“Had to be sure.”
“Fair enough.”
“Any Psy interference in your investigation?” Clay’s thigh shifted to press against hers and she had to bite back a gasp. Every time he moved, it reminded her of his strength, his predatory nature. But more than that, the contact tugged at hot, tight things in her, creating a hunger that threatened to destroy the already brittle equilibrium of their new relationship.
“No.” Max’s voice broke into her wandering thoughts. “They usually don’t bother unless it involves a loss or gain for their race.” He took another swig of his beer. “But someone is covertly monitoring my progress.”
“How do you know?” Talin asked, fighting her body’s reaction to the rough masculinity of the man who sat crowding her as if he had every right to invade her space.
“I put in some advanced security software on my files and they show unauthorized access. I keep the real files elsewhere so no harm done.”
“Your boss?” Clay asked.
“No. He has authorized access.” The detective finished his beer and put the bottle down on a coaster advertising the warm seas of Vanuatu. “To be honest, no one has much interest in this case on the surface. But the hacking was done by an expert. I wouldn’t have picked it up without the software.”
“Who supplied the software?”
Max’s eyes gleamed. “Funny that. It was the Shine Foundation.”
“What!” The word escaped at high volume. Face coloring, Talin lowered her tone—though oddly, none of the other patrons had turned. “When?”
“About eight months ago.” Max shoved up his sleeves. “They’re the reason I got this investigation. They made some calls and I was assigned.”
Clay shot her a sardonic look. “Maybe Shine’s not the saintly outfit you think it is.”
“They haven’t done anything wrong,” she retorted, though Max’s revelation disturbed her enough to blunt her razor-sharp awareness of Clay’s aggressive mood. “Did they ask you for something in return?”
“To keep them informed.” Max shrugged. “But I do that with all victims’ families, and for Mickey, Iain, Diana, and Jon, they’re it. I don’t give them anything extra.”
That made her feel a little better. “The things you’re going to tell us tonight …”
“Classified.” He looked around the busy bar. “Lots of sharp changeling ears here.”
Clay shook his head. “No one can eavesdrop. Speakers built into the booth are sending out a low-frequency hum designed to disrupt sound. It can come in but not get out.”
“Impressive.” Max raised an eyebrow. “Can you actually hear the frequency?”
Talin was curious about that, too. As a child, Clay’s abilities had delighted her. More than once, he had turned into a leopard simply because she’d wanted to stroke him—which now that she thought about it, had exhibited an incredible amount of amused indulgence on his part. She wondered if she’d ever get to stroke him again. That quickly, the slumbering need in her belly fired to brilliant life, sexual but also deeply, intensely emotional. She didn’t care how selfish it was—she wanted her Clay back.
“No,” Clay answered. “The frequency is pitched below our hearing but it works. That’s why no one turned when you yelled.” That last was directed at her.
“I was surprised.” She caught the smoldering embers in his gaze—he hadn’t forgotten her earlier provocation and, crazy as it was, she was glad. Being subject to that brooding temper of his was far better than being ignored.
Looking away, but with his arm now rubbing against hers, he nodded at Max. “Talin’s apartment. Anything?”
“Blood was—I’m sorry, Talin. It was Mickey’s.”
Even as Talin’s stomach threatened to revolt, Clay’s hand closed over her thigh. He squeezed hard enough to disrupt her nausea, drawing her attention to the heated power of his presence instead. Adoring him a little more, she put her hand on his. His skin burned hotter than hers, warming the cold in her bones.
“Go on,” he said to Max. “Tally can handle it.”
Max looked at her, gaze bruised by the cruelty he’d witnessed. “He right? This is going to be bad.”
Her hand clenched on Clay’s. Not making a sound, he broke the contact, raised his arm, and placed it around her shoulders. Such a simple act, but one she’d never allowed any other man. It had felt too much like a cage … and none of those others had been capable of breaking her neck with a single violent move. But at this moment, the memory of the safety she’d always found in Clay’s arms trumped that of tearing flesh and a monster’s shrill screams. She drew his scent deep into her blood, into her very cells. “I’m ready.”
Max didn’t ask again. “There wasn’t much else at your apartment. What evidence we have comes from the kids themselves.” He paused, rubbed a hand over his face before continuing. “The apparent pattern until Diana and Iain was a murder every three weeks.”
“You don’t think it’s the actual pattern?” Clay asked.
“I’m not sure we have all the victims,” Max said. “Finding Mickey, Iain, and Diana so close together—within two weeks of each other—tends to support that theory.”
“Any geographical pattern?” Clay asked with a predator’s sharp intelligence, his deep voice a rumble that vibrated in her bones, at once comforting and a warning that he was something other, something as lethal as he was beautiful.
“No,” Max answered. “I’m only in San Francisco because it’s the last known body dump. Diana was taken from New York but found here with Iain. She was the last of your New York charges, right, Talin?”
“After they got Mickey, yeah.” Oh, God, it hurt to think of her kids broken and bloodied. “Officially, Di didn’t need a Guardian anymore, not once she’d been accepted into the boarding school.” But she had still called to chat every so often, had still been Talin’s. “She loved being on the track team.” Talin curled a hand against the hard strength of Clay’s abdomen, mind filled with the sound of Diana’s laughter. Clay didn’t say anything but shifted his hold so that his thumb stroked over the sensitive skin of her neck.
“Four Shine kids if you count Jon,” he murmured. “I’m not buying the ‘fishing in the same pool’ argument, Tally.”
Her loyalty to Shine made her want to protest, but she tried for logic. “But there were seven others, all unconnected,” she reminded him.
“That’s what I have to tell you,” Max said.
Horror uncurled slow and insidious in the pit of her stomach. If Shine was evil, then what did that make her? Had she been leading the children she loved to their deaths?
Max reached for the bowl of peanuts on one side of the table. “You mind?” At the shake of their heads, he started picking out nuts and placing them on the tabletop. “We have fifteen confirmed fatalities.”
“Fifteen?” Her hand spasmed, gripped Clay’s T-shirt. “So many?”
“I’m guessing there are more.” Having counted out fifteen peanuts, he pushed the bowl aside and put the saltshaker in the middle of the table. “I only found these fifteen because I went digging. Most times kids like this disappear, no one reports them missing. By the time they’re found, it’s often too late to see soft-tissue damage.”
“Soft-tissue, that’s your link?” Clay asked what Talin couldn’t force herself to.
“Yeah,” Max answered, “but one step at a time. This”—he picked up a nut—“is the first confirmed victim. Harish, age eight. Died a year ago—so this has been going on longer than we initially thought. The forensic team found the card of a Shine Foundation Guardian hidden in his shoe. The Guardian confirmed he’d approached the boy two days before the abduction.” Max put the peanut about five centimeters from the saltshaker.
Talin’s sense of horror multiplied a thousand times over.
“Second confirmed victim: Miu Li, age thirteen, died eleven months ago. She was a walk-in at Shine’s Oklahoma facility. Did some tests, was entered into the tracking system, and disappeared.” That peanut, he put closer to the saltshaker. “Victim number three: Hana Takuya, age fourteen, in her first year of an accelerated course funded by the Japan-Korea War Widows Trust. Its major donor is Shine.
“Victims four and five, Depe Lacroix, age ten, and Zoe Charles, age fourteen, threw me because they seemed to have no connection to Shine. Until,” he said, mouth a grim line, “I
traced their families and found they both had younger siblings who had been tapped by the foundation. Seems logical that Shine must’ve approached the older kids, too, and been rebuffed.”
It continued like that until Max had connected all fifteen victims to Shine.
“My God.” Her mind refused to believe. “But Shine is good … they help kids. They helped me.” She rarely trusted, but she had given them a sliver of it.
“They might still be good,” Clay said, to her surprise. “You have to have considered the idea of a mole in the foundation.”
Max nodded. “Either that or Shine is a slick front for some very bad things. But I doubt that. If you’re out to hunt kids, there are cheaper ways of doing it than by setting up a multimillion-dollar foundation. Whatever the truth, it’s our best lead.”
“You can’t attack head-on.” Talin leaned forward, desperate. “If they think you’re getting too close, they might kill Jon.” Hope, she thought,
hope
. Johnny D was still alive.
“I know.” Max tapped the saltshaker. “That’s where you were supposed to come in. You have a legitimate ‘in’ at Shine. I was going to ask you to go in, be my eyes and ears.”
“But now she’s been warned off, it’s too dangerous.” Clay slid his arm down to rest around her waist, his hand curving over her hip in a blatantly territorial gesture. “There’s no question of her going in.”
She bristled. “Hold on. You don’t get to dictate—”
“He’s right,” Max interrupted. “If it is a mole and not a case of the entire organization being dirty, that mole has to be pretty high up. The bastard clearly has access to preliminary contact reports from around the country. He or she will either make sure you don’t see anything useful or shut you up for good.”
“Men,” she muttered, agreeing with them but loath to show it, given Clay’s arrogant pronouncement. “Okay, even if I don’t go in, we need information from the inside somehow.”
“Anybody you trust there?” Max asked.
“Dev—Devraj Santos,” she said without hesitation. Clay’s hand tightened on her hip. She retaliated with a scowl. “He’s a good guy.”
“He’s also the director.” Max’s face was grim.
“No. He’ll help us.” She turned to Clay. “You know what I mean. Tell him.”
After a taut second, he nodded. “Talin’s instincts about people are pure gold.”
His support warmed her even as she realized he was calling her Talin again. They had only been together a day and already she knew that meant trouble. A strange exhilaration in her gut, she returned her attention to Max. “That’s not everything, is it?”
Max nodded. “First thing—absolutely no one but me, the medical examiner, and a couple of detectives I trust—knows this. The bodies were all missing some organs.”
It was too much. Her heart felt frozen in her chest.
“Which organs?” Clay’s hand stroked over her hip, jerking her out of her shell-shocked state and firmly back into the present. “Could we be talking black market?”
Talin saw where he was going. While the world had come a long away in the field of artificial and cloned organs, certain parts of the human body continued to defy medical science’s efforts to create perfect replicas. Added to that, a small subsection of society preferred donor organs over cloned ones. “Did they take the heart or eyes?” It was impossible not to remember those eyes filled with laughter and hope.
Max nodded. “But I think those removals were a front for the real goal, red herrings to divert our attention in exactly this direction.”
“I don’t understand.” Talin frowned. “Hearts are the most expensive and difficult to clone and eyes follow close behind.”
Clay suddenly went predator-still. “There’s one other very complicated organ you haven’t yet mentioned.”
Talin watched the men’s eyes lock, felt the murky truth pass between them. But her mind refused to make the connection. “What?” she asked, frustrated.
“The brain, Talin.” Max’s tone was full of quiet grief. “All the victims found early enough to perform a soft tissue analysis were missing their brains.”
Clay sensed Talin’s shock, her driving pain. It threatened to tear the heart right out of him. “How good was the surgery?” he asked, holding her tighter.
“Top of the line. This is an organized operation, not some lone whack job, especially if you factor in the geographical spread of the victims, the schedule of body dumps, and the lack of evidence—the kids had literally no trace on their bodies but for a single fiber.”
“It help narrow things down?”
“Not to a specific location, but the material is used in high-tech surgical labs.” Max shoved a hand through his hair. “The victims were taken to some kind of medical facility, and I’m betting it was the same one in all cases, which means they were transported across state lines without raising any alarms. Smacks of organization.”
“Were they tortured?” Talin’s voice was raw, as if she’d been screaming silently.
Clay’s leopard flexed its claws, disliking the scent of her anguish. “Come on, Tally. You don’t need to know that.”
“Yes, I do.” She swallowed and when she looked up, he saw that her eyes were dull gray, that exotic ring of fire muted to pale bronze. “It might tell us why these particular kids were taken, the deviance driving the killers. If we know, we can narrow down the list of other children who might be at risk.”
“What the hell. I’ll send you everything I’ve got.” Max pushed aside the peanuts he’d spread on the table, his fist clenched. “You know these kids, the way they think—you might pick up something I’ve missed.”
“What about the search for Jon?” It broke her heart, but Di, Mickey, and the others were already dead. Their justice could wait. “He has to come first.”
Clay brushed his lips over her hair. “Leave Jon to me.” It was a promise. “I don’t particularly want you looking at Max’s files, seeing what was done to the victims,” he admitted, tone rough, “but you need to go through them. It might help us locate the boy.”
She didn’t even trust Max to fight for Jon, but it was frighteningly easy to fall into her old rhythms with Clay. “Okay.” He would never allow harm to come to a child.