Salvador grunted. “Let’s get this straight. The puke is Brézé—”
“Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there’s no Brézé in the DNA database.”
“That’s not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he’s not a donor and hasn’t been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor’s?”
“Sí. So, funny, eh?”
“Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?”
They both laughed. “Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?” Cesar said.
“Yeah, and he doesn’t sparkle. I’d feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball . . . but he did drink it . . . maybe some sort of kink cult thing?”
“So I’m not surprised he puked,” Cesar said, still chuckling. “It’d be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make you heave if you’d eaten more than you should.”
Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half-dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he closed it, he was frowning.
“What’s the news, jefe?”
“The boss wants to see us, now.”
The chief’s office wasn’t much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a small town, still well under a hundred thousand people. It was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn’t make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn’t come from San Francisco and L.A. and New York, either.
Cesar’s breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he’d have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.
Possibly from the Army of Northern Virginia, a.k.a. the Waffen-CIA.
“Sit down,” the chief said.
He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador’s older cousin—in fact, they were distantly related. Right now, he was giving a good impression of someone who’d never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Road.
The male suit spoke. “You’re working on a case involving the Brézé family?”
“Yes,” Salvador said. “Chief, who are these people?”
“You don’t need to know,” the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: “You don’t want to know.”
“They’re Homeland Security,” the chief said.
“Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?” Salvador said skeptically. “Besides, Homeland Security is like person, it’s sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?”
“You don’t need to know. You do need to know we’re handling this,” the man said.
Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He’s scared. Controlling it well, he’s a complete hardcase if I ever saw one, and hell, I’ve been one. But he’s scared.
Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.
“Handling it how?” Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.
“We’ve got some of our best people on it.”
“Oh, Christ—” he began.
“Eric, drop it. Right now,” the chief said.
He’s scared too.
“Hey, Chief, no problem,” Cesar cut in. “It’s not like we haven’t got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?”
The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded himself.
“Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go meow-oh-shit as my last words . . .”
“You have no idea,” the woman said, looking past him. “None at all.”
Then she turned her eyes on him. “Let’s be clear. There was no fire. There is no such thing as a Brézé family. You never heard of them. You particularly haven’t made any records or files of anything concerning them. That will be checked.”
“Sure,” he grinned. “Check what? About who?”
Salvador waited until they were back in the office before he began to swear; English, Spanish, and some Pushtu, which was about the best reviling language he’d ever come across, though some people he’d known said Arabic was better.
“Let’s get some lunch,” Cesar said, winking.
Yeah, Salvador thought. Got to remember anything can be a bug these days.
“Sure, I could use a burrito.”
When they were outside Cesar went on: “How soon you want to start poking around, jefe?”
Salvador let out his breath and rolled his head, kneading at the back of his head with one spadelike hand. The muscles there felt like a mass of woven iron rods under his hand, and he pressed on the silver chain that held the crucifix around his neck.
“It’s fucking Eurotrash terrorists now, eh?” he said.
“Yeah. Eurotrash vampire terrorists. Maybe Osama bit them?” Cesar said, still smiling.
“Or vice versa.”
“What sort of shit is going on?” Cesar said, more seriously.
“Our chances of getting that from those people . . .”
“. . . are nada.”
Cesar looked up into the cloudless blue sky. “Maybe these Brézés are just so rich they can shitcan anything they don’t like? Call me cynical . . .”
“Nah,” Salvador shook his head. “You can’t get that just with money. Not with those people, the spooks. You need heavy political leverage. Whoever they were, they were feds, and not your average cubicle slave either. They’re not going to tell any of us boondockers shit. The chief didn’t know any more than we did; he was just taking orders.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve known him a long time.”
“So . . .” Cesar said.
He leaned back against a wall. “How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?”
“Couple of months,” Salvador said. “First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you’ve got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.”
Cesar grinned. “I like the way you think, jefe.”
DREAM.
The sense of sick dread got worse as the flames erupted through the door and he was flung back to lie helpless. This time he could see the figure who walked through the fire.
It was a woman, young, naked, her face doll-like and pretty with slanted eyes, hair piled up on her head in an elaborate coiffure that looked Asian. If he’d seen a picture like that, he’d have gotten horny. Instead, he felt as if giant fingernails were screeching down slate everywhere in the universe, as if he should run and run and run, and there was a stink that wasn’t physical at all, and he retched hopelessly.
“Who’s been a naughty boy?” she crooned.