crate. This wasn't a tourist area, and blond German-American Midwesterners were conspicuous by their absence around here. Harvey was slumped in the passenger seat himself with a billed cap drawn down over his face, for the same reason in its Scots-Irish Texan Hill Country incarnation.
'The question is, my big boss, how do we get it to the target? Cannot you feel the threads of destiny on it? And this we will plant among thousands of Shadowspawn adepts? Perhaps we should carry it in on our shoulders, wearing red noses and big floppy shoes?'
'The adepts'll cancel one another out, a bit.'
Guha snorted. She was right; the overlapping abilities with the Power would help, but not that much when the wielders were all threatened with the same onrushing death casting its shadow backwards through time.
Harvey went on: 'Adrian's workin' on that.'
Though he don't quite know what he's working on hiding. Come to think of it, the world bein' what it is, there's a lot of people who don't know the truth of what they're dealing with. And God help the ones who stumble across the truth, or part of it.
'Okay,' Cesar said. 'Guess what? Something funny on the Breze case.'
'Tell me something funny. I could use it.'
Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling pinon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, they happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.
The prospect of an afternoon spent with a chain saw was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now.
Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sue cops to show how they're together again. Tell me again why I'm not selling insurance.
'The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,' Cesar said.
'Ain't a policeman's life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?'
' Si, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on US soil. Anyway, there's blood in the puke.'
'I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Breze's puke, right?'
'Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I'm pretty sure that Breze paid him something to forget about it-he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it, too.'
'So he's got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?'
Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.
'I'm not sure it does,' he said. 'But it's funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We'll have to work on that.'
Salvador grunted. 'Let's get this straight. The puke is Breze's-'
'Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there's no Breze in the DNA database.'
'That's not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he's not a donor and hasn't been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor's?'
' Si. So, funny, eh?'
'Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?'
They both laughed. 'Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?' Cesar said.
'Yeah, and he doesn't sparkle. I'd feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball…But he did drink it…maybe some sort of kink cult thing?'
'So I'm not surprised he puked,' Cesar said, still chuckling. 'It'd be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make me heave if I'd eaten myself into a stomachache.'
Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he tapped it off, he was frowning.
'What's the news, jefe?'
'The boss wants to see us now.'
The chief's office wasn't much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a small town, still well under a hundred thousand people. The office was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn't make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn't come from San Francisco and LA and New York, either.
Cesar's breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he'd have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.
She's Fart, Barf and Itch. Him…the Waffen-CIA, but ex-Ranger, maybe?
'Sit down,' the chief said.
He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador's older cousin-in fact, they were distantly related. Right now he was giving a good impression of someone who'd never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Row.
The male suit spoke. 'You're working on a case involving the Breze family.'
'Yes,' Salvador said. 'Chief, who are these people?'
'You don't need to know,' the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: 'You don't want to know.'
'They're Homeland Security,' the chief said.
'Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?' Salvador said skeptically. 'Besides, Homeland Security is like person , it's sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?'
'You don't need to know. You do need to know we're handling this,' the man said.
Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He's scared. Controlling it well, he's a complete hard case if I ever saw one, and hell, I've been one. But he's scared.
Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.
'Handling it how?' Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.
'We've got some of our best people on it.'
'Who, exactly.'
'Our best people.'
'Oh, Christ-' he began.
'Eric, drop it. Right now,' the chief said.
He's scared too.
'Hey, Chief, no problem,' Cesar cut in. 'It's not like we haven't got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?'
The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded.
'Okay,' he said. 'I wasn't born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go, 'Meow- oh-shit,' as my last words…'
'You have no idea,' the woman said, almost whispering and looking past him. 'None at all.'
Then she turned her eyes on him. 'Let's be clear. There was no fire. There is no such thing as a Breze family. You never heard of them. You particularly haven't made any records or files of anything concerning them. That will be checked.'
'Sure.' He grinned. 'But check what? About who?'
Salvador waited until they were back in the office before he began to swear: English, Spanish and some Pashto, which was about the best reviling language he'd ever come across, though some people he'd known said Arabic was even better.
