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“Then they went to wake her for breakfast this morning and—” He spread his hands. “Dead in her bed.”
“Anything strange?”
“Besides a healthy eighteen-year-old woman dying in her sleep?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
Cal cut me a glance, but he knew his job. He’d asked questions.
“Strange shrieking in the night, attributed to that weird increase in ravens we’ve had reported. I think we need to get the DNR in here to blast a few. That noise could scare the life out of a person unfamiliar with mountain living.”
“You’re saying the Browns’ niece got scared to death?” I laughed a little, as if it were a joke, even though I knew it wasn’t.
His eyebrows lowered until they nearly met in the middle. “She did look weird. I pulled the sheet over her face. I couldn’t stand to see her.”
My hopes that this was an unaided death fizzled. The Raven Mocker was sticking to the new pattern—taking young, healthy people rather than old or ill ones.
“Did you call Doc?”
“I waited until he was on scene before I came here.”
Doc would know what to do without my having to tell him.
“You could have called me,” I said. “You didn’t have to track me down.”
“This isn’t the kind of thing that should be told over the radio or even the phone. What the hell’s going on around here? You’ve got Doc doing autopsies on citizens who died by natural causes. You’re exhuming bodies and doing autopsies on them. We’ve got people dying for no reason all over the place. Maybe we should call the FBI.”
“There isn’t a serial killer. It’s—”
“A virus.” Ian stood in the bathroom doorway, a towel around his neck, chest bare, pants zipped but unbuttoned.
Cal didn’t appreciate the view as much as I did. He scowled first at Ian, then at me. I felt like I’d been caught in the backseat of Daddy’s truck with a boy. Not that I ever had been, but I could imagine.
“Is that true?” Cal asked.
“So Doc says.” Or would.
“I’ve had some experience with this.” Ian retrieved his shirt from the floor. “Grace called the CDC. Doc’s working with them. We need to let the experts do their jobs.”
“And in the meantime, people die?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s the nature of this beast.”
I blinked at the dual meaning to the word but managed to keep my expression concerned when Cal turned to me.
“Is it contagious? Is there something in the water? The air?”
“We don’t know.”
“Should we evacuate?”
“It’s too late for that. If it is contagious, we’d be spreading it across the country.”
His face creased in frustration. “How close is Doc to figuring this out?”
“Very close,” Ian answered. “Any day now.”
God, I hoped so.
