Nightshades (11 page)

“Because of me,” she said flatly. “To draw me out, force me to move against you?”

He shrugged. “My experts have suggested that studying your blood will help them figure out how to repeat the effect. I had to get your attention somehow. And it worked, didn’t it? You got careless. You became obsessed.” He shook his head fondly. “I have to admit, though, you gave me a run for my money. Do you know how many hackers I had to eat before I found one that could track your activity on the Darknet? I mean, talk about waste.”

Lindy made an effort not to clench her jaw. “All this just to boost the telepathy?”

“Of course. In part, anyway.” He looked a little confused. “I thought you of all people would get it, Lindy. That’s the dream, isn’t it? One smooth, unblemished conversation between like minds? Its what you and I used to have, and its what all of them want. To never have to be alone, ever again. The humans have all these little devices for constant communication, but their devices have been tainted. They can be hacked, corrupted, broken. I’m going to beat them at their own game. Shades will be even more superior than we are now, and they’ll see our advantages and tremble.”

She let out a short laugh. He was just so earnest, so ridiculous. He really saw himself as the messiah of vampires. King, indeed. “You don’t believe me?” he demanded.

“I believe
you
believe it,” she countered. “But you’re lying to yourself again, Hector. You might want to show off for mankind, but you’re not going to stop there. You’re still angry about New York. You’ll use your little telepathic commando force to kill people.”

He smoothed down his perfect lapels. “You’re being too emotional, Sieglind. Look at the numbers. Too many of us died during Eradication, and now those who remain have to go underground. And humanity is suffering for it. Surely you’ve noticed the rise in illnesses. Everything is worse, from autism to allergies. There simply aren’t enough of us to keep humanity’s diseases from spreading.”

“So make more,” she broke in. “You love making fledglings; why not just focus on that?”

“
Because,
” he said with exaggerated patience, as if she were a belligerent child, “while our numbers have decreased, theirs have skyrocketed. The planet is overpopulated; it’s dying. These humans don’t care: they’ll be dead before it truly expires. But we’ll still be here. The only way to save us, to save
all
of us, is to cull the herd.”

Lindy shook her head in disgust. He was like one of those evangelical preachers who picked and chose certain bits of the Bible in order to justify any atrocious behavior they felt like committing. “You make it sound so noble, but we both know you want revenge,” she said in a low voice. “Plain and simple. You’re pissed about Eradication, and you want them to know it. Now that we’ve been exposed, you’ve got your chance to—” She stopped short as the realization hit her. Hector raised his eyebrows inquiringly. “You
sent
Ambrose to get caught,” she said accusingly. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Does he know he’s the sacrificial lamb?”

One side of Hector’s mouth turned up in the devilish smile she knew so well. “Of course not. To be fair, I never thought the American courts would let it go on this long. I thought for sure they’d have killed and dissected him by now.” He shrugged.

The fury rose in her until it seemed to fill her up, like a balloon under her skin. Hector had exposed thousands of years of secrecy, out of a petty grudge? “You call yourself a king,” she spat, “but do you know how confused and terrified our people are over this? How
lost
? All so you could play your petty games? You son of a bitch.”

“Careful,” he hissed, real anger naked on his face. “That’s
your
mother, too.” Catching himself, Hector paced a few steps toward the window, preening. “Anyway. You don’t get to talk to me about responsibility and leadership. You walked away, remember? And now Giselle tells me you’ve joined up with those cretins, hunting down our own kind.” He shook his head in disgust. “You whore. I never thought you’d actually
work
for them.”

She blinked, surprised. “You must have known the BPI tracked me down. You were the one who sent them.” She still didn’t understand why he’d given the BPI her name just as he was sending his own people after her. It probably didn’t matter at this point, but the longer he talked, the more time Alex McKenna had to find her.

Hector’s eyes narrowed. “I absolutely did not. I knew they caught up with you in Cincinnati because my people were also there. I assumed you’d kill or mesmerize them.”

“You
just
said you got a hacker to find my current ID, tracing my Darknet activity,” she shot back. “Ambrose gave the same ID to the feds. Are you trying to tell me that your pet worm has gone rogue?”

Hector tilted his head, his irritated expression falling away as he thought that over. “That’s very interesting,” he mused, in that arrogant way he had, where he forgot anyone else was in the room. “I’ve been briefing Ambrose on our efforts, but I wonder what our Agent McKenna did to convince him to share.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter now. The point is, I never thought you’d actually become their pet. You act as if I betrayed you, but you betrayed our entire kind.”

She opened her mouth to remind him that he’d
tried to kill her,
but stopped herself. They were just going to go around and around again. This was getting her nowhere. “So what now, Hector? You’ve got me here; you’ve taken my blood. Is this the part where you try to convince me to join your cause? Or are you gonna do both of us a favor and just kill me?”

Hector scowled at her. “I can’t kill you; I may need more of your blood,” he retorted. He gestured at the small room. “Get comfortable.” He turned on his heel and strode toward the door, but paused just behind Lindy, where she couldn’t see what he was doing. “By the way, Giselle has requested some . . . recreational time with you. I saw no reason to deny her.” He smirked. “You girls have fun.”

The door slammed behind him.

At two in the morning, Ruiz was still at the office, seated at an empty desk out of the way of the main traffic. After the ambulances left, the SAC had actually tried to send Ruiz home, or back to the hospital with Bartell and Greer and the others, but Ruiz managed to convince him that the shade saliva had mostly worn off by now. He begged McKenna to let him stay and be in on the bust. He’d actually threatened to get down on his knees for the begging, which had either frightened or amused McKenna enough to let him stick around—as long as he didn’t touch any evidence or have access to a weapon. Ruiz had been happy to play by those rules if he got another run at Giselle.

And, if he was being honest with himself, he was also a little afraid to go home.

Instead, he sat and flipped through his own old files on the missing kids, keeping an eye on the rest of the team as they tried to figure out where the hell to find this Hector guy. After Giselle’s big shade offensive—another first in the history of the Bureau—Alex McKenna had announced that Lindy’s status as a shade was to remain absolutely confidential to this team, or they would all find themselves on the lookout for vampires in Antarctica at best, or jailed for treason at worst. Ordinarily Ruiz would have laughed off this kind of threat, or gotten angry, or maybe disobeyed just to spite the bastard, but he was just too confused—and too humiliated by his own treachery—to protest.

So they’d all stayed quiet, even when Palmer and a couple of backup agents returned to the BPI bullpen, looking incredulous. No one could believe that this mysterious species, which had been so elusive in the months since their discovery, had actually invaded the office of the Chicago BPI en masse and taken away their new consultant. It seemed far-fetched even to Ruiz, and he’d lived through it.

He finished rereading the Crombie file and set it aside. On the other side of the bullpen, McKenna and Eddy were talking to a woman he didn’t know, a hot Asian chick who was tall and skinny enough to play for the WNBA. Apparently Lindy Frederick had been wearing a high-tech tracking bracelet, and this newcomer, Liang, was responsible for monitoring it. Ruiz had been close enough to hear her explain that the signal had disappeared at an intersection in downtown Heavenly, after a short pause in the same place. She had hypothesized that someone had discovered the bracelet’s tracking capabilities and waited long enough to meet a second group, which had some way of removing the jewelry or blocking the signal.

McKenna was looking more and more frustrated as each minute ticked by and the chances increased that Hector would cut his losses and run. He had to know the BPI would be hunting him and his pet psycho bitch, and when he finished whatever he was doing with Lindy, the smart move would be to bail. At that point, he’d either kill the kids or transmute them, and this whole operation would have failed. Creadin would have died for nothing. Ruiz couldn’t have that.

Well, you’re not doing any good reviewing your own notes,
he told himself. He looked around. They had all improvised desk space in the main room for the moment, and Hadley’s was directly behind him. Ruiz wheeled his chair backward until he was in her peripheral vision. She was bent over photos of the body dump, which the FBI team had printed off in full color at their fancy office. “How’s it going?” he asked her. She just grunted, not bothering to look up. “Are those just the crime-scene shots, or is the pre-autopsy stuff there, too?” he tried. Before an autopsy actually began, the ME spent a few minutes photographing the body and collecting any evidence that may have clung to the skin.

Reluctantly, Hadley tore her eyes away from the file. “Aren’t you supposed to be lying low?”

He raised his eyebrows. She was what, twenty-five? Pretty ballsy, but Ruiz liked strong women. He looked down at the files. She’d already flipped through three-quarters of the photos. “Let’s trade,” he suggested. “I’ll look at those, you look through my files on the missing kids. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.”

Hadley kept her poker face in place, but he could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. She wanted to be the one to break this case open, and finding a mistake in the old files would be a hell of a way to do it. It was irresistible. “Okay, fine,” she said. They swapped files.

Ruiz eagerly turned the photo pages over, skipping straight to the pre-autopsy shots. He’d seen the body dump in person.

At first, he didn’t notice anything they hadn’t seen at the culvert. The bodies had been treated drastically different. Budchen still looked mostly unharmed, although the ME had immediately spotted some needle marks on the smooth underside of her arm that hadn’t been visible the way they were lying. There were a number of close-up images of the marks, but that didn’t tell Ruiz anything. Just out of curiosity, he flipped to the photos of Harrison to see if the kid had the same needle marks. He did. Ruiz put the pictures side by side, frowning at them. Something felt off. He flipped through the rest of the Budchen photos and found a good one of the tops of her wrists.

Ligature marks.

Back to Harrison’s photos, and yes, there were ligature marks on the tops of his wrists, too. Ruiz—and presumably, the other agents—had been so busy seeing the differences between the two bodies that they’d missed this similarity: the outsides of the wrists were damaged by some kind of restraints, but the undersides were unmarred.

He picked up the phone at his desk and dialed Jessica Reyes, the pathologist who was conducting the autopsies. Her caller ID must have said BPI offices, because she sounded very annoyed when she answered. “I
told
you, I will have the reports as soon as humanly possible,” she snapped, by way of greeting. “Calling me every ten minutes is only making this process slower, and—”

“Jess, it’s Gabriel Ruiz,” he interrupted. “Sorry to bother you while you’re cutting.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “Hey, Gabriel. I’m just finishing the second autopsy. What do you need?”

“I was looking at the photos, and saw that only one side of the wrists has a ligature mark.”

“Yes, I noticed that, too.”

“What does it mean? They were tied to a chair?”

“No,” she said without hesitation. “Even with a hard-backed chair, we usually see some abrasions on the underside of the wrist. The victims struggle and flail, and they end up with at least the top layer of skin rubbed away. Here, the skin is perfect.”

“Anything else weird coming up in the autopsy?” There was a long pause, and he could feel her reluctance. Like many medical examiners, Jessica Reyes did not like jumping to conclusions, or making guesses. In a case like this, where a BPI asset was at risk, it would only make her more cautious, not less. She didn’t want to send anyone off on a wild goose chase when the bad guys had their asset. “Come on, Jess,” he wheedled. “We go back. This is just between us.”

Another, briefer pause, and then she said, “Well, you’ll have the report in an hour anyway, so I doubt it matters. There’s some indication that the victims were both sort of half lying, half sitting when they died.”

“How can you tell?”

“The lividity. The shades didn’t leave a lot of blood in either body, but what there was had pooled downward into the buttocks, lower back, and ankles, rather than evenly across the body.”

Ruiz tried to picture it. “Like they were sitting in a La-Z-Boy?”

“I don’t think they make armchairs that you could tie restraints to, not without a whole lot of trouble,” she reported. “But I suspect the chair
was
padded, given the lack of abrasions.”

A padded chair that reclined, but not an armchair. What other chairs came with padding? Office chairs didn’t recline that much, and neither did waiting room chairs.

Then it hit him. “Thanks, Jess,” he said hurriedly. “You saved the day.”

“What did I—” But he’d already hung up.

“You found something.”

Ruiz jumped. Hadley was standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder. She’d made about as much noise as a cat. He eyed her. “You any good with computer databases?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice matter of fact.

“Then you’re probably better than me. Pull up a chair, we’re about to crack this.”