"Thanks, Skeet." Gidge scanned the C.V. on his screen. Dr. Herbert Fowler, neurosurgeon, was a triple-threat Harvard graduate, winner of several local and statewide awards, and one missing brain doctor.
Skeet waved him off, sipping his Mountain Dew with a relish. "No problem, Gidge, hope this helps."
Skeet's team in Sacramento had done their homework. He returned to Dr. Fowler's C.V. and an article detailing the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. The police investigation was still open. Fowler's car had been discovered between two exits on Rte. 80. There was no blood in, on, or around his car, and no tracks to be found on the asphalt shoulder. Fowler's work mobile was attached to the dash in a professional set up, head set and all, so that he could take work-related emergency calls, of which he probably had his fair share; he did emergency trauma work as much as scheduled surgery. His personal cell phone was found on the passenger's seat.
Gidge looked at the other two missing persons reports for the Sacramento area: Dr. Marie Autile, MD and PhD and Jennifer Samuels, RN. Autile's clinical research was an ongoing study of patients in persistent vegetative comas, so it was pretty obvious why the vamps had snatched her, as her expertise would be invaluable to the setup and maintenance of the blood farms.
Samuels was a bit more puzzling. Compared to the fifty-something Autile, and the mature forty-ish Fowler, Samuels was a kid. Graduating one year ago without honors from the University of Virginia School of Nursing, and accepting an offer for a post at the Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, Samuels was hardly a blood and guts expert, though she might provide some insight on patient care. Maybe they wanted someone freshly educated to shore up the dated training of the other doctors.
Maybe, and maybe Gidge would take up jogging outside in the park. Fowler didn't make a whole lot of sense; he was a surgeon, highly overqualified as a technician and underqualified in terms of patient care to monitor a blood bank. Possibly, he covered emergencies, Autile had the long-run stats, and Samuels had the bedside manner to fill in. But something was nagging him, picking at the inconsistency. Something Stone had said about women. Two out of three of the missing medical types were women. Coincidence?
It was possible they were just anomalies, like a handful of other local disappearances that the Sacramento crowd ruled out as potentially vampire-related. Except that all three had vanished without a trace of violence, without saying goodbye to relatives or having a single enemy in the world. Indeed, Sacramento thought the world of Dr. Fowler, and the world thought the world about Dr. Autile. Nurse Samuels had a fiancé who'd reported her missing in the first place.
These three he categorized in the less than fair but still accurate column of 'people who will be missed.' As a rule vampires avoided having too many of their victims fall under that designation. They had to have a very good reason for abducting people with such high profiles, and Gidge was more than a little afraid to know what it might be; if it was something worse than the blood farm the others talked about, he didn't want to find out.
The secure line flashed a half-second before it rang. He flipped it on.
"Yo."
"Gidge, call the crew." It was King, talking in a low monotone with only urgency for inflection. "Feliar knows Fox is here."
"Why don't you call them?"
"I don't have time, and I leave terrible messages, all right? So just do it."
And the man was gone again. He'd never get used to the new guys and their impatience. Caulder was a scientist, Alyssa a den mother, and whatever Joneses Stone and Fox had in their blood, they never took it out on him. Whereas Whistler and King took life at a run and expected everyone else to keep up. He, for one, was fucking exhausted by it.
He was also a little off his game today. In addition to working on no sleep and a shitload of caffeine, he'd caught a breaking news bulletin at noon which informed him that Tony Baker, the nobody familiar he'd tapped, was a corpse. Guilt chewed on his conscience for this even as he (mostly) absolved himself of responsibility. Still, he should have been more careful.
Maybe King had ratted the guy out to buy him an 'in' with the vampire. The casual cruelty of this notion unnerved him. It was a cavalier attitude towards life that he normally associated with the vampires. Then again, why should it surprise him if King was that chill? The guy had been a bloodsucker for long enough that neither he nor his partner would volunteer the details.
Or maybe Gidge was just a fucking idiot and shouldn't care that a familiar was dead. He half-expected that, if the vampires were gone, all the familiars would be disappointed but would ultimately just go back to their normal lives. But that was still a long way off. For now, the old rules still applied: familiars were bastards who sold out people to the vampires, and one living familiar was one too many.
He felt better upon reaching this resolution, and dialed San Francisco. There was no answer upstairs, so he pinged Caulder's computer and rousted the distracted biochemist.
"What's up, doc?"
"Gidge, is this important? I'm working."
"King called me to say Fox's made."
Caulder sighed, shrugging. "Whistler mentioned as much to me this morning. I gather she talked to him last night some time."
That his news was already expected rankled some, but Gidge pressed on.
"He said it was for sure. You might want to bench her until Thursday."
"She was helping me with Daystar and went to take a nap. I'll tell her to stay indoors when she gets up."
"You sure?" Gidge's gut rumbled. It was probably a protest of his steady diet of No Doze and Doritos, but he trusted that it meant more. He reached without looking for the tracker program and keyed in the code for Fox's biometric tracking device.
"Caulder, I hate to break this to you," he read off the coordinates of Fox's tracker and compared them to Caulder's. "But she's not at home."
Caulder frowned, still not resigned to worry. "She might have gone with Whistler and Alyssa."
"Where are they?"
Caulder's perturbation cut deep worry lines on his forehead. "Alyssa thought they should go talk to Leung and his wife."
Gidge goggled at the screen. "And you let her?" He could imagine that argument, sure, but no way could he have pictured Caulder losing it. "Alyssa's pregnant, Caulder, and you send her out to the guy whose boss eats babies for breakfast?"
"It was not my idea," Caulder grumbled, pinching his eyebrow and pulling out a few hairs. It was the oddest nervous tick, but Caulder did it whenever he was sufficiently agitated. "She seemed to think they'd be safe. The convention is a public affair, he's the agent on record who's in charge, and they have plenty of daylight left to work in. Whistler went with her as a precaution."
Caulder's rationalization convinced neither of them, but Gidge let it slide. He could beat Caulder over the head and give Alyssa a thousand noogies later. He popped in Alyssa's tracking code and aligned it with Fox's.
"I got more bad news for you then."
"What?" Now that the subject of his pregnant wife had popped up, Caulder was paying him a lot more attention.
"Fox is nowhere near them, Whistler or 'Lyssa."
"That is bad news," Caulder tapped a pen against his desk, frowning. "Give Alyssa and Whistler a call. Try Eli, too. Someone should go pick her up before the vampires do."
"What is she doing downtown?"
"No idea," Caulder shook his head. "She said nothing to me this morning. Just helped me with Daystar and went for a nap."
"Right, nap," Gidge rolled his eyes. Only someone as fundamentally trustworthy as Caulder could be that trusting. "Look, I'm gonna pull the data from the computers upstairs, see if I can't cross-reference anything new she's got with what I have on her familiars."
"The ones from Saturday?" Caulder thought about this. "You think she's going after them?"
"I can't think of what else she'd be doing. Feliar's all the way across the city with King at the Ritz, so she's not after her unless she's got some sort of surface missiles."
"With Fox, you never know."
"Don't say that, please?" Gidge signed off the video conferencing and connected to the laptop in the kitchen. Fox had nothing new on the familiars other than what he'd sent to her and Eli, and he almost disconnected when a keystroke log on his right-most monitor began to report typing. If the little kid was playing with his hardware, he'd get Caulder to spank her while he watched.
He re-opened the conferencing software.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing, missy?"
But it wasn't the girl. A dark shape reached across the camera's range, and Gidge recognized it as an arm. The view swiveled as the arm's owner turned the laptop to face him. Gidge stared at someone he'd never seen before in his life. It was definitely not the kid.
"Missy?" The man's voice rumbled on the lowest register, bordering on a growl that didn't sound remotely happy.
Gidge nearly cut the connection when he saw the guy's teeth. Definitely not human. Shit. He had to warn Caulder!
"Who are you?" the figure commanded.
Gidge swallowed, gagging, fingers flying as he tried to fire off a silent alarm to Caulder.
"Who am I? Who the fuck are you?"
"The boogeyman. Where's Whistler?"
"Where's Caulder?" Caulder wasn't answering his frantic red alerts. Not good.
"Busy." Not 'dead,' Gidge thanked God. He'd said he was 'busy,' not dead.
"Where's the kid?"
The man on the other end grinned, held a finger to his lips. "Shh. She's sleeping." The man didn't seem to intend the kid any harm despite his humorlessness. "Whistler?" He repeated.
"She's out."
The other man nodded, approving this answer. Fresh intimidation flushed through his body. This guy knew Whistler. Knew Whistler was a she, as opposed to the legendary Whistler Sr. who worked with…Oh Jesus!
He could feel his jaw drop and his eyes go wide.
"You-You're Blade, aren't you?"
The man on the other end grinned.