Page 8 of Concluded (The Bureau #13)

O n the other end of the phone line, Henry sounded exasperated. “We can’t send someone else, Achilles. Everyone’s out on assignment. HQ’s like a ghost town. I actually put in a call to East Coast HQ to see if we could borrow some people, but they’re maxed out too.”

Sitting in his rental car in Portland, Achilles groaned. “But somebody’s gotta go after him. I’m no Townsend, but my hunches are usually valid. And I have a feeling that something bad is going down with Dee Martell.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying I can’t do anything about it. Except tell you to find him.”

Someone was walking down the nighttime sidewalk with two dogs, both of them wearing glowing green collars. The dogs themselves were almost invisible in the darkness, so it looked as though the person was accompanied by a pair of tiny flying saucers.

“I was supposed to quit,” Achilles said.

“And I’m supposed to be furniture shopping with Dash. We’re redecorating the living room. But he’s in Hawaii and I’m here.” Henry sighed. “Look, Chief Grimes left me instructions about you. He said that if you ask for it, I should make sure you have whatever support you need. Except manpower.”

Had Grimes known that things would turn out this way, or had he simply prepared in case they did? It didn’t really matter, Achilles guessed. “Fine. Fine. I’m going to pad my expenses and nobody better complain.”

“You won’t hear a peep from me.”

Shit. How to even begin? Achilles felt a few moments of blank-minded panic before remembering that he was a detective—duh—with twenty years of experience.

He’d tracked down all sorts of things over that time.

“Can you get someone to put a trace on Martell’s phone?

” Technically, this should require a warrant, but the Bureau generally seemed to find a way around that.

“Sure. I’ll ask Con to get on it, and one of us will call you when he’s successful.”

Achilles thanked Henry and ended the call.

After procrastinating for a minute or two, he got out of the car and returned to the apartment, where he spent a while poking around.

The only interesting items he found were a wooden box full of miscellaneous junk jewelry and other trinkets, and an unopened packet of THC gummies.

Martell lived simply, it seemed. A few changes of casual clothing, a small assortment of thrift-store furniture, some basic groceries.

In addition to a small shelf of books, there was also a little stack beside the bed, all from the local library. Four of them were novels in a variety of genres, but one, surprisingly, was a book of poetry. Yeats.

Achilles took photos of everything. He really yearned to throw away the pizza and wash the dirty dishes, but for all he knew, this apartment could turn out to be a crime scene. He let them be.

Only when he gave a jaw-cracking yawn did he realize that he was exhausted. Today’s journey shouldn’t have taken that much out of him, but he was still recovering. He needed some food and a bed.

Henry had booked him a hotel downtown, the room a study in bland corporate pleasantness.

There was an on-site restaurant off the lobby, so instead of exploring the local culinary offerings, Achilles went down and ate a giant burger and a lot of fries.

When he returned to his room, he sat at the window and watched cars cross over the Willamette River.

The buzz of his phone startled him.

“Agent Spanos? Con Becker here.”

Achilles relaxed a little. Agent Becker worked in the basement of HQ—everyone called it Antarctica due to the frigid temperatures—and analyzed physical evidence.

He was also a tech wiz who conducted a lot of training sessions and sometimes helped out with investigative needs.

Some nasty injuries he’d received long ago precluded him from going out on most assignments, but he was smart, level-headed, and damned helpful.

“Hey, Becker. You traced my subject?”

“Yeah; sorry it took a while. Sort of swamped here.”

Glancing at his watch, Achilles saw that it was past eleven. “Are you still at work?”

“Yeah. I haven’t left here for… gee, four days? I have a cot set up and everything.”

Achilles, who was going to sleep on a nice bed soon, needed to stop feeling sorry for himself. “That stinks. Sorry.”

“It’s what we signed up for, I guess. Anyway, I’ll text you the coordinates for your subject.”

“Where is he?”

“Imperial Valley.”

Achilles blinked. “Southern California? Almost in Mexico? What the hell’s he doing down there?”

“I guess that’s what you’re going to figure out, Agent Spanos. I’m also going to send you a link to a fancy little app we’ve developed. It’ll allow you to continue tracking him if he moves—as long as he has his phone and it’s getting service.”

Well, it looked as if Achilles’ visit to Oregon was going to be very brief.

* * *

After a peaceful, if too short, night on a comfortable bed, fancy donuts for an airport breakfast, and a cramped flight, Achilles was once again in a rented vehicle.

This time it was a really nice SUV because he didn’t want to go ranging through the desert in an econobox.

For all he knew, Martell was planning to hide out somewhere among the cactuses and dirt roads, and four-wheel drive seemed like a good idea.

The desert had always felt weird to Achilles, partly because he’d spent his childhood in the very different landscape of the Midwest. But one of his first assignments as an agent—back when he’d been far too green to go on solo missions—had been dealing with aliens in Arizona.

Not the human kind, who politicians liked to use as scapegoats and who were none of the Bureau’s business.

These had been refugees from another planet, trying to survive in an extremely remote part of an Indian reservation.

They hadn’t been dangerous, but they had certainly been unusual, and they’d cemented Achilles’s association of the desert with strangeness.

As he drove, however, Achilles decided that maybe this location was good for him right now.

It made him feel disconnected. As if neither the chaos depicted in the news or the apocalypse Grimes had warned about had anything to do with him.

He breathed more easily than he had since the bear shifter, and he even found himself singing along with his playlist.

“You’re not on vacation,” he reminded himself more than once. He should be focusing on the job.

According to the file that Henry had sent, most of Martell’s background wasn’t noteworthy.

Like Achilles, he was forty-one. He had a criminal record going back to his teenage years, but they were nonviolent crimes like larceny and possession.

He’d moved around the country, done a little jail time now and then.

At times he’d held various minimum-wage jobs.

Mostly, however, he supported himself by selling good luck charms, which nobody at the Bureau had cared about until recently, when it had come to someone’s attention that the damned things actually worked.

There was no explanation in his file as to how the guy managed this, nor was there a precise description of what he was capable of. But Grimes wanted him on board.

Martell had already refused one offer to get to know the Bureau more closely, and Ferencz’s brief report had been included in the file.

The report summary had said it all: I don’t think Martell knows exactly what he can do.

He’s not willing to join us just yet. He’s not doing anything dangerous—but keep an eye on him.

All of that was fine, but it didn’t explain why Martell had suddenly disappeared.

It didn’t sound as if his encounter with Abe Ferencz should have been enough to spook him.

And even if he had decided to make a run for it after chatting with Ferencz, he wasn’t likely to have left so suddenly, with his pizza half eaten and his door unlocked.

But if the Bureau was interested in Martell, perhaps other parties were as well. Other parties whose intentions were less benign. Achilles didn’t know who those people might be, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Sometimes ignorance truly was bliss.

Yet here he was, trying to find out what Martell was up to and why, heading into the middle of nowhere, which according to the app that Henry had sent, was Martell’s last known location as of the previous night.

Still piloting the SUV through miles of sand and widely spaced low scrub, Achilles instructed his phone to make a call. It rang only once.

“Afolabi here.” Her voice always soothed Achilles, not just because it was pleasant, but also because she knew things.

And what she didn’t already know, she could almost always find out.

The Bureau might spend a lot of time training agents on how to use various weapons, but when it came down to it, information was the most powerful thing they had.

“Spanos. How are you doing?”

“Very busy. Just like everyone else. I’m happy to hear you’re well enough to return to work.”

He decided not to inform her that his return hadn’t been entirely voluntary. “I’m sorry to hit you with more. But I’ve got a subject who, according to my briefing, can create actual lucky charms.”

“Like the leprechaun?” She sounded skeptical.

“Yeah, only not the sugary cereal. Do you know how someone could go about doing that?”

Her answer came promptly. “Magic.”

“That’s… that’s ridiculous.”

“Agent Spanos, you were taught this years ago. Magic isn’t pulling rabbits from hats and it’s not a fairytale. It’s simply a term we use for forces we don’t yet understand.”

Yes, that was what he’d been told, but he hadn’t easily accepted that lesson.

He believed in things he could see, hear, and feel.

Most civilians might not realize that creatures such as vampires, merpeople, and shifters were real, but it was damned hard to deny their existence when they were biting you or attempting to eviscerate you with their claws.

Magic, on the other hand, felt way too woo-woo.

“If magic is a thing, why haven’t we researched it?” he asked.

“We have, although not sufficiently. There is some promising work suggesting that much of it involves focusing or harnessing forces of will, which can be quite strong despite being intangible.”

“Okay, fine,” he conceded. “How come this particular subject can do that harnessing and most people can’t?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll look into it. I’ll let you know what I can find.

But unless it’s urgent, I might not get to it for a day or two.

We have agents on the way to Fairbanks with a reported Amarok sighting, a family of bakeneko near Milpitas, a possible kishi in Seattle, a… well, you get the point. Can it wait?”

Achilles considered. It would certainly be nice to have this information before dealing with Martell, but it wasn’t critical. “Yeah, okay. Just call when you’ve got something, please.”

“Of course.”

He thanked her and ended the call, then glanced at his GPS.

Martell’s location was less than half an hour away.

Although the road pavement continued to be cracked and scarred from heat and the shoulders sandy, the rest of the overall landscape had changed.

The earth was covered with oasis-like patches of greenery laid out in neat squares.

Despite getting only a few inches of rain each year, this valley grew a lot of the fruits and vegetables Americans ate during the winter.

“Huh. What if magic is like irrigation, with metaphysical canals carrying those forces of will?” He’d have to ask Afolabi about that the next time they chatted.

Soon he reached the outskirts of El Centro, where fast-food joints, taco shops, and gas stations squatted under the unrelenting sun.

He considered stopping to grab something to eat but decided to get the business with Martell over with as quickly as possible.

After leaving town, he found himself in an even more alien landscape, with endless sand dunes undulating in all directions.

It reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the Sahara.

“What the hell is he doing here ?” he wondered for the zillionth time.

He was astounded that his phone continued to get reception out here, as did, apparently, Martell’s. Maybe Con or someone else at HQ had worked their own brand of magic to make that happen. If so, Achilles was grateful.

He almost missed the turnoff, which looked more like a path than a road: simply tire tracks leading across packed sand and disappearing behind a medium-sized dune. Access for off-roaders and campers, he supposed, although he didn’t see anyone else as he wound deeper into the wilderness.

Until he drove around a particularly tall dune and discovered a mansion.

It was so bizarre, so unlikely, that his first assumption was that he was seeing a mirage. He stopped the SUV, blinked several times, and even rubbed his eyes, but the mansion remained.

It was flat-roofed, two stories high, and glaringly white. A row of enormous columns topped by ornate gilded capitals created a deep front porch, and a line of palm trees surrounded the house on three sides. A Lexus SUV was haphazardly parked in front.

Realizing he was gaping, Achilles shut his mouth, then pulled in near the Lexus, cut the engine, and got out. He checked to make sure his gun was in its holster, and after a few deep breaths, he marched to the front door. The lion’s-head knocker was bigger than Achilles’s head.

“Here goes,” he muttered. And he knocked.

It took a long time before the door opened, and when it did, a woman wearing a sundress smiled at him. “Are you lost, honey?” She looked familiar, although he couldn’t place her.

“No. I’m looking for?—”

“This is private property, and I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Achilles had never been much attracted to women, but this one was an exception. She had vivid blue eyes and sunshiny hair, and it looked as if she worked out regularly.

He cleared his throat. “I just need to?—”

“You need to go.” When she smiled, she showed very straight white teeth.

And dammit, he wasn’t even supposed to be here. He’d intended to remain in his nice condo until he was fully recuperated and then maybe take a vacation before planning the rest of his life. The Bureau could go screw itself.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

He turned, walked back to his SUV, and drove away. If he drove fast, he could be home in less than four hours.