Page 70 of Cloak of the Vampire
RAGNOR RAYNE
“Your vamp sure knows how to bury her past.”
Ragnor glanced sideways and saw Eliza coming around the table to sit before him. She’d called earlier this week to let him know she managed to dig something up about a certain vampire who made herself at home in his head. They’d set the meeting, and now, sitting in the pub owned by his League, it was finally time to solve the mystery that was Aileen Henderson.
“Before you say anything,” he said after she ordered a cup of coffee, “I want to know one thing: Is she a threat?”
She stared at him long and hard before sighing. “Not in the sense you may think.”
This didn’t calm him, but he put his troubling thoughts aside and said commandingly, “Speak.”
She scowled. “I’m not one of your minions, Rayne.”
He didn’t budge. “Talk.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, you ass,” she huffed out, then turned serious, grave even. “The first thing I did was access public files. Using your descriptions of the girl, I tried searching for profiles that matched that, thinking she might be using an alias.”
It had occurred to Ragnor as well that she might be using a different identity. “And?”
“I found nothing, as if the girl was wiped off the face of the planet,” Eliza replied simply, but gravity pulled her words, making them even more solemn than before. “I then accessed the dark net, much like you said your people did, and also—nothing. Once I covered these basics, I started thinking about different approaches. I broke into the prison-system database, and while I found absolutely nothing related to your girl, I did find something else.”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her coat and handed it to him. “It was written in a section I didn’t even think of looking into but just happened across while searching for something else, and had I not read carefully, I probably would’ve missed this.”
Before he read what was written on the paper, he asked, “Why did you think you would find an answer in a prison database?”
She cocked her head. “People who want their past to disappear most likely committed crimes. I thought Aileen might’ve done time.”
That direction of investigating had occurred to him briefly, but it seemed Eliza really did know how to do her job. Pulling up the paper, he saw it was a partial list of inmates who’d died in 2020 at a prison near Portland, Maine. The words were small, but Eliza had marked the name that was relevant to this investigation.
Amir Zoheir-Henderson.
“That’s an Arabic name,” Ragnor pointed out.
“That’s what I was thinking too,” she said, “but then I remembered that Aileen said she was from Egyptian, Scottish, and Ukrainian origins. Zoheir is a surname found in Egypt, while Henderson is Scottish.”
Finally,finally, they were getting somewhere. “The Ukrainian part of her origins must come from her mother, then,” he said, raising his eyes to his comrade. “So is this Amir her father? What did he do time in jail for?”
Her eyes flashed suddenly. “Once I had the name, I found the prison graveyard and visited it. Amir’s age fits to be Aileen’s father, sowe now know that her father was in jail and died. Then with this name, I searched some more on the web and databases all around, but again, it seemed like your girl did a good job burying anything regarding the man. However,” she added, “she didn’t have access toeverything.”
“What do you mean?” Ragnor asked.
“I only thought of doing the most complicated research, then only later, it occurred to me to simply google him,” she said, her eyes burning brighter, “and I found these articles.”
She took out some crumpled papers and handed them to him. He unfolded them restlessly, and what he found made him feel his own eyes go neon blue. “He was charged for kidnapping, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering—”
“Girls under the age of ten,” Eliza finished the sentence for him, her mouth pursed tightly. “Knowing this, think what Aileen must’ve been through.”
That was sickening in more than one way, but he refused to contemplate it at that moment. “Did you find anything else?” he asked, controlling his emotions and turning off the beacons in his eyes.
“I found only one more thing,” she replied. “Amir was arrested twice. The first time was eight years ago, and the second almost four years ago. It seemed that five years ago, he got released for good behavior, and then he continued with his crimes and got in again, this time for much longer until he apparently died in prison a year ago. The official statement was that he hanged himself, and we have no way of knowing if that is the truth.”
“How did he even get released for good behavior?” he inquired, fury burning in his veins that the human authorities let go of such a fucker.
“Sometimes, lawyers do their job spectacularly.” She grimaced. “Anyway, that’s what I found. As for what happened to Aileen during the years Amir was in jail, I still found nothing, but I’ll keep looking into it.”
He was quiet for a while before he spoke again. “Is Aileen Henderson her real name, then?”
Eliza’s expression darkened. “The articles call Amir by his first surname, Zoheir. Nothing is mentioned about him having any children. However”—she leaned forward, her eyes gazing at him darkly—“while public records don’t have anything interesting to show, I did find the initials N. A. Zoheir as the only family member Amir has.”
