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“We’ll find out for sure when the ME runs DNA, but I would be surprised if they weren’t,” I replied.
Mays nodded, his blue eyes serious. Then he turned to Quincy. “You should probably call in another team, then get started here. I’ll take Ken and Joe and see what Detective Maza has for us.” He sighed. “It’s gonna be a long night.”
I didn’t bother agreeing. We all knew it.
I left Quincy and her people to the bodies and walked with Mays deeper into the warehouse, stopping abruptly at what we found when we rounded a corner behind a set of what looked like grain silos.
Ice rushed through my veins.
Set against the back wall of the building was a row of three very large cages, steel sides with grated doors. One of them looked like it had been used to try to contain a particularly pissed off and sizeable animal. There were dents—pushing outwards—in several places, and a few parts of the grating in the door were bent. The others seemed to be in decent shape, although whether that was because they’d held smaller shifters or because they hadn’t been used, I didn’t know. But we had three victims, and the fact that we had three cages was too convenient to be a coincidence.
The really disturbing part was what had been laid out on a series of tables between us and the cages.
Several heavy-duty plastic tables had been arranged in a half-circle around a single, similar table, its surface bearing multiple dark brownish stains. On the other tables were various implements and vials—most of them looked empty, although a few held dregs in the bottom—along with bits of metal and bits of clockwork and wires. And little boxes that looked disturbingly familiar.
I failed to suppress the shudder that rolled through me.
“Fuck,” Mays muttered.
“Tell me you can match this stuff, Mays,” I breathed.
“Assuming it is what I think it is, yeah, I should be able to. The drugs, at least. Maybe some of the batch numbers on the mechanical components.”
Dan had turned when we walked up, although he’d been standing alone. “DNA?” he asked Mays.
“Assuming we flag anything biological, we’ll try. Depends on how good a job they did at cleanup.”
Dan and I both looked at the stained table in the middle. Mays walked over to it. “Could be bacitracin,” he said, examining one of the stains. “There are a couple things on here, I think. Some of it could be blood or fecal matter.” He straightened up. “We’ll swab it all, then luminol the fuck out of this place.”
Dan nodded.
“Where’d the rest of your squad go?” I asked Dan.
“Back building,” he answered. There had been a second building on the property, although there was no official lease for it, and the one we’d pulled for Cornerstone Virtues had only listed a single address.
As though summoned by the question, a couple uniforms came in through a back door. “All clear, boss,” he called to Dan, who waved an acknowledgement of the report.
“We got any more CSIs coming in?” Dan asked.
“Quincy’s calling for another couple vanloads,” Mays answered from where he was crouched, pulling things out of his bag. The other two guys—Ken and Joe—were doing the same, Ken by the cages and Joe by one of the mechanical bits tables.
Dan bobbed his head once. “We’ll have to do both buildings,” he said.
Mays nodded. “Yep.”
Dan turned to me. “Can you bring out Campion?”
I blinked. “For the shifters?”
He nodded.
I pulled out my phone. “Let me see if he’s available.”
* * *
At least drivingover to pick up Ward got me the fuck out of that creepy-as-shit warehouse. I had the rather upsetting feeling that part of why I was so on edge was because there already were ghosts there—I can’t exactly feel spirits, but I tend to get kinda jumpy whenever there are a lot of them around, and I was jumpy as all fuck in there.
Then again, it might have been due to the fact that I was pretty sure that was where Taavi had been held. And where they’d stuck that goddamn dispenser in him.
