by E. A. Copen
“I had an uncle who was a cop,” Doc said. “Worked vice. Some of the things he saw... Well, he worked himself through three wives before he married his whiskey and put a bullet in his head. I know all about cop therapy, Judah. Burying yourself in your work so you don’t have to face that empty feeling of loss.” His fingers squeezed on my shoulder.
I shrugged his hand away. “Look, Doc, I appreciate your concern, but I really am fine. I’d love to stand here with you all day and chat about my feelings, but I’m late for work. Thanks again for the referral.”
He nodded once. “Of course. Anytime you need me, Judah, just call.”
I shoved the script into my pocket without folding it. The paper wrinkled and crumpled there, which was probably all the use it was going to get. No amount of talking would ever change Sal’s mind. He wasn’t about to take Mia to a shrink. Maybe if Daphne encouraged him to, but I doubted it. The Silvermoons liked to handle things inside the pack. Taking her to a stranger would mean admitting weakness, defeat. Injury. Predators don’t do that, not unless there was no other choice. At the very least, maybe I could get her to talk to Daphne. Sal trusted her.
I met Sal in the parking lot leaning against his truck with his back to the door. A long trail of smoke drifted up to dissipate several feet above his head.
“I thought you said you were going to quit smoking.”
He flinched as I spoke. He must have been deep in thought if he didn’t hear me approaching.
Sal pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at the smoldering end of it. “Yeah, I should, especially after…” He trailed off.
Chanter. The unspoken name hung between us, heavy like six feet of dirt. Neither of us had spoken it since that day. We buried his name with him. That was their tradition, to not speak of the dead. Sal believed they couldn’t rest as long as the living kept bringing them up. I’d never told him how Chanter had helped me the day I saved Mia. If not for him, I would have never survived the spell. Even in death, Chanter had given everything to protect me, something I’d never felt like I deserved.
Sal put the cigarette back in his mouth, took one last, long drag and then dropped it to the ground to crush it with his shoe. “You know, I can’t help but wonder how things would be different if he was here. He would’ve loved being a grandfather. Mia would have been his world.” His fingers jerked up to crush against his palm until the knuckles turned white.
I slipped my arm around his and leaned into him. He released the fist. “I’m sure he’d be proud of you and never say it. You two’d be bickering about everything, just like you always did, but deep down, he’d be proud. He always was.”
“It doesn’t feel the same since he’s been gone. Nothing does.”
Not knowing what to say, I just stood there. The silence felt hollow. Something chewed at my gut and a new heaviness settled in my chest. In the distance, a car backfired. I felt Sal’s arm jerk at the sound as he jumped at it.
He cleared his throat. “You think I should take her to Doc’s shrink, don’t you?”
“I think Doc knows what he’s talking about. I also think you shouldn’t throw away an idea just because it’s different. But you’re her father. You know best.”
He tilted his head, resting his cheek on the top of my head. “If it were Hunter, what would you do?”
I’d taken Hunter to counseling before, after he’d been kidnapped by a wendigo. Mostly, that resulted in an hour of him sitting across from the shrink, shrugging his shoulders and crossing his arms. He didn’t want to talk and I couldn’t make him. After a while, getting stuck with the ninety-dollar-an-hour fee once a week just got to be a waste of money, so we stopped going. It never helped him.
The last shrink I’d seen was the one BSI sent me to in Cincinnati. She told me I should spend less time at work and more time focusing on myself. Yoga, she told me, would help calm my body and mind. I never followed through. The only reason I even went was so that BSI would clear me for duty.
I sighed. “It’d be easier if it were Hunter. He’s older. I know he wouldn’t cooperate. It might help Mia. One or two appointments can’t hurt, can it?”
“I suppose not,” Sal said and turned to kiss the top of my head. He tugged open the passenger side door of the truck and held it. “Come on. I’ll give you a lift to work.”
I slid in next to Mia, who offered me part of a mushy graham cracker she’d found in her car seat. She stuck it in her mouth when I declined.
I suppose if I’d been a perfect stepmom, I would have taken it away from her and wiped her face and fingers with some designer baby wipes. In real life, though, you choose your battles. A mushy graham cracker wasn’t going to kill her, and I’d never sprung for designer wipes. That’s life as a parent. You always start out with the best intentions, but exhaustion and expenses often dictate more decisions than you care to admit. Real life parenting is dirty, messy business with lots of gray.
Sal climbed in behind the wheel and shook out another cigarette. He put it in his mouth and tugged the lighter from his pocket. I cleared my throat, drawing his attention, and pointed my chin at Mia.
“Right,” he grunted and plucked the cigarette from between his lips to tuck it behind his ear.
I frowned. I hadn’t seen him smoke two cigarettes in a row for a long time. The stress of everything was getting to him. He needed an outlet, a life away from me and the kids. He needed friends, something the Kings had provided for him before Mia came along. I didn’t want him to hang with them any more than he had to, but he needed somewhere to be without the expectation of responsibility. He needed space. I couldn’t give him that, not with this case landing on my lap. There wasn’t much of anything I could do but be there.
I reached across the seat and put my hand on his. “Thank you.”
“For what?” He asked leaning back in his seat, staring straight ahead. “I screw up everything I do.”
“You didn’t screw me up. You saved me, in more ways than one.” I offered a smile that he didn’t return.
Sal blew a breath out through his nose and started the truck. “You’re late for work,” he said.
I withdrew my hand. Dammit, why couldn’t I find the words to make everything better?
~
Mia’s appointment had been before hours. It was early when Sal dropped me off, so the station wasn’t alive yet. It was mostly cops from the redeye shift, dragging themselves to coffee pots or filing their last reports while waiting for the morning shift came in. I got a few nods of acknowledgement but not much else on my way to my office on the second floor.
My office had either been a very large broom closet or a punishment at some point. Nobody gives a cop a corner office that tiny as a reward. I had enough space to hold my six filing cabinets and my desk only if I stacked the cabinets. There was a window, though, and that was the room’s only selling point. In the colder months, it was freezing and Hell was probably cooler in the summer. The wi-fi was spotty and I’d shooed away more than one mouse who decided to make my bottom drawer home. But it was my office, dammit, and the door should not have been standing open at nine o’clock on a Friday morning.
I stopped just short of the door at the sound of papers shuffling inside. A filing cabinet drawer rumbled closed. Whoever was in there wasn’t trying to be covert.
The door creaked when I pushed it open wider. My intruder was a man of six-foot-three with a crooked nose and wavy, chin-length hair. He’d stripped off his long, leather duster and hung it on the back of my chair. A wide-brimmed leather hat sat amongst the unsorted mail on my desk. A black leather vest, black pants and black boots rounded out the nice goth look that went with his pale skin. He held one of my files, flipping through it with a very unimpressed look on his face.
His gray eyes danced with a smile that his face didn’t betray when he flicked them up at me. “Dobroe utro, Agent Black. You are late.”
Chapter Eight
“Abe,” I said, pushing the door open the rest o
f the way. “What are you doing here? And why are you in my files?”
He closed the folder and gestured at me with it. “Your office is a mess, Judah. How do you find anything in here?”
I dropped my purse on the floor behind the door and kicked a cardboard box full of more files further into the darkest corner of my office. I was pretty sure there was a colony of man-eating spiders back there. “Mess? It’s pronounced organized chaos.”
“Do you even have a filing system?”
“Yeah, it’s called Windows and control F.” I grabbed the file folder out of his hands and dropped it in the closest drawer. “Most of these are just paper back-up copies of stuff I’ve already digitized.” I put my hands on my hips. “So why are you here?”
Special Agent Abraham Viktor Helsinki was one of BSI’s top agents and a liaison between the agency and several foreign vampire clans. We’d worked together on only one occasion, though I’d consulted him over the phone several times since then. I didn’t usually get along with my co-workers inside the agency, especially letter of the law guys like Abe, but the half-vampire had his own unique charm that made him hard not to like. Since he was technically my superior, I was obligated not to trust him.
As far as I knew, Abe only worked high-profile cases, and I didn’t have any of those on my desk that he might be interested in. An abandoned, burning house might have been big news locally, but it probably didn’t even make the statewide papers, let alone national news.
Abe’s face sobered. He placed his hands on either side of him, gripping the desk as if he were supporting himself. “I am here for two reasons. After several incidents across the country, BSI has opened an investigation into the Vanguards of Humanity.”
I raised an eyebrow. “A formal investigation?”
“The brass currently feels that the group here in Concho County does not represent the organization as a whole. This investigation does not have wide support within the upper echelons of government.”
One of the lower drawers in my filing cabinet was sticking out, so I kicked it closed. “In other words, the only reason an investigation is happening at all is to placate a minority and nothing’s likely to come of it.”
“Just so.” Abe inclined his head. “Unless someone were to find irrefutable evidence that could not be buried. BSI has sent me without specific instruction. It was heavily implied, however, that burying any evidence I found would be a wise career move.”
Dammit. That was even worse. I liked Abe and could trust him to a degree, but he walked on the right side of the line. If BSI had sent him down for a cover-up, he might just do it. Or, maybe he wouldn’t. Not following those unspoken instructions would be career suicide. Who knew what BSI would do if their poster boy gave the board of directors the finger?
And then it hit me. If he was planning on a cover-up, I would be the last person he would tell. “You’re not going to do it?”
Abe shrugged. “We shall see what evidence I can find. I believe this is a test of loyalty from the new director. He does not trust me. Perhaps he is right not to.” He offered a tight-lipped smile that made me feel a little better.
I walked around my desk to sit. The desk wobbled when Abe pushed off it to stand and face me. I pressed the power button on my laptop and waited for it to boot up. “You said you were here for two reasons?”
“Yes,” Abe said and then put his hands behind his back so that he was standing in a parade rest. “I am here to evaluate your performance in the field.”
My fingers froze as they walked across my keyboard and my heart picked up speed. An evaluation? That could be good or bad news. Considering my history with BSI, it was probably bad. After a bad review, they could can me, and nobody seemed to know what happened to agents if they were removed from their post. All my research said they disappeared and something told me it wasn’t because the government was sending them to Tahiti.
I swallowed the lump of nervousness in my throat. “You don’t say?”
“They were going to send Gerry but, since I had to come anyway, I volunteered. I told the brass you and I have rapport.” His smile widened and he spread his fingers over the surface of my desk. “Do not worry, Judah. Unlike Gerry, I happen to like you. Just do not give me any reason not to and this will be easy for both of us.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, then, you might as well make yourself useful while you’re here and help me with my caseload. Will you hand me that red folder over there?” I pointed to a pile of folders sitting on a shelf.
“This one?”
“No, other red folder. On the right in the basket on my door. Yeah, that one. Thanks, Abe.”
“Abraham or Agent Helsinki, if you please.”
My response was an absent affirmative noise. I was too busy flipping through the file, looking for a name among the dossiers there. I flipped one of the pages over and scanned the back before I found what I was looking for on the next page. Hector Demetrius’ name was halfway down the page. It sat alongside the other fifty names of new occupants in Concho County that I still hadn’t got out to visit as of last week. I was supposed to check in with every name on the list and see if they needed anything. Unfortunately, there were so many new BSI registered residents in Concho County every month that I was hopelessly behind.
I pulled the page out and held it out to Abe. “Hector Demetrius,” I said. “Registered practitioner. Nothing impressive. Looks like he barely registered on the XYZ scale.”
XYZ was short for the Yates-Zimmerman scale. Whenever the bureau printed results of the XYZ, they printed out a line and stuck a big, red X at the corresponding point. Hence, XYZ. The further along the line the X, the more dangerous BSI considered the practitioner to be.
Abe frowned. “If he is so unremarkable, then why are you pointing him out?”
“He’s part of a case I’m working. You did hear about the fire out by Eola?”
He nodded once. “The arson case, yes. I heard about it on the radio. He is one of your suspects?”
I opened my middle desk drawer, pulled out a clean file folder and stuck the page inside after circling his name. “No. The primary suspect in the case is Father Gideon Reed. You met him last time you were in town. Unfortunately, I have no idea where he is. I’m waiting on a warrant to go through so we can search Reed’s house. It should be here any minute, actually.”
“And this Hector Demetrius has what to do with our case then?”
“He and his group own the property where the barn caught fire. He was evasive and even insulting when we tried to question him last night and I have eyewitness testimony that says there was rem being grown in there. When we drove out to the main building, I saw more greenhouses. I think this guy is in on the rem trade.” I pulled a thicker file folder from the corner of my desk and flipped it open. Stapled to the inside was Mara’s picture. After looking at it a moment, I spun the whole folder around for Abe to see. “And Mara is involved.”
Abe drew his hand over his chin with a gloved hand. “You have a thing for hopeless causes, do you not, Judah? Yet you cannot find time to organize your office.”
“Mara was never hopeless, just a little lost.” I jabbed a finger at her picture. “She’s been avoiding me. I don’t know her status, state of mind or anything. I spoke to her at the compound, and she seemed okay, but according to my witness, she may have been taken against her will. I think Hector is hiding Reed or they’re working together. He’s sure as hell not himself. I need to bring them both in.”
There was a knock at the door and Quincy Adams, Tindall’s old partner, stuck his head in. The precinct hadn’t yet given him a replacement, so he was doing the detective thing solo. He’d lost enough weight that it showed in his cheeks and his face had a permanently frazzled look in it. He held up a handful of papers. “Were you waiting on some warrants? They just got faxed over.” His eyes traveled to Abe and then widened. “Sorry, darlin’. Didn’t know you were in a meetin’.”
Abe held out his hand and Q
uincy deposited the papers with a mumble of thanks before he slinked away. I stood, expecting Abe to hand the warrants over, but he decided to flip through them first. “’All available members of SRT are prepared to assist with the execution of the warrant at your command,’” he read. “What is SRT?”
“You still driving that ugly truck, Abe?”
He sighed. “It’s Abraham and yes.”
“Get your coat. I’ll brief you on the way.”
~
I gave Abe the short version of everything and brought him up to speed on the way across town after calling Espinoza. Most of SRT was already on the rez when I called and they were just waiting for my signal. The two missing members, Espinoza said, were questioning someone else on an unrelated case. The whole team was in position by the time I arrived at the church.
Paint Rock’s only church was a small, white and steepled building. Reed rented a power washer from someplace in Eden once a month to keep the dust from settling into the siding and re-painted it once every few months. He spent hours every week pulling weeds and placing rocks strategically around the property so that it stayed attractive. He loved his church, but he loved the people in Paint Rock even more. He made it a point to visit the sick and troubled, even those who didn’t attend church. That was the kind of person Reed was. I still couldn’t believe he’d attacked me and Ed like that. The whole thing felt off.
Reed lived in a tiny, white two-bedroom house behind the church surrounded by an iron fence. Stepping stones traced a path from the back door of the church all the way up to a gate. Red-tipped Yucca plants brushed against the fence in the light wind, creating the illusion of whispering as I walked toward the house.
The black van that SRT had arrived in sat behind the church and, when Abe and I came into view, the double doors in the back opened. Four officers in modified SWAT gear emerged. Black, Kevlar body armor rustled and I paused, worried, when I saw they were armed with M4s.