Dark Matter

He looked away, obliterating the image and getting back to business. “So who are we waiting for?” he asked, deducing that someone of authority had made the call to put them on the case. He glanced around at the milling law enforcement. “Or are we just supposed to stand around? Maybe twiddle our thumbs?”

She turned to look at him. “What? You want to go fishing? Maybe take a jog around the loop?”

“I was thinking more like roust a couple of budding ornithologists.” He nodded toward the wooden footbridge with its viewing platform. He could just make out the bird watchers and their telephoto lenses trained on the crime scene. “Maybe even before our victim shows up on the front page of the paper.”

“They’re birders,” Erika said, turning to look in their direction.

“Ornithologists, birders, same difference.”

“Actually, ornithology is the scientific study of birds.” She nodded toward the guys wearing camouflage and standing next to binoculars so big they required tripods. “The birders?” She lowered her voice suggestively. “They just like to watch.”

This time, he gave her the satisfaction of seeing him smile.

The word game had started last month after a night spent watching a rerun of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A couple of beers and several artery-clogging bowls of buttered popcorn later, they both claimed the superior vocabulary. Seven was pretty sure Erika kept score…and that she was ahead.

Having done her duty and sicced a uniform on the birders, Erika knelt next to the body. “Come look at this.”

Erika took out a pen from her jacket and carefully separated the strands of hair covering the girl’s neck.

“See that?” she asked.

There was a red mark on the neck, like a prick of some kind. The skin around it appeared discolored.

He crouched down alongside the girl and frowned. “What the hell is that? An injection site?”

“She has another one here,” Erika said pushing aside the cordgrass with her pen to indicate the top of the girl’s hand.

“Doesn’t look like track marks. Could it be some sort of bug bite, or a crab or a fish having had a go at the body?”

Erika shook her head. “Too uniform.”

His cell went off. Without taking his gaze off the strange mark, he reached for the phone on his hip. But it rang only once, stopping before he could answer.

“How’s Beth doing?” Erika asked, not even trying to disguise her distaste.

He ignored her and focused on the body and the curious marks. Erika assumed the call was from Beth, his sister-in-law, par for the course the last two years. That’s when Seven’s older brother, Ricky—the happily married man and Nick’s father, the perfect son to Seven’s prodigal—had pleaded guilty to second degree murder. Ricky, a plastic surgeon, had killed a male nurse, the man who’d been his lover.

Beth, Ricky’s wife, hadn’t exactly taken her husband’s betrayal in stride. She’d fallen into the bottle. It had been up to Seven and his family to keep the pieces together for Nick.

But now Beth was in AA. She was studying for her broker’s license. Sure, she’d lost the waterfront home and the fifty-five-foot yacht, the condo in Big Bear. She and Nick lived in a small house that Seven owned with his father…and she seemed happier than ever.

Only, Erika wasn’t the forgiving type. She hadn’t bought into Beth’s new lease on life, or the fact that she’d given up on her game of musical chairs with the Bushard brothers. According to Erika, Beth was only waiting for the ink to dry on her divorce papers before she made her move on him.

Out of the corner of his eye, Seven caught sight of a familiar movement. A strange prickling heated the back of his neck. Standing, he could feel his heart pumping hard as his body acknowledged the threat long before his brain could put the pieces together.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath.

Someone of authority had just arrived, all right.

The woman marching toward them was blond and tall with the lanky build of an Olympic high jumper. Her long-legged stride forced the tech beside her to give a little skip just to keep up. She wore black slacks and a blazer with a simple white blouse, and accessorized with the requisite dark aviator glasses. But the thing that stood out—what made him instantly recognize her—was that damn BlackBerry in her hand.

She was headed straight for Seven and Erika, instructing the crime-scene tech jogging alongside, while no doubt browsing the Web on her BlackBerry. Special Agent Carin Barnes liked to multitask.

“Getting back to those twenty questions,” he said to Erika. “Why exactly did two Westminster detectives get called in here?”

Erika stood, training her gaze on the blonde. “I think you skipped the part about it being bigger than a bread box.”

“A hell of a lot taller, anyway,” he said.

Bright and early, Erika had given him a call. A DB—a dead body—in the wetlands. Female. Very young. He’d gone into automatic; his partner was calling him to the scene of a crime. Why ask questions?

He frowned. The fucking FBI.

“Since when do you have an in with the feds?” he asked Erika.

She lowered her sunglasses for his benefit. “Honey, I have an in just about everywhere.”

She popped the glasses back on the bridge of her nose and stepped toward the approaching agent. Since he’d last seen Special Agent Carin Barnes, she’d clipped her hair boy-short. It was a valiant attempt at looking the part of tough federal agent but there was too much of willowy blonde there to achieve the proper effect.

The women shook hands. Seven and Carin Barnes were of a height, just under six feet. Standing next to Erika, the two made a curious picture: A Viking warrioress looming over a Pictish princess. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he knew those two wouldn’t waste time on pleasantries.

“Special Agent Barnes,” he said, bracing himself as the FBI agent came to a stop before him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I assume that’s your attempt at levity,” Barnes said, pocketing the BlackBerry, “which we both know is wasted on me. This isn’t the killer’s only victim. Megan Tobin of Henderson, Nevada. We found her last month, dumped just like this. She’d been cutting school. According to her best friend, she was meeting someone, an older man. Possibly a love interest. Megan was the second vic. We found Mark Dair three months before her, same MO.”

“Anything on Megan’s computer?” Seven asked.

A lot of times, these kids were lured into meeting some stranger after prolonged discussion over the Internet.

“Nothing,” Barnes responded.

“You’re sure they’re connected to our vic?” Seven asked.

“All three had these stones in their hands.”

She held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a flat, rounded stone, the kind used by kids to skip on the water. The surface had been carved with curious markings that reminded Seven of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“An artifact?” Erika asked, not bothering to hide the surprise in her voice.

The fact was, Barnes wasn’t your ordinary FBI agent. She worked for NISA, the National Institute for Strategic Artifacts. The agency always reminded Seven of that last scene in that Indiana Jones flick, where a forklift takes the crated Ark of the Covenant and stores it in some enormous warehouse, giving the idea that the thousands of crates lining the aisles were filled with similar treasures never again to see the light of day.

Erika and Seven had first met Special Agent Carin Barnes ten months ago, while working on the fortune-teller murders. NISA stepped in when it turned out a local business tycoon, David Gospel, had managed to amass a sizable collection of mystical artifacts—all through the black market in antiquities. Unfortunately, the collection cost the man his life.

The story went that one of the artifacts was possessed by some evil spirit, having a kind of Hope Diamond curse. The spirit could attach itself to anyone who messed with the artifact—a crystal about the size of a man’s fist, called the Eye of Athena—turning them into rabid killers. Gospel’s wife ended up shooting him, but not before she and her son amassed some serious carnage.

Of course, Seven didn’t buy into the hocus pocus. One of the victims had been Gospel’s mistress. Seven liked the old-fashioned motive: Her man had done her wrong and Mrs. Gospel flipped her lid.

After they’d wrapped up the case, Seven had done a little research on NISA, but he hadn’t come up with much. It appeared that anything on the mysterious branch of the FBI was buried so deep, there was no sign of it on paper. Not even the conspiracy buffs on the Net had gotten wind of it.