Dead Heat (24 page)

Anna assured him that would be lovely.

“He didn’t ask what it was about,” Anna observed after hanging up.

“Could be a crime groupie,” said Leslie. “Lots of people are. Could be he is bored or lonely or anything. No speculation until after we talk to him.”

“FBI policy?”

“My policy. Assumptions drive an interview away from interesting places.”

“All right,” Anna said. “We’ll go talk to the professor.”

Leslie pulled up to a house that had been built in the fifties. Evidently they had beaten the professor there. Leslie did not obey speed limits as well as Anna. She arrived fifteen minutes earlier than the car’s navigation system’s estimate.

The house was large and most notable because it was not built in the Southwest adobe style Anna’s eyes were getting used to. Nor was the yard xeriscaped with the conscientious water conservation she saw everywhere. Green grass covered the very small front area and huge old trees surrounded the house. Likely the shade from the trees was how the grass survived summers here.

A Volvo, older but in pristine condition, purred into the driveway and disgorged an athletic man with a military-short cut that managed to tone down his bright red hair. He shut the door and took his time looking at them. Anna returned the favor. He looked a little younger than someone who had been five in 1978.

He walked toward them slowly and said, “Can I help you, ladies?”

“Professor Vaughn?” asked Leslie.

He shook his head. “No. Who are you? Why are you looking for Alex?”

The roar of an engine distracted them and a big truck pulled into the driveway beside the Volvo. The truck was painted black with bright pink flames and jacked up high enough it wallowed when it turned.

The door popped open and a mad scientist hopped out, looking very out of place in the redneck vehicle.

“It’s okay, love,” he called out. “If you answered your cell phone I’d have updated you.”

The red-haired man turned to the professor, tilted his head, and said, “I don’t talk while I’m driving. And you shouldn’t call while you are driving, Bluetooth or no. I don’t want to get that phone call.”

The mad scientist nodded, kissed the big man on the cheek, and patted his shoulder. “I’m Alex Vaughn and this bulldog is my partner, Darin Richards of the Phoenix Police Department. He worries, that’s his job. Dare, these are the FBI, they want to talk to me.”

Darin’s head jerked first to his partner and then to the two women. His eyes narrowed. “ID,” he said.

Leslie showed him her badge and he examined it. He frowned and said, “I don’t know you. I work with the local FBI office a lot.”

“They brought me out especially for this case,” Leslie said.

He looked at Anna, and she raised both hands. “Don’t look at me, I’m just a consultant.”

“And you are here to speak with Alex.”

“With Dr. Vaughn,” Leslie said. “Yes.”

“Dare,” said the mad scientist. “It’s okay.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, without agreeing at all. “Why are you here?”

“We have to do this on the lawn?” asked Leslie, not losing her smile.

“Dare,” said Alex gently. “What are they going to do? Shoot me? Let’s go in and have some coffee and talk.” He looked at Leslie. “I have a stalker, a former student. She quite often calls in complaints and we have police officers come to investigate strange noises, screaming, shots fired. You name it. The Tempe PD knows her, but occasionally she gets one through to a rookie. The fire department was here last week at two in the morning because she reported a fire. I guess she got tired of not getting a response.”

“We are definitely not here because someone called in a complaint,” Leslie said. “We’d like to interview you about an attempted kidnapping—yours—that happened in June of 1978.”

Both men’s faces went blank with surprise.

Darin recovered first. “You never told me you were kidnapped. Freaking damn it, Alex. You’d have been six in ’78. June. You’d have been
five
.”

“Attempted.” Dr. Vaughn sounded shell-shocked. “I don’t think the police even believed me. My dad installed a security system and my mom fed the dog steak every day for a week.”

“No one believed in fairies back then,” Anna said. “We’re all clapping our hands for Tinker Bell now, though. We have a missing child who lives four blocks from where you grew up. Would you mind talking to us about what happened?”

“Sure,” he said. “I guess. I was five, though. And it’s been a long time.”

“How about I go next door and see if your mom is home,” said Darin. “That woman has a mind like a steel trap. She’ll remember what you told her when it happened.”

“You think it was a fae?” asked Dr. Vaughn.

“He was green and hairy. His hands had six fingers with claws on them,” Anna said matter-of-factly. She’d memorized the words on the first reading—it hadn’t been hard. The boy’s terror and the police officer’s skepticism rang through in the dry words typewritten on paper older than Anna. She continued, “His voice was funny—like on TV sometimes. He had a long yellow tongue and he called you a barn. He said, ‘Come here, barn.’” She looked at the police officer. “If someone reported it now, Darin Richards, instead of years before the fae admitted their existence, what would you say it was?”

“Barn,” said Darin. “‘
Bairn
’ means child, right? If he was in Scotland instead of Scottsdale.”

“Yes,” said Leslie.

“You go in and have some coffee,” said Darin. In a gentler voice he said, “That sure explains some of your nightmares, Alex. You take them in and I’ll be right back.”

The mad scientist—well, mad mathematician—paced back and forth in the house even though he’d seated Leslie and Anna at the table and put coffee in front of them. He had that kind of kinky hair that never lies down right, and it was about two inches too long or ten inches too short to look good. Especially if it belonged to the kind of person who grabbed it and twisted or pulled when he was nervous.

Anna thought he was adorable. She wanted to adopt him as a big brother and give him a big hug to calm down his rising anxiety.

“My dad was a cop,” he said.

Leslie nodded. “That was in the report.”

“If he hadn’t been a cop, there wouldn’t have been a report,” Dr. Vaughn said. “He believed me. By the time I was ten, I didn’t know why. Hell, I kinda don’t believe me now. I mean, this thing looked like it was eight feet tall, and it ran away from my dog and a horseshoe I threw at it?”

“That dog impressed whoever wrote the report,” Anna said. There hadn’t been any photos of the dog in it, but she had a pretty good idea that “BFDog” in the report (complete with exclamation point and a penciled-in remark that read “I’d have run from that thing, too”) meant it wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill dog.

“Yeah.” Dr. Vaughn quit pacing and grinned. “My dad brought him home from work one day a few years before the … incident. I don’t remember it, but it’s one of those family stories, you know? My mom was scared of him and wanted Dad to take him back where he found it. Then that big dog walked up to her and put his nose on her foot and sighed. He stared at her until she fed him. She was a goner after that.”

He smiled at the memory, then sobered. “We only had him for another month or so after that. One day, he just wasn’t around. Maybe he was hit by a car or something. I think Dad knew exactly what happened because he never went looking for him. And hit by a car is the kind of thing you might not tell a kid. Hey, I ran across a photo of him the other day.”

He booked out of the kitchen, the speed an indicator of how grateful he was for the distraction, and Anna could hear him in another room opening and shutting drawers.

Leslie started to say something, but Anna shook her head. She could hear people talking just outside. In a moment Darin opened the door and escorted a tiny female version of Dr. Vaughn into the kitchen.

She frowned at Leslie and Anna and sat down opposite them with regal suspicion. “Darin tells me that you are here to ask about the time something came into our yard and tried to take my son away,” she said.

“We think it was a fae,” Leslie said. “It sounds like a fae. It acted like a fae. And a fae took a little girl and left a changeling, a fetch, in her place. We are trying to find that little girl. She is five years old. The attempted abduction of your son is not far from where we think our girl was taken. Thirty-odd years might be a long time for us, but it’s a minute to one of the fae.”

The stiffness left Dr. Vaughn’s mother’s back, and she softened. “Thirty years doesn’t feel that long ago to me, either.” She looked up at her son’s partner and said, “Sit, sit, Darin. I gather that Alex never told you about this.”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, I think he wanted to believe it didn’t happen.”

“What do you think?” asked Leslie.

“I think my son never exaggerated or lied about a thing in his life, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. He was twelve when he told us he liked boys instead of girls. That was right after some friend of his got kicked out of his home for doing the same. Stupid people tossing away the most precious thing God saw fit to give them, I say.” She looked at Leslie. “So yes, I believe him. I also believe we have not been introduced. I am Mary Lu Vaughn.”

“FBI Special Agent Leslie Fisher,” said Leslie as Dr. Vaughn came into the room and put a photo on the table with an air of quiet triumph.

“Anna Smith,” said Anna, staring at the photo of two small children trying to tug a rope from an enormous black animal, “special consultant. And that is a werewolf.”

Charles sat in the front passenger seat, since Leeds had taken one look at him trying to fit in the back and said, “Hey, man, that is just not going to happen, is it? No worries, I’ll catch the backseat.”

Charles wasn’t thrilled with having a stranger behind him, but even Brother Wolf couldn’t make that man feel like a threat, so he figured it would be okay. He didn’t like Marsden’s driving, either. He drove too fast and he didn’t have a werewolf’s reflexes. But if there was a wreck, Charles figured that he, at least, would walk away, so he kept his comments to himself.

“So we’ve concentrated our efforts in Scottsdale because Leeds thinks that this fae probably doesn’t have a huge hunting ground. The ones that steal children tend to get attached to one place even more than the usual fae.”

He waited, so Charles said, “It sounds like a reasonable way to make an impossibly big search smaller.”

“Okay,” Marsden said. “The first place we’re going is a foster home to visit with a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl’s parents gave her up to the state, said they couldn’t deal with her anymore. Claimed she was possessed, things flying around the room with no one touching them, which is why we are visiting even though she’s older than the girl who was taken. Her parents said she was dangerous, but the counselor who gave us this one said she was uncommunicative but showed no signs of violence. The foster mom says we’re okay to talk to her as long as we do it with the foster mom in the room.”

“Why isn’t she in school?” asked Charles.

“Yeah,” Marsden agreed. “I don’t know. But we’ll ask.”

The house they drove to looked pretty much like all the rest of the houses on the street. This was not an upscale neighborhood, but it wasn’t poor, either.

The woman who met them at the door was a human in her midfifties, if Charles was any judge. She introduced herself as Judy White, examined Marsden’s and Leeds’s badges, and frowned at Charles. She wasn’t unhappy about them, but she was careful.

“Consultant,” said Leeds. “No official ID.”

She looked grim. Grimmer. But just nodded. “Blair’s not going to talk to any of you,” she said. “She came here two weeks ago and she hasn’t spoken a word to anyone. She doesn’t eat much. If I could have a word with her parents…” She sucked in a breath. “Well, don’t stand out here. Come in.”

She led them into a house that smelled of … Charles shut his eyes to get a deep breath. Cookies, recently baked. Fresh homemade bread. A man, a woman, three children, and someone in between; that would be the girl they were looking for. Sorrow. This house had seen a lot of sorrow, but there was a warmth to it, too. Nothing smelled like the fetch, which had carried hints of greenwood, magic, and darkness.

He shut the door behind him and tried not to feel like an invading giant when the woman led them to a room with two couches and a couple of those soft squishy chairs, the kind that could unfold with footrests. Charles would let himself be shot before he sat in one of those. They always felt like they were trying to swallow him, and they were impossible to get out of quickly.

He was still trying to decide where to sit when the woman brought in a tall girl of about fourteen wearing clothes that would fit a woman twice her size. She didn’t look at any of them, just sat on the edge of one of the person-swallowing chairs, a pale-skinned, pale-haired girl who was little more than skin and bones. The word that occurred to him wasn’t “starving” but “fading.” This was why no one sent her to school. Even blind humans must be able to tell that she was mostly gone already.

Judy White introduced Marsden and Leeds but made no mention of Charles—and he was fine with that. He watched as Marsden and Leeds did a fair job of good cop/bad cop, Leeds unexpectedly playing bad cop. The girl saw them all right, but she said not a word and gave no reaction to anything they said.

She is abandoned,
something whispered in his left ear. Into his right, something else said,
Her true name is sorrow.

He did not always act upon the things the spirits told him. They were interested in this girl. They hovered unseen, even by him, in the air around her.

She could be anger,
they told him.
She could be vengeance, for she has much to be angry about, much to avenge. Those who should have cared for her acted for themselves when they rightly should have acted for her. She has been much sinned against.

This, he thought, this half child, half woman was where the sorrow that was trying to enfold this house was coming from. He’d told the Cantrip agents he wouldn’t talk, but he couldn’t let this lie. Someone needed to help her before she chose to leave this existence. He had the sure feeling that she would be needed somewhere in the future, that terrible things would happen without her. But that was not why he chose to act. Brother Wolf liked her.