by Lauren Esker
Think about your life, Peri. Think about your choices.
From the high cab of the crane, she could see across the junkyard fence to the glimmering city lights of Seattle. Right now they seemed to mock her. She'd had such high hopes when she moved here four years ago, with the ink barely dry on her journalism degree from Washington State University in Pullman, on the other side of the state. To a small-town girl, Seattle had seemed like a land of opportunity. She could reinvent herself here, leaving her slightly checkered past behind. She was going to be a real journalist.
And then she'd found that getting a job with the big papers was next to impossible. Newspapers were a shrinking industry, and there wasn't much room for someone whose only experience was working on the school paper and running a blog in college.
Instead she'd limped along with low-paying articles and freelance writing for online sites. She dusted off her old blog, Tell Me More!, with the idea in mind that even if she couldn't get a job with the Seattle papers, she'd just go freelance instead. She had started out thinking she'd do investigative journalism. She'd go looking for the stories no one else was looking for. She'd debunk bad science, go undercover in cults, shoot down Bigfoot once and for all.
And then a bad case of reality set in.
Stories about how Bigfoot was a bunch of hooey didn't pay the bills. What got the hits and made her advertisers happy were the pages on her site with annotated maps of werewolf sightings and clickbait headlines about ghosts. What brought her site to the top of the Google rankings were her personal accounts of wandering around in the Olympic rainforest with Bigfoot seekers, or trekking through the Seattle Underground waving a ghost detector around. When she supplemented her income with freelance work, she wasn't pitching her story ideas to respected online magazines anymore; she wrote for content mills and clickbait farms, junk sites that never fact-checked and would take anything.
Tonight's junkyard mishap would make a good story for the blog. She was already writing it in her head. And even though her takeaway from this little adventure was "There are no ghosts haunting Seattle's junkyards," she couldn't actually say that without alienating half her readers. She needed to spin the story in a fun and playful way, and leave it with that little element of doubt: maybe this junkyard isn't haunted, but who knows what else is out there? You'll never BELIEVE what happened in Bellingham last week! Click here to find out more!
Sometimes Peri had a gloomy suspicion that she was turning into her dad.
The vibration of her phone jolted her out of her thoughts. She reached into her backpack without bothering to unsprawl. The identity of the incoming caller gave her a moment's pause; it was one of her sources of information on paranormal events around the city, a night-shift worker at the King County Medical Examiner's Office named Zach. Like most of her contacts, Zach was a complete flake. Maybe talking to him would help keep her awake, though.
"Hey," he said when she answered. "Thought I'd get your voicemail. I forgot you don't sleep."
"I do sleep. I'm working tonight." She peeked through the window of the crane to see how her escape prospects were looking. The Rottweiler had curled up at the base of the crane's treads and appeared to have fallen asleep. Awesome.
"Any chance you could stop by the morgue? I've got something I need to show you."
"Zach, I swear to God, this better not be another bag of Bigfoot hair from one of your squatching trips. You are not getting me out in those woods again if you paid me—"
"It's not Bigfoot this time." The urgent note in his voice penetrated her apathy. He sounded spooked. "I need you to see this. I think it might be something big. Like, scary big."
"Can't you just text me a photo or something?"
"I don't want to talk about it over the phone." His voice dropped to a whisper. "The NSA is listening."
Well, yes, they probably were, but Peri doubted if they cared that much about Bigfoot.
"Could we meet up somewhere instead?" she asked. "Take your lunch break and tell me about it. Then I can come back to the morgue with you if it sounds important."
"I guess I can bug out for a little while—"
"Great!" Peri chirped, sitting up. "I'm in a salvage yard in Delridge. I'll give you directions. I could use a hand with a small problem."
Chapter Two
Noah Easton pulled into the parking garage beneath the Special Crimes Bureau, the Camaro purring like a dream. He'd been up early enough to have plenty of time for a jog and a workout, he was singing along to a sweet song on the radio, and today was going to be a good day, dammit.
Whether it wanted to be or not.
He juggled his coffee and a box of donuts while trying to free up enough fingers to punch the combination into the locked door leading from the garage to the SCB. Agent Cho breezed past him on her way out, holding the door for him—and slipped a hand into the donut box while she was at it. "For me? You shouldn't have!"
"That sugar addiction is going to rot your teeth, Cho."
"Fast shifter healing," she countered and stuck out her tongue before biting down on the chocolate bear claw she'd snagged, skipping off to her car.
"You can't heal your teeth!" he called after her.
The SCB's Public Affairs Office was located one level up from the parking garage, technically in the basement. Continuing today's looking-on-the-bright-side trend, Noah decided to consider this a plus: fewer stairs to climb. And he found when he opened the door that his staff were all here on time, another minor miracle.
All two of them ...
And they were glued to the radio. This might not bode well for an uneventful and pleasant day.
"Donuts," he announced, setting the box on an unoccupied desk. "What's going on?"
Trish Begay kicked her chair away from her desk, gliding over on the chair's slightly squeaking wheels to open the box. "Your girlfriend's on the radio," she announced gleefully.
"She's not my girlfriend," he said automatically, while his brain was already entering damage control mode. Which of their secrets had that blasted woman stumbled onto this time?
"Turn it up, Mayhem," Trish called. "We can't hear anything."
"Only if you don't steal all the donuts before I get there. And stop calling me that."
Intern Pete Mayhew—recently transferred to Noah's division in a transparent attempt to get him out of field work, which he was terrible at—cranked the volume as a commercial for a doggie day-care ended, and the DJ announced, "You're back with Mickey in the Morning, and we're talking to local blogger Peri Moreland of the website Tell Me More!—for those of you who just tuned in, that's tellmemoreland dot com. And if you're thinking the name Moreland sounds familiar, that's because Peri here is the daughter of Henry Moreland, who's got a little bit of local fame himself—look him up, folks!"
"I prefer to think that my theories stand on their own," a female voice on the radio cut in. "My dad casts a long shadow, but I'm definitely not him."
"Who's Henry Moreland?" Mayhew asked.
"He's better known as Hank the Crank." Noah reached for a donut. "He's famous, if you want to call it that, in tinfoil-hat circles. Government mind control using fluoride in water, that kind of thing. In the case of Ms. Moreland, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The problem is, one of her pet conspiracy theories happens to be true, namely that the government is covering up the existence of shifters. Sooner or later—"
"Shush," Trish protested, waving her hands. "I wanna listen!"
On the radio, Mickey in the Morning was talking again. "Peri, before we went to break, you were talking about the challenge of having your ideas taken seriously. And y'know, it does all sound a little—I mean, werewolves, folks, am I right?"
"I know how it sounds." Infernally annoying as she was, Peri Moreland had a good voice for radio, Noah had to admit: low and husky, the kind of voice that he could imagine introducing jazz albums on an all-night radio station. "Mickey, I'll level with you. I'm a skeptic myself. From Bigfoot to werewolves t
o the Loch Ness monster, I'm not sure if I believe in any of it."
"And yet you'll tell your loyal readers all about it," Noah muttered. Donut in one hand, coffee in the other, he hooked his desk chair with a foot and pulled it out.
"But I can't deny the proof of my own eyes," Peri's smooth, husky voice was saying. "Right now, Mickey, in the King County morgue, there are two bodies of unidentified cryptids, neither human nor animal, but something in between."
Noah stopped chewing with his teeth sunk into a bite of his donut.
Trish's idle spinning of her desk chair halted with a clunk. "Uh, boss? That sounds kind of serious, actually."
"—can see the photos at my blog and judge for yourselves. If you go to the main page—"
Noah swallowed so hastily he almost choked. "Does anyone have her blog pulled up? My computer's not booted yet."
"On it," Trish said, and then, "Well, I guess they're tasteful autopsy photos, as these things go."
Noah leaned over his shoulder, hoping he didn't regret that donut too much. None of the photos showed the victims' faces or any identifying features. Most of the images in the gallery were closeups: a hand with claws and brindled gray fur sprouting from the back, toes fusing into hooves, an X-ray detail that appeared to show a stubby antler sprouting from the temple of a human skull.
"Are they fake?" Mayhew asked, leaning in at Noah's other side.
"Mayhew, stay away from my computer," Trish snapped, batting his hands away. "Go break your own."
"Could be," Noah said, his stomach sinking. But he didn't think so. It was hard to tell on the screen, but Trish was pulling up high-res versions of the photos in tabs, and it all looked real to him. Or at least plausible.
Dead shifters stayed in whatever form they'd been in when they died. It was possible, but very rare, for a shifter to be caught mid-transformation. In his entire career, he'd only seen or heard of a handful of cases. How did the King County Medical Examiner's Office end up with two of them?
More importantly, what was he going to do about it?
On the radio, Peri was saying, "—lack of media coverage is clear evidence of a government cover-up. I know it sounds paranoid, but I have reason to believe the government has an entire department devoted to covering up exactly this kind of thing."
"Trish, record this. We may need it later." As he said it, Noah glanced around their small, windowless office. More like three working stiffs in a basement, but whatever.
"They're called the Special Crimes Bureau," Peri went on. "You can pull up their website and see for yourself; don't take my word for any of this. It seems to be a branch of Homeland Security, and their website doesn't say what they do—which is pretty suspicious, if you think about it—but I have noticed they have a tendency to turn up exactly wherever I am—"
"This is great stuff, Peri, but it looks like we're due for another commercial break!" Mickey in the Morning broke in, his manic cheerfulness amped to the max. "You heard it here first, folks: werewolf activity right here in Seattle, and the government agency covering up the whole mess! But now it's time to have your say. I see the switchboard is already lighting up. When we come back from the break we'll take a few calls; in the meantime, you can check out tellmemoreland dot com for more of—"
Trish turned the radio down. "Can we shut them down somehow? Pull the plug on the broadcast?"
"We don't have that kind of authority, and anyway, having the Men in Black call them up and tell them to get off the airwaves is just gonna give the entire conspiracy blogosphere more ammo." Noah shook his head, his stomach knotting itself into a tight ball. "No, we're just going to have to let this play out, and then discredit the entire thing for all we're worth."
"Whee," Mayhew said with false cheer. "This means more wandering around in the woods with rubber werewolf masks making badly faked footage, isn't it?"
"Don't listen to him, boss. The misinformation campaigns are the best part of this job. I'm already getting ready to dust off my conspiracy-site HTML skills. Blinking text, red-on-black type, and little notifications saying 'This site was created in Microsoft Word,' here I come." Trish cracked her knuckles. "Most fun you can have on a government paycheck, if you ask me."
The phone on Noah's desk rang, and all three of them jumped. It was the short double ring that indicated an internal call.
The other two looked expectantly at Noah.
He swallowed and picked up the receiver.
"Good morning," Division Chief Pam Stiers said in a tone of brisk cheerfulness. "Fine weather, isn't it?"
"Lovely weather, ma'am," Noah agreed numbly.
"Agent Easton, might I inquire why there's a woman on the radio telling the greater Seattle-Tacoma area all our secrets? And what do you have for me on potentially compromised shifter bodies at the morgue? I'm going to hope you have something."
"I'm looking into it right now, ma'am." Tucking the phone into the crook of his neck and shoulder, he hastily typed his password into the startup prompt on his computer. "My staff and I were making plans to deal with Moreland when you called."
"Yes, her blog is in front of me right now. I'm reading through her archives as we speak. Easton, would you care to explain why this woman is still operating freely?"
Noah launched into a well-practiced explanation. "She's a useful resource, Chief. There's nothing dangerous about her as long as she doesn't get too close to our actual secrets, and the more half-baked rumors she puts on her blog in the meantime, the less credible she looks. And it's useful to know when the conspiracy blogosphere is focused on us, so we can concentrate our efforts appropriately."
"Be that as it may, I understand she's coming increasingly close to the truth. Am I mistaken?"
Stiers was nothing if not thorough, and she'd evidently done her homework before calling him. "You're not mistaken," Noah admitted.
"Do you think we have a leak?"
"No, I think she's smart and good at putting clues together. She's a skeptic, which means that in spite of the sensational headlines, a lot of the articles she writes are actually very well vetted and plausible." He broke off; he'd hoped he was coming across as a thorough researcher who had done his homework, but suspected his voice had been veering a little too close to admiring.
What could he say? He appreciated a good adversary, and Peri Moreland was definitely that.
Through the phone came the rhythmic tapping of Stiers drumming her fingers on her desk. "Are people listening to her?"
"Yes," Noah said with a sigh. "She's got thousands of subscribers."
"You have to discredit her."
"I know."
Trish was right about misinformation campaigns; they could be a lot of fun. But the job wasn't all running around the waterfront with a Loch Ness monster head on a stick. He also had to tell grieving families that their son or daughter had been killed by wild animals instead of rogue lion shifters; he had to convince traumatized assault victims that they hadn't really seen their attacker shift into a bear or a fox right in front of their eyes.
He had to make sure that anyone who tried to reveal the existence of shifters was discredited so thoroughly no one would ever believe them.
Other SCB agents got to go out and save lives. Noah's job was ruining lives.
And he couldn't help wondering if there was even a point to it. Were shifters really safer if they were hidden? That was the conventional view, and shifters in most parts of the world tried to stay under the radar as much as possible, though he'd anecdotally heard of a few countries that had their own private arrangements. But there were times when Noah had to wonder if Peri Moreland, and others like her, weren't right after all. There was a conspiracy, and the government really was covering things up. And he wasn't sure how he felt about being part of that.
Something to bring up with Dad when I see him next, I guess.
For now, it was official policy. And it was his job.
Glancing down, he saw the light blinking on his phone to indicate an in
coming call from an outside line. No, make that three incoming calls.
"Oh look," Stiers said blandly. "What's this in my inbox? An email from IT, informing me that our website hits are going through the roof."
The blinking light flashed again. Four incoming calls.
"Noah," Stiers said. "Discredit her."
"I'll get on it," he promised, even as the words left a bad taste in his mouth.
Tiger in the Hot Zone – Shifter Agents #4
Read it here!
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