Having all the things they need, Leona and Mercurio took off immediately—they were not here to socialize—then went through the files Issac gave them in a brief and had a quick discussion on the road. Issac had followed up this serial kidnapper for quite some time now, so although the Kindred did clean up his trails quite well, they still found something useful in there.
"I wouldn't say it was no use at all. I mean…even though these girls are from everywhere, and if you match the time and place there's no travelling pattern of this Kindred, too," Leona looked at the map on the laptop and analyzed, while Mercurio was driving and listening, "but they were all flying on their own to LA and disappeared afterwards, so I'd say he got in touch with them online. That's the best fit."
"Yeah, makes sense." Mercurio nodded, "Then I will have my Nossie friend look up their online footprints, see where they crossed paths right now. Hopefully this guy is not a top-rank hacker, too."
"Well, even if he is, he can't be better than a Nossie."
Nossie is their nickname for Kindred of clan Nosferatu. They are indeed the information and technology masters in the Camarilla, but…the clan name is not very easy on the tongue. Hence the nickname.
After calling this Nosferatu pal about his new request of the info, Mercurio pondered over what Issac said for a while, remaining baffled about some details: "Still I don't feel quite right about the whole 'occult killing' thing…well, I'm not an expert, of course, but why would he be so specific about those girls' appearances? Like, maybe because some crazy shit he believes he would need to pick someone to kill, but that standard is not usually about the looks, right? At least not in such…details."
Skimming through the files and photos of those girls again, Leona silently agreed with what Mercurio said: same hair and eye colors, similar faces, and now that they had the statistics of the missing girls, turned out they even had close ages, heights and weights. That was…too particular, as if this Kindred was looking for them according to a real-life example.
Then Leona thought of something after being shortly puzzled: "Alright, I know a Tremere apprentice in the Chantry who used to study criminal psychology…maybe she knew something."
She immediately phoned that Tremere, while Mercurio raised his eyebrows and muttered in a low voice on her words: "A Tremere who studied criminal psychology? Wow…That's a whole new level of creepy…"
Leona wasn't able to tell the apprentice much over the cell, but the opinion of a learned individual was still very enlightening: Yes, occult killing doesn't usually have requirements of victims' appearances on such a level, a spiritual or religious connection is much more common…which in this case was weird—this Kindred didn't seem to care about the cultural backgrounds of these women at all.
In fact, this looked very personal, like this Kindred was trying to fulfill some sort of intimate fantasy—a very refined one, considering how picky he was with the ladies, and mostly there would be an "ideal victim", someone who he thought could make his dream come true, and the ideal victim was more likely to be the first one or the last one.
"I'd say it's the first." Mercurio heard the theory and spoke his mind, "Ginger Swan is an actress, a public figure, and would be more probable to have crazy bat-shit fans."
"Then she should be…'a crime of passion', as my friend put it, and this guy would possibly have some personal connection with her."
"Alright then, we focus on her. How much time do we have?"
"…Not much." Leona's face darkened.
When they started investigating, Alice had disappeared for five days, based on this cycle of 7 to 10 days, they had two or three days, tops, if she wasn't already killed—It was very unlikely for this vampire to keep the girls alive if Ginger Swan was the ideal victim: she was the "perfect" one, so others were just…one-time substitutes, used and dumped.
Realizing how little time was left, Leona didn't even bother to go back to the Chantry. She headed for Mercurio's place directly to wait for the news and work on it, didn't plan to sleep until this thing was…finished: the greatest advantage they had right now, was the supernatural conditions of their bodies—they didn't need to rest that much like humans did.
"OK, you can stay here over the day, but you will have to go to the basement, my house isn't sun-proof so it's not safe for you in there…"
Just when Mercurio opened the front door of his house, turned on the light, let Leona in and told her about things of note, somebody suddenly appeared out of the thin air and shouted:
"Boom!"
And it scared both of them to death. Leona realized it was some joke, calmed herself down and looked to the pranker, but what she didn't expect was that the moment she saw his face, she received a second fright.
It was her first look at a Nosferatu Kindred, and although everybody had said that "they are not lookers"…it was really not about "pretty or ugly"—this Nossie didn't look like a human at all: his head was swelling like it had several tumors and they totally crushed his face, his skin was cyan with pits and wrinkles, like worms were crawling under it, and his teeth and…claws were as sharp as the animals'.
Gosh…it was the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Leona breathed deeply for several times to hold the screaming and swearing down in her throat—she was told they were very sensitive about their appearances.
"Bertram, why are you here?" While Mercurio seemed less surprised: this was the Nosferatu friend he told Leona about.
And so the Nossie named Bertram just swayed his flash drive hanged on his finger, proudly declared: "I looked up the stuff you asked for and it was just sooooo fucking interesting. I got excited, so I want to show you myself…and hack your house security system again, just for fun. Don't worry, I patched up where I came in, consider it a payment for leading me to such a juicy finding."
Though his voice was hoarse and twisted, too, this Kindred himself didn't act very spookily—in fact he was very humorous, though in a crude way, which helped Leona accept his look a little. Them three entered the study room, and Bertram began his explanations while opening up Mercurio's computer:
"You guys know the movie Laputa, right? Academy's best picture two years ago."
Even for people who don't follow up movie industry frequently, like Leona, a work with the fame like Laputa had passed her ears. Actually, she watched it in the cinema because it was so widely acclaimed, and it was indeed a good movie: still a good-old romance film at core, but was really deep and sincere, and the director presented it in a stage drama style with bits of mimes inserted, which made it artistically unique in form.
However, she was reminded of something more important about it other than its quality: "Wait, the movie starred Ginger Swan, right? It was her first appearance on screen, and she was the heroin."
She also remembered that…Alice really loved that film.
"Clever girl, you! But Ginger Swan was completely outshined by the male lead, played by a babyface named Ash Rivers. Issac intended this movie to be the stepstone for both of them, but Ash clearly did better—that part in Laputa got him the best actor, and Ginger got nothing." Bertram licked his lower lip while saying this, with his finger swiping on the monitor, showing the other two his work, "Now here's the interesting bit: all the other girls you guys are looking for are big on this movie, and are the loyal fans of Ash Rivers, even after he disappeared from the public for a year now. No coincidence, right?"
"Hmmm…and?" Leona nodded and asked. She lost count how many times Alice said how handsome and cute Ash Rivers was.
"After the movie, lots of Ash Rivers fans criticized Ginger to be just a 'pretty vase' who has no real thing, which was an exaggeration, really, but she was still greatly depressed for this and didn't get any part in anything…Until recently, news said she was going to reappear in a movie that's going to come out next year, an again Issac Abraham production named Negative Zero, while Ash Rivers had vanished and faded away. See the picture I'm painting?"
"Wait…so you are saying Ash Rivers did this?" Mercurio felt like his head was totally messed up and couldn't figure it out, "But he is not a vampire, is he? I mean, if a celebrity like him have become a vampire, we'll know. Everybody in the Kindred society will know."
"I ask around and nobody in the Nosferatu knows, too." Bertram sat on the armchair with his legs on the desk, and spread his hands, "If we don't have the news of his Embrace, then I doubt it happened, but this movie Laputa was definitely involved somehow, because I just dug this up in our censorship landfill…"
In charge of the Camarilla IT department, Nosferatus also need to monitor everything that's going on in every dark corner of the internet, pinpoint anything that would risk exposure of the true supernatural existence to humans, then delete and dump it into what Bertram called "censorship landfill".
Leona had a bad feeling about the stuff Bertram dug up in there—most of the time, it would be records of supernatural violence, the real kind of violence.
"Brace yourself for this." Bertram clicked on the video in his drive, looking serious for the first time, "We've seen lots of nasty things by doing the cersoring shit, but this one…is really psycho."