CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Iwas in the house when the email came in, and I quickly saved everything.
I found that the office had a printer, and deciding to give myself physical copies to make notes on as well, I printed everything.
I spent enough time prepping that I had a moment of uncertainty.
Would this be enough information? Would I learn anything useful about my uncle’s new life that I couldn’t just drag out of him?
I’ll just have to see.
I started from the beginning, with the digital copy on my screen, the physical copy in front of me, and a notepad.
It felt very old school and not entirely what I did, but information gathering like that was theoretically something I could do.
I had to find things I could use in these files.
With a red pen ready, I was going to mark everything I could use to find more.
James Henry Bishop, my uncle Henry Abbott, had joined Maria’s nest fifteen years ago, only two years after he disappeared after my father’s death. Almost as if he made a straight line for California once he had figured out how to create his new life and escape whatever had happened with Jacob.
“Interesting that he ran across the country first. He could have stopped anywhere to find the fae he needed to help him create this new identity…” I made a face. With so many major cities, there were so many opportunities to find a fae to help him over two years.
“The fact that he even felt the need to get magic to help him get a new identity… Though Alexius said Jacob would have used the exile to kill Henry without killing Henry or something like that. Henry was probably desperate. A lone vampire doesn’t do well, not without outside support or a lot of resources.
And he would have been persona non grata if he tried to join a nest with the knowledge he’d been exiled from his previous… ”
I looked into his work and saw my uncle was a low-tier financial guy in Maria’s offices.
A budget specialist for different properties that either she owned alone or properties the nest owned through shell companies.
I had no real idea what his work had been for Jacob, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that he did a financial job for Jacob’s nest as well.
“It would be easier to stay in a line of work he knew well… He didn’t go to college or anything in those two years…
Did he?” I searched for his qualifications and found he did have some education and a CPA.
Whether that was legitimate or forged wasn’t something I cared to look into, but knowing he had thought of making himself seem like a good worker to hire meant he knew what he needed to do to be appealing to a new nest, especially a nest like Maria’s.
“Maybe he took the chance long before his exile to learn how people got into other nests and what made that easier or harder. He voiced his dislike for Jacob’s nest to me…
” I shrugged a shoulder and kept digging into his life.
The nest’s file on him read like an employment file.
There were no disciplinary actions on his record.
He never messed up at work. There was a note in a one-year review that he was quiet, doing good work, and didn’t like to be on the radar, not even to be praised.
A quote from Henry, written by the reviewer, was that he liked how he could quietly live his life in Maria’s nest and was grateful for something that felt normal.
It was similar to what he had said to me.
I worked for hours, dissecting everything.
He took his payments in check until it was discontinued, and they went digital for everything.
He had to give up his banking information for that.
He always earned his yearly bonus, one of the tops in the role.
He was never promoted, refusing the one time Maria offered.
He didn’t want more responsibility was the reason noted.
With no more offers, the nest was probably waiting to see if he would apply for an open promotional role next time.
I put a red underline under his banking information and his address. Then his email on record. The bank was going to be the hardest to get into unless I phished him, and most supernaturals didn’t fall for those tricks.
Alexius showed up at two-thirty in the morning. I looked outside to see him looking thunderous as he got out of the SUV and slammed the door.
“Uh-oh,” I said lightly, knowing that wasn’t for me.
“Everly, I need your help!” he called out as he entered the house.
“Yeah, in here!” I called back, and he was there within seconds.
“I need you to see something.” He reached for a remote and turned on a projector I had been ignoring. I had seen the wall scribbles, too, but they hadn’t been my business, especially since I was now on my own hunt. The map the scribbles must have been for was now up as well.
“You really had a thing going here,” I mumbled, looking appreciatively.
“I used to do this with physical maps, but when I discovered projectors… Maria made sure this was set up for me for this job. Now, these are spots they’ve been seen, these vampires I’m looking for. I included your sighting as well and the blood I had found in their abandoned sleeping place.”
“Yeah… but how can I help?”
“I want you to cross-reference this information with missing people and murders.”
“Oh, shit. Yeah…” I made a face. “It could be really bad. This is a giant city, not some small, middle-of-nowhere town in Alaska where bad things happen so rarely. This is… There could be thousands.”
“I’ll be helping,” he said, crossing his arms as he stared at his map. “When I got back out there, the vampires had cleaned up. They had snuck around Maria’s cleanup crew. They had protected their faces from cameras. They took everything left.”
“They knew they had been caught,” I said, nodding.
“And they cared,” Alexius said. “Which is more important.”
“Oh, fair. If they were ignorant and scared, they wouldn’t have been careful. They just wouldn’t have gone back. Clean up is for hiding.”
“Exactly. That’s the way it is in, I would say, ninety-five percent of these cases. But if I see a spot with more bodies than other places, perhaps I could focus there next; it might be the hub. They don’t dispose well; we have the evidence for that.”
“Okay. I was just looking through data on my uncle. I can spare the rest of the night for this to help you.”
“Thank you. Did you get his new name?”
“I did, and Maria already gave me the file. Which I’ve already deleted permanently from your work email, so don’t go looking for it.”
I saw his eyes go to the papers on my desk, and I closed my laptop and flipped the papers. I couldn’t have him chasing down my uncle in some possessive display of… something. He seemed very capable of it.
“Fine,” he muttered.
“He’s for me,” I reminded him. “And it’s not like he’s going to run or anything.
He has no idea I’m even looking into him.
Let’s get your situation with the vampires and dead bodies handled finally.
And here you were, telling me that you don’t need me for like three weeks.
” I actually stuck my tongue out, and the heated frustration that flashed in his eyes tickled me.
“You should keep that in your mouth unless you want me to put it to use,” he said, hot and threateningly. I never thought being slightly threatened would be immensely hot, but here I was, in deep with a man that most of the world was terrified of.
“Is that a threat?” I asked, faking shock at his words.
“It’s very much a promise, Everly… one I often fantasize about, but we can discuss that a different night.
Let’s get this done. I know how to identify what seems like it’s vampire-related and what isn’t.
We’ll be looking more at missing persons and probably people taken off the street, not out of their homes. ”
I looked for the records, lucky that the United States had a centralized database for missing persons. California had one of its own, as well as the Los Angeles police for the most local cases. Using those, I was able to start finding relevant data.
“What time frames are we looking at?”
“Let’s say the last year to start,” Alexius said.
“I would have tried to cross-reference this information earlier if I had known they were killing people. In a city this large, with no other evidence of kills that Maria’s nest would have found…
I didn’t want to deal with the mountain of information you’re about to pull. ”
It was work. I actually had to figure out how to download all their data for my own use.
It was messy, and it certainly wasn’t safe in some cases.
But once I had it saved to my own computer, I could leave, quickly cleaning up any tracks I may have left to make sure no one brought it back to the house or me.
“This isn’t easy, you know,” I said, looking up at him, hissing as he impatiently tapped a foot. “Not if I want to do it right.”
“Sorry. You make it seem easy.”
“Well, it’s not.” I made a face as I pulled up what I took from each site and started to find a way to sort them and remove anything I grabbed but didn’t need.
“Some of these will be older cases from national and state databases. LAPD will be the most recent and luckily the most public. And obviously, if people weren’t reported missing, we’d have no idea.
And if they were found as a bloodless body, then vampires have bigger problems.”
“Of course.”
We started marking them, using small tacks straight into the drywall using the last known location or residence of the missing person, depending on what was available.
Maria’s wall was going to need to be redone entirely when we were done.
In an hour, we got over one hundred tacks into the wall, and sure enough, there was an interesting little patch in one spot.
None right on top of a potential sleeping location, none too far, either, though.
“I assume you’ll be going there, and we’ll revisit this tomorrow if it doesn’t work out?” I looked up at him as he studied it.
“Yes… I think I’ll camp out here.” He pointed to a specific spot, a building near seven different missing people in the last two years that Alexius believed could have been caused by a vampire.
The building was also in a circle range of some of the vampire sightings.
“I’ll feed and stay up all day for safety, but it puts me in a good spot to catch anyone else trying to hide and rest. I can catch them waking up hungry and looking to feed if that is one of their most active hunting locations.
I won’t lose time to travel once the sun goes down. ”
“I don’t like it. What if some human finds you and tells you to get out?”
“Any human going in there would be having a problem… The nest owns that building,” he explained, frowning.
“That is the same address, I think,” he said, looking at his phone at something.
“Maria sent me a list of addresses, places the nest or her companies own for the nest to store things quietly without suspicion. Places that don’t get a lot of foot traffic.
I can handle this. You can get back to what you were doing. Thank you for helping me.”
“Of course. Good luck.” I waved at him as he left the room, moving quickly back out to his car.
Sunrise was just before seven. He had limited time to get back to that location, hide the SUV from the vampires he was looking for, and find a place where he felt safe to hunker down for the daylight.
I knew he could do it. He had done it for centuries before he probably learned what it was like to have a stable, safe place during the daylight.
He’d survived the threat of sun when he was, for lack of a better term, feral.
I didn’t like the word, but I couldn’t think of one better for the time I heard about before Jacob entered his life.
I looked back at my work on my uncle and sat down, knowing I had enough to dig for more in new ways. I had to be careful. He’d certainly get an alert if I tried to log into the wrong account. Everything was so interconnected now.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t. I just didn’t know if I had a need to do anything risky yet. What I did was take his information, places to break later on a list for easy reference, and look for easier sources that wouldn’t notify him that I was looking into him.
And that revealed some interesting finds.
He had more than one cell phone number, so I added that second number to my contact.
He owned two properties, but the nest was only aware of one, based on records.
The second property was interesting. I would check it out at next sunset since it was already too close to sunrise to safely get there and back.
Getting caught sleeping in his place would be a terrible situation.
“I wish any of this told me why he was exiled, but nothing.” I sighed, knowing dawn was coming soon. I looked at my phone to see an update from Alexius that he was in a safe location.
We were both waiting on the next time the sun went down.