by E. A. Copen
Abe gave me a sideways look, his face blank. I couldn’t tell whether or not he bought it. Could half-vampires hear lies in your heartbeat like vampires or smell them like werewolves? Shit, I wished I’d thought of that before I opened my big mouth. I cleared my throat again.
Abe held a bottle of water out to me. I took it, unscrewed the cap, and dumped half of it into my mouth. The other half went to washing soot and blood from my hands. “Well, you are standing on your own,” Abe said. “I am surprised at how quickly you have managed to recover. Good for a human.”
I tipped the water bottle up and swallowed the last of the water. “How’s Espinoza?”
Espinoza, who sat on the grass a short distance away, coughed, drawing my attention. He looked terrible, his face covered in streaks of black and gray. He held an empty water bottle in his hand that he laid on the grass in front of him. “Is this Seamus someone I should know about?”
“I don’t think so.” I shifted my right hand away from my pocket, hoping he hadn’t watched my exchange with Creven. “I’m going to need to talk to Ed as soon as possible.”
Both men frowned at my change of subject. “Ed Petersen. How is he connected to this case?” Abe asked.
“He’s Mara’s boyfriend, and he’s not buying that Mara joined the Adventists voluntarily. I can’t say I blame him. She’s never struck me as a girl to fall in with a cult. Something else is going on here. Reed wasn’t himself, either. Too many people are acting contrary to their personalities, Abe. We need to get to the bottom of this.”
Abe raised his head to look at Espinoza. “Will you live?”
“Smoke inhalation’s a bitch,” Espinoza answered. “But I’ll be good. Let me catch my breath and deal with this shit before I start digging up what I can through informants, see if anyone’s seen anything. In the meantime, Judah, you’d better go down to the station in Eden and bail out your werewolf friend. You can expedite his release by claiming he’s a key witness. Can’t promise those trespassing and harassment charges will go away, though. I’ll call you when I know more, I guess.”
“Call me? Call me how? My phone died last night.”
Espinoza pulled a cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to me. “Take it. It’s a burner. You ought to invest in a couple dozen of those.”
I thanked him and dropped the phone in my other pocket.
“Would you like me to give you a ride?” Abe offered.
Under normal circumstances, I would have accepted. The weight of the stolen hard drive in my pocket, however, reminded me that my bailing out Ed would serve a dual purpose. If anyone could find out what was on that hard drive and why Creven might have been sent to steal it, it would be Ed. But I wasn’t in any condition to drive the twenty miles to Eden from Paint Rock, either.
Espinoza seemed to sense my hesitance and dug in his pocket, pulled out a set of keys, and tossed them to me. “She’s parked around the corner from the church. Consider it a test drive. If you like her better than your Firebird, we’ll talk about a trade.”
“Thanks again, Espinoza.” I waved to Abe and let the keys dangle from my fingers. “Can you finish up here while I go deal with this other mess?”
Abe pursed his lips. “You are certain you are fine to drive? A moment ago, you could barely stand.”
“I’m fine.” Another lie. Maybe Abe wouldn’t pick up on that one either. My heart rate could be elevated for any number of reasons. I’d just shot a man and jumped out of a burning building, after all. I still ached all over, and I wouldn’t be able to tap into my magick for a while unless I wanted to completely lose my ability to walk or move, but I wasn’t going to die. I suppose there was a grain of truth in my lie. I was more fine than Reed, anyway.
The image of him bleeding out in the back of an ambulance on his way to the hospital hit me. Gideon Reed had been my friend, even if we hadn’t always gotten along, and I knew deep down that he was innocent. Someone or something else was making him attack people. No matter how many times Abe assured me shooting him was the right thing to do, it still felt wrong. You don’t shoot your friends.
I closed my hand around the bright red key fob and turned my back to Abe and Espinoza to walk away. My feet felt like they had lead weights attached, and my hip hurt something awful, but I fought the limp. Abe’s eyes made the back of my neck itch until I slipped around the corner and stopped to press my back against the wall of another building. The air I’d been holding in my lungs escaped in a slow breath. My shoulders relaxed as the pounding in my chest faded to a gentle flutter. I slipped my fingers into my pocket to feel the hard drive sitting there.
Answers to questions I never thought to ask. What the hell did that mean? Why would Creven want me to keep it from BSI specifically? Did Reed have dirt on BSI? That didn’t make sense. Reed was a priest. It wasn’t like he kept confessions on his hard drive. Whatever it was, it had to be something big. Creven wouldn’t have gone after it if it wasn’t.
Aside from being my magick tutor, Creven also worked as Kim Kelley’s bodyguard, which linked him to the vampire, Marcus Kelley. I’d long suspected Marcus was up to something. The guy was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company that had employed a wendigo named LeDuc, plus whatever the hell Doctor Han was. His company, Fitz Pharmaceuticals, had an exclusive government contract to provide testing materials for supernaturals. It was Fitz’s equipment every school, employer, and agency in the country used to identify supernaturals. Even BSI used them.
Could that be the link? I wondered, gliding my thumb over the cool surface of the hard drive. Maybe what I’ve got here isn’t about BSI at all, but dirt on Marcus Kelley. He wouldn’t want BSI to have that, and he just might send Creven to get it. But then why hand it over to me? That didn’t fit. Besides, why would Reed be looking into Marcus? He worked for Marcus as far as I could tell. Half of Concho County worked for him.
I needed to know what was on that hard drive, and the only person who could help me was sitting in a holding cell at Eden PD.
I pushed off the wall with a grimace and stumbled down the sidewalk, mashing my thumb on the lock button of the key fob. A car up the block chirped, and I stopped in my tracks at the sight of what he considered a trade for my beat-up, mismatched old Firebird. Espinoza drove what looked like a brand-new jet-black Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat with tinted windows. I hit the button again just to make sure. The headlights lit up and it gave a quick beep. There was no mistaking it. This was the car he’d loaned me.
I stole a glance over my shoulder, wondering if he’d hit his head on the way out of the building after all. But hey, I wasn’t about to look a gift car in the grill. I unlocked it, pulled open the door, and peered at the black leather interior with red accents. When I sank into the seat and it contoured to my aching rear, I thought I’d fallen in love and things couldn’t get any better. Then, I put the key in the ignition and started her up. She purred. There was no other word for it.
The CD turned over, and ACDC’s Thunderstruck kicked on. I stared at the bars jumping up and down on the screen set beside the dash. “God, Espinoza. Where have you been all my life?”
I pressed down the parking brake and put my hands on the wheel. “Well, let’s see what this baby can do,” I said and gave the car a little gas.
Chapter Eleven
I got from Paint Rock to the police station exit in Eden in twelve minutes flat. Two minutes of that were spent sitting at the border crossing on the way out of Paint Rock while they checked my ID and ran my tags. Guess I must’ve been driving it like I stole it or something. It was easy to do in a car like that where eighty felt more like forty. Driving down the street to the station at twenty-five felt like torture.
The parking lot beside the station was mostly full, but Espinoza had a pass on his dash with the number thirteen on it, so I pulled into the lot anyway. Each space was numbered, and as I thought, space thirteen was empty. I carefully pulled into it, flanked on either side by dusty trucks.
The ho
spital cast its shadow over the main branch of the Eden police department. The police headquarters were significantly smaller than the hospital, but that didn’t make it a less impressive piece of modern architecture. It had gotten a facelift in the last few years. The whole front was made of reflective glass, which made it look like there were two flags out front, whipping in the wind. Two stories tall, the building stretched back, made of red bricks placed in diamond patterns around white. A polished wall of steel gray held the inscribed names of the men and women who lost their lives in the line of duty. It was mostly full.
I walked past it to one of three sets of glass double doors. The station lobby had a gray floor of polished granite and a glass ceiling up on the second floor. Stairs stacked on either side of a big desk in the middle of the room led to a narrow catwalk filled with doors of wood and frosted glass. A detailed painting of a police shield decorated the floor between the front doors and the information desk along with the words “tendit in ardua virtis.” Virtue strives for what is difficult.
I walked up to the desk and leaned on it, producing my badge. The young man at the desk wore a clean, pressed uniform. Probably fresh meat from the academy. That’s what they do with the new guys—stick them on desk duty until they’ve earned a few stripes. “Can you point me to your holding cells?”
The young cop picked up the phone and put it to his ear after pressing a button. “If you have an appointment, you can wait over there,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward a seating area to the right. “I’ll call someone down to escort you.”
I frowned and shoved my badge against his nose. “I don’t need an escort. Your guys are holding a material witness in one of my cases on a trespassing charge. I need him released yesterday.”
Finally, he looked up at me, his features blanching. “Oh,” he squeaked out and slowly lowered the phone, “you’re a fed.”
I clipped my badge back on my belt. “Ed Petersen with an E. Where is he?”
“Let me pull that up for you.” The greenhorn’s fingers walked across a keyboard at a breakneck pace. “He’s in interrogation two pending formal charges.” His eyes flicked back up to me, his cheeks reddening. “Would you, ah, like me to take you?”
“Just point me in the general direction.”
He turned and pointed to an open area behind him where stairs descended into the belly of the station. “Fourth room on the right at the bottom of the stairs. You can’t miss it. Big sign on the door.”
“Thanks.” Whoever said I wasn’t polite when it counted?
I pushed off the desk and walked around it to the stairs. No one stopped me. You can walk almost anywhere without being stopped as long as you look like you’re supposed to be there. Of course, if anyone had stopped me, all I had to do was give them the same speech I’d just given the green kid at the desk.
I must have looked the sight, though, because several people near the stairs nearly crashed into each other when one of them stopped walking to stare at me. My clothes were wet and my face streaked with ash. There were blood spatters on my arm. I noticed them as I approached the stairs and tried to pull my sleeve down to cover it.
“What’s the matter? Never seen a plainclothes cop before?” I snapped at the woman who’d stopped to stare at me.
Her face flushed and she turned her perfectly contoured face away before her heels clicked off noisily. And that was why I didn’t have many co-workers as friends.
Narrow hallways and low ceilings created a more cramped atmosphere below. Doors lined either side of the hall, clearly marked with signs. The first one on the right was an observation room. I glanced in through the cracked door at the dark room where two cops stood, arms crossed, watching a rookie try to intimidate a suspect into giving up information. One of the cops saw me looking in and reached over to close the door with a scowl.
The next room was interrogation one, so I skipped it and opened the third door on the right to the darkened observation room for interrogation two. Someone from SRT was in there, a heavyset guy with a goatee. He stood, leaning against the back wall, typing into his cell phone. When I pushed the door open, he glanced up.
“Agent Black,” he said with a nod and wiggled the cell phone back and forth. “Espinoza said to expect you. My name’s Olson.”
We traded grips and I glanced to my left, where a large observation window took up most of the wall. The interrogation room on the other side of the glass was a simple one. A plain table, plain chairs, camera, trash can. Ed sat in the chair farthest from the window, his arms crossed and thumbs tucked in his underarms. His gaze was fixed on the floor between his knees while his legs bounced up and down at a hyperactive rate. He was wearing a pair of olive jogging pants and a mismatched pink tank top.
“Did he give anyone any trouble?”
Olson shrugged. “No. Complied with every order given, but hasn’t said much of anything. Hasn’t even asked for a lawyer or if he’s being charged.”
I looked back at Olson. “Did anyone call his alpha?”
“That’d be protocol, but Espinoza said there were special circumstances. Said we were to wait for you to handle it.”
That was a good thing. Sal wasn’t exactly happy with Ed right now after finding out Ed had lied to him. If Sal knew Ed had gotten arrested, he’d give Ed an ass-chewing he’d never forget. He might even do more than that. Ed was playing a dangerous game, running off and getting into trouble without the pack there to back him up. He’d get himself kicked out if he wasn’t more careful. I was sure Ed knew it, too. Maybe he didn’t care. Mara was worth it to him. He would have crawled into an active volcano for her.
“That was the right call,” I told Olson and sighed, putting my hands on my hips. “Are they pressing charges?”
“They’re running out of time to if they want to. We can only hold him for twenty-four hours, and he’s been on ice since six this morning. I haven’t heard one way or the other. Either way, federal jurisdiction would trump that. You want us to spring him, Agent, he’s yours.”
“Hold off on that. I’d like to talk to him first.” I waved to him and stepped back out with him on my heels.
Olson slid a keycard through a magnetic reader, and the little light turned from red to green. The door slid aside and he gestured into the room.
Ed’s head snapped up and he went stone still, eyes wide. Fear colored his face for a moment before he quickly turned his head away. “You here to yell at me? Or am I finally getting booked?”
“That depends on you.” The door slid closed behind me, and I crossed my arms. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Ed?”
He kept his arms crossed and shrugged.
“We can still do this the hard way. Process you. Keep you in a holding cell. Get you a public defender and let the courts have a crack at teaching you a lesson.”
Ed lowered his head and his shoulders slumped. “It’d probably be better than whatever Sal’s going to do to me.”
I stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “You know better than that. He’s worried about you, Ed. So am I. Everyone is. It isn’t like you to get into this much trouble.”
Ed let out a bitter laugh. “If you’re saying that, then you really don’t know anything about me. Everyone thinks I’m harmless. Geeky little Ed who fixes computers. I might not be big and scary, but don’t assume I’m harmless.”
“I know you’re not a troublemaker, not like Sal and Valentino.”
Ed pressed his lips into a thin line hard enough that the skin around his mouth paled a shade. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he said in a quiet voice. “But I know Mara wouldn’t join a group like that. I know it like I know a bard needs charisma points, Judah, like a ceiling is up and the floor is down. It just doesn’t make sense. She can’t be there by choice. She… She…” He sniffled and lowered his head, putting a hand over his eyes.
I knew what he was trying to say, and there weren’t words for that kind of loss. He loved her, and she’d just left, not
for someone else or a reason that made sense to him. Mara left him because she wanted to find a missing piece of herself. Maybe she thought the Tribulation Adventists could help her find it. Maybe she was up to something else. I couldn’t know. But if it didn’t make sense to me, I couldn’t imagine how confused Ed must be. There wasn’t anything I could do to make him better, but I could tell him he wasn’t as alone as he felt.
I leaned over and put my arms around his shaking shoulders, giving him a tight squeeze. “I know. I know it hurts, Ed. I know how shitty you feel right now and how all you want to do is get back what you lost. And maybe you’re right. Mara might not be there of her own free will, but you have to know that charging into private property and harassing people there isn’t going to win her back.”
“I know,” he choked out and sniffled some more. I pulled my arms away. “I know you’ve got a case and that I got in the way. I just don’t want to sit on the sidelines this time. I can’t stand to be so…”
“Helpless?”
He raised his bloodshot eyes to meet mine and sniffled again. “That.”
“Well, you’re not helpless. Not completely. I have something I need your help with.”
His throat bobbed. “Will it help Mara?”
“I don’t know. I do know it has something to do with Gideon Reed and that you’re the only person in the whole county who can help me with it.” I leaned in closer to whisper. “And it’ll have to be off the record. BSI can’t know about it. I’ve got a hard drive I need you to crack.”
Ed blinked and licked his dry lips. “Really?”
“Would I lie to you? You’d know.”
Ed stole a glance at the two-way mirror on the other side of the room. “So, about the charges…”
“No charges are being filed,” I said with a faint smile. “And Sal doesn’t even have to know if you don’t want him to. This can be our secret.”