* * *
“That’s the one. Alex Carlisle.” Amber leaned back from the computer screen to rub her eyes. It had been a long day and a long night. Neither school nor her evening at a pool hall were physically taxing, but doing it all while maintaining a cover created plenty of mental stress.
“Funny how he deleted his whole profile page the week after the mansion fire,” noted Matt Lanier. He’d had to work to dig up caches of Carlisle’s online life, but the Internet was an archive. It wasn’t like Carlisle could truly erase himself.
“No link to the girlfriend, though?” Hauser asked. He sat on the couch, reviewing info on his own laptop computer.
“Nope,” Lanier shrugged. “Even the stuff he had posted was pretty guarded. This is someone who paid attention to Internet safety lectures in school.”
Hauser grunted. “Presuming he’s a real boy in the first place.”
The whole task force-all six of them-sat in the apartment’s living room. Empty pizza boxes, discarded soda cans and laptops abounded. The apartment one floor up from Amber’s lodgings was minimally furnished with cheap chairs, couches and a couple of coffee tables.
“You think he’s a vampire?” Amber frowned. “He didn’t seem pale enough, or… I dunno. None of them did. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
“Not douchey enough?” offered Keeley from the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Amber said. “That.”
“Doesn’t mean much,” Hauser shrugged. “But this woman doesn’t fit with these kids. Not at all.”
“Boss,” Lanier said, “check your email. Sent you the records sweep on Reinhardt.” He busily tapped away at his keyboard, muttering, “Running one on the Carlisle kid now.”
Hauser nodded. He said nothing right away, though Amber immediately saw their leader’s eyebrows rise. “What is it?”
“Gimme a second to digest all this,” Hauser murmured.
“Be nice if we could just talk to the local cops to see what they know,” sighed Colleen Nguyen. She had more or less sunk into the couch, her head tilted back with a soda in her hand. “Kind of ridiculous having to skulk around like this.”
“Why can’t we?” asked Amber.
“Vampires generally make a point of getting their hooks into local police departments,” she explained. “It’s useful in covering up all their bullshit. One of them slips up, kills a victim or whatever, it helps to have the cops there to make it all go away, y’know?”
“How bad does that get?”
“Bad enough,” said Keeley. “Sometimes it’s straight bribery or intimidation. Other times they use their woojy supernatural mind tricks on people to bring ‘em in line. Even the ones in LA and San Fran don’t own whole departments or anything, but all it takes is one dirty cop knowing that the FBI is in town snooping around. He calls up his vampire sugar daddy and suddenly the whole batch scurries underground.”
“But we had local cops in LA helping us,” Amber pointed out.
“Hand-picked,” Keeley nodded. “Every one of them learned about the boogeyman on their own. It happens. Usually the ones who know the truth feel all alone and just shut up about it rather than getting checked into a padded cell. I like to think there are more of them than there are dirty ones, but…” he shrugged. “It’s not like we can take a survey.”
She shook her head, troubled once more by the whole thing. The Bureau encouraged its people to work with local authorities, not hide from them. So much of this assignment was all about unlearning everything she’d ever been taught.
“Wow,” grunted Lanier. His eyes didn’t come up from his screen.
“What?” Hauser asked.
“Sending.”
“Christ,” grumbled Colleen, “you two are like a couple kids passing notes in class. Why don’t you just speak up?”
“Gimme a second,” Hauser said.
Amber heard the toilet flush and water running from the sink in the bathroom. Doug Bridger stepped out then, drying his hands with a paper towel. “Anything yet?”
“Joe told us to sit down and shut up,” Colleen answered.
“No, he didn’t,” Keeley corrected.
“I said gimme a second,” Hauser repeated.
“See?” Colleen gestured to Hauser. “That’s Hauser-speak for ‘sit down and shut up.’”
“Figured,” nodded Doug. He sat down beside Amber. “Still feeling okay?”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged a bit. “I’ve only done that a few times. Have any of your recollections changed? Any of your impressions?”
Amber considered it, then shook her head. “No. Jason seems like a decent guy. Friends seem like that, too. Lorelei… I didn’t find her threatening or frightening, but something about her isn’t normal.”
“You said that Lorelei was incredibly attractive.”
Amber frowned. “I’ve never been attracted to women. I don’t think it was that. More like I knew she was attractive without actually being attracted to her, y’know? Like seeing a hot movie star on screen and knowing she’s sexy.”
“Never been able to see male movie stars that way,” Doug shrugged.
Amber rolled her eyes. “Of course not. You’re a guy.” She ventured the question that had been on her mind ever since she got back: “So are you a wizard or what?”
“No,” he said, shrugging again, “I’m a nerd. I went for my masters in ancient history and got researching superstitions and mysticism. I came at it from the standpoint that maybe it wasn’t all silly nonsense, just to get some insight into the people who practiced it. Then I figured out it was for real, and that I could actually use some of it.”
“So you joined the FBI?”
“I recruited him,” Colleen said, still looking up at the ceiling. “Everybody has a story for how they got here.”
“I don’t,” muttered Lanier.
“Okay,” Colleen conceded, “Matt doesn’t. We just needed a computer guy, so we recruited him from the white collar crime division.”
“Time to focus, people,” Hauser spoke up. “All these guys were good school boys right up through graduation. Drew has been arrested a couple times, probably just for being black in the wrong neighborhoods,” Hauser scowled. “Past that, they’re all perfectly clean… except every one of them has some little bad ass quality about him. Cohen’s the mildest-he’s listed on the rolls for a bunch of NRA-certified shooting courses at a local gun shop. Drew Jones has a black belt in kung fu. Wade Reinhardt graduated a semester early from high school to enlist in the Army. Looks like a nice record of service, but some of it’s classified… and for a kid with eighteen months in the airborne, that just doesn’t wash.
“And then here’s Alex Carlisle. Last month, he and some girl escaped being kidnapped by gang bangers. Carlisle put two of them in the hospital while getting shot himself, but it was a miraculously light wound. And he’s allegedly this Lorelei woman’s boyfriend.”
Hauser looked up from his screen then, sweeping the room with his eyes to look over each of his agents. “Reinhardt’s had his own place since he was discharged in September… but the others have all just recently moved out of their parents’ homes.
“Mystery woman surrounds herself with a bunch of young, malleable bad-asses of limited financial means, and then all of Seattle’s vampires just up and disappear? Yeah. I’d say we’re gonna be in town for a little while.”
Chapter Four: Due Diligence
Amber sat in her white graduation gown, her hat still on her head, wishing she had someone to talk to or laugh with while the principal droned on. She ought to have been surrounded by friends. Everyone else was. Instead, she sat surrounded by classmates, which was not remotely the same.
Some of the hats around her were decorated with paint and glitter and glued-on shimmering beads. The boy to her left, who had been suspended three times this year alone for fighting and who regularly insulted his teachers, had a makeshift lei of candy hanging around his neck, bought for him by parents who apparently felt graduating high school was some huge accomplishment. The girl on Amber’s right hadn’t looked up from her cell phone since they’d sat down. Amber remembered sharing an essay with her in freshman English, just to show her how the five-paragraph format was done, only to be confronted by their angry teacher who couldn’t help but notice that the same essay had turned up twice in his in-box, once in Amber’s name and once with the other girl’s.