Willard glared at me. “These are borrowed. Put that somewhere else.”
I considered being recalcitrant, but for all I knew, USGS maps were worth thousands of dollars. I pulled over another table and rested my plate on it, taking bites in between looking at the fields and forests and mountains around Bellingham.
“Here’s our road.” Willard pointed. “And it doesn’t have a label beyond a forest-service number. What makes the GPS map think it’s Misty Loop Lane?”
“Do you see anything else called Misty Loop Lane?” Rodriguez asked, his mouth stuffed full of hamburger.
Willard eyed his vigorous chomping. She’d sent her salad back because the lettuce had been limp and brown around the edges, and another one had not appeared. Maybe she was regretting being picky. It had been the only salad on the menu; judging by the grease coating the potatoes in my skillet meal, they didn’t cater to the health conscious here.
I took my phone out and ran an internet search for Misty Loop Lane in Bellingham to see if any other addresses came up. I’d already Googled the One Cave address and failed to get any hits, but I hadn’t tried the street by itself.
“No mention of it anywhere on the web,” I said. “Funny that my map app came up with a hit. Closest match on the web is a Misty Ridge Court.”
“Does it look like the kind of place with a castle full of ogre kidnappers?” Willard asked.
“It’s a cul-de-sac with three houses and is across from Huckleberry Park, which has slides and a picnic table.”
“It certainly sounds like a locale that menacing bad guys would choose as their hideout.”
I ran a search for castles in the area and didn’t come up with anything for that either. “Let me see the key.”
Willard eyed me, and I thought she would object, but she drew it from a zipper pocket and slid it across the map. “Why?”
I took a picture of it. “To see if anything comes up on a reverse image search.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“I can see you’re warming up to me.”
“Like a blowtorch to scrap metal.”
I looked at the captain as the search ran. “I’m the scrap metal in that metaphor, right?”
He nodded. “I think so.”
“It’s a simile, Thorvald.” Willard pointed at a brown patch of land adjacent to our forest-service road. “Look at this.”
The topography lines put it on the top of a hill about halfway down the road. I tried to remember if I’d noticed that spot during my drive, but I mostly remembered walls of trees to either side of the road.
Willard glanced at Rodriguez. “I don’t remember any open areas like this, do you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Thorvald, did you and your night vision see any clearings?”
“No, but it’s possible that trees along the road could have blocked it from our view.”
“Maybe.” Willard sounded doubtful. “Look at the topo lines though. That’s a hundred feet above that road we were on. Even if there were trees, we should have seen a hill through them.”
“There were lots of hills,” I said. “And a hundred feet isn’t that high. Not necessarily above the trees.”
“I don’t see a castle on top of it.” Rodriguez pointed to the bare spot.
“Maybe that was recently constructed.” Willard started looking for the date of the map.
I scanned the results of my image search and found a lot of metal bookmarks vaguely shaped like our key but no exact matches. It had been a long shot.
“Here’s your salad, Miss.” One of the cooks had brought it out this time, but he appeared as flummoxed as the waitress had been about where to put it. “Where would you like it?”
“Miss?” Rodriguez’s eyes crinkled as he mouthed this.
Willard gave him a dark look.
“I’ll take it. Thank you.” Willard took the plate and set it on the floor beside her.
The cook gaped and appeared aggrieved, but Willard turned her look on him.
“You’re welcome, ma’am.” He hurried back to the kitchen.
“I like how you were escalated from miss to ma’am after you glared at him, ma’am.” Rodriguez’s eyes crinkled even more.
“I think he just noticed that I was older than he thought.”
“Or you oozed military authority at him.”
Willard shook her head and pointed at a date in the margin. “The map is seven years old.”
I opened a Google map of the area on my phone and zoomed in to try to find the corresponding bald spot. The web map didn’t have topography lines, so I had to do my best to match it by the bends in the road. “I don’t see that cleared place on this map. It’s all green along our road.”
“What’s the date on that one?”
“Ah… The imagery is from last year.”
“If it was logged, maybe it’s grown back,” Rodriguez said.
“Trees don’t grow back in six years. Not even if the area was replanted. And this looks like it was clear-cut.” Willard put her finger on the map on the table. “There wasn’t anything there when this was made. There still shouldn’t be much there.”
“But there is.” I showed them my map.
“Let’s take a trip back out there and wave the key at the area.” Willard’s phone rang.
I dropped a pin onto the location on my map so I could get directions to the precise place. I sucked in a breath. One Cave Misty Loop Lane came up on the map as a location slightly to the side of my pin.
When I showed Willard, she nodded, but her face was grim, and she seemed focused on the call. I hadn’t been trying to listen in.
“Send me the address,” she said. “I’ll send Captain Rodriguez over.”
His eyebrows rose.
“Another body,” Willard said as she hung up. “Mauled by a tiger. Here.” She pointed to a housing development near the shore of Lake Whatcom. As the crow flew, it wasn’t that far from our address, but I already knew they were more than a half hour drive apart, thanks to the roughness of those roads. “The police are there, but they want someone from our office to take a look. That means they suspect something otherworldly at work.”
“More otherworldly than giant tiger claws?” I asked.
“Must be. They’ve seen a number of bodies killed by those this week.”
“You don’t think we should both go, ma’am?” Rodriguez frowned. “It’s not that far out of the way.”
“No, because I can already tell Thorvald is going directly to this suspicious spot on Misty Loop Lane, and I’m not letting her tramp around out there without supervision.”
“Supervision?” I mouthed, not bothering to deny the rest. With Michael and the sickly cub on my mind, I had no intention of delaying.
“Couldn’t you just take the key from her?” Rodriguez clearly didn’t want to let his superior wander off into the woods alone—or alone with the unpredictable and maverick me.
“You could try.” I smiled tightly at them and slid it into my pocket.
13
As Michael and I walked out of Quinn’s Pub on Capitol Hill, my stomach pleasantly full of chimichurri steak and wild boar sloppy joe fries, he brought up the subject I’d been expecting him to broach all night.
“What do you think about living together, Val?”
We were holding hands—he’d gotten used to walking on my left for this, so I could draw Fezzik quickly from the thigh holster on my right—and he smiled and squeezed my fingers.
“On your boat with the bed in the cupboard?” As always, I kept my eyes open and my senses alert as we walked.
Night had fallen while we were eating, and we’d parked on a back street that wasn’t well lit. I wasn’t wearing my sword today—sitting down with it in restaurants was awkward—but I was always ready for a fight.
Nobody had tried to shoot me in the past few weeks, and that made me uneasy. It was only a matter of time. I expected one or more of the trolls from the dead thief’s family to come after me, though any number of the other enemies I’d made over the years might try too. Being out in the open in the city wasn’t that smart, but as Michael was always quick to point out, I had to eat.
“I’d be happy to have you there,” he said, “but I was thinking of your apartment. Or I could sell the boat, and maybe we could go in together on a house.”
Sell the boat? I looked at him. Damn, he was serious.
Was I that serious? These past months that we’d gone from friends to lovers had been enjoyable, and I’d liked having someone I could talk business with, but I always worried about letting myself get too close to people, people who could be hurt by my life. It seemed a weakness that I’d allowed myself this relationship, an indulgence that I would regret later, but I’d been lonely since my divorce and since leaving the army, where I’d had colleagues to talk to and work with. Freelance assassins, as I’d learned, worked alone.
“It’s probably not a good idea.”
“Ah.” He didn’t sound surprised, but he did sound disappointed.
“Not because I don’t care about you and like being with you.” That was the problem. I did. “I’m just dangerous to be around.”
“Like a gremlin at midnight, huh?” He managed a fleeting smile.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, but I’ve also chosen a life that could get me killed one day.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
We crossed a street at an intersection, and I veered to avoid walking directly under the halo of a streetlight on the corner. It would have left us illuminated to any enemies out there.
“It just means that even if I didn’t know you, I could get myself in trouble. I’m willing to risk—”
As we continued along the sidewalk, my senses twanged at the rapid approach of magical beings. Trolls. Two of them. They were coming from the cross street toward the intersection we had just passed through.