She was talking about picking up Mom, so he figured Mom would straighten her out. But just in case, since she was getting real weird, he grabbed Mom’s buckley quietly. She’d forgotten to take it to work, and he wasn’t supposed to use it, but this was different. He tapped it on. “Marlee, record everything,” he said. “Um… send it to Mom’s voicemail. Real time.”
It would be expensive as hell, and she’d probably ground him for a month, but Dad had told him to look out for the family and it just seemed like a good thing to do. Especially with Mrs. Catt grabbing him by the collar, shoving Sheely into his arms — she was too startled to cry — and practically dragging them all out the door.
The Catts’ blue sedan was beat up to hell and gone. It had lots of rust, and foam stuck out in a couple of places where the seats were ripped. It smelled like someone had once left the windows open to the rain. But it ran good, and it started right up almost as soon as she put the key in. He tried to complain that they didn’t have a car seat for Sheely, but the woman wasn’t listening to him. She was kind of scary. He tried not to get attention as he set the buckley down on the seat beside him.
Rose and David were in front. In the back it was just him with Sheely and Karen. Karen was cool for a girl. She saw him put it on the seat, but shrugged instead of saying anything. She didn’t look too sure about how her mom was acting, either. He kept Sheely distracted from what otherwise might have become a tempting toy by making faces at her until she laughed. He kept her busy as they went out from town and onto park land, which had grown up wild but you had to go through to get to the parking lots.
The rain made the road slippery so when the car passing them hit them in the side, it knocked them into the canal. The water wasn’t deep, but there was really no way to get clear of the car before the men with guns came for them.
“So about all we’ve got now is running the DNA, pulling the winner in and squeezing him like a zit.”
“Picturesque, Cally, but yeah, that’s basically it.”
They were so used to food made of varying combinations of corn, soy, eggs, and cheese now that they didn’t even bitch, and it was a strangely silent crew who sat and picked at their morning meal. What was there to say? Each of them wanted to explode outward in violent rage at the bastards who murdered the Maise family, but the rage was focused in a circle of frustration. Did they have somebody inside who’d burned the safe house?
They knew the coals of rage would grow to white fury as consciousness returned and they absorbed more detail throughout the day. Right now, however, it was oh-five-thirty-something and they were, despite not having been able to actually sleep, groggy with morning.
For now, they sat and glumly shoveled in their morning fuel, an action that they interrupted, almost relief, to dive as one for their buzzing, beeping, or vibrating buckleys.
“O’Reilly’s office?” Harrison asked unnecessarily as all four of them were moving in the same direction like fingers on the same hand.
Cally’s anger was a palpable thing, like half-molten rock that had taken up residence inside her gut and was fast building its twin in her brain. She was allowing the feelings free rein now on the theory that getting them out of her system would help when it came time to lock everything down and take care of business. She knew that was just an excuse. Things like this didn’t get out of your system. To complicate things, she was, and knew she was, having a mother bear response to the murder of the children until she looked out on the world through a red mist, needing someone to kill. Letting the emotion run away inside her like this was not good, but for once it just wasn’t responding to her attempts to exercise training and lock it down anyway.
She looked at the cold professionalism on the face of the rest of the team and felt ashamed for her weakness, not knowing that every one of them was looking at her the same way. While she was unable to imprison her feelings in icy compartmentalization, her face had responded to muscle memory and training, forming a mask of stone except for a tiny, almost imperceptible tic at the corner of her lower lip.
Aware of everything, deviating for nothing, the team stalked upward through the Sub-Urb-style base, a wolf pack, albeit a pack with an acute sense of the emotional hole where their missing member should be.
The sense of oneness disintegrated abruptly as they entered their superior’s office and beheld the spectacle that was unfolding live on HV, with the gruesome gleefulness only those in the news business can display when provided with especially lurid fodder.
Cally sank into one of the chairs around the tank, others of which were already occupied by the priest and the Indowy Aelool. Without speech or thought, the two Schmidts split right and left, taking station on opposite sides of the room, while Tommy moved to stand behind Nathan’s left elbow.
“One of ours?” she asked, ashen.
“Niece,” O’Reilly said shortly.
The reporter stood outside the police tape, saying they couldn’t show some of the images they had taken on HV, and asking parents to send the children out of the room for the ones they were willing to show — after coming back from a commercial break, of course. Cally reflected on how much she did not give a shit about stupid breath mints at the moment.
“They got the mother, too.” The priest was wooden, the Indowy inscrutable.
“Let me guess. One of ours was close to his sister,” Tommy said.
“One of the DAGgers. His twin.”
“The evidence from the scene would inevitably ‘disappear,’ ” O’Reilly said. “So we’ll get there first. I’m sending you a list of possibles to fill out your team. Pick a cyber and get ready to do a collection run for tonight. You’ll take the equipment to preserve it, you’ll take as long as it takes to shake the bastards — who are no doubt drawing us exactly for the purpose of locating more of our network and this base. I think if they had us here, we’d already have gotten a visit. Get as open as you have to without leaving anyone behind. Concealment would be nice, but is a low second to recovery and egress.”
He looked at the tank in disgust and loathing. “Turn it off,” he said. “Don’t watch this excrement. Go sort through your options, my recommendations are there. Get prepped for a busy night.”
“She’s cherry as hell,” George grumped as they viewed the holo of the eleventh candidate and looked over her profile.
“Yeah, but she’s cute. Her other quals are good, but don’t underestimate cute. You can dress it down as needed, but making someone inherently prettier is hard. It’s an unfair world. Our job is to make it even more unfair — for the enemy.” Cally pushed her hair back behind her ear. It didn’t cooperate. The bitch of shorter hair was that it fell into her face easier than when it was long, and damned if she was going to go around in barrettes like a prepubescent schoolgirl.
“She looks… sweet,” Tommy said dubiously.
“She’s not. Look at her aggressor record,” she said. Cally had been to the same school the candidate had just graduated from. It didn’t make her biased, as far as she could see, but it did mean she had a much clearer idea of how to translate the candidate’s training record and evaluations into a big picture of actual performance. In this case, one of the final tests of a senior’s temperament came when they were assigned to act as enemies and opponents in the training exercises of junior high and underclassman girls. A student who couldn’t be thoroughly vicious to trainees, in the right way, and without breaking them, would have bad marks for aggressive-mindedness, and might even have been rolled back a year to see if maturation could train it out. Usually not.