“Come on,” Ben said. “Let’s finish up. At least I’ve got a few new candidates to report.”
His phone vibrated again. Feeling irritable, he answered, but not before seeing Nat Archer’s contact. “Nat,” he said. “What’s up?”
“It’s a frickin’ nightmare,” Nat said darkly. “Willow’s not answering. D’you know where she is?”
“I might.”
“Obstructing—”
“Okay, I know where she is and she isn’t going anywhere. What’s on your mind?”
“Has Chris contacted her?”
Mario ran a circle around the griffon and sat behind it again. Ben frowned. “No, he hasn’t, and she’s worried sick about him.”
“If anything was normal here I wouldn’t be spilling my guts to you. But Bucky and I don’t have a support system, other than a couple of cops they’d probably certify if they found out what they believe. We’ve got a new weird case, possibly two.
“A woman name of Caroline Benet came to New Orleans to get on a cruise to the Caribbean. She checked into a hotel overnight so she’d be here in plenty of time. That’s it. End of story. Her baggage is gone, she’s gone, her bed was never slept in. She never got on the ship. They didn’t even realize it at first. Somehow she was checked in for boarding and the baggage put in her cabin—only that was forty-eight hours ago and if she isn’t overboard, she never got on in the first place.”
Ben rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “And that ties in with our issues how?”
“Damned if I know for sure. No one remembers seeing her get on the ship. The hotel does say she checked in for sure, but not out. She’s gone off the face of the earth and from reports we’re getting we could have a similar story about a female dealer at Harrah’s. Someone called in to say she was sick. Twenty-four hours ago. She’s not at her apartment, not anywhere we can find out about. Lives a quiet life. No family or significant other. Oh, and the Benet woman doesn’t have any family, either.”
“I still don’t see any connection.”
Nat cleared his throat. “We found something.”
Ben waited, and he didn’t feel so hot.
“Did Sykes tell you about the eggs the Embran use to restore themselves—sort of? They eat them—including the young inside—to slow their own deterioration.”
“Huh?”
“It appears that the Embran who have visited earth—we know of only a few for sure over a lot of years. But they bring the eggs of some of their young—that’s the young Embrans who are hatched from eggs—”
“Whoa—gimme a minute here. Eggs?”
“Dammit, Ben. This isn’t easy. Just believe what I’m telling you and have Sykes and Marley—and Gray— explain it to you. Embran eat the egg, including the young inside. End of story. It makes them stronger for a while.
“Look, I’ll go slow. Apparently, the Embran bring a supply of the eggs with them when they come—the eggs they’re all born inside wherever they come from. They keep them handy all the time. I guess they have a selection system, and some eggs get to hatch, others are used to give the mature Embran an infusion of strength. So they believe. The dragon that attacked Marley tried eating some to stop himself from falling apart. Either it doesn’t work or it was too late.”
“Okay,” Ben said slowly. “That sounds crazy and sick.”
“Forensics came up with unidentifiable fragments at the Baker and the Green murder scenes, and now at Chloe Brandt’s.”
“Yes,” Ben said, striving to sound patient.
“Now we’ve got more of the same from a reception room at the hotel where Caroline Benet checked in, and in Chris’s apartment. They match the stuff the dragon left behind.”
“Oh, my God,” Ben said, looking skyward. “You mean we could have the first real connection?”
“Same thing with the woman from Harrah’s. Only now we know for sure what the fragments are—we think. Minutely crushed bone—not human.”
Ben slumped into a crouch again. “That’s useful.”
“They think it’s birdlike, or small animal of some kind. Probably crumbs that fell from Embran eggs.” Nat let out a long sigh. “Will you listen to me? Sounds as if I’ve lost it.”
“Sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” Ben said.
“It would.”
“Isn’t there a bird of some kind that crushes bones?” Ben said, speaking his thoughts aloud without meaning to.
“Yeah,” Nat said. “What do they call those?”
“I don’t know… Ossifrage! Bone crushers. They let the bones fall to crush them, so they can get at the marrow.” Willow had called what she thought she had seen a raptor. A big birdlike creature. He wished he knew how much he could trust her vision.
“Shit,” Nat said with a lot of feeling. “First bats, now birds of prey. One word and we’ll clear this city of everything but the gangs. We gotta keep this under wraps.”
“Shouldn’t be hard until the first little kid gets snatched.”
“Cut out your tongue,” Nat exploded. “I’m waiting for Blades’s report on Chloe Brandt. Molyneux will have to know about it—don’t know what else to tell him. All he does is hold press conferences and order me to keep my mouth shut. He’d fire me if he wasn’t afraid I’d start singing all over.”
“Are you safe?” Ben asked.
“Meaning?”
“How badly does Molyneux want to keep you quiet?”
Nat laughed humorlessly. “Badly. But he’s a man beyond his Peter Principle. He’s thick enough to think he can control me.”
“I hope he keeps thinking that.”
“Me, too. Wait for my next call.” Nat rang off.
While Nat finished his call, Mario had been hard at work digging, and he was an accomplished digger. A hole at the back of the griffon was deep enough to show that as much of the stone piece was set beneath the earth as above.
Ben scraped away more dirt, expecting to find a dog bone. No luck with that.
He wiped the back of a forearm across his eyes. Dogs dug holes—didn’t mean a thing. Ben got up and parted a stand of bamboo.
Mario went back to excavating the griffon.
“You can’t take it home,” Ben told him. “You’d get mud on the rugs.”
The dog only grew more determined.
Ben stood back and watched while earth sprayed between Mario’s back legs.
With a single, muted bark, Mario plunked his bottom on the ground, tail still wagging, and gave Ben a doggy grin.
“Very nice hole.” He gave Mario’s shoulders a good rub and got pants of ecstasy for his efforts.
“Okay, Sherlock, let’s move on.” He skirted the bamboo and gave a sleek angel a cursory glance. He had seen her before and wouldn’t call her beautiful.
His little buddy hadn’t caught up, and when Ben looked for him, Mario sat where he’d been left, in front of the deep hole he had dug by the griffon.
He whined.
Ben narrowed his eyes and went closer. He got down on his knees to explore.
Excellent eyesight was one of his blessings. All he saw here was the dirty base of the griffon and a hole he had better fill in.
Mario started jumping, all four feet leaving the ground at one time.
“Settle down,” Ben said. “You’ll get us attention we don’t want.”
He brushed soil from the griffon’s base, admiring the way the sculptor had curled the creature’s lion tail tidily around its feet.
