I found a comfy spot, out of the way of the security lights, and began to check the ground, my way, by reading the land. Sitting on the blanket, the psy-meter open in front of me as if I were still using it, my hands in the soil, I found nothing dead or dying. No indication that one of the creatures had been on the property at all. Not anywhere. I sighed and sat back on my blanket.
“Hi.”
I nearly flew off the ground. Spun around, going for my weapon. The form of a woman was limned by the security lights.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” It was Sonya Tolliver, in her robe and house shoes. Culpepper was still in place, his back to me, checking his phone. Idiot.
I let go of my service weapon, remembered how to breathe, and caught the strong smell of perfume that the cats had mentioned. It wasn’t unpleasant, but there was a lot of it. I said, “Nell Ingram, PsyLED, ma’am.”
She didn’t introduce herself, but she probably knew that no one on the grounds needed her to. She said, “I can’t sleep.”
“I can see how sleep would be difficult. You’ve had a bad few days.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice growing sad. “It’s been difficult. I suppose it always is when someone loses everything they hold dear.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I stayed silent.
“I saw you. At the fire. You told Justin I needed him.”
“Ummm. I’ve been known to have a big mouth, ma’am.”
Sonya Tolliver laughed, a despondent sound. “But in this case, accurate.” She reached up and pulled her hair around, tugging it out of the collar of her robe. It was long with reddish tints. “He used to be there for me. We used to be there for each other. Now he’s . . . distant. My husband is involved with work and . . .” She looked into the night. “I hope it’s only with work.”
I remembered the questions about the stability of the Tolliver marriage and what a burned house might mean to the finances of a distressed relationship on the verge of divorce.
Sonya looked out over the property toward the river at the back. “We used to go fly-fishing together. Camping. We’d pitch our tent on the bank of a stream, light a campfire, fish, and eat the catch if the season was right. And s’mores. We used to love s’mores. S’mores by moonlight.” She walked a few paces past me, staring at the back of the property and the river. I could hear it, lapping softly, a faint splash of fish or muskrat jumping. “Then the children came. Camping became a lot more difficult. And now we seem to have grown apart. We haven’t been camping in years.”
She fell silent, and I tried to figure out how to keep her talking. “I was married. John died a few years back.” I went to stand near her. “No children.” She didn’t reply. “John was older than me. There wasn’t much leaning on each other at all until he got sick. Then I was his nurse. And he passed.”
“Are you alone now? No husband? No boyfriend? No family?” Her tone said she found that thought unfathomable.
“Family nearby, but I live alone,” I said.
“Do you like it?” She turned to me, finding my face in the dark. “Living alone? I can’t imagine how I’d ever live alone.”
“I like it okay. I like the quiet.”
Sonya made a thoughtful sound in the back of her throat and we fell silent. “Are we in danger? Well, I know we’re in danger. But . . .” She pulled her robe even tighter. “Are they going to get to us? What if they use a drone or a long-scope rifle like in that movie?”
I didn’t know what movie she meant, but I said, “We’re doing all we can to keep your family safe, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” Sonya turned and walked back to the guesthouse. I heard the door close.
Culpepper was nowhere to be seen. So much for backup.
The night was long, frozen, and coffeeless. And tedious, mind-numbing, and boring. When the hours moved along toward dawn, I picked up my blanket and went back to my car, where I wrote my report about speaking to Sonya, while yawning, and listening to country music on a local radio station.
I was stumbling on my feet the next morning when Occam showed up, arriving early, just after sunrise. I was so tired I didn’t even care that he wanted to date me. That we had kissed. I just plodded to his fancy car and checked the psy-meter 2.0 against his were-energies. I decided that the machine was working, but couldn’t rule out that it was giving false positives, which was no help at all. I grumped that out, gave him my notes, and trudged back to my truck, exhausted, frozen, and annoyed. This case was likely to bore me to death.
Unfortunately for my exhaustion and state of mind, Rick pulled up before I left. I glared at him when he tapped on my truck window, but rolled the glass down and turned off the noisy truck. “What?”
He chuckled softly. “Long night?”
“No coffee. Humans are scared of their own shadows. Psy-meter is acting strange. And I’m sleepy.” And Occam kissed me. Wants to date me. Not said.
Occam trotted up, his gait long and lean. “Morning, boss. What’s up?” he asked.
Speaking softly enough that his voice wouldn’t carry out of our small group, Rick said, “The dogs indicated that a paranormal creature of unknown species was at every one of the incident sites. I got a good whiff of the Tollivers’ pillows at their burned house. The master suite was in a protected area away from flames and water damage. Justin smells human. His wife, Sonya, wears a lot of perfumed products, but underneath it all, she doesn’t smell human. Not quite. I’ve never smelled that scent before, but I’m betting that she’s a para of unknown species.”
My sleepiness took a hit of adrenaline and I woke up fast. I had talked to Sonya. And just before that, the psy-meter had spiked. But I hadn’t actually measured Sonya with it. My mind raced through the possible ways that Justin’s wife might have fired on the Holloway party while being a guest, burned her own home, and shot up Old City. She had been placed in the dining room at the Holloways’ when the shooting started. She was with Justin during the Pierced Dreams shooting. She was home with Justin eating dinner when the fire started and had been with her family for a good forty minutes prior. “There’s no way she could have done the attacks. And we’ve all agreed that the shooter looks and moves like a man,” I said.
“Partner?” Rick asked.
“We weren’t present when the FBI and Secret Service spoke with Justin and Sonya,” Occam said. “I doubt we’ll be allowed to bring them in for questioning.”
“We need to be careful,” Rick said. “We’ve got law enforcement overlap, political complications, and pressure from up-line to not upset the applecart. Funding is a never-ending issue, and Abrams Tolliver is a big proponent of funding PsyLED. We don’t want to offend him by bringing in his sister-in-law.”
“Or outing her,” I said, “if she’s still in the closet. Her husband may not know.”
“If we have to arrest her, that might offend the senator,” Occam said, with a bit of insolence in his tone. “But if we don’t arrest her and her alleged partner shoots him, that might offend the senator even more.”
“So, let’s posit that Sonya Tolliver is an unknown paranormal creature. Then maybe there are more of them,” I said. “Maybe the same kind of creature is tracking and attacking the Tolliver family.” I thought of the church and the way the churchmen had chased me. “Maybe she got away and they want her back. Or maybe they are protecting her. Or maybe lots of things.”
Rick had been checking our perimeter, his eyes traveling but his head unmoving. Satisfied we were unobserved, he withdrew his hand from his jacket with an odd, dull, crinkling sound. He was holding a gallon-sized plastic zipped bag, the air smoothed out, a wad of cloth inside. A pillowcase. Rick had stolen Sonya Tolliver’s pillowcase. “Get a good whiff,” he instructed Occam.
The werecat took the bag, hitched his hip against the truck as if to get comfy, opened the bag, and ducked his head to it. “Hooo,” he said, making a face. “Musky. That’s pungent.” He passed it to me.
I stuck my nose in, expecting to get an awful scent as part of the boys’ “Here, this stinks—you smell!” game. I caught a hint of body odor and something a little like pond water. I thought back to the house and the grounds. There had been fishing equipment and the kayak behind the shed. “I smell river water. The river is close enough that the scent shouldn’t count. There’s nothing here that reminds me of the assassin.”
“Your nose ain’t any better than a human’s, Nell, sugar.”
I shrugged and passed the zip bag back.
Rick said to Occam, “If you get a chance to read the senator’s house, I want you to sniff around. In case there are paras passing as human living there too.”
“Yeah, that’s gonna go over real good with the Secret Service. ‘Hey, you, Texas boy werecat,’” Occam said in a passable nasal Jersey accent. “‘What da hell you doin’ sniffin’ da senator’s laundry?’”
Rick didn’t laugh. “Don’t get caught. Nell’s right. If Sonya really is a paranormal, and still in the closet, then we might have an intra- or interspecies war brewing. The senator is working for pro-paranormal legislation. We need to keep him safe. And if someone in his family is paranormal and he knew it and didn’t reveal it to the Senate Ethics Committee—”
“He could lose his position, which would hurt paranormals everywhere. It’s to our benefit to keep him alive and healthy. Got it, boss.” Occam winked at me and walked away.
I looked back and forth between the two werecats, absorbing the possible ramifications of the senator’s family having a paranormal. In the middle of an internal or external war. Or launching a war. Or . . . Or I was too tired to think. I turned on the truck and the heater, and went home. Somehow I made it home alive, which meant Mama musta been praying for me because I’m sure I slept the whole way.
• • •
It was three p.m. when I woke to the sound of banging. I half fell out of bed, grabbed my shotgun, and stumbled to the front of the house, where I spotted Mud through the window, on the front porch, no coat, arms crossed over her chest, and three cats weaving around her legs. I put the gun away, located my service weapon hanging in its holster and shoulder rig on a kitchen chair, to make sure they were secure, and opened the door. The cats ran in, silent, twitchy, irritated. I’d left them out all day. “Mud?”
“You’uns need a dog.”
“A dog,” I said, feeling as if I’d missed something.
“To bark. To tell you’un when company’s here.” She looked at me as if I was stupid.
“I had dogs . . .” I stopped. The churchmen had killed my dogs, leaving the dead bodies on my front porch, about where Mud was standing. If I looked closely at the grain, I could still see the blood. Was Mud too young to know that? I decided not. “The churchmen killed them as a warning that I had to come back to the church and marry in.” When she only frowned at me and hunched her shoulders harder, I asked, “Why are you here without a coat? And how did you get here?” I leaned out to verify that there was no car in the drive, no dust hanging in the air. “What happened?”