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It was on the way, and Raj sounded serious. “We’ll be there in ten.”
When we got there, Raj, wearing a thick, puffy coat with a heavy knitted red scarf around his neck, was standing holding a small bag and two paper cups, tiny tendrils of steam creeping out of the drinking holes. He held one out to me. “Brown sugar latte.”
That sounded fantastic. “Thanks.” I wondered what he wanted.
He held up the bag. “Sausage and egg panini, since drinking out of a cup shifted is a disaster.”
Anubis whined, his eyes fixed on the bag.
Raj gestured with the bag toward a bench half a block down. “Shall we?”
Once seated, Raj passed me the bag, and I reached in and broke off a chunk of the sandwich, offering it to Anubis, who delicately took it from my fingers.
“What’s going on, Raj?”
The tiger shifter blew out a long breath, his golden-brown eyes troubled. “I’m not actually IAD, Hart.”
I froze, my hand in the bag. “I’m sorry, the fuck what?”
“I’m not really IAD,” Raj repeated, not looking at me. “I’m FBI.”
I took a deep breath, trying to sort that out in my head, putting the pieces together of what little I apparently knew about Raj. Thinking rapidly, I resumed tearing off bites of sandwich and giving them to Anubis. “Is Raj Parikh actually your name?”
He nodded. “As far as IAD knows, I’m a former FBI profiler.”
“Just not so former.”
“Correct.”
I thought about this a second. “And you’ve decided to tell me this, why?”
If he was undercover in IA-fucking-D, that probably meant that shit had hit fans, and I’d somehow stepped right in the middle of it. “Shelby, in part,” he answered.
“Fucking great. He’s a fed target?”
Raj nodded. “He is now. When this all started, we didn’t know who we were looking for. Or how many. I have to keep him on leash because we’re hoping he’ll give me connections I don’t already have.”
“So you weren’t onto him before I gave him to you?”
Raj shook his head. “No. But he’s clearly tied to what I’m working on.”
“Which is what? Or can’t you fucking tell me that?” I don’t like working cases with feds because half the time everything is classified and they don’t tell you shit-all.
“I’m A-branch.”
“No shit, Tony.” As in Tony the Tiger. I’m sure he’d heard that one before and probably hated it, but I was annoyed and a little stung that he hadn’t shared this with me. Raj didn’t say anything about my snarky comment, although he did roll his eyes.
A-branch was the Arcanid/Arc-human Investigations Division, but saying AID when you were undercover in the IAD probably got a bit confusing, even for somebody from one of the federal alphabet soup organizations.
“We’ve been investigating a series of Arcanid homicides that seem to be nationally coordinated—MOs are matching across state lines in timeframes that make it impossible to be the same specific killers.”
“Nationally?” A national campaign to target Nids wasn’t just sketchy. That was full-on hate-group level shit, and I was deeply disturbed that not only did such a group exist, but I didn’t know about them. Because that was exactly the sort of thing that somebody in my job should fucking know about.
Raj nodded, his expression grim. “At least six different states. Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Delaware. Possibly others. With this MO, it’s hard to tell.”
“And you think Shelby is a part of it?”
“There’s a handful of victims whose loved ones reported that they’d texted or mentioned being pulled over right before their disappearances. Several of the victims we found who reported a police encounter also have multiple stab wounds. All Arcanids.”
