It took Atticus a moment to connect "Indigo" with "Agent Zheng." "You've got to be kidding me. Agent Zheng?"
"She's a complete babe." Kyle ducked back into his connecting room and returned—sans sweaters—with a color photo of Agent Zheng. "She's really sharp. She has a mind like a diamond."
"Who uses a machete to cut through red tape," Atticus sang.
"Are you saying I don't have a chance?"
"I'm not saying that."
"If she knows you two are . . . you know . . . it's not like I have to compete with you."
Atticus sighed. He hadn't counted on Kyle wanting to join them at breakfast. "She knows. What did you find out about her?"
"She's twenty-six, like moi,and an Aries, extremely compatible with a Virgo like me. Her tax records claim that she's single and owns a luxury one-bedroom studiocondo in Pittsburgh." Kyle crooned the word "studio." "You know what that means—no live-in boyfriend. Her hobbies are science fiction and mystery novels, motorcycles, and cooking."
Cooking?The stocked refrigerator in Zheng's hotel room took on new meaning. "My God, she's a nerd's dream come true."
Undeterred, Kyle went on. "She's got a Suzuki Katana and a Ford Mustang, a black belt in judo, and is the Pittsburgh field office's top scorer in pistol."
Atticus shooed Kyle back into his room so Ru could go on sleeping. They'd been out late, working through the addresses Agent Zheng had provided. The places were so scattered that they drove nearly two hundred miles just to hit the first two.
On Kyle's laptop various windows were open to lingerie models.
"And the lingerie relates how?"
"These are all things she ordered last month from Victoria's Secret."
He was going to have to have a long talk with Kyle about what the words "find out everything" really entailed. "I don't know, Kyle. Women wear things like that when they have someone to show it off to."
"You think so?"
"Yeah."
Kyle dropped into a sulk.
"What about the Ontongard?"
He looked unhappier. "Either Indigo sanitized her reports completely or there just isn't anything. She joined the FBI in 1999, and I've been searching through five years of reports, but so far, officially, the only 'aliens' she's dealt with are Russian Mafia and Chinese Tongs. I'm sorry, Atty; I'll do some more digging."
Atticus went to gaze out Kyle's window, looking down on Boston Harbor. Fog masked all but the wharf at the foot of the hotel and its collection of sailboats and cabin cruisers. It felt like the fog extended through his soul; Atticus knew he wasn't human, but who was telling him the truth? Could he believe Agent Zheng merely because she was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way? Was "alien" any saner than "werewolf," "angel," or "demon"? Who knew the truth and who was deceiving themselves?
In the long run, did it really matter? After what he and Ru found yesterday, he knew that the cult needed to be stopped.
Deciding that Ice's instruction to Ascii might indicate a general direction to look, they investigated the northernmost addresses on the list. The New Hampshire farm had indeed been sold and the new owners were an investment banker from Boston, his pregnant wife, and their two children. After what they learned at the next site, Atticus nearly drove back to the farm and told the banker to pack up his family and flee any chance of interacting with the cult.
Zheng's list had innocuously noted: burn site.The police report had been dryly worded. What they found was little more than secluded acreage on the edge of extensive wetlands. There had been cinder blocks stacked around the bonfire, making crude fire tunnels, but they'd been numbered and hauled away to FBI crime labs. The ash had been gathered for bone fragments, the ground scraped for evidence, and all that was left was scorched earth and the scent of long-dead fires.
He searched anyhow, crouching in the cold wind, fingering the marshy edges of the clearing. In the break between two slightly singed bushes, he found where a woman had crawled through, missing a left arm and a right foot, burning hot enough to scorch the ground she scrabbled over. In a low hollow, fifty feet from the incinerator, she broke into a collection of mice—but that hadn't saved her. The cultists had smashed the mice with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. The police missed or ignored the pitifully small, charred bodies. Atticus steeled himself to pick one up, breaking open the heat-mummified remains to find intact DNA.
The cult killed the mice while they were still caught between two species. This cell was a mouse. That cell was . . . well, one couldn't call it human.
"Is that what I think it is?" Ru had whispered from behind Atticus.
"Yes." He dug a hole in the damp, loose soil and buried the mice. There was nothing else he could do; he couldn't take them to the police and say, "These were a woman—someone just like me."
It was a chance encounter with the incinerator's neighbor that exposed the rest of the horror.
"They did it at night—to hide the smoke," she'd said only after they'd shown her ID. She had the doors of her car locked, and the window cracked only a finger width. "The wind usually blows west to east—so it goes out over the wetlands, but one night last fall I could smell it—I live the next lot down the lane—so I called the fire department. They needed to bring in a psychologist for the whole department—it was like something out of a Nazi death camp."
Ru tsked. Atticus hung back, letting Ru finesse her. People liked Ru and opened up to him. "It must be terrifying to have something like that so close to home."
"We've bought a dog and a gun and had alarms installed on all windows and doors."
"Very intelligent of you," Ru murmured.
"I wouldn't have stayed except we would have taken a terrible hit trying to sell our house—it was all through the news, and no one wanted to live next to that."
Ru made more encouraging noises.
"I can't believe those monsters were so close to my house—that I might have passed them in the car and looked them in the face."
"Have they caught any of the ones responsible?"
"No, no." She scanned the empty road, either becoming aware they were alone on the country lane, or looking for monsters in the form of men lurking in the bushes, or maybe both. Ironically, she'd probably mistake Ascii as an ally against the monstrous. What would she make of Atticus? "The police keep asking us, insisting we must have seen something. There were cars every now and then—and trucks of firewood—but I thought those were deliveries for someone farther down the road. The McBeals or the Henrys."
Ru showed her the artist sketches of the cult members, but she didn't recognize anyone.
"Is this drug related then?" She seemed incredulous, as if unmotivated murder was simpler to understand than drugs being sold in her neighborhood.
"That's what we're trying to find out."
In the end, she could enlighten them only about the aftermath, not about the murders themselves. She repeated her tale of calling the fire department, and expanded on the story, telling about the police canvassing the area to see if residents were missing, and how the local paper still carried stories each time a victim was identified. "They think there were thirty to forty bodies cremated there. Once the news came out, I called everyone I knew, just to check on them—even one thieving cousin I won't let in my house; he might be a bastard but I wouldn't wish that on him."
Was this where they had been taking Ukiah? Had the victims been other family members Atticus now would never meet? Or had they been humans who fell prey to the cult insanity?