2013 - Bread and Water

What's the connection.  There must be a connection.  Simply find the connection.

Quinn started over.  With bandaged fingers he gently pulled the pieces of newsprint down from the wall.  Placing them on the floor before him he shuffled them and spread them out.

"Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba closed by health department."

Letters lit up before him, jumping out of the headlines, but refusing to arrange themselves into words.

"Water contamination at Kingston Mines."

He turned to his left, from the articles to the large map of Chicago that occupied one wall of the small, dark room.  A dozen red pins stuck out of it, marking each location.  The sites were clustered into a small part of Chicago, but nothing tied them together.

"Customers outraged at Mia Francesca."

Photos were no help either.  Looking over the articles spread before him there was no pattern of connection.  Just the same shot over and over of whatever little eatery had suffered that night.

"Chilam Balam Closed by Police."

Turning to his right, he read the police reports and others from his own people.  Each one told the same story in frustratingly different words.  "Bad food" here and "contaminated water" there.

The spots on the map are all clustered in that one area.  If it was someone's intentional attack, it was also surgical.  The reports moved North as the evening progressed, against the river, which supports the theory that it was intentional.  But what motive?  Poisoning the Daeva's food supply would be the obvious answer, but what the hell is the point of poisoning the Daeva's food supply?  And where do the Nosferatu come in?  Why was DiParma discussing it so urgently with Augustus?

The whole thing made no sense, and where there's no sense we fall back on the basics of the trade.  He reached out, staring at the map but fumbling for the spool of twine, and began to wind a cord around the first red pin where the first report was made.  As he pulled the white thread through his fingers it caught, roughly, making paper-thin tears and cuts through the bandages on his fingertips.  The thread came off the spool white, but was a dark, rusty maroon by the time it reached the map.  He tied the end off around the pin, and moved to the next one.

There has to be a connection.