My eyes met Occam’s and his one good eyebrow lifted in agreement with my thoughts. Biological causation would be bad. A combo would be terrifying. PsyLED brass and the military had been creating response strategies involving militarized magical energies coupled with all the other elements of CBRNEP. None of the scenarios had resulted in manageable outcomes.
Occam went on. “Kent doesn’t have a probable COD yet, but the drummer, male, and bass player, female, who started feeling sick in the basement, are on the way to UTMC-Knoxville for monitoring in the para ward.
“The coroner and Putnam County medical examiner are on-site, down there now with T. Laine, dressed in blue unis, each holding a null pen, debating how to transport the other two bodies. Current plan is to find some null biohazard HRPs for transport to UTMC. Otherwise it’s possible the bodies will be fully decomposed by the time they get there.”
Everyone, alive and dead, was going to Knoxville. It would be handy to have all the victims—patients and DBs—in one place. Even more than sixty years after the paras leaped out of the para closet, medical professionals who treated or worked on paranormal creatures were few and far between. UTMC had long been on the cutting edge of para studies.
I drew a little circle in the air with my finger. “And why does your face look like that? So unhappy underneath the cop-face mean.”
“As soon as the sheriff arrived, he called in the local FBI. The feeb SAC took Catriona in for questioning. In cuffs. She was gone before T. Laine got here.”
“Why in handcuffs? Because she’s a witch?”
“Witch. Woman. Foreigner. Young. Pick one. Or pick ’em all. From what I gather, the special agent in charge of the local FBI office hates most everyone.”
Tennessee PsyLED and FBI had not healed our professional relationship since the state’s FBI director had been outed by us as a gwyllgi—a devil dog. Not that they wanted a devil dog in charge, but the FBI embarrassment of having a deadly paranormal creature under their noses and giving them orders had been hard on the whole department. Now it was tit-for-tat at the higher levels of the state organization. The younger feebs seemed okay, but upper management and the older entrenched agents were often a problem. Occam nodded a greeting over my shoulder.
Before I could turn, T. Laine said, “Your hair is gorgeous. I officially hate you.”
The hate comment meant she was jealous of my hair—which had gone a strange shade of metallic scarlet a few months back and become wildly curly, thanks to my becoming a tree for a while. The color and curls were fading now, but T. Laine still had hair envy. I stepped at an angle to include her.
Lainie looked tired, her skin pale, purple smudges beneath her dark eyes, and her dark bobbed hair was snarled and squashed flat from the elastic strings of a bio face mask. T. Laine needed another witch in the unit to share the witchy duties, but witches who were willing to go into law enforcement were rare as hen’s teeth.
“Update, to make sure we’re all on the same page. I drove here and tested the site,” she said. “It isn’t a typical witch working or curse. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Just looking at the scene, it fits some of the parameters of a death working but falls totally outside on the psy-meter, and it’s everywhere downstairs, especially in the swag storage room, where the third victim, Monica Belcher, fell and died. That room reads so strong of these death energies that, so far, I haven’t found a way to stay inside safely, and the two city cops who went in to take crime scene photos before I got here were contaminated. They just arrived at HQ to sit in the null room for a while, in case that helps.”
“What kind of psy-meter reading?” I asked. Every species of paranormal creature had its own specific levels, even me. And magical workings and magical energies always read on the psy-meter.
“All four psion levels are up, but they bounce up and down, as if the energies are being affected by something else, like compasses going haywire over the Bermuda Triangle. Almost everything in the basement is showing signs of disintegration, not just the bodies.” T. Laine rubbed her hand through her hair, a gesture that was part frustration, part something else. Maybe headache. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, “and I don’t know where to look to help me categorize it since no one up-line has answered my calls yet.”
Her eyes cleared slightly and she gave me a wan smile. “No maggots yet, though.”
“Ha-ha,” I said. Vampires called me Maggots or Maggoty, or Little Maggot Girl. The nicknames were a thing of perpetual amusement to my coworkers. “What’s a swag storage room?”
“It’s storage space for promotional merchandise and display stands.”
“What do you need me to do? Why am I here? This thing is in the house, not the earth.”
“FireWind requested you on-site.”
“Oh.” FireWind was the new up-line big boss and he scared the pants offa me. Being scared made me mouthy and so Ayatas FireWind and I had not gotten off on the right foot, if there was a right foot with him.
“FireWind is on the way from New Orleans. For now? Familiarize yourself with the site. Then you can start organizing the electronic file tree for PsyLED’s inquiry, take photos and notes, hand draw the crime scene, and start the prelim witness interviews.” She took a breath that ended in a frown. “Let’s take a quick tour of the basement. That’s a vision that’ll melt all the red off your lollipop.”
I would never understand what lollipops had to do with dead bodies. I followed Kent through the gaggle of officers at the end of the hallway and down the stairs to a landing where the stairs turned. There was a narrow window there with three houseplants on the ledge, and a table stacked with sky blue unis. Under the table was a huge plastic container for contaminated unis. I opened one of the super-strong mints and placed it on my tongue before we both dressed out in the null P3E unis. The one-piece biohazard uniforms had been designed for contact-based biological pathogens and had then been altered and spelled by the Seattle coven against magic. They covered the wearer from head to toe, starting at the oversized booties, rising up our legs to a waist that never fit, to the head cover that could be cinched over forehead and chin. To go with the unis were extra-thick spelled nitrile gloves and darker masks, which could be fitted to our faces to create a seal so that all air exchange had to pass through the specially treated null cloth.
The stench coming up the stairway was enough to make me nearly gag, even with the mint. Some people said they breathed through their mouths when they encountered bad smells, but that left my tongue coated with a nasty smell/taste sensation. That perception lasted longer than the smell alone and made me not want my dinner.
On Unit Eighteen I had gotten sort of used to foul smells, but this stench was in a category all its own. If I could have stopped breathing entirely, I would have. The scent was a sweet, sick reek of advanced rot mixed with . . . I didn’t know what. Mixed with other things I couldn’t identify. When we were dressed, T. Laine handed me a null pen to protect me from the paranormal energies and a cloth handkerchief with mentholated vapor rub on it. I took both and tucked the cloth inside my mask, near my nose, and the pen into a chest pocket of the uni.