He turned back to the computers and fiddled for a moment, and a chart popped up on one of the monitors. “This is the missing-persons reports for Calgary, by month, for the last two years.”
There was a sudden, sharp increase and Aheed pointed to it. “This surge started nine months ago—approximately when your vampires are believed to have arrived, correct?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, eyeing the chart. If I was reading it correctly, missing-persons reports had doubled over a three-month period, stabilizing at twice their earlier level.
“These reports are a useful tool for looking for vampires,” Aheed told me. “They are hemovores; they have no choice but to feed. Only the very strongest of them can feed and not kill.
“Unusually,” he continued in his precise fashion, “several of our missing persons have resurfaced. While a portion, certainly, were ordinary cases, it is likely at least one or two are something...else.”
“But they’d be obviously vampires,” I objected. “Even to humans, they’d stick out.”
“I would agree,” he replied with a nod, “except that one of our reappearing persons went missing again a couple of weeks ago. His court-ordered therapist hasn’t heard anything from him since a Saturday several weeks ago when, as I understand it, you and Clan Tenerim dealt with a group of vampires.”
A click of Aheed’s mouse threw a picture of a dark-haired young man up on another screen. “Recognize him?”
I looked at the picture long and hard, mentally hollowing out cheeks and adding the shadow of a moonlit night, and then nodded.
“He was one of the vampires who attacked me,” I confirmed. He’d been the one who’d come after me with a cold-iron knife.
“And so, he was a vampire,” Aheed said with satisfaction, and then brought up another picture of the young man. “This is Mike Russells two days before you and he fought,” he continued. “Note that this photo was taken in daylight—this is a still frame taken from the police station security cameras.”
Russells looked perfectly alive in the picture, shading his eyes from the sun as he calmly entered the police station.
“How?” I asked.
“Lifesblood,” Eric said quietly. “Human blood mixed with heartstone would allow a vampire to do that. It would allow them to sustain a legal identity, one the cabal could use to buy property and vehicles.”
“Did this Russells buy anything?” I asked.
“No,” Ibrahim said, shaking his head. “He was too poor and broke for large purchases to be immediately justifiable. If he had survived, he would likely have ‘come into some family money’ and used it to open a front business of some variety. One of our other returned missing persons may still do that.”
“So, none of them have?” I checked.
“No,” he admitted.
“But they have to already have some base of operations,” I told the two other men. “Have you discovered anything on that?”
Aheed brought up a map of the city with tiny red dots on it on another monitor—he hadn’t turned any of them off yet. “If you analyze the distribution of missing-persons reports in the last nine months,” he said, gesturing at the new image, “you’ll note that they are disproportionately in the northwestern quarter of the city. The northwest is generally regarded as being a higher quality and is often disproportionately lower in missing-persons reports.
“That still, however, leaves you a full quadrant of the city for possible locations,” he added, “including the entire university campus.”
“That’s not hugely helpful,” Eric observed. “I expected better for one of my favors.”
Wordlessly, Aheed passed me a USB stick.
“This drive contains all of the information I retrieved on our six remaining reappeared missing persons,” he told me.
Aheed’s comment on the university reminded me, and I looked at him.
“Which of these are the cases that turned out to be Sigridsen’s murders?” I asked.
The djinni looked at me, surprised, and then fiddled for a moment, turning a grouping of the dots blue. “Those.”
I stood and walked over to the monitor to look at it more closely. The blue grouping was off-center from the main grouping, more central-north, where most of the missing persons were scattered evenly over the northwest.
“She sticks out,” I observed. “But she’s how they got into the city. She had to have prepared something. Do you know if she purchased any property—for that matter, what name was the house she was living in owned under?”
“I don’t know,” Aheed admitted, sounding surprised. “I can find out, though.”
I turned toward him and pointed a finger at him as his fingers flew to the keyboard.
“Yes, but what will it cost me?”
The djinni stopped, his fingers suspended over the keyboard. For a moment, he tried to fake a shocked expression, and then he broke out into deep laughter.
“You warned him well, Eric,” he told the gnome. The djinni turned his gaze on me as his wife came down the stairs behind me, the smell of tea suddenly filing the warm computer room.
“There is always a price with a djinni,” Aheed told me. “You are quite right to ask what it will be. In this case...” He eyed me. “In exchange for everything I can discover about Sigridsen, properties she owned or was involved with that may lead you to the cabal, I want a blood sample.”
“No,” Eric snapped instantly. “I can call in another favor.”
The djinni held up a hand. “You are not the one bargaining, my friend. My hobby is analyzing inhuman DNA,” he explained to me. “Much of our nature is bound up in things that science cannot explain, but blood still reveals many secrets. In trade for one small vial of your blood, I will track down what connections Sigridsen had.”
I looked at Eric, who shrugged helplessly. “It’s a fair trade—if she had connections that can lead us to the cabal,” he directed at Aheed.
The djinni shrugged in turn. “You are bargaining for my services, not for guarantees,” he told me.
I considered it for a moment. My blood wouldn’t, unless the djinn could do something I wasn’t aware of, give Aheed any huge power over me. It was a minor thing, really.
“Done,” I agreed.
“Good; now, if that’s settled, can you three drink your tea?” Nageena instructed us as she set her tea tray down on a small table clearly kept down there for the purpose. “While you’re doing that, I will grab my needles.”
I sipped at the tea as Aheed turned back to his computer and went to work. A few minutes later, Nageena returned with a tray of sterile-looking medical equipment and a folding table. She quickly and efficiently laid my arm on the table and drew the one tiny vial of blood. A tiny ouch, a minor gross-out, and I had finished my side of the bargain.
“Sigridsen hasn’t owned anything in her own name since the shifters burned her out last year,” Aheed told me. “At least, not real estate property in Calgary. One house in Africa. Some shares, none of them enough to give her a noticeable say in any company.”
“That’s not very useful,” I observed.
“No, but it does tell us that the house she was living wasn’t held in her name,” the detective said absently, scrolling through multiple databases as he switched between screens and monitors. “Ah, here. Sneaky woman.”
“Oh?”
“Her full name was Dr Elisse Laura Sigridsen,” Aheed told me. “However, according to this, she was married for five years when she was younger. For that time frame, she was Dr Elisse Laura Marshall. Being a sneaky woman, she managed to keep Marshall as a legally existing name when she went back to her maiden name.
“The house was owned by E. Laura Marshall,” he concluded. “It has been for two years. There are, however, no other properties under that name.”