by Lauren Esker
"Be that as it may, I understand she's coming increasingly close to the truth. Am I mistaken?"
Stiers was nothing if not thorough, and she'd evidently done her homework before calling him. "You're not mistaken," Noah admitted.
"Do you think we have a leak?"
"No, I think she's smart and good at putting clues together. She's a skeptic, which means that in spite of the sensational headlines, a lot of the articles she writes are actually very well vetted and plausible." He broke off; he'd hoped he was coming across as a thorough researcher who had done his homework, but suspected his voice had been veering a little too close to admiring.
What could he say? He appreciated a good adversary, and Peri Moreland was definitely that.
Through the phone came the rhythmic tapping of Stiers drumming her fingers on her desk. "Are people listening to her?"
"Yes," Noah said with a sigh. "She's got thousands of subscribers."
"You have to discredit her."
"I know."
Trish was right about misinformation campaigns; they could be a lot of fun. But the job wasn't all running around the waterfront with a Loch Ness monster head on a stick. He also had to tell grieving families that their son or daughter had been killed by wild animals instead of rogue lion shifters; he had to convince traumatized assault victims that they hadn't really seen their attacker shift into a bear or a fox right in front of their eyes.
He had to make sure that anyone who tried to reveal the existence of shifters was discredited so thoroughly no one would ever believe them.
Other SCB agents got to go out and save lives. Noah's job was ruining lives.
And he couldn't help wondering if there was even a point to it. Were shifters really safer if they were hidden? That was the conventional view, and shifters in most parts of the world tried to stay under the radar as much as possible, though he'd anecdotally heard of a few countries that had their own private arrangements. But there were times when Noah had to wonder if Peri Moreland, and others like her, weren't right after all. There was a conspiracy, and the government really was covering things up. And he wasn't sure how he felt about being part of that.
Something to bring up with Dad when I see him next, I guess.
For now, it was official policy. And it was his job.
Glancing down, he saw the light blinking on his phone to indicate an incoming call from an outside line. No, make that three incoming calls.
"Oh look," Stiers said blandly. "What's this in my inbox? An email from IT, informing me that our website hits are going through the roof."
The blinking light flashed again. Four incoming calls.
"Noah," Stiers said. "Discredit her."
"I'll get on it," he promised, even as the words left a bad taste in his mouth.
Chapter Three
Peri stepped out of the radio studio, blinking in the midday sun. The call-in portion of the program had run overlong, but that was only because so many people wanted to call and share their stories of werewolves, UFOs, Bigfoot encounters, and government conspiracies. Based on the people she'd interviewed for her articles, most of them probably fell into the category of a) mistaken, b) nuts, or c) lying, but she still had the warm glow that came from a job well done. The word was out there. Let's see those SCB bastards cover this up.
She was feeling damn good about herself.
That feeling lasted all of four seconds, until someone put a hand on her shoulder from behind. "Ms. Moreland—" a male voice began.
Peri lashed out backward with her artificial foot—the regular walking foot, this time, which made it useful as a club—and clipped him in the shin. She twisted free, sliding a hand under her jacket for the illegal, but useful, collapsible baton she kept there. She'd already snapped the baton out to its full length before she recognized the man cursing and hopping on one leg in front of her.
"Agent Noah Easton. What a pleasure. Are you arresting me, and if so, for what?"
Easton's breath hissed between his teeth. He was clearly fighting not to bend over and grab his shin. Peri had had plenty of practice at learning to kick hard.
At least they'd sent a good-looking agent to bother her. Easton was long and lean, with warm medium-brown skin, high cheekbones, and melting dark eyes a girl could drown in. A stud earring winked in his left ear, and he was dressed, as he had been most other times she'd seen him, in a black leather jacket with tiger stripes on the shoulders and form-fitting jeans. In her experience, the SCB employed a hotter class of agent than the FBI, or at least had the decency to dress them better.
"I'm not arresting you." He shook his leg and took a deep breath. "Jeez, girl. That was cold."
"If I was really in a bad mood, it would've been higher up," Peri informed him. "Do you often go around attacking women on public street corners?"
"Who's attacking who, again?" he demanded, carefully testing his weight on his injured leg. "Do you have a license for that baton?"
Peri folded it with a snap of her wrist and tucked it under her jacket. "What baton?"
Easton heaved a sigh and pressed his fingertips against his forehead. "Okay, let's start over. I just want to talk to you about what you saw at the morgue."
"Do you mean you want to talk to me as a confidential federal source for my blog, Agent Easton?" Peri asked sweetly. "There's a nice little café around the corner. I'll buy."
"No, I want to know what you found at the morgue."
"Great. My price is lunch, and my offer to buy is now off the table. It's on you." She turned briskly and led the way down the street. Easton limped after her, still favoring the leg she'd kicked.
"Might I guess," she said over her shoulder, "that your little federal cleanup crew is already on their way to deal with the situation at the morgue? Did you draw the short straw to get stuck with me?"
"There is no situation at the morgue. There are no mysterious bodies at the morgue. What you saw, Ms. Moreland, was a hoax, and unfortunately you fell for it."
"I've seen hoaxes, Agent. You might say I'm an expert in hoaxes. Those bodies looked about as real as anything I've ever seen."
"Peri." His use of her first name startled her as much as the warm, gentle grip of his hand on her arm, stopping her in her tracks as he pulled her around to face him. His deep brown eyes caught and held hers. "The bodies aren't real, and you're poking a hornet's nest. Lay off this story before you get yourself picked up and sent to prison for interfering with a federal investigation."
"A federal investigation of what? Are you saying there's something to investigate, Agent Easton? Was that on or off the record?"
"I'm saying you're messing with things you don't understand, and if you keep it up, you're going to get hurt."
Peri shrugged his hand off her shoulder. "Last I checked, we're living in the USA. We have freedom of the press here. You can't shut me down for telling the truth."
"Peri, listen to me. Investigate something else. Go hunt Bigfoot to your heart's content. Track down UFOs. Interview people about fluoride in the water. But what's at the end of this particular rainbow isn't a pot of gold, and it isn't the conspiracy you're looking for. It's only heartbreak."
"In other words, there really is something worth investigating, and I'm on the trail of it." She smiled brightly. "Thanks for the tip, Agent."
"Let me give you something." He reached into his jacket. She tensed, but all he took out was a business card. "My number. If you change your mind and decide to help us instead of working against us."
Dropping the card on the sidewalk would have been satisfying, but her reporter's instincts told her not to squander a potential source. Instead she tucked it away. "Thank you, Agent. I'll consider your warning with all the diligence it deserves."
This time, when she walked away, he didn't try to detain her.
She was feeling a lot less confident than she tried to look. If he'd tried to bully her, she would have had an easier time shaking off the encounter. She was used to people getting an
gry at her. But the warning had seemed sincere. She didn't think his bosses had sent him to shake her up. He'd come on his own.
Focus, Peri. If he's trying to get you off the hunt, then they really are covering something up. And you owe it to yourself and to the American public to find out what.
***
Well, that could have gone better. In all fairness, Noah suspected he had earned that kick in the shin, coming up on her from behind.
She'd taken the card, at least. Maybe later, once she thought about it, she'd be more willing to make a deal.
He watched her walk away, head high and a swing in her step. Her denim jacket had a large marijuana leaf stenciled on the back in white spray paint. Now that pot was legal in Washington State, was that still a counterculture statement, or a general political declaration, or what? Above the collar of the jacket, her punk hairdo bounced jauntily in the sun. The last time he'd seen her, at the site of an alleged cougar mauling last year, she'd had half her head shaved and the rest bleached white-blond. Now she had a close-cropped undercut in the back, which had been allowed to grow out a natural-looking brown, while the somewhat longer teased-and-sprayed top part of her hairdo was dyed in what he could only think of as mermaid colors: rich aqua, green, dark blue, and purple. Something about the place where the growing-out shave job met the top of her neck drew his eye. It looked very soft. There was a part of him that wanted very badly to pet it.
He'd had a feeling that warning her off would only make her double down on her investigative efforts. But he'd had to try.
His shin still hurt. Girlfriend had a mean kick.
An incoming text buzzed his phone. It was from Trish. Boss, are we still meeting at the morgue?
On my way, he texted back.
The King County Medical Examiner's Office was located in the Harborview Medical Center, a sprawling complex of medical towers on a hill overlooking I-5. Noah had never been there before; his job didn't usually entail autopsy visits. He was more of a "show up on the scene and talk to the media crews" kind of guy.
First time for everything, though.
He found Trish in the underground parking garage, leaning a hip against her tidy little Fusion. He snagged a parking space a few cars beyond hers, and Trish came trotting over to meet him.
Trish Begay was Navajo and a pronghorn antelope shifter. With a degree in marketing from the University of Arizona, Trish worked part-time for a Seattle design firm and part-time in the SCB's PR department. She was far and away the most competent employee Noah had ever had. His department tended to collect rejects and an ever-changing roster of interns, so when he actually found someone who was smart and good at the job, he wanted to hang onto them. He'd been trying unsuccessfully to lure her into a full-time job, but he couldn't blame her for not wanting to take the pay cut that would come with sacrificing her much more lucrative marketing job. The SCB was lucky that she was willing to work part-time for them at all. Trish could've made several times the money by taking a salaried full-time job at any ad agency in town.
"Morgue visits," she said, folding up her sunglasses and tucking them into her purse. "How cheery."
"And you thought this job couldn't get any more exciting," Noah said as they fell into step together.
"Well, it beats sitting around the office thinking about my lousy love life."
"I thought you were seeing what's-her-name."
Trish combed her fingers through her long dark hair, twisting it up into a coil that she secured with a clip. "Patty? No, we broke up. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the shifter thing, and she couldn't figure out why I was so secretive. She thought I was cheating on her. Maybe I should have told her, but ... that's so much trust, you know? I thought I could wait until we were more serious, but we never had a chance to get serious." She sighed. "Dating sucks, man, all the more so when you're restricted to the bi and lesbian part of the local dating pool, and have to narrow it down to the shifter segment of that."
"You're swearing off dating humans?"
"It's just not worth the heartbreak. The one girlfriend I did tell about the shifter thing laughed in my face and then got mad. She thought I was making fun of her." She shook her head. "Trust me, Noah, don't fall in love with a human. It only hurts."
For some reason an image of Peri popped into his head, the mermaid-colored punk hairdo and the defiant set to her jaw. His shin still ached.
"You're right," he said. "Humans are nothing but trouble."
"Damn straight."
On the second floor of the building, they showed their badges to the receptionist. "Homeland Security?" she said, interested. The SCB was technically lumped under the Homeland Security umbrella; the badges showed both agency names. "That's rare. Usually we just get cops, press, and family members. Sometimes FBI or DEA. Today we get the CDC and Homeland Security. What can I do for you?"
Noah and Trish shared a glance. "Centers for Disease Control?" Noah said. "What did they want?"
"Something to do with a new strain of SARS they're tracking. And," she added, "for confidentiality reasons, that's all I can tell you without a warrant, sorry. What are you here about?"
"Two bodies that may have come in sometime in the last couple of days. One's a John Doe; the other is named Margot Lewis." Peri's website was useful for some things, at least—they'd been able to get as much information as she had on the two alleged victims. This would be the kicker, Noah thought. If the morgue had no record of a Margot Lewis—
The receptionist looked up, startled, with her fingers poised over her keyboard. "You're not working with those CDC folks, are you?"
"No," Noah said. "Were they here about the same bodies?"
"Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. They might still be down there."
"I'd really like to talk to them before they leave."
It had to be either unrelated or a cover for something else. Shapeshifters, with their heightened immune systems, were unlikely to contract SARS. Last fall, his office had stumbled on a lab that was trying to create artificial, lab-designed shifters. Maybe something like that was going on here. It would be the height of irony if he'd walked into the middle of a different government conspiracy that the SCB, for a change, wasn't involved in.
The receptionist reached for her phone. "You'll need someone to escort you. Let me see if Dr. Bassi is available."
Noah tried not to jitter with impatience. He really wanted to talk to those CDC people before they left. If only he could shift into something inconspicuous ... but unlike some of his coworkers, who could become something small like a gecko or a spider, he was a tiger. Not exactly useful for sneaking around without being noticed. And Trish's antelope wasn't much of an improvement.
However, Dr. Bassi didn't keep them waiting for long. Rather than the gray-haired old dude he'd been subconsciously expecting, she turned out to be a stern-faced woman in her thirties, her sleek dark-brown hair pinned back in a no-nonsense bun.
"Yes, I worked on the autopsies," she said as she took them through a door behind the reception desk and down a flight of stairs. "That media report is ridiculous. Both of the individuals were homeless. One died of pneumonia, the other of a stroke, both caused, or at least contributed to, by a respiratory virus. Tragic, but perfectly routine."
"I understand both bodies had significant deformities. What's your professional opinion on those?" In other words, he needed to know how much lying he was going to need to do. Bassi wasn't a shifter; he would have known on sight. As a human, she shouldn't have recognized what she was looking at, but she might be one of the few who knew about their kind.
"Congenital birth defects."
"In both of them?" Trish asked, hurrying to catch up. "Isn't that a weird coincidence?"
"Maybe, but you get coincidences like that all the time. Two bodies coming in with the same rare cancer, that kind of thing." She shrugged. "I'm not sure how much I can help you if the CDC's already left. They're claiming the bodies—"
"Wait, they're con
fiscating them?" Noah would have overtaken her in the stairwell if he'd been sure where they were going.
"Yes, the paperwork's already filed."
"Did you sign off on it?"
"I didn't see any reason not to." Bassi stopped on the stairs and turned to frown at him. "Is there a problem?"
"I hope not. Do they have the bodies already?"
"If there's some kind of problem—"
"It's jurisdictional, that's all." At least he hoped that was all it was. "Why don't you go back upstairs? I've got it from here."
She gave him a level look and opened a door leading into a brightly lit room with a short row of steel tables. To Noah's relief, there were no visible corpses or anything else unpleasant, though his sense of smell, slightly sharper than human, caught hints of blood and other bodily fluids under the powerful scent of cleaning chemicals.
A bored-looking twenty-something white kid with a scruffy ponytail was wiping down the countertops. Dr. Bassi hailed him. "Zach, did the CDC team already leave?"
"Yeah, they took those weirdo stiffs out the back." Looking up, he caught sight of the visitors. "Uh, I mean, they moved the—"
"How long ago?" Noah interrupted.
"They just left. You might be able to catch 'em."
Bassi moved to intercept Noah and Trish. "Agents, I'm afraid this is really overstepping your bounds. Unless you have a warrant—"
"Sorry, ma'am. This is important. Which way did they go?" he asked the kid.
"Elevator to the loading dock is over there." Zach pointed beyond the row of sinks. He laid aside his cleaning gear and stripped off his rubber gloves so he could follow them. "What's goin' on?"
What am I, the Pied Piper? "Both of you stay here," Noah told them. "This is federal business."
"I can't let you down here without an escort." Bassi stepped into the elevator with the agents, and before Noah could stop him, Zach crowded on too. Trish looked amused.