Cooper's Passion: Scanguards Hybrids #5 (Scanguards Vampires Book 17), page 1
COOPER’S PASSION
SCANGUARDS VAMPIRES #17
SCANGUARDS HYBRIDS #5
TINA FOLSOM
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Reading Order
Also in this series
Other Books by Tina
About the Author
A Note from the Author
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Headstrong small-town Nevada sheriff’s deputy Anita Diaz follows the trail of a serial killer roaming the American West and ends up in San Francisco, where Scanguards investigator and vampire hybrid Cooper Montgomery looks into the murder of an unidentified woman. When their paths cross, handcuffs click, heads butt, and sparks fly between the two determined investigators.
As they team up to hunt the killer, Cooper knows that eventually Anita will realize that the serial killer who’s leaving exsanguinated bodies in his wake is a vampire—and that Cooper and his friends and family are too. But just how long can he keep his true identity hidden from her, once Anita begins to suspect that Cooper and his family aren’t the typical American family? When Anita stumbles upon the truth, will the sizzling sexual attraction that erupts between them be enough for her to take the risk of trusting the vampire she’s slowly falling in love with?
Copyright © 2023 Tina Folsom
Scanguards is a registered trademark.
1
“Chief wants to see you.”
Anita Diaz hung her jacket over the chair and turned to the woman who’d spoken. Like Anita, Eloise wore a uniform identifying her as a member of the Elko County Sheriff’s Department. She was ten years older than Anita and at least half a foot shorter. At five foot nine, Anita was tall for a woman and taller than some of the male officers she worked with. At the police academy, her male colleagues had seen her as competition, because her height and strength helped her outperform the male trainees in many physical disciplines. In hand-to-hand combat, she’d lifted plenty of men off their feet. They’d been embarrassed that a woman could best them. It had made her less than popular among her peers.
“Did he say what he wanted?” Anita asked tilting her head in the direction of the closed door to the sheriff’s office.
“Didn’t ask.” Eloise lowered her voice. “But he didn’t sound happy.”
“Well, better get it over with then.” Anita walked to the door and knocked briefly. When a sound akin to a bark came from inside the office, she opened the door and entered.
“You wanted to see me?”
He motioned behind her. “Close the door.”
She followed his command and looked at him. He was still handsome despite his age. At sixty-one, he could still turn a woman’s head. His tall, athletic frame, dark hair, and bronzed skin was unusual for a man his age, but he’d always looked after himself.
He rose from his chair, his jaw clenched tightly, his brown eyes piercing. “I’m disappointed in you.”
Anita sucked in a breath, her spine straightening as she steeled herself for the dressing-down that was to come. Yet, she didn’t say anything, knowing that he hated being interrupted when he was about to launch into a tirade.
“I’ve cut you a lot of slack, more than I should. Nobody else is taking the liberties you are.”
He pointed to the window that would have allowed him to look into the open-plan office outside were the blinds not drawn.
“But to misuse department resources to chase some cockamamie theory? That goes too far! Enough is enough. I warned you before not to go down that rabbit hole. There’s nothing to find there. There’s no case here.”
“But Janet Fillmore was abducted. I know it! She’s in danger.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Did I say you could speak?” He paused for a moment. “Didn’t think so.” He walked closer, his entire body looking tense. “Janet and Hank had marital issues. She left him. And why wouldn’t she? He’s a drunk and a lazy bastard. Without her business and hard work, Hank would have been out on the street a long time ago.”
Defiantly, Anita braced her hands at her hips. “I’m not saying he’s not. But I saw what I saw. She was taken.”
“Just because you saw her get into a van with a stranger, doesn’t mean she was abducted. It was probably the man she left Hank for. End of story.”
Anita filled her chest with air, ready to defend what she’d seen five weeks earlier when she’d left a local bar. But she didn’t get a chance.
“Not another word on that subject!”
“You can’t stop me from looking into these disappearances. It’s connected to Mom. I know it. She didn’t leave me. She was abducted. She would have never—”
He blanched. “Your mother left us! And she didn’t even have the guts to say good-bye.” His voice became louder with every word. “Don’t dig up the past. It’s been twenty-one years—”
“Dad, please,” she begged. “She didn’t leave us. She loved us.” Anita felt tears sting in her eyes.
José Diaz shook his head. “Stop making excuses for her. If I’d known that you would use sheriff’s department resources to chase a ghost, I would have never supported you to become a deputy.” He glared at her. “I can’t change that now, but I’m not going to show any more leniency. You’ll take two weeks of vacation, starting right now. And when you’re back on duty, you’ll follow orders. No more chasing wild theories.”
“You can’t do that! You can’t force me to take a vacation.”
“Would you rather be suspended without pay?”
Anita’s heart stopped. The threat was clear. “You wouldn’t—”
“Try me, and I’ll have your badge and gun,” he challenged, his voice a low grumble now.
Anita didn’t doubt that he meant it. After all, she was his daughter, and she’d inherited his doggedness, even though physically, she resembled her fair-skinned, blonde mother. José Diaz wouldn’t be swayed, not in the mood he was in right now. There was no talking sense into him. He’d made up his mind that Janet Fillmore had left her husband, just like Helen Diaz had left him. But somehow, Anita had to find proof to make him see the truth.
She thrust her chin up. “Fine. I’ll take a vacation.” Without waiting for his response, she turned on her heel and ripped the door open.
“Anita, it’s for your own good, and deep down you know it.”
She didn’t acknowledge his words, and instead slammed the door shut behind her. In the open-plan station, she noticed that several of her colleagues turned their heads to her. She ignored them too, snatched her uniform jacket and her bag, and stormed out of the building.
When she reached her house in the outskirts of Elko, she was still seething. She got out of the car and looked at the house. Her father had bought it shortly after her mother’s disappearance. Before that, they’d lived in Reno. José Diaz had insisted on moving away, claiming their old house held too many memories. As a nine-year-old, Anita hadn’t had a say in the matter, even though she’d wanted to stay where she felt closest to her mother. The sale of the house and the move to Elko had driven a wedge between her and her father.
When he’d married a widow after being granted a divorce in absentia from Anita’s mother, Anita had felt betrayed. But deep down, she couldn’t blame him. He was still a young man, virile, and handsome. Why wouldn’t he start a new family? When his new wife had given birth to two strapping boys within three years, the house had become too small for the growing family. They’d moved, and Anita, now a young adult, had agreed to her father’s suggestion that she stay in the house, and he and his new family moved to a larger one in the city. It gave them the physical distance they needed. Slowly, their relationship had improved.
Until today.
Anita locked the car and went inside. She was glad she lived alone now and only saw her father at the station or at his house, because it meant she didn’t have to explain why one entire wall in her living room was covered with maps, photos, printouts, and post-it notes. The map spanned five states: Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Blue and red dots were marked on the map. The blue ones indicated the disappearance of a woman, and the red ones stood for women who’d been found dead. Flanking the map on all sides were photos of women as well as information on where they were last seen and where they finally tur ned up dead.
Her father was right: she had indeed used department resources to look into the disappearances and murders of young women not just in Nevada, but also in the surrounding states. She’d realized very quickly that none of the women she’d identified were found in the same state from which they disappeared. When she’d made that connection, she’d realized she was onto something: the killer was travelling through these states, picking up women on his way, then killing and dumping them in another state. She guessed that this was by design to make it harder for local police and sheriff’s departments to connect the dots.
A Jane Doe in Nevada wouldn’t immediately be matched up with a missing person in Idaho. In addition, in the six years that Anita had found data for, the perpetrator had never abducted anyone from the same town twice. The same went for the dead bodies: each and every single one had been found in a different city. Yet, two things remained a constant, and therefore pointed to a serial killer. He only killed tall, blonde women aged between 30 and 45, and the cause of death was always the same: exsanguination.
Yet one thing gave her hope that Janet Fillmore from Elko was still alive. The serial killer kept his victims alive for six to eight weeks. The bodies that had been found in all five states had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. Janet Fillmore had disappeared five weeks earlier. She was still alive—somewhere.
Anita scrutinized the map again. If her theory was correct, the serial killer was traveling in a clockwise pattern, which meant that the missing woman from Elko would show up somewhere in Northern California. The previous year, a missing woman from Las Vegas had shown up in Oakland, California. Before that, it had been Sacramento, and before that Santa Rosa.
“Where did you go this time?” she murmured to herself and looked at the post-it notes she’d placed around Janet’s photo.
White van, it said on one. License plate: couldn’t read it; dirty. Time: 12:25 am.
She stepped closer to look at Janet’s face again. She was thirty-seven, blonde and tall. Her driver’s license had indicated that she was five foot eight, an inch shorter than Anita. Janet ran a successful business in Elko, a furniture store. She’d inherited the business from her parents, and she’d improved it to make it into a very profitable enterprise. Anita was certain that having put all this hard work into her business, she wouldn’t just leave without a word. No, Janet had been abducted. Anita removed a post-it note that said left voluntarily? and discovered another note beneath it. She’d almost forgotten about it. There’d been a sticker on the white van in which Janet had disappeared.
Sticker on van: two letters intertwined. S, F?
It had to be a logo. Maybe that of a company?
Janet sat down at her laptop and booted it up. Moments later, she did a search for logos with S and F. There were a multitude of hits. She clicked on Images. Various images all depicting the letters S and F in different fonts, colors, and configurations appeared on the screen. She started scrolling, when she stopped abruptly. The orange on the screen popped, drawing her eyes to it. This was it! This was the sticker she’d seen on the van. She clicked on it.
San Francisco Giants logo, was written below it.
Whoever had taken Janet had a connection to San Francisco. She glanced back at the map. So far, the killer had never dumped a body in San Francisco, nor had he kidnapped anybody from there either. At least not anybody who fit the profile she’d developed.
Anita knew it was a long shot, but by her estimate, Janet only had one to three weeks left, before she would show up too, dead by exsanguination. Sick bastard! This time, she had to stop him. She had to get there before he could kill her, and stop him once and for all.
And maybe then she could prove that he was the one who’d taken her mother twenty-one years earlier, and find out where he’d dumped her body. Then her father would finally have to acknowledge that her mother had loved them both and hadn’t left them like a thief in the night. It hadn’t been her choice. She’d been forced.
2
One week later
“Where’s the body?” Cooper asked as he rushed into the small command center on the first level of Scanguards’ headquarters in the Mission. Inside the room, monitors were mounted on one wall, and a large desk stood in the center, Nicholas, a twenty-nine-year-old vampire hybrid, the son of Zane, one of the meanest vampires Cooper had ever met, looked up. It was Nicholas’s week to staff the command center, which handled all incoming emergencies dealing with vampires and vampire-related crimes.
“They already removed it from the crime scene and brought it here.”
“Without doing forensics on scene? Who the fuck ordered that?”
“I figured you’d want the body removed as quickly as possible so nobody sees what state it’s in.” Nicholas thrust his chin up, now in defensive mode.
“Have I taught you nothing?” Frustrated, Cooper grunted. “Did you at least have them take photos of the crime scene?”
Nicholas shifted and clenched his jaw. “I’m not an idiot. Of course, I had them take photos. But it’s not the crime scene anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The body was dumped there. There was no blood anywhere. He must have sucked her dry somewhere else and then tossed her in that alley.”
“Who knows about this?”
“The human who found her.” Nicholas looked on a notepad on the desk. “Michael Lavine. He was on his way to a restaurant and cut through the alley. He called 9-1-1. They sent out two unis. By the time they cordoned off the scene and reported that the body was bloodless, Donnelly made sure to keep SFPD’s forensics team away from the scene, and contacted us.”
This news made him feel somewhat better. At least there were only a few people who knew about it, and with some luck they could keep this out of the newspapers. The discovery of an exsanguinated body would spark all kinds of speculations.
“Good. Is Maya already examining the body?”
Nicholas nodded. “Yes. Buffy is helping her.”
“I’ll go see them shortly. What do we know about the victim?”
Nicholas shrugged. “Not much. No ID, no jewelry, no clothes.”
Surprised, Cooper snapped his gaze back to the younger hybrid. “She was found naked?”
“Yep.”
Cooper ran a hand through his short hair. “That’ll make it harder to identify her. As soon as Maya has DNA, let’s run it through CODIS. Do you already have the fingerprints?”
“I was about to get those so I can run them through AFIS,” Nicholas said hastily. “Ahm, let me find the scanner.” He jumped up and walked to the opposite wall. He opened several drawers of the large cupboard, rummaging through them.
Cooper rolled his eyes. Nicholas still needed a lot of supervision, even though he was only three years his junior.
“I’ll be in the med center with Maya,” Cooper announced, not willing to wait until Nicholas got his act together.
“I’ll be down there in a sec,” he promised without looking over his shoulder.
Cooper left the room. He hadn’t seen Nicholas that nervous before. He knew what it meant to have to prove himself, and with a father like Zane it probably wasn’t easy for a guy like Nicholas to distinguish himself and forge his own path. Having Zane’s shadow loom over him would make anybody nervous. This was the first time Nicholas was running the command center by himself. Cooper and the older hybrids had done it many times before, but now it was time to train the younger ones so they were ready to lead when the time came.
