“I haven’t yet, but I have no gender preference when it comes to victims. I kill enemies. Period. So far, though, they’ve all been male.”
“Maybe you should specialize.”
“Why?”
“Because you smell like a snickerdoodle. An assassin cookie. Women would be helpless to fight you.”
He chuckled, wondering now if she was really still asleep. He eased her down to the mattress, reluctantly emptying his arms. “I’ll give that some thought. Might be a good strategy.” He pulled the blankets over her. She rolled onto her side, away from him. “Night, doc. I’ll lock the door behind me so you won’t worry about me coming back in.”
Greer went back to the living room and started rummaging around in the other boxes. Remi needed to get this info scanned and stored in a systematic, retrievable system. Maybe he’d help her with that when this was all over. He discovered a pattern of symbols she used as meta category labels. Some had peace signs. Some had crosses. Some had swords. And some had swastikas.
He checked all the boxes, then pulled out the ones with the swastikas. He got through three more boxes before fatigue made his eyes jump across the pages, scrambling what he was reading. He’d sent some of the information—the stuff Remi had approved, anyway—back to Max. They could work on finding the links, if there were any, between those groups and the Friendship Community when he got back to Blade’s.
He returned those boxes to the stacks and was about to quit for the night when the label on one of the boxes snagged his attention. The Grummond Society. Greer stared at the box. It pulled and repulsed him. He checked over his shoulder to see if Remi’s door was still closed.
He’d read everything he could find online about the group that was still active in southern Colorado. It was a reclusive group. Even the Feds had little data on them. The only pictures that he’d seen of the residents were taken with telephoto lenses from a good distance away.
He lifted the box and carried it over to the table. He flipped through the different folders, scanning Remi’s notes, newspaper clippings, a handful of photos, photocopies of permits the group had pulled for wells, and other public documentation.
He went back to look at the few photos. Some showed women in pastel hand-sewn dresses standing on balconies on the upper floors of various houses. Their hair was pulled back in neat buns and covered with white caps of some sort. There were lots of kids. The men wore white cotton shirts, black trousers, suspenders, and black boots.
A photo dropped out of the file onto the floor. He picked it up. It was a pic of several men, in traditional garb, standing in a cluster talking while women brought food to what looked like one of their celebration feasts. Hard to tell what time of year it was. The trees were green. Sometime in summer or early autumn.
His gaze drifted off, settling in an unfocused way on Remi’s kitchen island before returning again to the picture. It was hard to imagine Remi in this setting. She was intelligent, independent, self-sufficient. He wondered how he was going to get her to open up to him about her experiences there. He wanted to hear the story about how she got out.
He focused on the picture, looking at each community member’s face. “Sonofabitch!” he snarled, tilting the pic to hold it under better light. He snapped a picture of it and sent it over to Max in a text.
A minute later, he had a response. “Fuck. Me.” And then his phone rang. “What the hell is Senator Whiddon doing in the Friendship Community? It is the Friendship Community, isn’t it?”
“No. This is from Remi’s group—the Grummonds. I think we know why they’re coming after Remi. The photo came from the file Remi made on the group she grew up with. You think King knows about this?”
“Don’t know. Does Whiddon have the power to mobilize the WKB without him?”
“Another good question. Look, Remi has an apartment full of research she’s been doing for more than fifteen years. I think we need to get it transferred up to headquarters so that we can go through it and see what else is lurking in the files.”
“She gonna let you do that?”
“I’ll convince her.”
“I’ll let Kit and Owen know. Can we fit it in the SUVs, or do we need to rent a truck?”
“I think we can get it in the vehicles.”
“Copy. I’m out.”
Greer leaned back in his seat as he stared at the picture in his hand. A familiar chill crept down his spine. Without moving, he lifted his eyes and sent a look around the shadowy interior of Remi’s apartment, searching for the source of dread filling him. He saw nothing, but he knew he wasn’t alone. If Remi had come out of her room, he would have heard her unlock her door.
A sound outside the window caught his attention. He ditched the light in the kitchen. Remi’s apartment was one of three on the fourth floor of a nineteenth century red brick building. It overlooked the roof of the building next door. It was two a.m. No one would normally be out and about. Her building was two streets off the main drag—nowhere near the bars.
He pushed aside the curtain. What he saw on the roof next door lifted the hairs on his neck. That damned girl he kept seeing was standing there, looking up at his window. What. The. Fuck. How did she find him?
He went back to the papers spread across the kitchen table. He stacked them and put them back into the box, then set it with the others in the living room.
He went to the window again as a chilling realization jelled. This girl wasn’t human; she was a ghost. She was the one haunting him. He lifted the curtain to take another look, but she was gone.
He glanced around the apartment, checking to see if she appeared. All was quiet…until an orange-red ball smashed through the kitchen window and spread flames across the table where he’d just been sitting.
Chapter Twenty-One