Nearly a week after he searched the Melton property, Damien had managed to go through every report, every receipt, every scrap of paper he'd been given, and he hadn't found anything. Not only did Keith and Robert keep their records in perfect order, he found absolutely nothing incriminating in any of them. Their orders appeared timely and everything coincided with the product they'd found at the clinic.
He was, however, a little curious about some of the chemicals ordered. Having spoken to the forensic pathologist down at the lab he discovered that while not traditionally found in Veterinary medicine, Keith might have used the compounds to aide somehow in the healing process, but would need extensive knowledge in pathology to even attempt something of that nature, as mixing chemicals and running controlled tests or experiments could be rather dangerous.
Of course, this information merely made Damien even more suspicious of Keith Walker and prompted him to look further into his background. He'd run a standard criminal background check after the first attack, but seeing as he found nothing and the man always came up with an ironclad alibi, he didn't bother running a more thorough check into the man's personal life.
He supposed now would be as good a time as any given this new bit of information. Something about Keith set off alarms in his head, the man just didn't sit right with him, but he couldn't have said why. All outward appearances, Keith seemed like a genuine hero. He rescued and rehabilitated unwanted dogs, he gave them hope, he gave them new lives.
But there was more, there had to be more. The four women were proof of that. He may not have had any idea what really happened to any of them, but he knew Keith Walker had something to do with it.
He hit another wall with his latest background check though too. Vital statistics listed Keith Walker as having been born in 1983 on an American military base in Germany, giving him US citizenship. His parents listed as Lucas Romano and Kaila Walker, his father an Italian general, and his mother an unmarried sergeant in the Army, thus why he took his mother's last name and moved with her back to the US.
He'd been raised in New Jersey, and according to transcripts attended college in Maryland, studying Public Health, before getting a degree in Veterinary medicine. Which would explain his interest in pathology as well. Everything about Keith Walker appeared to be squeaky clean. He literally couldn't catch a break.
Until he finally did.
He'd been about to leave the station for the night when the hot new records clerk, emphasis on the hot, came into his office.
"What's up Ace?" He asked.
Ace, her first name Beverly, recently transferred in from Boston and hoped to work in forensics someday. For now the twenty-one-year-old with the long legs and the hot ass, worked in the records department while she studied down in Maryland.
"I've been going over those papers you gave me, and well, I found an anomaly, so I did some more research, and, you're going to want to take a look at what I found." She beamed, obviously proud of herself as she opened a folder on the desk in front of him and showed off her find.
"Well, I'll be damned," Damien said thinking out loud. "This is good Ace, really good."
"I hoped you'd think so. I also hoped you let me keep digging, I like this whole sleuthing thing, logging evidence, and filing papers all day isn't all it's cracked up to be you know."
"Yeah, of course. I'll ask the captain to bring you in on the case, I sure as hell wouldn't have found this otherwise."
Ace smiled, she liked Damien, both smart, and handsome, he also held a reputation for being damn good at his job, which she respected. Apart from Molly, a girl in her English Composition class, she really didn't have any friends, and she hoped one day that Damien might consider her a friend, or maybe even something more.
Damien thanked her for all of her hard work, assuring her she'd hear from the Captain, before turning back to the folder she'd dropped off and ultimately dismissing her. Ace took the hint, retreating as quickly as she'd come.
As he looked at the evidence a second time, Damien almost didn't want to believe it. This latest information opened up a completely new avenue for him to explore, and one that didn't make much more sense from a logical standpoint than his first assumption.
There were people in this world capable of creating entirely new identities, most of which happened to be reserved for those in top government agencies, and usually held up under scrutiny. Keith did not appear to be one of those people.
While true that he possessed an identity that would have held up under most circumstances, Ace somehow managed to find the loophole. Because according to records from the Maryland School of Veterinary Medicine, Keith Walker did not graduate in 2007.
But a Keith Welker did, only, he graduated ten years earlier.
Damien had no idea why, or how he'd forged transcripts, but he supposed it might not have been that difficult for someone with his intelligence given that only the year and one letter of his last name needed to be altered, but it sure as hell put an interesting twist on things. As well as raising a lot of questions.
Like, who is Keith Welker? And what happened to him?
Things at the ranch finally calmed down. Madison and Keith enjoyed a nice dinner together on Saturday, and on Sunday, she and Molly bonded while on a trip through Amish town to rescue a dog abandoned near one of the local farms. Madison enjoyed the drive, the countryside was beautiful, reminiscent of another time since the Amish remained so set in their traditional ways.
They picked up the dog, a Catahoula from the looks of it, from a ten-acre spread owned by a Mennonite family just south of Ephrata. Although the farmers thought the dog, with his patches of merle and his hound dog face, looked completely adorable, they claimed to have enough animals and weren't in the market for a new one.
Rather than take the dog to the local shelter though, they called Keith, informing Madison that they'd adopted a collie mix from her father a few years ago. It made her smile, between seeing the good deeds first hand, and listening to Molly recount various memories on the trip over, Madison began to forget all about her father's eccentricities and paranoia, quickly falling in love with the man he was.
Not for the first time Madison wished she'd been able to meet him. She still hadn't found it in herself to speak to her mother again though. She called her stepfather when her flight landed, and they'd spoken a couple of times during her first week on the ranch, but she refused to talk to her mother.
After putting the dog Madison named Dodger, into Molly's SUV, they headed back to the ranch where they showed Dodger to his new home, the kennel recently vacated by Annie, and went in search of Keith, to find out what needed to be done as evening set in.
The rest of the week found Madison falling into a routine. Breakfast with Keith, seeing to the Lycan Barn on her own, then working with Dodger, who she'd taken a special interest in since rescuing him, lunches were spent organizing and going through the contents of her father's safe a second time, actually reading the material and not just skimming over it, and then dinner either by herself, or with Molly, who was on a summer break from classes, and moved into the downstairs suite for the time being.
Having Molly around was a lot of fun, they watched movies together or played games at night after dinner, and Madison loved hearing Molly tell stories about her father, but it had its drawbacks too. Keith seemed to be avoiding her like the plague whenever Molly came around.
Molly slept in until at least noon though, so he still joined her for breakfast at the main house, but Keith refused her nightly dinner invitation, saying he had a lot of work to do and would just eat at home. Then, on Saturday night, she couldn't even find him to invite him over. Molly told her later that he'd gone out for the night while asking Madison if she wanted to go to a club in town with her and one of her friends.
Madison politely declined, not quite finished going through the stuff in her father's safe. She needed to go through two more piles, the same two piles from the first time around. So she told Molly to have a good night and made herself some coffee before heading for the safe room.
For whatever reason, she didn't want to move the safe back out of her father's little hidden lair, which she'd been using during her lunch break to go over everything, avoiding Molly at night seemed almost impossible, and she found it hard to come up with an explanation otherwise for why she spent so much time in the downstairs powder room. She did, however, have the safe moved into the cellar.
With the night to herself, Madison didn't feel the need to rush like she did in the afternoons, so she took her time reading every piece of paper in each individual folder. For the most part, none of it made any sense to her. Not the first time she'd read it, and not the second time. A lot of it, to include a couple of handwritten journals, were written in Romani, and since she found translating it to be an arduous task, she didn't even bother to attempt it.
What she did learn, however, was that her father either had a vast imagination, or he honestly believed in vampires and werewolves. Ghosts she understood, having seen one in the flesh so to speak and the origins of which she was surprised to learn made quite a bit of sense.
Her father, as well as their ancestors, believed that heaven only remained open to a select few, those chosen to rule the world along with Christ during the second coming of the lord. They wrote that the meek would inherit the earth, so it made sense that not everyone went to heaven, but what happened to those that died?
The gypsies came up with an interesting take on that. According to them, a person's soul was recycled, and while it waited to be reborn, it wandered the earth, some of them peacefully, some in agony, and others just restlessly depending on how they died.
Her father's research spoke of the devil, and how he'd been an angel once, that he currently ruled the earth, and thinking about all the death and destruction, hell on earth didn't seem so far-fetched to Madison.
With a friend like Ona, she even bought into the whole witchcraft thing. She'd read herself, in the Bible about angels coming to earth and taking mortal women as their brides, about the flood of Noah's day, and how it wiped out the wickedness those angels created before being forced back to heaven.
So when her father wrote that his ancestors believed that those angels returned, mating with gypsy women and creating magical offspring, she didn't doubt it for a second. How else did one explain the unexplainable?
Vampires and werewolves though? That seemed a bit out there. People that didn't die? Or, at the very least, couldn't be killed easily. People that survived on the blood of humans? That smacked of cannibalism, and she wondered if it might have been some diluted person's way of romanticizing it. And the idea of someone being able to turn into an animal, well, that sounded too fanciful to her.
All she'd read to this point sounded like suppositions and opinions, she'd yet to read anything she considered factual like the articles about witchcraft and reincarnation. Her father collected stories about villages being decimated by wolves, about bloody wars, and Vlad the Impaler, but nothing about how vampires and werewolves came to be.
Things didn't just exist in this world, they had to be created, but she'd try to reserve her judgment until after she'd read everything in the safe.
By the end of the night, she was close. With two more folders to go through, she suspected they would likely be the most important and provide her with the last missing pieces of her father's beliefs.
Beliefs that she still didn't understand what, if anything, involved her.
The first folder her father labeled Cain, a biblical name that she was, of course, familiar with. In it, she found a sordid tale of a young man who murdered his brother due to jealousy over a woman and winning God's favor.
A man cast out and forced to walk the earth alone, forever to remember what he'd done, and never finding contentment or purpose. She read, and this is where it got really interesting for Madison, that Cain met a woman named Lilith in his travels, a woman said to have been made for Adam out of the same dust before the creation of Eve, who coupled with the devil himself after refusing to be subservient to her husband.
She'd been known as the creature of the night, though never named in the bible otherwise, and upon seducing Cain, she convinced him to partake in a blood ritual where he would consume her lifeblood, and with it the true knowledge of good and evil, as well as the gift of immortality granted by the devil himself.
However three angels visited him afterward, each of them asking him to repent for the murder of his brother, and upon refusal, they cursed his newfound immortality. First, with a weakness to fire, second, a sensitivity to sunlight, and third, with a beast like urge that would only be quelled by the taste of human blood.
Little shivers ran the length of her spine as she read it. She didn't want to imagine such a curse, but at the same time, she could see it, and the devastation it caused so clearly. She remembered the stories about Vlad the Impaler, and she wondered if he'd been one of Cain's creations.
Her thoughts running away with her as she imagined her father coming across one of these creatures, had he met one? Perhaps he'd been attacked? He'd definitely put together enough information on them. From their creation to the beginning of their bloodlines, dating back to four individuals before the time of surnames.
John the Mason, Peter the Blacksmith, (Bloody) Mary the Weaver, and Elizabeth the Baker. He said that the creation of all vampires came through them, the second coming of Cain's bedfellows after his first creations committed suicide upon learning they no longer possessed the ability to procreate.
Of course, she found information about vampire menstruation too, her father clearly did his research. He concluded that female vampires didn't menstruate because their bodies healed so fast that the lining of their uterus didn't shed, and their eggs were absorbed back into their bodies before ever even being released from the fallopian tubes, but the men still copulated. However, they learned early on though that even if a mortal woman got pregnant, she would die within weeks as the baby ate her from the inside.
Madison imagined what a terrible ordeal it would have been given the times they lived in and understood why they hadn't continued to try. Why bother when they could just "create" another?
The details on creating a new vampire were a little more sparse, her father noted that a person needed to drink the immortal's blood and that the bite of a vampire alone wouldn't be enough, but he didn't go into further detail, and honestly, it felt a little too morbid to Madison anyway.
She couldn't imagine why anyone would want to be a vampire, living forever sounded enticing, but having to consume blood, and practically hide during the daylight? It didn't seem like much of a life to her. But what did she know? She still wasn't even sure she absolutely bought into all of it.
The second folder he'd labeled Peter, at first, she thought it may have been one of Jesus's apostles. But when she opened it, some thought, a feeling of déjà vu, came over her. Peter Stumpp. She'd seen that name before, she just needed to remember where.
Peter Stumpp would apparently be the answer to her werewolf questions though. Her father wrote that as a young boy, Peter was bitten by a rabid wolf, but rather than dying of rabies, it somehow bonded to his DNA, it made him stronger, if not a little more temperamental too. And as an adult, he'd married a beautiful gypsy woman named Emily Smith, creating two children, a girl, Camille, and a boy, Julien.
While Julien appeared, for all intents and purposes, normal, his daughter "inherited" a special trait from him, one that seemed to be enhanced by the magic of her gypsy mother, and once she reached the age of maturity, her raging hormones caused her to shapeshift into a wolf during her menstrual cycle, which is where the myth about the full moon came from.
Not until a few generations later, a grandson of Camille, Tristan Mellor... wait, Mellor? She knew where she'd seen that name! Putting the folder aside, even as it just started to get good, Madison searched frantically through the piles until she came up with the envelope holding her father's family tree.
There, there it was! A couple of pages back she found what she wanted, while her ancestry included a lot of Melton's and Mellon's over the years, she knew she'd find it. Mellor. Her lineage could be traced back to the first and last Mellor to arrive in the United States. Gina and Kyle Mellor, whose last name would be written down as Mellon in the book at Ellis Island.
Gina and Kyle, whose ancestry went all the way back to Tristan Mellor's brother Zechariah, the great-grandson of Peter Stumpp. And there it was, the reason her father became obsessed with vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts.
According to her family tree, her heritage was steeped in the supernatural.