Topic: The Index Case

Elias Granger · Date: 2011-03-15 12:21 EST

A small part of Elias felt guilty, as he stood there by Jonathan Granger's bed as the last of the cousins filed out: he had been in RhyDin for two weeks, and this was his first time in many years meeting every one of them but Helena, Jonathan's sister. Withdrawn into his studies, holed up in his room hammering away on his typewriter, listening to old interview tapes over and over, or stalking the streets of WestEnd like the undead predators he observed, no one in the family but Helena had so much as glimpsed Elias. Every time he told himself they were distant cousins, barely a family, only close at all with Helena because they were friends — he was freshly reminded of the lunches and dinners and bar outings spurned, chances to spend time with Helena and her brother, to whom he still had not been introduced.

Now there was a chance it would never happen. "Jesus Christ, Jon," Elias sighed, wringing his poor abused fedora in his hands. He hadn't been able to get much more information from the doctors: even in more advanced terms they still said the same thing, that they would not be certain about the extent of the head trauma until Jonathan woke up. It could be solvable with abundant therapy, in the long term Jonathan returning his lifestyle to normal with the help of strong coping mechanisms....or the damage could be far more extensive.

His stomach growled suddenly, and he nearly lit a cigarette when he remembered it was a hospital. He heaved another sigh, looked over Jonathan's form, frowned thinly and turned towards the door....and saw a quick flash of movement. A pale face, straw blonde hair beneath a dark hat, and wide brown eyes staring.

It could have been another cousin, one in a long line of family members Elias had not seen in many years, or had never seen at all. "Hello?" he called out. "It's all-right, I was on my way out, you're free to..." Footsteps raced away, the woman who had ducked out of sight now racing down the hall; Elias scowled suddenly and darted out after her in time to glimpse her leaping over a crumpled form on her way to the exit. One of the guards the family company had posted to the hospital.

"Oh nuts..." Elias already had his cell phone out, dialing the number of his 'assistant' Ivan waiting in the car outside. He stooped to put on a glove, compulsively, and checked the man's pulse. "Yes, Ivan. Well, who the hell else would it be, the Faerie Queen" No, don't answer that....Listen, guy. There's a lady leaving the building, dark hat, blonde hair, should be in a big hurry. You see her" Don't run her over! No, get out of the car, leave the keys in the glovebox and the doors unlocked, and follow her on foot. Don't let her see you, but don't lose her."

He heard the guard moan and mutter unintelligibly, and Elias hesitated as he shut the phone. He could stay here with the guard, file a report with the Watch as a witness, possibly the only witness to the woman's appearance, and let them pursue the suspect...

...no, she was more than a suspect, she was a predator. Elias recognized the behavior of a killer, returning to the scene of the crime or, in this case, to the location of a failed kill. In a city filled with countless new immigrants every day her face would disappear so easily, she would elude the Watch and outlast their limited resources. If Jonathan survived and recovered, he would be in danger....perhaps Helena, too.

"And if he dies," Elias muttered, "he'll go unavenged." The decision was made. He would not be placed at the scene as a witness, freeing him to pursue his own agenda: he would state that the guard was still conscious when he left, and clearly not paying attention, as indicated by the fact that someone soon after managed to get the drop on him. And if Elias did not know the woman's appearance or identity in the first place, he could not be guilty of her murder. It was not as concrete as he would have liked, but under the circumstances, it would have to do.

By the time the guard awoke, Elias Reid-Granger was already gone.

((Linked to Nightmares Do Come True))

Elias Granger · Date: 2011-03-17 11:53 EST

A long and stressful week and a dead-end lead found Gigi Granger at the Red Dragon Inn, finding what might have passed for solace in a strong drink and a fresh bowl of quinoa. She was lifting the fork, about to savor the first bite, but was thrown off by the ringing cell phone coming from the pocket of her coat draped over the bar. The ring tone was an oddly delicate string quartet piece. She groaned and reached for it, flipping it open in annoyance. "What." With her monotone few things sounded like questions.

"Um....Gigi Granger?" The voice on the other end of the line was quiet and clearly nervous. Carried a strong city accent.

She raised one pierced eyebrow at the question thrown back at her on the phone. For most people it was harmless and shouldn't have required any extra thought. "Why." Gigi however had plenty of reasons not to be straight forward.

The man on the other end hesitated again: "Just wanted to be sure, Gigi....It's been an awfully long time, you know. It's Elias Reid-Granger. Remember" That reunion back in '99?"

Her face relaxed at the answer though she had been scowling for so many hours in a row today that she wasn't about to smile. "It's the curse of my life not to forget any of our family. Especially odd little ****ers like you." Who knew if the caller on the other end of the phone would remember Gigi's particularly dry sense of humor. She took that neglected bite of grain.

"Yes, well," Elias laughed nervously. "Anyway. You sound busy, so I'll get to the point, cousin. I heard you were looking for someone."

The next few words earned her attention. She sat up straight on the stool. "Yes. You?" Gigi prided herself on being effecient when it mattered. Conversations included.

"Not quite. You see, I've already found her. My....research assistant, he's been keeping an eye on her for the last several hours."

Now the caller had every ounce of Gigi's attention. "Where." There was a deadly urgency in the one word. He knew something she had tried to learn all day. She was practically salivating over the news now, not from hunger at being so close to the cooling bowl of quinoa but at the bloody vengeance only a phone call away.

Elias breathed a relieved laugh into the other end of the phone. "The south end of the High Street, a duplex with a red-painted door. 2B. We think she's alone." There was another pause. "Just one thing, though, Gigi..."

Gigi's boots hit the floor and the jacket already halfway on with the phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder. "Quick." In her mind she was already at the address shared, already pounding whatever face was waiting there. It was only something in her relative's tone that told her to wait one second longer to hear him out.

This was more than he had told anyone in some time; somehow, though, Elias got the feeling that Gigi was the kind of woman to trust with it. "I'd like no one else to know of my involvement....and I'd like her alive, if you can manage it. There's an experiment I'd like to run, and it will kill her. But, if you'd prefer to kill her yourself, then I'd like a suitable replacement in the future....if that's acceptable to you, cousin."

Someone with better defined morals would have peppered him with questions at such a suspicious request. Gigi would try and sort out more details from him later but the rest of it sounded in line with her own sense of justice. Underneath the rage and bloodlust that pushed her forward for the door Gigi recognized an appreciation for the information. She would return the good deed. "Semi-conscious and unmoving. Details later. Deal?"

There was another laugh from the phone. "That works just fine. Happy hunting, and if you need assistance, don't hesitate to let me know."

"Give me forty minutes. Then come and claim." She closed the phone and shoved it back in her jacket taking off at a breakneck pace for High Street.

((Adapted from live play with Dr Greenthumb Granger, with kudos!))

Dr Greenthumb Granger · Date: 2011-03-28 15:14 EST

Forty minutes. Gigi's lungs protested at how much she asked of them, tearing through dark streets and puddled pavement, cutting corners and dodging pedestrians. Forty minutes and the jonesing for revenge would be satiated. She could have told Elias she needed longer with Jon's assailant but she knew the unfortunate truth that came with any desperate desire: once satisfied there'd only be hollow memories and a lingering emptiness. It didn't matter if she had forty minutes or forty days. She would have the debt now owed to her paid in blood. It would be glorious and then it would end. In most cases death could only be inflicted once on a person.

She was prepared for the letdown. It was the cost of making sure they could all rest a little easier knowing that the lunatic with an itch of her own for Jon's head wouldn't bother them again. These were snap predictions and decisions she made in the time it took for Eli to give her the information. She needed forty minutes because she had one stop to make on the way to the High Street. Gigi accepted that vengeance reaped only tasted sweet for so long but she would allot herself a small portion of time to enjoy it.

There were things she loved and had missed about RhyDin when she was living in Jenli. One was its anonymity. No one batted an eye at a woman wearing all black racing through the streets. There were so many strange sightings that any one of them alone rarely raised an alarm. The second thing she had missed was the city's efficiency. Where else could she find a home and hardware superstore open at this time of night' Her one pit stop saw her briskly walking through the well-known aisles to pick up the few supplies she had mentally settled on when she started running out of the Red Dragon Inn. When it came to dirty deeds Gigi's mind worked at an alarming and precise pace. She took only as many steps as she needed to fill her arms with the necessary wares and pay at the counter. Her hands did not shake when she counted out her coins for the clerk ringing her up nor did she look anxious to get out of the store. She controlled the overwhelming urge to grab her bag and bolt while under the bright fluorescent lights in the very public setting. Faking patience was a skill she had honed when working for Motou while she was still using yola. She couldn't act like every other junkie when the Jenli drug lord showed up at the greenhouse to see how his valuable crops were growing.

As soon as she was out past the automatic doors and row of shopping carts she took off again now with a plastic bag clutched under her arm. She slowed when she reached the start of the rundown stretch of cheap apartments, cheap liquor stores and cheap brothels collectively known as the High Street. Another beautiful fact about this part of RhyDin was the way most people on the sidewalk avoided making eye contact with those passing them on the street. No one paid much attention to Gigi when she ran up the front steps of the duplex with the red painted door. They all were heading on similar paths of front steps, doors and the vices that waited behind them and so gave her little mind.

When she reached the paint-chipped door with the rusted letters "2B" barely hanging on it Gigi paused to calm her breath and put her purchases down long enough to slip on her black leather gloves. She picked up the bag again, this time letting the vivid petals of the orange and red spider lilies bought at the superstore obscure her face when she stood in front of the door's peephole. She cradled the potted flowers in the crook of her arm along with what remained in the plastic bag. This left her free hand to knock twice on the door before disappearing into her pocket to work her brass knuckles over her gloved fingers. It was awkward but she'd take it over leaving too many fingerprints at what was going to be an already messy scene.

Dr Greenthumb Granger · Date: 2011-03-28 18:36 EST

((Warning: Some graphic violence included.))

"W-who is it?" A decidedly female voice came through from the other side of the door. One brown eye blinked through the peephole.

"Delivery." Gigi kept the flowers in front of her.

"Who are they from?"

"I'm not a f**king singing telegram, lady, I'm just here to deliver them. You want these or should I toss them?"

"Sheesh, do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"

Gigi half turned away from the door. "Whatever. I'll keep them for myself. This job doesn't pay enough for me to play twenty questions. Whoever this guy is going to all this trouble to send you flowers now needs to get his head checked."

"What guy?" Gigi could hear the woman slide the deadbolt open. Women. We're all suckers for any hint of romance. While in this case her gender's predictability helped her cause, Gigi did grimace for a moment at how easy it was to pique a total female stranger's interest. She pretended not to hear and took another step out back towards the main hallway.

The door cracked open. "What guy?" The voice, now accompanied by a straw blonde head, asked with more persistence. From her angle she couldn't see the demented grin crossing Gigi's caramel face for only a moment. Gigi doubled back in no time flat and wedged her foot in between the door and its frame.

"Jonathan Granger."

An involuntary excitement flushed over the pale face at the name before an alarmed fear washed it away. It was all the confirmation Gigi needed to justify her next move. Gripping the flowers and bag tighter against her side she wound up and struck the bridge of the woman's pug nose with the brass knuckles. Dazed, the woman staggered back with her hands in front of her now bleeding face.

"P-p-please, you've got the wrong person, I don't know what you—-"

Gigi shoved her way inside and took advantage of the woman's stupor to take the time to put down the flowers and bag without breaking anything. The only destruction Gigi was interested in was stuttering right in front of her. The woman was reaching a hand blindly behind her. Gigi soon saw the .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol and lunged not for the weapon but for the woman. She grabbed the blonde hair at the back of the woman's head and yanked it back.

"Not today, sweetheart, we've got to get you ready for my cousin."

Gigi dragged the woman to the shabby dining table and forced her back onto it. The long blonde hair was wound and roughly knotted along a table leg closest to her head so that she was stuck staring at the ceiling, her head partly off the tabletop.

"It was an accident! Please, I swear, I would never—-" The pleas and protests only earned another punch with Gigi's knuckles. She never had much luck keeping the brass clean and today would be no exception. She put the blood-stained knuckles back in her pocket and went to pull out the rest of the items she bought at the superstore.

"A mistake in your case. You're a sh*tty shot as luck would have it. And speaking of luck and accidents, perhaps my cousin will have a happy accident of his own when he's done with his experiment."

Gigi turned back with a roll of duct tape, a hammer and two long screw-shank nails in time to see the woman scrambling to reach her arms up over her head and try to free her hair from the table leg.

"That'll never work. Now, this won't be pretty, but it'll have to do. I'm cruder than my cousin. He's the scientist." She climbed onto the table and pinned the woman's limbs still with her knees, straddling her torso.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU—-" Gigi tore a piece of the tape off and slapped it over the woman's mouth. Next she held one arm up above the woman's head, palm out and proceeded to drive the nail down into the palm with a swing of the hammer. She gave it a few more hits on the head because she wasn't sure how well the nail would hold up but the wide-eyed terror staring back at her and the muffled screams behind the duct tape told Gigi it did the trick. She repeated her handiwork with the remaining hand, hammer and nail. Leaning back, she wiped her forehead with the back of her gloved hand and studied the display. She started to laugh.

"You look straight out of that Prufrock poem Teddy used to read to me and Jon boy. How's that part go again? "The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, and when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin?" Well, I don't know how you began, baby girl, but I have a good idea how you're going to end." She climbed off the table then and took a moment to take a good look around the room. There on the mattress and the moth-eaten sheets was an open scrapbook, both visible pages filled with magazine clippings with Jon's picture in each one. Confident the now barely conscious woman wasn't going anywhere Gigi walked over to pick up a wallet next to the scrapbook. An ID card to some office she didn't recognize the name of was inside and more importantly, the name of Jon's attacker and Gigi's victim, depending how you looked at it.

"Susie Trevor. Jonathan Granger's biggest fan. I'll tell you what, Susie, before I go and let my cousin have you I'll give you one parting gift. It'll be just like what Jon boy has now."

Gigi stalked forward and swiftly removed the switchblade from the waistband of her pants. She leaned forward over Susie stretched out like a worm for the dissecting and gave her scars to match Jon's. She dug the blade into Susie's left shoulder to carve out an "X? and then made an equal cut, though not as deep since she had promised Elias she'd leave something for him to work with, in the dead center of Susie's forehead.

She took the scrapbook with her but left the flowers. They had their own meaning and message to the wicked botanist. She had been wrong. It only took her thirty-eight minutes.

Elias Granger · Date: 2011-03-29 09:12 EST

The Community Faith Family Medicine & Triage Center was not far from the surprisingly seedy north end of High Street in WestEnd, and was the primary reason that Elias' assistant Ivan picked the place. No one paid any mind when Susie Trevor, wrapped and tied up in a black sheet, was dumped out of her back window into the alley with the rest of the garbage; nor did anyone notice the truck that took her to the shady clinic's back entrance.

Beyond that strange gift this neighborhood gave to evil men like Elias Granger, Susie Trevor herself was supremely forgettable. She had always been more plain than pretty, far more comfortable in the background than the foreground, where she could see her precious idols yet go totally unnoticed herself. It was another gift that Elias had been given this night: it might take some time for the city to realize a woman was missing at all....and then, who would care?

The tragedy of it stirred no sympathy in Elias' heart as Ivan wheeled her stretcher down the darkened hallway to the elevator in the back with its dying, flickering lights. He felt two things only, that this weird little woman had shattered the happiness of his family, especially Helena, the only human being in a long time he had dared to call friend...

...and then there was the thrill of opportunity, the knowledge that Susie Trevor's terrible suffering could provide. In spite of her sins she was not a monster yet, not truly, and unlike the other subjects the anthropologist had at his disposal in the past her transformation into a monster could happen on his terms.

The elevator doors rattled shut and the lift dropped about twenty-five feet beneath WestEnd precipitously fast. A thud echoed through the disused sub-basement when the elevator "landed," and Elias tumbled partway out of the doors, caught and yanked back by one of Ivan's enormous hands. He scowled, shrugged it off and stalked down the hallway ahead of them: "Come, Ivan! We have work to do."

Few of the fluorescent bulbs on this floor worked, and many had been removed and never had been replaced. The idea was to make this corner of the clinic, abandoned for storage many years ago as it was, not worth reclaiming, not worth the effort for such a woefully understaffed and underfunded facility, and for the time being it had worked. Elias Reid-Granger and his new colleague Dr. Tisar had complete freedom to work as they pleased down here, so shallow a depth beneath the surface yet already far removed from the moral good sense and the ethical caution of the people above.

Ivan's lumbering steps slowed behind the stretcher as they approached the double doors into the darkened laboratory. When the squeaky wheels on the stretcher stopped they could easily hear the soft growls and scratchings in the chamber beyond, which did not help matters at all for Ivan. He looked uncertainly at his master, who stared coolly back. "Come, Ivan. I won't let them hurt you," and he smiled suddenly as he stepped backwards into the dark room. His fingers scrabbled on a metal tray by the door, where he found a scalpel; he drew his sleeve back and cut - with only the shortest gasp of breath at the pain - into his skin, a long enough line for blood to drip free.

Ivan rumbled unintelligibly, looking between his master and the darkness over his shoulder, and Elias' smile grew and twisted, further and further, as he stalked back to his assistant with blood smeared on his outstretched left hand. "Have a taste, my poor friend....steel your nerves on this," he whispered, and calmly mastered his revulsion when Ivan finally seized his hand and sucked on it, sucking the blood dry. He let him have his fill before yanking it away; he would not let him feed from the wound, not when he needed the scent of fresh blood for mastering far more than his ghoul.

Susie Trevor's dried blood had awoken them to a drowsy doze, but the sudden flash from the ceiling lights and Elias' outstretched arm as he marched defiantly towards their cages drove them into a sudden and ravenous rage. Most had been humans, or elves, or similar creatures decades and centuries ago, and without masters, covens, or simple social compunction to hold them back these creatures had sated themselves too much and too wildly: the bloodlust had taken hold, and they barely resembled human beings at all any longer.

Heavy iron cages lined the entire back wall of the laboratory, though for now only four had been filled, each of them tall and narrow without even enough room for a creature to lie down. Their flesh had gone so deathly pale it caught strange light from without and within, appearing faintly blue on their cheeks from the light, while the backs of their eagerly parted jaws were the meaty red of the coiling muscle beneath. They grasped at their cages with curling black and yellow claws, scratched at the bars and snarled their hunger without any comprehension these were locked doors that held them in. By bloodlust these creatures had been reduced to an animal level, and Dr. Tisar, Elias Reid-Granger and his 'assistant' Ivan had only succeeded in driving them further into their madness.

Elias held out his arm as close as he dared to the cages and the beasts within, smiling in wonder at his terrible reflection in their great black eyes: "Ivan, prepare Miss Trevor for the first stage of our experiment, and then fetch Dr. Tisar. Tell him..." A laugh escaped his lips, unexpected but welcome, and he turned to stare over his shoulder at Ivan:

"Tell him this woman is in dire need of a blood transfusion, and that we already have a few donors in mind."