“I know,” she interrupted him, back to her steady, no-nonsense self. “It’ll be okay. Aub and I will be okay.” Lauren took her hand from his arm and started walking briskly down the sidewalk.
He didn’t have a clue what the hell to say to her. All he could do was try to wade through the conflicting emotions this damn case was making him feel while he caught up with her as Lauren followed the sidewalk around the light sandstone building. Together, they turned to their left to walk beneath white pylons that gave way to a very ordinary-looking glass door.
Raef had taken classes in Oliphant Hall—more than a decade ago, but the smell had stayed the same. “Books and formaldehyde mixed with testosterone and stress. I’ll never forget that smell,” he said.
“It was the same at OU. I think it’s a common higher-education smell. Well, minus the formaldehyde.”
A petite girl with big blue eyes and straight, well-maintained blond hair was coming toward them. She had a ridiculously thick anatomy-and-physiology tome clutched against her chest and an it’s-midterm-and-I-gotta-study frown creasing her otherwise lineless forehead.
“Excuse me.” Raef smiled at her. “Do you know where we can find Dr. Braggs?”
The girl blinked as if coming up through layers of essay test hell, and pointed at the ceiling. “He’s probably still in the dissection lab on the third floor—room 303.”
“Do you know if he has a class right now?” Lauren asked.
“No,” said the college coed. “Lab is done for the day.”
“Thank you,” Lauren said.
The girl smiled, nodded vaguely and hurried on her way from the building.
Raef called on the recesses of his college experience and accessed a few brain bytes that he hadn’t killed with alcohol poisoning. “Over here.” He led Lauren a little way down the wide hallway to an industrial-looking metal door that had been painted the same unpleasant yellow as the rest of the first floor. “It’s the stairwell that leads up to the third floor. If I remember correctly, and don’t quote me because halfway through my freshman year I changed my major from Environmental Science to Beerology, this is how we get up to the third-floor classrooms.”
“You went here?” Lauren asked as they climbed the stairs.
“For almost three years this is where I matriculated.”
“Which means you didn’t graduate,” she said.
“Not even close,” he agreed. “College and I didn’t agree.”
“Makes sense to me. OU and I had a fundamental disagreement, as well.”
“Which was?” he asked, realizing he was actually interested in her answer.
“Well, they thought their students needed to attend class. Even if said students could not attend class and just show up for tests and still make decent grades.” Lauren shrugged. “OU and I agreed to disagree.”
“You agreed to leave and they agreed to let you?”
Her smile was sly. “No, I agreed to let Mother endow a chair in the botany department, and OU agreed to give me a BS.” Her smile turned into a giggle. “A BS! It still makes me laugh. That’s exactly what it was—bullshit.”
“What about Aubrey?” He couldn’t seem to stop himself from asking.
Her gaze met his. He tried to read her eyes and found all he could decipher was weariness and a healthy dose of cynicism.
“Aub graduated with honors—without Mother bribing anyone. She has always been the smart one.”
“And which one are you?”
“I’m the pragmatic one. Which one are you?” she fired back at him.
“I don’t have a twin.”
“Let’s pretend like you do.”
“All right. I’d be the grumpy one,” he said.
As he grabbed the metal handle of the door to the third-floor hallway, she said, “Really? My guess is you’d be the lonely one.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The smell hit him right away. It had been bad enough on the ground floor. Up here in the dimmer, cooler third-floor hallway it was downright disgusting.
Lauren wrinkled her nose. “Eesh, what is that?”
He glanced at her. “You were a botany major but you didn’t take any labs?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I told you—I took a bunch of classes. I just didn’t attend many of them. So, what’s the smell?”
“Death,” he said. “Formaldehyde only preserves bodies for so long. It never completely covers the scent of decay.”
Lauren looked horrified. “There are dead bodies up here?”
“Yep. Humans, animals and probably a bunch of bugs, too.”
She shuddered. “No wonder I never went to class.”
“Stay close,” he said.
“Don’t worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.” She wrapped her arm through his.
Raef moved forward with Lauren practically stuck to his side, trying not to think about how good she felt and how badly he wanted to keep her safe.
The classrooms were clearly labeled and in numerical order, with odd numbers to the left and even on their right. Room 303 was only a few yards from the stairwell exit.
“Ready?” he asked her.
She unwrapped her arm from around his and lifted her chin. “Ready.”
Speaking quietly, he said, “This isn’t going to take long. Remember, let him see you, but then I’ll move between the two of you. Stay behind me.”
“And close to the door,” she whispered back. “I remember. Let’s just get this over with.”
He nodded tightly, and pulled the door open by the cold, metallic handle. Only half of the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom were on and very little light managed its way through the high, rectangular windows. Black lab tables were clustered in pods. The smell was bad, but the tables and the aluminum lab chairs—which looked ironically like bar stools—were spotless. The wall closest to them was decorated with large feline physiology posters that were almost as gruesome as the stuff that was floating in huge jars on the shelves that lined two of the other walls. The place was so dim and creepy that at first Raef didn’t think anyone was in the room. Then, from the head of the classroom, a man cleared his throat and said, “May I be of some assistance to you?”
“Dr. Braggs?” Raef asked in his best nice-guy voice.
The professor pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the back of his hand, which was covered in a latex glove.
“Yes, I am Dr. Braggs. How may I help you?”
“Well, if ya have a sec I’d like to ask you ’bout a tree,” Raef said, adding a healthy dose of Okie and country-ing up his words.
Braggs blew out a little sigh. “I’m a bit busy setting up tomorrow’s lab. But I can talk while I work.”
“Hey, great! That’d be great,” Raef said, and started moving toward the front of the room, staying ahead of Lauren.
“All right, then. Ask away.” Braggs put his glasses back on and bent over the large metal tray that was mounded with something Raef couldn’t quite make out. He studied Braggs as he approached him.
Had Raef not been so accustomed to the many faces of evil, he would have automatically discounted Braggs. The guy was absolutely average. His height was average—his balding was average—even the slight paunch he was working on was completely average. He appeared as harmless as Raef’s dorky tenth-grade math teacher.
But Raef had spent ten years with the OSI in the air force, and he’d been involved in the apprehension of men who looked like Mr. Rogers, even after they’d strapped explosives to women and babies and intimidated them into going into restaurants to blow themselves up, along with innocent civilians, just to make a pseudo-religious point. It’d been tough to learn to separate the seen from the unseen, but he’d damn well figured it out—lives had depended on him. He’d been good at his OSI job then, and that military experience had helped him become one of the best psychic murder investigators in the U.S. of A.
So, Raef looked past what his eyes could see, reached out and tested
the invisible energy around him. Nothing. He felt nothing. Not even the slight hum of irritation Braggs should have been feeling at being interrupted.
“I’m Buddy Chapman,” Raef began when they were within handshaking distance of Braggs, “and this is my wife—”
But Raef didn’t get a chance to finish his introduction. Lauren, who had been following just a little behind him, had stopped like she’d run into a glass wall. Her eyes were wide, staring at the tray Braggs was working on, and her voice was unusually loud. “You’re cutting up a cat!”
Braggs looked up, pulled off his glasses again, his average brown eyes blinking like he was having trouble focusing on Lauren. “Young woman, I am dissecting the internal organs of a feline specimen for tomorrow’s nursing students to identify in their anatomy and physiology midterm,” he said patronizingly. “I realize this might appear unsavory to an outsider, but I hope you will try to realize that this creature died for the greater good of science.” He hesitated and blinked again. Then, as if his vision had finally cleared, his eyes widened. He smiled at Lauren. “You look familiar. Are you a graduate of TU?”
It was when Braggs smiled that the bedlam of emotions hit Raef. Braggs’s expression never changed—never wavered from the benign dismissiveness and slight curiosity he was showing Lauren—but inside the real Braggs was a seething cesspool of hatred and rage, lust and fear, all mixed with the most disturbing wash of greed and violence Raef had ever felt.
“Graduate of TU? My wife?” Even though Raef was being battered by emotions, Raef forced himself to keep his tone normal, his voice jovial and as mildly patronizing as Braggs’s charade. “No, sir. My little woman here married me right outta high school. She went straight to the college of havin’ babies, if you know what I mean.” As Raef spoke he kept his eyes on Braggs, moving one more step forward, and positioning himself directly in front of the professor, who was on the opposite side of the dissection table, and between him and Lauren. “Hey, I gotta apologize. We shouldn’t have barged in here on ya. I just got a question about the big elm in my front yard. It’s lookin’ sickly and I hear you’re a damn good tree doctor.”
“Well, thank you,” Braggs said, sounding calm and cordial, even though Raef could feel that he roiled with hatred and a deep, desperate need for violence. “I truly do not mind that you and your lovely wife have sought me out.”
“Yeah, but you got your work to do, and the wife, she’s a little squeamish.” Raef tried to chuckle, but only managed to clear his throat. “How ’bout you give me your card and I call and set up an appointment proper?”
“Whatever you wish, Mr. Chapman. I have cards here in my desk, and I do see that your wife is looking rather faint.”
Braggs opened the top drawer of the dissection table, and Raef took the opportunity to glance back at Lauren saying, “Honey, you go on back to the car and the kids. I’ll get Dr. Braggs’s info and meet you—”
“Raef! Watch out!” Lauren screamed, eyes wide and terrified.
Raef lunged to the side, reaching for the concealed Glock he kept in his side holster, but Braggs was already over the table and on him, striking with superhuman speed at his arm with a dissection blade that was so sharp it slit through Raef’s sweater and sliced a long, deep path down his arm from bicep to wrist, causing him to drop the gun. It skittered across the slick floor as if it had been paved with ice.
“Lauren, go! Now!” Raef couldn’t even look at her. All of his attention was focused on Braggs, who had suddenly morphed from average Joe Blow to a slashing, cutting machine.
Raef grunted with effort as he dodged the guy’s blows. His body was taking too damn long to respond. No, it’s not me. It’s Braggs. He’s abnormally fast—abnormally strong. Braggs struck again. Raef couldn’t be quick enough. This time the blade sliced a red line across his chest, but Raef’s adrenaline was pumping so hard he only felt the warm wetness of his blood. The pain would come later—if he lived until later. Gotta buy Lauren time to get out of here—to get help.
Braggs slashed again, ripping a line of blooming scarlet down the inside of Raef’s thigh. As Raef staggered, Braggs rushed around him.
“No!” Raef snarled, reaching out and catching the edge of his lab coat and pulling him back. “You’re not getting her unless you go through me.”
Braggs laughed. Raef thought it was the most terrible sound he’d ever heard. “She’s as dead as you are.” His words were filled with venom. His face was twisted with anger. “I won’t go after her until you bleed out. She can run as far as she wants. I’ll find her. I’ll kill her. I’ll drain her. Just like I did her sister.”
Raef didn’t see her coming. Neither did Braggs. But suddenly Lauren was there, behind the professor. She swung the long metal pipe she was holding in both hands like a baseball bat, connecting with the back of Braggs’s head as she yelled, “Like hell you will!”
Braggs dropped to the floor where he lay utterly motionless.
Lauren was actually descending on him, pipe raised, to hit him again when Raef caught her in his arms. “Stop—he’s unconscious. We got him. We got him.”
Lauren hugged him hard and then abruptly pushed away from him, her trembling hands hovering over his bleeding knife wounds. “He cut you. Oh, God, Raef. You’re bleeding so much.”
“I’m gonna be okay.” He wanted to touch her face—to hold and reassure her—but she was right. He was bleeding. A lot. “Lauren, I’m going to cuff Braggs. You call 9-1-1.” Stifling a painful groan, Raef crouched over Braggs and took out his handcuffs.
“I can’t. I tried, but there’s no reception up here. At all.” Lauren’s breath caught on a sob. “Raef, God, the blood!”
“I’m okay,” Raef repeated, trying to sound calm even though he could already feel that he was getting light-headed. He managed to roll Braggs over and cuff him. “Here’s what you need to do. Go outside. Call 9-1-1. Get help.” He staggered over to where his Glock had slid to a stop against the classroom wall. When he bent to retrieve it his legs gave way so he sat beside the gun, and started to unbuckle the belt to his jeans.
“I’m not going without you.” Lauren rushed to his side and was trying to take his hand, obviously thinking she could tug him to his feet.
“Lauren,” he said, speaking as quickly and clearly as possible as he cinched the belt around his thigh. “I’m six foot four. I weigh two hundred and thirty-five pounds. You can’t even drag me out of here. I’ve got a tourniquet on this leg wound. The rest will wait. If you get your very shapely little butt outside and call 9-1-1. Understand?”
“Yes. Sorry.” She wiped tears from her face, leaving bloody smears across her cheeks. “I’m going right now.” She hesitated only long enough to lean down and kiss his forehead. “Don’t you dare die on me.”
“Not planning on it,” he muttered as she turned and started to hurry away.
It was then that Braggs sat up.
His entire face had changed. His eyes were larger, darker and sunken into his head. Blood flowed freely from the cut in the back of his scalp—it ran down his neck and seemed to cloak him in crimson. Raef had no idea how it could be, but the professor looked as if he’d lost half his body weight in a matter of minutes. He’d become almost skeletal and looked more reptilian than human.
“You have both been very inconvenient. I will take particular pleasure in draining you.” Braggs drew a deep breath, and with that inhalation Raef could feel the surge of siphoned violence and hatred that filled him, and as it did Lauren dropped to her knees with a terrible moan of agony.
“Lauren!” Raef shouted.
Lauren’s gaze met Raef’s. “He’s draining Aubrey now!” she gasped.
“I’ve never had twins before,” Braggs said. “It’s like a two-for-one special.” He lifted his arms and snapped the handcuffs as if they were a child’s plastic toy, spread his arms and embraced the flood of terror and pain that cascaded into him.
The raw sound of agony that escaped from Lauren sliced through Raef
. “He’s killing us,” she sobbed.
“No, he fucking is not.” Raef lifted his Glock and, in one smooth, quick movement, shot Braggs between his eyes, blowing away the entire top of his head.
Even though the world was going oddly gray around the edges, Raef could hear Lauren whimpering not far away from him. “Hey, it’s okay. The bastard’s dead. It’s over. Just don’t look at him—it’s not a pretty sight.”
When Lauren didn’t respond, Raef dragged himself over to her, thinking she must be in shock. “Lauren, honey, you gotta pull it together and get me some help. I know I look indestructible, but—” His words cut off as he reached her. She was in a fetal position, her arms wrapped around herself. Her face was absolutely colorless, her eyes blank, open and staring. “Lauren!” With a trembling hand he felt for a pulse. It was weak, but there. “Lauren, damn it! Don’t do this! He’s dead. He can’t hurt you or Aubrey anymore.”
The air above Lauren shimmered as Aubrey tried to materialize. Raef could only catch fleeting glimpses of her silhouette.
“Aubrey, what’s happening? I got the guy—I killed him!”
Like her spirit, her voice was a weak, whispering shadow of itself, and all Raef heard before Aubrey faded away was, “You killed his body. It’s his soul that’s draining us. Save us, Kent....”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Fuck! I’m a moron!” He closed his eyes against the pounding in his head. “Okay, yeah, I can do this. I Track murderers. Just because the asshole’s dead doesn’t mean I can’t Track him.” Raef drew a deep breath and reached out with his Gift.
Nothing.
The only negative emotions left in the room were his own. There was no murder trail. The murderer was dead.
“Save us, Kent…” seemed to hover in the blood-scented air around him.
“How?” Raef shouted. “How the hell do I save you? I can’t Track a dead guy!”
The realization hit him and Kent’s eyes opened. “I can’t Track a dead guy, but I have Tracked a dead girl. I found Aubrey before—I can find her again. And when I find her, I find the bastard that killed her.”
After Moonrise Page 9