“Oh, for really fun loads, though, you should have seen the day they were shipping in a load of tank parts to send up to the base in Edmonton,” Tom said with a grin. “Soldiers everywhere.”
I quietly drank my hot chocolate, listening to their stories, but no clues beyond a box of cadavers—one of which had walked!—coming into town nine months before.
Maybe I should look into this Dr. Sigurdsen, or whatever, after work.
WHEN I MADE it back to the dispatch office, Bill was there with Trysta, wiping sweat off his forehead with a dirty rag.
“Hey, Jason,” he greeted me. “How was the airport delivery?”
“Cold,” I replied. “Otherwise, no problem.”
“Good,” he grunted. “It looks like you’ll be doing it for a bit. Jake’ll be down for about four weeks, the docs say.”
“But he’s okay?”
“Yeah, the surgery went off without a hitch.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Four weeks on airport duty, huh?”
“Yeah,” Bill confirmed. “I can do it, but I prefer to be the backup, not the one and only.”
“Understood, boss.”
Bill grunted, and wordlessly gestured Trysta and me out of the office—it was closing time. The redheaded receptionist bundled herself up tightly in her winter coat and followed me out.
“What are your plans tonight?” she asked me as we walked to the bus stop.
“I have research to do,” I answered with a smile, “and a girl I should be calling back.”
“Oh,” she said, and went suddenly quiet.
“Yourself?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” she said shortly, and the rest of the short trip to the bus stop passed in silence and me wondering just what I’d said wrong.
I worked it out just after her bus pulled away. With a sigh of “oh, Powers, I’m dumb” I boarded my own never-quite-warm-enough public transit.
9
IT DIDN’T TAKE much time on the Internet to find the phone number for the University of Calgary’s med school, and one of the advantages to starting at six in the morning was that most places were still in business hours when you got home.
I decided to bite the bullet and called them.
“Good afternoon, Cumming School of Medicine,” a cheery young male voice answered.
“Hi, I’m looking to make an appointment to see a Dr. Sigurdsen,” I told him calmly. “It’s to do with a shipment he signed for some months back.”
“Hold a moment,” the young man told me. It wasn’t much longer than a literal moment before he was back.
“I’m sorry, we don’t have a Dr. Sigurdsen here,” he said. “We did have a Dr. Elisse Sigridsen here, but my files show she left the faculty about a year ago. Are you sure this shipment was to do with the medical faculty?”
“There was some mix-up with the paperwork, and the airport asked me to look into it,” I lied, hopefully smoothly. “They said it was headed for your faculty—I was advised it was a cargo of donated cadavers.”
“Um…” The man on the other swallowed. “I believe”—he paused again—“that we meet all of our needs for that...resource from donations in the local region. Let me check, but I don’t think we’ve received a shipment in a while.” There was silence on the line for a moment, broken by the sound of a keyboard.
“Yeah, that’s correct,” he finally continued. “We last imported cadavers two years ago.”
“There must be some confusion, then,” I allowed. “Thank you for your time.”
“Yes, of course. What was your name?” the man asked, but I hung up as he finished the question.
An Internet search quickly confirmed what the receptionist had told me. Dr. Elisse Sigridsen was a pathologist, with a specialty in rare human parasite strains. She’d worked for the U of C’s Health Sciences Centre for ten years, including many research trips around the world for research.
Some of her paper titles were very interesting: A Pathological Study of Human Mutation. Human Genetic Strains and Supernatural Myth. Rare Variations in Human Physiology. This was the kind of woman who’d love to meet an inhuman—so she could dissect them.
But she hadn’t been working for the U of C when she’d signed for that container, and it had never gone to the university, either. So, who had she been working for, and where had it gone?
Boxes of cadavers were suspicious when investigating vampires in the first place, but now this was starting to stink to high heaven.
Curiosity itched, though, so I threw her name into Fae-Net as I grabbed my phone to call Mary. The results came back instantly, and I dropped the phone with Mary’s number undialed as the red text flashed up on my screen:
WARNING: Supernatural Hunter. This individual possesses an unknown degree of awareness of the supernatural, and has reacted hostilely to all known encounters.
More details scrolled across the screen as I viewed a Fae-Net warning notice. Sigridsen was confirmed responsible for the death and—my earlier thought proved correct—dissection of five true fae and one changeling. Three more changeling and several fae murders were suspected. The warning notice concluded that she was definitely aware of the fae vulnerability to cold-forged iron and of most if not all of its limitations.
This woman had spent ten years bouncing around the world, hunting inhumans. Driven, from what the mortal Internet articles had suggested, by nothing more than an insatiable curiosity, she had killed and dissected half a dozen people—and I only had definite information on the confirmed fae murders. Anything outside of the Courts wouldn’t be solid enough for this sort of file.
If Sigridsen had been offered some of the answers to the riddles she was clearly willing to kill to resolve, she would almost certainly have been willing to abuse her name and credentials to sneak a container of vampires into the city.
Which, I realized with a sigh, did me no good whatsoever, because I still had no idea where she’d taken the container, nor any way to do so much as contact her.
AT A DEAD END on my own, I called Mary.
“Hi, Jason,” she chirped cheerfully into the phone when she picked it up. Call display ranked somewhere slightly above wizards on things that made me uncomfortable most days.
“Hi, Mary,” I said lamely. “How’s my favorite wildcat?”
“The only other wildcat shifter you know is my brother,” she told me laughingly. “He may be offended after stitching you up.”
I laughed with her. She had a point.
“I’m good,” she answered. “Work is boring, and a friend left me asking all sorts of uncomfortable questions around.”
“Where do you work?” I asked. “I was lucky and found a courier job right after I hit town.”
“You’ll laugh,” Mary told me. “I work at the local geek central—it’s a giant board-game, book and anime store right downtown. You’d be surprised how many inhumans are gamers.”
“I’m not sure I even know what you mean by the term,” I admitted.
“Role-playing gamers,” she explained. “Dungeons and Dragons, that sort of thing. It’s fun; you should come out for our weekend gaming group at the store—we’re playing tomorrow.”
“I may do that,” I said. Given the near kiss the other night, I figured time spent with Mary was a good thing. “I’m sorry if my questions caused issues.”
“Tarvers told me to tell you to be careful,” Mary said bluntly. “Then he asked for your email and said he’d be in touch with whatever he learned. Something along the lines of ‘I don’t tell fae where to dig their own graves.’”
“I appreciate his vote of confidence,” I said dryly.