Shadows Fall (24 page)

I still ignored him. Instead, I addressed Charlie while still struggling to take in enough air through throbbing pain. “Ask Dr. Johanssen if she’s ever heard of a chimera.”

Charlie looked back and forth between me and his partner, then excused himself from the room, thereby leaving me at the mercy of DeRossi.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “I
know
you’re keeping information from us. You need to come clean now to minimize the damage, both to yourself and our investigation. If you don’t, I’m inclined to believe you’re a suspect. Why would you want to protect a murderer?”

“I’m not protecting anyone but myself!” I cried. The words came out before I could stop them. I clamped my mouth shut, not willing to give any more away—especially not to him.

DeRossi started to respond but was cut off by Charlie coming back into the room, looking more pallid than I’d ever seen him. He pulled his partner off to a corner for a supposed whispered conversation, but I could hear them.

“I need you to let me talk to him alone. It’s like I told you before, he’s not going to tell you anything,” Charlie murmured.

“I think that’s a really bad idea, Hale.”

“Your concerns are duly noted.” Charlie tipped his head toward the door. “Now, please.”

DeRossi glowered at him, and then me, before making his exit. Charlie looked grim as he made his way over, taking the seat his partner had vacated. He propped his elbows on the table and laced his fingers together, resting his chin on them. He looked bone tired—and not the good kind that came from all-night sex.

When he finally met my eyes, his were anguished, pleading. He wanted me to say something that would put us back on the same side of the law. I sighed and pinched my eyes shut.

“Titus.” His voice broke when he called my name, and I thought I might split wide open. It was almost as painful was what Brandon had done to me minutes before. “You’ve got to give me something I can use or else… I’ll have to classify you as a suspect.”

I pushed his pleading aside. “What did Dr. Johanssen say?”

Charlie sighed and rubbed his hands over his short, rumpled hair. “She wouldn’t tell me anything. She said she needed to look into a couple of things.”

“That’s it?”

“She also said ‘it fits.’ What does that mean, Titus? Where did you hear that word?”

I was almost in tears. The effort it took to keep this part of me hidden from a man I was rapidly beginning to care for was tearing me apart from the inside. The worst part was that even if I could somehow make Charlie understand, I knew,
I knew
, DeRossi and the rest of the cops never would. They’d lock me up faster than I could blink.

I turned my anguish eyes to Charlie and met his even stare. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

“Try me. It’s really the only option here, Titus.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, turning it over and rubbing my palm with his thumb. “I know you didn’t kill anybody. I… I want to protect you from all this, but you’re making it pretty damn hard. Can you honestly say you aren’t hiding anything from me?”

It would be different if he’d said ‘related to the case,’ because I could reason that away—though that logic grew thinner by the minute. Instead, he said ‘anything,’ as in anything at all. I sure as hell
was
hiding something from him. I couldn’t lie to him directly like that. Maybe I could before we started dating or… whatever, but not anymore.

I took a deep breath to steel myself, preparing to lose Charlie, my sanity, and possibly my freedom. “I—”

I was interrupted by the shrill ring of Charlie’s phone. He glanced down at it and scowled. “It’s Karen,” he said. He held up one finger then pointed it at me. “Hold that thought. I mean it.”

When I gave him a curt nod, he answered the call. I could hear Karen talking excitedly on the other end of the call. Charlie listened for a minute or two, giving me occasional suspicious looks. Eventually he spoke.

“Hang on a minute, Karen,” he said, then covered the phone with his hand and looked at me. “I’m going to put this on speaker for the sake of time. There’s no way I’ll be able to repeat any of this medical crap. You came up with that word so I think you should hear it.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure of how he expected me to be able to help.

He put the phone back to his ear. “Hey, I’m putting you on speaker with a witness. He was the one we were… interviewing when that term came up. I want him to hear what you’ve got, to see if anything rings a bell.”

Tapping the screen of his phone, Charlie activated the speaker and set the handset down on the table. “Go ahead, Karen.”

“Right,” Karen said, her voice taking on a tinny quality through the phone speaker. “Generally speaking, a
chimaera
is a single organism that is an amalgamation of distinct genetically different tissues. It’s a very rare genetic anomaly, which is why I didn’t think of it before.”

Something sparked in my brain, pulling at me to remember my ‘flashback’ of Brandon Meyers’ life. Genetic anomaly. Genetic. Human genetics laboratories.
SevenTek Industries.
What did it mean? How was this business card related to Brandon Meyers’ genetic anomaly?

“When we’re talking about a human chimera, it
can
be a mutation but it’s more likely caused by the fusion of cells in early embryos—an absorbed twin, a mother passing on her DNA to her child. In my research, I found incidences of women giving birth to children who were not genetically related to them, or at least not in a mother-to-child way.

“In fact, it’s the only way I can figure it possible for Brandon Meyers to have two different blood types. It’s one of the ways chimerism manifests in humans.”

Charlie’s eyes snapped to my face and despite his frustration with me, I could see the excitement of the chase hovering there. “Holy shit. What if that’s how this guy chooses his victims? The double blood type thing…did you type the other vics?”

There was a pause, and a breath. I knew her answer wouldn’t be what Charlie needed to hear.

“Yes. Brandon Meyers is the only one with two.”

“
Sonofabitch!
” Charlie yelled, tossing his pen across the room. “So the fucking chimera thing is just an interesting fact that happens to be another dead end.”

“Well… Not necessarily,” Karen said, sounding as weary as Charlie did. “I mean, maybe it’s not the blood type so much as the aberration.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning evidence of chimerism in humans is so elusive, there are several different ways for it to demonstrate. There are some physical genetic mutations associated with chimerism, like mosaicism and heterochromia. Some chimeras have internal organs that contain entirely different DNA sequences. It can also be evidenced by patches of tissue that contain alien DNA—meaning different from the host, not the woo-woo kind of alien—in which case, there wouldn’t necessarily be anything on the surface to see.”

“It sounds like searching for all of these variables in our victims would be like searching for a needle in a stack of needles,” Charlie said.

“You’re not wrong. It’s a shit lead, but it’s all we have to go on. You should thank your witness. I guess I’d better get started with some DNA testing. Later, detective.”

“Thanks, Karen.” Charlie ended the call, then sat staring at the phone for long moments, as if deep in thought. When he raised his eyes, I saw infinite questions in them, and I knew the one he started with would be the same one from before.

“Titus…” he began.

I opened my mouth, again to bare my soul, but I didn’t even get a syllable out that time. My five shadows had appeared behind Charlie as he’d hung up the phone, and then they passed through him, and the table, until they surrounded me. Each one laid a hand somewhere on my body, and I was filled with the most excruciating, unimaginable pain. I shook, I flailed desperately, trying to get away from them. I may have screamed.

Then I felt that prick in my neck, the same one from my dream when I was Brandon and he was me, and I felt no more pain. I was consumed by nothingness, by blackness. I was a blank slate, which was exactly how they wanted me. An empty vessel.

* * * *

It wasn’t like before, how I saw through the victim’s eyes. This time I was just myself. The first one who approached me was the young African woman.
Talika Ross
, she said in my head. She spoke to me just like the
mule
did when I was… awake, or whatever, the hollow sound echoing inside my brain instead of coming out through her lips.

She showed me images of her childhood in Kenya, where she lived in a colony of albinos and their family members. Some of the indigenous peoples believed that albino body parts had magic powers which led to a staggering amount of murders, most going unreported or uninvestigated. Talika’s remaining family had smuggled her out of the colony and into an orphanage, where she was adopted by a young American couple.

Talika held my gaze steadily blinking those unusual eyes, one brown and one a startling clear blue. I could feel her loneliness so vividly, I could almost reach out and touch it. From an early age, she’d been unable to connect emotionally with her adoptive parents. I’d read somewhere that that wasn’t uncommon with adoptees from orphanages.

Then, when those parents had died tragically in Talika’s early teens, she’d gone completely off the grid, living like a shut-in. Even she believed that, had her body not been found, no one would have noticed her missing for weeks. How did I know that? Somehow she’d planted the information within me.

I felt that now-familiar zing of burning pain on my back, so I whipped around, coming face-to-face with Violet Eyes—Mara, she said. She had nothing to say to me, she just wanted me to see her. While we stared at each other, I memorized her features, since that was all she was showing me. I wondered what had put that shock of white in the front half of her otherwise mousy, brown hair. Had she been born with it, or had something happened to her to cause it? Maybe she’d been struck by lightning.

I turned away from Mara, convinced I’d seen all there was to see. Suddenly, I was nose to forehead with the blonde teenager. She bounced up on her tiptoes and threw her arms around my neck, sending waves of agony ricocheting through my body. Again, I was bombarded with rapid-fire images, mostly of Dallas in the hospital—being treated for liver failure, undergoing various invasive procedures that I couldn’t identify, being told by the doctors that she would need a transplant in order to survive.

She showed me the scene in which she and her parents received the devastating news that her body would probably reject any new liver she got due to the fact that, inexplicably, her liver had a completely different DNA profile than the rest of her body.

And there it was—finally a direct connection between what Karen said and one of the victims. Dallas nodded as if that was what I was supposed to figure out all along. I looked to my left and saw the little girl cowering behind Brandon. None of the
mule
seemed to be willing to let her get near me. That was fine with me. I didn’t have the stomach to confront the brutal murder of a child head on.

I did, however, want to talk to Brandon some more. I took a step towards him, then stopped when I felt a sharp sting across my cheek.

“Titus.” Brandon said, without moving his lips.

“I…” I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I couldn’t verbalize the questions I needed to ask him. In fact, I couldn’t think at all. Again came the burning pain on my face, this time the other cheek.

Titus!
Brandon said it again, this time sounding more urgent, more… scared. My vision grayed out and I was lost.

“Titus, wake the hell up!”

The third time my name was called, it wasn’t Brandon’s voice—it was Charlie’s. I grabbed on to that voice like a beacon in the fog and clawed my way back to the surface. I blinked my eyes open slowly, though I didn’t know when I’d closed them, and Charlie’s panicked face appeared, hovering above me.

I suddenly realized that I was facing the rectangular, flickering fluorescent lights. Why was I lying down? When my head cleared, I determined that I was still in the interrogation room, but I was sprawled out on the floor with Charlie crouched over me. He frantically tapped my cheek, so I figured the pain I’d felt on my face had been caused by more forceful slaps meant to revive me. Had I passed out?

“Oh, thank God.” When Charlie comprehended that I had come to, he closed his eyes in apparent relief. He clenched his fists, obviously struggling not to touch me, to refrain from showing any affection around his coworkers. “Don’t move, Titus, okay? The paramedics are here.”

“What?” I croaked. I tried to get up, because fuck if I needed paramedics, but my spinning head put the kibosh on that motion quickly. Confused and a little worried, I floated in a state of semi-consciousness as men in blue jumpsuits swarmed around me, poking and prodding, shining lights in my eyes, until I eventually closed them and surrendered to unconsciousness.

Chapter Eighteen

Charlie paced outside the curtained cubicle in the emergency room, listening to the sounds of the medics working on Titus. The guy had scared him shitless. He’d been about to say something—hopefully to explain how the hell he knew all the stuff he knew—when he just… checked out.