You don't really wanna know, just how far it's gone

[Narrator]

Pedro ran his hand through his hair, more out of exasperation than an actual need to keep it out of his face. On his desk sat an innocuous looking moleskin book he stared at like the uninvited vampire it seemed to be. Nobody admitted to having brought it to his desk so he considered it some kind of malediction. The note that had been stuck into it simply read 'Find the Monsters' in a kind of scrawled handwriting that either belonged to a child or somebody intentionally trying to obfuscate their handwriting by using their off-hand.

It was, on the surface, simply a book of contacts but ones that didn't quite seem to add up. Well known names from around town were next to complete unknowns, some of which he'd unearthed as varying degrees of unsavory. If it had just been the kind of sketchy that tended to disappear up peoples' noses he would have simply handed the book to the gossip desk but no. A chop shop, someone working at the docks, the owner of a club the rich and famous wouldn't be caught dead in. Yet here they were next to movers and shakers and it stank to high heavens.

It gave him the same feeling he'd had when someone clearly leaned on the editor in chief to strangle any larger stories digging into that gas explosion a couple months back. Two executive producers and a director dead from a gas leak that mysteriously caused no fires when it went up and a single surviving escort that had simply disappeared off the face of the earth along with any security camera footage. And now two of those names showed up in a book that manifested on his desk, seemingly over night. The same night that Casey Rose got pancaked between his car and the safe from his 8th story office. Fuck. This was something for the RICO division of the FBI, not a middling investigative reporter. This was the kind of thing that people got disappeared over.

Reluctantly he gets up and slides the book into his pocket. He'd just ask some questions. Around the periphery of this, from the angle of what was already out there, and if he found anything he could always pass it on rather than get tangled up in whatever this was.