It wasn't like there'd been a blood bath in the washroom, so to speak. But it was certainly more than if the man had nicked himself while shaving. The medicine cabinet door wasn't just ajar, but hanging from a single hinge, and if Lucifer had to guess, he'd say that Mark had managed to hit his head against the door when falling. Which would, of course, result in an alarming amount of blood in the sink and dripping down to the floor. Head wounds were like that—bloody but hopefully superficial.
If it weren't for the bloody footprint,Lucifer would almost assume that Mark had simply fallen and hit his head. But there was a bloody footprint, a grotesquely large boot print, to be exact. And while Mark could certainly have had very large feet, Lucifer didn't think the man would be in the washroom wearing boots. Lucifer himself was in sock feet because of Florence's expectations.
He knelt down to examine the boot print. It wasn't excessively large, but big enough that he was sure whoever it belonged to shopped at a specialty store. It was just so shocking because it was outlined in blood on an otherwise immaculately clean white tile floor. He stood back up before his curiosity caused him to touch the blood, knowing Ella would be very upset if he got his fingerprints all over the evidence.
He knew himself well enough that he'd touch everything he could. And while there was no police here to give him hell for touching things, he couldn't bear the idea of ruining evidence before everyone else had the opportunity to see it. Perhaps the Detective had managed to beat that one into him with her incessant disappointment in him.
"Viking!" he called out. "Ms. Lopez! I do believe you should come see this."
Silence met his words and a moment later he could hear everyone padding down the hall toward him. He turned to greet everyone, beaming as Eric glanced in the washroom first. "I do believe Ms. Davis's halfling was first accosted here before being chased through to the living room. Don't you think?"
Eric's eyes fell to the sink, seeing the drying blood there. His nostrils flared for a moment and he was suddenly beside Lucifer, leaning down to get a good whiff of the blood there. A feminine growl came from the doorway, where Florence showed her displeasure in Eric scenting her lover. The growl turned deeper when Eric grew still and then sniffed again, eyes closing as if enjoying himself immensely.
"He is mine!" Florence snarled, pulling Eric from his examination of the blood, fangs flashing as she threatened the taller and much older vampire.
"Did I say I wanted him?" Eric growled back, fangs out too.
"You didn't fucking have to!"
Lucifer felt far too close to the clashing vampires, but as they growled at each other, his gaze fell upon Ella in the hallway, her mouth a tiny 'o' of surprise as she watched the two supernatural creatures threaten to ruin a perfectly good crime scene. Lucifer might be in danger himself, but Ella most certainly was. Vampires were strong—lethally strong. And these two seemed hellbent on showing the other who was in charge.
Lucifer seemed to dance around the two of them as they postured, growls filling the air, his goal to reach the door and hurry Ella back down the hall and let the vampires work this out alone. Of course, Ella didn't want to move, digging in her heels as he tried to lead her away from the fight that was about to happen.
"Lucifer, you've got to do something!" Ella said, trying to shake out of his grip. "They're going to ruin the evidence!"
Lucifer sighed when she continued to struggle. She had a point and besides, he didn't want Eric to lose his cool. The vampire got moody when he let his temper slip, grouching about how he was doomed to Hell if he didn't learn how to control his immoral side.
He grudgingly let the bubbly woman go and turned back to the washroom, happy to see that the two vampires were still just squaring off in the small confines of the room. No one had broken skin yet and aside from the bloody boot print being smudged, they hadn't marred Ella's crime scene just yet. He barred Ella's entry back into the room with a protective arm against the doorframe.
"Viking," Lucifer started, his voice warm and hopefully distracting. "Perhaps we need some fresh air, yes?"
But there was no response from Eric, the blonde vampire posturing against the smaller, younger woman, clearly lost to his anger. She, too, was clearly in no mood to be reasoned with, which was beyond Lucifer. She'd come to them looking for help; Eric had told her already he had no interest in her halfling. For a species that revelled in promiscuity, the jealousy about lovers and favoured pets was astronomical in its absurdity.
Either be monogamous or not, as far as Lucifer was concerned. But if you were going to take on multiple lovers, you should be extending that courtesy to your lovers as well. He felt special, knowing that Eric saw him as belonging to him, but he'd be damned if he'd let the Viking refuse to let him share in the fun of other lovers—and he expected the same of the Viking back.
"Ms. Davis, my dear," Lucifer tried again, hoping he could gain the other vampire's attention at least. Admittedly, Eric was always hot under the collar, but hopefully Florence could at least be reasoned with. "Perhaps we can remove ourselves to the dining room and discuss things?"
"I will not have this interloper come to my home, sniff out my Mark, and then have him stolen from me!" Florence hissed.
"I don't need your fucking halfling," Eric ground out, and Lucifer decided that no, Eric was doing perfectly fine all things considered. He hadn't attacked Florence, he was simply standing his ground. Perhaps it was Lucifer who hadn't given the Viking the benefit of the doubt when he'd tried rushing Ella away from the confrontation. "I've already had my fill of halfling blood. Full fairy, too." The growl that followed that sentence seemed almost a whine of sound. Eric was struggling with his emotions, and not all of them were anger apparently. "Even if it lets me see the sun, no matter how brief."
Lucifer blinked in shock at this revelation. Eric had seen the sun—because of Sookie Stackhouse and her special fairy blood?
His words seemed to have done the trick though, diffusing the situation as Florence rocked back on her heels, eyes wide in surprise and wonder. "His blood can let me see the sun?" she asked.
"Just for a few brief minutes," Eric said, inclining his head toward the sink where the streaks of drying blood remained. "But he is part fairy. He smells like Sookie."
"And drinking her blood allowed you to see the sun?" Florence asked, a new kind of desperation in her voice. The kind borne of a hundred years of moonlight.
"Just for a few minutes," Eric said. "A few glorious minutes." He turned thoughtful, the tension between the vampires from moments before seeming to just drop away. "A full fairy will give you a few hours." Lucifer watched as Eric seemed to freeze to the spot, looking inward at memories that Lucifer had never been privy too.
Sookie, the waitress from Bon Temps—the missing waitress from Bon Temps—could bloody well give Eric the sun? What on Dad's green earth was Eric Northman doing entertaining the devil instead? Because the stupid little waitress had told him no?
Oh, but if Lucifer could give his Viking prince the sun, he'd do it in a heartbeat.
It took Lucifer a few moments, and Ella's jostling of him, to bring him back to the present, the devil having lost himself in thoughts of bringing light to a vampire's eternal darkness. If there was a way, he decided, he'd make it happen. But that was a problem for a different day. Currently he had two vampires who had managed to diffuse their anger all on their own—not to mention a crime scene that Ella was clearly desperate to get her hands on.
"If you guys are finished squabbling, can I take a look around?" Ella asked, finally wedging herself between Lucifer and the door jamb.
Both vampires gave her a withering look but when she ignored them both, they each left the washroom to give the small human space to look the place over.
Lucifer had no idea where she'd gotten crime scene gloves, but she was slapping them on her hands as she leaned over the sink to look at the blood splatters there. "Do you keep gloves in your back pocket?" Lucifer asked, stepping across the threshold to study her as she studied evidence.
"Hey, you never know when you might come across something you don't want to get your fingerprints on," Ella said. "For legal reasons or illegal ones." She gave Lucifer a knowing smile, which he couldn't help but return.
She was always full of surprises and Lucifer constantly had to remind himself that she wasn't as innocent as she appeared to be. It was just incredibly hard to see her as anything but a little sister—it was the vibes she gave off.
But she was certainly good at her job.
As Ella studied the sink and then leaned down to get a good look at the bloody footprint, it seemed as if everyone else held their breath. She stood back up, frowning at the vampires. "I wish you wouldn't have ruined the evidence by stepping all over it. We'll never know what size shoe it was."
"Ridiculously big," Lucifer supplied helpfully, but Ella just sighed and shook her head. "Think specialty shop big."
"I get that," Ella agreed. "But I can't tell the exact size and the tread is completely ruined—so even if you went to a specialty shop to inquire, you wouldn't even know where to begin. That means a lost lead."
Lucifer frowned, realizing Ella was right. If they'd managed to catalogue that footprint before the vampires had squared off and smudged it, they could have gone to specialty shops looking for the shoe and asking questions about potential buyers of said shoe.
Damn it all to Hell. It was only their first case and already they were screwing things up.
Ella turned back to the sink, a finger sticking out to touch a dry spot of blood and then a sticky little pool of it that sat at the bottom of the sink. "I believe this has been here for at least a minimum of twenty-four hours," she said, lifting the finger to look at the coagulated mess on her gloved fingertip. She glanced at Florence. "Why did you wait a full day?"
"Aside from the obvious?" Florence asked, deadpan.
It took her a moment, but then Ella blushed, looking chastened. "Right, duh. I'm such an idiot. I guess I didn't think about that, did I? It must be annoying, not being able to go out during the day."
"It can be . . . stifling," Florence said softly.
"I bet. All the things you can't do."
Florence gave a small smile to Ella. "That's why we make friends with humans."
Ella's eyebrows shot up in understanding. "Ahh, I get it. Human friends can help you out." She smiled to herself as she turned back to examining the washroom. "It must be so much easier now that you're out of the coffin. And with delivery services becoming a thing."
Ella examined the medicine cabinet, still hanging open by one hinge. "If I had to guess, I'd say he either fell, or more likely was pushed, into this." She moved the door carefully, the final hinge creaking in protest. "Yup. See? Blood and hair right here." She pointed but didn't seem to care if anyone was watching, as she moved on to looking at the sink again.
"He lost a lot of blood, but that's common. I'm sure he's fine but he definitely has a splitting headache." She paused, squinting at the faucets. "What on earth is this?" She leaned forward, but only she was close enough to notice whatever was different about the blood on the tap.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out—a cotton swab.
Did she wander L.A. on her time off looking for crime scenes to crash?
But even as Lucifer wondered at her preparedness, he couldn't help but come closer, watching as she dipped the swab into tiny bit of gunk sticking to what should have been a spotlessly clean faucet. Ella held the swab up triumphantly, as if she'd found some strange prize. "Look at this. It freaking looks like algae, don't you think?"
Lucifer leaned in, eyeing the green stuff threatening to drip off of the swab. He wasn't necessarily versed in green ooky things, but he had to agree with her—it did look like something you'd see clinging to the bottom of the boardwalk.
"What on earth would this be doing here?" Lucifer asked, reaching out to grab the swab from Ella. She made a tut-tut sound and pulled it away from him, clearly not wanting him to touch her precious evidence.
Lucifer sighed in exasperation and moved into her space until she gave way, so he could bend down and examine the green gunk still on the faucet. Upon closer inspection, while it initially looked like algae, Lucifer was pretty sure it wasn't . . . quite that. It was too thick, and it seemed far less slimy than the stuff he'd accidentally brush up against at the beaches. If it was algae, it wasn't the stuff that grew close to the shore anyway.
He reached out to touch it, finding it similar to the blood in that it was drying out slowly. Whatever it was, it had probably been sitting on the faucet just as long as the blood. "I wonder how something like this could show up here," he mused. "It's not like you live close to the beach, Ms. Davis."
Ella was examining the shower curtain, tugging at it to look at the dark blue material from different angles. "There's a lot more over here," she said. She glanced over at the vampires looming in the doorway. "Please tell me you keep your shower clean and this isn't just some nasty result of laziness."
Florence sneered at her as only a vampire could—the look always came with a hiss, Lucifer decided. Were they all like that or was Florence just eerily like Lucifer's Viking? Every vampire he'd met was quick to get angry though.
"Look around you. Does this apartment look like we'd let algae and fungus grow in our tub?"
Ella seemed to nod in agreement at that, not deterred at all by the other woman's attitude. "Good point," she said, but that didn't stop her from peeking around the shower curtain into the tub to make sure it was clean back there. When she turned back around she simply shrugged. "Only thing I can think is that the assailant was covered in it. But why would someone be covered in algae?"
"Is it actually algae?" Lucifer asked.
Ella gave him another shrug, before dipping a hand in her pocket to get out a baggy—so she could safely put her cotton swab away. "I can't tell for sure, but I can certainly get it checked out at the lab."
"I thought we agreed no police involvement," Florence said defensively as Eric came into the tiny room to make it feel crammed full of too many people. Lucifer was tempted to get too close to the vampire, but he let him slip past toward the back of the washroom where Eric began to examine the gunk coating the shower curtain.
Ella gave a chuckle. "Just because I send it to the lab doesn't mean any detective has to know about it. I've got connections. They know when to keep mum if I ask them." She looked about the room and frowned. "Besides, I think you're right. The police totally racially profile the vamps in this city. If you say Mark is physically fine, I don't see an issue keeping this between friends. Assuming Lucifer and his vampire friend can actually help."
"That's the plan!" Lucifer said brightly.
Eric leaned in toward the shower curtain and Lucifer watched as he took a big sniff—and then recoiled in disgust. "What the hell is that smell?" he asked, before narrowing his eyes and taking another sniff. He snarled at the curtain as if it offended him. "Whatever the fuck that is, it's sure as hell not your average algae," he said.
"Really?" Ella asked, surprised. She opened her sealed baggy and took a whiff, but she just shook her head in disappointment. "I don't smell it."
Likewise, Lucifer got into Eric's personal space so he could try to sniff out the apparent smell, but there was nothing . . . just the scent of soap from the day to day use of the shower. He gave Eric an inquisitive look.
Eric sighed in frustration and suddenly, vampire quick, he pulled the baggy from Ella's hands and strode to the door, shoving it at Florence. "Smell this."
Florence hesitated, but the two vampires exchanged a hostile look and she finally acquiesced, her body language showing she was bending to the stronger vampire's will, even if she hated to. The sound of the baggy was loud as everyone watched her bring it to her face and delicately breathed in. A second a later, she'd shoved the baggy back into Eric's hands. "That's disgusting," she said.
Lucifer looked back to the shower curtain with its blotches of the stuff. "What does it smell like?" he asked, genuinely curious—about what it smelled like . . . but also why he couldn't smell it. Was a vampire's sense of smell that much more refined than his?
Eric closed the baggy again before extending a long arm for Ella to take it back. "It's like seafood that's gone bad . . . only darker somehow. It's familiar, but I can't quite place it. I swear, I've smelled something like it before . . ."
"Rancid fish?" Lucifer asked, but try as he might, he simply couldn't detect even a faint whiff of what Eric had described.
"I can't smell it either, Lucifer. Maybe vampires just have weird noses." Ella resealed the baggy and before someone could steal it from her again, it slid into her pocket for safekeeping. "Either way, if it smells like the ocean, even the gross part, it does lend to the idea it might be an algae of some kind. Let me do some digging, see if we can't figure out what precisely it is."
"What for?" Florence asked. "I'd rather you be tracking Mark down . . ."
"If this green goo is from the attacker," Lucifer soothed, "it might help us track down where he was before he came here. It could very well be from where he lives, perhaps where he's taken your human."
Ella was nodding. "With a bit of luck, this could be a particular algae—and if it's rare, it could help narrow down a location."
Florence let out a growl of discontent. "And until then?" she asked, giving both Lucifer and Eric an impatient look. "What will you do to find my Mark?"
Lucifer rocked forward. "Well, first we can leave this washroom."
He motioned for everyone to get out of the tiny confines and he even turned off the light as he herded everyone toward the dining room. "Secondly, as we're at a bit of a dead end here, Mr. Northman and I will head out to Louisiana first thing this morning so we can continue the investigation there."
Florence hissed at that. "How will that help me?" she asked.
Lucifer pulled a chair out from the table and pointedly sat down, waiting for everyone else to join him. Ella was the first to do so, nearly bouncing into a seat while the two vampires stalked to opposite ends of the table to sit as far apart as they could.
"We are going to Louisiana because Mark is not the only missing halfling," Lucifer announced once he had everyone where he wanted them to be. "While the disappearances are far apart, if Mr. Northman's theory is correct, it would only make sense to go investigate Ms. Stackhouse's disappearance as well. The likelihood that they're connected if very strong."
"I'm going whether you want me to or not," Eric ground out from his end of the table.
"Yes, yes, Viking. We're going. The tickets have been bought." Lucifer refrained from frowning—but only just. He focused on Florence instead, trying to cast his worries aside. "Mr. Northman knows everyone in Louisiana. Perhaps with his connections, we might be able to find out more about these disappearances."
Florence huffed her grudging agreement.
"Rest assured, Ms. Davis. We will do everything in our power to bring the halflings home. In the meantime, take comfort in the fact you can feel he has not come to any physical or psychological harm. Wherever he is, he's safe."
"For now," Florence replied.
A low growl came from Eric at her words.
"We'll find them," Lucifer said. "I promise."
