Broken Elements (10 page)

Chapter 9

“They’re all men. All of them!” I shouted, bursting through the door. I’d just walked forty minutes back to the cabin. The walk had provided lots of time for thinking and dispersing the nervous energy I’d built up from the session with the federal agents. The thinking part had worked, but the energy wasn’t going anywhere.

I crashed into the living room, where Sera and Vivian sat poring over a list of names. Unsurprisingly, my ranting disrupted their work. I immediately had their full attention.

“Last time, he killed both men and women, right? No women have died this time. Why did we not notice this?”

Sera leaned back into one of the cushions, looking disgusted with herself. “Because we’re idiots,” she stated plainly.

“You don’t even know,” I told them, filling both women in on my session with the agents. I only left out Johnson’s final line about Chris considering breaking things off. I didn’t know if it was true, but it didn’t matter. Sera didn’t need to hear it. When she heard the name “Mark Foster,” she lightly banged her head against the wall and continued to do so throughout the rest of the story.

“Fuck me. Just... fuck me. I didn’t even recognize him in the morgue. He gained some weight and thirteen years. But I should have known the name, damn it.”

“And Arthur Elbin?”

“No idea.” Sera made a few quick strokes on her laptop and began searching.

Vivian sifted through the file, landing on the photos of Mark and Calvin. “You dated them and never knew they were shifters?” I shook my head, feeling a little simple-minded. “They are really good at hiding themselves, aren’t they? Why do you suppose that is?” She sounded fascinated.

“Focus, Vivian,” I said. “Bad guys trying to railroad me and Sera, remember?”

Sera sat back with a stunned expression. “Hell on wheels. Yeah, I knew him. He used to go by his middle name, Scott. He took the summer drama program with me, the year you went to Venice for break.” Her face was grim and her voice, more so. “You know what’s next. I dated him for a while. I guess it’s official, Ade. We really are
femmes fatales
.”

“What about that guy with the goatee and the ear plugs that I always said smelled of broccoli?” asked Sera.

“Study partner. We never dated. The one with one green eye and one blue?”

“Bought him a drink when he lost his wallet, but that was it.”

Mac entered the room mid-conversation. After a moment, he turned to Brian, who was currently trying to turn vodka, grenadine, and ginger into a working cocktail. It was definitely time for a liquor store run. “What are they doing?”

“Making a list of everyone they ever dated. I’m helping. Aidan, what about the professional bicyclist with the Celtic tattoo?”

“The Italian one? Hell, no. Way too much spandex. Sera, you remember the coffee shop guy?”

“The one that was prettier than me and played guitar? Of course I dated him. Find me a college student that wouldn’t. And he was more than one kind of player, so an outsider might think it ended badly. Put him on the list. His name was... Richard something. Richard Hill.”

Mac leaned over me, watching me add the name. “You’re making a list of everyone you slept with?” I wasn’t sure if his dubious tone was due to the questionable use of our time or the length of the list.

“Not slept with. Dated,” I clarified.

Sera nodded. “Yeah, we weren’t the Whores of Babylon, Mac. We weren’t even the trollops of Tahoe. Coquettes of the college is as far as I’ll go.”

“Why are you making a list of everyone you both dated?”

“Not everyone. Just those who dumped us, or otherwise did us wrong.”

“They’re preparing to write a country song,” Brian offered.

Mac continued to study the list. I couldn’t help but feel offended. It was only a single sheet of paper. It wasn’t a scroll or anything. “So, this is, what, about half the men you dated?”

“Half?” asked Sera, offended. “You assume that at least half the men we dated willingly gave us up?”

“They ran away screaming,” said Brian in a mock whisper. A moment later he was leaning away from a small fireball that threatened his eyebrows. He blew it out easily and tried adding bitters to the grenadine/ginger concoction. His contorted face let us know just how ill-advised that experiment was. “Screw this. I’m going to the store,” he announced, grabbing his coat and keys. He shut the door carefully behind him. With so many buckets perched in the living room beams, no one was slamming doors at the moment.

“Ade, what about that guy who thought pot was a vegetable and playing Resident Evil was a form of exercise?”

“You mean Jeff Brown. I thought you dated him, not me. Didn’t he get kicked out of school and take a job at one of the ski resorts? There was no dumper or dumpee, at least the way I remember it.”

“I dated him?” Her face scrunched in her attempt to remember. “That must have been a love for the ages. You’re sure it wasn’t you?” I shrugged, only mostly certain. “Fine, put him on the list.”

Mac was silent. I felt a flicker of embarrassment about my dating history and wanted to defend myself. I was feeling a little like the slut of the ski slopes, despite what Sera had said. “It was college. You know how it is.” His face was blank. Maybe he didn’t know. I hurried on, hoping to cover any awkwardness. “Anyway, these weren’t all serious. Most of them weren’t, really. They were just guys we went on a date or two with who never called us back.” I really wasn’t making things better. “We didn’t sleep with most of them. Besides, the majority of them are Sera’s,” I finished, happily putting the blame for our slutty ways on her.

“Only because I’ve lived here every summer for the past ten years, while you’ve spent that time doing your best impression of a nun wearing a chastity belt.”

That was really not information Mac needed to know. I hurried to change the subject. “The point is that the killer seems to be targeting men that done us wrong. Or who might appear to have done us wrong,” I added, thinking of Mark. I had never really cared about him or what he did, but he was every bit as dead as Cal, who had broken my heart. “And the feds know it.”

“So you’re trying to figure out possible targets?” We nodded. “What’s so special about you two?”

“For the sake of our friendship, Mac, I’m going to pretend I never heard that.”

He waved off Sera’s false indignation. “That’s not what I meant. Why you? From what I understand, there are elementals all over Tahoe, dating humans and shifters, and last time any one of those humans was an acceptable target. Why are you the focus this time?”

I’d had a lot of time to ask myself this very question on the walk home. “If we’re still working off the second gunman theory, then this guy knows who we are. He knows Sera and I were involved. Hell, maybe it’s revenge for killing his partner. He’s taunting us, or maybe trying to set us up. The more ex-boyfriends turn up dead, the less innocent we look. We can’t really explain to the feds that it couldn’t possibly have been us, because the killer’s earth, but I’m water and Sera’s fire.”

“Just one more reason to find this bastard as soon as possible. I wasn’t meant for hard time. Here,” Sera said, ripping the list in half. “Tomorrow, you track these guys down, see who’s still in the area. And let’s ask Simon to redo our security system. We can put the soil in my trunk, and I’ll dump it. If the feds get a warrant, it will look a lot better for us if we don’t have buckets of the murder weapon lying around. No one looks good in orange, and I refuse to spend the next forty years wearing a jumpsuit that color.”

I discovered one upside to modern communication. Private investigation was a lot easier in the internet age. A few basic searches of various social media websites told me that most of the men had moved on—no surprise for a bunch of college students in a resort town. They’d left to find jobs, and in the process may have saved their own lives. On my list, only three of the possible targets might even still be in the area. Finding their current addresses had been a little trickier, at least until Vivian got her hands on the laptop. Five minutes later, Sera and I had all the information we needed. I decided not to inquire about her methods.

The first man, one of Sera’s recent local flings and a shifter, lived in King’s Beach at the north end of the lake. It was a classic wood cabin set amongst the trees. Pulling into the driveway in Mac’s Bronco, I noticed that his truck was almost entirely packed, and the man I was looking for was throwing a cooler in the back. “Excuse me?” I called, using my perkiest voice. “Hi! Sorry! I’m your new neighbor, just down the road,” I pointed vaguely behind me, trying to hit as many different directions as possible. “I just wanted to introduce myself, but it looks like you’re heading out? I don’t want to interrupt.” I really didn’t. The sooner he got out of town, the sooner I had one less potential victim to worry about.

“You’re not,” he replied, slamming the tailgate shut. “And you’re not my neighbor, either.”

“I’m sorry?” I could feel my face turning red.

“It’s not my home anymore. Tahoe ain’t exactly the place for me at the moment.” He looked me over carefully, obviously noting my classic water coloring and body type. I was getting a little tired of these shifters seeming to know everything about me when I still knew almost nothing about them. “And you definitely don’t look like the sort of woman a guy like me wants to be hanging around these days. Good day.” He climbed into his truck. Moments later, he was headed for the highway, running from whatever was threatening the shifters of the area. I hadn’t anticipated being this lucky, but it seemed the local shifters were more aware of the situation than I’d expected. It made sense, once I thought about it. If the elementals could figure out what was happening, the shifters certainly could, too.

My next stop was a full hour away in Carson City, Nevada, to visit a drunken junior year fling. I wasn’t much looking forward to the encounter, since I hadn’t figured out a believable cover story that didn’t make me sound like a stalker, so I was relieved to learn from the man’s neighbor that my former fling was visiting family in Wyoming and wasn’t expected back for at least two weeks. For the moment, all I could do was drive down to South Lake Tahoe to check on Richard Hill.

It was another long drive, and it was already late afternoon. Steve Earle kept me company most of the way down, singing to me about how his “fearless heart just comes back for more.” I knew I couldn’t claim to have lived with a fearless heart—quite the opposite, this last decade—but something about Steve Earle’s certain delivery made me sing along and wish the words were true. Maybe, just maybe, when I wasn’t looking, I’d started to become fearless again. Just a little bit, but that was better than before. Whatever had happened years ago, I really was back, and this time I wasn’t going to abandon the story halfway through. I was going to see it completed and be certain this time. I didn’t know what would happen after that, but I knew, as clearly as I knew the feeling of a wave about to peak or a river swirling around jagged rocks, that I didn’t want to be fearful any longer. It wasn’t who I was, not really. Once, I’d been the sort of woman a man might write a country song about, and I liked that woman a lot more than the scared, hair shirt-wearing hermit I’d become.

It was in that spirit of hope and strength that I pulled up outside Richard’s condo. I was going to find this guy, I was going to get him out of town, and then we’d find this psychotic earth bastard, all without once wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, because Sera was right. No one looks good in orange. The positive feeling lasted only until I arrived at the front door. The lights were all on, but no one answered the door. I checked the mail box. It had been emptied recently, and the plants on the front porch had been watered. I rang the bell a second time, but again no one answered. Remembering some basic caution, I pulled on a set of gloves before hesitantly trying the door. It was unlocked.

“Hello?” I called. Silence greeted me. I walked slowly through the house, continuing to call out and receiving no answer. I felt sweat beading on my forehead. Richard kept his house ridiculously warm. Even Sera would feel toasty in his house. I wiped a forearm across my face, picking up the drops of sweat gathered on my brow. The living room held a couple of old guitars, suggesting he hadn’t completely given up his old life, but it also contained a plaque recognizing him as a local car dealership’s salesman of the month. I smiled. Sera would take a certain pleasure in hearing that, I knew. If he’d lost his hair, it would be even better.

If he was still alive, that is.

“Anyone here?” I asked, heading into the small galley kitchen. Food lay on the counter—mozzarella, mushrooms, and pepperoni. A pizza stone held dry dough covered in crusty tomato sauce. The heat came from the oven, which someone had preheated in anticipation of the planned meal. One shriveled mushroom lay on a cutting board, only halfway cut. Nothing appeared disturbed, but it also appeared that Richard had been interrupted while preparing dinner. Based on how warm the condo was, I imagined it had been the previous night’s meal, because it felt like the oven had been on for at least a full day. I looked through the rest of the house. I opened every closet and even peered behind the shower curtain, but there was nothing else to see. Suitcases rested on the closet floor, and his toothbrush remained in its charger. There was no evidence that he simply decided to take a vacation in the middle of making pizza. Neither was there any sign of a struggle. Richard simply wasn’t there.

Carefully, I closed every door that I’d opened, leaving the house exactly as I’d found it, although I did turn off the oven. I wasn’t going to be so stealthy that my caution caused a gas explosion. Once the front door latched behind me, I felt the tension I’d been holding in my shoulders slide away. I wanted to get away from Richard’s home as quickly as possible. Nothing about it felt right.

As soon as I turned around, the tension slithered back up my spine.

“Why, Ms. Brook,” said Agent Carmichael. “Fancy meeting you here.”

The office was much quieter on a Sunday night. Only a few dedicated agents lingered in the building. There were no ringing telephones or clunking copiers to disrupt the quiet. I sat in the same room I had a few days ago, only this time it was just me and Carmichael. The room’s fluorescent lights somehow seemed brighter, harsher in contrast to the peaceful night I’d left behind. I leaned back in my chair and tried not to fidget. I held the cup of tea tightly, locking my fingers around the mug so they weren’t free to tap against the table. I suspected I looked guilty enough, even without any nervous habits. Even so, under the table my toes performed a slow, silent tap dance of anxiety.