the vampire with the dragon tattoo by j.r. rain

Author:j.r. rain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: mystery, fantasy, horror, suspense, vampires
Published: 2010-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

I was sitting in a Starbucks a few streets away.

Adrenalin was still pumping through me. I still felt a strong desire to kick someone’s ass. The name Roy popped into my mind. Maybe later.

I had no clue what was going on, and that was the frustrating part. I’ve been frustrated on cases before, trust me, but this one was taking the cake.

Seriously, what the fuck was going on?

Sipping on a latte of some sort and eating a scone of some sort, I waited while my laptop fired up. Starbucks was mostly empty. No surprise there since it was coming on to midnight. My hands were still shaking a little. Adrenalin does that to you. Sometimes it takes me a little while to come down from my ass-kicking high.

Finally online, I did a quick Google search and came up with nothing. I sensed a very thorough beating in Roy’s immediate future. If that weird, blood-sucking asshole lied to me….

A few tries later, after trying different keywords, I came upon the article I wanted. For now, Roy was spared.

The article was in the L.A. Times. There had, indeed, been a car fire in Echo Park, one that had burned nearly half the hillside. Two charred bodies had been found inside a Cadillac. No indication of foul play, and no mention of the daughter who had witnessed the attack. The article gave the couple’s names: Jeremy and Tonya Fortune.

I quickly accessed my various data mining websites, proprietary sites available only to licensed private investigators, and found them soon enough. Jeremy and Tonya Fortune out of Reseda, California. The valley. About an hour north of Los Angeles. It had to be them because all their personal information abruptly stopped three years ago. I even verified the Cadillac.

I dug deeper.

Jeremy and Tonya Fortune had one daughter. Valerie Fortune.

Valerie? Veronica?

It was her, I knew it. Why she had changed her name, I didn’t know. Just as I didn’t know why she had not come forward to report her parents’ murder.

Maybe she feared no one would believe her.

Believe what? That a vampire killed her parents? If so, then she was right. No one would have believed her.

I checked her date of birth, then did the math. Valerie—or Veronica—was indeed seventeen. Which put her at fourteen at the time of her parents’ death.

So what did I have here?

Two dead bodies, and a girl who witnessed something. What she witnessed, exactly, I didn’t know. But a car with her parents inside didn’t just go up in flames on its own.

I sat back and drummed my fingers on the table. Veronica’s story was credible. But it was hearsay. I needed to talk to the source.

I needed to find Veronica. Or Valerie.

I packed up my laptop, polished off the latte thingy, and decided to start fresh in the morning.

After all, I had had enough of vampires for one night.

Hell, for a lifetime.

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