Authors: Paige Tyler
Five Years Later, Somewhere Near Sacramento, California
Danica Beckett didn’t have to hear what the two Sacramento police officers were muttering about as they followed her and her partner, Tony Moretti, into the warehouse to know they were pissed off. Local cops didn’t like it much when the FBI swooped in with their federal jurisdiction and took over their cases. And that was what had happened last night. After four deaths in the area—three of which had erroneously been ruled animal attacks—the governor had called someone high up, who’d called someone else higher up, and just like that, a whole lot of hides had been rubbed the wrong way. It wasn’t her fault, or her partner’s, but that was the way these things worked. Big shots at the top made the decisions, and the field agents had to deal with the mess on the ground.
Finding a serial killer was hard enough. The local PD could have run down the anonymous call that had come in this morning about another possible victim, but Roger Carhart, the new senior agent in charge who’d recently transferred from the New York office, wanted the FBI following up on every tip. He’d said he wanted someone on the scene who knew the difference between a murder and a bear attack, but what he meant was he wanted the FBI preserving the evidence before the locals messed everything up. That was going to get old quick, and definitely wouldn’t help to smooth any ruffled feathers.
Even though the warehouse looked deserted, Danica took out her weapon and held it down at her side, finger near the trigger but not on it. Beside her, Tony did the same. One of the cops snorted. She ignored him. It was standard Bureau procedure. If the locals didn’t like it, tough. No wonder the governor had called in reinforcements.
The smell of fresh blood assaulted her the moment she stepped through the open door, and she and Tony simultaneously lifted their guns to the ready position. That got the attention of the two cops with them. They pulled their own sidearms and immediately started checking the darkened building.
Danica did a quick survey of the room as she and Tony cautiously made their way across the big, open space to the body lying on the floor. It was a white male, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, though he could have been younger. He was naked from the waist up and there were dozens of jagged wounds crisscrossing his chest. On their own, they might not have been enough to kill him, but whoever had attacked him had ripped out his throat.
Shock gripped Danica, making her feel light-headed. It wasn’t the blood and carnage that bothered her. It was the fact that she knew exactly what type of person had done this. She’d seen this kind of kill before.
“Looks like our serial killer’s MO,” Tony said, jerking Danica back to the present. “These tears and lacerations look exactly like the ones in the photos of the previous victims.”
Behind them, one of the cops made a gagging sound. She looked over her shoulder to see him covering his mouth with his free hand, like he was trying not to throw up.
Tony swore under his breath. “Get him out of here before he fouls up the crime scene,” he ordered the second cop.
That guy didn’t look much better than his partner. He stared at Tony for a few seconds before the words sunk in. As the two men left, Danica turned back to survey the body again, hoping against hope she was wrong about who’d done this. She’d almost convinced herself when she heard a noise above her. She raised her Glock, aiming it in the direction of the sound. A metal catwalk ran from one end of the warehouse to the other, and her gaze darted over it just as a man up there hauled ass in the other direction.
“We’ve got a runner!” Danica shouted. “Cover the outside exits.”
She didn’t wait to see if Tony obeyed as she ran for the other end of the building. God, she hoped there was a stairwell that would get her up to the catwalk.
Behind her, Tony ordered the cops to get on the outside escape routes. Knowing her partner would be coming to back her up, Danica ran as fast as she could and slammed into the set of double doors at the far side of the warehouse.
As she’d hoped, it was a stairwell. Somewhere above her, a door banged against a wall, followed by pounding footsteps. She kept both her eyes and her weapon trained on the next landing as she hurried up the steps, fully expecting someone to come racing down the stairs.
But she got all the way to the top of the fourth floor without catching sight of anyone. The door that led out to the roof had just swung closed, so the guy couldn’t be far ahead of her.
Footsteps echoed on the stairs below her. Tony. Danica knew she should wait for him, but she’d never been the type to hang around for backup. Instead, she kicked open the door to the roof and darted her head out for a quick look. When no one took a shot at her, she stepped outside and did a slow sweep of the gravel-covered roof before moving around the stairwell, ready to take down the first threatening target she identified. She didn’t know for sure that the man she was chasing had murdered anyone—he might be some poor homeless guy for all she knew—but she’d assume the worst until she knew better. It had saved her butt more than once.
She saw him running away from her across the roof as she rounded the corner of the stairwell. He was bigger than she’d first thought—at least six two—and could run as fast as an Olympic sprinter.
“FBI!” she shouted as she took off after him.
Danica didn’t have a chance of catching up to him. Until he ran out of roof, at least. Unless there happened to be a fire escape. As the man picked up speed, she had a sinking feeling. She ignored it and ran faster.
She was at least fifty feet behind him, so far away that she could do little more than confirm he was in fact male, dressed head to foot in black, and that he had shaggy, sandy blond hair. But all of that became irrelevant when the man got to the edge of the roof and jumped.
Holy crap.
Danica skidded to a stop at the edge of the roof seconds later and peered down at the street below, expecting to see the man in black on the ground. But there was no sign of him. She looked around wildly for another way off the roof. There were some heavy-duty electrical conduits running along the side of the building almost all the way to the ground, as well as a set of guide wires that attached a big antenna to the corner of the warehouse. The man could have used one of those as an escape route, but it would have taken him a few minutes to get down to street level. Which meant he hadn’t gone down that way.
So where did he go?
The door leading to the stairwell on the building across the alley banged against the wall, then slowly swung closed. That really bad feeling she had in her stomach suddenly got a whole lot worse.
Dammit
.
She eyed the gap between the roof she was on and the other warehouse. It had to be twenty-five feet at least, maybe thirty. The roof over there was about ten feet lower than the one where she was standing, but there weren’t any normal humans she knew who could make that leap. She knew some not-so-normal humans who could, though. If she was right, this wasn’t the kind of guy she and her partner should go after by themselves. Hell, she wouldn’t want to go after him with four or five agents for backup.
Danica holstered her gun and turned to head back downstairs when Tony rushed onto the roof. She waved him off.
“All clear. It was a homeless guy. He slid down some electrical conduits and disappeared. I’m pretty sure he’s not our guy.”
Tony’s dark eyes scanned the rooftop as he shoved his gun in his holster. “Maybe he saw who dumped the body.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll give a description to the locals and see what they turn up.”
She hated lying to Tony. They’d been partners for the past two years and friends even longer—since all the way back at Quantico. But what the hell was she going to say? That there was a not-quite-human guy out there who could jump thirty feet in a single bound? Tony was a good FBI agent—a great one even—but he was practical to a fault. He’d think she’d lost her marbles. She had to keep her partner in the dark for his own good.
Luckily, the two Sacramento police officers had been so busy covering either side of the long warehouse they hadn’t seen what had happened on her end. Good. She hadn’t been looking forward to trying to convince them they hadn’t seen something they really had. Since that wasn’t an issue, she sent them off on a wild goose chase after an imaginary homeless guy. Yet one more thing to feel bad about, but she’d gotten used to living in a morally gray world long ago.
While Tony called in the situation to the task force command center, she crouched down and checked the body once more. As she surveyed the mutilated remains, she desperately wanted to convince herself this wasn’t what she thought it was. But that would be a crock of crap. She’d seen this more than once—back when she worked for the Department of Covert Operations.
She stood up and walked around the warehouse looking for anything that might give them a clue as to who’d dumped the body. And it had definitely been a body dump. She didn’t need a crime scene tech to tell her that. Unfortunately, the killer hadn’t left so much as a piece of lint behind. That sucked. It would be so much better for everyone if forensic evidence and old-fashioned detective work led them to this killer. But it wasn’t going down that way. And delaying the inevitable wasn’t going to make that call to the super-secret organization she used to work for any easier.
Danica walked outside to find Tony briefing the lead crime scene investigator. She gave her partner a wave as she held up her cell phone and moved off to the side. She dialed as she walked, her finger flying over the keypad from memory. Two years and she still remembered the number. God, that was sad.
She held her breath as she waited for the person on the other end to pick up. When she’d walked away from the DCO, it hadn’t been on her terms, and it had been ugly. Getting involved with them again was going to open a lot of old wounds. But stopping a serial killer was more important than hurt feelings and a broken heart.
* * *
This wasn’t going to end well.
Clayne squatted behind the sandbag barricade as live rounds of ammunition buzzed over his head. It wasn’t the live-fire training exercise out at the DCO training complex in Quantico that worried him—he’d taken part in hundreds of these stupid things. Other than someone screwing up and drilling a round through your forehead while you moved from one covered position to the next, there wasn’t much to get jazzed about. Occasionally, you might have to return fire against various pop-up targets. If the training officer running the op was really feeling his oats, you might get to engage in a little hand-to-hand combat at specific designated no-fire zones. Again, no big deal.
But today was different. Because today, he’d been paired up with Tanner, the Hybrid from Hell. Maybe it wasn’t the nicest way to describe a guy who was trying to get his life together, but Clayne couldn’t think of anything better to label the man-made shifter. The drugs that had been used to turn him into a shifter had come with some nasty side effects. While Clayne might have anger management issues, Tanner went stark-raving mad at the drop of a hat. And when he did, the ragged claws, long fangs, and strength beyond that of any shifter made him the most dangerous and uncontrollable creature the DCO had ever dealt with. That’s why everyone in the DCO called Tanner and those like him a hybrid instead of a shifter.
Some things just didn’t make sense from the get-go. Like ordering a Diet Coke with a monster burger. Or giving a guy who had more issues with anger management and impulse control than Clayne did a loaded weapon and putting him in a combat scenario.
Oh yeah. This
really
wasn’t going to end well.
Clayne swore under his breath as he moved out from behind his covered position and hauled ass for a pile of logs fifteen feet away. The gunfire over his head sounded a whole hell of a lot closer than before. If the machine gunner on top of the hill was doing his job right, the bullets would be ten feet above his head. But it was hard not to duck anyway.
As he dove behind the barricade, Clayne caught sight of Tanner out of the corner of his eye. The hybrid was right there beside him.
Thirty minutes earlier, Clayne had been getting ready to run the exercise with Trevor Maxwell, one of the other shifters he’d worked with a few times. He wasn’t exactly friends with Trevor—though that could be said about almost anyone at the DCO—but he respected him. The coyote shifter and his industrial-espionage-slash-counter-intelligence team—humans, or norms, though they may be—were damn good at their job.
Then Dick Coleman had shown up with Tanner Howland in tow. That should have clued Clayne in that something screwy was up. Dick rarely came out to the live-fire training area. Probably because he was afraid one of the dozens of people he pissed off on a recurring basis would “accidentally” shoot him. And if that hadn’t been enough to let Clayne know something was up, the fact that the Russian doctor, Zarina Sokolov, was hurrying after them with a concerned look on her pretty face sure as hell should have.
“Howland is taking Maxwell’s place,” he’d told Todd Newman, the training officer for the exercise.
When Todd had attempted to point out it wasn’t a good idea to introduce Tanner to DCO training in the middle of a live-fire exercise, Dick waved away his concerns.
“He was an Army Ranger. This stuff is child’s play for him.”
So Todd had given Tanner a loaded M4 carbine and told him to follow Clayne’s lead.
Clayne had to admit that so far Tanner was doing damn good. He covered Clayne when necessary, reacted quickly to pop-up targets in his sector, and didn’t hesitate to move under overhead fire. The tactical exercise was still talking a toll on the guy. Tanner’s eyes were a bit too wide, he was sweating a bit too much, and his jaw looked like it was clenched so hard that dental damage was a definite possibility. Worse, his heart was racing a hundred miles an hour. Clayne knew because he could hear it.
But despite all that, Tanner was keeping it together.