Page 16 of So Savage (Faith Bold #21)

Faith sighed and leaned forward, rubbing her temples with her hands. Turk slept next to her, and she felt a touch of jealousy. Dogs, in many ways, had the easiest lives. Turk could essentially sleep anytime he wasn't actively using his nose to hunt for clues. Meanwhile, Faith was on the back end of another all-nighter, once more greeting the sun with zero hours of sleep and a groggy mind only barely kept alert enough to function by copious amounts of caffeine.

I’ll probably die of a heart attack before I reach fifty.

She sipped more coffee anyway. She needed to find a missing woman, or if nothing else, find the person killing K9 handlers and make sure he couldn’t kill anyone else.

She wondered why the killer hadn’t finished Delgado off the way he had the others. That supported the hypothesis that there was more than one killer. It was possible this one liked to beat people instead of use knives.

Or maybe it was possible that the killer hadn’t been successful at keeping the element of surprise. If Delgado had seen him coming, and if she was a boxing champion, then it was likely she had put up more resistance than the others. It might even be the killer’s blood they had seen and not hers. Wayne had heard a male shouting, not a female. Maybe he’d heard the aftermath of one of Delgado’s blows finding its mark.

Faith hoped so. If Delgado was dead, it probably didn’t make a difference if she’d gotten a shot in or not, but it would make Faith feel better to think that she’d gotten her licks in before she’d lost her life.

She stiffened as she realized they’d missed an opportunity. She quickly dialed Marcus.

“Hey, Faith,” the detective replied, sounding as weary as she felt. “No sign of Delgado yet. We’re looking still, but wherever the killer took her, he did a good job of hiding it. Other than the scene of the scuffle, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of either of them.”

“Have the MPs search the exercise field,” she replied. “Tell them to look for darts. I think the killer wasn’t able to sedate Delgado right away. I think she might have tried to defend herself, and the noise of that encounter was what alerted Wayne to the danger.”

“Oh shit,” Marcus said. “You’re right. I’ll have them look right now. We might be able to get fingerprints off of the darts. I’ll see if we can get DNA from the blood in the snow too.”

“See if you can also find out who manufactured the darts,” Faith said.

“Right. I’ll start that right away. You’re a genius, Faith.”

Faith smiled when Marcus hung up. It was encouraging to hear such praise, especially since Faith didn’t feel like she was doing a very good job at the moment. That could just be her exhaustion talking. It was getting harder to pull these irregular hours the older she got.

“Well, back to work, Special Agent.”

Turk raised one ear, but when Faith reached down and scratched behind it, he lowered the ear and returned to sleep. She chuckled at her fur baby and wondered how, on Earth, anyone could hurt a dog. They were such good creatures.

Then again, the killer wasn’t hurting dogs. He, she or they were being very careful not to hurt the dogs. Yes, they’d messed up the dose this time, but the dog was still alive, and the mistake—if one was made—was a fairly innocent one.

She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and returned to work. Finding manufacturers of ketamine, xylazine, diazepam and phenobarbital was easy. Finding manufacturers of the synthetic hormone that was used to accelerate the drug’s action was next to impossible.

But that drug was the key. Finding that substance would tell Faith where to look for their killer. Judging by how difficult it was to get any information at all, Faith guessed that finding the manufacturer would likely provide them with a narrow choice of suspects. That could make it easier to find the exact person they needed.

At the moment, she was on a DoD server, trying to use her FBI credentials to discover which pharmaceutical companies were currently providing veterinary drugs to the United States.

That was tedious work. The Department of Defense was understandably reticent to share all of that information online, and it took Faith several tries to get someone on the phone. Once she did have someone on the phone, she was told that she didn’t have the clearance to know the answer to her questions. Threats to superior officers fell on deaf ears.

So now she was back on the server but using a backdoor so she wouldn’t be detected. Hopefully not, anyway.

The computer chimed to let her know that her credentials had been accepted. She pumped her fist and began to explore.

Cue more tedious work. The database she'd hacked into listed hundreds of veterinary companies of all different sorts. She filtered it down to pharmaceutical companies and ended up with dozens. Filtering it by companies in the Midwest, and she ended up with sixteen entries, eight of those in Minnesota. Apparently, veterinary drug manufacturing was a thing in the land of ten thousand lakes.

Now, she had to search each company to find suspects that fit their profile. Hard to do when you weren't entirely sure what the profile was.

The killer hated K9 handlers, that was for sure. Two men stabbed to death, and a woman carried off and probably killed already. Thus far, they'd assumed it was something personal with the two particular men who were killed, but throwing Delgado into the mix complicated things. She didn't have a particularly close connection with the two men.

Or maybe she did. A search of their military records didn’t reveal any collaboration between Delgado and the others, but the humans weren’t the only victims to consider. Dr. Parker saw any military K9 in the Duluth area. Maybe there was a connection on the veterinary end.

Well, she was researching that connection, so that was good. But what was the motive? Who on this list of hundreds of names was the one person who had a reason to want all three of them dead?

All three had clean service records. Reeves and Walsh had lost dogs in combat, but Delgado hadn't. Reeves and Walsh had served on a review board investigating another handler who had lost a dog. Delgado hadn't. Delgado had participated in K9 competitions, but the other two hadn't.

She sighed. She felt like she was floating on the surface, trying to find a creature a thousand feet below.

She gave up trying to put all of the pieces together. She wasn’t ready to use a hook yet. She needed to cast a net.

She plugged all of the names into an FBI search engine that would look for connections between them and the victims. The technology was brand new and still in testing, but since most of the police manpower was being used to look for Delgado right now, she was a one-man show, and this could help narrow things down until she found her next suspect.

While the search engine ran, she went to the breakroom and got herself some breakfast and coffee. Breakfast might be a bit of a stretch, actually. Michael might consider a maple bar and a bear claw a breakfast, but Faith needed protein, not just carbs.

She smiled wistfully as she thought of Michael. She missed her old partner. It wasn’t the same working without him. Marcus was a good detective, and he was doing a good job with this given the circumstances, but she still felt scatterbrained without Michael.

It was funny. From the outside, Faith was the brilliant one. Maybe in a sense that was true. Michael was more by-the-book and tended to think of clues as stepping stones rather than puzzle pieces. When one clue didn’t lead to another, he could lose his way.

But just like Holmes was better with Watson, she was better with Michael. Michael kept her grounded. She would take theories and run with every possible solution, or she would fixate on one thing that sounded good and bang her head against the wall until it either made sense or was too outlandish to consider anymore. Michael helped keep her on track and gently prodded her to move on when it was time.

And something about working with him helped her find answers faster. Not just that she was grounded but that her brain somehow worked better with him around. If she ever went back to therapy again, she would have to ask her doctor why that was. Maybe certain people were just compatible in ways that were hard to explain.

Before she could think of the larger implications of that thought, Turk trotted into the breakroom and nudged her. “What is it, boy?”

He turned and walked away. Faith followed him back into Marcus’s office. He sat in front of the computer and looked up at the screen.

Faith smiled. “Good boy.”

The algorithm had worked. She had a name. Dr. Nathan Hayes.

She sat behind the desk and did a quick background on Mr. Hayes. What she found was promising.

Hayes worked for Lake Pharmaceuticals. The company’s primary business was manufacturing drugs formulated by the larger pharma businesses, but they did have a few proprietary products.

One of those products was a synthetic hormone that caused increase absorption of certain sedatives for use in veterinary settings.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

She read further and discovered that Dr. Hayes had once been a U.S. Army veterinarian but had retired after a long failed campaign to reform K9 deployment protocols. He claimed that the current standards were too dangerous for the dogs and were, therefore, unethical.

Pulling on that thread a little further, she looked up the case and read the documents. The specific data was expunged, but the names of the handlers assigned to the dogs Hayes mentioned were left in. Master Sergeant Thomas Reeves, Staff Sergeant Kevin Walsh and Technical Sergeant Maria Delgado. She hadn’t lost a dog in combat, but one of her animals had suffered a career-ending injury in training.

She looked at the time. Nine o’clock. Dr. Hayes should be in the office by now.

“Come on, boy,” she said, standing and grabbing her coat. “Let’s take a little trip.”

She had a bounce in her step as she left the office, but there was an undercurrent of desperation in her expression. This lead was no stronger than the others they’d followed, and those had led to dead ends.

Please let this one pan out , she prayed. Please don’t let anyone else die.