The two detectives head upstairs after Alton picks up a quick dinner from a hand pie vendor outside. The very top floor of the station house serves as documents storage and library. A demoted detective works as librarian, and both detectives try to avoid him as much as possible.

At the top of the stairs he stops them before they can even fully enter.

“Stop right there! I smell food and there’s no eating allowed in the library!” Silas Phelder shouts from his desk by the stairway. Cook watches incredulously as Phelder scurries to clear away his game of solitaire before Alton finishes her pie.

“Evening, Silas,” Cook greets the surly librarian. “Are you staying long?”

“What do you mean?” Phelder grumps, “My shift just started.”

Alton suppresses a groan. The two detectives head to the card catalogue and begin checking indices. Alton begins at vampire, turning, and Cook begins looking at Spawn, vampire. Each pulls a few records, and pass them to Phelder. Phelder, for his part, retrieves each file one at a time. It takes a long time to gather just a few cases, and between them they encounter just a little overlap in the records they retrieve. There have not been many cases involving Spawn, and most are cases where Spawn were found when they attacked someone and were caught in the gruesome act of feeding.

Cook manages to find two cases where a vampire was actually prosecuted for creating Spawn, and Alton finds one case of a victim claiming that they were turned as Spawn after the master vampire was destroyed. They crack open the documentation on the first of Cook’s pulls.

In it, a vampire lord from the old country is accused of creating Spawn to use to recruit thralls and gather wealth. The documentation does not include immediately what the wealth was used for or how it was gathered, but the original detectives’ notes suggest a connection to sex parties and wild origies. Both detectives express skepticism over such an outrageous claim.

Alton cracks open a second case to review. She finds another instance of Spawn being used to generate funding, this time by simple theft. The Spawn were found to be robbing stores so that the master vampire would not be caught in the act.

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Before she can get into the gritty details of the investigation, they’re interrupted by the arrival of both Trageser and his partner, Madlen Isaacs. Isaacs stands less than three feet tall, a halfling necropolitan. Alton quietly passes them documents to inspect.

As time passes, they find a set of similarities across all three cases. Master vampires make use of Spawn to fund their lifestyles. In one case they’re used as thieves, and in the other two more recent cases, they find Spawn with good credit histories used to take out multiple loans, and borrow against the victim’s own property.

“You know,” Isaacs says, after a long and frustrating period of silence, “if I were a vampire, I don’t imagine that I’d really behave that much different than any kidnapper.”

“Kidnapper?” Cook asks, “None of them are demanding ransom.”

“No, instead they can send their victim to go get it for themselves, which is really just lazy.” The halfling shrugs, putting her more devious thoughts to good use.

“That makes sense,” Alton agrees. “See what you can find for me on magical kidnapping.”

Isaacs starts digging through the card catalogue, dropping off her suggestions with the equally surly librarian one at a time. She manages to collect five cases for the detectives to inspect, but drags her feet and grumps the entire time.

Eventually Cook gets fed up with the halfling, and insists that the two younger detectives head out to continue the hunt for Hendry Wymark. They leave with great relief. The experienced detectives relax once they’re gone, and chat quietly amongst themselves.

Phelder is unhelpful, sitting at his desk and playing cards by himself. It’s late in the evening when they develop a strategy for how to proceed in the morning. With that decided, they head home to get some rest: Alton to her meditations and Cook to his mental relaxation. They pass off a few interlibrary loan requests to Phelder on the way out.

“What could you need with all these religious and arcane texts?” he asks, before copying down their requests.

“Can you get them or not?” Cook demands, not feeling very generous toward the unhelpful librarian.

“I can get them, I’m just asking.”

“We know a way to free Spawn exists,” Alton answers, “maybe it can help us identify them too.”

“Alright,” Phelder shrugs, “I’ll send off to Sacred Dark to see if they’ve got any copies. I can’t promise anything.”

“Of course not,” Cook says with resignation. “Of course not.”