Chapter 9

"PARIS."

The reply to his text message had been that one cryptic word.

Of course, he could have been at his apartment in an instant, yet here he was, raising his arms for the full body scan at the international terminal. He couldn't travel around Europe without a Euro-zone stamp on his passport. Many things could not be disregarded in this high security, digitally intensive age, and one of them was passport control. Even if he could push people to do certain things, he did not want to take risks with border security.

After re-lacing his shoes, another odd insight struck him. Hunter wanted to be a human being, not one of the Children. The ones that he had killed hadn't been human, no matter how good their disguises. He still felt human, loving his brother and his sister-in-law, connecting with his niece and nephew. Sex with Katie was human, truly human. She and he were a bit high-strung in bed, but no one would mistake them for anything but a man and woman in lust.

Hunter stared at the tarmac through the window, tracing the lines of tar that covered the cracks. There was no discernable pattern to the lines even though it looked as if there should have been. Would his insides turn into black goo?

Six hours later he landed in Paris. It was a Tuesday morning. He had forced himself to sleep on the plane and was less jet-lagged than he would have expected. When he turned on his phone, another text message awaited, consisting of three Interpol file numbers. Hunter let an evil laugh slip from his throat and then offered an apology when the person next to him suddenly took a step away.

At his apartment, Hunter popped open his laptop and went to work. Each of the Interpol files was thick and the cross references looked complex with multiple sources. The first file concerned murders in and around the northern Spanish city of Oviedo. Its population was 210,000. Hunter wondered why a Child would settle for such a small enclave. Then he looked at the geography and found an answer. It was mountainous terrain. The area was under the influence of the Basque separatists though. Hunter concluded that it was unlikely to involve the Children.

The second file was London. London, being intimately connected by shitloads of CCTV cameras, would make it hard for a Child to go undetected. Shitloads apparently being 10,000 cameras at £200 a pop. Still, fifteen bodies with their chest cavities emptied was a provocative argument for a Child on the hunt.

The last was Buenos Aires. With large swaths of unregulated slums, Buenos Aires appeared to be a perfect hunting ground. The city was unsafe and the police were overwhelmed, corrupt, and unconcerned about the peasants. Unfortunately, most of the file was in Spanish, which was not one of the languages Hunter knew well. While he could pick out some words, he was not able to get the gist of the various reports.

Translation services would take time and secure translation services would take even longer. London moved to the top of his list for the time being. He began scanning the file.

Something didn't feel right about it though. The first perusal left him confused and frustrated. He went downstairs to his favorite lunch spot. As he waited for his order, he sipped an espresso at the bar. The restaurant catered more to locals who zipped in for their order and then disappeared back into the street. He watched two old ladies, dressed in matronly print blouses and proper skirts gossiping over their lunch plates at one of the tables. A pile of chicken bones was the only clue to what they had eaten remaining on their table. Even their beer glasses were completely drained.

Hunter noticed a copy of the Wall Street Journal poking out of the side pocket of an oversized purse at their table. One of them, at least, had an appetite for more than food. In Paris the Journal was a pricey and unusual commodity, not something he expected from two frumpy old ladies.

He almost dropped his cup as he put two and two together. The problem with the London case was a question of appetites, or rather, of too many possible appetites for murder. He almost forgot to pay when they handed him his sandwich. He was already sending queries from his phone as he ran back to his apartment.

Human predators and Children shared many traits: Both were choosy about their prey, for instance. Lithuania was a good example. The businessmen above a certain income in the Eastern Block countries were targets of the Russian mafias. The difference is that the mafias didn't usually want their targets dead. Even so, the Russians left trails of bodies wherever they went because shit happens.

The London case had all the hallmarks of a Child harvesting, but it also had markers of a Jack-the-Ripper copycat killer: two different appetites. It was funny how the British loved "their" serial killers.

The first chore was to untangle the threads and determine who or what was committing the murders. Hunter felt himself warming to the hunt. He called up his contacts and began ordering his research tools. In the late afternoon, Hunter went downstairs and walked three blocks to a bookshop to purchase a tourist book on London and the surrounding area.

Weeks passed. Hunter went to Ohio twice for conjugal visits, as Penny called them. He did his best to keep in touch more frequently with his brother's family. He went to London three times, each time on a train through the Chunnel. On the last trip, he had arranged to interview the lead detective from Scotland Yard. The detective wouldn't share any new information, as was appropriate for his sensitive job, but he was full of self-important opinions. The one thing that made Hunter look up was the statement of how the cases had a supernatural feel with mutilation of the corpses.

Hunter was convinced.

The tikka masala was delicious at a little restaurant a block down from the Bayswater Tube station. The hotels in the area were old and cheap, but the Chinese and Indian restaurants were top-notch. After plowing through lunch, Hunter took time to go through his notes over a pot of tea. The entire exercise felt so civilized in spite of the gruesome topic and the accompanying photographs. The body count was now sixteen.

Connecting the murders was a murky convergence of tube stations and kill locations. All of the murders had happened within four blocks of a tube station, yet there was no corresponding facial recognition from the station cameras in the hours before or after each of the murders. All of the victims had been women between the ages of 22 and 56, which meant little except for the gender preference. The preferred time was between 22:00 and 24:00.

By late September Hunter had a statistical model in place and he was ready to begin surveillance. He had no clue (again) to how his bosses had arranged it, but he could tap into the London's CCTV system.

Katie was back in school and finishing her required high school classes, along with her French lessons. He had given her a DVD of Finding Nemo that had been dubbed into French. He told her when she could understand the entire flick in French, only then would she be confident that she had trained her ear to hear the language. She nearly threw the package at him and hadn't forgiven him when he took his leave. The security firm that Hunter had hired out of his own funds confirmed that not only was all quiet back in Ohio but that Katie had been watching the DVD over and over again.

In the meantime, Hunter was dealing with distractions. One day something kept causing him to jerk away from his focus. It took him hours to track it down. A white paper bag, common to a patisserie, had been caught between the bars of a storm grate. It had been the crackling of the paper four buildings down as the wind whipped down the street that irritated him. Across the street and over one building, the second floor residents had installed reflective film on their windows. It reflected the rays of the afternoon sun, turned dark red light by the film, into his apartment. The cheap laptops he was using hurt his eyes because images looked chunky on their screens. His reflexes were too fast so he had to quit his dojo before he raised suspicions.