Read Chasing Daybreak (Dark of Night Book 1) for Free Online Page B

forgotten about it until I asked about the credit card, because that day Lisa was wearing one of the missing rings. She noticed it when Lisa handed the card to the waitress.”
    I was impressed. “Well done, Shane. Anything else?”
    He grinned. “She asked me out this weekend. I had to let her down gently. The poor girl was totally into me.”
    I rolled my eyes. “That’s great. Tomorrow, I’m going to see if I can find out where the Gamblers Anonymous meetings were and talk to a few people there. It’d really help if you called your computer guy tonight to see if he could track Lisa’s movements from the steakhouse using the traffic cameras in the area. Also, according to the records, she used her cell phone to call and check her home messages at a little after two o’clock. Maybe he can do his tech voodoo and pinpoint where she was when she made the call.”
    Shane nodded. His one useful connection in the vampire world was Richard Clark. Richard was over a hundred years old and could make a computer stand up and sing Jimmy Buffet songs if he wanted it to. Oh, and he was kind of evil. Like, invented Wal-Mart evil. Shane and Richard had both been changed by a vampire named Irena Tarkeroff. It sort of made them brothers.
    “Sure. I’ll pay him a visit.”
    Did I mention that Richard was extremely paranoid and reclusive? I’d asked Shane once if I could meet the tech genius, but he’d told me Richard was dangerously unstable around humans. Too many years of feeding off them had left him with little in the way of self-control. And Irena wasn’t exactly the maternal type. She tended to turn and run, leaving her newbie vampires to fend for themselves. Lucky for Shane, he’d been found right away. Richard hadn’t been so lucky. According to Shane, Richard was changed and abandoned to roam the back alleys of London, feeding off street people. He was finally captured by the local Conclave in 1889 and caged until they could calm him—over fifty years later. Now he was a hermit, content to tinker with computers from the safety of his basement beneath Conclave.
    I didn’t ask to meet him again.
    With a nod of thanks, I clicked off my desk lamp. “I’m going to bed. I’m exhausted.”
    “Yeah, you should rest. You look like crap.” Shane snickered.
    Too tired to verbally shoot back, I locked up the office, trudged upstairs to my room, and crawled into bed.
     
    When I woke up the next morning, there was a note from Shane stuck to the already-brewing coffee pot.
     
    Isabel,
    I need to talk to you about the initiation next week. Please keep an open mind. Also, I left the street camera footage from Richard on your laptop. You can thank me later.
    ~Shane
     
    Shaking my head I poured myself a cup of hot coffee and opened the laptop Shane had left on the kitchen counter.
    The file was on the desktop labeled ‘Shane is Awesome,’ and proved to be a slide show of images from traffic cameras and ATM machines that ended with Lisa’s car parked outside The Broken Plow, a downtown antique shop.  She was feeding the parking meter. With a silent thanks to Shane and Richard, I closed the screen, took another sip of coffee, and plotted my day.
    I started by going over the case files one more time. Before I knew it, noon had come and gone with no word from Tyger. I tracked down the Gamblers Anonymous group’s meeting place. For being anonymous, they really didn’t fly under the radar well. They had a full-page ad in the Yellow Pages. I scribbled the address on a sticky note.
    The group was meeting at the new headquarters for the Church of Redeeming Sacrifice. The CRS, an offshoot of several faiths, was openly opposed to the new vampire legislation some lawmakers were trying to push through. CRS members wanted to go back to the good old days where you could kill a vampire for no other reason than that they were soulless monsters who stood as an affront to God… yada, yada, yada. They weren’t the only faith to come out