Chapter 12: Work Exchange

“Hi,” David (Cristiãn) softly spoke while holding the front door of The Cavern Nightclub open.

Cassidy stood outside the door with a mixture of dread and concern on her face before responding.

“Hi.”

David (Cristiãn) urged Cassidy forward with a gesturing nod of his head. He shut the door behind her after she stepped through. Cassidy stopped just inside the entrance, took a deep breath and gave David (Cristiãn) a second thoughtful look.

“You want some blood?” David (Cristiãn) stoically offered.

The therapeutic property of vampire blood was something Cassidy had firsthand knowledge of. The fact that vampire blood would give her a temporary immunity to vampire pheromones gave her cause to consider the offer. After a moment of thought, Cassidy nervously shook her head no.

David’s (Cristiãn) question reflected his understanding that Cassidy was uncomfortable with the location of this meeting. He thought a small amount of his blood would ease her concerns, but he was not surprised when she declined; and he marked that with a brief smile. He gave her a moment to ready herself before leading into the main room of the club. They stopped at the top of the three steps at the edge of the dining room floor. Together they looked out over the floor at Ryan Sandoval, Alexandra Hays, Ronald Hollis, Brooke Chapman, Herman Weber, Mia Bauer, Armel Valcourt and Simone Deveaux. The Dacia Vampire names that they went by when speaking with each other were Radu, Flavia, Sorin, Adrianna, Stefan, Helga, Petru and Nadja. They were all seated in pairs at neighboring tables.

“So, the gang is all here,” Cassidy sighed.

It was early Wednesday morning. Cassidy requested this meeting late yesterday evening so that she could provide the group with information on Tony McGuire. Her trepidation at the door had nothing to do with the conversation she was about to have and everything to do with her unease with being in a confined space with vampires. She endured several bad experiences in the past when she was alone with several of them. Cassidy knew what they could do, and she dreaded the loss of her freewill. More than one nightmare in her recent past involved vampires seizing control of her mind.

“As you commanded,” Stefan pleasantly responded as Cassidy and David (Cristiãn) descended the stairs.

“You lied to me,” Cassidy angrily accused as she walked towards the group of eight.

“We withheld certain facts,” Brooke testily countered.

“You knew about this vampire, and you didn’t tell me,” Cassidy disputed.

“I don’t recall that stipulation in our agreement,” Stefan pondered with a feigned look of confusion.

“Bullshit! I told you no more vampire killings.”

“We—immortals—are working on it,” Nadja returned with a correcting inflection. “But we could use your help.”

Cassidy paused to give Nadja special attention. In her vampire nightmares, Nadja was the face from which she was running. Her position as the central vampire in her fears made Nadja the being in the room that Cassidy most despised. Her malice toward Nadja was motivated by the fact that she was the vampire who came the closes to killing her. When she recalls being at the edge of death, it is Nadja’s face that Cassidy sees, and it was the terror within that memory fueling her anger. For a brief time, Cassidy fumed at the vampire she most detested. Nadja returned Cassidy’s contemptuous glare with a cool gaze.

“Here,” Cassidy announced as she turned her attention toward Stefan while dropping a file jacket on his table. “That’s what I found in the system on Tony McGuire,” she finished with a point.

Stefan quickly removed the paperwork from the file jacket and began scanning through them with Helga’s assistance. It was clear to Cassidy that Stefan and Helga were looking for something specific. It also appeared to her that Nadja, Petru, Sorin, Adrianna, Radu and Flavia’s fixed attentions on them meant that they knew what was being searched for in the documents.

“What are you looking for?” Cassidy asked with a frown.

“This is useless,” Stefan complained with a frustrated look. “We already have most of this information and the rest tells us nothing.”

“That’s an NYPD summary background check,” Cassidy insisted.

“There has to be more,” Helga grumbled while looking through the papers.

“What are you looking for?” Cassidy asked for a second time.

Stefan sat back in his chair and began examining Cassidy as he considered her question. Seconds later, he sat forward and began to speak.

“This is not enough, Detective Tremaine,” Stefan gruffly asserted. “We’ve already been to all of his properties. We know about his businesses, and we don’t care about his credit card activity. We want to know where he is now. He’s hiding. He’s not going to do something stupid. We need you to find—HIM.”

Cassidy was astounded by Stefan’s directive. Cassidy suspected they did not understand the amount work that went into a manhunt for someone who was hiding, especially someone with money and resources. For several seconds Cassidy scanned the faces of the vampires in front of her with an aghast expression.

“I can’t just stop what I’m doing to go on a manhunt,” Cassidy complained with a dismayed toss of her hands.

“You do know what’s going on here?” Brooke questioned with an annoyed tone. “There’s an immortal out there, and he’s eating people.”

“You said this wouldn’t happen,” Cassidy argued back.

“The coven had nothing to do with this,” Ryan quickly defended.

“You had everything to do with this,” Cassidy roared in response to Ryan’s remark. “Razvan was one of you.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Petru loudly spoke up. “Time is not on our side, Detective. You have the resources we need.”

“I’m in the middle of multiple investigations,” Cassidy insisted stridently.

“What investigations?” Stefan asked.

“I’ve got a stabbing at a Pier 17 concert and a robbery/murder that I’m working,”

“A robbery/murder where?” Stefan asked with a stare and a ruffled brow.

Stefan’s multiple questions on this subject made Cassidy suspicious.

“Why?”

“Curiosity,” Stefan answered cavalierly.

Cassidy studied Stefan for a moment.

“It was a Manhattan South bodega robbery a couple of weeks back,” Cassidy hesitantly reported “Gary Bibb, the owner, was killed,” she continued with a studious look at Stefan. “Does that mean something to you?” She finished with a quizzical stare.

“No, no,” Stefan replied with an indifferent shrug.

Cassidy paused to consider his response.

“Those investigations are nothing,” Ronald contemptuously complained. “We need you to find McGuire now.”

“These investigations are my job,” Cassidy emphatically declared.

“You’re not hearing us,” Brooke countered. “New York is about to become an all you can eat buffet for immortals,” she stressed.

“I can’t just drop what I’m doing,” Cassidy yelled back.

“What part of buffet for immortals did you not understand?” Brooke sarcastically repeated.

“This is just going to get worse,” Nadja spoke up with insistence. “McGuire will turn a mortal into an immortal, and then that immortal will do the same. They WILL grow in number. We must stop him now.”

Cassidy was taken aback by Nadja’s words. Accusations and complaints had sharper edges when they came from her.

“You have to help us,” Alexandra pleaded with worry. “We want to stop him just as much as you do.”

Cassidy paused to consider Alexandra’s plea, then she turned to look at David (Cristiãn). His silence and placid expression gave her reason to believe that he did not want to take a side, and that was all the motivation she needed to agree to their request.

“Okay, I’ll see what I can find out,” Cassidy solemnly acquiesced.

“Finally,” Helga declared with exasperation. “We need the names and addresses of the people he associates with.”

“Criminal associates,” Ronald quickly explained. “Somebody has to be helping him.”

“Fine!” Cassidy angrily barked. “I’ll make some calls,” she consented with a shrug.

With nothing more to say, Cassidy turned and started for the exit. David (Cristiãn) quickly followed. When Stefan was sure she was out of earshot, he turned his attention toward Ryan (Radu) and Alexandra (Flavia). All present waited for him to speak.

“Radu—Flavia,” Stefan started in a soft voice. “See what you can find out about the Pier 17 stabbing and that bodega shooting. Our Detective Tremaine seems a little too distracted for our needs right now.”

“Okay!” Alexandra gleefully accepted.

~~~~~Line Break~~~~~

Ryan and Alexandra were eager to take on the job that Stefan had given them; it was excitement motivated by the thrill of investigating a crime. They had never done anything like that before. Up until now, they used social activities, large entertainment events and sex to negate their boredom. The prospect of doing something that was way different from anything they had done before had them exhilarated. When their glee calmed down and they began to consider the task and quickly discovered their ignorance. At first, they had no idea how to proceed. It took brainstorming for the larger part of an hour to come up with the idea of quizzing reporters who did articles on the crimes. They thought it was a good place to start.

After deciding to query one or more reporters with knowledge of the crimes, it took Ryan and Alexandra nearly half an hour of online searching to find the name Leslie Dunn, a Metro New York reporter who did in-depth stories on the Pier 17 Concert stabbing and the bodega shooting. Minutes after finding his name, Ryan and Alexandra were on their way to speak with him. The time was 9:38am.

Waiting for nightfall was not an option for Ryan and Alexandra. The people they needed to speak with were mortals, and mortals were daytime beings by nature. Ryan and Alexandra also understood that expediency was the goal. Subsequently, they fortified themselves with blood, loaded an ice chest full of blood in the back seat of their car and then set off to speak with Leslie Dunn. They found him behind his desk at his place of employment.

With the help of a few million vampire pheromones, they shortly learned from Dunn that the Police had too many suspects for the Pier 17 stabbing and none for the bodega shooting. The suspects that Dunn specified were the dozens of people known to be in the vicinity of Eric Calder when he was stabbed. The Metro New York reporter pointed out that there were hundreds of social media pictures of the concert and the vicinity where Eric Calder was stabbed. Dunn sent them 133 images of the area around the time of the stabbing via E-mail. Ryan and Alexandra viewed those pictures on their cellphones.

“So, what now, Watson?” Alexandra playfully questioned.

“Why am I Watson?” Ryan mockingly disputed.

“Because I’m Sherlock, obviously,” Alexandra insisted flippantly.

“No,” Ryan returned with a disapproving frown while shaking his head. “I see you as more of a Nancy Drew or maybe a Veronica Mars,” he finished with an analytical look.

Alexandra endured the remark with a supercilious indifference.

“That’s fine with me, but you’re still Watson,” Alexandra intoned with an impish aloofness.

Ryan smirked at Alexandra in response.

“Radu, what do we do?” Alexandra whined.

“We talk to the witness,” Ryan answered with an imperious smile.

“She said she didn’t see it happen,” Alexandra insisted a bit hysterically.

Angela Burke was the witness that Alexandra was speaking of. She went with Eric Calder to the concert. In her narrative of the events leading up to Eric’s death, he was stabbed when she was standing ahead of him and looking at the stage. She reported that she started looking for Eric when the song stopped several minutes later. In her narrative, she found him leaning against a pole after a few minutes of searching. She said she could not make out Eric’s words because of the difficulty he had speaking and the noise from the crowd. She said it was nearly ten minutes later when Eric Calder collapsed while she was trying to help him out of the concert and another fifteen minutes later when she learned from a paramedic that he had been stabbed.

“I’m not talking about her,” Ryan responded to Alexandra’s query about Angela. “I’m talking about this guy,” he explained while holding up an image on his cellphone.

Alexandra noted that the cellphone had an enlarged concert image. In the center of the picture was a security guard in a red shirt and blue cap marked SECURITY. Her initial response was confusion. She did not know what he might tell them that he did not tell the police already. A few seconds of thought brought her to the realization that he could not tell the police everything. It was then that an expression of understanding formed on her face.

“Now you’re getting it,” Ryan continued to smirk.

“Yeah,” Alexandra agreed with a wide smile.

“Who’s Sherlock now?” Ryan questioned her smugly.

“Ha, ha,” Alexandra returned with a sneer.

Ryan and Alexandra spent two hours of sleuthing and compelling, using their vampire pheromones, to learn who and where the security person in the picture was. It took them another hour of travel and some more vampire compelling to get a meeting with Larry Hudson at his full-time job as a package handler in a FedEx Warehouse. During the cognizant verbal exchange portion of their meeting, Larry Hudson repeated the story he told the police.

“I was too far away and there was too much noise for me to see or hear anything. The first I knew about the stabbing was when the police began questioning me an hour later.”

Ryan and Alexandra expected that report from Larry Hudson, but they also knew from the photo that he was ideally situated to see everything. Perched on a two-foot-high walkway along the perimeter of the audience, Hudson had an unobstructed view over the concert audience. His focus was on the audience not the concert. Ryan and Alexandra knew that Hudson saw far more than what his brain could assimilate into memorable knowledge. They also knew that resurfacing and extracting those visual memories was easy enough work for a vampire.

After the cognizant verbal exchange with Hudson, Ryan and Alexandra put him into trance with their vampire pheromones and compelled his mind to replay everything that it saw. While Hudson’s brain was revisiting the concert with a singular focus on Eric Calder, Ryan was showing him images of the concert attendees that they received from Leslie Dunn. As Ryan went through images, one by one, the entranced Hudson used yes and no answers to signify if that person was ever standing behind or near Eric Calder. Twice during the first fifteen minutes Hudson answered yes, but each person was dismissed as a suspect when Hudson reported that Eric Calder displayed no ill effect from the encounter. It was third picture a couple of minutes later that produced a different report.

The person in the third image was a young man, and Calder did slump away immediately after this man left. Hudson identified the young stranger as someone who never stood directly behind Eric Calder, but close to another young man who was directly behind him. Hudson reported that there was a total of four young men standing behind Eric Calder at that time, and they all moved away together seconds before Eric Calder doubled over and began backing away from the concert. Ryan was convinced that he had found one of Eric Calder’s killers. The problem he pondered aloud was, “now we just need to find out who he is.”

“That’s easy,” Alexandra insisted in a condescending tone.

“Really?” Ryan questioned with incredulity. “And just how would we do that?”

“Ha, ha, I see it and you don’t,” Alexandra cheerfully boasted.

“See what?” A vexed Ryan tossed out.

“So, who’s the Sherlock now?” Alexandra crowed.

“Flavia?” Ryan impatiently called out. “How do we find him?”

“Look at his jacket, Radu,” Alexandra instructed, gesturing toward his cellphone.

Ryan brought his cellphone back up toward his face and began examining the jacket of the young man in the picture. After a brief study, he noted that the jacket had a high school emblem sewn on it. Seconds later his confused expression was swapped out with a knowing look.

“Okay, that’s one for you,” Ryan reluctantly conceded.

After a brief online search for the school with the matching emblem, Ryan and Alexandra set off for Brooklyn and Midwood High School. In little more than three quarters of an hour, they were walking through the door of the principal’s office under the guise that Ryan was a former student looking to donate to the school. A pheromone induced trance was used to compel the receptionist to accept that lie. When Ryan and Alexandra were inside the office, they targeted the principal with their vampire pheromones to sharpen his memory. Moments later, the principal was able to recall the year the young man graduated from Midwood. It only took a few minutes more for the principal to find the student’s name in the class yearbook and then pull his address from the school computer. Ryan and Alexandra were in and out of Midwood High School in a little more than ten minutes with everything they wanted.

At 3:18pm Alexandra rang the doorbell to Robert Guffey’s home. Ryan agreed to stay in the car after Alexandra convinced him that the interview would go smoother without him. After two more rings and a minute of waiting, Alexandra gave the screen door handle a tug and noted that it was locked. She was thinking about abandoning the effort when she heard movement in the house. After waiting several more seconds, a tall, slim and physically fit looking young man snatched open the door. Alexandra immediately recognized him as Robert Guffey.

“Yeah?” Robert Guffey asked with a challenging insolence.

“Robert Guffey,” Alexandra greeted with mild astonishment. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been looking for you all day.”

“Who are you?” Robert asked with a frown.

Robert Guffey examined Alexandra from behind a screen door. He was dressed in a JFK Airport baggage handler uniform. His expression was a mix of confusion and annoyance.

“I’m a reporter with Metro New York,” Alexandra answered.

Robert was surprised by Alexandra’s declaration. His first thought was to wonder why a reporter was looking for him. His second thought was a fear of the answer to that question.

“Can I come in?” Alexandra asked in a pleasant voice.

Alexandra knew from experience that her pheromones would not work while they were standing on either side of the front door to the house. She could feel the warm air of the interior flowing out the open door. Getting herself inside the house or him outside of it was essential so that her pheromones could envelope him.

“What do you want with me?” Robert asked with a perplexed expression.

“I want to talk to you about Eric Calder,” Alexandra explained as though it was a routine response.

Robert took a barely noticeable gulp of air in surprise.

“I don’t know an Eric Calder,” he insisted swiftly.

“Yes, you do,” Alexandra playfully contradicted. “The concert—the stabbing,” she finished with enthusiasm.

Robert was unnerved by Alexandra’s remark. He gave her an agitated look.

“Why do you want to talk to me about that?” He asked with a hint of alarm.

“Because you were there,” Alexandra returned with a pleasant expression. “Can I come in?”

Alexandra did not want to force her way inside even though she could easily do just that. She understood that her goal was to get information without being a disruption in the situation.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Robert disputed vehemently.

“Sure, you do,” Alexandra countered with an affirmative nod. “You were standing nearby when Eric Calder was stabbed,” she asserted as though speaking a well-known fact.

“What if I was?” Robert grumbled quizzically. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

“There’s some things about the event that I thought you might be able to help me with,” Alexandra responded with a contemplative frown.

“I don’t know anything,” Robert blared.

He stepped back to close the door.

“Shutting that door would be mistake,” Alexandra quickly asserted.

Just as he was about to swing the door shut, Robert stopped to listen to Alexandra.

“I know you didn’t kill Eric Calder,” Alexandra stated in a casual voice. “But I also know that you were close enough to see something. If you don’t speak with me then I’ll just have to take my observation to the police,” Alexandra suggested placidly.

Robert Guffey did not know how to respond to Alexandra’s remark. He feared having his name in a story that she wrote, but he feared the attention of the police even more. He was conflicted between closing the door on Alexandra and letting her in. He pondered his choices for several seconds while examining the young woman at his door with suspicion.

“Hey, Robert, come on,” Alexandra urged with a smiling face. “I’m not going to attack you, and you can frisk me if you want. But I warn you, I’m ticklish.”

Robert was not amused by Alexandra’s jest. The seriousness of the situation had him worried about his choices. He had a secret that he was desperate to keep, and he considered Alexandra a threat to that secret. He also wanted to know what she knew.

“I have to go work,” Robert stated as he opened the screen. “So, you’ve got 10 minutes.”

“Great,” Alexandra cheered as she hurried through the open doorway.

Nearly twenty minutes later, a gleeful Alexandra hurried out of the house with a sheet of paper in her hand. With a walk that said she was pleased with herself, Alexandra strolled over to the car that Ryan was seated in and climbed into the front passenger seat.

“Did you learn anything?” Ryan asked as he started the car.

“I learned everything,” Alexandra answered with a wave of the paper in her hand and a smug smile.