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I’d almost tripped over Taavi at least five times by ten am, though, because he wanted to stayreally closeto me, which meant I kept snagging a foot on him as he pressed against my calf. I’d let him off leash around the bullpen, assuming my colleagues had gotten so used to him that they wouldn’t really care. Nobody said otherwise, anyway.
“Okay, bud,” I finally told him when I just about took a header into the water cooler. “I appreciate you being supportive and all, but if we could take that a little less physically literally, I think that would be healthier for both of us. I don’t want to breakanotherleg for you, okay?”
He let out a whine, but he stopped being a tripping hazard.
And when Raj came in the door sporting his federal badge instead of his IAD one, I knew things weren’t going to improve.
Today’s mission was to try to ID our victims—the ones whose faces were still attached, anyway. So while I didn’t have to spend time studying the skinned shifters, I still had to go through the images, log them, and then sort them, which meant that I still had to look at every single fucking one.
“Hart!” Villanova yelled across the bullpen.
I didn’t bother standing. “Sir?” I called back.
“You and Agent Parikh need to go downstairs and talk to dispatch,now.”
Raj and I shared a confused look, but we went—Raj moving quite a bit faster than me, although he very politely paused on the landing to wait for me to catch up. Stairs were a bitch when your body was as battered as mine.
I’d told Taavi to stay at my desk, and while he’d whined about it, he’d stayed put.
Raj and I got downstairs and found Caro in semi-hysterical tears.
“Caro, what happened?” I’d walked up behind her, and when she turned and half-threw herself at me, I wasn’t really prepared to take her weight and staggered a little. Raj’s hand on my back steadied me, although I had to suppress the hiss of pain because he’d put his hand directly on the deep cut from the riot.
“It w-was awful!”
Caro is easily the best dispatcher we have—calm, collected, hysterically funny when we got calls that deserved it. If she was this upset, I didn’t want to know. But knowing was my job.
“Can you tell us what happened?” I asked, when she’d calmed down enough to step back, wipe her tears, and readjust her embroidered linen mask.
Instead of answering, she walked back toward her station, then hit the rewind button.
Raj shot me a look.
Then Caro hit play.
“9-1-1, what is your emergency?”came the operator’s voice, a man, almost bored-sounding.
The voice that responded was anything but calm or clear. The speaker sounded female, but was speaking in such a low, rushed whisper that it was hard to tell anything, to be honest.
“I—I just got pulled over… there’s something… wrong. I—my uncle’s a cop, and I used to ride along, and this is all wrong.”
“What do you mean, all wrong, ma’am?”
“He—he made me get out of the car right away. I’m—oh, god, he’s coming back.”A momentary pause.“My name is Sabrina Estevez.”Her voice got louder, as though she’d brought the phone right up by her lips.“His name is Shelby, and there’s a four and a zero in his—”
The voice stopped speaking, but we could hear the rasp of panicked breath. I clenched my jaw. I looked over at Raj, finding his lips pressed tightly together and both hands bunched into fists.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing, Nid?”
This voice sounded male, low and angry. I didn’t know Shelby well enough to ID his voice, but somebody in the room sucked in a breath.
“N—nothing!”This was the woman’s voice again.“Please d—don’t—”
We didn’t hear what she didn’t want him to do.
There was a hiss like static, a thud, then a rasping sound like gravel.
“Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?”
