“Just about. Should I have her look for a medium?”
“It’d kill two birds with one stone. Get our ID and maybe give us a jump-start on who murdered him.” She grabbed her keys from the table and sat down to pull on her boots. “Want to get dressed while I find us some coffee?”
“Sure.” He finished typing out a reply message and glanced at her. “You feeling good enough to drive, or should I take the first shift?”
“I’m fine. I was fine last night.” It felt like salt in the wound, making catty comments about the distance between them when he’d left his beloved bike behind, so she avoided his gaze as she shoved clothes back into her bag.
Patrick didn’t push back. He rose in silence and tugged on his jeans, then his boots. He’d tied the laces before he sighed. “You scared the hell out of me. Someone showed up gunning for me, and you took three bullets and passed out in the car. I’m glad you’re okay.”
The blunt honesty made her want to laugh and scream at the same time. On the surface, the words were nothing more than an apology. They could have easily come from the partner he’d agreed to be instead of a friend or lover. Safe, if a little raw. They didn’t break any rules.
But beneath the apology, she heard something else—a weary explanation that twisted through her like a blade.
This is why,
he was saying.
Why couldn’t she just
hear
it?
When she didn’t answer, he tossed his bag on the bed and started packing. “And maybe I’m a little jealous. I don’t heal like you.”
She’d never understand how he could casually admit things like that, things that would have made her bleed. Maybe they did him too, only he was brave enough to shoulder through the fear and say them anyway. “Not many people heal like me, even wolves,” she said absently. “Look, I’m sorry. That shooting yesterday could have gone south real fast, and I didn’t think. I didn’t consider what you might have to go through if I didn’t make it.”
“You had my back.” He met her gaze. “You’ve always got my back. We
are
partners, Lenoir. That’s the one thing that’ll never change, all right? I will always have your back.”
“I know.” Just like that, she wanted to curl against his chest and let him hold her. She turned away. “Coffee. I’ll get it.”
“Extra strong.” He zipped his bag. “And I’ll even let you pick the radio station.”
“That’s generous, McNamara.” She had to choke out the words, and she hurried out the door before he could answer.
The New Mexico Scientific Laboratories facility sat just off the interstate, all glass and brick against a backdrop of desert and roaring diesel engines.
A pretty brunette leaned against the trunk of a nondescript sedan, shading her eyes against the intensity of the midday sun. She waved, and Patrick broke out into a grin as he hopped out of the car. “Jennifer!”
The woman shook her head and smiled as she opened her arms. “Uh-uh, after all this time? That better not be all I get.”
He laughed and swept her up into an easy hug, looking more relaxed than Anna had seen him in all the time she’d known him. When he released the woman, he gestured to her. “This is Anna, the one I told you about. Anna, this is Jenny.”
She rolled her eyes and held out a hand. “Jennifer. Or Detective Lackmond, which Patrick should remember, since I’m not fourteen anymore.”
“Anna Lenoir.” The one Patrick had apparently told her about, though Christ knew what that meant.
“The badass, I know.” Jennifer shook her hand and gave her an appraising once-over. “You’re not really what I pictured.”
“I get that a lot.”
Patrick poked Jennifer in the shoulder. “Cut it out. She’s going to think I told you horrible shit.”
Letting it stand felt like giving in to her own insecurities. “I don’t think that at all.” Anna nodded toward the building. “Do we have to sign in?”
Jennifer shook her head. “I’ve got that covered. Just follow me.” She headed for the main entrance, sticking close to Patrick’s side. “I was damn sorry to hear about Ben.”
Patrick tensed. “I should have invited you to the funeral, but I was a mess after it happened. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Hey, I get it,” she murmured. “I’ll miss him.”
Anna had never met Ben. She couldn’t miss him, couldn’t feel anything beyond a secondhand sense of loss. She’d given Patrick what comfort she could, had spent that night wrapped in his arms as he drifted back and forth between nightmares and waking, but now it didn’t seem like enough. He should have had this woman with him, an old friend who would have known exactly what to say and do.
“He was being a hero. One of the good ones.” Patrick caught Anna’s gaze and smiled self-consciously. “Let’s talk about the dead guy. Did you track down a medium?”
“I did, but it wasn’t cheap.” Jennifer led them through the front doors and past the security desk. The guards didn’t even look up.
And no wonder. Magic pulsed out of the woman, a wave so subtle but powerful that Anna blinked. “Nice trick.”
Jennifer smiled. “You like it? It should get us all the way to the autopsy suite with no trouble.”
“You’ve gotten better.” Patrick held the next door open for them. “Or maybe you’re just using your powers for good now. Gonna tell Anna why you learned how to do this?”
“Honestly? Shoplifting, sneaking in to movies without paying.” She leaned closer to Anna, lowered her voice and winked. “Maybe even unauthorized male visitors after lights out.”
Patrick choked on a laugh. “You would have given Mama Dee gray hair if she’d cared a little more.”
“You never minded when you were the one tiptoeing into my room.”
Patrick blushed, and Jennifer studied them both openly. A test, then, to see how they’d react.
If
they’d react.
Anna almost smiled, more out of newfound respect than amusement. The woman certainly knew how to get information without wasting time or words, and it was hard not to appreciate such efficiency. “Same foster home?”
“Same foster home,” Patrick agreed. “She’s still too clever for her own good. And nosy as hell.”
Jennifer turned down a long hallway with cheery yellow walls. “No wonder I’m such a good detective, right?” She stopped at one of the first doors on the left and clucked her tongue. “In here. Hope neither of you has eaten recently.”
As soon as she walked in, the scent of death hit Anna full in the face. It permeated the whole building, but there, in that room, it smelled like disinfectant and
blood
. So much blood. Magic tickled up the back of her neck as she rounded the long metal table and lifted the edge of the white sheet covering the body.
The corpse barely looked human, more like a messy, three-dimensional rendering of an anatomical model. Rings and lines of muscle covered the man’s frame instead of skin, stretched taut and revealed white flashes of cartilage and bone here and there.
“Shit.” Patrick stood across from her, all traces of humor gone. “Are there tool marks at all? I can’t even tell.”
Jennifer grabbed a glove and pulled back the sheet. “Plenty. There are nicks in some of the muscle structures that roughly correspond to the way you’d slice if you were skinning an animal. Something about this murder was magical, but not the act itself. It was done the old-fashioned way—big fucking knife, non-serrated blade.”
Anna swallowed hard. “Could it be a message for Jorge Ochoa? A warning?”
“Maybe,” Jennifer allowed as she took a manila folder from a rack by the door. “Ready to hear the really sick part?”
Patrick stared at the body, his face blank. “He was alive?” he guessed.
“Through every second, according to the ME’s findings.”
Anna shivered. “They’d have to keep him alive if they were harvesting magic, but that doesn’t explain the flaying. Why not keep him captive?”
“Like a rechargeable battery, yeah. It’d be smart. Then again…” Jennifer shrugged. “Signature, maybe? No reason you couldn’t combine a magical ritual with honest-to-God bloodlust. Skinning him could have been the icing on the cake.”
Patrick shook his head and dropped his corner of the sheet. “When do we have access to the medium?”
“Not until tonight.” Jennifer stripped off her glove. “I’ve got the other John Doe case files you wanted, though none of them fit your description very well. They’re in the car.”
“All right. We have a few hours, then.” He glanced at Anna. “What do you think? Files, or chase down the man Oscar was meeting?”
It didn’t matter to her. “They’ve both got to be done.”
“So bring the files to lunch,” Jennifer suggested. “I’m buying.”
The last thing Anna wanted was to hang out with them while they reminisced about old times. “No, thanks. You two should go. I’ll find a hotel, get settled and start going over the files.”
Patrick studied Anna for a moment and shook his head. “You know how it goes, Jenny. We’ve got to get a move on before this thing blows wide open. After it’s over, we’ll catch up for lunch. I promise.”
“Yeah, yeah—work comes first.” She pulled open the door with a grumble. “Does he pull that shit with you too?”
Anna shoved her hands in her pockets and pasted a bland smile on her face. “Only when I try to climb in his pants.” Then she walked out.
Chapter Eight
If he didn’t know better—and God, he
knew
he knew better—he’d think Anna Lenoir was jealous.
It took ego to even imagine it, and a sick streak of something to be pleased by the idea, but it was the only explanation he could come up with for the tension that hadn’t left until Jenny did.
Not that he was about to press his luck. He and Anna had fallen into a comfortable rhythm, with chairs pulled up to either side of the bed in a cheap motel. Files covered the comforter, both those provided by Nathan and the ones they’d gotten from Jenny.
Matching was tedious. Ben would have scanned the data and cross-matched it in the blink of an eye, one of the endless advantages of being able to manipulate technology with your brain. He and Anna were confined to doing things the old-fashioned way.
He flipped open the next file on his stack and squinted at the picture. “This one sort of looks like that younger brunette. Trisha Raine.”
Anna rustled through the scanned and enlarged drivers’ license pictures until she located one with an Oklahoma header in stylized blue script. “Raine is five-foot-six. Does that track?”
“Five-six, one-thirty. Brown hair, hazel eyes?” He flipped the photo so Anna could compare.
She peered at it before sighing and reaching for a pen. “It’s hard to tell with that level of decomposition, but it could be her. We should let Alec know so her family can get in touch with Jennifer.”
Patrick turned the file back around and found the date. “So they found her almost a month ago. Not that many days after her family says they last saw her.”
“Nineteen years old.” Anna groaned and dropped her face to her hands. “Why did we take this job, again?”
“Because we’ll get it done before another nineteen-year-old goes missing.” He pulled the file and set it aside for their daily check-in with Alec. “I get it. It hurts like hell to see the young ones. I saw too fucking many broken kids growing up. I damn near
was
one.”
“The magic, or something else?” She propped her chin on her hand and watched him. “If you want to talk about it, I mean.”
He’d never told anyone about his childhood. Ben had probably told his girlfriend, but Lia had died with Ben, taking the secret with her. Jenny was the only person left who’d known him as a troubled teenager, before his magic had been bound by tattoos and computers had progressed enough for Ben to give them new identities.
Anna should know. A partner needed to know his weak spots, especially on a case where too much of what they’d already seen had scraped against those inner scars.
Deciding to tell her was hard enough. Figuring out where to start was damn near impossible. “Ben was my half-brother,” he said finally. “His dad was a decent guy, but mine was a crazy bastard. A crazy, jealous bastard.”
Her calm expression faltered, and she covered the sudden sympathy in her eyes by lowering her gaze. “Is that how your mom died?”
“And Ben’s dad.” Painful memories shoved at his numbness, and he shuddered. “We have an older brother out there somewhere. My dad drove him off before Ben was born.”
“You haven’t seen or heard from him since?”
He barely heard the question, because it was always like this. Thinking about Arthur hurt in so many ways. The misery they’d endured together, and the way those precious memories blurred around the edges, as if he lost a little more of his older brother every year.
They’d been so
young
. The difference in age wouldn’t be much now, but to a seven-year-old, fifteen-year-old Arthur had been the epitome of cool. Their mother had still been enchanted—preoccupied—by Patrick’s charismatic bastard of a father, so Arthur loomed large in all of his early childhood memories. Arthur had taught him to tie his shoes, made sure there was dinner on the table, gotten him to school on time. Made him brush his teeth.
And when the crazy passion between his parents twisted into rage, Arthur was the one who had herded Patrick into his room and shut the door on the shouting and crashing dishes. Patrick had learned to read huddled under a blanket fort while Arthur helped him sound out the words.