Beneath the Skin (3 page)

Mr. Dion laughed, his voice as soothing as the cocoa in her mug. "You'll make a good agent, sweetie. This is a special room we use to interview FBI agents and their families when ... tragedy ... strikes, so we don't need to monitor anyone. It's a safe place from the bad guys." Leaning forward, he rested his clasped hands on the table. "One more photo, then you're done."

"Okay." Brisia looked at the last photo and she inhaled in sharp surprise at the man captured in the picture. He looked way young, for one thing, younger than she remembered. Black hair, dark chocolate-colored eyes, white skin, a tilted smile on his lips, a black collar strapped around his throat. He looked happy and sure of himself. And what surprised her was that without all the blood on his skin, he was cute, like pin-the-poster-to-your-wall-and-sigh-over-it cute.

He didn't look like a monster.

But she knew he was.

He appears in front of her in a gust of air smelling of autumn leaves and Halloween apples. Blood smears his white face. She backs up until she bumps into the sofa. She freezes, her heart drumming, frantic and wild. He kneels down on one knee in front of her, leather pants creaking. A smile tugs at his bloodstained lips. He reaches a trembling, blood-smeared hand for her hair and slides a lock between his fingers.

She catches a whiff of something pungent and coppery.
She sees blood on his pale fingers, glistening on his shirt, trickling from his nose. So much blood. But he's not acting like he's hurt. Maybe it isn't all his blood.

A thought loops through her mind, numbing her heart and stealing her voice.

Where's Daddy?

"Did he hurt you?"

Brisia shook her head. She tried to blink away the tears blurring her vision, but she couldn't blink fast enough. Tears spilled over her lashes and slid hot down her cheeks. No longer ten years old, but a bawling baby. And a baby couldn't help Dad.

"He was there," she said, her throat so tight, the words hurt. "He came outta my dad's office."

"Dante Prejean. Are you sure he didn't hurt you? Absolutely sure?"

"He didn't hurt me." She remembered the blood glistening on his shirt, smeared on his face, his hands.
He didn't hurt me, but he hurt Daddy.
She wiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands and another memory flashed into her mind.

The red-haired woman walks out of the hallway's darkness and stops beside the office door, a small black gun clenched in her hands. She looks at Brisia and her eyes widen.

"Help me," Brisia whispers.

The woman, face tight, lifts the gun and aims it at the blood-smeared man kneeling in front of Brisia, stroking her hair and speaking to her in a language she doesn't know.

But it isn't anger she sees on the woman's face, or even horror. It's sorrow.

Sniffing, Brisia wiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

"I don't see any Kleenex," Mr. Dion murmured, brushing a hand over his short caramel-brown hair as he glanced around the room.

"A lot of times it's kept under the interview table or in a drawer," Brisia said. Shoving her chair back over the low beige carpet, she peeked under the table. No box of Kleenex. Just Mr. Dion's polished black shoes and gray-trousered legs.

"I think we're about done, Brisia."

"So I get to go see my dad now?" she asked, sitting up and scooting her chair back to the table. She lifted her mug and took a swallow of the cooling cocoa.

Mr. Dion stood up and walked around the table. He crouched down beside her chair. Brisia's fingers clenched around the mug, and for a moment, she thought she smelled copper and Halloween apples, saw blood against white skin. Her stomach rolled, queasy. She set the mug back down on the table.

"Before I take you to the hospital to see your dad," Mr. Dion said, his voice low and smooth, "I want you to close your eyes and go back to the moment you walked into the house this evening."

Brisia looked into his eyes. His violet gaze was flecked with gold and burning bright--rimmed with fire like molten glass. She'd learned in art class last year that molten glass could be shaped into anything.

Offering Mr. Dion a smile, Brisia said, "Okay." She closed her eyes.

You trusted family.

"I'm going to touch your temples, but keep your eyes closed, sweetie."

Brisia nodded. Fingers brushed aside the hair at either side of Brisia's head, then settled against her skin. Their heat made her feel drowsy, all floaty, like a balloon.

"Go to the beginning," Mr. Dion whispered.

A wave of dizziness swirled through her and when she tried to open her eyes, she couldn't. Fear rippled in, black and cold. "Mr. Dion? I don't feel good."

"Shhh. It'll pass. Just focus on what happened tonight."

The dizziness vanished, but an icy ball of dread lodged in her tummy. She gripped the sides of her chair to make sure she didn't fall out of it.

A thought breezed through her mind:
Everything's okay. You're safe and you'll be seeing Daddy soon.
She relaxed and let the thought curl through her like hot cocoa steam as she shifted her thoughts backward a few hours.

She opens the front door and walks into the empty living room. "Daddy?" she calls. "I forgot my iPod!"

And even as the memory and its sounds and images flowed through her mind, she felt each one being un-threaded and undone, like when her mom unhooked her knitting when she didn't like how the piece had turned out. Until it was just yarn, waiting to be knitted into something new. Or molten glass waiting to be shaped.

Then even those thoughts unraveled.

1
A NECESSARY EVIL

SEATTLE, WA
March 25

EMMETT THIBODAUX STOOD AT the threshold of the victim's home office, light from the hallway casting his shadow across the body on the floor.

FBI SAC Alberto Rodriguez was stretched out on the carpet like a man seeking relief for an aching back. But the thick, coppery reek of blood and the crackling of police radios from the living room told a different story.

Emmett flipped on the light.

Rodriguez stared up at the glass-domed ceiling light with half-lidded, milky eyes. His throat looked shredded, savaged. Blood had soaked into the front of his pale blue sweater, staining it a dark maroon that matched the blood halo soaked into the carpet around his head.

"Christ, did his daughter see him like this?" Emmett asked.

"No," his partner, Merri Goodnight, murmured from just behind him. He heard the whisper of suede against his windbreaker as she leaned forward to look into the murder room. Caught a faint whiff of cloves. "Not according to what Abano told me. The kid only saw the perps. She didn't know about her dad."

"Abano? The fed in charge of the scene?"

"You mean the fed that
was
in charge of the scene?" Merri replied dryly. "That'd be him."

"No doubt he's one unhappy camper at the moment."

"Given that the vic's one of their own, that's putting it mildly."

"Yeah, well, wonder how he'd feel to learn that some of his own might be involved in the killing," Emmett murmured. "The feds'll be even unhappier when they realize we're shutting this crime scene down altogether."

Controlling and sanitizing the situation. A clean wipe. Scraping clinkers into the furnace to watch them burn, as his granddad used to say. No matter how you put it, the result was the same. Events were being altered at best and erased at worst.

A necessary evil in his line of work.

From the front room, Emmett caught a low murmur of voices from the TV that no one had turned off, hoping to catch the result of the Garcia-Dowd middleweight championship bout and the latest sports scores while processing the scene. No more police radio static or low, irked mutters.

The Bureau's people had vacated along with the Seattle PD's people. Hell, maybe they had all gone to a local tavern to brew up a booze-fueled bitchfest about the Shadow Branch's glory-stealing theft of their case.

But nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Especially here.

Emmett stepped into the room, carefully avoiding the spatters of blood marring the cream-colored carpet near the threshold. He caught a faint whiff of piss just under the blood reek.

"ETA for our cleanup crew is ten minutes," Merri said. "Gillespie's supposed to drop by with instructions from HQ."

"Wonder what's taking so long? Usually Gillespie's first on scene."

"HQ probably put the chief on hold while they were busy trying to figure out who to smear the sticky, gooey blame on. Once they have that figured out . . ."

"Heads are gonna roll," Emmett agreed. He allowed his gaze to rove around the room, ticking off each item he saw as normal or not, a mental what's-wrong-with-this-picture game that he played at each assignment. Hell, not just at assignments or crime scenes anymore. He found himself doing it everywhere he went--at Safeway, the mall, in a movie theater, picking up the kids from school.

Gun on the carpet against the north wall, a Smith & Wesson--not normal.

Desk with neatly parked chair--normal. Black, four-drawer file cabinet--normal.

Opened gun safe containing a single box of ammo--probably not normal.

And the late Alberto Rodriguez sprawled on the carpet in a drying pool of his own blood--well, hell, not even
close
to normal.

But normal had nothing to do with what had happened in this house.

"Abano and his people have no clue about vampires," Merri said, as though reading Emmett's mind. But he knew she hadn't; that was an issue they'd hashed out years ago. "They think Rodriguez was killed by multiple slash and stab wounds to the throat. And I sure as hell wasn't going to enlighten them."

Emmett chuckled. "They wouldn't've believed you anyway."

"Not at first," Merri said, a smile quirking at the corners of her mouth. "You didn't either, as I recall."

"Still don't," Emmett drawled.

Merri folded her arms across her chest, slung her weight onto one hip, and arched an eyebrow. "Uh-huh. Don't make me prove it to you, Thibodaux. Again."

Emmett shook his head, smiling. "Once was enough, thanks." He pinched up his trousers at the thighs, then crouched down beside Rodriguez's body. The man's ruined throat had been pierced and torn by sharp teeth.

"Not the neatest work I've ever seen," Merri said, her voice pitched low, and now right beside him. After five years of working together, her speed and stealth no longer startled him. Most times, he even forgot what she was.

"Looks to me like one outta control vamp." Emmett glanced up at his partner.

Merri tilted her head, her dark brown eyes studying all that remained of Special Agent in Charge Alberto Rodriguez, husband, father, Bureau man. "Young vamp, maybe. Or hungry as hell." She shifted and glanced back at the doorway and Emmett followed her gaze.

High-velocity blood spatter speckled the doorway's wood frame and the peach-colored wall beside it. "Looks like Rodriguez got one good shot off, though," she said.

"He did." Emmett agreed.

Merri nodded at the gun on the carpet. "For all it was worth."

"So what stopped the vamp from killing Rodriguez's daughter?" Emmett said. "Why didn't he snatch up that kid and drain her dry?"

"Good question." Merri crouched down beside Emmett and he smelled spice and cloves from the cigarettes she smoked. "And I think I have the answer."

"Yeah? Let's hear it, then, Goodnight," Emmett said, his voice a low drawl, a little bit of Louisiana creeping in underneath his words. "You gonna tell me this vamp's got a soft spot for kids?"

Merri shook her head and her straightened black hair, gathered and glossed into a high and neat ponytail, swung like a pendulum across her shoulder blades. "Nope. Someone else shot him again."

"Yeah? Who?"

A smug smile curved Merri's rosy full lips. She lifted her hand and displayed a small, slender dart pinched between two fingers. "One of the other perps dropped the vamp with a trank gun. I relieved Abano's techs of the one they'd bagged while processing the scene. But they missed finding the dart in the carpet."

Emmett grinned. "I knew there was a reason I kept you around."

"Because I'm a better field agent than you'll ever be?"

"That'd be it."

"Truth, brothah," Merri said, then chuckled, the sound warm and throaty. She slid the dart into an inside pocket of her black suede jacket. "Makes me wonder what else they missed."

"Truth, sistah. I'm guessing tons, but it doesn't matter. It's never going to court." Emmett rose to his feet, his knees creaking with the movement. An annoying new voice in the body-choir his joints, tendons, and bones had orchestrated ever since he'd turned forty. A body-choir that sang loud and strong when it rained. Given that he lived in Seattle, the singing was almost year-round and lusty as hell.

Looks like all those years of karate sparring are catching up with me.

"Do we know for certain that feds are involved in this?" Merri asked.

"HQ just said it was possible and to keep everything hush-hush until the perps were positively identified," Emmett said, offering a hand up to his partner.

Merri snorted. "When
isn't
something hush-hush?" She grasped his hand, her dark brown skin bleaching out his hard-won tan, and he pulled all five foot nothing of her up onto her booted feet. "It isn't called the Shadow Branch for nothing."

"Sing it, sistah. Wanna bet that even the director's dumps are classified?"

Merri shook her head. "Man, that's nasty. What's the matter with--" She straightened, her hand sliding free of his, her alert posture reminding Emmett of a hunting dog on point. She swiveled smoothly to face the doorway. "Our people are here."

Emmett heard the front door open, then click shut. A cold draft of air swept into the room and goosebumped his skin. He heard the squeak of wheels underneath the background noise of the TV, felt the thud of footsteps coming up the hall.