Secrets Burned True
3rd of February 2007 A.D.
"We can't just make him vanish, or kill him, the victims' families deserve closure..." you begin to argue, but before you can get any further Lydia 'finishes' the sentence:
"While they are still alive, I did not think of that, apologies."
Olivia gives her a odd look, though you notice not Daniel. Your brother was apparently used to the idea that his girlfriend thought of death as a curtain to be freely parted this way and that, just not the part where she could kill someone because in restitution for crimes without a second look.
Glancing down at the ID you ask again:
Where can more information of his misdeeds be found?
The answer you get is more through than you want: a trophy cache, ponds tucked out of the way, so many ponds, now filled with the rotting bodies of victims, disposed of like so much refuse once their killed had taken everything he wanted from them. No, you wish you didn't have to remember, but knowing is useful, it's going to put this bastard away.
Lost 1 Essence -> Now at 13/15 (Crown Question)
Taking a swig of water to clear the phantom taste out of your mouth you turn to Tiffany to explain what you had seen. "Do you still want to...?"
"Yes, information is only as good as the police's willingness to check the site. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that if presented with that series of locations that they will chalk it down to a false lead. After all how would anyone but the murderer know in that situation? Add a recording to that and it suddenly becomes a good bit more credible."
"I'm coming with you."
After another fifteen miles or so the car ahead pulls into a gas station you speed on past so Tiffany, disguised to the full extent of her considerable skills and preparations as dark haired brown eyed girl in a battered hoodie gets out to play the hitchhiker . Sealed inside a perfume bottle in her purse you do not see what happens next, but though the glass you can hear it. He tries to turn small-talk into flirting, she pretends not to get it, he pushes, she refuses, he pushes harder, the car speeds up, she pretends to cave and then something... odd happens, he just offers her money for sex, a hundred pounds which you think is a lot. It's almost like a canned response.
Confirming she's a 'whore' in his head. It is perhaps a good thing that Broken Seeker is half a world away because if he were outside that car door you'd be tempted to throw him a snack.
By the time he Halliwell pulled out the knife Tiffany slips into the role his warped perceptions had assigned her with in infernal grace, begging, bargaining, telling him he is a
good man. The dam breaks, he's talking faster now, a kind of performative cruelty meant to terrify what seems a particularly timid victim. Had he been a bit less enthralled at this fantasy-come-to-life he might have wondered why a woman who should have been petrified with fright was articulate enough to ask questions with the precision of a skilled investigator. She gets numbers dates methods of killing and picking his victims, though only a handful of names. He didn't care about the names.
"That's enough." Tiffany cuts him off in a wicked-sharp tone wholly unlike what she had used before.
There's a scuffle and the sound of a knife being dropped as the car swerves off the road.
"Whore, I'll rip out your...!" The words cut out with a thump
"Couldn't even hold a knife straight," Tiffany speaks up again, this time to you. "Pity really, I've finally managed to make some improvements to this body and I wanted to see how they would hold up in an actual fight."
Just to be safe she takes the knife. You'll have to remember to throw it in a bog.
***
Iris is of course more than up to the task of disguising Tiffany's voice in the recording, though you do worry that you'll have to go all the way back to Chicago to burn a CD since none of you had thought to bring a laptop along, but you manage to find an Internet Cafe run by a guy in slacks and a polo shirt who looks like he couldn't give less of a damn if you were copying state secrets as long as you paid him. Disk goes in the nearest mailbox to the appropriate authorities and you're on your way again.
The wildlife preserve proper is small, barely more than a hundred hectares, but it's set in the middle if picturesque Welsh countryside peppered by the kind of small villages whose shape has not changed at least since Victorian times if not longer, the sort of place where everyone knows everyone and you can set your clock and your calendar by particular visitors to the village pub. If ever there was a place one would expect to see old Welsh legends coming down the street it was Cilgerran, though probably not in a facsimile of a Rolls Royce driven by said legend's daughter's American boyfriend. They even have a gothic revival church from the middle of the Nineteenth century, and a ruined castle on a hill, peering out through a blanket a mist that even the afternoon sun doesn't have the power to dispel.
Lydia explains that the hounds she's after rarely show themselves before nightfall so the five of you meander though the village taking in the sights, up to the castle finding it wholly bereft of lingering shades, but your friend has a grand time talking about the history of the area, the long wars between the Norman Baron and Welsh King as the former pressed the latter into the seam, though not without unexpected reverses, heroic stands and twists of fate over hill, stream and copse of trees. "My mother used to love these kinds of stories and she'd have loved even more to see the land that birthed them..."
Your ears practically perk, Lydia rarely talks about her mother and when she does it's only with a vague sense of nostalgia, like she's just another story of her father's.
Then she looks up at the darkening sky, the sun just having slipped behind the hills. "Best not to talk about this at night father says."
What do you do?
[] Ask her to continue, if something does happen you're pretty sure you can take it on
[] Say nothing, continue on into the marshes
[] Write in
OOC: This isn't your last chance to hear about Lydia's mother, but like it says above she doesn't like to talk about it so if you do not take this chance it might take a while. 
