“Stop them, Audrey!” Sheila wailed.
She stood at her lab desk with the phone to her ear, her face gone blotchy with emotion. I’d never seen her worked up like this before, and it unsettled me. I needed to intervene before this whole situation got out of control. I went automatically into detective mode, pulling that mantle of authority around me even though it might not hold too much weight with these guys.
“Detective Audrey Vorkink,” I said, thrusting my hand out at them to shake. It was less a polite move than it was an intervention. Now they had to engage with me on some level, even if it was to reject me. “I didn’t realize we had visitors today.”
Although the G-men looked virtually identical, I knew one of them had to be in charge. The lead triplet, as it were. When the two right hand agents looked toward the one on the left, I knew I’d identified my man. He didn’t look much different than the other two except for one chipped tooth in the front. Perhaps he’d gotten into a fistfight the last time he’d invaded someone’s lab. Sheila sure looked like she was about ready to haul off and hit him.
He looked down at my hand like he was trying to debate what to do with it, then gave me a two-pumper handshake that made it obvious he was trying to get it over with quick.
“Agent Morgenstern,” he said. “If you’ll excuse us.”
He tried to step around me, but of course I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t the biggest person in the world, but that doorway only had so much room to spare, and if I stood in the middle, he either needed to shove me out of the way or practically hump me if he wanted to get past. I stood in the middle. He neither shoved nor humped me, which was a relief.
“You can’t take those out of the lab without the proper authorization,” I said, nodding to the specimen bags in the middle flunky’s hand. “I’m assuming they didn’t give you the right forms, Sheila?”
“Forms? They refused to even show their badges!”
My eyebrows climbed so high that I thought they might leap off my forehead. I was that surprised, and suddenly very cautious. I’d never seen a Fed who wouldn’t take any excuse to wave around a badge and declare their superiority. Something fishy was going on here for sure. I squared off in the doorway, listening for movement out in the hall just in case I needed backup. But it was getting close to the lunchtime lull, and the break room sat all the way on the opposite end of this floor, far from the acrid smells that sometimes emitted from the lab. Hopefully, Sheila would manage to rouse someone on that phone of hers, because I’d begun to think we were going to need help.
“Badges,” I ordered. “I need to see them.”
For a moment, Morgenstern looked like he was going to bark at me, but he got himself under control with visible effort.
“Left breast pocket,” he said in warning before he reached for it. It was the kind of thing you did to warn fellow officers before making a move in a tense situation. I hadn’t expected that courtesy, but I appreciated it. Of course, I remained on high alert as he produced his badge holder and flipped it open, waving it at me. “Department of Homeland Security.”
He would have pocketed it again if I hadn’t stopped him, but I did. Although he fussed some, he let me read the badge, and it all seemed in order. I flipped it closed and handed it back to him.
“Thanks. I’ll show you mine if you want,” I added jokingly, trying to deflate some of the tension in the room.
No one laughed. The G-men shared Sheila’s nonexistent sense of humor. I would have thought they were long lost relatives except for the part where she clearly wanted to kill them. Then again, I wanted to kill some of my relatives sometimes, so it wasn’t out of the question.
“Okay, so you need to give us an evidence release form before you can take those. Maybe you forgot that?” I asked, trying to keep it light when I really wanted to add that they must be total cockups if they couldn’t remember this basic element of evidence transfer. “We’ve got a fax machine if you need to have authorization sent over. In the meantime, you’re welcome to examine the evidence here to preserve the chain of possession. What is it that you’re interested in?”
“It’s the device from the air show,” said Sheila.
I frowned. “And what do you want with it?”
“None of your business,” said Morgenstern. “Now step aside and quit interfering with a government investigation, or we’ll have to take you in too.”
“Sheila, go get Sergeant Scorsone,” I ordered. She didn’t balk for one moment, and Sheila wasn’t a marathon runner for nothing. She slipped past the G-men and through the door before they could quite decide what to do. One of them made a half-hearted reach for her but was too late to catch anything but air. I returned to my central door blocking location as soon as she’d passed me. “Now listen, gentlemen,” I continued. “This is not how we do things, and you should know that. Either you’re new agents who decided that your badges gave you a right to be assholes, in which case you’re about to find out that you’re sorely mistaken, or you’re up to something you shouldn’t be doing. In which case you’re about to find out what a mistake that was. I’m all for cooperating with the government, but—”
I never got to finish the sentence. Morgenstern’s hand flashed out toward me. I swung my arm in an instinctive blocking motion but didn’t quite manage enough force between the surprise and the lack of space. My forearm connected with his. If he’d been trying to punch me, I would have evaded the strike without problem, but he wasn’t trying to hit me. The Taser that he’d swung at me grazed my arm.
The whole work exploded into light, and I fell into it.
CHAPTER 23
When I came to, Sheila’s concerned face hovered in my field of vision, too close for comfort. There were a lot of things I hated about today, the least of which was the part where everyone kept getting in my space. Every time I turned around, someone was up in my grill, or they would have been if I’d had a grill to be up in. Instead, they were up in my bridge—I’d lost my front teeth in a fist fight with a perp shortly after I got my badge. I’d learned my lesson, and now I erred on the side of caution, not letting anyone get too close. Having people repeatedly enter my space over the past few days was adding insult to injury, and I definitely felt injured. My neck twanged with pain, but nothing too bad. I managed to pull a muscle on the way down, and the whole thing felt tight from the base of my skull down into the shoulder blade. I sat up, wincing, and rubbed at the ache.
“Audrey? I’m so happy you’re okay. You are, aren’t you?” Sheila asked, her lean face wrinkled with concern. Then she backed up to give me a critical once-over, which was the nicest thing she’d ever done. I would have given her a thank you hug except that it would have brought her back into my personal space, and that was the last thing I wanted.
“Yeah, I’ll live. What happened?” I croaked.
“Based on the burn mark on your shirt, I think they tased you,” she said. “Those…those…”
“Fucktards?” I supplied.
“Yes. The fucktards tased you.” She offered me a hand. “I don’t think they were from Homeland Security, either.”
“What clued you in?” I asked as she pulled me to my feet.
Other than the pulled muscle and a residual Taser headache, I felt okay. I’d fallen well. I’d been hit with a stun gun before as a part of my training. Hadn’t really anticipated repeating the experience, either, but at least I knew I’d live. I looked down at the scorch mark on my sleeve and scowled. At least it wasn’t one of the new shirts I’d just bought last week, but damage to this one meant I’d have to go shopping again or do laundry more often, and I’d rather perform a self-appendectomy with nothing but a pair of old knitting needles. I hated shopping and laundry with equal verve.
The rapid clip-clopping of footsteps in the hallway heralded the approach of the cavalry. It would have been reassuring if not for the fact that they were unknown minutes too late. Plus, I had a headache, and I really would have preferred ninjas over cavalry.
They might have been late too, but at least they would have been quieter about it.
“What the hell happened here?” demanded Sergeant Scorsone as he barreled into the room and nearly tripped over me. I hurriedly scooted across the tile and out of the entryway as he dodged around me. His eyes darted around the room but didn’t find what he was looking for. They fixed on Sheila with fury. “Where are the agents?”
“The fucktards weren’t here when I returned, sir,” said Sheila. “They left Audrey unconscious on the floor. And they took the device from the air field.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, pinching the bridge of my nose.
She nodded. “I checked when I got here.”
“While I was still unconscious on the floor?”
“You were breathing,” she said, shrugging.
I held up my hands and turned to Scorsone, who looked just as helpless as I did in the face of Sheila’s lack of people skills.
“Did you catch a name? I’ll get in touch with my contact at Homeland and see if we can’t track these guys down,” he said.
“The lead agent showed me his badge. Last name Morgenstern. First name Lionel. No middle initial. I don’t remember the badge number. Too long.”
He nodded, pulling out his phone. “Give me a moment, if you please.”
With that, he went into the hallway, holding the phone up to his ear. I sat down at Sheila’s desk, sighing. “Where’s everyone else? The other lab techies, I mean.”
“Birthday lunch. Someone has to stay behind in case there’s an emergency request, so I volunteered.”
She slumped in the seat opposite me, and I gave her a long look. As a matter of course, Sheila didn’t slump or sigh or fidget, and she was doing all of those things now. I’d always known her to be full of efficiency and intelligence and perfect straight-man lines. Few things phased her, and most of those things had to do with people who didn’t catch on to what was to her an obvious line of thought. But now she seemed incredibly out of sorts.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You seem upset.”
“Of course I’m upset! Someone took evidence out of my lab without permission. They’re not supposed to do that. It’s against the rules, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
I kept my voice gentle. On the surface, her outburst might seem silly, but I knew the discomfort of having your safe space invaded, and this lab was Sheila’s baby. She’d always guarded her position in the lab with ferocious zeal, arriving before everyone else and leaving well into the night.
“Now I’ll never be able to tell you what that device was. I know you and Detective Hardwicke were counting on me for answers. You called me in special.”
On someone else, it might have sounded whiny, but Sheila didn’t whine. She declared it in her usual flat voice, but her still-slumped shoulders communicated her feelings on the matter quite clearly. I felt for her, which was probably why I made the following offer despite the fact that I should have known better than to mention it at all.
“You know, I have a similar sample at home. I found it…last year. Picked it up. Maybe we could still figure out what it is,” I said with studied casualness.
She blinked. “What good would that do? No chain of possession.”
“Right, of course. Never mind,” I said, regretting the statement already.
Luckily, Scorsone picked that moment to return from his hallway conversation. His face was grim and drawn, and I knew what he was going to say before the words even left his mouth.
“Homeland has no record of Agent Lionel Morgenstern.”
He didn’t ask me if I had the name right, because he knew me well enough to realize I would have provided a disclaimer if necessary. But I’d taken a nice long look at that ID, and I felt confident in my memory, even post-tase.
“Well, isn’t that a surprise,” I observed in a voice that wasn’t surprised at all.
“Oh, it gets better,” said Scorsone. “The boys at the security checkpoint don’t remember letting them in. They would have checked IDs, and there’s no record in the log at the visitor’s entrance. We’re looking through security footage, trying to figure out how they entered the building in the first place. Maybe someone let them in. When I find whoever did it, I’m going to have their guts for garters.”
I held up my hands as if that would prove my innocence. Like maybe he’d suspected me of dressing up like some mysterious secret agent and tasing myself. The movement was a mistake. Now, on top of all the other shit I had to deal with, I had a missing sample, mysterious G-men who weren’t really G-men, and one hell of a pulled muscle. The universe owed me some positive karma. I could only hope it would cough up something good for me soon, because I sure was getting pissed off.
CHAPTER 24
After the attack in Sheila’s lab, I hobbled back to my desk in a fury. I might have been walking like a pissed off geriatric cowboy, but I was sporting for a fight. In the hallway, some of the guys from accounting took one look at my face and got the hell out of the way. Which just went to show that those guys had common sense along with a knack for numbers.
Hardwicke didn’t share their common sense. When I arrived at the detective bullpen, I found him actually sitting at his desk for once. He’d unpacked all of his things, and somehow that simple act had transformed the area. When I looked at it, I didn’t immediately think of Ronda. First, I thought about how much he pissed me off. Then I thought about how stupid his bobblehead collection was. Then I thought about Ronda. Usually, I couldn’t so much as glance at the space without her death flashing before my eyes, so it was progress. Poorly adjusted progress, but I’d take what I could get.
I collapsed into my desk chair with a grunt, all my well-tended anger dissipating like a fart in the wind. All I could think of is what my old partner would have said if she’d been here. I missed her. My neck still hurt, and I rubbed at it in a half assed kind of way.
“What happened?” asked Hardwicke.
He didn’t even sound accusatory or anything, and I gave him a suspicious once over but he just looked concerned in a way that reminded me of the Brad Hardwicke I used to know before he went into his cocoon to metamorphose and came out a total asshole. I shrugged with one shoulder, still rubbing the other.
“Some jerkoffs stole an evidence bag from the lab, and I got in the way. They tased me,” I said.
“You okay?”
I’d expected him to jump down my throat for being careless, like being tased was ultimately my own fault, but he just sounded concerned. I began to wonder if he’d been replaced by a pod-person, which would have been a real good joke if not for all the real live aliens.
I waved my hand. “Yeah, I’m fine. A little sore. Pulled a muscle. Nothing too bad, all things considered.”
“Good.” He frowned, leaning over his desk to check for himself. After a moment, he leaned back, apparently satisfied with what he’d seen of me. “So why aren’t they sounding the alarm? Intruders in the building and shit like that? I’d think they’d be calling down the wrath of god on them.” He paused. “You’re not pulling my leg, are you, Audrey? I’m trying to do the right thing here. I’m making an effort.”
“No, I’m telling the truth. Look.” I held out my sleeve, displaying the tell-tale burn mark where the Taser had struck. “And Scorsone asked us to keep it quiet. The guys flashed some government badges at me before all three of them swarmed me. But the IDs didn’t check out. Scorsone wants to verify that they’re not some kind of black ops military guys, which may be true. I get the feeling that there’s more, though. None of this makes any sense. The handling of the air show device, the response to the intruders…none of it adds up.”
He nodded. “You don’t have to tell me twice. Things are getting incredibly weird around here. I feel like I can’t trust anybody.”
“You and me both, brother.”
There was a moment of strangely comfortable silence between us. Neither one wanted to break it, but someone had to speak. Ev
entually, Hardwicke took the leap.
“You know,” he said completely out of the blue, “I’ve got a buddy who works in building security.”
“Do you?” I asked, wondering where he was going with this.
“I might be able to get him to search the tapes at all the building ingress and egress points. See if he can’t spot those agents.”
“That would be handy, but Scorsone already requested that.”
He fixed me with a look. “It might be a good idea for us to double check. We’d only be doing our jobs, you know.”
I paused to consider what he’d said, and just as importantly, what he hadn’t. Hardwicke sounded just as suspicious as I felt. He and Sergeant Scorsone had gotten along okay, although they’d never been former partners and didn’t have the kind of relationship Scorsone and I shared. Or at least the relationship I thought we shared before things went sideways. But Hardwicke had seen the changes in our sergeant just like I had. Under these uncertain circumstances, I needed someone to watch my back. After all we’d been through, it seemed ridiculous to think that Hardwicke might be that guy, but then again, I knew I could count on him to be honest with me. He certainly hadn’t censored his feelings before. So maybe it was worth a try.
“Good idea,” I said. “I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“Me either. I’ll make the call.”
So he did, while I filled two cups of coffee and brought one over to him as a kind of peace offering. Maybe this partnership would pan out, and maybe not, but it wouldn’t fail because I hadn’t tried. I felt cautiously optimistic about the situation for the first time since I’d seen his stuff on Ronda’s old desk.
But when he hung up the phone and I handed him the cup, he looked less than pleased. I knew it couldn’t be the coffee. I remembered how he used to take it—one cream, one sugar—and was fairly sure that hadn’t changed. I cocked an inquiring brow.
Unidentified Flying Suspect (Illegal Alien Book 2) Page 13