Just past two-thirty on a Thursday morning the alarm sounded, throwing all begins, paranormal and human, out of their sleep. Growling and cursing under his breath, Hellboy rolled out of his bed and immediately reached for his duster and Samaritan when Manning's voice reverberated throughout the building.
"Attention all staff! Report to the library immediately for emergency briefing."
Emergency briefing? Hellboy thought. Crap, this can't mean anything good.
Five minutes later the entire Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense was assembled in the meeting room, all eyes trained on Manning, who stood before them. He wasted no time on preamble.
"There has been a string of ten unsolved murders stretching over the last six years that have only now come to our attention."
Hellboy interrupted. "Why only now?"
"No one made the connection until the last attack ten months ago. That was in Seattle. After which a detective at the Seattle PD finally connected it with the preceding nine attacks in New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and Austin. The only connecting factors between them all, and this is where things get really strange, are the facts that each murder took place with in walking distance of a strip club, each victim was mutilated in the same fashion, and at every crime scene there were white feathers scattered near the body."
"The first attack occurred six years ago in Manhattan. This is the most perplexing as none of the others involved two people, and the murders took place in an apartment, not near a strip joint. In 2001 an unidentified man was found dead in a Manhattan apartment. His stomach had been gouged out, his entrails removed and left on the floor, and his face had been …clawed…beyond recognition. Also, his hands had been torn from his body: they were not found anywhere in the apartment. Lack of documented fingerprints or papers combined with records of phone calls made from the apartment to a town in Czechoslovakia led the NYPD to believe that he was an illegal alien from Eastern Europe."
Manning paused for a moment and drew a long breath. His face was wreathed in shadows and, as Hellboy looked upon the director, his feeling of unease grew.
"However," Manning continued, "that wasn't the worst of it. Also found in the bedroom…there was a child. An unidentified boy, estimated age six or seven. Rope burns on his wrists and ankles showed that he had been tied down to the bed. There were signs of anal penetration suggestive of a lead pipe, which was found at the crime scene." Manning had to stop for a minute to take another deep breath. "The boy died from blood loss, inflicted by over thirty whip lashes to his back and legs."
Beside Hellboy, Meyers put one hand to his forehead, saying softly, "Oh my god. That poor kid."
"Both bodies were discovered by the building's superintendent when he arrived the next morning to fix the sink."
"Over the next five years, the following eight attacks occurred sporadically around the country. There are no connections between any of the victims, beside the fact that they are all male. And then of course there was the way each murder was committed. The victims bled to death from major gouge marks inflicted by an unknown weapon. The closest any of the medical examiners have ever come to identifying it was describing it as an overlarge hawk or falcon's claw. Which of course has kept investigators baffled for years, because, naturally, nothing like that exists in this world." Here the tension was momentarily broken as everyone spared a glance at Abe and Hellboy and chuckled softly. Even the demon managed a small smile at Manning's delayed humor.
"Besides those facts, there are no other connections between the attacks. None of the victims knew each other." Manning consulted the folder in his hands. "They came from all walks of life; a lawyer, hospital orderly, two truckers, sous chef, bar tender, electronics store clerk and a young man on unemployment with a record as a mugger. The killer clearly doesn't distinguish between classes, so it must have something to do with all of these men's presence in the red-light districts. That is about all we know at the moment."
The technician, Jenny Klein, looking quite worn and sleep deprived but triumphant nonetheless, spoke up. "I've been up for the last few hours running search engines trying to find a more solid connection than the feathers I believe I have." She clicked her mouse and an image appeared on the large screen against suspended form the ceiling; it was the sight of the first strip club murder. "So far the only connecting factors were the white feathers and the fact that all of the attacks took place in the red-light districts of their respective cities where a murder took place. I've come across one more factor; a person to connect them all."
Immediately Hellboy was on his feet, hand making for a gun on his waist that wasn't there. "You've figured out who is behind these attacks?"
"Well, not quite. I mean, I might have…but then again maybe not. I just mean that I've found a person who might have some sort of association to these murders."
Manning spoke as Hellboy sank back into his seat. "Do you have a name for us?"
"Uh…no, not exactly. This is the best I can give you." The techie clicked her mouse and drew up a series of images. After a moment of staring at the screen Hellboy realized that he was staring at a flyer for a strip club, The Black Angus, in Chicago. A dozen or so girls in various raunchy poses and revealing costumes grinned back at the room.
"What are we lookin' at here Jenny?" Manning said.
"Wait for it," Jenny responded.
More images of flyers for different strip joints an gentlemen's clubs began to go by one by one, at least eight or nine of them…one for every murder. Hellboy stared at the images flashing before his eyes and suddenly, as though a switch had been thrown in his mind, he saw it. A woman's face was discernable in every different flyer. Different city, different strip club, same woman.
She was uncommonly pretty, full lips painted blood red, a startling contrast against her pale, almost translucent skin. Her beauty would have been complete were it not for the barely concealed look of distrust in her wide, slanting green eyes. It was hard to tell what color her hair was, because in some advertisements she seemed to be a brunette, in others a blonde, and in the last one she sported a head of thick black curls. All the clever work of wigs, no doubt. This last flyer was where Jenny finally stopped her rotation of pictures. Like all the others it showed an array of young women in various states of undress, the haunting woman featured in the top left corner.
"A stripper?" Meyers said incredulously. "We're looking for a stripper?"
"Mmmhmm." Jenny nodded.
"Do we have a name to go along with this woman?" said Manning.
"No. The most I can come up with is what I suppose must be her stage name: Angel." She picked up a laser pointer and directed all their attention to the name printed in small letter underneath the woman. Indeed, Angel was written beneath her picture, just as the names Chastity, Roxanne, Jasmine and several others were printed below the many grinning and grinding girls.
"There is nothing to find out about her. I've tried running searches on any stripper, call-girl or hooker ever arrested under the name Angel, and trust me, there have been a lot, but none of them have fit her description or matched her movements over the years. Who ever this woman is, she's never been arrested. The only thing we have about her is her stage name and an approximation of her current location."
"And that would be?"
The techie pointed with her laser pen again to the top flyer where bright red letters proclaimed, "Pamela's Exotic Dancers." Below it there was an address in Louisiana.
There was silence for a few moments until Manning stood up, took a deep, tired breath and said, "All right kids, pack it up; we're going to the Bayou."