All right, “looming” was overstating it. He was sitting normally, going through an official-looking file of papers and photos, barely even glancing up as Petrosian took corners too quickly, only once muttering something she didn’t quite catch. But when he did look up, she felt his gaze like a physical touch, as soft as a cat’s tail flick and just as unmistakable. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly…but it made her uncomfortable.
He made her uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just because he was good looking. Or even because he was arrogant. Lily had seen better and worse examples before, both on her job and in dealing with the cops and the press. But there was something about this guy that was putting her on edge.
Or maybe it was this…whatever it was that Aggie had called her out for, and Agent Patrick was just catching the fallout. She wished that she had asked for more detail before agreeing, but…
It didn’t matter, not with regard to Agent Attitude. Either way, it wasn’t as though she was going to have to deal with him for long; she could put up with the arrogance and just enjoy the eye candy while it lasted.
When they arrived, she got out of the car before Aggie had even finished parking, looking around curiously. She had lived in Newfield for three years, but she didn’t know this neighborhood. It seemed a little rundown, but reasonably safe. Although, she admitted, that might have had something to do with the noticeable police presence on the street.
“Up here,” the detective said, waving her toward the storefront. She swallowed hard and went inside, passing a uniformed officer in the doorway.
There was no warning: one moment she was moving forward, and the next she was knocked back on her heels, a full-body slap.
Aggie had said it was ugly. Ugly wasn’t the word for it. Lily stopped just inside the doorway and blanched, the back of her hand pressing against her mouth while she swallowed, hard, and tried not to breathe.
“Oh God.”
The inside of the front room was splattered in red; walls, counters and empty glass-fronted display cases. In a photograph it might have looked like paint; the smell told the real story. Some atavistic sense in the back of her brain told her what the tinge in the air was, and what the spray, by default, had to be: blood, with the undercurrent of meat starting to go bad.
But the floor was what caught her attention: a cleared space in the middle of the room, the pale green linoleum tiles covered with a black cloth about four feet square. On the cloth, seven still, limp forms were arranged in an odd-shaped circle, nose to tail.
Cats.
And, without warning, she was back in the echoes of a dream. Cats, sprawled as though basking in the sun. Only there was no sun, and their heads turned wrongly, their tails stilled, their voices silent…. A shadow rose behind her; despair and terror flooded her throat….
“Oh, the poor moggies,” she heard Agent Patrick say behind her, and the faint flash of not-quite-a-dream shattered. Her mouth was dry, her skin clammy. Where had it come from, that flash, that overwhelming, painful visual? It wasn’t a memory, nothing she had ever seen. She would remember something that horrible. But where had it come from, then? Television, maybe, or something she had read?
It didn’t matter, she decided, trying to shove it away. The here and now was disturbing enough.
“Who did this to you, little ones?” she heard the agent ask, obviously speaking to the cats, and the discomfort she had felt in the agent’s presence earlier was diluted by an instant and unexpected kinship with him. Arrogant as he might be, there was real sympathy in his voice. They weren’t just animals to him—they were victims.
“I’m going to need photos from every angle,” he barked to Aggie, taking command of the scene as if it had been deeded to him. Clearly, no matter how much he might have felt for them, he was all business now.
The arrogance that had annoyed her earlier was reassuring now. Attitude was much more appealing when matched with clear competence.
Lily took a shallow breath, and regretted it. The bodies weren’t fresh. More than a day, from the smell, but not much longer, or it would be worse. She thought it would, anyway. Actually, she had no idea, and wasn’t able—or willing—to turn around and ask Aggie for an answer.
“You were the one who found the bodies?” Patrick was now asking the young cop nearest him, who nodded. The man—a boy, really—looked as ill as she felt.
Intellectually, Lily knew that people did things like this. The first year she worked at the shelter, around Halloween, she’d been asked to help with two black cats that had been tortured by a couple of wannabe Satanists, to see if the cats could be used to identify and hopefully convict their abusers. It had been a slow news week, and the media had gotten hold of the story. The shot of her leaving the scene with one of the cats clinging to her, his triangular head hidden in her hair, had run every time they touched on the story. That had been what started the “cat talker” nickname. The press had hounded her for a week afterward, even though she refused to give any interviews or sound bytes. Petrosian had sworn to run interference with the press from then on.
Lily didn’t like being in the spotlight. It made her nervous, the same way the unblinking scrutiny of cats once had, as though someone was judging her, finding her lacking, unworthy. Not the way Agent Patrick had, but deeper down, where it mattered. Where you couldn’t avoid it. Connection, a therapist had told her once. She wasn’t good at maintaining connections. The responsibility made her nervous, made her wonder how she had failed, even when she knew that she hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have.
But nobody was watching her now. Even Aggie had turned away, joining Agent Patrick in talking to the cops on the scene, giving her a moment to regain selfcontrol.
“Your people have already been through?” Agent Patrick, his voice still and intense again, as though the lapse into emotion had been a—well, a lapse.
“Last night, yeah, when we made the discovery of this new source.” Aggie’s gravelly rumble was soothing by comparison. “Everything’s been documented and swabbed, but since no humans were involved, we left the scene itself intact, as per your request. As soon as you’re done here, we’ll bag and tag it.”
Lily stood over the circle, wondering what she was doing there. Normally, at a scene, there was a live cat present, of some breed or another, that she could observe and interact with. Normally there was something she could do. Now, all she could do was to take in the details, look at the still, unmoving, cold bodies, and wonder who could have done such a thing.
God have mercy on them, the poor innocent beasts, she thought. She wasn’t much for religion—going to church had always left her feeling more empty than fulfilled, and her brief foray into Buddhism during college wasn’t much better, but there had to be someone who looked after those so ill used….
She swallowed hard against the surge of emotion, willing herself into professional behavior. Thankfully, some coolly analytical portion of her brain came forward, sorting the scene into dry facts, something she could process, the way she handled numbers at her day job at the bank. All right then. Aggie wanted her here for some reason. She knew cats. So she would study the cats.
Seven bodies, all spotted tabbies, their silver, gray and white coats covered with black thumbprint-size spots, tails striped with wide black marks. Young, male. Not at their full growth yet, they weren’t, with tails too long for their bodies and ears too large for their heads. There was a slice across each throat, a puddle of red underneath where each one had bled out. Where had the blood on the walls come from, then? How much blood was in a single cat, multiplied by seven?
No, don’t go there. Keep the thoughts all clinical, detached, distanced, and unreal. Safe. Like counting out money, entering numbers. Important but not emotional. Not anything that could make her chest hurt for the horror of it. Lily was