Blood of Eden

by Tami Dane

  “Did you find something?” I asked the only part of his anatomy I could see—his butt.

  “No.” With one hand flattened over the back of his head, he stood up, turned around, crunched his way to the edge, and climbed out. “I don’t know how I got in there. One minute I was checking the back of the building—I thought I saw someone running back here—and the next, I woke up, feeling like my head had been flattened in a sheet metal press, and smelling like month-old meat.”

  “Oh, my gosh, you’re kidding.” I took a cautious look around. I wouldn’t want to end up getting clobbered on the head and thrown in the trash too.

  “Does it look like I’m kidding?” Standing somewhat unsteadily, he picked bits of crumpled napkin, mushy bagel, and unidentifiable ick from his clothes.

  Evidently, JT’s personality got ugly after a knock on the melon. I didn’t hold it against him. Mine would too.

  I brushed a piece of bagel off the back of his shirt. “Sorry. Of course, it doesn’t look like you’re kidding. Are you okay? Is your wallet missing? Your gun?” I reached for him, offering some support if he needed it.

  He rejected my offer with a shake of the head. Which led to a staggering sway. “I’m fine.” He patted himself down. “Wallet’s there. So is the gun.”

  “How strange.” I circled around his back and tried to get a peek at his head. His hair was matted down and covered in something dark and sticky. Congealed tea? Melted chocolate? Blood? “Maybe we should get you looked at.”

  “No, I’m okay.” He shuffled toward the side of the building. “Shit, my head hurts.” He glanced back at the Dumpster. “What did you do?”

  “Me? Nothing. What do you mean, what did I do?”

  “To my head. It hurts like a son of a bitch.” Grimacing, he fingered the place where the sticky stuff was. “Did you hit me with something?”

  I was thinking ... concussion. Definitely. Or ... had he been doped too?

  I gently steered him toward the car. “Let’s take a ride. You need to get checked out.” I had no idea where the nearest hospital was.

  Thank God for GPS.

  It wasn’t easy convincing JT that he needed to be the passenger, not the driver. He was one stubborn man. But after about ten minutes of him repeating himself, and then vomiting, he finally slumped into the passenger seat and belted himself in. I took the driver’s seat. I rummaged through the contents of his trunk and scored a plastic shopping bag. I handed it to him, just in case he felt sick again. It took about five minutes to adjust the mirrors, seat, and steering wheel. In that time, JT tried, and failed, to convince me he wasn’t hurt. And while I looked up the location of the closest emergency room, he reminded me that I didn’t know how to drive a stick, and that there was a killer running loose, and his next victim didn’t have much time left.

  There was no need to remind me of any of those things, especially the last one. I was more than aware of how fast time was flying and how little we were accomplishing. Wasting hours upon hours in an emergency room was the last thing we needed to do. But it was necessary. Vomiting after a head injury was a bad sign in an adult.

  I handed my phone to JT. “Here, you’re the navigator. Tell me when I need to turn. I can’t hear the GPS very well. Stupid phone doesn’t have a decent speaker.”

  “Okay.” His head bobbed to the side. His eyes rolled around in their sockets. He was going to be as useful as a toddler.

  Before he dropped the phone, forcing me to pull over to retrieve it from the floor, I snatched it from him and set it in my lap. “Miss GPS” was my only company as I lurched and sputtered JT’s car to the hospital. JT took a nap.

  When we pulled up to the emergency entry, I had to more or less drag him out of the vehicle. He put up a fight. A security guard wheeled a cussing JT inside, while I stalled the car twice in the driveway before bouncing it into a parking spot. I called Chief Peyton before I headed inside, asked what she wanted me to do—stay with JT or continue without him. She told me there hadn’t been a new victim reported yet, so I should stay with JT, so that’s what I did.

  JT slept some more.

  After JT was taken back to a room, I opened the romance novel Katie had downloaded onto my phone. I wasn’t a big novel reader, but what the hell? Katie had been bugging me for months to read it. I couldn’t get a signal on my laptop. And I was in the mood to be amused. Surely, The Viking King and the Maiden would amuse me.

  A nurse came to the waiting room to get me just as I was opening my newly downloaded e-book. She escorted me back to JT’s room and asked what the problem was.

  Sporting a blue hospital gown, JT looked at her with squinty eyes and snapped, “I told you, nothing’s wrong.”

  I said, “He was hit in the head and is acting weird.”

  She nodded, Velcroed a blood pressure cuff around his arm, and squeezed the little bulb at the end of the rubber tube to inflate it. “Do you remember what happened, sir?”

  “Yes.” JT looked at me. He looked at her. “No.” He winced, fingered the back of his head. “Damn, my head hurts. And I feel sick.”

  “He threw up once already,” I mentioned. “You might want to give him a pan.”

  The nurse finished taking his blood pressure before fetching a pink plastic basin from the cabinet. Lucky for her, he didn’t need it before that. He made use of it shortly after she handed it to him, though. I had to look away. It felt wrong watching him lose his breakfast like that. It was a private, shameful moment. Granted, he’d seen me toss my cookies at the crime scene my first day on the job. But he was a man. Men were supposed to be strong. And he was a strong man. But he sure didn’t look it when he was vomiting.

  A doctor who looked like she was fresh out of junior high came in a few minutes later. I didn’t think much about it. I’d graduated a smidge early myself. But I did think something about the timing of her arrival. I read seven words per second. The fact that she came strolling in before I’d finished a single paragraph suggested they were taking JT’s injury seriously. This was a good thing. I didn’t like what I was seeing either.

  She greeted him with a cheery “Hello, sir.”

  He responded with a mumbled “Hi.”

  “What happened today? Why are you here?” the doctor asked, skimming his chart.

  “I dunno.” He closed his eyes. “I’m tired. And I think I might hurl again.”

  “Hmm.” She grabbed the little handheld light from the wall and twisted the top to illuminate the little bulb. “Open your eyes, please.” As she checked his pupils, she asked, “Do you know what day it is today?”

  “Thursday.”

  It was Friday.

  “Can you tell me who the president is?”

  “Obama.”

  “Good.” She turned off her light. “Where does your head hurt?”

  “Back here.” Grimacing, he touched the lump on the back of his head.

  “Can I see it?” she asked.

  “You tell me, can you?” he answered.

  The doctor gently pried his hand away. “Can you sit up, so I can take a look?”

  “Yeah.” He slumped forward.

  She gently palpated his scalp, stopping when JT let out a yelp. “You have quite a lump there. Do you remember how you got it?”

  “ No.”

  She looked at me.

  “I found him in a garbage Dumpster, behind an Einstein Brothers Bagels shop. He said somebody clocked him.”

  She gathered up some supplies—gauze and alcohol to clean the wound. “Was he knocked unconscious?”

  JT ouched as she dabbed his scalp with a soaked gauze wad.

  I answered, “I can’t say for sure, because he was awake when I found him. But it’s possible. Or, I worry he might have been drugged. We’re working a case. Can’t say more. Either way, I don’t know what happened. I was inside, getting a sandwich. It took a few minutes.”

  “Okay.” She dropped the bloodstained gauze in his pink pan and took a step back. “He’s probably okay,
but I’d like to get a CAT scan, just to make sure. And he should probably have a tetanus shot too.”

  I nodded my agreement. “Better to be safe than sorry.” As soon as the doctor headed out, I went back to reading.

  JT went back to sleeping.

  “Sloan Skye?” he slurred.

  “Yeah, JT?” I scooted my chair closer to his bed so he could see me.

  “I like your name.”

  “Thanks. I like it too.” Trying not to chuckle—at the moment, it was kind of like talking to a younger JT—I clicked the button on my phone, turning the page in my e-book. So far, I was sort of liking The Viking King and the Maiden. The vocabulary posed no challenges. The sentence structure was simple, like second-grade simple. It was super easy to comprehend. I hadn’t read a book that easy since kindergarten. But the images the words painted were making me a little warm—in a good way. I had never imagined I’d get into a man with big muscles, small clothes, and a big ... sword, but there it was.

  “Skye makes me think of angels,” JT said.

  “That’s nice, JT. Angels are good things to think about when you’re in a hospital.”

  “You’re an angel, Sloan.”

  Urk. Awkward.

  My heart did a little pittery-pattery thing in my chest. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that I’d been sitting here reading a love story. I clicked the button, closing the file.”Um, thanks, JT.”

  “No, really. I think you’re beautiful.”

  Now, that wasn’t awkward. It was funny. Me? Beautiful? No way. Evidently, after the mean phase, JT turned extremely affectionate after a hard knock on the head. This side was definitely more charming. But also more dangerous. “JT, as much as I appreciate the compliment, I think your head must be hurt worse than we both thought. You’re seeing things.”

  “No, I’m not. I thought you were gorgeous, and sexy, and fucking hot, since the first day we met. I just didn’t know how to tell you, until now.”

  I was speechless.

  If JT wasn’t an FBI agent, and if he wasn’t suffering from what I was beginning to suspect was a life-threatening concussion, I might’ve pursued this. “Gorgeous” was much more applicable to JT than me. And “sexy.” And “hot.” And it sucked that I didn’t know if he genuinely meant what he was saying or not. And it sucked even more that it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t do anything about it, no matter how much I wanted to.

  And, boy, did I want to.

  “Skye?”

  “What, JT?” I braced myself for another compliment.

  “I’m going to hurl.”

  Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don’t let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.

  —R. I. Fitzhenry

  8

  Six hours later, I walked a groggy-headed JT out to the car. The diagnosis: a concussion. No surprise there. The treatment: rest, and someone waking him up periodically to make sure he was okay. Again, not a big surprise. As we strolled to the car, JT informed me he lived alone. He didn’t have any family close by. Nor did he have any friends.

  In other words, he didn’t have anyone to handle wake-up duty.

  I decided I could volunteer for the job, but only if we stayed somewhere safe. Somewhere public.

  Once we were snug and belted in, he dug a hunting knife out of his glove compartment. Before I could stop him, he cut the plastic hospital bracelet off. I thanked “The Big Guy Upstairs” JT’s hand didn’t slip, and I contemplated where to take him. The FBI Academy was probably my best bet. I could try to get some work done while he slept, and I wouldn’t be alone with him for any length of time. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. He’d made it clear, after his heartfelt confession, and after throwing up, that he’d never do anything to compromise our jobs.

  The problem: I was not 100 percent sure I could trust myself.

  This was new for me. I’d never been attracted to someone I shouldn’t be. Not this attracted. And not when so much was at stake. I liked JT. A lot. When our eyes met, little sparks of electricity sizzled through my body. I haven’t felt that way about a guy in ages.

  Not since Gabe.

  When the car jerked and sputtered out of the parking lot, aimed for the freeway, JT said, “Easy on the clutch. Where are we headed?”

  “To the office. You’re on desk duty. You heard the doctor. You need rest.”

  “I’m fine. I haven’t thrown up in at least a couple of hours.”

  That was true. He was also looking a lot less shaky. His eyes weren’t rolling around in their sockets anymore. His CAT scan had come back clear. He had no bleeding in his brain. Or bruising. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to take any chances. If he was clunked in the head again, he could suffer long-term, irreparable brain damage. Brain damage was nothing to scoff at.

  “You’re going back to the office, and that’s final.” It was a little after rush hour, and the traffic on the freeway had eased up. I navigated his car into a spot between a bus and a beer truck. My knuckles turned white.

  “Are you nervous, Skye?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I lied. Truth was, I hated driving this car, on the freeway, especially with trucks. And even more, with trucks going eighty miles per hour. “How about we work on our case while I drive? Organized or disorganized killer?”

  “Organized. Definitely,” he said.

  An organized killer was, basically, a psychopathic killer. Organized killers avoided capture. They planned their kills. They killed strangers. They hid evidence, controlled the crime scene, controlled the victim, and usually followed the media reports of their crimes. They were intelligent, had lovers, friends, spouses, and sometimes children. They were the Ted Bundys and John Wayne Gacys of the world.

  I had to agree. So far, what little evidence we had pointed to an organized killer. “If that’s the case, then we’ll find no personal connection between the unsub and his victims. It’s also highly unlikely he lives near them. But I think the Columbia area is his trolling grounds. Maybe he uses a ruse, like Bundy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Male or female?” I asked next. JT had been referring to the unsub as a male all along, but my gut told me he was a she.

  “Male,” JT stated, sounding very sure of himself.

  “Why do you say that? There seems to be no sexual motive to the crimes. No mutilation or torture. Poisoning is used more often by women. I’d consider injections of a lethal infectious agent to be a poisoning.”

  “Sure, but what about the saliva?” he countered. “The biting and licking could be related to a sexual fetish. And he’s killing strangers. Women kill patients in hospitals, people they know, rarely strangers.”

  He argued his case well, but I wasn’t swayed. “Okay, so we’ve settled upon an organized killer, male—though I’m not convinced you’re right there. That leaves motive. Is our killer a visionary, mission-oriented, or hedonistic killer?”

  “Hedonistic. Most definitely.”

  I didn’t disagree with that. There was no sign the killer was trying to rid the world of dangerous thirty-year-old brunette women, or was suffering from a psychotic break. “Thrill killer, you think?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I had my doubts there too. “Okay, but here’s the thing. Thrill killers feed off the victim’s fear. If he’s using an amnesic to make his victims forget about the attack, what’s he getting out of it? The victims are walking time bombs, but they don’t know it. What need does that satisfy in the unsub?”

  The pieces weren’t exactly snapping into place for me. Some of them fit okay. Others, not quite. I decided I’d go on the Internet when we got back to the office and read up on criminal profiling. It had been a while. My memory wasn’t hazy, but I wondered if I might have missed something.

  While I kept us alive for the rest of the drive—no small feat, considering what I was driving—JT called Chief Peyton to talk about our profile ... which, I couldn’t help noticing, did not include any
species but Homo sapiens. This kind of surprised me. That first day, they’d been so quick to jump to conclusions about the nature of our unsub. Specifically deciding he or she was some kind of vampiric creature. What had made them completely dismiss the idea of a nonhuman unsub now?

  After a quick trip through a drive-through, we rolled into the FBI Academy’s parking lot a little after six. I parked the car and dropped JT’s keys into my purse. I didn’t want JT to get any stupid ideas about trying to drive tonight. He didn’t seem to notice.

  He was quiet as we rode the elevator up to our floor. And he didn’t say anything as we each headed to our respective cubicles. The unit was dark. Silent. Our footsteps echoed on the gleaming tile floor. Tap, tap, tap. For some reason, the hollow sound gave me a case of the shivers. The paper bag in my hand—dinner—crinkled. The cola in the paper cup—caffeine—sloshed. My laptop bag smacked against my hip, the material giving off a soft sloughing sound with every step. While I carted my bagged meal to my desk, JT flipped on the lights. I blinked as my eyes adjusted. They focused on the folded piece of paper sitting on my desk as I sank into my seat.

  That handwriting looked familiar.

  I unfolded the paper and looked at the last line. No wonder it had looked familiar.

  Gabe.

  I felt my teeth clench.

  Heading home for a change of clothes. Be back in less than an hour.

  Gabe

  Ugh.

  Why was he leaving me notes?

  He hadn’t left a time on the note, so I had no idea how long it had been. There was no sign of Fischer, Chief Peyton, or Brittany. I assumed Fischer and Peyton were working—they wouldn’t call it a day with so little time left. Brittany, on the other hand, was a big question mark. It was a Friday night. She might not be back until Monday morning. At any rate, I was semirelieved we wouldn’t be alone in the office for long.

  “I’m going to wash up,” JT said, his voice echoing through the stillness, making me jerk. A fry that had been on its way to my mouth flung from my hand, smacking the frosted glass pane in my cubicle’s wall. It rebounded and landed with a plop on the desktop. For some reason, it didn’t look so edible after all that.