“Clear!” Carver shouted after she swept through the back storage room. The smell of death assaulted her nostrils. There were dried blood puddles on the uneven wooden floor, big enough that it looked as if they’d butchered a cow in here, but no bodies, and certainly no living terrorists or cartel members.
Somebody had set up a shrine inside the storeroom. She’d seen the painted skull faces in the briefings, Santa Muerte, popular with the cartel assassins. Corvus walked over to the shrine and started shoving around the flowers, papers, and dolls with the muzzle of his SCAR, checking if there was anything interesting. All of the crucifixes had been turned upside-down. He found a plastic dog bowl. Corvus gagged and backed away from the shrine. There was a pile of glistening white spheres inside.
“I think those are human eyeballs, LT.”
A bunch of little devotional candles were still lit around the shrine. So the occupants couldn’t have been gone long.
“They must have bolted,” Sandbag said. “Did they see us coming?”
She shook her head. There was only one road out, and nobody had passed them. The terrain was rugged enough that they could have escaped on foot, horseback, or four-wheelers, but she wasn’t getting that vibe at all. “My gut’s telling me nobody got out of this place.”
“Yo, LT. I’ve got something weird here. It looks really old.” Gator had picked up an odd-looking silver amulet. He was scowling at it. “Is that Arabic?”
She looked at the antique. It was the head of a goat, with ruby eyes. An unconscious shiver of revulsion went through her and she had no idea why. “Greek? Maybe. I don’t know what language that is.”
Gator was holding it in his glove. Suddenly, red droplets of blood appeared on the silver. She looked up to see that it was coming from Gator’s nose. He was just staring at it, and didn’t seem to notice the rivulet of blood running down his chin. It was as if he were in a daze.
“Gator, you’re bleeding.”
It took him a long second to focus. He slowly looked up from the amulet. “Huh?”
“Did you hit your head or something?”
Gator seemed to snap out of it. He wiped the blood away with a sleeve and looked at it in surprise. “Naw. Damned dry heat.”
Captain Quinn came over the radio. “Target’s in the wind. We’re splitting into teams and searching the town. Zeke, take the cantina. Carver, you’ve got the church.”
“Roger that. We’re on the church.” She let go of the transmit button. “Bag that necklace and let’s go.”
“What did you find in the church?” Rudy asked softly.
“He found us.” The lieutenant’s trembling had gotten worse. He was inclined to give her a sedative, but Mr. Church had been adamant they needed answers now.
“Who is he?”
Rudy waited for her to elaborate, but this interview was like pulling teeth. “Tell me about what happened in the church, Olivia.”
Abruptly her trembling stopped. The change in manner was so complete, so chilling, that it brought to mind patients he’d worked with suffering from dissociative identity disorder. In the blink of an eye, there was a different person sitting across from him. Only this one was utterly calm.
“Are you okay, Olivia?”
Seemingly curious, Carver tilted her head to the side, a bit too far. “I like eyes. Your eyes are broken, Rudy. I can only see through one of them.”
The shift was so sudden, and the topic so unexpected, that it put him off his game. “I was injured. I have a glass eye.”
Carver nodded slowly. “Your world is flat.”
“You mean I have no depth perception. Correct.”
She stared at him for a long time. “It makes me sad you’re broken.”
Despite being summer in Texas, Rudy felt a sudden chill. There was a knock on the other side of the glass. It made him jump.
He tried to hide his relief at having an interruption. “Excuse me a minute.” Rudy got up and went to the door. He had to wait for them to unlock it.
There were four MPs waiting in the hall. Mr. Church was by himself in the observation room. He was simply standing there in the dark, watching Lieutenant Carver through the one-way glass, inscrutable as ever.
“What do you think, Doctor?”
“It’s too early to tell. She’s a severely traumatized young woman who has been through a lot, but beyond that I’m going to need more time to reach her.”
“I’ve received a call from another agency. They are sending a specialist. He’ll be here soon.”
“What kind of specialist?” Rudy asked suspiciously. “From what agency?”
“The kind you don’t ask questions about. His name is Franks. I’ve worked with him before.” Considering how broad and mysterious Church’s background was, that was incredibly unhelpful. “Agent Franks is a thoroughly unpleasant individual, but very good at what he does. You’ll want to stay out of his way. He’s not big on conversation.”
“It’s unlike you to turn over DMS jurisdiction to someone else. Carver is one of us.”
“Is she?”
“What do you mean by that?”
Church glanced at the wall clock. “He should arrive in an hour.”
“Then let me keep talking to her until this specialist shows up.”
“I wouldn’t advise that.… However, I will admit I’m curious to hear what she has to say. Carry on.”
“Okay, then.” Rudy started walking away.
Church called after him, “By the way, Doctor, we got the preliminary results back on her dead teammates. No toxins, drugs, or biological agents were present in their systems. The causes of death were all straightforward — gunshot wounds, stabbings, strangulation, blunt-force trauma, that sort of thing.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“It might be a sticky subject, but I would suggest asking her about the cannibalism.”
“What?”
“Human tissue was found in some of their stomachs. We have not had the time to get the DNA results yet, but considering some of the bite patterns on the survivors, it probably came from their teammates.”
Rudy blanched.
“Do you still want to continue?”
As he’d told Carver, his small part was helping put the good people back together. Until proven otherwise, he was going to assume good whenever possible. “Yeah, I’ve got this.”
“Very well. Can I help you with anything else, Doctor?”
“Sure, tell the army to turn down the air conditioner. It’s freezing in that little room.”
“Really? They were just apologizing to me for the accommodations. According to the thermometer it is over eighty degrees in here.”
“Shit.” Rudy put his head down, plowed through the hall, past the MPs, and back into the oddest psych eval he’d done in quite some time.
Carver had gone back to shaking and mumbling. It was sad, but that sign of human frailty made him far more comfortable than the creepy mood swing from a few minutes before. Rudy sat back down. She gave him a weak smile.
“Okay, Olivia. Tell me about what happened inside that church.”
Corvus kicked the door open and her men swept inside. They had trained so constantly that their movement was like clockwork. Each one covered a sector.
“Clear!”
A minute later the small Catholic church was secured. There was still no sign of the tangos, or any of the locals, for that matter. There should have been something.
The church was old, and humble. The wooden walls had been painted white a long time ago, but they were faded and chipped now. Heavily lacquered wooden saints looked down on them. The pews were polished smooth from decades of use.
“Where is everybody?” Louie wondered aloud.
“Nailed to the telephone poles,” Sandbag muttered.