FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Hey, Mark?"

"What?"

"Look at this." John Malone turned his screen around so his partner could see it. Mark Ramirez leaned over their shared desk with a frown.

"What am I looking at?"

John scrolled down a slowly. Mark's lips moved a little as he read. "Wait, a note to a food bank?"

"Yeah."

Mark stared at it, his eyes narrowing. "That's...concerning. What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we start talking to food banks."

Mark nodded slowly. "Make a list and we'll split it. It might just be a coincidence, but..."

"Yeah. But."

John turned his computer back around and began searching for food banks in the area. "How far out do you think we should go?"

Mark paused, tapping his fingers on his desk. "How far away is that one from ours?"

John checked. "About 50 miles."

"Wow. OK, then. Let's do 50 and see if anything comes up."

"Gotcha."

Five minutes later they had a list and started making calls.

Three Days Later

The two partners stared at their pile of evidence in disbelief.

"We have to go to the captain," Mark said softly.

"Yeah. This is...this is bad."

John gathered everything up into a folder and led the way across the bullpen to the captain's office. Despite the fact that the door was open and he could see that no one was with the captain, he knocked on the doorframe.

"One minute," the captain called, typing away.

John waited as patiently as he could, shifting from one foot to the other. Mark reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. The other man could be calm and collected in the middle of Armageddon, a fact that John relied on. He himself was always ansty, jiggling his leg, or tapping his fingers on his desk. He could be patient if he had to, but especially when he had something this big, it was hard.

The captain looked up a few minutes later, and waved them in. "What can I do for you gents?"

John laid the folder on the captains desk. "You remember the Stravinsky case?"

The captain nodded. "Serial abuser. Let out, went back to wife, violated a VPO and beat the daylights out of her, then disappeared into the night. You're not still looking for him, are you? That was weeks ago."

John ran a hand over the back of his neck, feeling the close-shaved hair there. "It got to me, captain. So yeah, I still look through tips and see if I can track him down."

"Fair enough. As long as it doesn't interfere with your caseload. Did you find something?"

"Yeah, that's the thing." He opened the folder and pulled out the top photo. "About a week after Stravinsky beat his wife and ran, a box of perishable and non-perishable food was delivered to a local charity along with this note."

The captain looked at the photo, frowning. It read, Warm regards from Mieczyslaw Stravinsky. Don't bother looking anymore. The handwriting was full of loops and curlicues, extremely distinctive. He looked up at them, frowning. "How did we miss this?"

"The charity worker who took the food couldn't pronounce the name, so she didn't recognize it when she heard it on the news. It wasn't until she saw it in print a couple days ago that she made the connection and came forward."

The captain sat back, tapping the photo on his desk. "And she kept the note?"

"They keep records of all donations, just in case they take in something that was stolen."

"OK, so...he's taunting us?"

John took a deep breath. "See, that's what I thought at first too, but," he reached into the folder and laid out a line of photos of similar notes, all in that signature looping writing. "All of these notes were delivered to food banks or food-related charities along with boxes of food in the last fifteen years. All of these names are perps who were on at least their second offense. All of them are missing. And the handwriting matches on all the notes."

The captain's eyes shot up, flooding with concern. "You're thinking we have a vigilante serial killer."

Mark nodded over John's shoulder. "Basically, yeah."

The captain ran a hand over his head. "Crap. Who knows about this?"

"You, me, and Mark. Once we started getting suspicious we clamped down on it."

"OK. Reach out to the local FBI office, ask them if we can get a profiler over." He looked up at them, reaching out to put his hand on the photos for emphasis. "Do not discuss this. Do not let the press hear about this. The last thing we need is a circus over something that we may be misreading."

They nodded. "Heard and understood, captain."

He blew out a breath as he looked down at the photos again. "I really hope you're wrong."

Two Days Later

"Holy balls, she's here?"

The partners looked at each other, groaning inwardly. Mark stepped forward, catching the excited young profiler's eye. "Who's here?"

The young woman waved at the photos. "The Charity Vigilante. This is her signature."

John blew out a breath. "Dang it. She's known?"

"Known? She's freaking legendary!"

Mark grimaced. "What's her pattern?"

"That's just it, she doesn't have one. We only know she exists because whenever she kills, she delivers a crate of food to a local charity, a different charity every time, in the name of the criminal she kills. The donation stays the same, as far as we know she donates every time. Same note, every time, just the name changes. And she always uses the same box, a cardboard document box with a built in lid. No bodies have ever been recovered, so all we know of her is her ritual after a kill."

John sucked his teeth thoughtfully. "You keep saying 'she.' Has she been caught on tape?"

The profiler shook her head. "All we have are eyewitnesses. They all say it's a young woman with pale hair, but that's all we get. She just doesn't stick out."

Mark frowned. "How many vics are we talking?"

The profiler tapped the photos. "In the hundreds that we know of. She's been operating for years."

The two officers stared at her in shock. "Hundreds?" Mark whispered.

"That we know of," the profiler repeated. "We think she has to be independently wealthy, because this seems to be her full-time job."

"But still--"

"We also think she's a legacy killer."

John covered his face. "This just gets better and better. She's been active that long?"

"We've found notes going back, fifty, sixty years. We'd guess copycat, except that nothing about her has ever been released to the public. Unless the latest killer is in law enforcement, but that doesn't track. Charity hits all over the place. We've got a deal with Interpol, and there have been notes found in Europe, Great Britain, Australia, and China, as well as reports of notes in India, Africa, and South America. Always in the local language, always the same handwriting, always after a known criminal has gone missing, always a young woman with pale hair. The global reach is another thing that makes us think she's rich."

John sat down heavily, staring at the photos. "So we're looking for a woman rich enough to travel the world who was probably raised with the idea that taking out criminals is noblesse oblige, whose full-time job is hunting and killing people."

The profiler nodded. "Yeah, basically."

"Beautiful. Just freaking beautiful." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "And why haven't we told all the charities to be on the lookout for her?"

"Because we can't do that without alerting the public."

Mark nodded slowly. "And the fact that there's a rich woman who kills with impunity on a global scale is not something we want out there."

The profiler shook her head. "Not really. Plus, there's another theory that we _really_don't want getting out there."

John frowned, but Mark's eyes widened. "There might be more than one."

"Exactly. Wigs are cheap. The handwriting could be some kind of calligraphy that can be done by anyone with enough practice. You can bulk order the boxes by the gross. Why travel the world when you can contact your best friend a globe away who knows the terrain and can navigate without being seen?"

John groaned again and rubbed his face tiredly. "Crap on toast, a murder cabal. A _rich_murder cabal. Because that's exactly what the world needs."

The profiler grinned. "Welcome to the hell that is the Charity Vigilante case."

Two Weeks Later

John stared down at the folder moodily. Since they'd been on the lookout, they'd spotted two more hits in the past few weeks. Both second time offenders, both in the wind. Knowing there was a serial killer loose in his city was driving him nuts. Knowing that he had nothing to go on, no bodies, no leads, and that they could only run around behind her picking up the pieces...

"We could bait her," he said softly.

Mark looked up from his computer. "What was that?"

"We could bait her. Set up the kind of victim she likes best. Track him, see where he goes."

Mark rested his chin on his on hand, looking at him thoughtfully. "That's a little dark. What if she gets away clean? Besides, who's going to volunteer to be murderer bait?"

"What if..." John glanced back and forth sideways, "what if we didn't tell them that's what they were?"

"That's a pretty hard line to cross, John," Mark said softly, rolling his chair over so the could speak in lower tones. "What brings this to mind?"

John reached over and grabbed a folder off his caseload. He slid it over to Mark. The other cop opened it and glanced over it. "Hank Bruit. Petty thief, escape artist."

Mark looked up at his partner. "And you're thinking we give him enough rope to hang himself with? And what, follow him 24-7?"

John shook his head. "He's having minor surgery. We could slip a transponder in--"

"John, are you hearing yourself? That's a massive breach of privacy! Not to mention bodily autonomy!"

John glared down at the desk. "But it would work." He looked up at Mark. "We have to try something. Hundreds of people, Mark. She's killed hundreds of people. And she's depending on our resources and procedures limiting us to get away with it."

He slapped his hand down on a photo, holding it up. "She was twenty-two, Mark. Yes, she'd killed people, robbed convenience stores, sold meth to schoolchildren--"

Mark cocked an eyebrow. "Yeah, that's a real tragedy."

John looked away for a second, abashed. "My point is, even vicious, hardened criminals don't deserve to just disappear into whatever hell some rich woman thinks is right."

Mark winced. "Look, John...even if the victims were innocent children, this plan would never get approved. And even if it was approved somehow, any evidence we find would be thrown out from the get-go. This is some spy bullcrap you're talking about."

John stared at the folder. "Then maybe we go to the spies."

One Month Later

"I cannot believe you got the FBI to sign off on this," Mark muttered, as they sat in the van watching the little dot that was Bruit moving along in his taxi.

He really couldn't. Going over the captain's head had been a huge risk on John's part. And when he'd pitched the plan to the case officers working the Charity case, Mark had been sure they were going to get reported for ethics violations. They'd received exactly the reception he'd expected, a sort of cold disbelief that John was even suggesting it. But two weeks later, a different set of agents had contacted them.

The new agents were excited, talking about the plan like it was the best thing they'd ever heard. It was a little surreal to see officers of the law eager and willing to break the law, to go around the rules, in pursuit of a criminal they couldn't even prove existed, really. They'd approved it lock, stock, and barrel, and set everything in motion, inviting Mark and John along to liase on the case. And here they were, sitting in a surveillance van, following Bruit using a GPS tag in his leg. The kind they used to track wild animals, no less.

John rolled his eyes. "You've said that a few dozen times now."

"And I'm going to keep saying it," Mark said, looking away from the screen. "We GPS tagged a criminal without his consent and allowed him to escape to act as unknowing bait so we could maybe catch someone who might be a murderer. This is wrong on so many levels, John."

John sighed. "Look, we got it approved. I don't know how or why they approved this, but we're doing it, so would you stop freaking out on me?"

Mark fell silent, and turned back to look at the screen. "Where's he going?" he wondered aloud.

John leaned over. "What do you mean?"

"He's headed out to the suburbs. Not sure what could be out there for him."

John shrugged. "Maybe he's got a stash."

Mark nodded, thoughtfully. "Or maybe our serial killer got hold of him, lured him in somehow."

John frowned. "How would she?"

"Well, he had a phone hidden, and we know he bought a top up card for it. Maybe she has his phone number?"

"How? How would she get that? That implies she was stalking him before we cut him loose."

"True. And that worries me a little."

John shook his head. "Nah, it's possible, but really unlikely. I'm betting on him having a stash. Bet you five bucks he goes to a storage unit."

Mark tapped his chin. "Make it ten, and I'll counter that our killer somehow found him and got him pulled in."

"Fine. And if he goes somewhere else?"

Mark shrugged. "Then we're both wrong and nobody wins."

"Deal."

They shook on it, and went back to watching the screen. The van they were in turned as it continued on its course, following the GPS tag in Bruit's leg. Mark wondered privately whether Bruit could tell there was something here, whether it itched or dug into him. He also wondered how they were supposed to get it back _out_without Bruit noticing.

Twenty minutes later, the cab came to a stop. The van pulled up just in time for them to see Bruit disappear into a house. John's jaw dropped open as he saw a flash of blonde hair before the door closed.

"No way," he whispered.

Mark was equally shocked. He'd had a gut feeling that Bruit was meeting up with their killer, but he hadn't actually expected it to be true. He shook himself as the FBI team grabbed equipment to listen to their conversation.

"It could be that he knows someone who's blonde," he offered quietly.

John picked his jaw up off the floor, shaking his head slightly to clear it. "Yeah...right, lots of people are blonde."

Mark nodded. But he was thinking, not that shade of blonde. The profiler had said pale hair, not blonde hair, and that lady's hair was either white or darned close to it.

The FBI team finished setting up and suddenly Bruit's voice, along with a woman's voice, filled the van.

"--ppy to see you took me up on my invitation," the woman was saying.

"I'm still not clear on how you got my phone number. Nobody's supposed to have it."

John and Mark exchanged looks, both startled to hear their suppositions playing out.

"It's like I said, it was a wrong number. Just your luck that I happened to have a room you could stay in."

"Yeah, I'm still not clear on that, lady. Why invite a total stranger into your house?"

"Well, I'm sort of a social worker. I help people turn their lives around when they're in trouble."

"And what makes you think I'm in trouble?"

She laughed, low and musical. "Well, you did agree to stay in a stranger's house!"

They heard him laugh softly. "OK, you got me there, lady."

"Did you want to talk about it? The trouble you're in?"

There was a long moment of silence, and then another laugh. There was a little swagger in his tone as he responded. "Oh, why not? I'm running from the cops. You gonna call them?"

"Are you going to hurt me?"

John winced. She sounded very vulnerable and he had a flash of horror at the thought that maybe they'd set a criminal loose on an innocent do-gooder.

"Nah, I'm just a thief. I don't hurt people. Well, I mean I don't put people in the hospital. Usually."

They heard her sigh with relief. "No, I won't call the police. Although I think you should turn yourself in."

He laughed. "You've obviously never been to jail, honey. There's no way I'm going back if I can help it."

"I understand, I know jail is terrible. Like I said, I'm sort of a social worker. Still, you should consider it. Why don't you sit down and I'll make you something to eat? You can tell me more about the troubles you're having."

What followed was bizarre. As the woman cooked, Bruit told her everything about himself, his tone light, humorous, even a little smug at times. Bruit told her about his ganger beginnings, his drug habit, stealing to cover his drug habit, prostituting himself when he was younger, again to cover his drug habit. He told her that he went back to drugs again and again, waxing rhapsodic about how much he enjoyed the high, the feeling of touching God he got from heroin. But drugs led to theft, and since he was a terrible thief that inevitably led to another stint in jail.

He talked to her for hours, and the woman, whose name they'd learned to be Ally, asked insightful questions at the right time, kept him talking, made sympathetic noises at the right times. Nothing he said fazed her or shook her, and John decided that either she really was a social worker or she had nerves of steel.

They finally wound down into silence, drinking tea from what they could gather. After a few minutes, the woman spoke quietly. "You could turn it all around, you know."

"Yeah, right," Bruit said with a chuckle. "I've got a rap sheet a mile long. Besides, I'm not much for the kumbaya bit. I'm a criminal, I always have been, and I probably always will be. I mean, how would I even start at 'turning it around'?"

"Go to the police and turn yourself in," she said softly. At his snort, she spoke a little louder, her tone wry. "Yeah, I know. Not what you wanted to hear. But really, going back and serving your time is your best bet. Once you get out, come find me again, and I'll help you get back on your feet."

There was a long silence. "Look, lady, I appreciate the place to lay low, but I am not going back."

"Will you at least think about it?"

"Fine, whatever. I'll...I'll think about it, sure."

"That's all I ask. Now, the spare bedroom is made up. Why don't you get some sleep?"

He went to bed and shortly thereafter she did too. If it bothered her to sleep in a house with an escaped criminal, she showed no sign of it. John tapped one of the FBI people on the shoulder. "Can we get a search warrant for her house?"

The man nodded. "She's harboring a fugitive. That won't be a problem at all."

The warrant came through the next morning. Mark was a little shocked that in addition to the warrant to search the house, they'd also obtained a warrant to put cameras in her house.

"What the heck are we going to do with that?" he asked the agent who handed him the warrants.

The man shrugged. "Take a tech with you, put some cameras in if you find anything that's suspicious, but not suspicious enough to bring her in."

Mark started to object, but John leaned over him and plucked the warrants from his hand. "Thanks, we appreciate it."

Mark glared at him as he looked over the warrants. "Aren't you the slightest bit suspicious that we got a warrant we didn't even ask for?"

"Nope. Huge case, old case, and besides," he spun the warrant around. Mark's eyes went wide when he saw it was issued through the Department of Homeland Security, "it comes from the people who handle that kind of thing. And we have probable cause, so...why not?"

Mark licked his lips. "I'm just...I feel like we've stepped into something bigger than we can understand. That we're in over our heads."

John sighed. "Maybe we are. But we're here now, and all we can do is keep swimming and go with the flow."

Mark fell silent at that. They watched the house, waiting to see what would happen. At about 7 in the morning, the woman shooed Bruit out, telling him she had some errands to run. She left a few minutes after, driving a small sports car that had Mark and John looking at each other again, both of them thinking the same thing: that their possible perp was rich enough to afford that car. Once she was gone, they went up to the house, and an agent used a lock gun to get them in.

They went through the house, wearing gloves so as not to damage evidence. They found what they needed in the first five minutes: a pile of cardboard document boxes in the basement next to a camp cot and a pad of paper with familiar looping handwriting in the kitchen.

They met back up in the living room to share their findings. "I think we have enough to bring her in," Mark said quietly.

John stared at the handwriting on the pad. "And what do we charge her with? We have no bodies. The handwriting could be a fluke. The profiler said you could order those boxes anywhere."

Mark's eyes narrowed. "What are you suggesting?"

"Let's put the cameras up. Watch her a little longer, maybe we'll get something more concrete."

Mark sighed. "I'm not really comfortable with bugging her house."

"Look, we have a warrant. It's all legal, all aboveboard. We just need to build a case."

Mark stared at his partner for a long moment. "Fine," he said, blowing out a breath and looking away. "Let's do it."

It took the agents less than twenty minutes to put tiny cameras in almost every room in the house. They retreated to the van and waited. About halfway through the day, the other team, the one following Bruit, reported in that Bruit had knocked over a convenience store at knifepoint. Mark was horrified that the agents hadn't intervened, but they'd assured him that no one had been hurt and they'd been ready if it looked like things were going to go bad. From there, they'd followed Bruit to a known dealer, where he'd purchased some of his drug of choice. They advised they were still maintaining a wait and see.

At about 5pm, they got another check in from the other team. Ally had shown up at the hotel Bruit had gone to to get high, picked him up, and left with him. More to the point, she had all but carried him out to her car. The other agents weren't entirely certain that Bruit had even been conscious for the trip. Half an hour later, the two teams rendezvoused on the next street over from Ally's house, watching on their cameras as she carried Bruit into her house.

Mark squinted at the screen. "Look at his head lolling. He's out. I think we should move in, if she's our killer, anything could happen once he gets inside."

The agents with them considered that for a moment. "Closer, but not in to take her yet. It's all still really circumstantial," one said.

Mark sighed. "Fine. It's not like there's a man's life on the line, after all."

The van was already moving as the agent sent him a cold look. "I'm well aware of that. And at the first sign of trouble, we'll pull him out. But he could just be sleeping off a bender at his social worker's house."

Mark grimaced, but nodded and didn't say anything more. He turned back, watching as Ally mostly carried Bruit down to her basement. She was obviously stronger than she looked, hauling the bigger man around like a sack of potatoes in a fireman's carry once she got into the house. He held his breath a little bit, hoping fervently they hadn't missed a weapon when they searched the basement.

She laid him down on the camp cot, and then sat down next to him and sighed. She ran a hand over his forehead, wiping the sweat away, running her hand through his hair.

"You really could have turned it around," she said softly. "You could have been wonderful. It wouldn't have been easy, but it would have been worth doing. But now... if you will squander the potential you have as you are alive...then let the cycle accelerate."

The hair on the back of Mark's neck stood up. "Get him out."

The agent next to him glared. "We wait until she does something threatening. We're less than a minute away from her front door. It'll be fine."

On screen, she stood up and stretched her hands out over him. The gesture looked...formal, ritualistic, and Mark was shaking inside. He crab-walked over to John, and hissed, "We need to get him out!"

John barely looked away from the screen. "She hasn't done anything wrong yet."

Mark fisted his hands in his hair, watching as Ally continued to breathe deeply. She was preparing for something, he knew it in his soul. "Look, he's...I can't explain it but we need to get him out of there. Something's wrong."

John stopped and looked at his partner. Mark's intuition had saved their butts and proved accurate time and again.

"OK," John said quietly. He turned to the agents. "Guys, I trust my partner, we need--"

There was no fanfare, no light show, no hum to mark the changes. But silence fell in the van as they watched the impossible happen. Bruit began to transform. As Ally moved her hand over his head, it distorted and ballooned up into a watermelon. As her hand continued down his body to his torso, they watched in horror as his flesh came apart into cartons of eggs, loaves of bread, and a jug of milk. Simultaneously, his arms turned into cans laid end to end, and then his hands shriveled into ginger roots. The transformation swept down his legs, following her hand in its inexorable, terrible movement, turning them into more cans. Finally, his feet rippled and collapsed in on themselves, turning into bundles of carrots.

"What...?" John whispered.

Ally looked down at the food and sighed again. She grabbed a box and popped it into shape, set it on the floor beside her.

Mark sagged back against the wall of the van. "That's not possible," he whispered, starting to shake a little bit.

The agents, if they were feeling anything, didn't show it, their faces masks as they watched the screens.

Ally picked up a sheet of paper and swiftly wrote a note on it, a note they knew would say, Warm regards from Henry Bruit. Don't bother looking anymore. She set it in the bottom of the box and began to pile the food on top of it, the cans on the bottom.

Mark snapped out of it. "We have to...we have to arrest her. We have video proof that she just killed a man...somehow."

John was staring at the screen, his face a rictus of horror. "There's no way this holds up in court."

Mark glared at him. "We just served a man up on a platter to that...whatever she is! The least we can do is arrest her!"

He turned and grabbed the handle of the door and pulled. And then pulled again. "Unlock the door!" he snapped.

There was a moment of silence, then a soft thunk as the doors unlocked. He jerked at the handle and nothing happened again. "I said unlock the damn door!"

"It _is_unlocked!" the agent in the front called. The thunking of the locks came again, and then Mark watched in growing horror as the agent tried both front doors. "The doors are stuck or something!"

Mark turned back to look at the screen, understanding washing over him. "She's doing this. She knows we're here."

On the screen, Ally was placing the last carton of eggs into the box. She turned back to the cot and picked up a small, dark object off it. She held it up to the light, and they could see it backlit: a human heart. A smooth, shiny, almost black human heart. She bit into it and chewed slowly, her eyes drifting closed. Mark gagged and looked away from the screen, but the sound of eating her grisly treasure and the little breaths of pleasure coming from her were unmistakable.

"The darkest of chocolate, from the darkest of hearts," he heard her say softly a few minutes later, satisfaction evident in her tone.

Mark looked back at the screen, gagging again as she licked her fingers to get the last bits of chocolate off them. She stopped, slowly withdrawing her finger from her mouth, turning to look straight into the camera. His heart stopped for a second, and then went into overdrive as he imagined his body tumbling apart into a pile of food.

Ally passed her hand across her face in an almost lazy gesture and John shouted out in shock at the same time that Mark and the agents gasped. Gone was the beautiful young woman. In her place, they were staring into the face of Hank Bruit. Mark felt frozen, unable to look away as she repeated the gesture and another face appeared, the young murderess that had set them on the path to Bruit's destruction. A wave of the hand and she wore the face of Mieczyslaw Stravinsky. Her hand passed in front of her face a dozen more times, and a dozen faces they they recognized from their folder appeared where her face should be.

The shock of the party trick was starting to wear off when her hand passed in front of her face one last time. Mark felt his knees turn to water and he sagged back against the wall of the van.

She was wearing his face.

She was wearing_his _face.

He got another shock, his stomach flip-flopping, when she spoke in his voice. "Let there be no illusions here: you found me only because I allowed you to. And if he had shown potential for change, you would have had him back. What I do for those beyond help is simply accelerating the process of living, dying, decomposing, and nourishing new life. Now, as you have come this far wondering who I am, I will introduce myself."

Her hand passed over her face and then continued on to wave down her body. In its wake, she changed once more. From a young woman with a man's face, she became a cat. Not a cat girl, but an anthropomorphic cat, standing on two legs, humanity in the shape of her body, but everything else impossible. She was perfectly white, so pale that she seemed to glow on the screen. Her eyes were disturbingly feline, no humanity left in them. There was something else odd, and he shuddered when he realized he could see that her eyes were hazel, the only color on the otherwise black and white screen.

"Alabaster. That is the only name you need to know," she said. Mark felt a wave of disorientation watching a cat speak. "Your place here is to condemn a mortal for taking justice into their own hands. I am not a mortal, nor is my family, and so you have no claim on us. We will continue our work to make this world a better place. You may seek us out if you wish; each of our patterns is distinct, and we will not harm those whose intentions are pure. But neither will we allow you to stop us."

She stepped backward from the camera, her movements delicate, feline, and utterly alien. "You have your justice to follow, and we have ours. We remain discreet and disguised because we have no desire for everyone in the world to be scared of mysterious man-eating beasts. We all know that the fact that we prey only on the wicked will not prevent rumors of us being just as evil. But the choice as to whether you tell anyone of us is ultimately yours. I will be going now, and I will not return to this house. If you seek one of us out again, ensure that you have an excellent reason."

Alabaster raised her paw, and all the cameras turned to static.

Mark sat there, waiting for his shaking to calm. The sound of static filled the van, echoing in the silence. When he finally was able to move, he tried the door again. It opened easily this time. He jumped out and walked across the street to the house, not sure what to expect, or even if he expected anything. The door was open, and he walked right in. The house was empty, like it hadn't ever been occupied. He walked down to the basement, just because he had to be sure. It was as empty as the rest of the house.

He walked back across the street, a wave of exhaustion hitting him as the revelations of the past ten minutes coupled with the last week of surveillance hit him all at once. He reached the van and sat on the bumper, listening to the sound of static that no one seemed to have the presence of mind to turn off.

Something occurred to him, one of those random thoughts that comes up in times of shock. "Hey, John?"

His partner jumped and turned to look at him, his face pale and sweaty. "Yeah?" he croaked.

Mark laid his head back against the door, closing his eyes.

"You owe me ten bucks."