Chapter 16: Played!
Phil closed his eyes and leant his head back against the window of Buddy's truck.
"Sleep good?" Buddy asked as he kept his eyes on the road.
"Eh, tossed and turned all night. I kept dreaming about chuppahs and my mom running around complaining that there wasn't enough brisket to go around."
"Ha! I had some wild dreams when Sherman and I were planning our wedding. One night I dreamed the minister was getting to the part about "does anyone have just cause why these two should not be joined together…" and Sherman's ex-wife ran down the aisle, pregnant like someone about to have triplets, screaming "I'm having his baby!"
"Oh my G-d!" Phil laughed.
"And his ex is actually pretty nice, not one of those bitchy vindictive ex-wives you hear about. She's really cool about their daughter's custody situation too."
"I didn't know Sherman had a kid."
"Oh yeah, but we don't get to have Morgan over that much because of Sherman's crazy work schedule. And we really don't have the room in our apartment for her to have extended stays. Poor thing has to camp out on the couch when she's over on visitation weekends."
"I know what that's like. I slept on Biff and Chet's couch for months after my breakup with Dan."
"I remember Biff telling me about that." Buddy pulled up to the front of Phil's office building. "Want to get another pizza for dinner tonight with me and Sherman?"
"Sure, sounds good to me. Thanks for the lift." Phil hopped out of the truck and headed in for another day of work. Thank G-d it was Friday! In another day and a half Frank would be home and back in his arms. Phil couldn't wait.
…..
"Joe Honey?" Vanessa came out of the bathroom weak and exhausted. How many more weeks was this morning sickness supposed to last?
Joe wasn't in the bed. Maybe he'd gone to the kitchen to start his breakfast. The kitchen sounded like a good idea just then. The ginger ale was in there, so were to the saltine crackers. She made her way down the hall and found Joe sitting at the kitchen table. His wavy blonde hair was wild from where he had been running his fingers through it. He had his laptop open and his phone to his ear.
"What's wrong?" She whispered. It wasn't like Joe to be working from his laptop this early in the morning. It wasn't like Joe to work from home period. He looked up at her with worried eyes and held up a finger to indicate he'd tell her in a minute. Vanessa poured her soda and got her crackers out of the cabinet while Joe was listening to whoever was on the other line.
"Okay, thank you!" Joe ended the call and turned to his wife.
"Frank's missing. He went out for breakfast without Biff and by the time Biff got there, Frank was gone. Only his phone was found."
"Oh Joe! Are you going down there?"
"Yes, trying to book a flight now." He finally put his phone down and took his wife's hand. "I'm sorry I'm leaving you while you're so sick."
"It's okay Honey. I'll get Mom to come by and check on me, you go help them find Frank." Suddenly Joe felt like a bucket of cold water was poured over him. Wasn't that the very thing Frank had been asking Joe to do? To stay closer to home and take care of his wife and child, to stop depending on his mother-in-law to do what he should be doing in the first place. Van was his wife now. Van was his responsibility. But here she was, ready to be handed off back to her mother while he ran off to do G-d knows what.
Joe dropped his head into his hands, choking with emotion. Vanessa put a comforting hand on his arm to pull a hand from his face.
"Joe, talk to me. What's going through that head of yours?"
"Frank and I had argument a couple of weeks ago. Frank was lecturing me about hunting with Biff so much, expecting Andrea to look after you, about being here for you more. I more or less told him to mind his own business. I just…"
"Honey, look at me." Joe raised his head to face his wife. "I knew there were dangers and risks going into this marriage. And I'm all Mom's got now, so I don't mind spending the extra time with her. After all the horrible things Frank's been through, maybe he just wanted to make sure everyone he loves is safe and sound, including you."
Joe took Vanessa's hand and kissed her palm.
"I love you." He said.
"I love you too." Joe's phone rang again. He picked it up and saw the call was coming from his father. How was he going to break the news of Frank's disappearance to his dad? That twice in a year's time his eldest son had gone missing.
"Hello?" Joe answered.
"Joe, are you still at home?"
"Yeah."
"I just got a call from Doug Wiseman, he's down in New Orleans at the conference. He said that Frank's gone missing…"
Crap!
…..
Emile Louvel closed and locked the heavy vault-like basement door with satisfaction. Forget Eric Langhorne's sappy tale of love lost. With the information Mozelle provided him with last night, he was going to be a very rich man in a few days. He was comfortable now, but this would set him up for the rest of his supernatural life.
He walked into the office in the back of his perfume store, and there sat Mozelle placing an order for more ribbons, tissue paper and shopping bags.
"Mon cher, for you!" He tossed a silver bracelet to his employee. The blonde woman caught the bracelet and turned it over in her fingers.
"This one looks similar to the one Eric gave you to pick up the boy's scent, just in better condition."
"Oui, that it is." Emile picked up the cane Mozelle had brought in and examined its intricate silver workings. "For one so young, he has very nice taste."
"When's Delebon and his bunch supposed to get here?" Mozelle asked as she retrieved a jeweler's monocle from her desk drawer to examine the emerald on the bracelet.
"Let me see… Today is Friday… Sunday night at the earli…"
"Oh shit! Emile, look at this!" Mozelle turned in her chair and handed the monocle and bracelet to older man.
"What is it? What am I looking at Mozelle? What is that thing behind the emerald?"
"Where's the first bracelet Emile?" Emile rummaged through a drawer in his desk and withdrew the battered bracelet whose emerald was missing. He'd never examined the thing other than to smell it to get Frank Hardy's scent, and Mozelle hadn't bothered to give it a second look since the jewel was missing.
"It's a computer chip of some sort." A sudden realization came over Mozelle and the woman began to panic. "Think Emile, what did Eric say Frank did for a living? Why was he in New Orleans in the first place? The P.I. convention! Emile, that's probably a tracking device!"
"Merde*! We must get rid of them." Emile thought for a moment. "Go change clothes mon cher. Take these and lose them in the French Market." Mozelle left immediately for the room where she kept her spare clothes while Emile took a handkerchief to wipe the jewelry of any fingerprints. Satisfied with his work he dropped them into a small paper bag and had them ready for this employee.
A tall African-American woman with striking white hair entered Emile's office.
"You are not worried about drawing attention to yourself are you?" he asked as he handed her the bag.
"Don't worry this one was a hair dresser." She held up her palms. "Hair chemicals wore off her fingerprints off over time."
"Good thinking." He stood and kissed her quickly. "Hurry, we open soon."
…..
Doug Wiseman got off the phone with the New Orleans police department and sighed, frustrated.
"Just as I thought, Frank has to be missing for twenty four hours before they can put out a missing person report."
"I called Café Du Monde's corporate office. They said they would be willing to let us look at their surveillance tape, after we get a warrant." Said an athletic looking African-American man named Travis Hudson. "My laptop's back at the room, I'll go and see if I can hack it."
"And we can't get that warrant until Frank's officially missing." said Mark Thompson, the only detective in the bunch who was licensed for criminal investigation in Louisiana.
Three of the detectives from New Jersey that Frank met at the conference had made a table in the corner of the café a temporary ground zero. Doug Wiseman had served on the same police force as Fenton Hardy back in the late seventies and early eighties. When he'd seen Frank in one of the seminars, he swore it was like stepping back in time to their days as rookies, just without the thick sideburns and moustaches. But Frank was his father's son, no doubt about that. Wanting to catch up with the young detective about his family and tell a few humorous tales about his and Fenton's good old days on the force, he'd invited the youth and his companion to breakfast with his office mates.
When Doug and his business partners had arrived at Café Du Monde later that morning, Frank wasn't there. No big deal, really. They would have waited for a bit and if he didn't show, then they would just go on with their day and meet up with Frank and his friend at the banquet later that night. But when only Frank's friend had appeared just as their coffee and beignets arrived, with the young detective's phone in hand, he knew their plans for the day had drastically changed.
All Biff could do right now was to sit back and watch the three men do their thing. Wiseman had gone around to the patrons and wait staff with a picture of Frank from Biff's phone asking if they had seen him. Thankfully two waitresses recalled seeing Frank leave with a short middle-aged woman. According to them, he had gotten sick at the table and they took off toward Jackson Square.
Well, that made sense, since the tracking app placed Frank going in that same general direction. Biff checked the app on his phone just as Doug's phone rang again.
"He's moving! Frank's heading back through Jackson Square." Biff hopped up from the table and ran across the street to Jackson Square, Doug Wiseman hot on his heels. They stopped in the center of the square, looking around as the red dot on the screen drew closer to their location.
"Come on Frank. Come on…" But there was no Frank, just an increasingly busy park with tourist milling about. The red dot on Biff's screen continued past them.
"The tracker is going in the direction of the French Market."
"You said the tracking device was on a bracelet. Maybe whoever he went with took it from him." Wiseman suggested. They followed the signal toward the market, still not seeing any sign of Frank, or the woman fitting the description of the one he left with.
By now the French Quarter was alive with tourists bustling through the stores, boarding horse drawn carriages, and crowding the French Market. Biff ran ahead to the north end of the market to cut off the path of the dot, Doug entered the market from the south. When they met in the middle the dot was stationary. They were in an empty space between stalls of Cajun seasonings and preserved alligator heads.
"The dot stopped here, but it's just you and me." Biff fretted. Wiseman looked around the stalls. Biff squatted to look under a stall and sure enough, there were two silver bracelets under a table of bulk Mardi Gras beads. Two? For the second time that morning Biff felt like he had been punched in the gut.
…..
"Both are clean of prints. No traces of blood on either bracelet." said the deep baritone voice of Travis Hudson. He put Frank's bracelets in a sterile plastic baggie and closed up his examination kit that he had brought with him as well. Biff accepted the baggie from the detective and sat on the edge of the man's hotel bed, shoulders slumped in defeat.
It had not been a productive morning for the other detectives either. Mark didn't get very far with the owner of the perfume shop. The elderly proprietor had not seen Frank or the picture of the woman Travis had hacked from Café Du Monde's digital surveillance. Neither had any of the other store owners in the stores and restaurants on all sides on the building.
"We'll keep an eye out for anything and give you a call. There's bound to be some evidence around that PontalbaBuilding, but again, we've got to wait before we can do anything legally."
"I really do appreciate the help you've given me so far. I'll call you if Frank tries to contact me too." Doug clapped Biff on the back sympathetically as he left the hotel room.
Biff wanted to scream or hit something the entire walk back to the Ritz. Twenty four hours? Frank could be in the next state in twenty four hours. He could be dead. Where was the common sense in that? But no, there were laws and guidelines and procedures. Dark couldn't come soon enough, he'd scale the building and … Great, now he was starting to think like Amy.
The other thing that had him over a barrel was the other bracelet. How on Earth could Frank's old bracelet have made it down from New York to Louisiana? Phil had said it had been lost after the HersherPark battle. The last time Biff had seen the thing it was flying out of Frank's hand when he had attached that vampire Magnus. Maybe he could get Phil to look up the old bracelet's movement history, to see where all it had been since January. Maybe that would give them an idea of who was behind Frank's disappearance, or maybe there would be a travel pattern they could follow.
Oh no… Phil. He was going to have to call Phil and tell him what was happening. Damn it! Could this day get any worse? He looked at his watch and it was nearly noon. Phil was going to be expecting Frank's lunchtime call anytime now. Biff reached his room just as Frank's phone rang out. Biff took a deep breath before he it the answer icon.
"Biff?"
"Hey Phil." the athlete said sullenly.
"Where's Frank? Can I speak to him?"
Well, here we go…
…
Buddy was driving about ten miles over the posted speed limit, praying for all he was worth that he didn't run into any patrol cars or speed traps on the way to the airfield. Phil was typing furiously on his laptop checking the signal history of the old bracelet. Why in all these months did he not even think to check on that damn bracelet?
"Quit beating yourself up, okay Phil?"
"What?"
"You're mumbling, talking to yourself. Look, after you, Joe and Chet took off with Frank for the hospital, Papa and the rest of us torched the place to finish it off and cover up the vampire ashes. It was a mess! It's only natural to assume the thing got destroyed in the fire or got plowed under when the state finally came in and bulldozed the debris a few weeks later." Buddy rationalized.
"I… I just wish in all these months I'd taken one, just one moment to look up the thing's frequency. Maybe if I saw it had been moved…"
"Don't do that Phil! I swear to G-d I'll pull this truck over and horse-whip you. Look, I understand. You feel guilty. I've lived that too man. But quit dwelling on should haves and concentrate on what you need to do."
Phil was quiet. He wasn't ready to admit that Buddy just might be right, because he was still despairing over Frank. He looked down at the computer screen to see that the information on the old bracelet was finally uploading.
"The bracelet moved the night after we got Frank. It went south, Alabama, Florida, stayed there for a few months." Phil continued to scroll through the dates and locations coming up on the map. "July, Virginia, then back up to New York… That was the same week Amy was gone to that fashion show. Then Louisiana, back up to New York…Oh shit! Buddy that was about the time Zeke saw that rogue Were. Oh fuck!" He picked up his phone and called Biff to relay the information.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Phil asked Biff as Buddy turned onto the gravel road that led to the private airfield.
"That we've played right into that bastard's hands!"
…..
Author's Note:
* French: Shit!