Page 86 of Midnight Coven

Vampires also didn’t even leave fingerprints very easily. Vampires didn’t have oil on their fingers to smudge the tips against things they touched the way humans did. They also had stone cold skin, so a heat signature tracker couldn’t pick up their fingerprints that way.

That put the cops mostly back in the gumshoe days.

When it came to finding a murderous vamp, they often went fairly low-tech.

They also had to rely on more surface characteristics.

The vampire’s facial features, height, build, mannerisms, any accents they might have, voice, shoe prints of their favorite shoe brand, payment records, credit accounts, residency records. They couldn’t use DNA. They couldn’t use blood type. They couldn’t use retinal scans, since vampire eyes were too similar to one another, and also had a tendency to change frequently, depending on the vampire’s mood.

They couldn’t even use body scans, since vampires were too cold.

No eyecolor,of course, since that was all gone.

They needed to know what this asshole looked like.

That, or they needed his name.

Luckily, if Nick’s dreams were accurate, he should be fairly conspicuous.

The weird hat, the bandages, the all-black clothes.

Of course, that might all be diversion. He might only wear those things for the actual murders, then shed them to look more normal when he wasn’t on a kill.

Nick didn’t think so, though.

He was pretty sure that guy was weird all the time, everywhere.

He could smell the blood better now.

He could smell where the largest concentration had sunk into a thick, pile carpet on the floor above. He already knew that rug was located inside the room where Jordan told them to go. From the scents, the whole family had been killed in there.

Unlike the Manhattan household, where the bodies had been scattered around the house, this time, he’d lured them all to a single location.

That struck Nick as strange.

It wasn’t the only thing that was strange, however.

It wasn’t even the weirdest thing.

Nick still didn’t smell a single drop of blood outside that kill room. Not on the steps or landing, not in the corridor. Everywhere he looked and smelled, the walls and floors remained pristine. They reached the third-floor landing, and that impression only intensified.

No blood spatter. No residue from anyone’s shoes or fingers.

Nothing on the marble or wood floors in either direction.

Whoever did this, they didn’t track even aspeckof blood into the rest of the house. Not even on the carpet runner outside the door to the kill room.

Nick didn’t know how that was even possible.

Vamps, especially rogue vamps, didn’t generally clean up after themselves. They didn’t clean off floors, or walls decked with blood spray. They didn’t even bother to wash off their shoes or clothing a lot of the time. They would usually just discard those things and replace them if they got them bloody, unless they planned on going out among humans again immediately and needed to disappear in a human crowd.

They definitely didn’t carry around cleaning fluid so strong that Nick wouldn’t smell so much as a single drop anywhere in the house.

That struck him as unlikely to the point of being bizarre.

Vampires had better scenting ability than bloodhounds.

Obviously, this dickhead would know that.

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