“Maybe I should do it.” Desmond reaches for the letter opener, but I pull away from him.
“Says the man who accidentally pushed me into a pool of blood. I can handle it, big guy. Give me a little credit. I wouldn’t have made DSI detective if I didn’t have some modicum of balance and hand-eye coordination.”
Desmond raises a dubious eyebrow. “It’s not that, Cal. I just think Ella would prefer that I take the risk over you, now that we’re in a situation where we can trade roles with no impact on innocent bystanders. The repelling issue was pretty clear, but this—”
“Look,” I say with a faint sigh, “I know you guys are still feeling that Mama Bear mentality regarding me, the team baby, after I got kidnapped and tortured by werewolves. But at some point, you’re going to have to let that incident go so I can perform my duties to the best of my ability. Just because this is a serious case and not another silly werewolf-in-the-woods chase, or an awkward but relatively harmless Oops, our witch suspect got hit by a truck incident, doesn’t mean you should shield me every step of the way. You know that, right?”
“Yes, Calvin. I know. But…” His expression softens into one of fondness, mixed with a hint of nostalgia. And regret. He must be thinking of Norman Bishop, the long-time teammate who died in France last year, the teammate I replaced shortly thereafter, a newbie agent shoved into the middle of a mourning elite team not quite ready to let go of the friend and comrade they’d lost.
I get where Desmond’s coming from, and Ella too.
For days after my kidnapping at McKinney’s hands, they had every reason to think I was dead. Because they found Liam Calvary’s body discarded in the woods like a piece of trash—and god, there’s a memory that haunts my dreams even now, McKinney stabbing a terrified Liam in the heart—and they had no information to suggest I hadn’t been murdered right along with him.
So I understand their feelings. Really I do.
They thought they’d lost me, thought they’d failed me. And when they got me back, a little worse for wear but still breathing, they felt like they’d been given a second chance to protect their precious rookie teammate, a chance to do a better job (even though they hadn’t done a bad job to start with). Now, they don’t want to risk me falling victim to another McKinney-style fiasco. And they definitely don’t want to risk me becoming another Bishop, whose death sent Riker into the rage that nearly cost him his leg, or another Liam, whose ruthless murder still haunts Delarosa’s team, months later.
But they can’t shelter me forever—we can’t be an effective team that way—and if they try, they’ll end up hurting themselves.
And that’s not acceptable to me.
Without waiting for Desmond to make up his mind, I trudge by him and reach out toward the inbox with the letter opener. The green envelope doesn’t do anything as the tip of the opener closes in, but that doesn’t mean it won’t try to “bite me” too the instant I make contact with it. So I tense up, ready to recoil in the face of a snake-like attack. The opener gets closer. And closer. And closer. The tip is almost there…
I touch the envelope with the opener. Nothing happens.
Letting out the deep breath I was holding, I use the opener to pull the green envelope out of the mail stack. When it’s half an inch from tumbling out of the pile, I smack the edge of the envelope, and it sails off Riker’s desk, bouncing across the floor a couple times before it comes to rest on the carpet near the side table. I notice, from the way I flicked the envelope, that it’s not heavy enough to contain any sort of metal spring contraption. It felt like the weight of a typical greeting card.
Huh.
I throw a look at Desmond, who seems as perplexed as I am. If there’s nothing dangerous inside the envelope, then how did it attack Ella? Did we pick the wrong envelope, or…?
A thought occurs to me, one that should have popped into my head much earlier, given my ample experience with magic and mayhem.
Tossing the letter opener on the desk with a resounding clang, I mumble, “Oh, of course.” I walk up to the green envelope and crouch before it, first reading the words on the front face: Nicholas Riker, followed by the DSI office street address, and surprise, no return address. Then, without hesitation, I grab it full on and flip it over, revealing the backside.
The flap is sealed with one of those cutesy stickers, but the design on this particular sticker, a pastel flower pattern, has been distorted. By swirling black lines that appear to have been burned into the paper.
“A ward.” I hold up the envelope so Desmond can see the evidence. “Someone warded the envelope.”
“To hurt the captain, with so small a…?” He shakes his head. “No, not to hurt him, not really. The effect of the ward was too minor for that. Which means it was put on the envelope either to intimidate whoever tried to open it, or to bring attention to the fact the contents are in some way important.”
“Yeah. That was my thought too.” I rip the envelope open, revealing a simple greeting card. Tossing the ruined envelope aside, I flip the card open to display the handwritten message inside, an elegant script in red pen. The message isn’t long, six cursive lines and a signature that I expect to be a threat from some Crow hater who doesn’t like it when we meddle in “their” business.
But when I skim the words, I learn it’s not a straightforward message at all. It’s not the usual hate mail DSI gets in bulk. It’s something else. Something I haven’t seen before.
The tight ball of irritation in my gut loosens, and a sense of dread fills the gaps. “Hey, Desmond? What do you make of this?”
In the shadow of a dancer’s silhouette, I wait, impatient
For the marked elite to dig me from the stinking refuse
And if they don’t, two days past the hour of first light
Among the dancers, I will set the sky ablaze once more
And a new fire shall burn the trash from our troubled city
Sincerely,
An Old Friend
Desmond snatches the letter from my hand and rereads the message several times. “Is it my imagination,” he says after a long silence, “or does this sound like…?”
“A riddle?” I guess.
“Precisely.” Desmond yanks the phone off his belt clasp. “And those last lines—‘set the sky ablaze’ and ‘a new fire shall burn’—do they remind you of any recent events, Calvin?”
I bite my tongue, trying to force down the words bubbling up my throat like vomit. But they pry my lips open anyway. “They remind me of the convention center bombing that killed dozens of people and covered a tenth of the city in a toxic haze. Is that what they make you think of?”
Desmond gives me a grave look as he hits the dial button to call Riker. “Unfortunately, yes.”
I bend down and pick up the discarded green envelope, the blackened ward on the flower sticker staring back like a half-whispered taunt. “We’re not getting any sleep tonight, are we, Desmond?”
“I think we’ll be lucky, Calvin, if we get any sleep this month.”
Chapter Four
I’m starting to think the task room table is the strongest hero among us.
After regrouping with Ella and Amy, the former now sporting a white bandage and three fresh stitches, we head down to the “Case Cave,” an enormous room filled with metal file cabinets, one floor above the Archives, where the office stores hard copies of every case file ever written by every agent in the Criminal Investigations Division.
While all case files are required to be digitized nowadays, so they can be indexed in the DSI database for future research purposes, Desmond informs me on our elevator ride that most detective teams didn’t grow very diligent with the whole computerized record-keeping movement until the last four years, give or take. And even then, they only did so because Bollinger threatened disciplinary action against any team with messy files in a reproachful office-wide email around that same time.
Riker and Ella, according to Desmond, always kept fairly neat files,
per their overall organized personalities, but little things—phone numbers jotted down in quick scribbles, notes about certain case details written off to the side on printed overviews, etc.—would often get left out of the digital versions of the files, until a couple years ago, when the office launched the database app that allows agents to access case files on our phones and other mobile devices.
Therefore, if we want to get the complete info for any cases older than two years, we need the hard copies. And we may very well need complete info for many cases older than two years if, as Desmond and I suspect, the “Old Friend” mentioned in the riddle card is someone, a practitioner maybe, that Riker sent to prison for supernatural crimes in the past.
“You really think somebody blew up the convention center to get revenge against our captain?” Amy asks as the elevator shudders to a stop on the subbasement floor. “Sounds a bit extreme to me. You’d have to be a complete nutcase to think that’s appropriate retribution for a jail sentence.”
The doors roll open, and we stroll out into the hall that leads to the Case Cave.
Desmond shrugs. “I’m not saying I think that’s the only reason this person may have destroyed the convention center, nor am I saying that I believe only one person is responsible for the attack. I do think, however, that the captain was sent the riddle letter because of a personal connection between himself and at least one of the people involved in bringing down the Wellington Center.”
“I agree,” I say. “Nothing else makes sense. If the attacker, or terrorist, or whatever we’re calling them, wanted to put pressure on the whole of DSI, why not send the letter to Commissioner Bollinger, who runs the whole of DSI?”
“Good point,” Amy concedes.
Ella, fiddling with the bandage on her hand, pulls ahead of the group and trudges over to the plain beige door that separates the hall from the expanse of the nearly endless storage room. “Right now, the exact motives of the sender don’t ‘matter.’ What matters is that we confirm the location of the next implied attack. According to the riddle, we only have two days to do all the legwork. And I assume the clock started ticking the moment the convention center came down, so it’s actually more like a day and some change. We have to get on the ball, guys, or we’re looking at countless more civilian casualties.”
She tugs a key from her back pocket and unlocks the Cave door. “Since this incident may indeed be related to one of our past cases, particularly one where Nick played a big role in nabbing the bad guy, I agree that it’s in our best interest to grab all our case files and take them upstairs for easy access. After everything that happened last fall, from Charun to Ammit, I don’t believe it’s possible to be over-prepared for a case. This convention center disaster could spiral out of control in basically any direction from here on out.
“So, with that in mind, let’s start the manual labor.” She turns the knob and pushes the door open, then flicks a series of light switches on a panel to the right of the doorframe. The Case Cave gradually comes into view as rows and rows and rows of fluorescent lights flicker on.
Oh, wow. That’s a lot of file cabinets.
Fifty-two minutes later, after eight round trips, we carry the last forty case files into the elevator and ride back upstairs. Once we reach the task room, we drop our stacks next to the mountain of identical file folders already on the table, and the collective weight of the files is so heavy that the metal legs of said table let out a disconcertingly loud groan. But the table holds.
A real hero, I tell you.
With a skeptical frown, Amy says, “There’s no way we can review all these. Even if we had every analyst in the office on board, it would take weeks. And we don’t have any analysts—they’ve all been reassigned to rescue operations.”
Desmond sinks into his usual chair. “I agree with Major Sugawara. We’ll have to narrow these files down to a manageable number. Somehow. Perhaps Captain Sing will get lucky at the convention center and bring us a few clues we can utilize to eliminate a large number of cases.”
“As if.” I lean against the table, suppressing a yawn. “What are the odds her team will be able to find anything viable in the dark? We could barely navigate the scene during the day. There’s too much debris to sift through.”
Ella rubs her temples, exhaustion gnawing away at her composure. “And even when morning rolls around, we’ll still have the manpower issue. As with the analysts, most of our detectives have been assigned to search and rescue, followed by cleanup, until further notice. We might be able to pull a few teams off the roster if and when some of the bigger disaster relief organizations pull into town, but…The convention center was so large a building, I’m honestly not sure we can cover all the necessary ground in a reasonable amount of time, regardless of how many boots we have sweeping the area.”
“So what do we do?” Amy throws her head back, bumping it against the wall. “How do we approach this threatening riddle crap if we can’t collect evidence the normal way? I mean—”
There’s a soft knock on the door.
Desmond cocks an eyebrow. “Wonder who that is. Captain’s not due in for another half hour. He was still at the mayor’s office when I called him.”
“Also, if it was the boss, he’d have barged in after knocking,” Amy adds. “He doesn’t need to wait for a response. It’s his task room.”
Ella gives me a questioning glance, but I shake my head—I didn’t call anybody—so she moves closer to the door and shouts, “Who is it?”
“Uh,” says a faint but familiar voice through the door, “Cooper Lee?”
Ella opens the door, revealing Cooper waiting patiently in the hall. The archivist’s arms are laden with bags of food from a nearby Mexican restaurant, and he’s still wearing a coat and scarf, indicating he only arrived at the office a few minutes prior. Not waiting for an invitation, he strolls into the task room, examines the massive mountain of files with minimal interest—he works in Archives; large amounts of paperwork don’t intimidate him—and sets the food bags on a narrow side table in the back of the room.
“You brought us dinner?” I ask, moseying on over to the food bags. My stomach rumbles, a reminder I haven’t had nearly enough to eat today. No time for the McDonald’s drive-thru when your city’s been attacked by magical terrorists.
Cooper sends me a sidelong glance and frowns. “Captain Riker called, said you were working late, and asked me, very politely, to pick you up some food, because you idiots apparently haven’t eaten since breakfast. Which is not healthy. Especially given how much work you’ve done today. So here I am.”
Amy stares at Desmond. “Professor, did that stuttering archivist just call us idiots?”
Desmond stares at Amy. “I believe so, Major.”
“You’d be surprised, guys.” I clap Cooper on the arm. “He can be vicious when he wants to be.”
Cooper turns up his nose. “Yes, I can. Now eat something before you all drop dead.”
“Always so considerate, Cooper. But really, thanks.” Ella hugs him. “You want me to pay you back for the food?”
“No, no.” He waves her off. “Don’t worry about it. You guys deserve some free stuff after the day you’ve had. I mean, first werewolves in a swamp, then the convention center nightmare?”
I dig through the food bags, pulling out cartons of taco ingredients and platters piled high with quesadillas. “Oh, you heard about the werewolves, did you?”
“I got a brief overview.” He glances at my clothes. “You get all that mud off?”
“God, I hope so.”
After we all grab paper plates and load them up with food, we settle in around the minimal amount of free space on the overladen task room table and chow down. For the first ten minutes, no one says another word, because my team is famished and tired as hell, and while the food will only give us a short energy burst—we need sleep too—a good meal is better than nothing.
“You know,” I say as I bite into a cheesy quesadilla, “I should eat
at this place more often. Their food’s not half bad. I mean, it’s nothing compared to my mom’s old dishes, but…it’s not the worst replacement.”
“Your mom cooked Mexican food?” Amy says with a mouth full of taco. “I thought she was a baker.”
“By trade, yeah. But she could cook all sorts of food. Mexican food, the real, authentic stuff, was her personal favorite, because it was part of her heritage.” I pop the top on a Coke can and swallow a big gulp. “She probably made Mexican dishes for dinner, like, three or four times a week. Big tradition at the Kinsey house.”
“Her heritage?” Ella asks, cutting into her enchilada with a plastic knife. “I didn’t know your mom was Hispanic. Or you, for that matter.”
“Oh, did I never mention that?”
Cooper points his fork at me. “Didn’t tell me that. I thought your mom’s maiden name was Kinsey.”
“Well, it was. Sort of.” I set the Coke can down. “She was born in America to first-generation Mexican immigrants, but her parents died in a car accident—drunk driver, I think—when she was only two. She got adopted by this older white couple, the Kinsey family, Margaret and Calvin. They were nice people, and even though they didn’t know a lick about Mexican traditions, they did the best they could to help my mom keep her heritage intact. So she still grew up learning Spanish, how to cook Mexican dishes, etc.” I reach for another quesadilla on the platter. “Anyway, her full name after the adoption was Maria Alvarez Kinsey.”
Desmond wipes his mouth with a napkin. “So you’re named after your adoptive grandfather?”
“I’m named after both my adoptive grandfather and my maternal biological grandfather. My middle name’s Camilo.”
“Calvin Camilo Kinsey.” Desmond rolls the name off his tongue and grins. “Catchy.”
Amy comes up for air after practically inhaling four tacos in a row. “So, hey, are we trading fun facts about ourselves while we wait for the boss to arrive? Because I’ve got a great story to tell you all, about that time in Mosul when—”
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