Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

to read his thoughts. All she was getting was a low hum of jumbled words and emotions, but there was no mistaking the fear in his voice. The terror.

“Fee, Fee, ye have to come quick,” he said, his accent thick. He sounded near to tears.

“Uncle Sean, what’s happened?” Not Fin, she thought. Anyone but Fin.

“It’s happened again,” he blubbered. His next words were unintelligible, just a jumble of pitiful sounds.

“Uncle Sean,” she interrupted. “Uncle Sean, listen to me. You have to calm down. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Her heart raced, but she was already thinking more clearly. It wasn’t Fin. Fin was safe. She would know if he was dead. She’d know because a part of her soul would be gone. “What happened again?”

The moment she repeated his words, she knew what he meant.

No. It was impossible. Bobby’s death was the single, solitary act of a strung-out junkie looking for cash. A second beheading would establish a pattern. It would indicate that the random, unprovoked murder of Bobby McCathal, member of the Kahill Sept, had not been random.

“Uncle Sean, take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on or put someone on the phone who can.”

She heard him take a deep, strangled breath. “He was found less than half an hour ago on the game preserve. Head and hands gone. Jesus and Mary and Holy St. Joseph, Fee, it’s a bloody mess.”

“I’m coming, Uncle Sean. Give me three hours. I’ll call you as soon as I reach town.”

It wasn’t until Fia hung up that she realized she hadn’t asked who had been murdered.

“I disagree with you, sir,” Fia said calmly. “It doesn’t make sense to split up the investigation this way, especially now, with a second murder.” She gestured. “Some info being sent to Baltimore, some here. Copies all over the place.”

“I don’t give a fat rat’s ass what you think, Kahill.” Jarrel stuffed a forkful of spinach from a Styrofoam take-out box into his mouth. He was reading e-mail as he ate. Thousand Island dressing.

Fia despised Thousand Island dressing.

“Call Agent Duncan. If his office wants to hand the case over to us, fine, that’s up to them. But Senator Malley’s office green-flagged this bipartisan team, and I’m not screwing with it.” There was a spot of pink dressing on the corner of his mouth.

Fia wondered what he would do if she leaned over his desk and licked off the fleck of dressing. She could bite his carotid artery and he’d be dead in less than three minutes.

She touched the corner of her mouth, wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She was usually in control of her thoughts. She rarely allowed them to stray so far.

“Why are you still standing there, Kahill? You need me to make the phone call for you?”

“No, sir.” She turned to go. “I’ll call to touch base before you leave the office today.”

“You do that.” He munched a mouthful of salad. “And Kahill…”

“Sir?”

“Don’t screw this up. Don’t let this petty territorial shit get in the way of your investigation. We can’t afford it, not with a U.S. senator’s office involved.”

“I won’t, sir.” She looked back at him over her shoulder as if she was with him on the whole Bureau politics thing, but in her mind she was already forty-five miles south, trekking through the forest, looking for a head.

“Those your hiking clothes?” Fia glanced back at Glen, who was struggling to match her pace. The dirt road was no more than a three-foot-wide deer path, cut through the forest.

The woods were thick and heavy with undergrowth and the oppressive September heat. The trees, mostly hardwood—ash, birch, poplar, and elm—hung in a canopy over their heads, blocking direct sunlight. The humid air was heady with the rich, damp scent of leafy vegetation, thick moss, and rotting humus.

“You didn’t tell me we were hiking anywhere.” He swatted at a mosquito.

“I told you the body was on the Clare Point Wildlife Preserve, a mile off the main road.”

“You didn’t say road as in the only road.” He blocked a branch she released just before it snapped back and caught him in the groin. “I assumed there would be a dirt road, a pickup truck, some way to get back here.”

“I told you, my uncle’s arranging for ATVs. It’s a federal preserve; deer, fox, raccoons, they don’t need paved roads.” She ducked under a tree limb that had grown out over the path and shifted the pack she carried on her back. Inside was her camera, a notebook, plastic bags, and other items they would need to collect evidence. She had her cell phone with her, too, although it would do her little good. There were no towers nearby, so poor or no reception.

“And you’re sure we’re going the right way? Your uncle said there were almost four hundred acres of woods, here.”

“I’m going the right way.”

Fia could have followed this trail in the dark or with her eyes closed. She’d run it many times in the night, over the years. Deer had been running it for the last three hundred years and at least as many before the Kahills’ arrival. An old Lenape Indian village was said to have once sat on the crest of a small hill to the northeast. As a teenager, she and others combed the forest floor for stone artifacts like axes, spear points and arrowheads. Many had been found in the first one hundred years they had lived here, and were now displayed in the town’s museum.

“You want to go back?” she asked, pushing on, refusing to slow down to allow for his polished loafers and creased pinstripe pants. At least he’d had the sense to leave his suit jacket in his car. At her apartment, after throwing a bag together, she had dressed in a pair of khakis, an FBI polo, and sneakers. She was hot in the pants, but they protected her legs from the greenbriers and mosquitoes. “You could wait for the ATVs. Uncle