Then I called Jessica Ingstrom.
Jessica worked for Minerva Technics. A year ago she had come to my brother and I looking for help. She claimed she was being stalked by ghouls. She employed us to protect her and we agreed, even though things didn't really smell right about the situation. When she was kidnapped, we were fed lousy information by one of her coworkers who was also her enemy. We ended up breaking into the Clark Building of Minerva Technics to save her, discovering only then that she didn't need saving. She had fed us lies, and the whole situation had been some sort of internal politics. Of course, our break-in fucked that all up, people died, monsters tried to escape, and it was a big clusterfuck. Mikkel and I had fortunately made it out alive. Afterward Jessica told me how much she hated me, but noted we were off the hook - I believe she mentioned that admitting our existence and our break-in to the higher-ups would have been more damning to her than naming us and letting the company hunt us down. So I guess that was sort of a win for Mikkel and I.
So it was reluctantly that I called her. The phone rang quite a few times, and I wondered if she was asleep or simply wouldn't answer. Sure, it was late at night, but it wasn't too late. The bars were still open and it was a weekend. Jessica might try to come off as put together and adult, but she wasn't much older than me, so I don't think the lateness of the hour would be the reason she wouldn't answer. My name on the caller ID would be the reason.
Surprisingly, she answered. There was a long moment of silence before she said anything.
"You know, I really considered not answering at all. By all rights, you have no business calling me. I may in fact hate you."
Did I mention we slept together? I seem to have that response from women. What am I doing wrong?
I started apologetically. "Hey, I know you're not that much of a fan and it's been a while..."
"But you want something," she said, sleepily. It didn't sound like I had woken her, but she seemed either bored of me or had been drinking. Possibly both. "Either that or this is a late night booty call. And I don't think you're either that desperate or that stupid to suggest the latter. Which surprises me, honestly. I didn't realize I thought so well of you."
"While yes, I do need to know something," I said, "I think it may be worthwhile to you. I mean, I hope it is and I just didn't fuck up more."
"Forever the optimist," she said tiredly and then sighed. "What do you need to know, Szandor? Let's not waste each other's time."
I took a deep breath. "Okay. I'm trying to find out about someone - a person, not a monster - and I'm having trouble. I've been running out of leads, but then I found he has an MT badge. But he doesn't seem like one of your people."
"I'm going to find you mugged one of our people under false pretenses, aren't I?"
"I really don't think he's yours," I said. "But I have a photo I can email you. If you'll look."
She sighed. "Go ahead, I'll look." I heard her audibly drink something.
I got up and went over to my computer, Ace following me. I typed in Jessica's email and sent a screen capture from my video of my first encounter with the man in the alley of the barbecue place. I picked it from when he was very clearly alive. "Sent."
"Got it," she said. There was a long pause. "Very interesting. Szandor, where was this taken?" Her tone was different. Curious, interested.
"A gentleman never tells," I said. "Why, what's the deal? Did I actually get your attention?"
"Surprisingly, yes," she said. "I'd love to know his location."
"Me too," I said. "Well, I have a lot of questions, but I won't go into it. But you recognize him? What can you tell me?"
"David Kelvin, former Minerva employee."
"Kelvin? Why is that name familiar?"
"It's a unit of measurement for temperature, but I doubt that's how you know it. His father owned a used car dealership. He had very annoying commercials when we were young - Honest Joe Kelvin - and a catchy jingle. Remember the old guy in the cowboy hat shouting about how he'd beat any deal in town? Must not have worked. I believe the dealership is gone now."
I tried to rack my brain for childhood jingles, but nothing was connecting just yet. "It's not ringing any bells just yet," I said. "What's the deal with David Kelvin?"
"I'd give you the whole preamble about this being hush hush, but I assume you already know that you've always been a hair's breadth from being a priority enemy for Minerva. The fact that you've stayed quiet is why your secret has been kept, and your safety maintained."
"And I have always praised your benevolence," I said sarcastically.
I couldn't hear it, but I'm pretty sure her pause was for an eye roll. "David Kelvin was one of our scientists. He was working under Ezra Ross."
I cursed. Ross had been Jessica's enemy within MT, the one who fed us bad intel. The one who manipulated us and even her. I redoubled my hope that a revenant had killed him.
"He didn't like Ross, if that helps," she continued, having the same dislike of that most hated scientist. "Kelvin was working with Ross to sequence the DNA of the Avalon creatures. He was a decent researcher, but he was very unlucky, and even I couldn't help him."
"I'm sure you tried real hard," I said.
"What Minerva wants, Minerva gets. As you probably had heard from Ross, there were tests of genetic recombination, seeing what DNA could be introduced to other organisms to see what worked. The ghoul scents, for example. While ghouls worked well, other creatures didn't. We never found any subject, human or otherwise, which seemed to accept the DNA of the hive creatures. Until Kelvin."
Hive creatures... She meant the Spiders. Them coming up was never good.
"Wait," I said. "You were trying to use Spider DNA?"
"We tried to use every DNA," she said. "We were looking for application as well as any possible chimeras we could engineer. We tried it all. Kelvin was a researcher, usually the one introducing the DNA to others. But then we found out quite by accident that his DNA for some reason went well with the hive creatures. Good for Minerva, but bad for Kelvin."
"You made him a test subject," I said, understanding the subtext.
"Yes," she said. "Though that overstates the situation. You act like he was kept corralled like one of the creatures. Kelvin was well kept. He was kept in biomedical quarantine, much like I had been. He had a nice bed, television, and whatever other amenities he wanted."
"But he couldn't leave, he was still a prisoner."
"Yes, well, certain protocols had to be kept. We couldn't just have him walking around with all that going on in his blood. That was Minerva intellectual property. And possibly a biohazard."
"And you didn't want to lose your star subject."
"What Minerva wants, Minerva gets," she said.
"But you don't know where he is anymore."
"Yes. During your little adventure in the Clark Building, all the security protocols in the biomed center were turned off. We had a specimen problem, namely all the creatures you helped unleash. Our security was based on stopping them. So a human-looking employee, wearing stolen clothes and using a stolen badge was ignored. In that confusion Kelvin slipped out."
"And was never seen or heard from again..." I suggested.
"Oh no, we heard from him," said Jessica. "He stole equipment out of one of our storage facilities."
"No shit?" I said. "If it were me, I would have gotten as far from your company as possible. South America or a small island in the Caribbean."
"We have him on video footage," she said. "He broke into the facility, using his previous experience and the stolen badge. He loaded a large amount of equipment into a truck. Before you ask, despite what I am telling you, I'm not at liberty to tell you what he took. You wouldn't understand it either."
"Are you sure it was him?" I thought, remembering how many men I had seen with the same face.
"I'll send you footage of the external cameras," she said. "There's nothing secret in those. Perhaps that will help you find him. We would very much like
to find him."
"Of course, he's a prime subject for your research," I said tiredly.
"We can make it worth your while, Szandor. I know how little money you make."
"Beware of exes bringing gifts," I said. "I saw that in a fortune cookie."
She laughed. "Don't call me an ex. You hardly deserve even consideration for that. But the offer's real. We'd pay well to find out his whereabouts."
"I'll keep that in mind," I said. "Send me the video. I'll see what I can do."
"Hopefully something more useful than last time." She hung up.
Jessica had given me a lot to think about. There was obviously the new revelations about David Kelvin, but there was also MT's interest in him, which made me uncomfortable. I was not too keen on getting in bed with Minerva Technics again. Even if they were good for the money, I didn't like the idea of doing anything that benefitted them. And researching Spider DNA was something I would want stopped no matter what. That particular breed of monster was better off eradicated, not used in experimentation. So even though they'd probably pay me more money than I'd know what to do with, working for them was not an option. Whatever I did next would be for me.
I went to sleep after the talk with Jessica and woke up the next day, a little more refreshed, in a little less pain, and with much less bed. Ace had climbed into bed with me, so I found myself pushed against the wall on the remaining third of my bed once he had sprawled out to full length. Moments after waking, I was greeted by a slobbering tongue. On the plus side, that kept me from lingering in bed and pushing my late start any later.
I gave Ace a bowl of food while I got a bowl of cereal. We were both eating pretty similar today, it seemed. I sat down at my computer with the intent to review the footage Jessica had sent me. But first I couldn't help checking my funding campaigns. The main one hadn't moved at all, leaving me far from my total. My Matreon account was equally stagnant. My financial worries were now changing. It wasn't about my debt anymore; now I was beginning to worry about food and rent. Odd jobs were drying up and my campaign seemed like it wasn't going to be any help.
Having distracted and depressed myself, I got to work on things that mattered. I downloaded Jessica's footage. There was one video file with feeds from two external cameras, one on each side of the screen. I couldn't tell where the building was, but it wasn't central Avalon. Maybe Cobalt County, maybe Glenntown, maybe even out in Huskerville. The cameras viewed a large parking lot and far off in the background was the occasional car passing. This footage was from nighttime. I focused on the right feed first, since that was from high on the building. I saw that the lot was empty for a while until a large truck and trailer showed up. A man got out and walked to the building. He disappeared for a while. Later in that footage he reappeared and I saw him pushing out large machines using a dolly and a pallet cart. As far as I could tell, it was just him.
The second feed was more useful. At ground floor, the camera was just above the door. I could see the man walk forward to use the keypad and card scanner to gain access. It was close enough that I could see his face, even with the poor quality feed. All my doubts disappeared. I paused the footage and zoomed as much as I could (which wasn't very much). This was the same man I kept seeing. If this was David Kelvin, I knew for sure he was my problem. He was different than I had seen him so far. He wasn't the bald version with the nervous look and exploding head. But neither was this the angry, burned version. This man had a full head of hair and a face unmarred by scarring. He was neither nervous nor angry. He wore a determined yet haunted expression as he dealt with security protocols and then walked through the door, disappearing off the camera for a few minutes. He reappeared with the equipment that he loaded into the truck before driving away.
That confirmed his identity, but did it help me? If simply Googling him worked, MT would have had him already. Then again, they had looked for him and then seemed to have given up. Maybe they had missed something, since I seemed to have no trouble bumping into him. Would I find something they hadn't discovered in my amateur sleuthing? As much as I hated MT, they were probably far more thorough and skilled at this than I. I'd probably only find something if the situation had changed or I had information they didn't.
I knew that there were a bunch of David Kelvins. Did MT know that? Were they clones? I still had no clue. The Kelvins seemed in two varieties, the bald head exploders and the angry scarred men. The angry ones were new to me. But when I had made that call from the payphone, the carload of them showed up in like ten minutes. Assuming they traced or knew the location of the phone, they were ten minutes away. So I would say that they were either based ten minutes away or had already been in the car driving around that area. If they were in the car, they could be from anywhere. But if they were dispatched from their lair, they were nearish to the Husks. My intuition said somewhere in Huskerville, probably the Husks side more than Ville side. But that was still a very large area to find them in.
I thought about where I had encountered the bald Kelvins. The last two I had encountered in the Husks - in the Night Market and at that bus stop. But the previous two I had seen in different parts of Cobalt County hours away. I had no idea what one had been doing in a trash pile behind a barbecue restaurant. The other had been driving a truck... a truck that had a Spider hive in the back!
I had completely forgotten that fact. My concussion and everything else that happened had made that memory fade to the back of my mind. But that was definitely a Kelvin driving that truck full of Spiders! I tried to remember what else I could from the event. Was there anything about the truck? Other than that it crashed into a gas station which exploded, I mean. Wait, I remembered a logo. It took a minute for my mind to remember that blurry memory. I knew that logo. It was for Kelvin Automotive.
Bells began ringing in my head. I rewound the footage Jessica had given me. The truck there had a Kelvin Automotive logo too. David Kelvin had at least one truck from his father's business. But that bell was still ringing in my head. I went through the pockets of my jacket and found the car keys I had taken from the dead Kelvins near the Night Market. The keychain also said Kelvin Automotive.
Was that it? David was hiding in his father's old dealership? That seemed like an odd and obvious thing for MT to have missed. I searched the internet for the address of the dealership. I had to use some archived websites and some old review sites, but I found the address of Kelvin Automotive. Unfortunately, that location in Glenntown had been bulldozed for a Super Jeffmart grocery store. So that lead was dead. I'm pretty sure the grocery baggers would notice if there was a big clone conspiracy operating from the break room.
Since I was already looking up Kelvin Automotive, I decided to find out more about Joe Kelvin and David if I could. There wasn't much about David, but since Honest Joe Kelvin had been a fixture of Avalon, his downfall was the subject of various news articles. Yusef "Joe" Kelvin was a first generation immigrant who had made a name for himself selling used cars. He did well for a number of years, but then after a few decades of success, things started to sour. There was much conjecture on why, but the only verifiable fact was that his sales were down. There were a number of failures as he tried to pull out of that decline, such as ad campaigns, focusing on different types of cars, even a proposed new location, but eventually Kelvin Automotive went under. The next news I saw was an obituary for Joe Kelvin. He died of a heart attack while avoiding his creditors, playing a shell game of companies, deeds, and titles, to keep the people he owed from getting anything from him. The article made it sound like he died bitter and paranoid, which sounded horrible.
That seemed like a dead end, much as MT's search for David Kelvin had probably reached. But that mention of a new location had me searching. Where was that new location? Had they done anything with it? I spent some time searching and eventually only found an archived news story in the Huskerville Herald, a pretty minor newspaper. It had a brief note for the community about how proud they were to host the new locat
ion for Kelvin Automotive, which they thought would revitalize a declining area north of the highway. They listed an opening date and where people could apply for a job. I tried to find more about it, but there wasn't much else. I was sure that the new location had never opened, but it seemed like it had been close to opening. I took the address from the article and punched it into a map site. It was in Huskerville, in the north side, the Husks side. It didn't show anything there and when I checked satellite pictures, I saw a fenced lot with cars and a building. Was the second location still there? Had it not been repossessed in the shuffle to avoid creditors? Had Honest Joe Kelvin put the deed in his son's name?
I had questions, but not answers. This meant it was time to do something. I had my lead and I knew what I was doing for the afternoon. I was going to check out that site.
I took a cab to the address in the Husks. I had thought of taking the train and walking over, but I needed this to be a drive by. There was every possibility the site could be inactive and abandoned, a dead lead. If so, then my cab ride was being too cautious. But if those angry Kelvins were there, I didn't want to be stuck as a pedestrian outside their fortress. Even with Ace coming with me (as if I could stop him), I didn't want to get stuck on the street with who knows how many Kelvins there actually were. Car reconnaissance seemed the best bet, and lacking one of my own meant I was hiring a cab.
Since I had Ace riding with me, I had to flag down three cabs in Chinatown before I found a driver willing to take him[11]. A bearded black dude with a serious affection for Abba, the driver told me if Ace messed up his cab, I was cleaning it up and/or paying for it. Other than that, he took the address, turned up the music, and avoided talking to me until we got to the destination.
Ace loved looking out the window, something he had enjoyed in Kolchak's car, so this was familiar and pleasant for him. When going across the bridge, the afternoon sun seemed really bright, so I put on sunglasses. My sleep schedule was all messed up and it didn't seem like it was going to get any better before this was all figured out.
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