(A/N: I hope everyone enjoyed the first chapter and likes this one just as much. It seems to be going well so far, so that's good and I hope it stays that way.
Warning: there will be an attempted sexual assault in this chapter. Please take in mind that it will be attempted, but please avoid this chapter if it is a potential trigger for you. I care about you guys and I don't want to upset anyone.)
U-I-U-I-U-X-U-I-U-I-U
It was the morning after the dinner with the Rasches and Winstons, and Cora was in her room, staring up at the ceiling as she thought about what she wanted to do that day. John had already left for the precinct he worked at, homicides don't solve themselves.
She thought about going into the city just to see if it was the same as when she last saw it. She wasn't very social and didn't particularly enjoy walking about the city, especially while well aware of the high crime rate. While in school she would never consider it, but she was an adult now and had military training.
Finally making her decision, she got up from the bed and started to get ready for a walk around the city. She didn't bother to shower since she already took one the other night, instead she put on a pair of black shorts and a shirt with the Army camouflage pattern.
She put her shoes on and grabbed her old book bag out of her closet. She opened her duffle bag on the floor and took something out of it, putting it into her book bag. She grabbed some money and her cell phone from her dresser before leaving her room.
She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth quickly, a habit from her time in the military. She picked up her hairbrush and used it to straighten her hair.
Once she was finished, she left the apartment and walked out to the sidewalk. She could drive, but didn't have a car, many people in New York City didn't, but she liked walking, she was fine with it.
While walking, she took out her cell phone and sent a text message to her uncle. Telling him, "Going on a walk around the city."
She put her cell phone back in her pocket once she was done with the text message. She wasn't sure why she felt like she had to, he was usually working entire nights on his homicide cases, it would often be days before she saw him growing up.
She walked by an internet cafe and stopped in her tracks. She hadn't eaten breakfast yet and decided to walk inside.
She bought a slice of lemon flavored bread and an iced coffee, sitting down at one of the computers. The bread and coffee were good but difficult for her to eat, she almost struggled to eat the dinner the other night as well.
She was used to eating the food carried inside of an MRE, or a Meat Ready to Eat, and had developed a taste for them, it was all she ate for the most part during her deployment to Iraq. The food an MRE carried was often not the best quality, but it was still food, this food was better quality, but since her body had eaten the same type of food for so long it was a struggle just to swallow.
She turned on the computer she sat at and used the mouse to click on the browser. Typing on the keyboard, in the search bar it spelled 'Guatemala', she tapped on the 'enter' key and a page with images of the landscape of the said country appeared.
Taking a bite of the bread, she clicked on the link to an internet encyclopedia, it had information on Guatemala. She scrolled through the information until she got to a section about the role the country played during the Cold War. She scanned the paragraphs with keen eyes until something caught her attention.
There was a reference to a guerilla group, sympathetic to the Communist regime, that was massacred in 1987. The same year when her father suddenly disappeared.
There was no additional link to further read about the slaughtered group, so she tried the search bar. She wanted to find more information on this incident, but all she was able to find was the statistics of people in favor of communism in that part of the world.
"Dammit," she whispered to herself.
Disappointed but undeterred, she took to the search bar again. This time, she was searching for libraries in the Brooklyn area. If the internet couldn't help her, old fashioned books might.
The nearest library was over twenty blocks away from the internet cafe. Exiting from the browser and turning off the computer, she stood up and picked up her book bag, quickly leaving.
She started walking in the direction of the library she found online. She was walking at a rather fast pace, she was very eager and determined to get there to see if she could find any information.
So much so, that she didn't notice that she had people tailing her. It wasn't until a hand suddenly grabbed her that she realized she was being followed.
"Hey, hotness, where you goin'?" a man with a Cajun accent asked.
"Yeah, why don't you hang with us for a while?" another man asked her, this time with a thick New Yorker accent.
"Otoydi ot menya, illi ty pozhaleyesh' ob etom," she growled.
"Ooh! A foreign hottie," the male with the New York accent approached her. "My favorite-!" He was suddenly grabbed by the arm and she rammed her elbow into his eyes and nose, disorienting him. She raised her leg back and kicked him in the crotch, sending him to his knees.
"Why you!" The other man tried to grab her, but she punched him upwards in the chin, disorienting him just like his friend. She kicked him in the stomach, causing him to grunt and fall to the side on the concrete.
"Bastards," she spat. She started to walk away, continuing to the library. "Do svidaniya."
It wasn't even the afternoon hours yet and those rancid men decided to attempt a sex act in broad daylight, next to a street? How idiotic could people be?!
She sighed, thinking, 'This town never ceases to both amaze and disgust me.'
In the shadows, in an alleyway adjacent to the scene of the attempted assault, something was watching. It saw the entire thing from beginning to end, and it wasn't happy.
The sound of metal gliding against rang out in the otherwise quiet alley. "Do svidaniya."
She finally made it to the library after putting the attempted assault behind her. She walked inside and immediately started to look for the records of guerilla groups in Guatemala. In order to find that, she would have to find something that documents communism in that area of the world.
The Cold War ended less than two decades prior, but finding records of the Communist spread in Central and South America was a lot more difficult than she thought. She was in the correct section to find such records, yet she was fruitless.
She was losing hope and thought it might have been best to forget about it. She wished she knew about where her father disappeared while she was still active duty military, she would have had access to the documents she needed.
She turned to leave, but then she heard something fall off of the bookshelf. She turned back and saw a book on the floor and picked it up to look at it.
It was titled "The Unseen: How Much Did The Government Hide?" At first, she thought it was one of the books written by conspiracy theorists, but she was willing to look at it if it could help her. She sat down at a table and started to read it.
As she suspected, it was mostly conspiracy theories that she neither believed nor cared about, but then she found something that caught her eye. A woman claimed to have been captured after the guerilla group she was aligned with was killed by a team of military operatives. One by one, they were all killed by someone or something she called "El Diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres", the demon who makes trophies of men.
The woman was named Anna Gonsalves, she was taken prisoner after her group was suspected of killing a team of Green Berets, the same team her uncle told her about the other night. She described seeing what she could only parallel to a demon, or possibly even the Devil himself.
She immediately set the book face down on the table and started to look for some paper. She eventually found some and took it back with her. She took a pen out of a plastic cup on the table and started to write notes with it.
She wrote down the circumstances that drew her father and his team to Guatemala and the name of the woman that was captured. While she still had some doubts about the authenticity and reliability of the book, it was a start and all she had until she could find more.
She put her notes into her book bag and closed the book. She took it up to the librarian, not to check it out, but to ask about it.
"Excuse me, can I ask about this book?" she inquired.
She looked at it and asked, "Would you like to check it out?"
"No," she replied. "I was wondering if you know a place where I might be able to purchase it."
"Let me look," she said, typing on her computer. She furrowed her eyebrows and turned back to her, "That's funny. According to our records, this book isn't ours. Where did you find it?"
"I'm not entirely sure," she answered. "I think I was looking in a few different sections before I found it."
"Well, since it doesn't appear to be ours, I can keep it here or you can take it with you if you want it," she said.
She thought about it for a second before she picked it up, telling the librarian, "I'll take it."
"Alright, then. If you're looking to buy a book, I would recommend the bookstore three blocks away," she said. "Just south of here."
She nodded and put the book in her book bag, "Thank you, ma'am."
She left the library and began to walk in the direction of the bookstore the librarian told her about. Hopefully, she would find what she was looking for.
It was a very short walk, less than ten minutes, but when she got to the bookstore, she was disheartened to discover that it was closed. She would have to go back to the store another day, which only made her feel more anxious to find out more about the book.
With nothing but the book in her bag, she decided it might be best to return home. She couldn't help herself but to feel as if she may never find out what happened to her father. She knew that she should not have the inevitable thoughts on her mind, but after questioning where he was for the past twenty years of her life, she couldn't stop herself.
Cora arrived back at the apartment and sighed as she practically collapsed onto the sofa, she wasn't tired, just very frustrated. She considered everything she had found during her time walking around the city, and came to the frustrating conclusion that she had gotten nowhere.
She wasn't even sure why she decided to start an amateur investigation to begin with. She felt she had to come to terms with the thought that she would never find out what happened to her father; it wasn't a new feeling.
Suddenly, she heard the door open and close. It was her uncle, most likely to have a quick lunch break before he went back to work.
"Did you see anything interesting today?" he asked, almost teasingly.
"No," she answered quietly. She reached down at her book bag and took out the book she found. "All I found was this."
He took it from her to look at it before giving it back, "Where'd you find that?"
"It just fell off a bookshelf at the library. I… I wanted to find out more about the day my Dad disappeared," she uttered, almost as a confession.
He sat down beside her on the sofa, "Well, did you find anything?"
She shrugged slightly, "I guess, but I'm not sure if it's reliable or even true. I have one name, a woman named Anna Gonsalves."
He seemed to shift uncomfortably on the couch, as if disturbed, as if he was remembering something. He stood up to leave, but she quickly grabbed his arm and gripped it with the force of a vice.
She was smaller and shorter than him and hadn't been in the Army longer than he had been, but her advantage over him was that she was a leader for a fair portion of her time, something he never got the chance to be. He was a brilliant soldier in his prime, but those days were over long ago; he hardly went to investigate crime scenes anymore.
"You recognize the name, don't you?" she nearly seethed, seemingly upset that he had withheld information from her when he promised he knew nothing about the disappearance of her father and his brother. When he didn't answer, she roughly tugged on his arm, "Don't you?!"
"Yes, I do, but I don't know anything about her," he claimed. "I was told that she was the sole survivor of her team's slaughter and the last person to see Alan before he disappeared."
She finally let go of him and looked away from him with a frown. She still thought he was hiding information from her, but if she tried to interrogate him, he would probably laugh because he was a trained police officer.
"Do you know what happened to her?" she asked quietly, much calmer than before.
"Just that she was interrogated by the government," he responded. "She was never seen again after that."
"Which government? Ours? Or hers?" she inquired.
He was silent for a minute before she finally got a response, "Ours." He then looked at her book and tapped on it, "Whoever wrote this was either an insider or given to them by a whistleblower."
She looked down at her book and thought about how convenient it was that she would be the one to find it. She also remembered how peculiar it was that the librarian had said it wasn't from the library.
She didn't read the entire book, but the only part of it she was interested in was just proven to be true by her uncle. It was asking what the government was hiding from the public and she wondered just how much the author did know.
It said the author's name was Samuel Hain, but she had her doubts that he was a real person. To her, Samuel Hain sounded like it was a parody of Samhain, a time during the year where harvesting was welcomed. If that was true, then who was this author and how did they know so much?
He stood up from the couch, "I better eat something and get back to the precinct."
She held up the book to him, "Here. Take it."
He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, but took it from her anyway. He made himself a sandwich before leaving the apartment with the book.
John was in his car, en route back to the precinct. While driving, he was thinking about his niece and about the questions she was asking and how much he actually did know.
He did know what happened to his brother and had been sworn to secrecy by a much higher power in the government. If he had no family, he probably wouldn't care if he allowed the story to spill past his lips. But he did have a family, his ex-wife, his son, and his niece, and he needed to protect them from what he knew.
He came to a stop at a red light and looked down at the book sitting in the passenger seat. How did the author know so many details that were never released to the public? Many people in the federal system likely didn't know, how could they have gotten so much information?
He picked up the book, muttering to himself, as if asking it, "How do you know so much?" He put the book down when he felt his cellphone buzz and took it out, answering it, "Schaefer."
"John, I need you to come out to a scene." It was his partner, Detective Brad. "We got a double homicide just a few blocks away from the public library near your apartment building."
That almost made him drop his cellphone, he thought his heart stopped. It crossed his mind that it could have something to do with Cora, but that couldn't have been it, could it? Surely, this had to be a coincidence.
"I'll," he paused for a moment, "be on my way."
He arrived at the scene and got out of his car to see what was happening. His heartbeat was pounding in his throat, he hadn't been so nervous in a long time.
He saw his partner writing in his notepad and approached him, "What do we have?"
One of the crime scene investigators removed the sheets covering the bodies, "Two male victims, stab wounds through the chest and out the back, both decapitated."
John felt he could let out a breath of relief, but he didn't have the time to relax. Unfortunately, he recognized the method of attack and cause of death, and he knew it meant nothing to be content about.
U-I-U-I-U-X-U-I-U-I-U
(A/N: And… finally done. Jeez, I am exhausted! But at least I got something done today.
Translations:
1. Otoydi ot menya, illi ty pozhaleyesh' ob etom. - Get away from me, or you will regret it. (Russian)
2. Do svidaniya. - Goodbye. (Russian)
Some of this chapter takes inspiration from the comic book "Resident Alien: the Sam Hain Mystery." I personally love the "Resident Alien" comics and I would definitely recommend them.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Independence Day and we should never forget why we celebrate. Again, Happy Independence Day.)