“What?” I shout loudly over the noise to Aki. He’s not trained in guns so I figure straight away he has to be here with some kind of news; an update maybe on the cult case? What was I kidding? It wasn’t a case, it was an encyclopaedia we lived on. Hopefully he had news.
“The police investigation squad, are they on our case?” He shouted. Oh, the city police. I was wrong. He wasn’t here for that.
“Just mine,” I shout. BANG! BANG! BANG! “I’ll deal with it.”
“I know you’re a one woman show, but if this crashes we could all fall down. Shut them down before they find something they really don’t want to find. Deal with whatever mess you’ve got yourself into.”
Aki was quick to get away from the noise. I sighed but no one could hear it. How was I going to shut them down exactly? Clearly that Mr Herwin fellow was motivated on convicting me. Would this all just blow over? If they couldn’t find any strong evidence would they subside to find other leads? I didn’t know but I couldn’t rest luck on this kind of thing. I needed surety by building some faulty fundamental back-up why it couldn’t possibly be me. I needed to plan, but right now all I needed to do was get back to work.
#Two work days later#
I’m sitting at my desk. I always kept my station clean and very organised. That’s right; as hard as it is to believe. Us slayers have cubicles. People need a waged job. We had bills. We had loans for living just like the regular next fat guy. Right now I’m on “phone patrol.” Or that’s what we call it. A lot of the time we get calls from very stressed out people in uncomfortable circumstances and we’ve been approved licenced to have brief or in-depth conversations with these individuals or groups, whatever, giving streetwise tips and survival advice if it’s suited to their predicament. Sometimes it would be appointments and I’d have seatings with a man or a woman, couples, friends, families; it was a shunned way of verbally giving a victim a gun. We just gave them the information they needed to know. For now, there were no calls. It wasn’t the regular busy day so I took the opportunity sending some faxes. This is how we shared our Intel’s with anything at all about the cult; it didn’t have to be conclusive; Just a scratch of detail. Most of the cases we did, we did alone but this one we all engrossed together for a pending six years. For example, if one was spying on a group that came from inside the cult they’d write any notes down they could and then copy out for the rest of us so we didn’t have bits and pieces everywhere but we could all study it in our own cubicles. The problem was we barely had anything. We had some random pieces of information, some notes, only one photo and that wasn’t even that good. It was of David standing in the middle. It had to look like a photo bomb to get them in the picture. If it was directly pointed at them, they would have known. Vampires were masters at obscurity and this cult have outdone themselves. This was the only case that was non-closure. We could burn up, stake and exterminate the rest but this one. The phone rang. I picked up.
“Miss Hamilton speaking, you’ve called the V.D.P. What is your problem?” Yes, that was our pickup line. For this number anyway; we had others.
I hear a frightened woman’s voice at the end of the line. “S-some attacked me early this morning. I got away but… I was jogging my usual morning run through the park and hands just grabbed me.”
“Can you identify if it was man or woman, colour? Could you make a description?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” she sobbed. “That’s not why I called,” she cried. I played with my finger curling around the phone cord. She took a while to continue, “What I want is to make it not happen again.”
I nodded. “Tell me, you said this was your usual morning run?”
“Yes? But I got away because I’m a good runner.” She was still whimpering.
My work
Start from the beginning
