Nightshades Page 11

  One side of Hector’s mouth turned up in the devilish smile she knew so well. “Of course not. To be fair, I never thought the American courts would let it go on this long. I thought for sure they’d have killed and dissected him by now.” He shrugged.

  The fury rose in her until it seemed to fill her up, like a balloon under her skin. Hector had exposed thousands of years of secrecy, out of a petty grudge? “You call yourself a king,” she spat, “but do you know how confused and terrified our people are over this? How lost? All so you could play your petty games? You son of a bitch.”

  “Careful,” he hissed, real anger naked on his face. “That’s your mother, too.” Catching himself, Hector paced a few steps toward the window, preening. “Anyway. You don’t get to talk to me about responsibility and leadership. You walked away, remember? And now Giselle tells me you’ve joined up with those cretins, hunting down our own kind.” He shook his head in disgust. “You whore. I never thought you’d actually work for them.”

  She blinked, surprised. “You must have known the BPI tracked me down. You were the one who sent them.” She still didn’t understand why he’d given the BPI her name just as he was sending his own people after her. It probably didn’t matter at this point, but the longer he talked, the more time Alex McKenna had to find her.

  Hector’s eyes narrowed. “I absolutely did not. I knew they caught up with you in Cincinnati because my people were also there. I assumed you’d kill or mesmerize them.”

  “You just said you got a hacker to find my current ID, tracing my Darknet activity,” she shot back. “Ambrose gave the same ID to the feds. Are you trying to tell me that your pet worm has gone rogue?”

  Hector tilted his head, his irritated expression falling away as he thought that over. “That’s very interesting,” he mused, in that arrogant way he had, where he forgot anyone else was in the room. “I’ve been briefing Ambrose on our efforts, but I wonder what our Agent McKenna did to convince him to share.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter now. The point is, I never thought you’d actually become their pet. You act as if I betrayed you, but you betrayed our entire kind.”

  She opened her mouth to remind him that he’d tried to kill her, but stopped herself. They were just going to go around and around again. This was getting her nowhere. “So what now, Hector? You’ve got me here; you’ve taken my blood. Is this the part where you try to convince me to join your cause? Or are you gonna do both of us a favor and just kill me?”

  Hector scowled at her. “I can’t kill you; I may need more of your blood,” he retorted. He gestured at the small room. “Get comfortable.” He turned on his heel and strode toward the door, but paused just behind Lindy, where she couldn’t see what he was doing. “By the way, Giselle has requested some . . . recreational time with you. I saw no reason to deny her.” He smirked. “You girls have fun.”

  The door slammed behind him.

  Chapter 14

  At two in the morning, Ruiz was still at the office, seated at an empty desk out of the way of the main traffic. After the ambulances left, the SAC had actually tried to send Ruiz home, or back to the hospital with Bartell and Greer and the others, but Ruiz managed to convince him that the shade saliva had mostly worn off by now. He begged McKenna to let him stay and be in on the bust. He’d actually threatened to get down on his knees for the begging, which had either frightened or amused McKenna enough to let him stick around—as long as he didn’t touch any evidence or have access to a weapon. Ruiz had been happy to play by those rules if he got another run at Giselle.

  And, if he was being honest with himself, he was also a little afraid to go home.

  Instead, he sat and flipped through his own old files on the missing kids, keeping an eye on the rest of the team as they tried to figure out where the hell to find this Hector guy. After Giselle’s big shade offensive—another first in the history of the Bureau—Alex McKenna had announced that Lindy’s status as a shade was to remain absolutely confidential to this team, or they would all find themselves on the lookout for vampires in Antarctica at best, or jailed for treason at worst. Ordinarily Ruiz would have laughed off this kind of threat, or gotten angry, or maybe disobeyed just to spite the bastard, but he was just too confused—and too humiliated by his own treachery—to protest.

  So they’d all stayed quiet, even when Palmer and a couple of backup agents returned to the BPI bullpen, looking incredulous. No one could believe that this mysterious species, which had been so elusive in the months since their discovery, had actually invaded the office of the Chicago BPI en masse and taken away their new consultant. It seemed far-fetched even to Ruiz, and he’d lived through it.

  He finished rereading the Crombie file and set it aside. On the other side of the bullpen, McKenna and Eddy were talking to a woman he didn’t know, a hot Asian chick who was tall and skinny enough to play for the WNBA. Apparently Lindy Frederick had been wearing a high-tech tracking bracelet, and this newcomer, Liang, was responsible for monitoring it. Ruiz had been close enough to hear her explain that the signal had disappeared at an intersection in downtown Heavenly, after a short pause in the same place. She had hypothesized that someone had discovered the bracelet’s tracking capabilities and waited long enough to meet a second group, which had some way of removing the jewelry or blocking the signal.

  McKenna was looking more and more frustrated as each minute ticked by and the chances increased that Hector would cut his losses and run. He had to know the BPI would be hunting him and his pet psycho bitch, and when he finished whatever he was doing with Lindy, the smart move would be to bail. At that point, he’d either kill the kids or transmute them, and this whole operation would have failed. Creadin would have died for nothing. Ruiz couldn’t have that.

  Well, you’re not doing any good reviewing your own notes, he told himself. He looked around. They had all improvised desk space in the main room for the moment, and Hadley’s was directly behind him. Ruiz wheeled his chair backward until he was in her peripheral vision. She was bent over photos of the body dump, which the FBI team had printed off in full color at their fancy office. “How’s it going?” he asked her. She just grunted, not bothering to look up. “Are those just the crime-scene shots, or is the pre-autopsy stuff there, too?” he tried. Before an autopsy actually began, the ME spent a few minutes photographing the body and collecting any evidence that may have clung to the skin.

  Reluctantly, Hadley tore her eyes away from the file. “Aren’t you supposed to be lying low?”

  He raised his eyebrows. She was what, twenty-five? Pretty ballsy, but Ruiz liked strong women. He looked down at the files. She’d already flipped through three-quarters of the photos. “Let’s trade,” he suggested. “I’ll look at those, you look through my files on the missing kids. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.”

  Hadley kept her poker face in place, but he could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. She wanted to be the one to break this case open, and finding a mistake in the old files would be a hell of a way to do it. It was irresistible. “Okay, fine,” she said. They swapped files.

  Ruiz eagerly turned the photo pages over, skipping straight to the pre-autopsy shots. He’d seen the body dump in person.

  At first, he didn’t notice anything they hadn’t seen at the culvert. The bodies had been treated drastically different. Budchen still looked mostly unharmed, although the ME had immediately spotted some needle marks on the smooth underside of her arm that hadn’t been visible the way they were lying. There were a number of close-up images of the marks, but that didn’t tell Ruiz anything. Just out of curiosity, he flipped to the photos of Harrison to see if the kid had the same needle marks. He did. Ruiz put the pictures side by side, frowning at them. Something felt off. He flipped through the rest of the Budchen photos and found a good one of the tops of her wrists.

  Ligature marks.

  Back to Harrison’s photos, and yes, there were ligature marks on the tops of his wrists, too. Ruiz—and p
resumably, the other agents—had been so busy seeing the differences between the two bodies that they’d missed this similarity: the outsides of the wrists were damaged by some kind of restraints, but the undersides were unmarred.

  He picked up the phone at his desk and dialed Jessica Reyes, the pathologist who was conducting the autopsies. Her caller ID must have said BPI offices, because she sounded very annoyed when she answered. “I told you, I will have the reports as soon as humanly possible,” she snapped, by way of greeting. “Calling me every ten minutes is only making this process slower, and—”

  “Jess, it’s Gabriel Ruiz,” he interrupted. “Sorry to bother you while you’re cutting.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “Hey, Gabriel. I’m just finishing the second autopsy. What do you need?”

  “I was looking at the photos, and saw that only one side of the wrists has a ligature mark.”

  “Yes, I noticed that, too.”

  “What does it mean? They were tied to a chair?”

  “No,” she said without hesitation. “Even with a hard-backed chair, we usually see some abrasions on the underside of the wrist. The victims struggle and flail, and they end up with at least the top layer of skin rubbed away. Here, the skin is perfect.”

  “Anything else weird coming up in the autopsy?” There was a long pause, and he could feel her reluctance. Like many medical examiners, Jessica Reyes did not like jumping to conclusions, or making guesses. In a case like this, where a BPI asset was at risk, it would only make her more cautious, not less. She didn’t want to send anyone off on a wild goose chase when the bad guys had their asset. “Come on, Jess,” he wheedled. “We go back. This is just between us.”

  Another, briefer pause, and then she said, “Well, you’ll have the report in an hour anyway, so I doubt it matters. There’s some indication that the victims were both sort of half lying, half sitting when they died.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The lividity. The shades didn’t leave a lot of blood in either body, but what there was had pooled downward into the buttocks, lower back, and ankles, rather than evenly across the body.”

  Ruiz tried to picture it. “Like they were sitting in a La-Z-Boy?”

  “I don’t think they make armchairs that you could tie restraints to, not without a whole lot of trouble,” she reported. “But I suspect the chair was padded, given the lack of abrasions.”

  A padded chair that reclined, but not an armchair. What other chairs came with padding? Office chairs didn’t recline that much, and neither did waiting room chairs.

  Then it hit him. “Thanks, Jess,” he said hurriedly. “You saved the day.”

  “What did I—” But he’d already hung up.

  “You found something.”

  Ruiz jumped. Hadley was standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder. She’d made about as much noise as a cat. He eyed her. “You any good with computer databases?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice matter of fact.

  “Then you’re probably better than me. Pull up a chair, we’re about to crack this.”

  Chapter 15

  “A dentist’s chair?” Alex repeated, giving Ruiz an appraising look. They were in his office, with Chase at his elbow. “Even dental clinics must have some kind of security. And where are they taking the kids during the day?”

  Ruiz gestured to Hadley, who stepped forward and laid several Google Earth printouts in front of him. “Sir, we found an abandoned private dental clinic just outside of Heavenly. Closed two years ago due to a malpractice suit. This is where we think they are.”

  Alex looked from one to the other, impressed. “Let me make a call,” he said finally.

  Deputy Director Harding pulled strings to get them immediate access to one of the Bureau’s satellite feeds. Ten minutes after that, Bureau technicians had confirmed the presence of nine warm bodies—the surviving teenagers, most likely, and a human they didn’t know about—and more movement just outside: the shades, loading things into enormous moving vans. Their body temperatures weren’t high enough to register on thermal, but Lindy’s hunch had been correct: they were packing up.

  When Alex hung up the phone, he ordered Palmer to get their team mobilized. Then he turned to Chase. His friend wrinkled his nose in annoyance. “Shit, Alex, you know I hate that look.”

  “Protocol would have me send you, while I stay here,” Alex began. “We’re reversing it. You’re in charge here. I’m going with the extraction team.”

  Chase shook his head. “No way, man. You can’t play cowboy anymore. You wanted to be the SAC, and you’re good at it. I’m going.”

  “No, you’re not.” Alex gestured around the office. “I’m good at action, Chase. Making things move. But there’s a solid chance that this isn’t going to work, and then this team is going to need a strategist. That’s you.”

  “Bullshit. This is your plan, and you think responsibility means going down with the ship. It’s a romantic idea, but this is the twenty-first-century FBI, Alex. We have a chain of command for a reason.”

  Alex’s face hardened. “Do I need to remind you that we’re not exactly playing by Bureau rules these days? The BPI is new, and it does things differently. That fluidity exists for a reason.”

  Chase opened his mouth to protest again, but Alex overrode him. “This isn’t a debate, Agent Eddy. You’re in charge here; I’m going with the team.”

  Chase glared. “You’re pulling rank on me?”

  Alex tasted sourness, but he had already committed. “Yeah. That’s an order.”

  “Fine,” Chase snapped. “Have it your way. But by God, Alex, you better not be doing this to us over a goddamned girl.”

  He stalked out of the office.

  Alex’s team nearly broke the sound barrier on the way south, arriving in less than twenty minutes, at three thirty in the morning. One SUV did a quick drive-by: The shades had stopped loading, but the moving van was still sitting there. The building appeared to be completely dark from the road, but when they parked a block ahead and snuck back, Alex could make out snatches of light filtering through the blinds. They were in the right place.

  The building had three entrances: a front door, a back door, and a large side door that had been used for large deliveries when the dental office was operational. This was where the shades’ truck was parked. “How do you want to do this, boss?” asked Hadley, who sat in the passenger seat next to Alex. There were two more agents behind them, and fourteen total in the trailing SUVs. Everyone was waiting on Alex’s order before they went in.

  Alex considered it. He was still feeling a little out of sorts after the argument with Chase, but he told himself it was time to get his head in the game, or he’d have more than hurt feelings to worry about. The research team had dug up the building’s blueprints, but they still didn’t know where any of the shades were within the building. If they went in right now, with no other intelligence, there was nothing to stop Hector and his people from killing the teenagers on the spot.

  There was also the problem of weapons. They’d brought guns, Tasers, and even a few KA-BAR knives, which weren’t exactly protocol. The problem was that almost none of it had been tested against shades before. They still knew so little about their physiology.

  It made Alex wary of just storming all the entrances. He remembered the package in the backseat, still in the box labeled “Cat Treats.” He thought of the way Giselle had called Lindy “princess,” and how Lindy had never once demonstrated the least bit of physical fear. If she was who he thought she was . . . maybe they didn’t need to storm the place.

  He grabbed the walkie-talkie and the building plans. “We’re gonna flush them out. I want three people on each exit, waiting outside to stop the shades as they come running out. Remember: They’re faster than us, so keep them as far from your person as you can. Taser on sight, then arrest them if they go willingly: secure with plastic zip ties and hoods.” Gil Palmer relayed the command to his agents, d
ividing out the door assignments. When the line went silent again, Alex added, “The rest of you are with me. We’re going in the side entrance, with two priorities: secure the kids and free Lindy. I have a feeling if we can get her loose, she’ll do a lot of our work for us.”

  “Yes, sir.” Beside him, Hadley raised an eyebrow. “Any final advice on how to hurt them, sir?”

  “We know they need blood, so try to force them to lose as much as possible, as fast as possible,” Alex told her. “And if you can detach the head from the body, I’m pretty sure it’s game over.”

  Hadley nodded, her expression unreadable. When this was over, Alex thought, he was really going to need to get to know his team better. “Everyone geared up?” he said into the walkie-talkie. The people in his vehicle nodded, holding up their helmets. The night was warm, but every man and woman under his command wore turtlenecks, gloves, and long plexiglass visors that went down past their chins. He’d learned his lesson about shade saliva with Ruiz. “Let’s go.”

  It was somewhat pathetic, Lindy thought, that after all her years of life, all the wars and tragedies and accidents she’d seen, her own downfall would come at the hands of a few strips of plastic.

  Wiggle and pull as she might, she couldn’t get even a single limb free of the fucking zip ties. Out of desperation, she even tried to slide her arm out by letting her skin tear off, hoping it would have time to heal before anyone realized what she’d done, but the moment she began, the scent of her blood brought two of Hector’s minions running. They’d tightened all the remaining straps and even added on a few more.

  After awhile, even Lindy had to admit that she was just fucking stuck.

  She settled back to wait, listening hard to glean information. From elsewhere in the building, she could hear several people crying—probably the teenagers. There was an occasional scream, and some begging: “Please, I want my mom, please . . .”