I made an effort to turn the conversation to a lighter note and swiveled my chair around to face him. “Oh, come on. I don’t have to learn the whole butterfly thing, do I?” I teased. “You have to wear toe shoes for that. I hate those.”
“Your call, but you’ll look silly in the wings and hiking boots.”
“I think I’ll just stop when I reach the chrysalis stage.”
“What, all encapsulated away from the world and mutating?”
“Hey!” I said, directing a mock glare at him. “I could be a very dynamic chrysalis.”
“You are a very dynamic chrysalis.”
“Ooh, low blow, J.J.”
He blinked at me. “Why do I find it disturbing when you call me that?”
I winced, mentally cursing myself in light of the conversation we’d just had. “I am sorry. I promise I won’t do it again. It’s just that your name—umm, names—came up with Solis. He doesn’t know what to call you and I guess that got me wondering, too. I mean, I call you by a nickname, but we’re . . . almost like an old married couple. It suddenly seemed strange.”
“I prefer it. I don’t really like being named after my dad. My grandfather was OK—he was the Jason. But being ‘James,’ or—worse—‘Jimmy,’ kind of curdles my blood. I’d rather be Mom’s son than Dad Junior.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I can see that.”
And we both seemed to have decided to drop the subject. I went back to my computer and he went back to removing the burned pot pie from my dish. The ferret ignored us both and stole the keys from my bag, which I’d foolishly left on the floor, and we later spent twenty minutes looking for them. We found them behind a stack of ancient videotapes I’d forgotten I owned. Which led to laughing about old movies, then finding some online and watching them together. Which always leads to snuggling and snogging and then, of course, to various bed gymnastics and horizontal dancing. I had a feeling I’d be sleeping late. . . .
FOURTEEN
Morning comes too soon when it starts with excited phone calls from cops. Especially when I’ve been in bed only a few hours, and not asleep for most.
“What?” I mumbled at my phone.
“The lab has forwarded their report on the samples from Seawitch,” Solis repeated. “Also, I can find no records for Jacque Knight nor for Shelly Knight.”
“Mysteries on enigmas,” I said, which made more sense when it started out of my mouth than by the time I’d finished. “What do the labs say?”
“I would like you to see the reports for yourself.”
I grunted and dragged myself upright. “Where? When?”
“I am in my office. Where are you?”
“In bed. I went back to Seawitch last night and stayed up too late. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t go aboard. I just wanted to look at Pleiades from a different angle,” I explained, staggering toward my closet with half-closed eyes. I hate morning on my best days and this wasn’t starting out to be one of those. I had that persistently groggy and startled feeling that comes from being rudely forced awake in the midst of a dream.
Solis paused before he asked, “And what did you see?”
“Something creepy and very interesting—but you’ll have to take my word for it, unless I can track down the otter.”
“Otter?”
“I’ll explain when I see you. Which won’t be for an hour or you’ll be embarrassed to be seen with me.”
“I will meet you at your office in an hour.” He hung up without further ado.
I turned my head and glanced at Quinton, who was still mummified in the bedding—the rat. “Why can’t breakthroughs happen after coffee?” I asked his shape.
“Because they wouldn’t seem as interesting if you were fully awake,” the lump replied.
“You don’t think this is interesting?”
“What? The only interesting thing I heard was the part about being in bed.”
I threw a pillow at him. “Sex fiend.”
“Ah! There’s my girl, casting aspersions.”
“Next time I’ll cast a shoe.”
He let out a muffled chuckle but didn’t emerge from under the pillow. I was tempted to let the ferret sneak in and nibble on his toes, just for spite, but I restrained myself.
I managed to shower and get dressed with my eyelids still at half-mast, and get out of the condo looking more like a human than I felt. I stopped for coffee and still managed to get into my office before Solis knocked on the door. I hadn’t checked my watch, so I don’t know if he arrived late or if I was just moving faster than I thought. I suspected the former.
I let him in and returned to my chair behind the desk, picking up the coffee cup as I sat down. “So . . . what was in these reports?” I asked.
Solis handed me an envelope with a few pages in it and removed his coat while I read them. He sat down and waited for me to finish, which didn’t take long since the report was pretty short.
“So . . . there was human blood, but also something from a nonhuman mammal—specific genetic tests on that haven’t been completed yet so we don’t know what animal we’re looking for. But since we didn’t find animal remains at the scene, whatever it was probably didn’t die there. Still, it looked like a lot of blood. . . .”
“Less-than-life-threatening amounts if there was more than one donor.”
I nodded, my eyes feeling loose and gritty in my skull even under the influence of coffee. “With an animal in the mix it’s even less blood per . . . donor. And the rest of this . . . fish scales, mammal fur,” I read, “and nematocysts from some variety of jellyfish, all of these species unknown.” I looked up. “Does that mean they haven’t yet determined the species or they can’t identify it at all?”
“I believe they have been unable to identify them yet,” Solis replied.
“OK. And what’s a nematocyst?”
“I also asked that. It is the part of a jellyfish that stings.”
“So jellyfish stingers. But no jellyfish or remains of them. What sort of Frankenstein’s otter are we dealing with here?” I wondered aloud.
“Again you mention otters. Why?”
I drank more coffee and hoped I wasn’t just about to shoot the infant trust between us in the head. “I had a few interesting words with one last night at the marina.”
Solis scowled. “Words? With a large aquatic mammal.”
“It sounds crazy, but that’s kind of what you get with me.”
“I know.”
“Let me start at the beginning rather than giving it to you in pieces. Remember I said I saw something at Reeve’s house and again at the hospital?”
“This green mist you mentioned and the dog.”
“No, we didn’t see the dog for ourselves at the hospital. It was only hearsay. But the mist, yes. It’s some kind of energetic residue that was present at the hospital, but it was a more active thing at Reeve’s and I saw it wrapped around his chest like a snake that was constricting his ribs.”
Solis frowned, but his expression was less skeptical than in the past. “I still don’t understand what this is that you see.”
“I can’t be sure, as I said, but it’s related to what I suspect your mother-in-law sees—and that’s why she said what she did about me. She probably believes this is mystical in nature, that she’s crazy or ‘touched by God’ because she can see it, and she’s got preconceived notions about what sort of people have certain types of energy signatures. But I’m getting off the point. This paranormal energy is visible as light, or a reflection of light, under the right circumstances. In my case—and Maria del Carmen’s and probably Ximena’s, too—some energy that you can’t see is still visible to me and I perceive it as having color and radiance, even substance in some cases. Sometimes it just looks like light—like neon or a laser show. Sometimes it looks more like colored smoke, steam, or light reflecting through clouds and mist. In this case what I saw was a sort of dirty green smoke with brighter pinpoints of red light—like sparks—inside it. That’s what I saw wrapped around Reeve and squeezing his chest when he had his heart attack. The dog—or whatever it was—was at the other end of the smoke, but I don’t know if it was generating the stuff or trying to tear it away, now that I think of it. Because it was on the receiving end last night. . . .”