The Blood Born Tales (Book 1): Blood Collector

by T. C. Elofson

  “Good morning, Mr. Richmond. I’m Special Agent Jack Mitchell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Jack addressed him and offered his hand to Mr. Richmond. The man took the offered hand and shook it with a weak grip. Jack could tell everything from that handshake. It told him volumes. This supervisor was insecure and unsure as to how to handle men that had more leverage and power over him. He may have been a brother to someone who was much more successful than he was. Jack felt sure Don Richmond had been compared to his big brother at every family gathering and Don had never quite measured up. The man might as well been shrugging and turning to hide, his fear and discomfort were so painfully apparent to Jack.

  “What can I do for you this morning, Agent Mitchell?” the man said as he tried his best to look the part of a leader. Jack pulled out his cell phone, accessed his photos and handed his phone to Don Richmond.

  “Do you recognize these two men?”

  The man squinted his eyes as if he was attempting to think deep thoughts, put his hand to his chin for a moment, and then answered.

  “I’m sorry, but we have hundreds of people in and out of here every day.”

  “These men are registered as electricians employed at Boeing,” Jack said.

  “We should talk to Bob. Bob’s the head electrician.”

  The two turned around and Jack noticed a man in his late forties standing on the nearby scaffolding. He was holding a blue clipboard supported by a large gut that was barely contained in his work shirt.

  “Bob, can I see you down here for a moment?” Don yelled. His voice carried up and boomed far louder than Jack would have thought possible.

  Wooden stairs creaked under Bob’s weight as he bounced his way down the staircase next to the scaffolding. A Boeing ball cap held back his beads of perspiration.

  “What’s up, Don?”

  “Bob, this is an agent of the FBI,” Don introduced Jack to him as he descended the weak stairs somewhat more cautiously.

  “Special Agent Mitchell,” Jack said, pulling out his identification one more time.

  “Oh. Hi. I’m Bob Read.”

  Bob stammered a bit and he seemed a little uncomfortable, as if he was the one that Jack had come calling on. He stood rigid and unbalanced, as if a stiff breeze would blow him over.

  “Mr. Read, I was hoping that perhaps you might recognize these two men.”

  Jack displayed his cell phone for him, showing the DMV photos of the victims. Of course Jack already knew the men’s names, but to release that information was not his way. He chose to have a story unfold naturally, with no coaxing from him. The man looked at the pictures and right away Jack knew that Bob recognized them.

  “Yes. Mike Florida and Travis Macavity. They’re apprentices, new to the union. They didn’t report to work today. I’m sorry.” Then Bob handed the cell phone back over to Jack, and it seemed as if he was reluctant to offer any other information on them.

  “They didn’t report to work today because they were murdered last night.”

  The two shocked men stood motionless as the words of the FBI agent sank in. Jack read the details of their subtle, but negative facial expressions. He could see it in their eyes—the victims had obviously not been adored at Boeing. If only Jack could get just a few solid clues out of the two workers. If only their expressions would tell him more about their secrets, fears, and other repressed miseries, then he might actually get somewhere in his case.

  “Is there some place we can talk?” Jack asked.

  “Follow me,” Don replied to him.

  A moment later, Jack saw it—a large conference room with grey indoor and outdoor carpeting. The room housed a long Formica table and impersonal metal chairs designed for maximum discomfort. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, maps, and designs for a new airframe destined to be in production soon. Jack positioned himself in front of a large glass wall that looked down to the assembly line where he had been standing just moments before.

  Several men had made their way into the room, five of them—all wearing short sleeve dress shirts and ties. A secretary with a note pad also joined them. The important and necessary calls had been made and the suits flooded down from the heavens of the company. The FBI was there and it was big. Soon it would hit the news and stocks would fall.

  “Gentlemen, my name is Special Agent Jack Mitchell. I’m the agent in charge of this investigation. Now, I know this could be particularly hazardous and damaging for your company to be linked to the killings that occurred in your state. However, two of your employees have been found as the latest victims of this killer, and it is my intention to find out everything about these men. Now, I need to know everything that you know. The ages and habits of these men, for example. I need to talk to employees who knew these men personally and anyone who might have been social with them, especially off the clock.”

  Jack passed around a series of photographs which were viewed by everyone in the conference room with an assortment of sighs and moans. At the head of the table, Jack waited impatiently for his photographs to be returned to him.

  They were grainy color images with horizontal scanning line streaks, photographs from a video screen in a hotel camera. But the images were unmistakable. The victims Mike Florida and Travis Macavity had been in the hotel in downtown Seattle. One picture came from the lobby surveillance camera. Another had been taken in a stairwell and one more in the hall outside the room where they had been found.

  A few hours later, after interviewing several of the victims’ coworkers, Jack was sitting at a long wooden table in an empty office down the hall from the conference room. A man sat across from him.

  He was a balding gentleman in his mid- to late-forties. The hint of grey stubble on his round head—what little of it that nature had been kind enough to allot him—was gone by his own design. And as he sat across from Jack, the special agent immediately took notice of the man’s eyes. They were very much like the eyes of his murdered son. A cobalt blue stare fixed on Jack from across the table and Agent Mitchell wondered what else his son might have inherited from his father. He had an air of confidence about him and seemed unsurprised by the news of his son’s death.

  His name was John Florida, father to Mike Florida and a floor manager at Boeing.

  “Mr. Florida, I am sorry about Mike. You have been told the circumstances that have brought me here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Florida, you work here at the company?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You got your son the job then?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did your son live with you, Mr. Florida?”

  “No, Mike lived in a condo.”

  “When was the last time that you saw your son?” Jack asked.

  “Mike and I didn’t see each other much, outside of work. Despite the fact that I put a roof over his head,” Mr. Florida told him rolling his eyes.

  “According to Boeing, all his paychecks were sent to your address?”

  “The money went to pay for the mortgage on the condo, which was also in my name,” he told Jack. “Mike was as irresponsible as a person could get. I told him after he paid his debt to me, he could spend his money any way he wanted.”

  “Tough love,” Jack commented.

  “A lot of good it did him.”

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  Chapter 17

  11:09 a.m., November 24

  As often happens when a situation is urgent, the simplest answer becomes the best. This was a concept that had always stuck with me. I had an instructor in the police academy that said something to me once. It had always made sense to me. When you investigate a problem, it is always the simplest explanation that will lead you to the truth. The most obvious rationalization will always be the most reasonable until evidence is found to prove otherwise. This was a bastardization of a concept called Occam’s razor and it works well for law enforcement officers.

  It was just past 11 a.m. on Sunday morning and Kenny and I r
aced under the viaduct into downtown. Anxiety and anticipation grabbed hold of me as I pushed my truck faster and faster, lights blaring out every window. Brake lights and turn signals buzzed past the truck as long streams of illumination. The green Ford F150 zipped in and out between cars without ever slowing.

  The traffic in front of Mike Florida’s condo was calm. After flashing our shields to the manager of Kings Court Condos on 1 Avenue, we were escorted down a salacious hallway of red and gold décor that imitated the Golden Age well. Antique wall paper covered both sides of the long walkway as bronze light fixtures glowed yellow and a lengthy red carpet hid the sound of our steps from the neighbors. Kenny and I came to the door of Mr. Florida’s home. The manager stepped forward and, with the quick swipe of a key badge, the lock of the door clicked free.

  “Thank you, sir,” Kenny said to the manager. “But we need to ask that you wait in the hall.”

  As we stepped through the doorway and into the empty room, immediately the atmosphere cried out for attention. The walls were bare and the counter tops were clean. Not one single photograph sat out. No papers or personal magazines anywhere. The condo had been untouched for quite some time. In fact, I found no evidence of Mike at all until I entered the back bedroom. And when that door opened, everything changed.

  A thin, hollow door squeaked on brass hinges into a room inked in black. Heavy velvet curtains hung over the windows and dead candles burned down to their bases sat on every shelf and table top in the room, long stringy tails of cold wax hung from shelf to floor. The walls were decorated in vampire posters of all kinds. They ranged from your typical Dracula posters to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. But then there was also Requiem for a Vampire and Nosferatu the Vampire, both old and European looking. There were several handmade posters that stunk of typical vampire lore like Vampire Love, and another that said I want to drink your blood. All in all, the room displayed all the evidence of someone obsessed with the Hollywood fantasy world of the undead vampires. I was sure Jack and his psychology degree was going to have a field day with this room.

  My hands fumbled under a black tapestry that hung down a wall and over the light switch for the room. When my searching fingers found it, the gloom and darkness suddenly felt gone as light consumed the space. My eyes were looking over everything, over the countless faces of vampires and quotes from movies scrawled in pen on the walls. Then, as I spun around, I saw it. Scribbled above the door, in what had to be blood, were the words Vampire Clan.

  “Man, this guy had some issues to work out,” I commented softly.

  “To say the least,” Kenny dryly mumbled from the kitchen, “He hasn’t been here in a while. All the food is out of date by at least a month, some even longer.”

  Kenny’s voice was getting louder as he made his way from the kitchen and came to a stop in the doorway just behind me. His eyes darted from one side of the room to the other. “Fuck me… It’s a cult, isn’t it? I hate cults, man,” he told me, exasperated.

  I had had enough of this place. It felt cold and I wanted no more to do with it.

  “Alright. Call in the Evidence Recovery Team and have them go through this place. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Right,” Kenny said as he pulled his phone from his pocket and made the call.

  The sky was beginning to turn a dusty blue haze and the wind was picking up. Our eyes scanned over buildings and down long alleyways, around corners of streets that came and went in an instant. We searched and stared for anything out of the ordinary. Dozens of people blurred together in a haze of faceless images, each one looking just like the last as we raced down the wet street. Kenny thumbed through paperwork in a file folder as I pulled to a stop just in front of the pig statue in front of Pike Place Market. It was large and bronze and looked just as it always had when I was a child. The pig had stood guard on this particular street corner for as long as I could remember.

  Our heated breath spilled into the air as the Friday tourist crowds were in full force and they made their way into the market. Venders selling dried flowers of subdued pastel colors and fish merchants slinging seafood yelled into the crowd. A homeless person sang “Sweet Home Alabama” on an acoustic guitar that looked like it had been run over and sent across the country, several stickers stuck to its weathered body like destination stamps on a passport. His voice echoed throughout the market as money landed in the open container at his feet. Coins clanged together and rolled to a stop in the fur-lined bottom of his guitar case.

  “Okay, there must be at least one person here that knows one of these guys. I emailed your phone the pictures of our victims and we both have one of the suspect. Let’s each take one side of the market and we’ll meet back at that comic book store downstairs that you like so much,” Kenny said, shutting his door behind him after we climbed out.

  “Be careful. I don’t like it when we split up,” I said, hesitating.

  “Come on. It’s not like some stupid horror movie. This is real life,” he came back at me with a smile. “Even though you do tend to scream like a girl.”

  My demeanor soured as I followed a cobblestone walk in the shade of tourists that bumped into me repeatedly. A man walked in front of me with a pipe in his mouth and sweet smoke danced past me as I pushed forward. My mind immediately returned to a time when I was a little boy on the lap of my grandfather. I remembered how he tapped his pipe tobacco into a glass bowl in his home in California.

  Grandpa would get up from his chair only when it was necessary, crushed by a depression that turned the room dark and the air thick with oily scents. His smell lingered around me in a haze of smoke. It ran through me like the edge of a knife cutting my flesh. This whiff of the stranger’s tobacco, with its smoky sweet mist, locked the aroma into my mind as I walked behind the man in the market. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and noticed a small boy watching me from a staircase that led to the lower level of Pike Place.

  Silence reigned for a short moment. The salted air seemed to shimmer ominously and I rubbed my face as I walked over to the boy. We looked at each other like two animals meeting for the first time.

  “Hi, I’m Tim,” I said with a kind smile.

  “I’m Sammy.”

  “Well, Sammy, how are you?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Aren’t you just a little young to playing here alone?”

  “No,” he said with confidence.

  “No? Why is that?”

  “My father works here. He’s just over there,” he said, pointing over to a man selling handmade jewelry to a thin Japanese woman in a black dress with a small camera dangling around her neck. I gave the boy a nod and he followed me as I moved in the direction of his father.

  “What do you do?” he asked as we walked.

  “Me?” I spoke while pointing to myself as if the question was ridiculous.

  “I’m a police officer.”

  “Yeah? Cool. What are you doing here then?”

  “I’m looking for two friends of mine. They’re lost.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Sammy,” his father spoke up as we got closer. “I told you not to bother the patrons.”

  “Sir, he’s no bother. In fact, he’s good company. I’m Detective Anderson of the Seattle PD,” I stated as I displayed my police identification and badge. He gave it no more than a cursory glance. I then pulled out my cell phone and displayed the two victims for him. “Can you tell me if you recognize these two men?”

  The man squinted his eyes as he stared into the glowing screen of my phone for a moment. He shook his head, softly telling me no.

  “Wait! Let me see,” his son said and I lowered my hand so he could look into my phone. The boys eyes opened wider and I knew the look—he recognized someone.

  “Do you remember one of them?” I asked. The boy gave me a nod.

  “Tell me.”

  The boy’s father had a concerned look on his face and I tried my best to look reassuring for his b
enefit, but I really was not that good at things of that nature. I kneeled down to Sammy behind his father’s booth and he leaned in close to me, looking up at his father for encouragement now and then. He whispered his story into my right ear.

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  Chapter 18

  11:30 a.m., November 24

  Sammy had become an expert in judging shadows and light, never venturing out unless he was certain it was safe. He used the same skill to judge people and was rather gifted at it. However, when he first spotted the two victims in the lower part of the market late one evening, his curiosity got the better of him. He was playing in the framework of one of the empty tables and hidden safely by darkness. The light of the moon was unable to find him as he watched the two men begin to walk down the slightly descending stairs. Their footfalls echoed around the empty market; most of the merchants had gone home, all but his father.

  Mike Florida and Travis Macavity’s favorite form of recreation was to sit for hours in an Irish pub named Kell’s, drinking one draft beer after another. Their favorite golden nectar was served in tall, plain glasses from a very sexy waitress named Mickey. The two had often joked about how they could put away several gallons of beer in one evening but any other liquid would be impossible for them to drink, even if they had days to drink it.

  The two stumbled through the shifting shadows of dusk, making their way into the near empty market. Their voices were loud and booming with the aid of their drunken bravado. They laughed and held onto one another, trying to steady each other as they walked. Then, out of the murky nightfall appeared a figure cloaked in black, and it seemed that thunder and lightning began to announce themselves to the silence of the night. He stood proudly, calm and composed with a terribly white face, and he lifted up a hand to strike the drunk men across their faces. Young Sammy, tucked away behind a leg of the table, could see a gleaming gold ring on the cloaked man’s hand. After a stunning blow, the two men lay at his feet, groveling for forgiveness from the mysterious man who had some kind of inexplicable power over them.