Chapter Nine – Translation

Detective Benson walked over to her desk where Dawn was typing away on her laptop.

"Quite a little display your sister put on," she said.

Dawn shrugged her shoulders. "Not really. I've seen her do better."

"She does that kind of thing often?"

"Only when it needs to be done," Dawn responded. "She really doesn't like to be patronized. She's use to people underestimating her. She can deal with that. But the patronizing thing really annoys her."

"What about you?" Benson asked.

"I've had more practice dealing with silly old men who underestimate me because of my age and looks and then resent me because I'm better at their jobs than they are."

"Got to be tough running a company at your age."

"Guardian pretty much runs itself," Dawn replied. As much as she hated to admit it, Quentin Travers really had set up a good system with Guardian. The company provided an independent source of revenue, a way to recruit potential watchers and a great means to track various mystical artifacts. He apparently did have a few innovative ideas in his early days at the Council.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Somebody needs an appraisal, they call us and we pick the best person for the job, then do it. Everything after that is just paperwork, making sure the bills get paid and the clients pay up on time."

"With someone like Buffy to collect the bills, I image that's not much of a problem."

Dawn had the sudden image of a couple of Slayers 'talking' with some of their more annoying clients. She shook it off. Giles would go ballistic. Besides it would be wrong. Very very wrong.

"I'll keep that in mind," Dawn said. "But I think we've had enough of the pumping me for information portion of our afternoon."

"Have I been that obvious?"

"No," Dawn replied. "I bet you're pretty good in an interrogation."

"Thanks," Benson said. "You have to admit though, it's pretty strange how much knowledge you and Buffy seem to have about serial killers and how to track them."

"I don't suppose you're going to buy the old we both love watching cop shows on TV line," Dawn smiled back.

Benson shook her head, "No."

"Darn, I had a whole spiel about CSI all worked out," Dawn said. "Look, I like you Olivia. And more importantly Xander liked you. And he's the best judge of character I know. But like Buffy said yesterday, there are certain things we're just not allowed to talk about. You're just going to have to accept that."

Benson spent a few seconds studying Dawn then made a decision. "Fine. So where are you with the translation?"

"Hitting a dead end. I've narrowed down the region. This looks to be a language that popped up for couple of centuries before disappearing in the crisscross of armies that marched across Eastern Europe. Probably used by a pre-cursor to one the gypsy tribes."

"So what's the problem narrowing it down further?"

"I've been operating on the assumption that the killer is marking the bodies using the names of the gods or demons that he's making the sacrifices too. But so far nothing is coming up as a match for any of the various entities worshiped in that region in the first millennium."

"So maybe our perp is using something else?" Benson thought for a second. "All the victims come from different backgrounds. Different jobs, different ages, different sexes. Maybe the markings are meant to identify them in some way."

Dawn stopped moving for a second, then closed her eyes and nodded her head. "Damn, I hate it when I'm stupid. That makes sense. That's the link. He kills them someplace else. That place is already dedicated to his god. But he would need to identify the offering," Dawn started working on her keyboard again. "Ok, it's not likely that age is the identifier. Job or title is more likely."

"Margaret Charney was a grade school teacher."

"So we have teacher, mentor, educator, guide," she kept typing. "What about the second victim."

"College student."

"Major?"

"Communications."

"Anything else?"

"He was a track star," Benson answered. "Specialized in distance running."

"Ok, that means, student, athlete, competitor, scholar, apprentice, runner, messenger."

"Messenger?" Benson was thrown off.

"For a lot of centuries runners were used as the principle means to deliver messages. He specialized in distance running. It might be a match."

"Gotcha. That just leaves Emily Gaston."

Dawn took a breath. "Appraiser, curator, keeper of antiquities," she kept typing.

"Alright the new search programs are running," Dawn said. She looked over at Benson. "Good thinking Olivia. If you ever get tired of your current job, give me a call. We're always looking for good people."

"Somehow I don't think I'd fit in with old men and a bunch of books and antiques."

"You'd be surprised," Dawn said.

The computer started beeping. Dawn leaned over her keyboard and started typing again.

"Ok that narrows it down to a workable number," she began typing again. Benson watched as she stopped and studied the screen. She pulled up a second window and began scrolling through both of them. She nodded her head and pulled up a third window and started typing again. Benson watched her go through the process for maybe twenty minutes. Only pausing to ask for a cup of water.

Finally after nearly thirty minutes she smiled. "Bingo."

"You found it."

"Yep," Dawn said. "The tribe that used it came into being in roughly in the late second century. Wiped out in the mid fifth century. They lived in what we would now refer to as the southern Romania northern Bulgaria region."

She continued. "The first marking translates loosely as mentor. The second as athlete and the third as judge."

"Judge?"

"A more literal translation would be 'the judge of value' which is what an appraiser is." Dawn replied. "Now I can e-mail Linda in London with what we know about the ritual that's being used and on the information about the types of sacrifices. She can check through rituals used in that region in the second through fifth centuries. Hopefully she can get us an answer by tomorrow morning."

"You guys have a library of occult rituals?"

"We have a library that covers many subjects," Dawn replied. "Occult rituals is just one of them. We also have a surprisingly large collection of albums from the sixties and seventies that we inherited from one of our board members after Willow finally convinced him to go digital. Even I have to admit some of them are pretty good. Now if I can just get him to stop dictating his e-mails to his secretary," she shook her head. "Total technophobe."