returns to work from their lunch breaks and midday appointments, wide awake and stone-cold sober. In light of last night’s murder, the omnipresence of the undead made the trek even more surreal.

As I stumbled off the train and down the platform at my subway stop, an advertisement for the summer’s blockbuster vampire movie caught my eye. In it, a pouting young woman gazed listlessly out at me between a somber, pale-faced vampire and a tanned, shirtless werewolf. I sneered back at her, suddenly angry. What’s your problem, slut? I spoke aloud to the woman in the ad. "This country’s gone to shit in a handbag, I haven’t gotten laid in like six months, there’s a dead girl lying in my morgue with fang marks on her neck, and all you have to do is choose between two hot supernatural dudes. What the fuck do you have to be sad about?"

Chapter 3.

Every shift at the OCME begins and ends with Grand Rounds. It’s an opportunity for the pathologists (AKA medical examiners) to update each other, as well as us forensic anthropologists, on the results of their latest postmortem exams. Our two departments work under the same roof, along with folks from a whole cadre of other specialties–forensic DNA techs, the entomology bug guys, and the trace evidence people–but in general, our analyses and those of the MEs are pretty different. Pathologists deal with fresh bodies, anthros deal with bones–and ne’er the twain do meet. So, in accordance with a decision made by the Chief Medical Examiner way back when, all of us dead-people dorks get together twice a day: the day shift pathologists lecture us on causes of death, heart infarctions, and distended bladders before clocking out for the evening; and the graveyard shift pathologists summarize their nightly findings as the day shift begins. In addition to being educational and totally fascinating, it’s a great chance to catch up with the medical doctors, and to peek into their freaky little world of autopsy tables and bloody shoecovers.

Grand Rounds is always well attended, but the night after the first Vampire Murder autopsy, the conference room was packed. By the time I arrived at the party, all of the pathologists and anthropologists from both shifts were there, in addition to a few death investigators and more than one cop–the latter a really uncommon sighting at these simultaneously dorky and macabre gab sessions. I skulked in the door feeling totally hungover and vaguely claustrophobic, hugged the wall, and squeezed into the only open seat. Taylor was already seated across the room from me, looking only slightly more alert than I felt. Yup, last night had been fun. Soooo many vampires. Sooooooooo many shots.

I noticed that bossman Forester was sitting to Taylor’s right, so I mustered my most winning smile and nodded in his direction. As usual, he ignored me. All traces of my smile faded and I slunk further down in my chair. I had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at me, and when I turned around to glower at the row of chairs behind me, I came face to face with the enormous, good-natured visage of Dr. Horace Walker, one of my favorite pathologists. He’s a total shit-talker, just like me. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel up to his semantic sparring at that moment.

I briefly considered saying good morning, but instead spat, Back the fuck up, Walker, you are way too close to my frickin’ face right now.

Good morning, Doctor Drea! he boomed at a volume far exceeding an acceptable level for that hour of the morning… er, night. The annoyingness of the greeting was only accentuated by his cheery Aussie accent, which I usually find charming, but today found intolerable. You are looking exceptionally lovely today.

Now, let me just take this opportunity to state the fact that I was not. At all. On any given day, I’m not winning any beauty contests: my ass is too fat and my arms are too scrawny and some people find my punky, flame-red, straight-from-the-bottle hair color off-putting. But! Let it be said that I do have a great rack. And, especially if I wear one of my curve-hugging black dresses that show off my tattoos, and take the time to match the color of my lipstick with the color of my hair, I can look damn good when I want to. Today, however, was not one of those times. My fiery hair was piled on top of my head in a shaggy bun secured with a mechanical pencil, and I was attempting to mask bloodshot eyes behind my vintage black cat-eyes with the diamondy accents.

But the grinning, booming Doc Walker just would not quit. Got pissed again last night, did we?

What’s it to you?

His grin stretched wider. Aha! I knew it. The glasses are a dead giveaway. You only ever wear them when you’re nursing a hangover.

Meh.

I turned away from the gloating pathologist and zoned out listening to the conversations of the people sitting at the table in front of me. From what I could hear, the pre-Rounds buzz was of nothing but vampires.

Danny Rodriguez, one of the newer pathology fellows, was talking with Ann Kosciuszko, a night-shift anthropologist who has worked at the OCME since like, before I was born. My parents are pretty freaked out, Danny was saying, My mom keeps texting me to ask if I’m wearing my crucifix.

Isn’t it depressing? Ann shook her short-cropped hair, I mean, the only thing my daughter has talked about for the past year is vampires, vampires, vampires. You should see her room. It’s like a shrine to that actor–the one that plays the handsome vampire in those movies? Then this happens, and suddenly she’s afraid to go out after dark.

The Chief Medical Examiner–a tall, wiry old timer who still wears the suits he bought in the 1970s–called the meeting to order, starting the day’s bill of fare by presenting the case of a hospital death that turned out to qualify as medical malpractice. Then we had to sit through three MVAs, two GSWs, and a jumper before we got to the real reason we were all crammed in that hellhole of a room. The good stuff always comes last. Just like your prom date in the Abstinence League, the Chief ME looooves to make you wait.

None other than Dr. Walker turned out to be the pathologist assigned to the case. As he shifted his bulk to a standing position and pushed his chair back to speak, an audible murmur of approval went through the room. Everybody loves Walker, especially at Grand Rounds. He sure knows how to tell a good autopsy.

Case number M11-1372 is a 24-year-old Caucasian female, five feet and seven inches in height and weighing 54.5 kilograms. He paused, and actually had the audacity to wink at his audience, That’s about 120 pounds, to you. Nothing but skin and bones, a veritable toothpick. Terrible, really.

Walker. The Chief ME didn’t even bother to look up from the case file folder he was studying.

Sir, Walker gave a curt nod in his direction that seemed positively martial. Right you are, moving on. External exam revealed two small, round puncture wounds on the decedent’s neck, overlying the left external jugular vein. Each wound is approximately three millimeters in diameter, and they are spaced approximately two centimeters apart. There is no tearing or bruising of the soft tissues surrounding the wounds. In addition, a larger round puncture wound approximately three centimeters in diameter is visible externally, approximately three centimeters to the left of the sternum.

Taylor’s eyes met mine over the conference table. This was something we hadn’t known last night, and I could imagine Tay wracking his brains to figure out how this particularly juicy nugget of gossip had escaped him. Chill out, Tay Tay, I thought, It probably wasn’t visible until after they stripped the body. But Walker was continuing.

The soft tissues surrounding the larger wound are ragged, but no signs of bruising are evident. There are no other marks, bruises, or wounds visible on the body externally. Walker stopped for a sip of his Big Swig coffee thermos, from which he was inseparable. He was just warming up.

"Moving on! The internal exam revealed the extent of the wounds. The smaller wounds are shallow–they penetrate just a few millimeters into the soft tissues of the neck. But, and here his face-splitting grin returned, They go deep enough to tap– (he sounded the p in tap loudly and percussively, like the sound a cork makes when it pops from a bottle of bubbly) …directly into the external jugular vein!"

Walker. This time the Chief looked up sharply as Walker’s audience started to murmur and chortle. Keep it professional.

Of course, sir. Another slurp of coffee. I was just getting to the chest wound. As far as we could deduce on internal examination, the puncture appears to have been made by a small, slender wooden stake, approximately three centimeters in diameter and ten in length, charred and sharpened to a point at one end, and roughly splintered on the other…

By this time, the murmuring in the conference room had risen to a dull roar, which one of the veteran pathologists quashed by demanding, How were you able to deduce the exact nature of the weapon that caused the wound, Dr. Walker?

Walker grinned his shit-eating grin. Because, ma’am, it is still embedded in the decedent’s heart.

Roar turned to pandemonium. Across the room, I saw Taylor’s eyes widen, and I raised my eyebrows in response. This was getting good. The beleaguered Chief ME struggled to subdue his staff like a late night TV judge presiding over a courtroom of belligerent DUIs. Dr. Walker! his voice finally broke through the din and brought us back to business. Did you note any hemorrhaging of the surrounding tissues? In your opinion, did this wound cause the decedent’s death?

Ah, yes. Cause of death. Yes. You’d like to know if the decedent was already dead by the time her assailant punctured her heart with the stake? Of course. Based on the utter lack of hemorrhaging in the surrounding tissues, I would have to answer that yes, indeed she was dead at the time she sustained the puncture wound to the heart. Walker paused to make certain everyone was paying attention. But determining cause of death is a bit tricky in this case.

Why is that? What did the rest of your internal examination indicate? The veteran pathologist again.

Nothing, replied Dr. Walker, innocent as a newborn babe.

Nothing? repeated the Chief ME.

No sir. Nothing. No disease, no trauma, no obvious signs of drug use. Come to think of it, there are no gastric contents, either. And, of course, there is no blood.

Gasps all around.

No blood…where? The Chief prompted, as he monitored Walker closely through narrowed eyes.

Anywhere in the body. Pardon my pun, doctors, but she’s bloody bloodless!

The Chief was too astounded by this response to subdue his unruly underlings, so chaos reigned for a moment or two as he sat in his chair staring blankly at Walker. Finally he asked, Do you mean that the neck wounds caused her to exsanguinate prior to your examination?

This time the response came from the opposite corner of the room. No, Doc, offered one of the medicolegal death investigators, There was absolutely no blood at the scene. A few police officers nodded in agreement, and one piped up,

Sir, we checked the bathtub drains and the apartment balcony and everything.

At this point, Walker took a final triumphant drink of coffee. A girl sustains two injuries: one to the external jugular vein, one to the heart. There is no blood at the scene, no blood at autopsy, no blood at either of the sites of injury. So, ladies and gentleman, the question remains: what killed this girl?

There were a few seconds of silence. Then someone, I think one of the cops, prompted him. OK fine, I’ll bite. What?

Walker was positively radiant. Aha! You’ll bite, will you? Why, sir, I believe you’ve hit upon it, exactly. He beamed mischievously around the room, arms outstretched like the patron saint of pandemonium.

The room exploded. Most of us sickos laughed; a few old gray-hairs shook their heads in disgust. We’ll mark this one down as ‘pending,’ Walker, the Chief spat as he gathered his legal pad and file folder angrily and stood up from the conference table. But I want to see a cause of death determination by the end of the week. No–by tomorrow, if the tox screen comes back. Tell toxicology to put a rush on it. And you, he looked at the cops, have you considered that the murder might have been committed at another location? That she might have been killed and later moved, leaving her blood at the actual crime scene? No, of course not. You’re just like everyone else in this damn city, you’ve all got vampire fever. It’s the only explanation you’ll accept. Well, I’ll be damned if my morgue falls prey to the pressures of the media and the whims of public opinion. Find the crime scene. Find the cause of death. Time to shape up, all of you, and act like professionals. He turned on the heel of his 1970s wingtip and strode from the room with as much purpose as his 70-plus years would afford him.

A few old veterans followed him. The rest of us stayed to rehash the events. This was just too good to let go. Walker was like a celebrity in the corner of the room, surrounded by pathologists asking questions and offering ideas. I plopped down on the edge of the conference table, pushed back, and swiveled around on my butt to face Taylor. He was coming toward me from the other side of the room, shaking his head. "Have you ever seen the Chief freak out like that?" I asked.

No. Never. He’s usually cool as a cucumber. He must be seriously pissed. ‘Vampire fever’? Taylor laughed.

Oh my God, and Walker? I added, That was rare form, even for him. We were both laughing now, all traces of our hangovers gone. "This is frickin’ great. I’m gonna wear a real hot dress tomorrow for the paparazzi. Do you think I’ll get my picture in the paper? This is totes the biggest thing to hit the OCME since I’ve been here."

We started to walk to the elevator that would take us back to the anthropologists’ corner of the building. Eh, I don’t know, Taylor assumed the role of the veteran OCME employee as he pushed the elevator button, It all seems like a big deal now, but it’ll blow over soon. Cases like this always do.

Now, let me just say for the record, my WBF Landis Taylor is almost always right. He can look at any fragment of bone (no matter how small) and tell you what side of the body it comes from. He always matches his socks perfectly with his shirt. And you can count on him to know exactly who’s screwing whom in the office.

But at that particular moment, my WBF was dead wrong.

Chapter 4.

Later that night, Forester tasked Taylor and me to macerate the remains of a partly decomposed gunshot suicide who a couple of kids had found while partying under an overpass. Now, for those of you for whom the word macerate connotes soaking strawberries in balsamic vinegar, allow me to unburden you of this misconception. In anthropological circles, maceration involves boiling (or rather, gently simmering) the remains of a deceased individual so that the flesh comes loose from the bones, then rinsing, scraping, and pulling off any soft tissue that still adheres. We don’t do this because we like it. Or because we’re freaks. We macerate remains so we can see all the cool, bony details that the nasty, goopy flesh is obscuring. Capisce?

So there Tay and I were, under the fume hood, up to our elbows in goop, cheerfully pulling more goop off of bones and chatting away behind our face shields (because, hey, sometimes goop splatters). The door to the lab opened, and in walked Dr. Danny Rodriguez, the path fellow. I love it when the medical doctors come to visit our stinky little corner of the world. The look on their faces when they enter an anthropology lab with maceration operations in full swing gives me a sweet pang of victory that all their better-paying jobs and higher social status can’t take away from me. But Danny did pretty good, actually. He hardly even flinched.

I put down the femur I was cleaning and pulled off my face mask. What’s up, Day Rod? (My distaste for people creating dumb nicknames for me is not so intense as to preclude my making them up for others.)

Hi, Drea! Hey, Landis. How’s it going? Danny had a coffee cup in each hand. He looked bright and chipper, and pretty cute actually, in a fresh-out-of-med-school way. I checked him out subtly behind my cat-eyes. Scrubs are an unforgiving medium: if you have a few extra pounds hiding on you anywhere, scrubs will seek them out and expose them to the world. There is nothing less aesthetically pleasing than an overhanging gut in a scrubs top. Danny’s top, however, was neatly tucked into his pants, creating a straight, gutless line from chest to…well…you know.

Taylor caught the direction of my stare, and froze me in my tracks with a you straight chicks are all alike glare. No liquids in the lab area, Danny, Taylor chided aloud.

Oh, yeah, Danny grinned as if he’d forgotten how his hands were occupied. The coffees are for you guys, actually.

Taylor and I exchanged a glance. We are pretty low men on the OCME totem pole, so we’re generally suspicious of random acts of kindness. Still, I de-gloved greedily and took off my plastic protective apron to accept the gift.

I get sick of talking to doctors all day, Danny explained, holding the door open for us as we left the lab for the break room. Uh, medical doctors, that is. He caught his mistake and offered that winning grin again. Just wanted to see what’s up in the world of anthropology.

I took a sip of coffee. Well, I sat down in a folding chair and put my feet up on the table, People keep killing each other, murders make dead people, dead people decompose, and we look at decomposed dead people. Other than that, nothing to report. How ’bout in the wonderful world of pathology? Any good gossip?

Danny looked excited. God, he was so green. Heard we’re getting a new pathologist soon! The job’s been posted for months. Sounds like the old man finally chose somebody.

Boy or girl?

Danny laughed, Ohhhh, Drea, you’re so funny. You’re not in kindergarten, you know. Here in the big leagues we call them men and women. Through his laughter, I detected a hint of condescension in his tone which I did not like at all. Goddamn medical doctors. They’re all the same. "Anyway, he’s a ‘boy,’ Danny chuckled. From San Antonio I think. My neck of the woods." He grinned and stretched his lovely muscular arms above his head conspicuously.

Behind his back, Taylor mouthed to me, "He totally wants you."

"Really?" I said with my eyebrows. I am always completely oblivious to men’s advances. This is probably because I know the Secret of Life. Listen closely, my children, and I’ll share it with you. It goes a little something like this (ahem): all people are shit bags (myself included) and all people do shitty things to each other, especially when they like each other, so why even bother?

All of a sudden, Danny slapped his palm to his forehead in an exaggerated gesture of forgetfulness. Oh my God! I can’t believe I didn’t tell you guys! We got another Vampire body!

I pulled my feet off the table abruptly, and Taylor set his coffee down so fast that a little geyser of caffeinated deliciousness spurted out of the to-go lid. "What?"

Yeah, just came in. A man this time; some gay dude from Brooklyn. Otherwise, same deal as before: two puncture wounds on the neck, stake through the heart, no blood anywhere at the scene or on the body.

Holy fuckin’ shit! I was freaking out. Are you serious?

Serious as cancer. He glanced at his watch. Speaking of which, I have to autopsy an alleged medical malpractice death in five minutes, so I’d better head. Seeya, Drea. He actually winked at me as he left. Um…as if I had time to think about hot guys at a time like this!

I looked at Taylor with mouth agape. Can you believe this? It’s unbe-frickin’-lievable!

Taylor looked uncharacteristically serious. That’s not all it is. You realize what this means, right?

I shrugged, palms up. It means New York City is dealing with some batshit loony wearing vampire teeth and running around stabbing people with stakes?

He frowned. No, Drea. It means New York City is dealing with a serial killer.

Chapter 5.

Every Tuesday after work, I have my weekly phone date with my mother. It’s kind of a farce, really–and a pathetic one, at that–given that we haven’t seen each other in over ten years, and that our phone conversations typically consist of platitudes on her end and noncommittal grunts on mine. But we started the damn tradition way back in my junior year of college, and my mother is a sucker for tradition. I can’t imagine that she actually enjoys the conversations: I mean, there’s only so many times you can ask a person what’s new in the land of the dead and regale them with the latest news from Guilford, Connecticut. It’s always the same shit, just a different day. Well, sometimes my dad gets on the line and says a few words. But that’s a rare treat. I always hang up the phone feeling depressed and mildly guilty.

On this particular phone date, though, we actually had something to talk about. "We’ve been reading all about these Vampire Murders in the Times," my mother was saying. My parents are members of that elite caste of upper-middle-class non-New Yorkers who have the New York Times delivered to their doorstep. It sounds just awful!

Tell me about it, I said, Work has been a fuckin’ shit show all week.

I heard some commotion on the other end of the line, and suddenly my father’s unmistakable baritone came booming through, Andrea Arnett! You watch your mouth!

I groaned, Mooooom, did you put me on speaker phone?!

I could hear her protesting feebly as my dad kept ranting on in the background, You are a grown woman, Andrea, not a rebellious teenager, he was saying. You are a well-bred, well-educated professional. I knew the rest of the rant by heart, and he and I said the next line in perfect unison:

And anyone with a vocabulary like yours does not need to fall back on profanity!

Part of me wanted to laugh, but the rest of me spontaneously regressed into a whiny sixteen-year-old version of myself. Daaaaaad, I wailed, I worked with the military for two years; it’s force of habit, everybody cusses!

"I was in the military for two years, and you don’t hear me swearing."

But Daaaaaaaad, I was utterly disgusted with my own whining, but what could I do? All parents have this unimpeachable ability to shrink their grown offspring back to tiny children at their every whim. I work at a morgue! I see a lot of crap! I mean, I scrape the rotting flesh off of dead criminals for chrissakes, so if I have a gutter mouth, it only makes sense, ’cause I work in the gutter! I mean, literally, I do, Dad–remember that one time when Forester made me wet-screen a whole block of the New York City sewer?

But he had already abandoned the speaker phone–it was, after all, a device that seemed newfangled and unnecessary to his Luddite sensibilities. I shook my head. But before my mother picked up the phone to turn it off speaker, I swear to God I heard my dad returning to his usual dinnertime post at the gas range, picking up his wooden spoon, and starting to stir a pan of meat sauce. It may have been my imagination, but it sounded so real, so familiar, that in an instant I was a kid again, before the Big Blowup, back in my parents’ cozy colonial New England kitchen, tiptoeing across the uneven floor to see what Dad was cooking, and watching him duck his head to go through the tiny pantry doorway that had been built centuries ago for a different breed of American. I was hit with an attack of homesickness more acute than I’d felt in years.

Andrea? my mother was back on the phone. You’re taking care of yourself, aren’t you?

I brushed aside my wave of nostalgia like an unruly strand of hair. Yeah mom, of course. I always do.

You know, being a single woman in New York City can be dangerous. Are you seeing anyone?

I heaved a huge sigh. "No, mom, I’m not seeing anyone. I haven’t been seeing anyone since I kicked Kevin out. And that was almost a year ago, in case you’re counting."

Well, what about that Danny person you were telling me about? He sounded nice.

I froze. Then grimaced. Then shook my head in awe. That was just too frickin’ weird. I mean, how did she do that? I haven’t seen my mom in years, and I could only have mentioned Danny Rodriguez to her once, twice tops, in talking about the latest crop of pathology fellows. And now here she was throwing him in my face, on the very day Taylor told me Danny wants to jump my bones? How do moms have that sixth sense about men in their daughters’ lives? And why, oh why do they use that extra sense to torment us?

I contemplated ignoring her, but ultimately I knew that resistance to her mom powers was futile. I sighed again. No, Mom. I’m not interested in Danny. He’s…nice. He really is. He’s just…not my type.

When I heard the double sigh on the other end of the line, I realized that Mom had never actually turned off the speaker phone. Well, who is your type? my father asked gently. Aragorn? Beowulf? They’re fiction, Drea.

I felt the hole in my heart open up again. God, I missed them. I actually missed them. And after all the shit they put me through. Maybe it’s just taken me ten years to realize that even though they dumped me like a sack of trash when I chose state school over the Ivy League, they’re still decent people.

Maybe.

My dad’s mother was born in England–moved over here with my gramps after the war. She was foolish and innocent. He was a career Navy NCO from Texas who knew a pretty young thing when he saw one. My dad was born a few years later. My gramma was an absolute saint, and for whatever reason, she sure loved the good old