Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "All right, then," Thiessen said. "Caine and I will take the first shift as the security escort on the real Peri. The rest of you—"

  "Wait, I thought I was Peri's protection detail," Noah protested.

  "No, I want you and Trish on the team checking out the local morgue. After your experiences in Seattle, you'll have a better read than any of the local agents on whether things are kosher there. Delgado can go with you for extra firepower if you need it."

  Trish smiled at Noah. "What do you say? It went so well the last time."

  "I don't like this." Noah turned to Peri. "Say the word, and I won't go anywhere."

  Peri looked nervous, but she offered him a brave smile. "It'll be okay. I won't be far away, and I'll yell if I see even the slightest hint of trouble. I don't have any desire to meet a Valeria assassin in a dark alley, trust me."

  She offered her hand, palm up. Noah closed his over it and laced his fingers through hers. He managed to muster a grin for the Arizona agents. "Good luck keeping track of her. Hope you've got your running shoes on."

  ***

  The Flagstaff medical examiner's office was located in a low beige building in a business park a short drive from downtown. A cheerful ponytailed tech whose name tag read LOPEZ met Noah, Trish, and Delgado up front.

  "You're the federal agents, right?" She took a cursory look at their badges. "You know, your office was a little vague over the phone about what you're looking for."

  "What did they tell you?" Noah asked.

  "Just that you wanted to know if we've seen anything 'weird' come through lately." She made air quotes. "Given the kind of things that we handle, you're going to have to be a bit more specific."

  "My colleagues here—" Delgado nodded to Noah and Trish. "—are down from Seattle on a serial-killer case they're working on up there. We think the guy might have been operating in this area and wanted to know if you had anything similar to what they've been seeing."

  "Our suspect picks out victims with certain kinds of congenital deformities and infects them with the flu," Noah explained. "Death might be exposure, pneumonia, anything related to that. Usually homeless people, but it's possible he's branched out to other victims now."

  He'd been wracking his brain on the drive to come up with an even vaguely plausible explanation that fit the evidence and didn't involve shapeshifters. He'd been hoping they'd luck out and find a shifter working in the medical examiner's office, but the odds were really too low to expect it.

  "Wow, that's definitely a weird one, all right."

  "You're telling me," Delgado said, giving Noah an exasperated look.

  Lopez spun her chair around to her computer. "What kinds of deformities? That ought to be fairly distinctive."

  "It's not consistent," Noah said. "But usually there will be visible deformities of the face and hands. Bony overgrowth on the face, fused fingers, that kind of thing."

  "Wow, your guy sounds like an amazing dick. I mean, for a serial killer I guess that goes without saying, but even by serial killer standards, that's low. I hope you catch him." She pulled up a database program. "How far back do you want me to search?"

  Noah and Trish glanced at each other. "Say a year?" Noah suggested.

  While Lopez paged through computer files, Noah got a text from Peri. How's the morgue?

  Dead.

  Ha ha. Hotel is deader I bet. Talked my jailers into taking me for a walk before I went over the wall.

  Noah's heart lurched. He'd expected her to make it outside at some point; he just didn't think she would have succeeded this quickly. At least she hadn't tried to give Thiessen and Caine the slip ... yet.

  Be careful! he sent.

  Peri's return text was a selfie, smiling up at her phone from under the wide-brimmed straw hat and making the victory sign with her free hand. Portrait of an innocent tourist, she texted.

  Remember you just poked a stick into a hornet's nest. Don't get stung while I'm not around to protect you.

  Awwww, Noah. You DO care.

  Of course I do, he texted. I love you.

  He sent the text before he could change his mind and take it back. Peri's answering text was a long time in coming. When it arrived, it consisted of one word. Ditto.

  "Okay, this isn't going to be simple," Lopez said, starting Noah out of a dazed and happy reverie. He hastily tucked away his phone in his pocket. "I can search by cause of death and a few common kinds of identifying marks, such as tattoos. But we're going to have to look at each record individually to see if it fits your guy's profile."

  "We can exclude any that died of vehicular trauma, violent causes, really anything other than illness or exposure," Noah suggested. "Can you narrow down the results based on that?"

  "Sure. Gimme a minute."

  Trish jumped. "Phone. 'scuze." She stepped away, holding her phone to her ear.

  Even with slightly-sharper-than-human shifter hearing, Noah couldn't hear what she said, but he heard the alarmed note in her voice, and when she turned back around, her eyes were wide. "Guys. There's a thing. We gotta go."

  Delgado and Noah shared a fast glance. "Do you think you could go ahead and have your recent files sent down to our office?" Delgado asked. "Here, I'll give you our fax and email on the back of my card—"

  Trish was almost vibrating in place. Noah was ready to charge out the door—his first thought had been that something had happened to Peri—but Trish didn't look scared, more like excited. Also, now that he'd managed to get past the initial panic, he'd realized Peri would certainly have called him instead of Trish if she'd encountered trouble.

  As soon as Delgado finished passing her contact information to Lopez, Trish herded them both toward the door. "I think we've got something better than a stiff," she murmured. "I think we've got a live Patient Zero."

  Shock sent a livewire current through Noah's brain. "What? How?"

  "I just got a call from a cousin of mine who's a nurse in the hospital here. Well, she called Aunt Mav first, who told her to call me. She's got a patient who is, you know, one of us, and has a disease she's never seen before. She sounded really freaked out."

  "I hope you told her to take quarantine precautions," Delgado said.

  "Aunt Mavis did, and she's going to try. I also told her not to call the CDC." Trish looked uncertain. "Was that the right thing?"

  "It's gonna have to be." Not for the first time, Noah thought how much easier their job would be if they could liaise properly with other agencies.

  But this was their first real break. Maybe they could finally start cracking the case, and get to the Valeria before the Valeria got to Peri.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Peri had expected to get a lot more pushback on going out in public, but Thiessen was surprisingly okay with it. "The whole point is to draw out the perps, after all. We don't want to make you a target, but if you're willing to take the risk, it'll actually help us. Right now Flagstaff is crawling with SCB agents, so you're about as safe as you would be anywhere. Just stay close to the hotel, follow instructions, and keep your eyes open."

  Peri hated to admit it, but after just a few minutes outside, she was glad for the ridiculous, enormous hat. Flagstaff wasn't as brutally hot as Tucson, but the sun was just as fierce. She already could feel her ears and the tip of her nose starting to sunburn, despite the high-SPF sunscreen she'd slathered herself with.

  Thiessen had given her a nifty little radio that fit in her ear canal like a hearing aid. She glimpsed him occasionally, always staying at least a block or two away from her and appearing to be completely engrossed in his own sightseeing. He was pretty good at surveillance, she had to admit, a tip of the hat from one professional sneak to another. She hadn't spotted Caine yet, which either meant he was seriously badass at keeping a tail, or he was sucking down iced coffee in an air-conditioned coffee shop and letting Thiessen do all the work.

  In all honesty, despite her reassurances to Noah, she wished he was there rather than the two local agents.
But it wasn't fair to make him spend the day following her around Flagstaff when he could be running down leads on the case. Rationally, she knew that Thiessen and Caine both had way more field experience than Noah did. By all rights they should be even more effective at protecting her.

  But Noah was the one she trusted.

  It made sense to split up, she told herself, and tried to put it out of her head. She wished she had her baton. She'd been forced to leave it in Seattle; Stiers had drawn the line at signing off on anyone carrying an illegal weapon through airport security, even in checked baggage.

  Sightseeing would've been a lot more fun if she hadn't been constantly looking out for Julius's scarred face among the passing shoppers. She'd wandered into a sporting goods store to get out of the sun for a few minutes when someone right behind her whispered "Signorina!"

  Peri nearly jumped out of her skin. She whirled around, reaching for her pocket before remembering the lack of baton. Instead she grabbed a large metal water bottle from a nearby shelf, the kind that clamped onto a bike frame, and gripped it to swing.

  The person who had accosted her was holding both his hands up. He was a squirrelly-looking little guy, not much taller than Peri herself and a couple decades older, starting to lose his hair. He wore a nondescript jacket and jeans, both still new enough to be creased, but overlaid with a layer of dust as if he'd rolled in a roadside ditch. His lips were cracked and dry. He didn't look well.

  "Yeah, what?" Peri demanded, waving the bottle at him and making him flinch.

  "Signorina—Miss Moreland?" Her name was just barely comprehensible, lifting at the end into a vowel: Moralanda.

  "Yes," she said slowly. So much for the disguise. When he kept staring at her, she nodded. "Yes. Moreland. That's me." She pointed at her chest for emphasis.

  He hesitated before loosing a torrent of an unfamiliar language that curved in a question at the end.

  "What language is that? Italian? Italiano?" It was only a guess, but now he was nodding. "Valeria? You? Valeria?"

  "Moreland, what's going on?" Thiessen asked in her earpiece. "Do you need us to move in?"

  "No!" she said quickly, stopping the Italian guy in the middle of an answer that was as incomprehensible to her as everything else he'd said. He stared at her, wide-eyed. "Not you!" she said. Of course he couldn't understand that either. "Everything's fine. Uh, do you speak any English at all? English?"

  His answer was more Italian, which she assumed was a no. She tried her limited French on him, in case he spoke that. He switched to another language which she thought might be German. Having reached the limits of their ability to communicate, they stared at each other in mutual frustration.

  "Peri, situation report, please," Thiessen said in her earpiece.

  "Just a minute." If the guy really couldn't speak English, she could speak freely with Thiessen in front of him. But if he was faking and it was a trap, she might tip off the Valeria that she was working with the SCB.

  This spy stuff wasn't as easy as it looked.

  "Do you speak Italian?" she asked Thiessen, looking straight at Maybe Valeria Dude so, just in case he could understand her, he would hopefully think she was talking to him.

  "No," Thiessen said. "Hang on, I'll see what I can do."

  "Nevermind, I have an idea." She got out her phone. At the sight of it, the Valeria dude's hand shot out and he grabbed her wrist. Peri wrenched her arm away with a startled yelp, thinking he was trying to take her phone away, but he let go immediately, though his hand still hovered near hers.

  "No, no, no!" he begged. "No polizia!"

  "Are you okay?" Thiessen asked at the same instant.

  "I'm not calling the police. No police. Everything is fine," she said for Thiessen's benefit more than the Valeria dude's. "Look, I'm gonna—hold on—gonna use my phone to translate, see?"

  She turned the phone where he could see it while she pulled up an internet translation app and turned on the voice option. "What do you want from me?" she asked and pointed at the Italian translation.

  He looked at the phone, and at her, and said a single word: Help.

  "Could you be a little less specific?" The translated results of this were apparently incomprehensible, based on his baffled look.

  "Help you how?" she tried.

  His answer, as interpreted through the translation app, was: I was told on her blog to my friend, and I need to help me, please.

  "Right," she muttered. "This is gonna take forever. I have a better idea. Hang on." She held up a finger for "wait a minute," which apparently he understood, and did some quick Googling.

  Bingo.

  The Internet was really an amazing thing.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, Peri led her baffled-looking informant through the door of a chain home-improvement store a short walk from downtown. She could only imagine what Thiessen and Caine were thinking right now. Thiessen told her through the earpiece that they were staying on her, whatever that meant, and they'd alerted the other team. She grunted in acknowledgement, mindful that the Valeria dude, jumpy as he was, would probably skip out if he realized she was in contact with someone.

  "Help you?" asked a weedy-looking store employee arranging a display of buckets.

  "I hope so." Peri beamed at him. "Does someone named Dawn work here?"

  "Uh ... Dawn at the paint counter?"

  "Sure, I guess so. Where is it?"

  He pointed wordlessly at the giant sign, some ways down the store, reading PAINT.

  Peri towed the Valeria guy through the store, while he did his best timid-woodland-creature impression and jumped a foot in the air when someone dropped a sheet of plywood over in LUMBER. Peri could relate. She was nervous enough already, and the guy's obvious fear was contagious, making her flinch at every sudden movement.

  There was only one person visible in the paint section, a curvy black lady with a dusting of gray in her short hair, bright purple lipstick and—yep—a name tag reading DAWN pinned to her denim shirt. "Help you, honey?" she asked.

  "I hope so." Peri flipped her phone around to show Dawn the website she'd brought up. "It says here you teach Italian. Are you the right Dawn? Is this your website?"

  "I sure do, and it sure is, but I'm at work right now, hon. I only tutor in the evenings. I can take down your number and email—"

  "But you can speak it, right?" Peri asked hopefully. "You're fluent?"

  "Pretty fluent. I went to college in Italy, and I have family from there. If you'd like lessons—"

  "Actually I wanted to find out if you'd translate for my friend here." Peri pointed at the Valeria guy, who seemed to be trying to do his best chameleon impression on the paint shelves. It didn't work nearly as well on him as it did on Delgado. "He doesn't speak English. I think the language he's speaking is Italian. I guess if it's not, you can tell me."

  Dawn was frowning now. "I'm sorry, I'd like to help you, but—"

  "What's your hourly rate for Italian lessons? I'll pay you."

  "Twenty an hour," Dawn said promptly, "but I'm at work, and I'm not going to help with anything illegal."

  "Nothing illegal," Peri reassured her. At least nothing illegal that I'm doing. At the moment. "I'm a reporter and he's my informant. I can't ask him questions because of the language barrier." She took out a twenty and plunked it on the counter. "If it helps, we can look at paint samples while we talk. Do you have something in, uh, beige?"

  Dawn's sudden smile was impish. She covered the twenty with her hand and made it disappear in a quick flash of sparkly purple nails. "We have beige, taupe, eggshell, ecru ..."

  "Yes, show me those." Peri beckoned to the Valeria dude.

  Once they were all three arrayed in front of a wall of paint chips, Dawn quietly asked the Valeria guy a question. This prompted a torrent of Italian, in which Peri was pretty sure she caught the word polizia again.

  Dawn turned a skeptical look on Peri.

  "What'd he say, what'd he say?"

 
; "You promise there's nothing illegal going on here? This man is not a criminal?"

  "Not that I know of," Peri said, managing with an effort not to cross her fingers behind her back. "What did he say?"

  "First of all, I think he said his name is Fulvius, which is not an Italian name as far as I know; it sounds Latin to me. Anyway, he said he wants asylum and told me not to call the cops."

  "Gosh, thanks for helping improve my credibility," Peri told Fulvius.

  "We're getting most of this," Thiessen said in Peri's earpiece. She tried not to flinch and failed utterly. "Sounds like he and the Valeria had a falling out. Perfect. See if you can get him to come in."

  Dawn was still giving her a skeptical look.

  "See, the deal is, he got away from ... a ..." Peri trailed off, unsure how to proceed.

  "Secret society?" Thiessen suggested. "Cult?"

  "—cult. Local cult. That's what I'm investigating. I'm a reporter, like I said."

  "What paper did you say you work for?" Dawn asked.

  "I have a blog. Just a minute ..." She showed Dawn the Tell Me More! site on her phone, which unfortunately was displaying the fake Valeria story as its top post. Dawn's eyebrows ratcheted slowly upward by degrees as she read first the headline and then the first few lines.

  "Okay, so it's kind of tabloid-ish," Peri admitted.

  "Ish?" was Dawn's response.

  Fulvius grabbed Dawn's sleeve and began pleading with her in Italian, with Dawn injecting an occasional "Più lentamente" or "Come?" Her face quickly grew alarmed, which in turn alarmed Peri.

  "What? What's he saying?"

  "He says someone's trying to kill him." Dawn pulled the crumpled twenty from her pocket and shoved it into Peri's hands. "I'm done, I'm out. I have a kid. I'm not getting involved in this."

  "Hey, no, I paid for an hour of your time—" Peri began, when a sudden crash came from the front of the store. This was less like something being dropped and more like a lot of somethings being shattered.

  Fulvius screamed before Peri could stop him, but his scream was lost in the chorus of other screams from the vicinity of the store entrance.