Blood of the Earth (21 page)

T. Laine took up the narrative, saying, “County and state canine units have spent the last twenty-four hours on the first two scenes, in the order the girls were taken. They got a hit on the ballet school site, though the feds can’t tell us what it means. Or won’t. What I was told was that the dogs went, and I quote, ‘Squirrelly.’” She made finger quotes in the air. “Frankly, we were there, so we might be to blame. They now want to keep the dogs separated, not mixing up dogs and scents on the nonhuman case, so we have a new team coming in from Nashville. This team has worked paranormal cases before and will be here by one p.m.”

“Specifics on the K-nines?” Rick asked.

“One tracking dog, one air dog. We haven’t had rain, so we might get a scent,” Tandy said.

I knew a lot about hunting dogs. A tracking/trailing dog followed a scent on the ground. An air-scenting dog followed it through the air. Some dogs did both tracking and air scenting. If there was little wind and no rain, air dogs with really good noses had been known to follow scents for miles. The official record was twenty-four miles to rescue a kidnapped girl. But I remembered the wind yesterday and had serious concerns about that possibility.

Rick said, “When JoJo gets here, we’ll get a quick debrief, and then I want her and you two”—he pointed to T. Laine and Tandy—“to have five hours of downtime before joining the canine unit, to keep the dogs from wigging out at our cat smell. The dogs will start at Wyatt School and move into the woods nearby,” Rick said. “And before you say anything, yes, we should have stayed out of the woods until the dogs had a chance on-site, but we have better noses than humans, even in human form, and I had hoped we might find something. I’ve requested a dedicated dog team. We might get one, making it easier to track with dogs accustomed to our scents, but I’m not holding my breath. And even if we got a team, we’d have to share them with all PsyLED units nationally.”

“Brute?” Tandy asked and then yawned hugely.

Rick looked at me. “Brute is a werewolf stuck in his beast form. He’s usually part of this team, but he’s . . .” Rick paused as if trying to figure out how to say the unexplainable. “. . . not someone we can compel. He’s in New Orleans, spying on, or maybe working for, the Master of the City there. Unless he asks to join us, that’s a no.

“The rest of us smell like nonhumans, and that’s why I’m pulling JoJo off the FBI and back to us for the day. We might confuse the dogs’ noses, so she can take point. The all-nighter means we’ll have three team members out for the morning. While JoJo, T. Laine, and Tandy are getting shut-eye, we’ll divvy up the teams differently today. Occam will still handle the trailer park door-to-door, but, Nell, can you go with Occam today, once the canine units are done? See if you feel anything about our girl?”

I nodded slowly. I could work with Occam. That funny feeling I’d felt when I saw the smooth toenails and fingernails on the werecat was gone.

“I want T. Laine in after the canine unit completes its search, to see what she can pick up magic-wise once we have a trail.
If
we have a trail.”

Tandy said, “While we’ve been talking, I got a text. JoJo has news, and she should be here in—” JoJo shoved open the door and flung herself into the room, dropped two boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts on the table, and raced through the room saying, “I gotta pee like a racehorse!”

I thought about that peculiar statement while Rick opened the top box, took one and passed around the box. Through a mouth full of donut, Tandy murmured, “Dear God in heaven, they are Hot Nows. Thank you, Jesus, for the Krispy Kreme company, and may you bless them and JoJo forever.”

I had a feeling he wasn’t really praying, so it might have been blasphemy. Or I thought that until I bit tentatively into a glazed ring of fried dough. It melted in my mouth. Sugary sweetness flared through me. I wanted to pray thanks too. It was, by far, the best thing I had ever eaten. It beat Leah’s apple uglies by a mile and a half, and her uglies had been declared the best pastries the churchwomen had ever made. It seemed the others in the room agreed, as there was no sound but moans of pleasure, the soft sounds of chewing, licking and the slurping of coffee. I drank my coffee from the Styrofoam cup and ate some more and thought that this donut might really
be
holy.

I finished my donut and licked my fingers. Into the silence I asked, “How sure are we that all the girls were taken by the same people? I mean, we only have timing and age. What if someone heard about the first kidnappings and used the opportunity to take Mira? If someone had figured out that she had some kind of magic, she might be useful. Or maybe someone wanted control over the vampires.”

Every eye came to me. It was unnerving.

“What did I say?” I asked, taking a second donut.

“Part of the briefing this morning,” Rick said, his face too rigid to be expressionless, “that we have yet to get to. Part of what we discussed last night after you left. In this room.”

“I did a sweep,” T. Laine said, starting on her own second donut. “No electronics.”

“Except we didn’t sweep the electronics themselves,” Occam said.

“And there’s no way to sweep her gift,” JoJo said, coming back into the room, “since we don’t know what it is.”

“And I didn’t set a circle at either meeting,” T. Laine said.

None of which made any sense at all.

They were all staring at me. Evaluating. Calculating.
Accusing
. I had been looked at this way by the church for years, so it didn’t surprise me. Too much. But, oddly, it hurt. I bit into the second donut and thought about what we had all been saying, trying to figure out what was going on and how to get beyond it. Whatever
it
was.

“She doesn’t know what we’re talking about,” Tandy said, “except the accusation part. She understands
that
, as if she expected to be accused of something. Or, rather”—he tilted his head, his eyes half-lidded—“as if she has always been accused, all her life, and why should we be any different?”

And then I did understand. They were accusing me of planting listening devices in their room or listening in some magical way. I stopped chewing and sat there, in the upholstered chair, thinking about the accusation, gooey dough in my mouth. Thinking about the conspiracy theorists in the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church.

I felt something strange bubble in my chest, push its way up and out through me. It was that strange sound again.
I was laughing
. It was a peculiar noise, sort of giggly and high-pitched, muffled by the donut in my mouth. I chewed and giggled some more, investigating this new feeling inside me. Giddy. Silly. The others looked baffled. I shook my head and managed to get the bite of donut swallowed, without choking, and drank some coffee to make the half-chewed bite go on down.

“She had no idea what we were talking about,” Tandy said, “until she started laughing. And now she’s . . . I don’t know what to call it. Drunk on amusement?”

“Nell?” Rick said.

I sipped more coffee, still giggling. When I could speak, I
said, “Conspiracy theorists.” Tandy started laughing too, one hand over his mouth as he chewed. Much more slowly, as they pieced together what I might have meant, the rest of them started laughing.

Rick shook his head. “We are . . . conspiracy theorists? Like your cult is?”

“Not
my
cult. I told you that.” I licked delicious sugar off my mouth. “And I told you that I’m capable of deductive reasoning. And you told me that you wanted me because I thought on both sides of a box, inside and outside. So either you trust me or you don’t.” My amusement died in an instant, and I glared at him to make my point, my church vernacular hitting its strongest twang in years. “But iffen you accuse me of cheating again, I’m outta here, slicker ’n goose grease. We clear on that?”

Rick’s humor fled as well, and he studied me with steady eyes. “We’re clear. I’m sorry, Nell.”

“Forgiven. Besides, you mentioned that word,
copycat
, yesterday, and I looked it up. And, logically, I understand why you have to watch me. Now what’s in the other box? ’Cause I want more.”

Tandy smiled happily. “Nell has never tasted a Krispy Kreme before.”

“Never?”
JoJo said, incredulous, opening the second box as I finished off my second glazed. “Try this one. It’s blueberry filled.” She took another and bit down, something gooey and red poking out a hole in the side of the donut. “Thish ’uns raz’ber’. You go’ try one deese too,” she said, with her mouth full. She swallowed. “That cult is evil through and through to keep the women from eating one of God’s finest creations. ’Cause I’m betting the men eat them all the time.”

She had a point. And it made me mad. Something to think about later.

Rick said, “JoJo? Report.”

JoJo said, “Two things. One, Mrs. Clayton told me that over the course of the last ten years, six of Knoxville’s fangheads have gone missing. Disappeared, like poof”—she snapped her fingers—“and never returned. I got to thinking about the men at God’s Cloud and wondered if the one suckhead they took—the one that Jane Yellowrock got back—might not have been the first or only. Something to look into.”

She stopped talking and drank down a bottle of water in one continuous glug. When the bottle was crinkled up empty, she tossed it into a plastic garbage can and said, “You should see me chug beer. I’m only two seconds off the world beer mile champion.”

I had no idea what that meant and jotted it down for future research.

“The FBI has received a ransom demand on Girl Two, one million dollars for her safe return, same account numbers in the Turks for the transfer of funds. Again, they let her talk to her family. She was alive and unhurt. Call came in on a cell, but by the time the agents got a team there, they were gone. No cameras, no prints but the girl’s. They have this down to a science, just like the HST always did things, with multiple abductions and multiple ransom demands so that law enforcement is overwhelmed.

“FBI has run all the taped calls through various kinds of software and determined that every conversation took place in a vehicle, diesel engine—unlike the kidnap van, which was gas-powered—and the engine was an older model with some kind of knock,” JoJo said. “That is the total of what they have. Our unsubs are low-tech, fast, and smart. No mistakes. Rach—sorry, Girl One’s family deposited the money they got through Clan Master Ming, but she has still not been returned to her family. The family of Girl Two has taken similar steps. The Clayton family has not been contacted for a ransom. The feds did prelim evals on the bank account number given by the kidnapper. Because it’s a foreign, private financial institution, it’s hands-off as far as getting depositor info, but they’re applying political pressure and financial leverage. The feds might be able to buy the information on the offshore account.”

I didn’t know what the Turks were, except people from Turkey, maybe, so I tapped laptop keys to check on that.

JoJo pulled on the earrings of one ear as she talked, something she had done before. The motion looked like something she did to calm herself or to focus. Or maybe, this time, to stay awake. “Oh. I’ll update our files as soon as I get some shut-eye. I’m too tired to type right now. Where was I?” She yawned hugely. “Oh yeah. They’re using sat maps and ALDS,” she said, “to narrow down where the next call might come
from, and trying to figure out what make and model might sound like that diesel. Nothing’s been determined yet. There isn’t enough manpower in the state to cover all the possible locations.”

“ALDS? I asked.

“Algorithm for Location Differentiation Software,” T. Laine said. “It’s an acronym for the algorithm software used by law enforcement and the military to determine comparison of locations. For instance, if a military or civilian enemy typically uses one type of location to commit a crime, or drop off money, or make an exchange, that locale could be assigned a number to each set of parameters. Like, no cameras might get the locale a ten. Easy access to four outbound streets would get an eight. Three streets would get a five. Traffic might be accessed and numbered by time of day. But they assign a number for each facet of each similar location. It sounds fancy and high-tech, but so far, the math has shown little use in real-life sitches.”

Sitches,
I thought.
Situations. Got it.
Info popped up on my screen. Not Turkey the country, but the islands. The Turks and Caicos Islands were a British Overseas Territory consisting of tropical islands. The larger Caicos Islands and smaller Turks Islands were in the Lucayan Archipelago, which were located between Cuba and Haiti. I had never heard of them, but they were big business in the financial world, with seven licensed banking institutions and several private financial organizations.

I said, “Can we go back to
offshore accounts
? I don’t understand.”

“The HST uses them all the time,” Rick said. “Using offshore accounts and rerouting the money through other banking institutions and countries is the best way to get through an abduction without being caught. Of course, they would need to go to the island country to open the account. So far as I know, opening an initial account isn’t something that can be done from home. Everything about the ransom MO, if not the kidnappings themselves, points to HST, which means that the Human Speakers have ties to this. They have to be in Knoxville.”

JoJo said, “So someone in the HST—and yes, the FBI is assuming HST is behind at least some of the abductions—had to go out of the country. They’d need passports and money in
hand; cash is preferred to open most offshore accounts. Dozens of HST members have passports, and the feds have to know how many have traveled out of country recently, but they didn’t share that info with me or the local LEOs. So I ran my own search, through our own databases, of known HST members who’ve traveled outside of the country. We have four.”

All I got from that was more questions, but the only thing I could think to say was, “Leos?”

“Law Enforcement Officers,” Tandy said gently. “Ease up, you guys. She’s . . . rattled.”