11: Shell Game
Fifty four per cent of the employees of Lakeview’s Blackwater Monitoring Division had type A blood. Hubert, alone in his office and abusing his high security clearance to violate the privacy of his coworkers (they really did need a more sophisticated security clearance system), found this incredibly suspicious, given that the population of Lakeview as a whole was thirty two per cent type A. But after an hour or so of looking into the employees of other departments and businesses (seriously, high clearance for the purposes of water analysis should not give him high clearance in viewing citizen data, who designed this system), he concluded that there was nothing to worry about – there seemed to be a normal distribution of blood type ratios and his department happened to be towards one end of it.
Terrible luck for whoever was trying to prevent some employee from becoming a vampire. Or perhaps they were trying to prevent anyone in the Monitoring Division from becoming a vampire? Why?
Maybe the whole division was hiding some kind of secret, something that the vampire assassin (or whoever was employing them, probably the Scarlet City government) didn’t want the other vampires to know about. But what could it be, and why would someone in the department becoming a vampire mean they’d tell the other vampires? No, no; that couldn’t be it. If that were the issue, just killing off all the potential recruits ahead of time would be far more difficult and risky than waiting to see if any of them were turned and then dealing with them after they were in Scarlet City, away from human jurisdiction. Besides, Hubert was part of the division and didn’t know any such secrets. Being after someone specific, but not knowing who, merely knowing their blood type and that they worked in his department, still made more sense as a motive, but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, either. How would the assassin know the blood type and where they worked, but not have any idea of their general age or sex? Something wasn’t right here. Something was missing.
It was getting dark outside. The rest of the staff had left hours ago; even the janitors, used to his workaholic nature, had bid him goodbye, and he’d waited for them all to leave before getting into this personal research project. Normally, if he’d stayed this late, Terry would drop by to badger him into letting her escort him home, but she hadn’t returned from the countryside yet. Ha, it’d be something, wouldn’t it, if the one time she’d taken her eyes off him and gone out of town, he’d fallen prey to some vampire? Which was ridiculous. The Children’s Militia might patrol civilian streets like they expected blood-starved feral vampires to leap out at their friends and relatives from every alley, but they never found them; vampires rarely left the nightclub district unless courting a specific human, and while vampire stalkers weren’t unheard of, Hubert didn’t have one. There wasn’t really any reason not to work late, beyond Terry’s paranoia.
Except for the vampire mass murderer, of course. But they’d stuck to the downtown district, his office was nowhere near the downtown district.
They had specifically targeted people who worked in his office, of course. So while their first few victims happened to be encountered downtown, they’d probably end up hunting them elsewhere eventually. Like in their homes. Or at their workplace.
But Hubert wasn’t a target. He had the wrong blood type. They only cared about type A.
Standing alone in an office building as the sun went down, it occurred to Hubert that ‘only type A people are targets’ was a pretty big thing to be so certain about after only three victims. After all, more than half of his coworkers were type A. Three deaths from the same workplace probably was a pattern, but given how many of those potential victims were type A, could he be sure that the same blood types weren’t a coincidence?
Could he really, truly be sure?
Someone was coming up the elevator.
Hubert burst out into the hall, realised that that was probably the opposite of what he should do when responding to the threat of a potential killer vampire, and dashed back into his office. His office was only a few doors down from the elevator, and he shut the door just as the elevator door opened (of course it was stopping on his floor, why the fuck wouldn’t it be stopping on his floor). He locked the door, like that would do anything (a simple mechanical lock), and looked at the window. Could he climb out there? Was the threat of a three story drop more or less dangerous than the threat of vampire murder?
He was being stupid, he realised. Jump out the window? Really? One of his coworkers had probably just come back to get something. It wasn’t like –
The lock on his door broke as it was shoved open. He grabbed his office chair in both hands and lifted it like the world’s worst club.
The woman was certainly a vampire; those round cheeks and thin lips had been the height of beauty when his grandmother was a child. Also, the teeth were a clue, sharp and bared and ready to bite. Not the delicate long canines of ancient legend, but razors like incisors, ready to slice away skin (and, if she wanted to, the fat and muscle beneath) and suck the blood from the open wound.
“Aha,” she said, “there you are. Let’s settle matters, shall we?”
Hubert took a step backwards and raised his office chair higher. “I’ve already called the police,” he lied desperately. “Th-they’ll be here in minutes. If you kill me, they’ll be able to track you down, there’s security cameras…”
This seemed to puzzle the vampire. She cocked her head and looked him over carefully. Then she stood up straight, closing her mouth, and frowned. “You’re human.”
“Um. Yeah?”
“Why are you human?”
“I was… born that way?”
“No, I mean, why are you here?”
“I… work here. Hang on, I should be asking the questions! Why are you here?”
“Well, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I’m trying to catch a mass murderer.”
“Oh.” He lowered the chair slightly. “So am I!”
“With an office chair?”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting them to show up! Which I guess they haven’t, I mean, if you’re not the – ”
“No, I’m not the murderer.” She rubbed her temples. (Hubert, whose arms were getting tired, figured that it was probably safe to put the office chair down.) “I’m being framed.”
So there was evidence that she could be the murderer. Hubert contemplated raising the chair again, but figured there was no point. “And you expected the murderer to be here?”
“No, I expected information to be here. It’s probably nothing, but I figured there was a slight chance that the fact that all four victims worked here might mean something. Maybe the obvious motive was a cover up for a less obvious one.”
“Isn’t them working here the obvious motive?”
“Is it? Is there a reason that the vampire government would want to knock off your department?”
“Not that I can find. But they are targeting us, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I think it’s a distraction. For your police. I don’t think the vampires care who they hit.”
“Oh. Well, it’s a pretty complicated – wait, did you say four? I thought there were three victims.”
“Ah. You hadn’t heard about last night’s.”
“Blood type?”
She looked at him with a little more respect in her gaze. “A.”
“Rhesus factor?”
“Does that matter?”
“I don’t know, does it?”
“Not to us.”
Hubert bit his lip. “My assumption,” he said, “was that they were after someone specific who worked here, but had very little information beyond blood type to go on. The timing suggests that maybe they want to prevent someone here from becoming a vampire; you’ve got your big drive for type A vampires right now, so if there’s someone specific they want to keep away who’s type A, they might be panicking. But I can’t think of a situation where a vampire would know a specific target’s place of work and their blood type but not have any idea about their age or sex, even if they didn’t have a name. Which lead me to think that they might simply want nobody from this department to be a vampire, so they’re eliminating everyone who could be turned in this type A push, but I don’t know why. I certainly don’t know any secrets that some vampire assassin would want other vampires not to know.”
“I’m not sure it’s got to do with this workplace at all,” the vampire said. “I think this just happened to be the workplace of the first victim.”
“And she was what, random?”
“Mo. She was my friend’s sister.”
“You know Benny?”
“You know Benny?”
“He was my friend back in the day. Why would anyone want to kill his sister?”
“To frame him, so they could drag me into it, to frame me.”
“Yeah, I’m still confused about that. You think people are framing you for murder?”
“I don’t think. I know. Madame pretty much told me to my face. My sister’s a politician, and she’s making some pretty unwise political moves. I’m her opponents’ insurance policy.”
“And they murdered four innocent humans for that insurance policy?!”
“No, They murdered four innocent humans so far. We have no reason to think that this is over.”
“Why?”
“What?”
Why keep killing? If they’ve framed you, they’ve framed you, right? Surely they could do that with just Penelope. If they wanted a serial killer, maybe the second killing. But you said there’s been another victim… why? Why keep going?”
“You think they’ll stop now?”
“I think it’s interesting that they didn’t stop earlier. This isn’t just about you. Either framing you is an excuse, or they’re accomplishing multiple goals at once. I guess we’ll know for sure if type A people in my department keep dying.”
The vampire started pacing. “It’s not a red herring, it’s a shell game. Multiple possible motivations and we don’t know which one is real and which ones are covering for it.”
“Or they might all be real.”
“Or they might all be real.” She wrung her hands fretfully as she paced. “I suppose killing to frame someone is a good cover for if you specifically wanted to kill someone. Although the government is involved. I don’t see why they couldn’t just arrange an ‘accident’ here or something and wipe out a whole lot of your department indiscriminately. Vampire assassin seems a showy way to do it.”
“I don’t know either,” Hubert shrugged. “if they are trying to target someone, it’s their bad luck that their victim works here. Over half of my department is type A. Fluke cluster, I think.’
The vampire stopped moving, and stared at him. “More than half of your department is type A?”
“… Is that bad? I just assumed, far end of the bell curve…”
“What? No. I mean, yes, it’s probably a fluke. It’s not important. The change of a specific unknown target happening to be working somewhere with such a high type A population is low, right? I mean, you can just-so miracle chances of anything after the fact, but I think it makes more sense for the causation to be the other way around.”
“That their target… chose to work here to hide among other type As? But…”
“No, no, no. That your department was targeted because of the high type A proportion. We forgot the third shell in the game – the fact that this is a serial killer focusing on type As in the first place. We looked beyond that into why – maybe they’re targeting someone whose blood type they know in your workplace. Maybe they’re framing Benny or me, and needed an easy way to indicate that the killer is a Bee. But what if my framing and your department are the red herrings? What if our killers are trying to hide something a lot simpler?”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that they’re targeting type As for their own sake. What if the whole point here, in response to the impeding Type A recruitment drive, is to simply kill as many conversion candidates as possible without anyone figuring out that that’s what they’re doing?”
Derin Edala 