Wild Card (18 page)

And why the hell was I being pulled over?

How easy would it be for the Nagas to lift a police car?

I slid the HK out and sank into my seat. Trying to make myself a smaller target was pretty futile when the Nagas were taking out vans with RPGs.

But I recognized the figure trotting up to my door and let the HK go.

I tried for normality. “José, you been demoted back to cruisers?”

“Can it. Got a call from Edmunds, gotta go,
now
.”

We ran back to his cruiser and he drove us away with roadside gravel spraying from the wheels.

“What is it?”

“It’s a murder. I don’t know what else,” he said. He looked embarrassed. “Wally and I, we worked out a code for talking over the radio with other people listening.”

“I remember. You called Lieutenant Edmunds on his cell and said ‘game’s off’ when you had to close down Project Snakebite.”

“Yeah. Maybe not that dramatic tonight, but he used a couple of words, ‘timely’ and ‘cowboy.’ That’s top priority, get here now, and bring you. Couldn’t raise you on your cell, and Jen said she didn’t know when you’d be back in. I was driving by on the chance. Just plain luck I spotted your car.”

I rubbed my face with my hands. “I’m not sure I can help, José, I’m kinda losing it here. In fact, I may need to go away for a while.”

“Huh?” He looked surprised.

“I don’t want to talk about it now. How far have we got to go?”

“Here already,” he said. We’d barely gone a mile. “Wash Park.” And he turned onto South Vineyard Street.

“No.” I felt the first premonition of what was about to hit me. My voice shook. I couldn’t handle this. I was still a mess from my disaster with Alex.

José turned and look at me. “What’s up?”

“Number?” My voice sounded hoarse.

“971.”

“No,” I said again, as if repeating it would make it change. I stared at the familiar small bungalow coming up. “No.”

Another cruiser was already there. The house lights were on. Curtains drawn. Yellow crime scene tape. Uniforms standing guard.

José pulled up outside the house my family and I had been living in, all those years ago, when my dad died.

Chapter 18

It got worse inside.

From the hall, we could see an elderly man who had been tied up and killed. His throat had been torn open in the living room. Blood soaked the carpet and had sprayed over the furniture and walls. Around the body, there were what looked like paw prints in blood.

But I knew, somehow, that wasn’t what I’d been brought to see.

José hadn’t known this was where I’d once lived, and I doubted Edmunds had any idea either. I wasn’t going to believe the choice of this house for a murder was a coincidence. This was aimed at me. That told me that there was one specific room in the house that the killer would use for whatever sick message they wanted to communicate.

We took plastic booties and gloves from the crime scene kit beside the front door, and I put them on with trembling fingers and a churning stomach. I breathed shallowly. My Were sense of smell was an advantage in warning me there was more to come, and it was a massive liability in the depth of detail it was feeding me. It was fortunate I had nothing left in my stomach.

Edmunds started to say something to me, but I moved past him as if I was in a trance.

Narrow corridor to the side. Door at the end. The second bedroom. The bedroom that an older child would have. My bedroom. The one where Dad had died, surrounded by machines we couldn’t afford and which had failed him anyway.

All the furniture had been moved out. A part of my mind noted the planning and preparation, the time needed. And the sheer inhumanity of it. She—I already knew it was a she—would have been alive while the killer calmly stacked things out of the way. She must have known what was coming.

I stepped carefully into the room.

At a word from Edmunds, the CSI agent slipped out.

She was lying face up in the middle of the room. Four foot-long marlinspikes had been driven into the floor and she was tied, spread eagled, to them.

She was about my size and hair color.

She had been dressed in my clothes, though the shirt was unrecognizable; all that was left was shredded strips of cotton soaked in her blood. The jeans were pulled up, open, and splattered with blood, badly torn about the left thigh. My unmistakable boots were on her feet, soft shafts pinched tightly by the restraining rope, but looking bizarrely undamaged.

Her right cheek had three chevrons cut into it as a parody of a sergeant’s badge of rank. Other than that, her face hadn’t been mutilated. She looked shocked, but oddly calm beneath all the blood.

I prayed her body had shut down at the end and she wasn’t conscious. She hadn’t died quickly or easily. She’d been eviscerated.

“We got a fingerprint match off AFIS,” Edmunds said behind me. “Lucky break. She’s a vet.”

Of course she was. There was nothing lucky about it. Another of the tokens that Liu talked about.

I knelt down beside her, careful not to touch anything.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Barbara Green, originally from Colorado Springs, no immediate family, seven years in the Cavalry, two tours in Iraq, honorable discharge.” He slowed and I glanced back. He was flicking through screens on a tablet computer. “Looks like she had problems since then. No police record, but no continuous employment either. Diagnosed with PTSD. Treated at the VA medical center… initially.” He cleared his throat.

Treated. I bit off the rising anger. Not useful at the moment.

“Also registered at the St Francis Shelter on Curtis. No known permanent address.” He trailed off.

I’d never met Barbara, but I knew her and many like her.

Some soldiers come back to the love of their family and the greetings of their friends. They ease back into their civilian lives and carry the price of their service lightly, but no less honorably. Some soldiers come back in a coffin draped with a flag and everyone can gauge the price of their service. Some soldiers don’t really come back and the price of their service is beyond understanding.

I heard the commotion outside before the others, but I ignored it.

I concentrated on the repulsive visible facts in front of me.

Her abdominal organs had been removed. From the amount of blood spray, she’d been alive when the killer started. She’d been hollowed out; even the front of her ribs were gone. There was no sign of the organs or missing rib bones. Her thighbone looked to have been bitten through. I’d leave confirmation to the ME, but I guessed postmortem.

There was a trace of Were scent, but thin, as if it had been masked.

I leaned forward trying to learn everything I could in the few moments I had left with her.

I was trying not to even breathe on her, not to add to the horrors that had been done to her and the indignities that were to come. Trying to apologize that I never knew her and had done nothing for her.

Apologize; for what had been done to her was my fault.

And imprint her face into my mind, so I would never forget it.

“This case and site is now under FBI jurisdiction,” Agent Griffith’s voice came loudly from the corridor. “You will hand over any and all evidence or observations you have gathered and then you will leave.”

I stood and turned to go with the others.

Griffith did a double take and rounded on José. “Morales, what kind of an operation are you running? What’s she doing here?”

“She’s here as a consultant,” José said calmly, hiding his anger.

“On what?”

“Veterans.” He turned and walked away.

Griffith caught my arm as I passed.

“Stay away, Farrell. If I find you’ve tampered with evidence, or in fact, if you ever get involved again at any site under this investigation, I will arrest you for obstruction.”

I said nothing. I looked down at his hand and he let me go.

Edmunds and I followed José, stripping off the gloves and boots by the front door.

Outside, we stood by José’s cruiser and watched as Griffith’s team moved in and took over.

“How did Griffith get on it so quick?” I asked.

“He’s probably got an alert on AFIS matches requested from Denver.” José sighed. “He also has a team listening to the radio.” He glanced at Edmunds, unable to turn off his detective mind, even after the FBI had taken the case. “So, anything else? Neighbors? Who reported it?”

Edmunds shrugged. “Lady next door saw a green van parked on the drive this afternoon. ‘Some kind of commercial van’ she said. Driver wore blue overalls. Didn’t see anything else. Old man’s daughter called him. When he didn’t answer the phone, she called the neighbor. Neighbor said he wasn’t answering the door either and the curtains were drawn. It was at about 9 p.m. she got here. Called us right after that.”

Edmunds flicked through his notebook. “Looks as if the rope and tape could’ve come from any hardware store. Perp used the shower to wash off the blood, then sprayed the bathroom with bleach. But CSI are pretty sure there’s got to be DNA somewhere. And partials, epithelials, and so on. You can’t do this and not leave evidence.”

He and José talked on, but I tuned them out.

Barbara had been tied up. The rogue had to have been in human form up to then. But I was sure her thigh and the old man’s throat had been bitten. I had no idea what DNA did when a Were changed. Would they find two sets of DNA? One with peculiarities?

How much of a problem was this for the whole paranormal community?

Why had the rogue gone from painstaking secrecy to a blatant murder he wanted to be discovered? Maybe that was part of the message.

How had he figured out he was being hunted?

How had he masked his scent?

And, especially, how did he know about me? Not just old details like where I lived fifteen years ago, but my car, and the fact that I’d be meeting with Ricky and Alex at the restaurant yesterday.

He or she, I reminded myself, until proven otherwise.

A silence fell over us. There was a feeling of depression from Edmunds. No one likes a murder, but as a detective in Major Crimes, he lived for solving this sort of case and the FBI had just pushed him aside.

After a minute, José leaned to me and spoke quietly. “You said you’re going to be away?”

“No,” I said, staring at the house. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Chapter 19

WEDNESDAY

It took me a long time to get to sleep, and once I had, nightmares kept jerking me awake. Barbara Green’s staring eyes. The taste of blood. Formless, screaming panic.

I gave up. The pale pre-dawn found me exercising silently in the gardens at Manassah.

Julie joined me to greet the dawn, then Pia.

Dew lay like a veil across the grass. A wintery wind tugged the tips of sleepy larch and cypress, while the shadows of guards passed silently beneath them. Deep, clean lungfuls of chill air chased the night thoughts away.

Good. I needed to be at my best, today and every day until I hunted the rogue down.

With the sun up, we went inside for breakfast.

Carmen wasn’t going to be in until later, so I massacred some eggs under Pia’s dubious gaze. Julie handled the coffee and toast while updating me on her calls to Ops 4-10.

She’d gotten through to a dozen people and delivered her message, as vague as it was. The difficulty was that she’d gone AWOL, which raised questions in their minds about the validity of her warnings. I could hear the hurt in her voice as she listed those she’d spoken to who simply hadn’t believed her. Even those who had believed her could take no positive actions at the moment. Petersen was still their commanding officer and they were under military law. But they’d be cautious.

Jen came in, sleepy-eyed and finger-combing her tousled hair. Why didn’t I look like that when I got up?

“Frambled or scried?” Julie asked her, dishing out the results of my cooking onto plates while I was looking for the coffee mugs.

“Whichever.” Jen kissed my cheek. “Hmm, smells good.”

Julie snorted.

We perched on stools in the warm kitchen, and I took the opportunity to brief them all about the rogue and my role in hunting him. Or her. And I got Jen’s permission to use the downstairs study as an incident room.

I shied away from the details of last night, other than to explain why I thought the rogue was aware of the hunt and had changed his behavior drastically.

As I reached the end, David came bustling in, fully dressed and wafting in cold air from outside. He turned down eggs but greedily emptied the coffee pot.

Then the others went off to change, leaving me with David. I washed and he dried.

“That your best work suit?” I said.

He nodded. “More appropriate for the Kingslund office. They’re very formal.”

I could understand. He was there as a bodyguard and it was smart to blend in.

The dishes done, we walked into the living room to finish off our coffees.

“Everything okay with you and Pia?” I asked.

He looked puzzled. “Yeah. Why?”

“Pia wasn’t here yesterday evening and then you weren’t here last night.”

“Oh. That.” His eyes flicked up as Jen rejoined us, elegant heels clicking on the floor. Louboutin or Blahnik—she’d been tutoring me, but I wasn’t up to telling the difference at a glance yet. She was sleek in a royal blue power suit with a cream silk scarf at her throat. A night in her own home had done wonders for her. She looked as if she was back to the confident woman that I knew, and I wouldn’t want anything to change that.

“That what?” I prompted David as he hesitated. Anything that could be said to me could be said to my kin.

He cleared his throat. “We had to feed.”

Well, I had asked. I glanced at Jen, who appeared unfazed.

“You have kin?” she asked David.

He leaned forward, carefully placing his empty mug on the table. “Not exactly. New Athanate take time to learn control, and—”

“I get that,” Jen said sharply. “It’s dangerous to have kin until you have control. So what’s the alternative?”