Izzie and Patrick exchanged a look.
“Believe me,” Izzie said, turning back to Daphne and laying a hand on her knee, “you’re not the only one having a hard time with this.”
Daphne let out a ragged sigh. “Well, at least the FBI’s Resident Agency is closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so we’ve got a little time to work out how we’re going to spin this with Agent Gutierrez.” Seeing Izzie’s frown, she hurried to add, “Look, I told you that I’d help keep the Bureau off your backs while you try to figure this out, but he knows that we both went down to assist with a Recondito PD investigation last night, so we have to give him something.”
Izzie tried not to scowl as she took another sip from her coffee mug. Her experiences with Gutierrez were limited, but the Senior Resident Agent struck her as the type who wouldn’t likely be satisfied with anything other than an airtight story. He was already bristling that she’d come to town in the first place, for fear that her investigations might reopen the books on a murder case that the local authorities would very much prefer remain closed.
“We’ll figure it out,” Izzie answered brusquely, then turned to face Patrick. “You were on the radio with the station house earlier, right? Where do things stand with the Recondito PD?”
“Things aren’t great.” Patrick shook his head, a morose expression on his face. “Chavez sent a couple of uniforms down into that warehouse subbasement after I didn’t check back in, and they found what was left of Officer Carlson. Everyone knows that a police officer was murdered in the line of duty last night, though the department has been able to keep the exact details away from the press, so far.”
“The EMTs have already delivered his remains to the city morgue,” Joyce said, talking around a mouthful of bacon. She held one finger up, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and then pulled out her cell phone. She thumbed it on and opened up her text messages, displaying an automated notification sent to her at the medical examiner’s office. “The request for an autopsy came through the system this morning.”
As Joyce reached for another piece of bacon, she caught the glance that passed between Patrick and Izzie.
“You’re worried about what I’m going to say, aren’t you?” Joyce said. She narrowed her eyes, glaring at Patrick.
He gave her a pleading look. “You know that the authorities aren’t prepared to deal with this, Joyce. Not yet.”
“So, what, you want me to just make something up? Look, I’m the city medical examiner, damn it. I’m not going to falsify an official report and lie about the cause of death. I don’t care what kind of weirdness is going on.” She took a bite of bacon and crunched angrily on it for a moment, fuming. Then she sighed, calming visibly. “But I can, I don’t know, be a little vague in the way that I record the details, and go with a watered-down version of the truth. Something that frames the results so that they’re less likely to raise any red flags about what happened down there until we know what we’re doing.”
“Thanks, Joyce,” Izzie said. “We’ll have enough trouble explaining away the rest of what they found down there.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Patrick said, chewing the inside of his cheek. “They might have found Carlson, but what they didn’t find was anything else. No other bodies, none of that equipment that we found, none of the Ink supplies . . . nothing. It was all gone by the time they got there.”
The fact that the half-dozen bodies they had seen the night before were gone didn’t come as much of a surprise. After all, they had gotten up off the tables and chased Izzie and the others out of the building, and then joined the horde that pursued them all the way to the Ivory Point lighthouse. But the missing medical equipment was another matter entirely. Someone with resources was covering up their tracks.
“So what’s the official story on what happened?” Daphne asked. “What did you tell them?”
“It’s like she said.” Patrick indicated Joyce with a quick nod of his head. “A watered-down version of the truth, basically. I told the duty officer that Carlson and I found what appeared to be an Ink lab down there, and that in the course of our investigation we were attacked by unknown individuals. After Carlson was down, I engaged in a high-speed pursuit, and was unable to radio for backup due to technical malfunctions.”
All of which was essentially true, leaving aside the fact Patrick and the others were the ones being pursued. And the minor detail that the “unknown individuals” pursuing them were half-dead drug users who had been taken over by an entity from another universe.
“I’ve got to go to the station house and submit a full after-action report today,” Patrick went on. “The captain will write me up for not filing it sooner, I’m sure, but otherwise it doesn’t sound like they doubt my story.”
“What about all of those people on the street? The . . .” Daphne looked from Patrick to Izzie. “What did you call them, again? The Riders?”
“The Ridden,” Izzie answered. She thought of the horde of men and women who had pursued them through the streets, their skin almost completely covered by the black blots associated with long-term use of the street drug Ink. Men and women whose minds had been eaten away, both figuratively and literally, leaving them little more than puppets being controlled by an intelligence from a higher dimension that Izzie had dubbed the loa the night before.
The loa that, to all indications, was either
