Frequently pigeonholed as “The Flake,” Frank Calder prefers the more professional title Private Investigator.
Calder is in his mid-forties, with twenty years of experience working the unglamorous trenches of the investigative trade. In that time he’s become legitimately skilled at the nuts and bolts of the profession,
- Pretexting — pretending to be someone else in order to obtain privileged information.
- Cultivating contacts — bartenders, night janitors, disgruntled DMV clerks, retired cops, and anyone else who knows things they’re not supposed to know.
- Surveillance and photography — sitting in a car for twelve hours with a thermos of burnt coffee and a camera with a telephoto lens the size of a small telescope.
- Entering buildings that are arguably unlocked.
In short: Frank Calder is good at the job.
Unfortunately, he has never once found professional satisfaction. This is because Calder is convinced that nearly every case he has ever worked—divorces, insurance fraud, missing persons, one memorable investigation involving a stolen schnauzer—is merely the visible ripple of something vastly bigger.
The problem is that Calder’s theories tend to spiral… rapidly. Over the years he has attempted to connect otherwise ordinary cases to:
- the Reptilian Shapeshifter Cabal
- the Philadelphia Incident
- several black-budget psychic warfare programs
- and, most persistently, the Global Danish Cultural Subversion Initiative, allegedly operating through the international distribution of LEGO.
None of these connections have ever been successfully demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction but his own. This has not stopped him.
Personal Life
Frank Calder’s personal life could best be described as collateral damage.
He has accumulated:
- several bitter ex-girlfriends (most of whom he owes money)
- a handful of former clients who would prefer never to hear from him again
- two process servers who know his usual coffee shops
- and one particularly furious city alderman, whom Calder publicly accused of being a synthetic duplicate grown in a NATO laboratory beneath Copenhagen.
The accusation was printed in the local paper. The alderman remains extremely litigious about the matter.
The Wall
Like any responsible investigator of global conspiracies, Frank Calder maintains The Wall.
The Wall contains:
- maps
- photographs
- newspaper clippings
- pushpins and yarn
- several parking tickets that “prove something once you look at the dates.”
Anyone attempting to follow the logic of The Wall inevitably reaches the same conclusion:
There might be something here.
Unfortunately, no two visitors have ever agreed on what that something might be.
A Break in the Case
Just when things were looking particularly bleak—his office lease overdue, his car one payment away from repossession—Frank received a call from one of his stranger contacts.
A man he knows only as Jimmy Front Range.
Jimmy claimed he had assembled a small group of capable individuals investigating “unusual incidents” around Red Rocks, Colorado.
According to Jimmy, this group had recently tracked down and killed an actual werewolf. Now, Jimmy admitted they hadn’t preserved the body. Or collected samples. Or documented the event particularly well.
But they had gotten closer to The Truth than anyone else Frank Calder had ever heard of and that was all the encouragement he needed.
He packed everything he owned into the back of his car, vacated his apartment under cover of darkness, and headed for Red Rocks.
Because if these people really killed a werewolf…
Then they might finally be ready to hear about the Danish LEGO Plot.
And once they start pulling that thread?
Frank Calder is certain the entire world-spanning conspiracy will start to unravel.