“I’m willing to keep going,” said Trujillo, “but how? Even if the Withered’s plan is just to wait for us to come to them, how is that not an incredibly good plan? Mary Gardner was ambushed by a special forces assassin and she still put him in the hospital. We don’t have a new Potash to spend on every Withered that comes along.”
“The attack on Mary Gardner was reckless,” said Ostler, and I felt a pang of guilt—and another pang of anger. “We thought we knew how she worked, and we were spooked by the revelation that we were being hunted. Taking her out quickly was smart, but we weren’t thinking clearly, and we weren’t ready. I take full responsibility for that.”
“So that’s the plan?” asked Nathan. “Just keep doing the same thing we always do?”
“But do it better,” said Ostler.
I could do it better alone. No one to help me, but also no one to attract attention and get in the way. But with my photo on the Internet, could I ever truly sneak up on a Withered again? My methods were simple: make friends, find their weakness, and kill them. How could I make friends in secret if they all knew my face?
“Dr. Trujillo,” said Ostler, “I want you to talk to Brooke and see what you can get out of her: tell her about the corpse, about the three men, anything that might help her to remember something new.”
“I can embalm the victim,” I offered.
Ostler looked confused. “Why would we need you to embalm the victim?”
It was a long shot anyway. “Then I’ll talk to Brooke,” I said. “She knows me, and I know what to ask about.”
“Trujillo is the expert,” said Ostler.
“Trujillo is also the only one left with police contacts,” I said. “He’s investigated serial killers before, and someone he’s worked with is bound to know something about an unsolved cannibalism case.”
“You don’t make the assignments,” said Ostler.
“Brooke doesn’t even like him,” I said. “She’ll talk to me.”
Ostler thought a moment before nodding. “Take Nathan with you.”
“She won’t like him either.”
“Hey,” said Nathan.
“Half of what Brooke talks about happened thousands of years ago,” said Ostler. “Nathan can interpret that data better than you can.
“I’ve kept notes on everything Brooke’s said so far,” said Trujillo. “They’re not transferred to my computer yet, but—”
“I prefer paper anyway,” I said quickly, trying to think of a way to avoid a partnership with Nathan; the thought of him asking Brooke questions made my hands shake with anger. I pressed them into fists and hid them behind my back.
“My notes are all back in the office,” said Trujillo. “You’re welcome to any of it.”
“I’ll continue to work with the hospital,” said Ostler, “and coordinate with the rest of you as necessary. Dr. Pearl found a steroid treatment that seems to be helping Potash a lot, but don’t expect him to bail you out of trouble any time soon. You’re all armed?” Nathan, Diana, and Trujillo each patted a concealed gun; I held up my knife. Ostler raised her eyebrow at it. “You don’t want a gun?”
“He’s not comfortable with them,” said Diana.
“Too easy to hit the wrong target,” I said. And not nearly personal enough when you hit a target you really want to kill.
7
“Four of them,” said Brooke, sitting on her bed in the dementia ward. She was more lucid today than she had been in a while, and we were making as much use of that clarity as we could. She looked at me with worried eyes, but I watched as her expression shifted into a sly smile. Even lucid, there was a lot of Nobody mixed in with Brooke. “Four Cursed in one place is dangerous.”
“Do you mean the Withered?” asked Nathan. “Or is this a new group?”
“They are Withered and they are Cursed,” said Brooke. Her voice changed abruptly, sounding almost like a different person’s—small and weak and scared. “They used to call themselves the Gifted, and some of them still do, but Nobody never did. Sometimes Nobody did. Only when Kanta was around to hear it. He still believed in the old days, but not me; I hated them all.”