The widow of Josef Svoboda, the victim from nine years ago wasn't a widow anymore; in fact, she was very clearly happily married to her second husband. She was over 40 but looked no older than 30 and she was eager to talk about her late husband. Apparently, she still carried a lot of grievances from the past.

Turned out Josef Svoboda wasn't a nice man. He used to beat up her wife, especially when he was drinking (which was almost every day) and had a major gambling-addiction which pushed the whole family into deep debt. He had his problems with the police, too, because when he wasn't beating up his significant other, he liked to provoke bar fights. Even though the once widow never said it out loud, it was obvious that she was grateful to whoever killed her first husband. She wasn't the prime suspect only because she wasn't a vampire or sorceress, but Blake knew from the case file that the police still looked into her financials to see if she would be able to pay a hitman. Naturally, she wasn't, not with a gambling husband.

'Did Josef know a policeman called Honsa Zelezny?' asked Blake, turning back from the exit, in a "just one last question before I forgot"-style. He hoped that if he makes it look like the question wasn't particularly important the widow won't alarm Detective Zelezny right away.

'Honsa? Sure. They were friends before Josef started to drink. Why?'

'Routine, ma'am,' lied Blake with a tired smile. 'My bosses figured out this new filing system and it doesn't let you file your report without answering every question in the form. It's a real pain in the… You know.'

The woman giggled. Blake might not have been able to pull off the "walk", but he was handsome enough to make a bored housewife talk and giggle any time.

His luck ended there however; he couldn't talk to Helenka Zelezny. Detective Zelezny stated that his daughter was too shaken because of what happened to be bothered and that he sent her off to her grandparents for a while. According to the files, Helenka was almost 22, so the whole thing seemed a little odd, but Blake decided that he won't confront Zelezny just yet. Not until Sarah comes back from her "walk", for sure. He considered another talk with Dorka Vesely, based on the old police knowledge that people tended to forget what they had lied before, and questioning someone one more time paid off sometimes. He put it aside, however: it was too early for that. He talked with the young Britons, George Clarke's friends instead. He had some very specific questions after the chat with Josef Svoboda's widow.

Turned out, even though George was indeed a "great guy", from a good family and an also good looking carrier afoot, he wasn't flawless. One of his friends seemed to remember a couple of occasions when he was less than respectful towards young ladies.

'I mean, nothing special, mind you, he was just a little hot-headed every now and then,' the friend, Peter said with a thick Londoner accent. 'You know how it is, he never hurt anybody, he was just… He always got what he wanted, and if he had to grab it a little roughly, he wouldn't mind.'

'Are you talking about sexual aggressivity? Sexual act without consent?' asked Blake.

They were at one of the police stations: Blake noticed a long time ago that people always got nervous when they had to go to a police station, even if they weren't guilty in anything. And a nervous man was not a smart man.

Peter shook his head with a surprised face.

'Nah, nothing like that. I mean, you know, how it is when you and the girl had a few… She might say no but she will let it happen anyway… But that's just how the game works, innit?'

Blake fought off the urge to arrest or hit Peter on the spot.

'So he always knew when a "no" actually meant "yes", right?'

'Sure, he would have never done anything… Wrong. He respected women,' answered Peter.

Just like he was full of respect when he tried to have sex with Dorka in the alley behind the bar, thought Blake.

The other fresh victim, the vampire Albert Frost's criminal record was clean, although his name showed up in half a dozen case files as a suspect. One of them was sexual harassment, from forty years ago, back before he became a vampire. That meant three different men, all with aggressive tendencies, all murdered brutally. Blake was sure that he would find similar things if he would dig deeper to find out everything he could about the other victims. The connection was so clear that a detective must have spotted it, unless he chose not to.

Even though Blake was fairly sure about what was going on, he wanted to do his homework. Not like he could have done anything while Sarah was away. So he spent the next two days in dusty old archives and libraries, reading old newspapers, undigitalised case files and handwritten notes from long-dead police officers. Given that all of those were written in a language he didn't speak, he considered asking Detective Novak's help first, but then he wasn't sure if he could trust the woman or not. He asked her out for a date, however, following up Sarah's idea. He wanted to find out everything about Detective Zelezny and Detective Novak promised to be an excellent source. They agreed to have dinner the next evening.

Fortunately, MAGE had a standardly issued solution for Blake's language problems: a little software on Blake's phone that translated everything the camera saw in real-time. It wasn't something unique or unprecedented, but unlike the other similar softwares, it worked perfectly, on every possible language, without a hackable Internet connection.

Rather unsurprisingly, almost every victim had a checkered past, even those without an official criminal record.

It was a long day and Blake accomplished quite a lot, so he rewarded himself with a huge dinner, two bottles of local beer and a movie night in his hotel room. He must have been more tired than he thought, because he fell asleep during the film, and only woke up for the quiet knocking noise in the middle of the night.

The room was dark now, the television must have switched itself off after a while. The noise that woke Blake was the one of the locks: someone opened the door and was now in his room.