by-the-book guy.
Patrick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Well, if he suddenly needed to borrow the brain inside that lovely casing, then he’d pull out the professional charm and make her forget that she’d ever thought badly of him. The fact that she rang his bell would just make that job pleasant, rather than a chore.
“Let me get my coat, I’ll be right back.”
“Patrick.” The cop got his attention with a thick, stubby finger waved under the agent’s nose. “Don’t underestimate her,” Petrosian warned. “She may look like a little girl, but she’s smart. And tough.”
Patrick raised his eyebrows at Petrosian’s wording. The last thing he would ever describe that woman as was “little girl.”
“Aggie. You driving?” She was back, a denim jacket pulled over her sweater. Clearly, the chill air outside didn’t bother her at all. Spring in New England, ha. He was already homesick for D.C.’s milder weather.
“Yeah. I’ll bring you back after, okay?” Petrosian was already herding them out the door. That was fine by Patrick—the crime scene wasn’t getting any fresher while they stood here. The sooner he got to it, the sooner he could determine if he had any business being here at all.
The dark green sedan slid through traffic, heading away from the downtown area into more residential blocks. Petrosian left the radio muted to a quiet squalk and their cat lady didn’t seem inclined to talk, so Patrick took advantage of the time, sitting in the backseat, to go over his notes and compare them to the official file on this incident. There wasn’t much in the update Petrosian had given him at the airport, and he closed it without having made any more progress than he had since getting the original material via the local bureau office the night before. The information was too slim: he needed to see the site himself, form his own impressions. That was why he was here: his skill was in transforming direct observation into a working and workable theory. Someone else’s observations, with their inevitable biases, were useless to him.
“Please, don’t let anyone have fubar’d the scene.”
“What?” Petrosian raised his eyes to the rearview mirror to look back at him.
“Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the files in explanation. Thankfully, Petrosian just nodded and went back to his driving. Bad form to tell your host that you expect his men to be incompetent. No, Patrick thought ruefully, he was not getting off on the right foot with anyone here so far.
Ten minutes later, they parked outside a small storefront, a single-story corner convenience store in a neighborhood of small, neatly maintained houses with neatly, if unimaginatively, tended lawns and a grade school down the block. There were two squad cars out front, but no yellow tape to be seen anywhere. Ms. Malkin got out of the car and waited for Petrosian, who gestured her toward the front door. She nodded once, her body language changing from uncertain to aggressive, and moved up the walkway. Another thing to like, Patrick noted: she took possession of her scene like a pro. It took them a year to hammer that into cadets at the academy, and some of them never learned how to do it.
Lily had been aware, the entire ride, of Agent Patrick’s presence directly behind her. Oh, he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t said anything, but she could practically feel him looming behind her.
All right, “looming” was overstating it. He was sitting normally, going through an official-looking file of papers and photos, barely even glancing up as Petrosian took corners too quickly, only once muttering something she didn’t quite catch. But when he did look up, she felt his gaze like a physical touch, as soft as a cat’s tail flick and just as unmistakable. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly…but it made her uncomfortable.
He made her uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just because he was good looking. Or even because he was arrogant. Lily had seen better and worse examples before, both on her job and in dealing with the cops and the press. But there was something about this guy that was putting her on edge.
Or maybe it was this…whatever it was that Aggie had called her out for, and Agent Patrick was just catching the fallout. She wished that she had asked for more detail before agreeing, but…
It didn’t matter, not with regard to Agent Attitude. Either way, it wasn’t as though she was going to have to deal with him for long; she could put up with the arrogance and just enjoy the eye candy while it lasted.
When they arrived, she got out of the car before Aggie had even finished parking, looking around curiously. She had lived in Newfield for three years, but she didn’t know this neighborhood. It seemed a little rundown, but reasonably safe. Although, she admitted, that might have had something to do with the noticeable police presence on the street.
“Up here,” the detective said, waving her toward the storefront. She swallowed hard and went inside, passing a uniformed officer in the doorway.
There was no warning: one moment she was moving forward, and the next she was knocked back on her heels, a full-body slap.
Aggie had said it was ugly. Ugly wasn’t the word for it. Lily stopped just inside the doorway and blanched, the back of her hand pressing against her mouth while she swallowed, hard, and tried not to breathe.
“Oh God.”
The inside of the front room was splattered in red; walls, counters and empty glass-fronted display cases. In a photograph it might have looked like paint; the smell told the real story. Some atavistic sense in the back of her brain told her what the tinge in the air was, and what the spray, by default, had to be: blood, with the undercurrent of meat starting to go bad.
But the floor was what caught her attention: a cleared space in the middle of the room, the pale green linoleum tiles covered with a black cloth about four feet square. On the cloth, seven still, limp forms were arranged in an odd-shaped circle, nose to tail.
Cats.
And, without warning, she was back in the echoes of a dream. Cats, sprawled as though basking in the sun. Only there was no sun, and their heads turned wrongly, their tails stilled, their voices silent…. A shadow rose behind her; despair and terror flooded her throat….
“Oh, the poor moggies,” she heard Agent Patrick say behind her, and the faint flash of not-quite-a-dream shattered. Her mouth was dry, her skin clammy. Where had it come from, that flash, that overwhelming, painful visual? It wasn’t a memory, nothing she had ever seen. She would remember something that horrible. But where had it come from, then? Television, maybe, or something she had read?
It didn’t matter, she decided, trying to shove it away. The here and now was disturbing enough.
“Who did this to you, little ones?” she heard the agent ask, obviously speaking to the cats, and the discomfort she had felt in the agent’s presence earlier was diluted by an instant and unexpected kinship with him. Arrogant as he might be, there was real sympathy in his voice. They weren’t just animals to him—they were victims.
“I’m going to need photos from every angle,” he barked to Aggie, taking command of the scene as if it had been deeded to him. Clearly, no matter how much he might have felt for them, he was all business now.
The arrogance that had annoyed her earlier was reassuring now. Attitude was much more appealing when matched with clear competence.
Lily took a shallow breath, and regretted it. The bodies weren’t fresh. More than a day, from the smell, but not much longer, or it
