Van Hell v2.0 Chapter Two

Van Hell v2.0 Chapter Two

Chapter Two: The Murder of Joseph Skiner

This was the third death in less than a month for me.

I might not have been so angry had the deaths been my doing, but the truth was, I had never killed another living human being.

Vampires though…

…they were a different story.

As I skirted the edge of the police tape line that was set up on the corner of 17th street, I let my eyes wander to a uniform who stood off a few feet from the door to gun shop.

His eyes met mine and he couldn’t help but stare at me with wide eyes.

I wasn’t conceited.

He looked at me, not like a male appraising a female, but like a deer staring into the eyes of a wolf in the woods.

I couldn’t blame him. Human’s tend to have a natural instinct to avoid danger.

The thought brought a smirk to my face, and I should have known better than to do that. His throat convulsed as he swallowed nervously.

Rookie. I chided in my mind and ran my hand up into my dark, scarlet hair. It slid over my shoulders and this time he stared for another reason altogether.

Definitely a rookie. He had no idea who I was.

I reached down and pulled the tape up a little so I could cross under it and into the forbidden zone of the scene. My eyes strayed to his as I did and then they widened suddenly. He must have been hoping no one would cross his yellow line tonight.

Poor guy.

As I lingered in my spot for a moment, he stood there debating in his mind. He wasn’t sure what to do. Finally though, he took a step forward and I took a step to meet him. He needed to stop being so hesitant. I would bet money that he was an awkward dater. If he’d even ever been on a date that was.

As we met in the middle of the ring of police tape, I took a quick assessment of him. He was average height, a couple inches over me at 5’8”. Maybe 5’10”. He was lean like a swimmer, but he was broad in the chest making him seem a bit odd shaped. His hair was blonde and cropped short like Hitler’s idea of perfection, but his eyes were green. He’d have been one for the reject line.

His name plate read Starrington. A strong name. I bet the Starrington family was full of cops and military men.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but no one is allowed past-”

I cut him off there with the simple action of moving past him without a word.

Again, he hesitated. A bad move on his part. Had I been the real bad guy he would have been a goner.

And then he did something much more ignorant.

He reached out and grabbed my arm just above my elbow.

“I’m going to have to ask you to step back behind the police line, Ma’am. This is a crime scene.”

Ma’am. I should have been offended by that alone.

“I think I have some right to know what happened here.” I stated coldly over my shoulder to him and I was surprised how level my voice came out. He flinched.

Maybe he sensed the razor’s edge there under my words.

For another moment he seemed unsure of what to do or say. When he spoke again, his voice was shaky. “Are you…Mr. Skiner’s daughter?”

Nervous shit. I chided.

“No.” My words cut him again when I spoke. But perhaps what really made him jump was the indifference in my voice.

He was getting quicker though and he corrected his momentary shock. “Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Civilians are not allowed into the crime scene. This is a secure area.”

Not very secure, it would seem. I kept that last bit to myself as I pulled my arm from his hold. “I’m not a civ.” I corrected and moved to step past him again.

He blocked me with his body. “Please, Miss. You don’t want to see this.”

I paused at that. Maybe he was right. I really didn’t want to see what lay in the gun shop, but if Joe’s death really had anything to do with me then I owed it to him.

“How was he killed?” I asked. Starrington looked around as if for back up.

“I…can’t divulge that, Ma’am.”

“My name is Nikolai.” I corrected him. He flinched again like a scared dog. Too jumpy.

“Nikolai…as in…you’re…?” His voice trailed off.

“Yeah.”

His mouth opened in a small “o” of amazement. “Nikolai Van Helsing…I didn’t think…I mean…You don’t honestly hunt vampires?” His voice lowered as he spoke that last.

I looked at him blankly, voice still level as I repeated myself. “Yeah.”

He seemed to get annoyed then. Maybe because he didn’t like how elaborate my answer to his question was. “But Skiner wasn’t killed by a vampire. You have no jurisdiction here. So you need to move your ass off my crime scene.”

Ah, so it was his crime scene now. “How do you know it wasn’t a vampire?” I asked curiously.

Starrington huffed his chest out indignantly. “Because he wasn’t bitten.”

I walked past him again. “I wasn’t aware that was a prerequisite to being murdered by a vampire.”

I was starting to ruffle some feathers now. He grabbed my arm again, this time harder. Good. He wasn’t so scared now…though perhaps he really should have been with the knowledge of my name. “You can’t go in there.”

“I suggest you take your hand off of me before-”

“Starrington, what is going on here!?” I turned at the boom of the voice, recognizing it instantly.

“Officer Tandy.” I nodded to the older, mustached officer. He was heavily set into his uniform these days, but with the growth of beard on his face he looked more like the bear of a man I had known in my younger days.

Ted Tandy was a good friend of my father back then. And he was still a good man from the looks of it.

“Nikolai? What are you doing here, dear? Jack, let the girl go.” Tandy slapped the young man upside the head sharply and Starrington reluctantly obeyed.

“I heard about Joe.” I said simply and Ted frowned down at me, his salt and pepper mustache twitching with unease.

“Joe’s wife doesn’t even know yet…how did you find out?” Always the cop even when we hadn’t seen each other in years.

“I have my sources.” I confided and he looked reluctant to let things go at that. He sighed.

“It’s not pretty, Nikki...” Ted said softly, trying to usher me back to the tape line.

I didn’t let him herd me. I stood my ground. “Then save me the sight. What happened to him?”

Again, Ted sighed. Starrington looked to him anxiously as the older cop spoke once more. “We aren’t sure yet. It looks like some sort of ritual killing.”

I was silent as I pondered that. “What kind of ritual?”

Ted looked me over, assessing my reaction as he spoke. “Possibly Satanic…”

I kept my face unreadable as I processed that. “…I need to see him, Ted. Please.”

The officer sighed once more, sounding forlorn. “I can’t let you, Nikki. You shouldn’t even be near this area right now.”

“They suspect me, don’t they?”

“Now, I never said that-”

I cut him off. “But it’s the truth. You have to look at me, Tandy. It’s your job. At least let me see what I’m up against though.”

He looked reluctant, just like Starrington had at first, but this was no mere hesitation. He was torn between old friendships and relations to my family and what he needed to do for his job.

“Please, Ted. If it were my father standing where I am you would let him see.” I twisted that knife, though I knew I shouldn’t have. He was a good man, but sometimes you have to nudge people in the right direction to get what you want.

He drew all the air he could into his lungs then made his way toward the door of the building.

I followed him in, Starrington making up the tail of our little group as if he were watching to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. “She better not touch anything.” He muttered and I don’t think he really meant me to hear him.

I ignored him as we came into the shop. The shelves(though they weren’t normally very tidy to begin with) were strewn this way and that. Bullets and shells littered the floor, spilling from their boxes. The showcases had been smashed open, glass laying like a thin layer of snow over the room. Someone seemed to have been quite angry.

A wolf perhaps? They tended to throw themselves into these sorts of violent fits. Maybe a new vampire could have done this damage.

But then I saw Joe and all thoughts of wolves and fresh vampires left my mind.

He was behind the counter, tacked to the wall like a new product on display. Or, more definitively, he had been stabbed to the wall, crucified upside down.

His arms were spread out to the sides, staked in place with twin daggers. They even still had the price tags still hanging from the hilts.

I shook my head as I took in the scene. Blood coated the wall behind him when it had run from his wrists. It would have taken him hours to die from them alone.

Other than the wrists, I saw no other injuries, until I stepped closer across the glass-covered floor. The tips of his thumbs and fingers were missing, cut as if they’d been removed one by one. He’d been tortured for some reason before he’d been killed. But why? That question troubled me.

Then I was distracted by something else. His chest seemed caved in under his shirt, hollow.

It was just like how Jay had been killed. They’d crushed his ribs, beaten him so hard that his lungs had collapsed in his chest. This was the same murderer…or murderers.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt a hand settle on my shoulder. I turned to see Starrington looking at me curiously, his hand still resting on me. “A bit jumpy for a hunter, aren’t you?”

I narrowed my eyes on him and shrugged off his hand.

Ted stepped closer to the body then, shaking his head at the sight. “Joe was a good man…even if his kids didn’t hang around much after the divorce. He still was a good guy.” He was talking aloud, mostly to himself I figured, but I needed answers.

“You can’t honestly think I did this?”

Ted looked at me sadly. “It doesn’t matter what I think, Nikki. The detectives in charge of this case are still going to look at you.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him, Ted…you know it. I have no motive. He supplied all my tools, why bite the hand that feeds you?” I reasoned.

He didn’t look at me as he continued speaking. “They have their suspicions about you, Nikolai. You must understand that. Even as secure as your files are, the FBI can still get into them.”

Starrington looked between us, a little confused with the line of our conversation, but I knew what Tandy was getting at.

“There’s nothing in my files that can incriminate me, Ted. Everything was cleaned when I turned 18 and the important things were never on record to begin with.”

“Are you sure about that?”

The way he said that made me wonder. What could be on my records that had not been erased? My mind ran quickly back over the years in search of anything they could use. I could think of nothing.

“Not unless they plant something, Ted…” I paused to ponder that as I narrowed my eyes on Ted’s back once more and he turned to me as if I’d found my answer. “Are you telling me there’s dirty cops I need to worry about?”

“I’m saying I wouldn’t trust anyone at the current time…” He walked back toward me, nodded to Starrington to let me go then they both walked me out toward the door.

As the rookie cop took the lead once more and made to return to his post, Ted stopped me, pulling me in for a quick, friendly hug.

As he did, he whispered something very quickly for me against the top of my head. “They cut his tongue out, just like with the other ones. I think whoever did it might be pissed that they’re giving you info. Try to figure out who could have a motive to stop you from doing your job.”

With that, he let me go and I nodded before I headed past Starrington and toward the tapeline again. He lifted it for me this time and let me pass under. I nodded my thanks to him, but he looked disapprovingly away.

Maybe he thought I should have been more shaken up at the crime scene. Maybe I should have been like any other girl and screamed…cried…thrown up…or at least went faint at the gruesome sight.

I smirked at the thought for a moment, then my expression dropped to a frown as I made my way through the small crowd of reporters and onlookers still huddled around behind the police line, waiting for the body to be brought out.

Who would want to stop me from doing my job? I could think of a lot of people.

Who would go to the extreme of killing anyone who helped me? The answer was surprisingly simple.

All of them.