“So I imagine you’d like that explanation now?” Hauser asked, sitting down in the chair across from Alex. Hearing nothing, Hauser put a small stack of manila files on the table. He opened one in front of Alex and drew from it a series of close-up pictures of various people, each attached to a standardized form. Other than the fact that these were all primarily facial pictures, there was little to unify them. Some were old, some relatively new. Most of the subjects were fairly young. There seemed to be an even spread of men and women.
“Do you recognize any of these people, Alex?”
He looked over the photos. He glanced at the text on the files. It all seemed to be personal information: name, date of birth, physical description. Most were from the west coast. Many were from Seattle or its neighboring towns.
“Am I supposed to have a lawyer for this?”
“We can arrange that, but it’ll take time. Until then, Alex, I need to know: have you seen any of these people? Because it would help put a lot of fear and pain to rest if you have.”
“Why don’t you try explaining all this to me instead?”
Hauser leaned forward in his seat. “Everything I’ve seen and heard of you says you’re a stand-up guy, Alex. Everything says you’re one of the good guys. Law-abiding, honest, compassionate, patriotic… up until recently. Then things got weird. Are you still a good guy, Alex?”
“Are you?” Alex asked. “Were you ever?”
“Oh, yes,” Hauser nodded. “You weren’t kidnapped. You were arrested. We’re not thugs. We’re the FBI.”
“Cops can be bought.”
“Yeah, they can,” Hauser agreed. “I’ve seen it. I’m not bought. Alex, if I were a paid tool for the people who are after you, I wouldn’t keep the act going this long. Those kinds of people would just strap you down on a table and hurt you until you talked. You already know what that’s like.”
Alex stared at him, his eyes narrowing. “Explain.”
“I’m with a special task force formed under secret national security orders to deal with supernatural crimes,” Hauser said. “If that sounds crazy, you should ask yourself how crazy it would be if there wasn’t such a task force, because you know the kinds of things that are out there in the shadows. You know they get sloppy. You know what modern technology and organization can do.
“We’ve been around since the nineties. Before that, it was just independent agents and individuals in local law enforcement all feeling like they were alone. Like nobody would believe them or help them with the shit they knew was out there. We answer to proper, designated officials within the Department of Justice. We have real judges that handle all of our trials. Everyone gets his or her day in court. Or night, for most of our suspects.”
“Supernaturals,” Alex frowned.
“Yes. Vampires. Werewolves. You’ve fought a few. You’ve taken on a couple of demons, too, and that’s a step up from anything we’ve dealt with as far as we know. How you tell a demon from your garden-variety monster with delusions of grandeur I really don’t know, but I’m hoping you can help us with that.”
“What happens to these supernaturals you catch?”
“Like I said, when they commit crimes, they go on trial.”
“Supernaturals get trials? Terrorists don’t always get trials.”
“This task force and the courts we answer to didn’t get set up under the same circumstances that brought us the war on terror. That gets played by different rules. We got set up before that, so we have to adhere to constitutional rights and legal code as closely as possible.”
The younger man’s brow furrowed. “And that never changed?”
“The existence and functions of this task force was never, ah, fully disclosed to the Bush Administration. It kind of ran on its own until 2009.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Hey, would you have told those guys about all this?”
“You don’t look like a Democrat to me.”
“I’m not,” Hauser admitted with an uncomfortable frown, “but it wasn’t my call.” He waited for the skeptical look to come off Alex’s face. It never left, so he continued. “Alex, we’re trying to bring down murderers and organized criminals with powers most people think exist only in fiction. They do real harm, though. You know that.”
He tapped one of the pictures in front of Alex. “These people are all missing. We have reasons to believe they are all victims of various vampires whom we haven’t caught yet. So I’m asking you, have you seen any of these people?”
Alex looked down at the pictures again. He tried to keep his face clear of emotion, but his breath deepened. “What does all this have to do with me?”
“C’mon, Alex, don’t play dumb,” Hauser said patiently. “You kicked one of my guys in the face today because you knew he was going to cast a spell on you.”
“I kicked a guy who came at me with a wooden stick and a handful of some sort of powder,” Alex replied. “Lotta different ways to read that.”
“So I haven’t made it obvious enough that I know what’s going on with you?”
“Seems kinda stupid to admit or deny anything without talking to a lawyer.”
Hauser reached into another file folder and slid out a detailed, high-quality sketch. “Do you recognize this woman?”
Alex glanced down at the face of Lady Anastacia-twice, though he didn’t mean to. He brought his eyes back to Hauser’s. “Should I?”
The agent pulled a glossy sheet of paper from a third file folder. This one contained several different pictures of the same man from various angles and ranges. “Have you met this man?”
Alex looked down only once this time. He knew instantly that he shouldn’t have even done that much.
“You’re no bullshit artist, Alex,” Hauser said. “You might know when to keep your mouth shut, but it takes a lot more than that to throw a guy like me off a scent. You’ve seen Kanatova before, and you’ve seen him. I can tell by your face.
“This man is Carlos Medina, and he’s not a vampire. He’s been missing for over a month. He comes from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and he’s a high-ranking member of a large and nasty cartel of drug traffickers and murderers. They sent him up here and he disappeared along with his wife and two of his thugs. When a guy like that goes missing, all sorts of bad things happen.”
The younger man’s eyes fell away. He stared at the table, then off to one wall.
“I need to know what happened to Carlos Medina, Alex. People could get hurt. Innocent people. Cops. Federal agents. People with families. I need to know.”
It could all be bullshit, Alex thought. It could all be bullshit and this could all just be a long con to get something out of me.
A voice he couldn’t actually hear said, You can’t take that chance. People could die. Can you live with that?
“Alex, this is bigger than you. You need to talk to me.”
He’s right. It’s bigger than you.
Alex swallowed hard. “He’s dead. You won’t find a body.”
“Do you know who killed him?” Hauser asked, his voice easing further.
Tell him. Tell him everything. He needs to know. People could die.
“Am I being charged with something?”
“That depends,” said Hauser. “Right now, I’ve got you on kidnapping and assaulting two people with a deadly weapon, assault on a Federal agent and resisting arrest. That’s just the stuff I can sew up in court right now. It gets much worse once the prosecutor hashes out all the charges that come from waging some wild-assed secret vigilante war in the middle of an American city. You don’t get to blow up houses and bus tunnels and plead self-defense.”
“But you’ll let me off if I talk, I suppose?” Alex frowned.
“That depends on a lot of things. It depends on how cooperative you are. I already know a lot. I have plenty to go on from here without you, but it makes a big difference if you can corroborate things. But you have to tell me everything. You have to tell me about the vampires and the demons and Lorelei and Rachel. All of it.”