Sometimes being a writer is bizarre.
A friend of mine went to school for language arts, but while she was in college, she worked with campus security as a dispatcher. She moved out of state after graduation and now works with her local police force as a dispatcher.
I have a vampire who has to murder someone, like you do, and who wants to keep his privacy and anonymity intact. What else did I do? I texted my dispatcher friend and asked her if she were a vampire and wanted to get rid of a body, how might she do it? Her reply, in about twenty seconds:
“What kind of vampire am I and what powers do I have?”
This is a good friend.
My husband watches too many crime shows. After my friend suggested taking the body far from civilization and burning it, my husband insisted that dental records would direct any investigators straight to the vampire’s door. Another check with my PD friend revealed that no, that’s not the case. There are a lot of reasons the victim in question might not have dental records, a lot of reasons why no homicide investigator might be brought in, a lot of reasons, in fact, to assume the remains might never even be looked for much less found.
In fact, an internet search on the details of unsolved homicides shows that a ridiculous number of violent crimes go completely unsolved in this country. It varies widely from state to state, but the bottom line is that an average of 53% of violent crimes go unsolved in America. Some people blame it on lack of funding, some blame it on the war on drugs. I have my own political opinion on all that, but end result? A thoroughly burned corpse ain’t gonna bring no one to my vampire’s doorstep. Cremation it is.
As posted previously, I have been to my local ER to ask staff about how they would care for a strangulation victim and what sorts of injuries the person might have, called my local PD to ask about protocol for responding to a report of kidnapping, and have now run internet searches for how likely a homicide is to actually be solved.
Last month, I went to Menard’s to buy plastic sheeting to protect the hard wood floor in my house from my elderly cats peeing on it, and a saw to prune my overgrown trumpet vine.
If I’m NOT on some sort of FBI watch list, I will eat my left shoe.
