Blood of the Earth (34 page)

“Yes. But that can wait until we get a gander at the Stubbins farm. Rick wants us on-site.”

The van rolled out of the trees. The Stubbins house was set in a flat area about halfway down a slope, between two hills, with the gully where the hills met about a hundred fifty feet from the front door. A trickle of water ran through it, but the topography of the land suggested that the gully would carry a lot of runoff in big rains. The area around the house was hill mud, brown and grayish, with a goodly rock content. Not as good for farming as Soulwood, but okay for cattle. The extralong cattle trailer behind the house and the fences that cordoned off pastures to the south and west said it had been used for that purpose. The absent smell of cow manure said it had been a while. The place was a proverbial anthill of activity.

There were FBI vehicles, an ambulance, sheriff cars, two crime scene vans, and, in the distance, news vans behind a barricade. There were also ruts in the grass of the house’s yard where eighteen-wheeler-sized trucks had been parked, and then had recently churned up the lawn, driving away.

There was a large group of men and women in white suits at the cattle trailer, mud to their ankles. And damp from a rain that hadn’t fallen in the compound. Occam rolled down his
window and tilted his head, as if listening to the wind. Tandy held still, watching the werecat, and I watched them both. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked, “What’s over there?”

“Body,” Occam said. “The feds are all over it like white on rice. According to what I’m overhearing, the body ties the Stubbinses to HST.” He slanted a look at me and tapped the side of his head, sending his blondish hair swinging. “Cat ears. And they got a boy over there.” He pointed to a small group of men near a car. A boy’s familiar head was about chest high on them. The boy who had led the attack on my house. Occam tilted his head at a slightly different angle, listening. “He claims . . . he’s Jael Stubbins, son of Nahum Stubbins. His daddy lost his job recently and they came back to stay on the family farm awhile.”

Occam listened and I stayed so quiet I scarcely breathed. Nahum Stubbins had left the church, according to the Nicholson women. Had Nahum really lost his job or were these more backsliders staying at the Stubbins farm? Too much coincidence.

After a bit he said, “The boy was at the church when the shooting started and he hid under the floor of a house. When he got here, the place was deserted. His daddy and uncle and two of the mamas are gone. He’s been abandoned. He’s sniffling, crying.”

He turned his head, picking up parts of conversations from different parts of the grounds. I made a note to never whisper secrets in his presence, and decided that my escape from my own house this morning had been sheer luck. A bit later, Occam said, “Jael’s daddy and his uncle have been having company, what the older men call
townies
.

“The feds over there”—he pointed to a group standing on the front porch of the house—“found HST manifestos. We now have a clear link between the church, or at least a faction, and HST.”

That meant that the FBI would be all over the church grounds. I didn’t know whether be happy about that or miserable at the trouble it would eventually cause my daddy.

Another car pulled up and Rick got out, walking with a long-legged stride to the porch. The men there walked down the steps and away, not speaking. Ignoring Rick. Who was PsyLED and a were-leopard. It was a clear indication of the
rampant prejudice in the state’s law enforcement agencies, and it had to hurt. But Rick walked through them and inside as if he didn’t notice.

Occam and Tandy got out of the van. I followed much more slowly. It had grown cold this morning, with a wind blowing, and low, wet clouds scudding across the hilltops. I had only a thin layer of clothing, no coat or sweater. Though the trees were still mostly green, colorful leaves swirled in the breeze and danced before me in loose spirals. I crossed my arms and followed the men across the rutted, muddy road and up the stairs.

Inside it was just as cold. The door closed behind us, cutting off the wind, which made me feel warmer, but inside, the smell of urine was horrible. Ammoniac, astringent, harsh, an eye-burning stench. I turned in a circle to see why. There were traces of urine running down the walls . . . everywhere.
Someone had peed on the walls
.

A white-clad crime scene tech looked up at me and laughed, not unkindly. She was wearing goggles and a face mask. “I know, right?” she said.
“Men.”

“Watch the sexism, Sharon,” Rick said, semiteasing, his face as relaxed as if the ostracism on the front porch hadn’t happened. But she was right. The smell was horrible. I covered my nose and breathed through the cracks between my fingers.

Rick said to Occam, “Same one?”

“I think so. What does Paka say?”

“Same one,” Rick said. Neither one explained the exchange to me.

The house was a shambles. A hundred-year-old handmade wooden table lay on its side. Hand-turned spindle chairs were broken everywhere. Shattered pottery appeared to have been swept or kicked into the corners, spoiled food still on some surfaces. Pizza boxes and beer cans had been stacked and tossed. Chairs had been destroyed. The couch and a recliner looked like someone had slashed them with a knife, and stuffing erupted like a fluffy volcano.

Crime scene techs were working in every room. An older tech barked, “Stay between the markers. The walkway has been worked up already. The rest of this place is a disaster.” I nodded in silent agreement and stepped into the walkway
through the mess, the wood floor clean and marked with what looked like little pink plastic triangles. Yellow triangles, each of them numbered, were in other places. I figured the yellow ones were for evidence, the pink ones were for directions.

Holding my wrist against my nose, I took the pink-marked path. In the first-floor bedroom were more yellow markers. Books and papers were on the floor, files were strewn across the bare mattress. Rick stood in the room, alone, his face lined and drawn, staring at the file in his hands. From where I stood I could read the title stenciled on the front:
PARANORMALS WITHIN OUR BORDERS
. Beneath that, in larger print, were the words
CIA
:
CLASSIFIED
, and below that were the initials
FYEO
, which I didn’t understand.

Tandy was standing close to me, and I was so cold that I could feel his body heat across the minuscule space. I met his reddish-brown gaze, looked to the file and back with a question on my face. Tandy leaned close and whispered, “A classified file from the Central Intelligence Agency marked ‘For Your Eyes Only.’”

I thought about that and little pieces came together in my mind with almost audible clicks. This was the file with a list of all registered paranormals, which HST had been said to possess, but it hadn’t been created by them. The data had been amassed by a government or law enforcement group—or better yet, by one or two researchers in such a group—and sent to one government person. That couldn’t be good. That spoke of factions and maybe of one high-up individual using resources to a personal, paranormal-hating end. And then giving the list to the HST . . .

A second puzzle piece slid into place that suggested PsyLED had been provided with incomplete information into the FBI’s abduction investigation of the human girls, for some purpose other than case jurisdiction, command structure, and decisions. Maybe because of this file, which proved the government had been tracking paranormals, and they didn’t want the paranormal cops in PsyLED to know about it.

I remembered the ostracism on the porch and nodded my understanding.

“LaFleur,” someone shouted from the front. “Where the hell are you?”

Rick looked up and handed me the file. “Under your shirt. Quick.”

I tucked the file under my shirt, the icy papers cold on my skin. I wrapped my arms around myself and Tandy seemed to notice for the first time that I was underdressed. He pulled off his coat and hung it on my shoulders. I should have protested, but I had begun to shiver and the coat was marvelously warm.

To Tandy and Occam, Rick murmured, “See what else you can find that pertains to paranormals. Make it fast and get it out of here.” To me he added, “You’re our mule. Don’t let anyone see.”

I didn’t know what was happening, but I didn’t like this. Rick was hiding things from the FBI officers and the crime scene techs. Secrets always got me in trouble. But Rick walked away, leaving us in the bedroom surrounded by stacks of papers. Occam and Tandy moved fast, as if speed-reading everything and making decisions faster than light. Moments later, Occam handed me two more files and a paperback book titled,
How to Kill Paranormals
. I stuffed them up my shirt with the other file, and looked like I had gained twenty pounds, all in my belly.

Tandy used his cell phone to take photographs of dozens of other papers, but even I could tell that they were not near finished when Rick called them to head back to the van. We left behind important papers, four handguns, two assault rifles that Occam called Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifles, and the thousand rounds of nine- and ten-millimeter ammo he found under a floorboard in the closet, all boxed up. He had also found a large box of .223 Remington rounds and a box of 5.56 NATO rounds. Lots of weapons, lots of ammunition, and lots and lots of papers.

Holding the papers against my skin, and my arms crossed against the cold, I wandered back through the pink trail, looking lost and as innocent as I could manage. As we left the house, we passed several suited agents, all with muddy shoes and looks of disgust on their faces at the stench. It was a different and better-dressed group from the one that had shunned Rick, and I expected at any moment to be stopped and searched, but it didn’t happen. We ended up outside in the icy air, which smelled wonderfully sweet and fresh, and then in
the van, the van engine running and the heater on high. I stuck my booted feet into the heater blast and willed my toes warmer, but it seemed they weren’t interested in obeying.

Rick took the top secret file and Tandy and Occam each took one of the others. I was left with the paperback book. What the title lacked in imagination, the book itself made up for in barbarity and cruelty. It was poorly spelled, improperly punctuated, and full of grisly descriptions of death, with accompanying illustrations drawn by an untrained hand. There were drawings of witches being burned at the stake, drowned, and skinned alive. There were pictures of werewolves being shot with silver, doused with caustic acid, and skinned alive. Skinning alive was the method of choice for many other forms of paranormal beings, most of which were mythical. The author was singularly unimaginative and with a bloody bent. I closed the book and when Rick stepped out of the van to talk to another federal agent, I asked, “Same one what?” Occam looked up, clearly confused, and I said, “When we went in the house, Rick, the werecat, asked you, the werecat, if
it
was the same one. And you said yes, you think so, and then asked Rick if Paka, also a werecat, thought so too.
Ergo dipso
, you smelled something humans can’t. What did you smell?”

Occam gave me a half smile. “Do you mean ‘
Ergo, ipso facto
?’”

I gave him a hard look back. “Are you over being mad at me?”

“I don’t know, sugar. You over getting shot and growing roots in your belly? Because that nearly did me in.”

Which sounded like a Texan way of saying he had been scared for me. Which was nice. No one was ever scared for me. I offered a half smile back to him. “I’ll do my best to not get shot. Since I don’t know what I am, I can’t promise I won’t grow roots. And yes, I meant
ergo, ipso facto.
”

He said, “Yes. Smell. The dog that peed all over that house was the same one we smelled at the Claytons’. We smelled it on the compound today too. And our Nellie has a saying about coincidence and enemy action that seems to have become a rule in Unit Eighteen.”

I ducked my head in pleasure at that one. Occam went on. “The feds’ K-nine dog indicated that the first two kidnapped
girls were at the Stubbins farm for a while. They found evidence that Girl One died there. Girl Two was kept there too. But not our girl. Not Girl Three, Mira Clayton. Yet the dog that was at Mira Clayton’s house was here and kept inside long enough to mark the walls. A lot.”

Which meant that somehow, Mira Clayton’s kidnapping had been part of the same plan as the others, and had been carried out by the same people. Or a faction of the same people. I was mighty tired of thinking about factions and their possible convoluted plans.

“Could it be a werewolf?” Tandy asked.

“Not a were. Just a big, stinking dog that likes to mark its territory. The abductions are all related somehow, but we don’t know how or why.”

“So all the kidnappings are related to HST?” I asked.

“Related to, yes. And related to some members of the church, but we don’t know the participants.”

“Factions,” I said. “It has to be factions of both.”

Rick climbed back into the van and said, “We’ve been kicked out of this part of the investigation. We’re picking up JoJo and T. Laine and going for lunch. We need a break and we’re going to Sweet P’s, where Girl Four was taken. We never checked out that location, and we need to see what it smells like.”

The team was set up in a new hotel, not far from the old one, at Mainstay Suites. Seems they hadn’t heard about the guns and the damage. Or didn’t care.

It wasn’t quite as fancy as the suite in the other hotel, but at least it wasn’t all shot up either. Sweet Pea’s was packed with a weekend lunch crowd, so we stopped at a mom-and-pop pizza place and picked up four large pies on the way to the hotel. Pies. Not pizzas. I was learning how the unit spoke, the jargon they shared. I was beginning to think that they were pizza addicts.

The team was on the fifth floor, and had taken three rooms, the one in the middle with a large seating area for group sessions. The overpowering scent of pizza filled the suite as JoJo opened the top box and dug in while Rick passed around colas. Everyone ate in the kind of silence that was dedicated to appeasing hunger. The moment he was finished with his part of the pie, Rick dried grease off his hands and said, “Update. I’ll go first. As of three hours ago, the family of Girl Four received a ransom demand and proof of life. The money was transferred to the account in the Turks and the FBI is waiting to hear back on a recovery location. The family of Girl Two received a call that their daughter could be found in an abandoned storefront on Fletcher Luck Lane. Local LEOs and FBI went in and found the girl in the store, exactly where stated, alive and physically unharmed, if traumatized. There has been no demand for Mira Clayton.

“Crime scene techs are still at the Stubbins farm and the church compound, taking samples. Simon A. Dawson Jr., Nell’s church outcast, has not been found. Boaz Jenkins is still missing. The Stubbins family is missing, except for the boy,
who’s confused and uncooperative. The feds are still questioning members of the church, but so far, it looks like no one knew any members of HST except the Dawsons, the Stubbinses, and Boaz Jenkins, and they didn’t know that they might be/were involved with HST. No one recognized any members of HST in the photo lineup identification, and no one assisted with the abductions. This leaves us with a tangled mess that makes no sense. We clearly have kidnappings for money, likely by the HST and few church members, for three of the four girls taken. We just as clearly have one kidnapping for other reasons by members of the same group.”

Factions,
I thought.
Maybe factions of both groups. Factions make us think one thing, and then another. Factions make it tangled.

“The farm was deserted except for a young boy, Jael Stubbins,” Rick went on, “but there had been significant gunfire at the church and plenty of time for anyone on-site to get away before he got there. Tracks in the yard suggest that a few RVs and one eighteen-wheeler were parked there for some time, and hadn’t been gone long.”

“What about all those people by the cattle trailer?” I asked.

“The trailer was a different matter. There was blood spatter there. The feds think the space had been used to keep a prisoner but the dogs went squirrelly—which seems to be a clue if Nell’s hypothesis about three times being more than coincidence. Crime scene did find a bloodied scarf that belonged to Mira Clayton, so we have our proof that HST, or a splinter group of HST and a splinter group of the church, had her at one point. I’m trying to get the scarf and samples of the blood spatter for scent comparisons, which will be much faster than waiting on DNA. They also found a shoe that matches the one Girl One was wearing when she was abducted.”

I remembered the shiny blue shoe. A girl had died. A girl had been stolen from her family. A girl had been killed. And someone, or several someones, from God’s Cloud of Glory had been involved. I had survived. I touched my belly, the odd rooty scars there hard and uneven.

Rick spread out the satellite and RVACs surveillance maps. “The Stubbins farm wasn’t part of the satellite photo reconnaissance, but by piecing together edges of the shots, we now
have photos of the Stubbins farm.” He tapped the papers he had printed and taped together. “Note the RVs and the eighteen-wheeler. All now gone.”

JoJo said, “Rebel flags on this RV roof. Looks like that one has a missing AC cover. Should be easy to spot from above.”

“The feds have eyes in the sky looking for the vehicles in the hope that they stayed together in a convoy that will allow us to pick them out of traffic. So far, we have nothing. The fear is that they went to ground and/or covered the RV tops.

“Inside the Stubbins house we found evidence of people living there for some time, with enough trace to keep the techies busy for months. We found a manifesto of sorts”—he nodded at me and I gave him the book—“a treatise on how to kill paranormals with extreme prejudice, published by HST. The forward demands all nonhumans be put in concentration camps and eventually destroyed, with the exception of the ones that are ‘useful to humankind.’

“We also found a list of paranormals.” His voice went toneless, though his words were still steady. “I’ve come to understand that the CIA created a formerly top secret list of paranormals. It seems that somehow HST stole or was provided a copy of the spreadsheet and added to it. The HST list is even more comprehensive than the original. Every paranormal member of this PsyLED unit, and every paranormal creature in the nation, is on the CIA list, with contact information and personal data, including every one of us, except for Nell.” His mouth flashed me a smile that never touched his eyes. “Staying off the grid worked for the government. However, you
are
on the HST list, you and your sisters.”

Sudden fear gripped my throat with skeletal fingers, and tears filled my eyes. HST knew about my family. But Rick didn’t give me time to let the fear take hold.

“We at least know that HST spent a lot of time in that house, and it’s the first
direct
link with HST that we’ve found. Credit for that goes to you, Nell, and your idiotic foray into the compound that allowed us access to the surrounding areas, looking for suspects. The Stubbins farm was not on the list of places the FBI had been trying to get warrants for.” His tone suggested satisfaction that PsyLED had one-upped the feds. “However, if you go off again without orders, you are off this
unit. Understood?” I nodded, my face flaming. Rick poured himself some cola and drank before continuing.

“One good thing came of the interviews on the church grounds. Your sister’s family has been cleared of working with HST. Their passports were part of mission trip the church was planning, to Haiti, to dig wells and teach microfarming. And share the word of God according to God’s Cloud.” The last was said with a dose of sarcasm, and I didn’t object. But a sense of relief feathered through me, alleviating my breathlessness, knowing that Caleb and Priss hadn’t been part of HST.

“But we have a time crunch. According to Mrs. Clayton,” Rick said, “Mira doesn’t have long. We still don’t know what species Mira is, and for all we know, she’s a singularity, something that made it through, or fell through, one of the liminal lines’ weak spots, the places where there’s a weakness in reality, but whatever the girl is, she’ll be dead in just hours. That brings us back to looking at Nell’s suspects, Simon A. Dawson Jr. and Boaz Jenkins.”

Rick looked at me for a moment before continuing. “According to statements made to police and FBI, and Sister Erasmus’ statement, both Dawsons were on church property, visiting with family and friends, including Boaz Jenkins and the preacher, Ernest Jackson Jr., prior to the attack on us. Dawson Sr. was found dead, full of silver shot. No one’s seen Dawson or Boaz Jenkins for forty-eight hours. We have the photos of them in the SUV at the shooting, Dawson’s rehab, and his presence on church property. All that shows they are involved with HST, but not who,
exactly
, among our list of possible suspects, took Mira Clayton. The involvement of the Dawsons and Jenkins in the kidnapping of Mira Clayton is circumstantial at best, and what we have now would never hold up in court. Circumstantial also won’t help us
find
Mira, if indeed they took her.”

I didn’t know what liminal lines were, or weak spots, though both sounded like the church’s description of entrances to hell. Now wasn’t the time for an education, however, and I didn’t ask. I said, “So, there are four kidnappings, three by one group, Mira’s by another group, probably a faction of the bigger group?” Rick nodded his head, and, encouraged, I went on. “A few churchmen are part of group two, the smaller group.
And at the Stubbins farm, the two groups met, and maybe divided, leaving behind a boy who was away and a dead body?” Rick nodded again. “And we don’t know where any of them, from either group, went?”

“Remind me to let you do summations from now on,” Rick said with that tight smile.

“You said chasing suspects led you into the Stubbins farm.”

“Joshua Purdy.”

“What happened to Joshua?” I asked. “Last I saw, he was leaping through the air, right at you.”

That tight nonsmile pulled Rick’s face down into an emotion I didn’t have a name for except it wasn’t happy. “In the initial phases of the action, we had an . . . altercation. He shot a little boy, so I shot Joshua, cuffed him, and threw him in the back of a squad car. While I was applying pressure to the boy’s wound, Joshua ripped apart the cuffs, tore the door off the squad, and got away, down toward the Stubbins farm.”

My mouth hung open in front of a new slice of pizza. It stayed that way.

“The kid will be fine,” Rick said gruffly. “But I lost the
one
person whose questioning could tie everything together.”

I was now able to translate the expression on his face. It was loathing, for himself, for not being able to do everything right. “The boy’s life is worth more than Joshua,” I said. “We’ll catch him.”

“I don’t need platitudes,” he spat, fury crossing his face.

“I’m not offering platitudes,” I said back, just as mean. “I was speaking fact. If you want to wallow in guilt and misery, by all means have at it. But wallow later. Right now you have a job to do. So do it.”

The people in the room went still and silent, as if they’d never thought to tell Rick what he needed to hear. That was a shame. And it was something I seemed to have an unexpected talent for. That and summations.

A ghost of a smile crossed Rick’s features and his shoulders relaxed. He shook his head and scrubbed his hands through his hair before dropping them to the chair arms. “Good advice. Okay. We have files on all the known HST members, and the info hasn’t resulted in a single arrest. We
have new squares, and those squares are Simon Dawson Jr., Joshua Purdy, Boaz Jenkins, and the dog scent at multiple sites. We need deep background on them all. They’re connected to HST, and we need to find how they intersect with Mira Clayton. Mira is our single paranormal taken; she’s the only abductee whose family hasn’t received a ransom demand. It’s possible that she was taken by an offshoot of HST for a reason different from the other girls. And based on the locations of the dog scent, it’s also possible that the churchmen are that offshoot.”

JoJo said, “Boaz was living on the church compound with his wives and children until two days ago, when he disappeared. He had zero intersection with society outside of the church. He had no property, no job, no friends, and no family outside of the church. His wives are clueless, but it’s presumed he’s with Joshua.”

I thought about Mary, but there was nothing I could do to help my old childhood friend.

“I want JoJo and Tandy to visit the Master of the City, Ming, at the Glass Clan Home and talk to the vamps who used to feed Dawson. See if Ming’s people showed him or told him anything about secure places where they kept blood-meals, a place he might keep an abductee. I want T. Laine and Occam in research, taking over all the intel from the feds, and paying attention to anything they’re keeping from us.”

Rick turned his full attention to me, “I want you on the church premises, talking and making nice-nice with the natives. Find out if we’re on the right track with this. Get any locations Dawson or Jenkins might have gone to family property, hunting cabins, that sort of thing, and what weapons they have. They’ll volunteer things to you, Nell, that they might not to us. You’re our ace in the hole with the church.”

I put down the pizza slice and pressed a hand to my stomach, feeling the gnarled scars. A pit opened in my middle at the thought of going back inside, but I understood the need. Until the young girls—human and not—were safe, my own lack of security was unimportant. I wondered if Mary would talk to me. If my family would. “Okay.”

He said, “Check your e-mail on your laptop periodically.”

I understood that the others would get dinged on their cells
or tablets as needed, but my cell wasn’t as smart as theirs. And I needed to get the stolen cell phone I had given to Sam back to the owner. “I will.”

“Their answers might give you an idea who to talk to and what additional questions to ask. One thing,” Rick added. “How many times did you shoot the preacher, Ernest Jackson Jr.?”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Tandy sat up straight, staring at Rick. Occam growled softly. My chin went up. “I shot him four times with one of Daddy’s shotguns. Point-blank. Dead center. I reckon the FBI will want to question me. Am I gonna face charges?”

Rick leaned in, closer, into my personal space, his pretty black eyes staring into mine, his nostrils fluttering with scent. “No. Because Jackson Jr. got up from the crime scene and walked away.”

I blinked, feeling as if I was on the brink of something, like a high cliff with nothing beneath me. Possibilities flitted and stung at the back of my mind like angry hornets, but nothing settled. When I didn’t answer, Rick placed a series of crime scene photos in front of me. Three were photos of the place where I’d left Jackie lying, the blood pool looking as if a mop had been swished through it. A single set of bloody footprints raced away from the dais in the chapel. I studied the photos. No one had picked him up and carried him away. He had gotten up and run.

Jackie wasn’t dead
.

No one could have survived being shot four times with a shotgun at close range. It wasn’t possible. I touched my shoulder. The recoil bruises told me it hadn’t been a nightmare. I hadn’t missed, and the gun hadn’t been loaded with foam pellets or paintballs. I said, “I only got a glimpse of him after. His blood was pooling around him on the floor. His clothes were shredded, and pulped flesh showed through. His skin was going gray. He was
dead
. Deader than dead.”