Raisa Paretti

Raisa tried not to feel like they were doing something wrong. 

Her goal was to find Caroline, though, and they couldn’t do that without figuring out where she’d been. When Emilio had suggested retracing her steps as best they could, Raisa agreed that it seemed like the best thing to do. She just hadn’t realized that would be prying their way through Caroline’s life and forcing their way into her home.

But it was for the best. Raisa took a deep breath. “Would you hurry up?” she hissed as she leaned over to see how Emilio was doing at getting the door open. “I keep waiting for someone to notice us.”

—

Most of the time when someone hired him, they sat back and waited for answers. Most of the time. People didn’t call a private investigator to hang out with him, after all, and Emilio could count on one hand the number of people who took active involvement in their cases after handing them over to him. He wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad one that Raisa was now included in that number.

Right now, it was a bit of an annoying thing. Nobody liked someone hovering over their shoulder as they worked, and Emilio would insist that picking the lock would go a lot faster without the audience. He cursed under his breath as Raisa hissed at him to hurry, shooting a glare over his shoulder. “Do you want to pick the lock?” He snapped, looking back to the lockpick in his hand. “If you think you could do a better job, you’re free to…” The lock clicked, and the door creaked on its hinges as he pushed it open. “...take the next one. Come on.” 

—

Raisa took a step back at his question, opening her mouth to argue, even if she didn’t yet know what she was about to say. Then it opened, so the point was irrelevant. “Perhaps I will,” Raisa said with a sniff as she stepped past him into the open space.

As soon as she did, though, Raisa slowed, her eyes locked on the kitchen table. A lone coffee mug sat all alone. She stepped toward it to peer over the rim. A dried out crust that had probably once been the last dregs of a cup lingered along the bottom, clearly days old. Almost without meaning to, Raisa said, “I don’t think she realized she wasn’t coming back.”

She lifted her head to take in more of the space. It didn’t seem like anyone had left in a hurry necessarily, but things sat scattered in the same fashion as the cup–a normal kind of messy and lived in that had clearly been intended to be cleaned up later.

—

“Sure. I’d like to see you do better.” In all honesty, Emilio had no idea if she was the sort of person who could pick locks. She didn’t strike him as such, but maybe he was wrong about that. After all, in a town like this one, no one was quite what they appeared. Emilio included. 

He trailed behind her into the apartment, carefully shutting the door behind them. Raisa’s deduction was a good one; there was a coffee mug on the table, still half full of liquid. Two pieces of bread stuck out of the toaster, an open jar of peanut butter and a butter knife beside it. The television was still on, playing reruns of some show on cable, laugh track filling the quiet of the apartment.

There were no signs of a struggle; that was the next thing he noted. “Nobody took her from here,” he mused, walking over to switch off the TV. It was a little eerie, the sound of it. “If I had to guess… she stepped out for something quick. To get the mail, to take the trash out, to run to the store for something she was missing for breakfast. Must have been morning.” That ruled out a few things, too. Vampire attacks usually happened at night, for obvious reasons. Werewolves were more prone to losing control when the sun went down and the full moon came up. “We should walk to the mailbox first. Then the dumpster. Finding out where she disappeared from will tell us more.” 

Or… finding out where she was killed. Emilio was more prone to believe they were looking for a corpse than a person, but he wouldn’t say that to Raisa. No one hired a private investigator to find someone they didn’t care about, and telling someone that someone they cared about was dead without knowing for a fact that it was the truth was a dick move. “Come on.”

—

Such simple words, and yet they made a chill run across Raisa’s skin. She knew it was naive to hope Caroline could be fine with the way she’d disappeared. Some people could blink out of existence for months and come back like it was nothing, but that had never been Caroline’s way. She was dependable. She didn’t make commitments she didn’t plan to keep, and she didn’t blow them off like they were nothing. 

“Morning makes sense,” Raisa said. She reached for the coffee cup, then hesitated. Probably best not to touch. She shoved her hands back into her coat pockets, then watched Emilio move around.

She nodded and followed him toward the door. At the last second, Raisa paused to ruffle through the basket by the door. “No key,” she said. “Your mailbox theory might hold a little weight. Unless she carries it with her. I suppose that’s always possible too.” Personally Raisa didn’t like to carry more than she could help, but one up and down of owning her own house: no lock on the mailbox.

Raisa followed Emilio outside at that point. She closed the door gingerly (though didn’t lock it) behind them. She found herself falling back as they approached the mailboxes for the apartment. She glanced around. “Won’t people get upset if we look like we’re breaking into the mail?” she asked.

—

Contrary to what hyperbole might want people to believe, no one ever disappeared ‘without a trace.’ There was always something left behind, always some kind of evidence to be found so long as you knew where to look for it. Emilio had gotten pretty good at knowing exactly where to look for it.

More often than not, the things he found weren’t what his clients were hoping for. He found corpses, found broken watches or bloodied wedding rings or undeniable proof that the person he was looking for was being digested somewhere by something ravenous. Optimism wasn’t the kind of thing he clung to anymore, hadn’t been a thing that interested him at all in years now. As he led Raisa towards the mailboxes, he prepared himself to stumble upon some such proof of tragedy, got ready to tell her that the story they were writing wasn’t one with a happy ending. It was an inevitable thing, after all. Most stories didn’t end in ‘happily ever after.’ Most stories ended in blood.

He slowed as they got close to the mailboxes. Still no outward sign of a struggle. But… something gleamed from the concrete, and Emilio leaned over to pick it up, ignoring the protest from his bad knee. The key was small and silver, and he held it for Raisa to see. “We don’t have to break into the mail,” he said. Finding the box with Raisa’s friend’s apartment number on it, he slipped the key inside and, confirming his theory, found that it fit. He turned it and pulled open the box, finding several days’ worth of mail inside.

Turning back to Raisa, he nodded towards the box. “Gone before she opened it,” he confirmed. Hesitating, he glanced around. No one nearby, but there was a camera on the wall across from the mailboxes. He nodded towards it. “We’ll get that footage,” he said. “But… Look, before we go any further, we need to make sure we’ve got all our facts straight. Wouldn’t normally ask this, but you and me took down a damn snowman together, so I figure you know more than most people. Is your friend human?”

—

Raisa stepped back as Emilio bent over, though she couldn’t exactly say why. Something about the idea of clues perhaps. She knew the odds here, or at least she thought she did. Whatever they were, they wouldn’t be good. Raisa knew that much. When he lifted a key, Raisa breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing bad yet. Well, she stiffened as she considered the implications. People could drop something like a key without anything being wrong. That seemed unlikely. Caroline was too detail-oriented to misplace something like that. 

She peered over Emilio’s shoulder as best she could, but when Raisa stepped back, she tried to see the way he did. As he glanced around, she did the same, eyes lighting on a camera. She glanced toward him, pleased with herself to see he’d also considered it important enough to focus on. She hadn’t missed some obvious clue.

His question, though, took her by surprise. “That’s not–” Raisa stopped to take a deep breath through her nose. He hadn’t asked about her. He could make any assumptions he wanted there, but Raisa knew she couldn’t be offended by a question like that. It probably would help solve this if he knew the truth.

“Zombie,” she said. Generally Raisa didn’t like to acknowledge such things out loud. Even Caroline had only ever mentioned it in passing, something to allude to. Raisa did the same. They both had needs that set them apart from their coworkers, even if they blended in quite well. “Do you think this could be related to that? I know such things happen, but I thought there was usually more of a mess left behind.” She was about to make a smart remark about the recklessness of hunters but best not. From everything she had guessed of him so far, Emilio was of that sort, even if she didn’t officially know that for a fact.

As she spoke, Raisa started walking toward the management office on site. Perhaps they could charm or distract their way into a little information.

—

Zombie. He tensed a little at the revelation, though he knew it was unfounded. Raisa’s coworker was the victim here, the person who they were looking to help. There were no signs pointing towards her having disappeared to go on some rampage, no evidence that she’d hurt anyone. If anything, this new information only increased the odds that he was looking for someone like him. The thought made him uncomfortable. 

Even now, he disliked going against other hunters. He’d done it more than once, at this point — there was a body buried in the woods of a hunter Andy had killed, and Emilio had dug the grave. He’d sprung Ariadne from Rhett’s van, would do it again a thousand times over. He’d severed Parker’s finger from his hand, regretted only the fact that he hadn’t taken his head off instead. Emilio was more than willing to go up against other hunters when it was necessary, but it always left a sour taste in his mouth. It always made him feel like he was doing something wrong, like maybe his mother had been right to want him out of the picture. But this was who he was now, he supposed. He did what was necessary.

It fucking sucked. 

“Could be,” he acknowledged. “I think whoever got her must have at least known. Otherwise, it’d be difficult to take her out.” Whether ‘taking her out’ meant knocking her unconscious or something else remained to be seen. “Someone could have cleaned up their tracks after. Or taken her someplace less public to finish things off. Just because there’s no mess here doesn’t mean nothing messy happened.” It was important to keep Raisa’s expectations in check. Emilio knew that.

He nodded, trailing along behind her to the management office. “You should probably do the talking,” he said as he pulled the door open for her. “People don’t like me much.”

—

Raisa caught his momentary reaction, but she tried to let that roll off without responding. Normally zombies weren’t her favorite companions either. She couldn’t hold it against him.

She swallowed hard as he vaguely described what could have happened. “You’re probably right,” she admitted. “Caroline was always on top of things. She spent too long around humans to let herself get sloppy about something like… cravings.” The last word left a strong distaste in her mouth, but Raisa tried to brush that off too. It was the reality that came with zombies. If they were investigating this, they needed to stay neutral, perhaps even pragmatic. 

At his final comment, Raisa snorted. “Can’t imagine why,” she said lightly, careful to toe the line between joke and too-truthful insult. 

She shifted her purse on her shoulder as she quickly scanned the office, letting a smile spread across her face as she caught sight of a balding man reading a comic book behind the counter. Almost too easy when he was presenting his interests so readily. “Hi,” Raisa said. “Are you a big Spiderman fan? What did you think of his last movie? Personally I thought it was a little controversial, and–” She pretended to catch Emilio’s eye and let herself flush. “Sorry, I mean…” She sighed and leaned against the counter. 

Raisa offered the man another, more apologetic smile. “So my boyfriend here swears someone must have broken into our mailbox, but I’m pretty sure someone managed to leave the key in it because we can’t find that either.” She rolled her eyes and leaned forward a little closer. “Is there any way we could get a look at the security footage for the mailboxes to find out for sure? We’re just trying to figure out if we need to order a new key or if it’s somewhere in the apartment.”

—

As a child, Emilio had been taught that all supernatural beings were just looking for some excuse to hurt someone. His mother had been adamant that any humanity the undead may have had died when their heart stopped beating, insisting that higher vampires and zombies and everything else with an unbeating heart resting in their chest was just as monstrous as the ghouls and spawn that slayers culled in graveyards to keep people safe. For the longest time, he’d accepted this truth. After all, why would his mother lie to him? Back then, he would have seen this case and assumed, without question, that Raisa’s friend was the perpetrator and not the victim. 

But things were different now.

He’d seen plenty of undead people who felt more human than he did, seen plenty of ‘monsters’ less monstrous than the people he loved. If Raisa said that her friend had control, Emilio had to believe her. He had to open his mind to the possibility that they were looking for something else here — and that uncovering it might open a decently-sized can of worms. If someone had grabbed a zombie without winding up dead on the concrete, there must have been a reason for it.

Rolling his eyes at Raisa’s comment, he followed her into the office. He let Raisa strike up conversation, tilting his head slightly when, instead of bringing up what they were here for, she started talking about… spiders? His brow furrowed a little, and she seemed to notice his expression and decide to move on. 

The man’s eyes flickered over to Emilio as Raisa spoke, and he offered a curt nod. It was easy enough to play the part of the silent, slightly embarrassed boyfriend who was disgruntled to admit that someone had broken into his mailbox, and the man seemed to buy it well enough. He met Raisa’s eye with a smile. “You sure your boyfriend’s not pulling your leg?” There was a teasing lilt to his tone, and Emilio let out a huff, rolling his eyes as he propped his elbows on the desk.

“We’re sure,” he replied flatly, allowing himself to sound as annoyed as anyone might be in this situation. The man glanced to him again, then shrugged.

“I guess I can let you take a look. Just don’t tell anyone, okay? I’m not really supposed to.”

—

Raisa hadn’t given Emilio a terribly difficult part to play, and thankfully he played it well enough. She glanced toward him here or there when it felt appropriate, but her attention stayed primarily focused on the guy at the desk. When he gave them the yes, she smiled at him, wide and full of sunshine. “That’s amazing! Thank you so much. And absolutely! We won’t tell a soul.”

Without asking, Raisa moved around the counter as he clicked in a few keys on the keyboard to pull up the camera they needed. This would be easier too without him there, but she hadn’t figured out a solution for that yet. After a few seconds, she spied his comic book. If the bit wasn’t broken…

“Here you go,” he said at the same time Raisa asked, “So is that the newest issue?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Do you read it?”

“I try to,” she lied, hoping he wouldn’t push her too hard on facts. She needed to move quickly if they were to avoid that. “I missed the last one and need to catch up. You don’t happen to have it, do you?” Raisa glanced at Emilio in an effort to get him to understand what she was doing. “Maybe I could take a look while my boyfriend looks at the footage?”

The man lit up. “I have it in my car! It’s around back, but give me like five minutes and I’ll have it for you.”

“That’s so great!” Raisa gushed as he was already getting up out of his seat. She waited long enough for him to get out the door before whirling around to face Emilio. “I don’t know how much time I actually bought you, but I hope you’re fast at this stuff. I don’t actually want to pretend to care about the comic.”

—

Emilio followed Raisa around the desk, watching as the security guy pulled up the footage. He was just beginning to wonder how they could view this footage without potentially having the security guard insisting they involve the police — if the footage showed the abduction, it would be a hard sell — when Raisa launched into a distraction.

It was kind of impressive, the way she slipped so seamlessly into the role. Emilio was a little impressed. His own undercover work wasn’t exactly stellar, even on his best days. He managed when he had to, but Raisa was a far better actress than he could hope to achieve. Given her profession, that probably made sense. Still, he couldn’t help but offer her an impressed nod when the security guy rushed out to fetch his comic from the car.

“Nice,” he commented, quickly navigating around the footage. “Shouldn’t take too long. Just need to find the right… Here.” 

It was early morning in the footage. Not quite light yet, but not dark enough to be night, either. A woman with dark, curly hair opened her mailbox, pulling out a few envelopes and shuffling through them. A figure came onto the monitor. There was no sound, but Emilio could imagine the commotion as the man grabbed her. He watched closely, pausing the footage when the man turned to face the camera. Pulling out his phone, he snapped a photo of the grainy image. “There’s our guy,” he mumbled.

He pressed play again to watch it play out. Towards the end, the man turned to someone offscreen, saying something impossible to make out. “He had a partner,” Emilio mused. But when the man disappeared off screen and the shadow of the vehicle he’d arrived in sped off, the partner still hadn’t appeared. “First step, find out who this pendejo is,” he said, turning his phone towards Raisa. “Then, we find his partner. Sound good?”

—

Raisa leaned in close as she watched Emilio work through the footage with impressive speed. She couldn’t help her gasp as Caroline appeared at her mailbox, just going about her daily routine. A sense of dread settled low in her stomach as she waited for something horrifying to happen. She almost held back a small squeak as a man appeared. Raisa wanted to look away, but if these were Caroline’s final moments, her friend deserved for it to be seen. They wouldn’t be able to bring her back, but they could find the details and figure out how to get her justice.

Thankfully, though, while Carolien was obviously under duress, she seemed to be very much still alive as the man dragged her off. Raisa felt her hope return. Surely they wouldn’t take her away just to kill her, would they?

“Sounds good,” Raisa replied, almost as an afterthought. She glanced toward the door. “Is it better to fake our way through this interaction or try to get out of here before he’s back?” If she could help it, Raisa really didn’t want to fake flirt more than she had to.

They had someone to identify, someone Raisa didn’t think she’d ever seen before in her life. Hopefully it wouldn’t be as challenging as those parameters felt.

–

It was hard to know what the abduction really was. Emilio had known hunters who preferred to work slowly with their prey, liked to take them somewhere where they could spend days finishing them off. He thought, painfully, of Rhett, of the van, of Ariadne, and he shook the thought away. If Raisa’s friend had been taken by someone who intended to kill her slowly, it just meant they had a more serious time limit on what they were doing here. It didn’t change much.

Raisa spoke, and Emilio turned towards her with a shrug. “Never gonna see him again,” he replied, looking briefly back to the computer. He wasn’t much of a tech guy, but he knew a delete button when he saw one. He quickly deleted the footage of the abduction, knowing that if the security guard got curious and went back to look at it, it could mean trouble. 

With that done, he pushed away from the desk and started for the door. It was far easier to slip out before the security guard came back than it was to make up some excuse for leaving. The man would jump to his own conclusions — that the ‘couple’ had realized they’d made a mistake and left, that Emilio had been irritated by Raisa’s flirting, that they’d gotten some important phone call. The best cover, sometimes, was no cover at all. People’s minds would go a long way to rationalize things, he’d learned. You could use it to your advantage if you knew how.