Nightshades (8 page)

Chicago, IL

Monday afternoon

At five, an hour before the briefing at the new BPI headquarters, McKenna sent her a text on the new phone: “Everything okay?” Lindy texted back an affirmative and said she would meet them at the briefing. He sent her the address.

The Chicago branch of the FBI was housed in a rather unimaginative brick-shaped glass building on Roosevelt Road, near Douglas Park. The crowded building hadn’t the space to squish in a newly created branch of the Bureau, so the BPI was temporarily housed in an empty medical office building in Tri-Taylor, several blocks away. Security was much simpler than Lindy had expected—the front doors just had an intercom system. She pressed the button and was buzzed through immediately, though she paused to look at the door. The intercom system may have been simple, but the doors were steel, and that lock was heavy-duty. She doubted even she could have broken through by force. Good.

The front door opened into a deserted lobby with four doors. The lettering had been scraped off three of them, so Lindy walked toward the door that said, simply,
Chicago BPI.
She wondered what had happened to the other companies in the building. This much empty, unguarded space made her uncomfortable, and she’d only been there for fifteen seconds.

Through the BPI doors there was a large reception space with people milling around a coffee cart. There were more of them than Lindy had expected—she’d been under the impression that the Chicago BPI was a very small unit—and she paused uncertainly just inside the door.

“Lindy,” Alex called. She felt a stab of relief as he shouldered through the crowd with his hand extended as though they hadn’t seen each other in days. She understood that this was part of the “convince everyone that Lindy’s human” ritual and played along. “Glad you found the place.”

“Are all these people part of your team?” she asked, gesturing at the crowd.

“Yes and no.” Alex’s face was grave. “Our team has access to a group of FBI staff to handle evidence collection and pathology, and they all came over for this initial briefing. With the bodies this morning, everything is a little . . . heightened. Do you want coffee before we start?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth he winced, remembering that she couldn’t drink it.

Lindy just smiled and touched his shoulder in a friendly way. “That’d be great.”

He led her to the coffee machine, where Lindy put about an inch of dark roast in a paper cup and covered it with a lid. A prop. Then Alex introduced her to the small BPI support staff: an office manager, Sarah Greer; several assistants; a couple of interns. Alex needed to get the briefing started, so he simply pointed out the FBI staff: A liaison agent, Gil Palmer, who was looking bored and impatient to get started; a forensic pathologist and a handful of criminalists; as well as the state medical examiner. The FBI group stood in clusters on the other side of the room from the BPI staff, drinking coffee and looking uneasy, as if they were afraid the BPI team had some sort of communicable disease.

Before Alex could actually call them to attention, Sarah Greer rushed up and asked to speak to him privately. After the agent excused himself to his office, Lindy used the opportunity to collect some gossip, since no one knew about her enhanced hearing. Pretending to sip the coffee, Lindy learned that the FBI group was indeed nervous about being associated with the shade team: There were now three dead teens and a number of dead federal agents, and this mess was starting to look like “a political tar baby,” as one sullen criminalist put it.

The FBI group also had a lot of things to say about Alex McKenna, who was apparently the son of the first female director of the FBI. Lindy hadn’t known that, and wondered if it explained his ambition and the enthusiasm that bordered on recklessness. Everyone was also talking about the tall, willowy woman standing in a corner with long red hair in a French braid down her back. Alex had briefly introduced her as Jill Hadley, and she was apparently a notorious rising star in the Bureau, the kind of agent who seemed destined to fly up the ranks, maybe even all the way up. Everyone in both the BPI and the Bureau was shocked that she’d crossed over to the BPI team, and speculations about her reasons were flying back and forth. Most of the hypotheses were so ridiculous that Lindy couldn’t begin to take them seriously. It sparked her interest in Hadley, though, and she made a mental note to keep an eye on the young agent.

That was all Lindy could gather before Alex finally returned and called the meeting to attention, waving a hand so they would gather around him as he stood in front of one of the office’s stark, undecorated walls. Even with the extra Bureau people, there was still a lot more space around their group than was needed. The generic, relatively modern office building had been designed to hold hundreds of workers, rather than a few dozen. Because of the large space, and the crowd of people around her, it took Lindy a moment to realize that Alex was agitated underneath his blank expression. She stepped closer to the front of the group, pretending to take a sniff of her coffee. His pheromones were off, and his pulse was tripping. Something had happened.

“This is where I was planning to make a speech,” Alex said without preamble. “But there’s been a development, and I’m gonna keep this as brief as possible.”

Around her, the agents glanced at one another and passed around minimalist shrugs. No one else knew what was happening—except for Sarah Greer, who looked equally distraught. “I’m Special Agent in Charge Alex McKenna. This”—he motioned to Chase—“ is my second in command, Chase Eddy. You’ve probably met Agents Hadley and Bartell, and our fifth agent, Ruiz, is currently in the Cook County Hospital recovering from the attack that killed my predecessor.”

The crowd around Lindy stilled, everyone uncomfortably aware of what had happened to the last group that had pursued the shades. Alex let a moment of silence pass, and then went on. “I’m trying something a little different for our sixth pod member: Instead of another field agent, I have brought in a consultant.” He pointed at Lindy, who fought to keep herself from slinking into a shadow. As a rule, shades did not like the spotlight. Attention made it a lot harder to pick off your prey. “Everyone, this is Lindy Frederick, the last new member of the pod. She’s a specialist in language and human behavior, and now we’re pulling her out of the private sector and into the pod. She has been studying Ambrose.” This was a lie, but no one seemed to suspect it. Lindy listened to the crowd whispering. They were all curious about her, and about Ambrose, who was considered an asset on par with the Ark of the Covenant. But no one was questioning Alex’s story, just as he’d promised.

“She does not have special agent status, but I expect you to give her the same courtesy and respect you would any other team member,” Alex went on. “Her methods are a little different from the Bureau’s, but in this case I think that’s a good thing.” The agents around him grimaced. They were all aware of the Bureau’s need for fresh tactics.

Alex paused and looked around the room, meeting the eyes of everyone present. “I know that many of you are dealing with a new city, new home, and new office all at once. On top of all that, we’re all coming here with different backgrounds, different goals, different strengths. Under normal circumstances we’d have months to get to know one another and figure out how to work together as a unit, but these are not normal circumstances.” He turned around, producing a black marker, and wrote the names of three towns on the bare white wall. Capping the marker, he faced them again. “Folks, an hour ago our suspect took four more teenagers captive out of Homewood, Lansing, and Heavenly. This is in addition to the three we believe he still has.”

The room erupted into chatter. Lindy felt electric shock zip through her daylight-dulled brain. Hector had taken kids
during the day
? That was too bold, even for him. Shades rarely left their lairs between sunrise and sunset; they were too weak then. Well, most of them were. Something must have changed, some kind of catalyst that had caused him to—

Her.

Lindy swore out loud, not caring who heard. Hector had felt her presence and moved up his plans; that was the only explanation. All that potential, and he was going to waste it.

She looked back at Alex, who had lost control of the room. No, he hadn’t—he was simply ignoring it, staring directly at her as the not-so-hushed conversations went on all around them. They locked eyes for a long moment, and then Alex gave her a small, weary nod. She found herself shouting. “Were they related to the previous missing kids?”

The room went instantly quiet, and everyone heard Alex’s low response. “Yes.” He turned back to the wall and began scrawling names under the town names. “Josh Crombie’s sister Mimi was taken, along with Chloe Davis’s older brother and Danny Cole’s half-sister.” When he was finished writing, McKenna turned back to meet her gaze, his eyebrows raised. “What are you thinking?”

Every eye in the room turned toward Lindy. She swallowed.
Time to pick a side
. Moving slowly, as if levitating, Lindy threaded through the crowd and went up to McKenna, standing next to him, facing the group. “According to the information from Ambrose, our suspect’s name is Hector,” she began, her voice shaking just a little, “and I think I know why he’s taking siblings.” She paused, but none of them were laughing at her or screaming that she was a vampire. Not even whispers. She pushed on. “He’s experimenting with transmuting a group of them at once.”

Now the crowd rustled uneasily, but Lindy continued, choosing her words to be as efficient and straightforward as possible. “Under the right circumstances, older shades can send orders telepathically to the ones they create. Its a one-way connection.” To give them a moment to absorb that, she held out her hand, and without hesitating Alex put the marker into it. She drew a stick figure on the wall, and an arrow leading to a second stick figure below it. “Twins who are transmuted, however, can communicate with both their sire and each other.” She drew a second stick figure next to the lower one, and arrows connecting all three. “My theory,” she went on, “is that Hector is attempting to find a way to expand that bond, to form telepathic connections among an entire group of shades.”

A skeptical voice rang out from the back of the room. “So these kids are what? Lab rats?”

“In a sense,” Lindy said soberly. “My research suggests that even shades don’t fully understand how the bond between old and new shades works, so trying to repeat a phenomena that’s only worked on twins . . . you’d need a lot of different subjects to experiment on.”

“In what type of setting?” Chase asked. “Does he need a laboratory? Would it have to be underground? Is there a certain location that might work better than another?”

All very good questions. Lindy tilted her head a moment, considering it. She ignored the whispers that had started from the back of the room, which speculated on everything from how she’d gotten Ambrose to talk to her “fuckability.” Some were even drawing a connection between the two. “An actual laboratory wouldn’t be necessary,” she said finally. “But some lab equipment would be useful: needles and syringes, possibly narcotics to keep the kids sedated. Underground would work, but so would the interior of any building.”

The FBI liaison, Palmer, made a noise of frustration. “That could be anywhere. An abandoned warehouse, deserted businesses, sewer systems. Anywhere.”

“Why is he being so obvious about it?” asked a new voice. A few people shuffled around, and then she could see Harvey Bartell, the older agent. McKenna had said he’d been on the original team that brought in Ambrose. “I’ve been hunting shades since Exposure, and I’ve never heard of one kidnapping and killing people and being so bold about it.”

“I don’t know,” Lindy said. “Shades are predators, hunters with perfect camouflage. There’s no reason to . . . I don’t know.”

“How much time do we have?” came a quiet alto voice from the side. The redhead, Hadley. “How long before this Hector kills the new kids?”

“Hours,” Lindy said honestly. She knew Hector as well as she knew herself. The moment he knew she was in town he had grabbed new subjects, the ones that matched the living subjects he had left. “He’ll be experimenting with their blood right now, or possibly tonight, when the shades are strongest.” And when he’d used up all those kids, he would either come after her or leave Chicago to start over somewhere else.

The agents around her were looking frustrated, helpless. She wished she could say something comforting, but she had no idea how to go about finding Hector’s base of operations. She was not an investigator. For the first time, Lindy regretted the transfusions that blurred the connection between her and her brother. This would be so much easier if she could lead the team straight to him.

Alex saw her floundering and stepped forward again. “Here’s what we’re doing,” he announced. “Research and interns, I want you going over the case files from the original group of missing kids, including the three deceased. Recheck everything with the new information in mind, and look for connections to the new victims. Bartell and Hadley, I want you to start files on the kids who just went missing today. Backgrounds, known associates, likes and dislikes, everything you can find. We’re low on time, so do what you can over the phone before you start ringing doorbells. Then get together with the others and look for patterns, connections.”

He turned to the FBI members, still standing a little apart from the BPI team. “The rest of you, either pitch in with our research or go back to analyzing the evidence from the body dump, plus the autopsies. I’ll be coordinating with the labs and the authorities to give you priority on everything.” He glanced at his remaining employees. “Lindy, Chase, Sarah, with me, please.”

The meeting dissolved into a bustle of individual activity. Alex led them down a short hallway to his office, which was currently just a bare cube with his briefcase tossed over one of the visitor’s chairs. Alex sat behind the empty desk, looking first at Sarah Greer. “Sarah, at seven o’clock I’d like you to order pizza and sodas for the staff. Pick someplace decent.” He shot a quick, amused glance at Chase. “Someplace with deep dish. It’s on me. Come find me and I’ll give you my credit card.”