Papers were stacking up on the out tray of the laser printer. Caro wondered where Chloe was getting all that information. The police were keeping the story close to their vests this early on, and reports to the press had so far been shocking only in that an entire family had been murdered. No other information, other than names and ages, had been released.
But the stack of paper was growing, and Chloe was gnawing her lip as she continued keying her way through computer screens.
What was going on here?
Jude and Damien emerged from the inner office and she looked up. Damien’s gaze raked her, causing her to shiver pleasurably and unwillingly before he looked away from her.
What was wrong with her? She had far more important things to think about than sexual attraction to a man. Worse, attraction to a man with a very strange aura, and she had enough strange in her life as it was.
The door buzzer sounded, and Chloe jumped up. “I’ll just get our food.”
“How much have you got here?” Jude asked, picking up the pages from the printer.
“Police reports, M.E. reports and the crime scene investigation. You’ll be glad to know they’re done with the house.”
Then she bounced out the door.
Caro hopped to her feet. “You don’t have access to all that stuff. You don’t have the authority.” She was appalled that anyone could hack into information that should only be accessible to investigating officers. “That’s not legal.”
Jude, holding the sheaf of papers, tipped his head a little. “I have special permission for special cases.”
She stood there, her mouth still open to complain. But Pat had recommended him, after all. Maybe they had some kind of agreement? She made a mental note to check with her.
Slowly she sank back onto the couch. “This shouldn’t be possible,” she muttered.
Damien answered. “There’s a lot that shouldn’t be possible, but as you’ve seen for yourself, it is.”
She tossed him a glare. “One doesn’t equal the other. Access to an ongoing investigation is severely limited.”
“Unless,” Jude drawled, “you’re part of the investigation.”
Now, what did he mean by that?
Still disturbed but realizing there might be good reasons for this, she settled down and accepted the lo mein that Chloe handed her.
She trusted Pat and Pat trusted Messenger Investigations. Pat was trying to help her. But she wondered if Pat had some kind of offbeat secret life.
Because there was no question that Messenger Investigations was entirely offbeat.
Chapter 2
Jude read through the papers he had in hand but passed only a few of them to Damien. Caro wondered why, and then decided some of the details of the investigation were probably useless to them.
Most of them, probably. Reams of highly technical details that weren’t going to tell them much, if anything, about the invisible force she had encountered.
Hardly tasting the lo mein she was eating, she forced herself to stop watching the two strange men, and instead turned her attention to thinking through, yet again, exactly what had happened that night.
No police officer wanted to receive that kind of call—a man claiming his family was being murdered. Adrenaline went through the roof, of course, but an extraordinary dread built, the kind of dread you didn’t feel when called to even the typical murder scene. A family. Somehow that changed all the parameters.
It was a very well-to-do part of town, a place where the usual crimes were burglary and robbery, with an occasional domestic thrown in. Not the kind of place where entire families were murdered. Hell, even the worst parts of this city couldn’t lay claim to that.
Gang killings, drive-by shootings, they happened. And sometimes the innocent got caught up in them. But an entire family sleeping in their beds?
Extreme for any city, any neighborhood.
And then that thing. That unidentifiable something. And what truly troubled her about it was that it had had no feeling. No sense of evil had struck her. Simply a sense of power. Indifferent, directed power.
Somehow that was scarier than the stories her grandmother had told her. But it wasn’t a story, she reminded herself. She had seen what it could do, felt it watching her and knew it was real. What had her grandmother said many times when a story scared her? Something about how she would have nothing to fear when she found her own power.
She had never believed in that power, or its ability to hold nightmares at bay. Now she was smack in the middle of a nightmare she couldn’t claim was simply a dream.
Her stomach tightened and almost revolted at the lo mein as she began to wonder for the very first time how much her own stubbornness may have blinded her and limited her.
Then a golden-haired young man joined them. Apparently he had a key, as she had heard no buzzer. He appeared to be in his early twenties, and had adopted an appearance of elegant dishevelment. It suited him. He also had a winning smile.
But Caro viewed him from eyes aged by her job. Something about him struck her as naive, almost puppylike.
“This is Garner,” Jude said. “Garner, this is our new client. I want to know one thing and one thing only from you. Do you sense demon around her?”
Caro gasped. She couldn’t help it. Demon? Jude had to be joking. But she had grown up with hints of such things. Her grandmother had been remarkably reluctant to speak that word demon. But there had been warnings of dark powers to be wary of, and constant lessons about things she must never do.
She hadn’t believed most of it even as a child. For her those stories had been about as real as the volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales her grandmother had read to her from after her parents died.
The notion that she might have dismissed something real almost made her brain reel. She was a realist, living with some psychic senses that she couldn’t entirely ignore, but she didn’t accept the fantasy world of her grandmother. In fact, she had chosen to work against evil in the most realistic way possible—by becoming a police officer.
Now this?
Garner cast his blue eyes over her, then approached cautiously. “Not demon,” he said with surety.
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. There’s something clinging to her, but it’s not exactly a dark energy, and it’s certainly not some discarnate entity. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That’s it, then,” Jude said. “Go back to your life.”
Caro was shocked by the dismissal, but Garner flashed a grin. “I’m curious,” he said. “I want to pursue this.”
“You’re a demon hunter. This isn’t a demon. All you do is give me headaches, Garner. You know that.”
Garner shrugged. “You’re lucky to have me.”
“Sometimes.”
The young man laughed and sauntered out.
A short while later, Jude tossed the papers onto Chloe’s desk. “These are no ordinary murders. I need to do some research. Damien, I want you and Caro to go to the house where the murders occurred. I want you to check for something unusual, something out of place, something that sets your hackles up.”
“I can do that.”
“No, we can’t,” Caro objected, rising as she put her food container to the side. “We can’t enter a crime scene.”
“The techs are done with it,” Jude answered. He tapped the papers. “Finished. So we can. You’ve been in there before, and Damien won’t leave any traces. But he might note something your crime techs didn’t consider significant.”
“Why should he?”
“Because he has different training. Just go and do it. And, Damien, see that she gets home safely, will you? I need to talk to Terri about some of the M.E. reports.”