Parole (Hypernaturals 7)

Alternative Paths

According to the city council, Austin has over three thousand homeless people, and it is rising all the time. The city spends several tens of millions of dollars on the situation.

Our particular problem is that Tommy could be mixed anywhere into that population anywhere in the metroplex. He knows how to live on the streets. He knows we are after him. He also has no credit cards to leave a digital footprint with. It is a bit like when we were hunting William after he stabbed Helen. He went to ground and was too smart to leave easy tracks. In his case, his truck breaking down let us on a merry chase that led to nowhere: William exposed himself to us when he tried to run a game on the Sirens. Tommy is not going to do anything like that. Our way into Tommy is his pattern of killing, and that is not great. He has to kill first, and we would deeply prefer to not have that happen again.

We have the entire resources of the Cleanup Crew, the NorthAm council, the Austin PD, and the best PI on planet earth (I admit: I am biased about her), however, we are looking for a needle in a haystack.

I assume Tommy's picture is everywhere by now. Every convenience store will have it pinned to the wall if they gave half a damn. Every touchpoint between law enforcement and the community is talking about him. The gay community knows they have a person hunting them. Same in every city in the area, from Waco to Corpus Christi north to south, and Sonora to Houston west to east. It would open up wider as time went by.

The FBI is informed as well. We have Vampires inside every agency someplace. If the humans find anything, we'll have it too, pretty quickly/

We have nothing.

Morgan and I sat on the bed, reading all the reports looking for the tiniest clues. The problem is Tommy has very little consistency in the way he does things.

I looked over the Colorado crime scene photos. It is clear from the M.E. report that while the neck fractured from Tommy's attack, the victim suffered a prolonged death. It had not been a clean break. Tommy is not yet that strong, and it is only his berserker attitude that let him do that at all. He hunted with knives twice, and then when that proved to be a problem for him, he tried a sword. In every case, there was a struggle. Tommy won all the struggles because he was armed and he is insane.

As Tommy's Vampirism matured it added a bit of upper body power, and he used it to kill the man from Holly's place in his home. There he attacked the man while he apparently was feeding his dog and bent over. It was a little dog, and apparently Tommy got away without being bitten or the dog getting any cloth in its teeth from his clothing. The man's neck wrenched but not broken, same as Denver. Another slow death as the man lay paralyzed and unable to breathe, especially face down in the dog food.

This last kill in the bar is bolder and a change of pattern. Public place. Getting a man to willingly turn his back and bend over for him. The neck break this time enough that the death is nearly instantaneous. His first really clean kill. In a dark alley among other people there to just make a connection to another person.

Silent kill. Unobserved getaway.

I flopped the Colorado paper into the Colorado pile.

"He is escalating, Morgan. He is getting better with each kill. Bolder. Stronger. He seems to want to do it hands-on. The only time he moved away from that pattern of wanting to be close in for the kill is when he moved from knives to the sword, but that still 'feels' to me like he is practicing. He was still human and his small physical size combined with the muscle power needed to cut across the throat with a knife was not getting it done. He had to fight two different times. Then he started escalating. When he turned Vampire and recovered, he was handed a new weapon. Himself. He switched to it immediately, and each broken neck since has been more severe than the one before it. This last one at the club he had everything he needed to kill and leave quickly. It will only get worse from here."