“I don’t want you out on the street, so you ride a desk for the rest of the day, give yourself time to settle. If the lieutenant needs a driver, Debany or Hilborn can handle it.”
Burke clasped and unclasped his fingers a couple of times, debating the wisdom of saying anything, even now. “When you’re a cop serving in a small human village within the wild country, sometimes you make hard choices that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—make in a human-controlled city. And you look the truth in the face when its fangs are bared and its fur is smeared with the blood of the prey you had gone out to talk to that morning. But you’d taken a walk beyond the village lights the night before, and you were mulling things over out loud about how to handle a difficult situation, about the nice woman who had a broken arm again, how her mate beat her but she was too frightened to say anything against him so there was nothing you could do, and that was a shame because she really was a nice woman who had shown a couple of terra indigene females how to mend clothes, which is what started the argument that ended with her arm being broken, along with a couple of fingers to keep her from doing any mending for a while. And when you go to talk to the man the next morning and discover he isn’t home, you follow the game trail behind his house and you come upon a savaged, partially eaten body and you look the truth in the face—not the truth that has fangs and fur but the hard truth about yourself, that you’re just as dangerous as the beings the rest of the people fear but you can’t afford to be as honest about it. You can’t tell those people that you’ll make deals with what they fear in order to keep them safe from the monsters who look just like them.”
Kowalski said nothing for a long minute. “You think I should have stepped aside?”
“No,” Burke said gently. “You interfered because you’ve been around the Others long enough to understand that it’s one thing to know something intellectually and quite another to look the truth in the face. The police? We’ve seen plenty of evidence of how the terra indigene respond when they’re angry with humans. But civilians like Ruthie and Merri Lee who are living so close to the Courtyard and working among the Others? They don’t need that much truth.”
“Protect the women?” Kowalski gave him a dry smile. “They might take exception to that.”
“Of course they would—and should—but I’ll deny I ever said it.”
The smile faded. “You’re giving me a lot of credit for a few seconds I don’t remember.”
“I recognized the look in your eyes when you got to the station. I saw it in a mirror once or twice when I was around your age.”
Burke’s phone rang. He glanced at it, then focused on Kowalski. “You steady enough?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get to work.” He picked up the receiver as Kowalski walked out of his office. “Burke.”
“It’s O’Sullivan.”
Trying to remember if the ITF agent was back in Lakeside and had heard about the debacle in the Courtyard, Burke merely said, “What can I do for you?”
“Do you have any news about Dr. Lorenzo?”
He’d tell O’Sullivan everything once they could talk face-to-face, but he didn’t want to say anything about Lorenzo over the phone. “I heard he resigned from the task force. And his car was found. Had some bullet holes.”
A hesitation. “Are you checking hospitals and the morgue for any John Does?”
“Not necessary.”
“Did you fill out a DLU?”
“Not required.” Did O’Sullivan understand the message, that Lorenzo was alive and his whereabouts were known?
“Could you check the hospitals and morgue anyway?”
Burke sat up straighter. “Problem?”
“Half the doctors who were gathering information about the cassandra sangue resigned from the task force after being threatened by members of the Humans First and Last movement. During my talk with the governor, I confirmed that several other doctors besides Lorenzo have disappeared.”
He wrote down the names O’Sullivan gave him. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Appreciate it,” O’Sullivan said. “I’m on my way to catch a train back to Lakeside. Should be arriving late this afternoon.”
“Give me your ETA when you know it, and I’ll have someone pick you up.”
“Thanks.”
Burke hung up and sat back. There were still plenty of blood prophets living in the compounds where they’d been held all their lives, unwilling, or unable, to conceive of any kind of independent life. But there were also plenty of those girls who were now trying to shape a life for themselves, struggling with their addiction to cut, pushed into that self-destructive act by visions that wouldn’t be denied. Even the least talented among those girls could give a handler a very nice living, and the best among them . . .
He’d done a little digging, a little research, called a couple of places posing as a possible client before all the dirty secrets about benevolent ownership and what was done to the girls in those places came crashing down on the prophecy industry. One question, one cut on a girl with low-end talent and basic training, cost a couple of hundred dollars. Someone like Meg Corbyn, who was intelligent and absorbed information perhaps too well, who saw strings of images and was frighteningly accurate? A cut on someone with Meg’s skill would cost thousands.
Plenty of motivation to abduct and interrogate men who would know where to find girls who might not be as well protected as the Others believed—mainly because they would never consider that a human would be rash enough and greedy enough to try to get past them and snatch a girl.
Burke pushed away from his desk. He wanted to go to the Courtyard and assess the situation. But first he would get Kowalski started on locating the missing doctors, or at least getting some idea of where and when they were last seen. And then he needed to apprise the mayor and police commissioner of the potential trouble this attempted theft of meat might cause the city.
? ? ?
“What?” Simon snapped when Vlad, who was behind HGR’s checkout counter doing nothing useful, continued to stare at him.
“I noticed that all the books you’re putting on the display table are thrillers by terra indigene authors and are the type that could be described as ‘rip and tear.’”
“So?”
“Don’t you think the message is a little too blunt?”
Snarling, he turned toward the counter—and noticed Miss Twyla standing quietly between the shelves that separated the front area from the rest of the store.
“Is there something we can do for you, Miss Twyla?” Vlad asked.
“I understand that all the meat that was delivered yesterday was stolen.”
“Currently there is nothing in the butcher shop for sale.”
“I see.”
Simon couldn’t stand having her think there was no meat, that the female pack would have nothing to eat but greens. “The meat the thieves didn’t take we gave to Meat-n-Greens to use. And we can thaw a couple of packages of bison meat.”
Miss Twyla nodded. “That’s a good plan. And humans don’t need as much meat as you folks do, so a little can go a long way.”