There was no sig line. At some point, some cop had done a supernat investigation, and he'd clearly been left with some loose vamp ends. I wondered if he'd survived being nosy. The words were too faint to photograph. I didn't recognize the blocky handwriting and when I sniffed the page, the scent signature was unfamiliar, almost obscured by lingering tobacco smoke, as if the writer had been a two-pack-a-dayer. But something about the list felt important, so I copied it into my little spiral notebook, then texted it to myself, just in case I wasn't allowed to leave with notes, and went back to the files.
The cops had done a history on each of the clans, and rather than read the info here, I took more photos, hoping the picture clarity would be good enough for later reading. I continued searching the cabinets and came upon a stack of old MPRs--missing persons reports--with a reference to file number 666-0W. I checked the other cabinets but all of them were locked. I remembered the ring of keys Rick had carried. Shrugging, I settled to the one I had. And I spotted a red folder. A quick search told me there weren't many of them in the drawer, and when I sniffed it, it smelled strongly of Jodi Richoux. It was the file she'd been putting in the drawer while she looked meaningfully at me. Inside were more MPRs.
All the missing in Jodi's file were children and teens, all within the last twenty-five years, ten of them from recently. They had all vanished at night, all were under eighteen, all were witch children. The chill I'd been feeling off and on settled across my shoulders as I stared at the photographs and the reports.
All of them vanished at night. It was circumstantial, but could vampires be involved? I couldn't see what they had to gain.
The last witch child had vanished three months ago.
The reports were scanty and didn't go beyond interviews and I wondered how much the cops were doing to find the little witches. NOPD had a well-publicized antipathy to witches that deepened following the witch debacle of Katrina, when a lone witch coven tried to turn a category-five hurricane away from land. They got it down to a cat three, but they couldn't turn it. Their efforts and power weren't enough; the old, poorly built levees failed; thousands died in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast from wind and storm surge. But would human anger be enough to make some cops ignore the continuing kidnapping of witch children for decades? I hoped not. But I had a bad feeling about it.
The MPRs weren't up to date, but they indicated the direction of the investigation--back into the witch community itself, which I figured was a smart place to start. Over the last decade, it looked as if every known witch above twelve years of age had been questioned, and some fifty vamps. I checked the name of the lead investigator. Elizabeth Caldwell. It meant nothing to me, but I could pump Rick later. And then I remembered the look on Leo's face, torchlight flickering across his features. His eyes on Angelina above me, his nostrils wide as he took her scent. Leo couldn't be involved with the disappearing kids. Yet the thought iced across my shoulders and down my spine like sleet, sharp as frozen knives.
I spent the next hour photographing police files. I didn't know what I was looking for until I found a folder with twenty-seven police reports in it. The reports were cases of attempted and successful rogue vamp attacks. They too went back some twenty years.
A heated frisson of certainty sizzled over my skin. This was it.
The reports were in no particular order, so I spread them out over the table. Making educated guesses, I pushed any reports that might be about old rogues into one stack, while young-rogue attacks went into another. Once I got them separated, I had twenty-one that fit my profile--small fangs, unclaimed by any clan. I wanted the addresses of the attacks so I could situate them on a map and see if any particular locales stood out. Wishing for a map application on my cell phone, I jotted notes, texted them to myself, and added anything that looked interesting. Then I photographed the pages. Info in triplicate. I was so not losing this.
On a hunch, I did a quick comparison to see if any witch disappearances correlated with the young-rogue attacks and was disappointed to discover that none correlated exactly; they were weeks apart in some cases. But it was close enough to make me curious.
Before I put them away, I sniffed the reports. Three of the oldest reports smelled like the same cigarette tobacco on the anomaly list. All of them had been handled by Jodi. Satisfied, I put them away, making sure I was leaving nothing behind.