[color=gray][h3][sup][sup]Sometimes it took the form of an ambush, as it had in the library. Other times a bribe, a trade. Extortion or duplicity or even a gift freely given. But The Hunt; ever and always and ubiquitously (and more than a little euphemistically) they called it The Hunt. Its afterglow still tingling in his veins, Connie expressed himself on anything that would survive him; vented some of that vigor, that aggression, some of that newfound resolve on whatever laid within reach. He slammed his palms against the steering wheel and stomped down on the gas pedal. And when the Hemi roared so also did he, hanging out the window of the Challenger, loosing a war-whoop which startled a gaggle of sidewalk-goers into a bout of nervous giggles. A message to the Other sharing his body that he wasn't for sale—not tonight. A message to the fledglings wherever they were. A warning. They didn't have to hear it bellowing through downtown toward the Strip; only feel it as a rising of the hairs on the backs of their necks, a dread-stone calcifying in their kidneys, a whisper, a promise. Another of their Dark Ancestor's many barbed gifts: the same voice scraping the insides of their skulls as which scraped every Kindred's. [i]Danger. Danger...[/i]

He took stock of himself, the Brujah, once he was pulled away into the first abandoned, weedy lot he'd happened across; engine idling; headlights tunneling the dark and terminating on the white and grey wall of a derelict auto body shop, white paint flaking off grey concrete in scabs. The scents of the city tangled in his hair, the Brujah, its dusts darkening the inner conch of his left ear. One of the lenses popped from his clubmasters, a mean, one-eyed glare peering back at him from the rearview mirror. (He peeled the broken sunglasses from his face and cast them out the window, heard their plasticky clatter across the asphalt.) Sand and road grit glued to the mayonnaise slathered up and down his suit pants. But despite this—despite it all—better. [i]M̴͕̖̫̱̒ü̷̧̡̼̬̐c̶̥͆̀̂h̶̞̜͎͇̐́[/i] better.

He patted down his pockets and much to his relief it had survived his hot-heeled escape across the library lot, back through the sports medicine place, the entirety of his rolled-window rout out of downtown: the guest slip, thin and brittle as a cicada's sheddings. "Alright, [i]'C. Capdevielle,'[/i]" Connie muttered—as if he addressed the Gangrel herself, sat beside him in Teresa's usual spot or perhaps in the backseats where the ziptied fugitives liked to kick and struggle, and their loved ones bleated and begged without end—"show me where you've been hiding." Already the MDT, built into his center console, glowed at the ready; bathing his every scruffy feature in an artificial cobalt blue. He didn't waste his time where the cops no doubt had already scoured—residences, registered vehicles, previous criminal activity, outstanding warrants—all the obvious and trodden avenues—no need. Not when he knew something they didn't. Instead, navigating the blocky U.I. with practiced pecks, tapping in the name of the fledgling who'd haunted and harangued them for most of two weeks, Connie pulled up two nationwide databases. Missing persons first, a compilation of Silver Alerts and AMBERs, kidnappings, all the human trafficking hotlines. Then, windowed beside it, the obituaries. He queried strings, substrings, and tokens. Hot cases and cold ones. False positives and recent sightings and every dead-end lead. He pulled it all; cast his net as wide as wide went. Couldn't be too thorough, not with Brace breathing down his neck.

Sifting through the flagged results, his spine curdled.

Not at first, of course; fewer than a dozen matches, most of them useless. (Thank God she wasn't a Smith or a Jones or a Lopez.) But as Connie sifted through the males, the elderlies, the blondes, the pre-2000s, just as he was becoming sure he'd sniffed his way to nowhere, lost the scent at a creek or a falter-line like an old bloodhound with a nose not half of what it used to be, the first fateful track caught his eye: wherein a "Paul Capdevielle, Sr."—along with a Horatio T. Behan and a Jack and Lily Addison—had pooled a $25,000 dollar reward for information leading to the safe return of their three children, last seen, the whole clique, on the eighth of June, boarding a taxicab to Louis Armstrong International. Connie didn't know what compelled him to pull up a police report from Louisiana, replete with a Xeroxed scan of the reward fliers ("5'3...petite build...last seen wearing..."); to give it more than the perfunctory dismissive glance; but it could not have been anything less than a quirk of fate, the guiding hand of good luck itself. As these posterboards had not only been slathered across every telephone pole, bulletin board, and milk carton in NOLA that Old Money could buy: a little more delving, and it turned out this cadre of aging socialites had photocopied it to every major newspaper and late-night news outlet in Vegas. A few tabloids had picked up the story and buried it on page six or ten or twenty-two; the Review-Journal and the Sun had each rented out a half-spread of ad space. (Hardly the showing a few old rich pearl-clutching cunts had hoped to bring out for their dead rich cunt kids, and yet...)

Connie's hands would have begun to tremble had his undead body still featured a functioning endocrine system. All the same he lit a cigarette. Readied his notepad and a cheap gel pen, and kept digging.

Caroline Capdevielle, Madison Behan, and Haley Addison. Once he had all three names, courtesy of their worried-to-death families' missing persons flier, tracking their week-long glorified bar crawl across the Strip was a cinch: their cards pinging from concierge desk to restaurant to casino teller. ATM to ATM to ATM. (Spoiled little shits. Connie couldn't see the objects of the transactions but he salivated at the amounts in the statements, all zeros and commas; seethed at the names of hoity-toity celebrity chefs, at hour upon hour of bottle service. And not a credit line in sight; only debit.) Interestingly, all three paper trails ended at roughly the same time, in roughly the same area: the Resorts World complex. For some reason all three girls had drawn large sums of cash all within twenty minutes of each other—one at the on-site sports betting shop, two more at the casinos—seemingly to meet up again somewhere nearby and blow it all at a fourth location. Connie clicked his pen and recorded his suspicions:[/sup][/sup][/h3][CENTER][H3][SUP][sup][SUP]Caroline[s]        [/s]Hilton casino floor
Madison[s]        [/s]Conrad cas. floor
Haley[s]        [/s]Egan's Saloon/Sports Book
___________________________________
June 14[SUP]th[/SUP], met up @ RESORT WORLD, drew cash
in 3 difrent spots (worried abt getting traced/
folowed??)[s]        [/s]to nervus to use cards?
[i][u]WHY THE SECRESY[/u][/i]
Must of been founded[s]        [/s]last sign of them
befor they vanish of the face of the earth[/SUP][/sup][/SUP][/H3][/CENTER][H3][SUP][SUP]He had a date now; maybe even a rough triangulation of where these girls had met their First Deaths; but hardly enough to seal the case. With that avenue, for the time, exhausted, he continued the—

Girls?

He paused—wasn't the second perp—the one in the CCTV footage...?—Connie fast-rewound the tape, still inserted; pulled up the feed of the parking garage, of Curtis Prince DeWayne being herded to his slaughter. He played it back. Rewind and replay and rewind and fast-forward and replay. No. No, no matter how he looked at it, what timestamp, what angle, Caroline's accomplice was male. Skinny-wristed and a bit of a faggot, sure, but in the shoulders and the crotch and the hunched, shrinking gait, shriveled by neurosis, by paranoia, unequivocally a fucking [i]dude.[/i] Connie tabbed over to the missing persons poster; zoomed in on the photocopy of a photocopy of three small, grainy, cropped pictures of three dead girls, all three dolled out and dressed up in their prettiest little princess blouses and bell skirts. Nope: not a she-male in the bunch. This, too, began to make its way into his notebook, but before he could finish asking himself the question did its answer call out to Connie from the dark, low and mewling. It occurred to him to tab back to the obits—to query Behan and Addison and sure enough up came their mugshots, the splatter across their chins and throats the color of chocolate cake batter, their perfect skin the color of grubs, the one girl's stare a glassy and lidless stare the other's bunched and raisined, transfixed mid-scream by the death-stiffness. Connie looked at them; beheld them. Beheld the desolation and the waste. He amended his question.[/SUP][/SUP][/H3][CENTER][H3][SUP][sup][SUP][u]Who is the boy?[/u]
[s]Were did Madison and Ha[/s][i][u]Why only Imbrace
Caroline?[/u][/i][/SUP][/sup][/SUP][/H3][/CENTER][H3][SUP][SUP]Little by little, inch by agonizing inch the picture was becoming clearer, but he had to laugh; it wasn't like him to flinch away from uncomfortable truths, to draw out the inevitable, to ignore disquieting questions by posing other, gentler ones. Certainly not to miss the constellation for the stars. They'd already found the girls. They'd already found the girls and catalogued their names, their faces, already uploaded the mugshots to their server farms, already filed the carcasses away in cold, steel cabinets scrubbed neat as silverware. They'd already prodded glass rods at the wound channels (cursorily and amateurishly concealed with knife or gunshot or belt sander as was the habit); already typed up a coroner's report awash with words he didn't understand like "carotid sheath," "antemortem," "acute exsanguination," "demarcated." And his "C. Capdevielle"—already toe-tagged, already autopsied, already a [i]fucking[/i] Masquerade breach. He was wasting time. [i]A corpse walked the streets[/i]—they had her I.D., her picture, they'd broken the news to her family and here was Connie Beauclerc puzzling over the [i]polite[/i] dead girls, the [i]obedient[/i] ones not walking out the freezer front door and eating the tourists. There had to be something. Come on you washed-up bastard, you old sniffer-dog, it's out there somewhere and all you got to do is find it, then you can go back to your ratty apartment, the neighbors' meth-den stink seeping through your walls, your loathsome landlady; get back to the nightly grind and stop doing charity work for the Primogen Council at least for a little while. The bank statements. That's right, all those bottles of Château de Fartsniffer 2007, all those Michelin-starred midnight snacks, there had to be a room; and no mere four-walls-and-a-bed affair, either, not for this pillow-mint posse. Come on, you stupid little pricks, Connie muttered as he backclicked his way to the relevant page, as cigarette ash spilled down into his lap, please for the love of Caine don't use PayPal. And his prayers were answered. He widened the parameters, pulled up new searches; scoured Addison's financial details and Behan's, but accordingly it was Caroline herself who had paid for the group's lodging, for so went one of several dozen frivolities she had transacted within city limits since her arrival: [i]Point of Sale Withdrawal / VENETIAN PALAZZO FRT DESKLAS VEGAS NV 881921311 Card #1447.[/i]

And so at last. At last he'd hunted down the next bread crumb. At last he knew where to go next. And yet no exuberance, no triumph flooded him; for weren't Connie's heart an inert lump of muscle in his room-temperature chest it most assuredly would have dropped down into his diaphragm, pressing the dread deep, deep into the gulf of his stomach. The Venetian was Giovanni turf.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]