Nightshades Read online

  Alex nodded, looking a little guilty. “He’s been my best friend since college. He’s coming to Chicago to watch my back.”

  Lindy felt a pang of wistfulness. It had been a long time since someone had “watched her back.” She could hardly remember what it was like.

  The pilot announced their descent into Chicago, and the seatbelt lights went on. Alex started to raise his seat tray. “Tell me about what happens when we land,” Lindy suggested.

  “We’ll go straight from O’Hare to the hotel where we’re all staying. The Bureau is putting us up for a month, or until we find new homes, whichever comes first,” he said. “We’ll get a couple of hours to shower and sleep, and be at the BPI headquarters at 10 a.m. for a briefing. The rest of the team will meet us there, with the exception of Ruiz, who’s still in the hospital.”

  Lindy bit her lip. “It’s interesting to me that they left one alive,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Giselle . . . she’s a sociopath. She does anything Hector wants, but she’s in it for the fun. That’s what she thinks killing is: fun. I’d keep an eye on this Ruiz guy. Giselle is like a cat with a whole nest of mice: She might be saving him to play with later.”

  He nodded. “I was gonna call the hospital to check on him this morning anyway. I’ll send a message to add to the guard on his door.”

  He pulled out a cell phone and fiddled with it, turning it back on and putting it to his ear. Lindy reminded herself that she was going to need a new one of those soon. She started to mention it to him, but he put up a finger. “Hang on, I have voice mail.” He listened, frowning, then leaned over to wake up Agent Eddy. The agent behind them woke up with a start and leaned forward to put his face near the crack between their seats. “There was a development overnight,” Alex said quietly.

  “Another missing kid?” Eddy asked.

  The SAC shook his head. “They found two of the bodies in a culvert outside of Heavenly. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “How long have they been dead?” Eddy asked immediately.

  McKenna’s face was expressionless. “ME says about six hours.”

  Chapter 8

  Chicago, IL

  Early Monday morning

  When the call came on Monday morning, Ruiz was awake, flipping channels on his hospital room television. He would only accept the bare minimum of morphine, and that was only because the pain was too intense for him to think without it. The goddamned vampire had very nearly disemboweled him, and after a day and a half in surgery he had twenty staples and sixty stitches, inside and out, holding his guts in. Since then he’d slept only when his body’s exhaustion finally overcame the pain, but it always woke him up again within a few hours.

  The call came from Sarah Greer, the Chicago BPI’s office manager. Sarah was a no-nonsense, slightly brusque woman in her late forties or early fifties, and she had a soft spot for Ruiz. They both told it like it was, she’d said once. Like most of the surviving BPI staff, Sarah had dropped by to see him on his first day in the hospital, but unlike the others, who’d left after a cursory visit, she returned the next day with homemade cookies and a stack of cheap paperbacks. She was good people, and unlike most of his well-wishers, Ruiz was pleased to see her name on the caller ID.

  “Hey, Sarah,” he croaked. His voice was hoarse with disuse, because speaking consumed energy he didn’t have. “What’s going on?”

  “Agent Ruiz,” Greer said, and he recognized the heaviness in her voice. Someone’s dead. Of course. He felt stupid: Why else would she be calling this early? “The sheriff’s department in Heavenly recovered two of the kids’ bodies this morning. I thought you’d want to know.”

  He blinked, pushing the button on his hospital bed to make himself sit up. He hadn’t expected to recover any more bodies. He’d expected to encounter several new shades. “Which ones?”

  “Budchen and Harrison.”

  Two of the earlier victims, taken nearly two months ago. Ruiz cursed. Rachel Budchen was the youngest of the missing kids, just sixteen years old. She was a cheerleader who didn’t do so well in school, but her grades had recently begun an upswing after a concerned teacher discovered Rachel’s dyslexia. She didn’t deserve to die, and neither did Ethan Harrison. “Where?” Ruiz growled.

  “Don’t you start,” Greer said severely. “You can’t go out there. This was just a courtesy call; you’re supposed to be in the hospital for at least another ten days.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ruiz said. “But I’m just sitting here staring at the ceiling; I might as well think about the case. Where did they dump ’em?”

  Greer paused for a second, deciding whether to trust him. Finally she said, “The big culvert on I-43, just out of town.”

  As soon as he was off the phone, Ruiz began disconnecting the machines.

  There was a portable plastic tent erected around the crime scene—standard Bureau procedure. That meant someone from the BPI was already here, Ruiz realized. He doubted the Heavenly sheriff had sophisticated evidence-gathering tools. The area in front of the tent was cordoned off with the traditional yellow tape, but a crowd of onlookers was gathered around it, whispering to one another and shouting the occasional remark at the sheriff’s deputy guarding the barrier. Ruiz slowly, painstakingly pushed his way through these people, staggering like an extra in a zombie movie, one hand locked across his stitches to keep them from being jarred too much. At the crime scene tape, Ruiz held his badge up to the sheriff’s deputy, who nodded and let him amble past with awe in his eyes. Ruiz had been on the front page of the Heavenly weekly newspaper the day before.

  When he reached the entrance Ruiz had to pause and deal with the problem of getting the tent flap up. It lifted diagonally, and there was just no way he’d be able to raise his arm that high. He stood there for a long moment, feeling stupid, until the baby deputy guarding the line realized the problem and hustled over to lift the flap. Ruiz grunted his thanks.

  There were five people inside—well, five living ones: the sheriff, the same two FBI techs who’d been helping with the rest of the investigation, and two people Ruiz didn’t recognize. Every single one of them stopped what they were doing and stared in silent shock as Ruiz approached. Finally, one of the new people—a kid in a rumpled suit—stepped forward. “Agent Ruiz. I’m Special Agent in Charge Alex McKenna.” He extended a hand, which Ruiz just stared at. Eventually the kid realized why Ruiz couldn’t shake and stepped back again, mumbling an apology. He gestured to the woman beside him. “This is Lindy Frederick. She’s a consultant working with the BPI on these murders.”

  A consultant? That was new. Ruiz studied her. She didn’t look like a federal agent, that was for sure. Frederick was doe-eyed and curvy—not overweight, Ruiz thought, just a little fuller in the hips and bust than most of the gym-toned female agents he’d met. She wore a BPI baseball cap and Windbreaker over jeans, despite the warm morning, and she looked tired and drawn—although Ruiz certainly must have looked a hell of a lot worse. He would have dismissed her as an inconsequential lightweight, a temporary hire who would bail as soon as it got bloody, except there was something about her he couldn’t quite put a finger on. Then Ruiz realized that unlike the sheriff or even the techs, Frederick didn’t look the least bit repulsed or disgusted by the bodies behind her. She just looked . . .

  Annoyed? No: frustrated. Like you’d look at a dog that just wouldn’t stop peeing on your rug.

  Ruiz just nodded at both of them, because if he was being honest, the thought of speaking and standing at the same time made him nauseous. He shuffled forward to see around the two new people. Behind them, the two teens had been tossed in a crumpled heap, with Budchen lying half on top of Harrison. Both of them were naked.

  “What are you doing out of the hospital, Agent Ruiz?” McKenna asked, a clumsy attempt to gain control of the situation. “My information suggested you would need twenty-four-hour care for a couple of weeks yet. I was planning to stop in this
afternoon and introduce myself.”

  “Just a day pass,” Ruiz said in a mumble. Best he could do. “Got a cab waiting to take me back. On my own dime,” he added, in case McKenna wanted to raise a stink. “Why haven’t they been covered?”

  McKenna looked ready to protest for a moment, but then shrugged, letting it go. “The local sheriff’s office asked us to do evidence collection. I called in an FBI team, but they arrived about three minutes ago. We’re working on it.”

  Ruiz nodded and moved closer. Now that he was almost on top of the bodies, he saw that they were very different: Budchen didn’t appear to have a mark on her, other than a few bruises at her wrists and ankles. Restraint marks. The other kid, Harrison, had been ripped open, literally: sliced down the middle, his ribcage cracked wide like a walnut shell. There was no blood at all, but Ruiz could see ruptured organs peeking out through the opening. He swallowed hard, trying to keep his gorge down. There was already some vomit in the corner of the tent, and the smell hit his nostrils just as he was trying to control his stomach. He swayed on his feet. Most of the people in the tent moved forward, but it was the consultant, Frederick, who took a few quick steps to his side, holding his elbow. She was strong under those curves, and he let a little of his weight sag onto her. He shot her a grateful look. The sheriff and his deputy made an excuse about getting some fresh air and stepped out of the tent, leaving the three BPI employees alone.

  No one spoke for a long moment, and Ruiz had time to look around the dank culvert opening. It hadn’t rained in over a week, so the ground near the kids was fairly dry, which ruled out the possibility of them floating here from somewhere else. “Why dump them here?” he asked aloud. “They’ve never gone back to the same town before. Even Klay was dumped in a new location.”

  “They’re getting bolder,” McKenna remarked. “They think we can’t catch them, and so far they’ve been right.”

  “More than that,” Frederick said quietly. “Even a shade would want to use a car to transport dead bodies, and the longer you’re in a car with the dead, the better the chances you’ll get stopped or pulled over. I think wherever their base of operations is, it’s not too far from here.”

  Ruiz gave her a look. “Who are you again?” he asked. It came out more confrontational than he’d intended, and he tried to amend it with, “I mean, why are you here?” Nope, that sounded even worse. The painkillers were not helping his already crappy manners.

  She gave him an oblique look. “I’m a language and communication specialist. I’ve been studying the shades as a personal project, and contacted Agent McKenna in that regard. He offered me a job.”

  Ruiz grunted. He didn’t like the idea of a civilian on the BPI team, but hey, what were the odds that any of them were going to survive the week, anyway? “You know why they were treated so different?” he asked, nodding at the bodies.

  “I may have an idea—” she began, but at that moment Ruiz’s knees gave out, and he started to crumple. Frederick actually held his weight for a second, but then she, too, began to buckle, and McKenna rushed forward.

  “That’s enough,” said the new SAC firmly. “Ruiz, you’ve seen everything there is to see here. I’m ordering you back to your hospital bed, and if you don’t go now I’ll suspend you.”

  Ruiz glared at him, but he could barely get the breath to protest. He’d known the second he pulled the IV that he’d be working on borrowed time, and it had just run out. McKenna saw his concession and began to back up to help him out of the tent, but Ruiz summoned the fragments of his willpower and pulled himself upright. He was about to insist that he’d walk out by himself, but then he saw the opportunity he’d be passing up. “Miss Frederick, you mind walking me back to the cab?” he said to the attractive young woman, doing his best to look contrite.

  She blinked in surprise but answered, “Well, of course. And please call me Lindy.”

  He grunted. She returned to her position under his shoulder and edged him back through the tent flap, past the group of anxious onlookers and the journalists who were beginning to arrive. Ruiz kept his head down, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized. In their rush to get to the carnage, the reporters barely give him a glance, probably taking him for some old fool who got a little faint after getting a glimpse of the corpses. Let ’em.

  The cab was still thirty feet ahead, idling in the road, and Ruiz finally saw his chance. “What’s your theory?” he muttered to the young woman.

  She gave him a sidelong glance but actually answered. “I think he’s experimenting with them. Trying to change them.”

  “Like, he doesn’t know how to make a new shade? How is that possible?”

  “That’s not what I mean. . . . Look, you don’t seem so good, health-wise. Why don’t we have this conversation when you’re feeling a little better?”

  He made an effort to straighten up, take some of the weight off her. “Or we can just talk now,” he said firmly, stopping in front of the cab.

  She rubbed her lower lip for a second, thinking it over, then reached out and took his hand. “Listen, Agent Ruiz, don’t you think the best thing for you to do would be to go back to the hospital, get some good, solid rest, and worry about this later?”

  Suddenly, Ruiz felt a little foolish. Of course that was the best thing to do. Rest, that was what he really needed. He could think more about all of this after he’d had some good rest. Feeling suddenly very tired, he thanked Lindy and climbed into the cab.

  Chapter 9

  Lindy did feel a little bad about mesmerizing Ruiz, but it was for the man’s own good. To assuage her guilt, she gave the cab driver a hundred-dollar bill to cover the fare, and Ruiz was too out of it to protest. When the cab was nothing but a dust cloud on the dirt road leading to the culvert, she turned back to the tent, squinting against the sun. The hat and long-sleeved Windbreaker that Alex McKenna had offered her made it bearable, but she still felt exposed and vulnerable. She was always exposed and vulnerable during the day, really, but it also gave her a kind of safety: There wouldn’t be any other shades out here to spot her. Most of them were too young to be out like this; they stayed inside.

  She stepped back over to the tent and watched the buzz of activity around her. In all her many lives, Lindy had seen plenty of crime scenes, even caused some of them herself. She’d never experienced it from the police side of things, however. The BPI had taken over the crime scene now, using one of the FBI’s veteran evidence collection teams. Lindy trailed Alex McKenna, watching as he oversaw the procedure of it all: There was a certain way for everything to be bagged, documented, studied, put away. There was a rhythm to conducting interviews, interacting with the local police, keeping the onlookers away from the crime scene, talking to reporters. It was a lot like on television, actually, except for the FBI veterans there was a banality here, a long unraveling of time as everyone trudged through the motions. Meanwhile, behind the federal team, the local law enforcement officers ran crowd control, watching the agents with wide, excited eyes.

  Although the procedure of collecting information was interesting, unfortunately there was very little information to be had. No one had seen or heard the vehicle that dropped off the two corpses. The physical evidence confirmed that the bodies had been moved, but immediate results didn’t give any indication of where the kids had been killed.

  The kids. Lindy had been alive too long to be hurt by the deaths of strangers, but she could still get upset about waste, and that’s what this was: wasted potential. These teenagers could have gone on to become anything, up to and including shades themselves, but instead Hector had just tossed them away. Looking around at the grief-stricken, angry faces crowding the yellow crime scene tape, Lindy realized that each stolen life was a rock dropped into a pond of grief, sending ripples and waves that would affect this entire community for years. And for what? For nothing. It was disgraceful.

  It was afternoon when Alex and Chase finally finished at the crime scene, and the SAC announced that they would go
back to the hotel in Chicago for a few hours of rest before convening with the new team members and making a plan. Lindy had expected him to want to start hashing it out in the rental car, or at least ask her more questions, but no, the two male agents were subdued on the ride back, their thoughts tainted by the death of the young. Lindy understood that seeing the dead teens had made this whole thing real for them: not an abstraction, not a puzzle to solve. She kept quiet.

  The hotel was a generic chain in the suburb closest to Bureau headquarters, probably the best the government could afford. Lindy’s suitcase and her cat wouldn’t arrive until late in the day, so there was nothing for her to unpack, nothing for her to do. She considered reading the files again or maybe catching a couple of hours of rest, but she was too wound up after seeing the wasted bodies. So she shed the BPI Windbreaker and cap, put on a Cubs hoodie she’d bought at the airport, and pocketed the new cell phone that McKenna had had sent to her room. Then she walked to the nearest train station.

  While the rest of the team slept, Lindy walked Chicago, a city she had once loved. Lindy had spent a few years here in the early twentieth century, curious about Chicago’s unusual circumstances. Big cities usually began in one spot and sprawled out or up, but most of Chicago had burned to the ground in 1871. When the city planners began to rebuild, they did it with an emphasis not on speed or necessity but on architecture and beauty. Lindy had fallen in love with the city that rose from the ashes, and she had been back to visit several more times, the last in 1980. It was wonderful to walk the streets again, with reality layered over her own memories. The city had changed in a lot of the ways she’d expected—a Starbucks on every corner, fewer overt drug dealers and prostitutes, more and more vagrants—but also in ways she hadn’t. Everyone now walked the streets wearing headphones and staring at their little glowing screens, for one thing. There were signs advertising street festivals and outdoor jazz concerts, monuments honoring not just presidents and national figures, but local heroes and athletes. Despite the oblivious residents, there was a sense of pride now, of community, not just for different bands of immigrants, as she remembered, but for individual neighborhoods, interests, types of music. For someone who had spent hundreds of years observing human behavior, it was fascinating to see.