Ukiah - Alien Taste Part 19

It took all his courage to call her.

She answered with "Special Agent Zheng" in her steel-hard voice.

"Hi. It's Ukiah." He wasn't sure what to add.Her voice went warm and concerned. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't call earlier. I hope I didn't worry you too much."

"Max called and told me what was going on. I'm sorry that I bugged your bike without warning you.

When it went dead, I was afraid that I might have caused you serious harm."

Ukiah laughed weakly. "We both have our little demons, don't we? I'd like to see you. I'm out at my moms at the moment, but I can be down there within twenty minutes."

"I'd like to see you too, in one piece. How about twelve-thirty, outside my office?"

He checked his watch. It would give him forty minutes to make her office. "I'll be there."

She came out of the Federal building carrying her helmet and riding jacket. He found himself smiling in spite of everything as she walked up to him. Her eyes gleamed with happiness, and she tasted of plums when they kissed.

"I'm so glad you're okay." She handed him her helmet as she pulled on her jacket. "Did you find the Pack? Did they tell you what you needed to know?"

His heart fell with the reminder of what he needed to tell her. She caught it on his face and her brow creased slightly.

"What is it?"

"I found them, they told me. We need to talk. There was so much I didn't know about myself, stuff I found out, that you need to know."

She nodded slowly. "Let's go someplace private, then, and talk."

She pulled on her helmet and straddled the seat behind him, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist.

Private? His first thought was of his tree house. It was a long drive, though, and he wasn't sure how much time they had. She might only expect to take a long lunch. He settled then on the offices. Max was gone and the place would be empty.

She tugged off her helmet as she followed him into the mansion. This time she paused to touch the rich chestnut burl paneling. "This place is so beautiful."

Ukiah nodded, disarming the security system, except for the outside doors. "I didn't know it at first.

I'd only been in a few houses when I was a kid, and you've seen my moms'. I thought everyone had great big Victorian mansions. After a year or so of being in and out of people's homes, it suddenly struck me.

Wow! This is big and it's elegant and it's beyond what most people could ever hope to own."

She laughed. "Can I have a tour?"

He had planned to tell her the moment the door was shut, but the chance for delay was too tempting. "Sure. This is the foyer. Max and his wife bought the grandfather clock in England on their second honeymoon, a couple of days after his company was bought out. When they got back to the states, they bought this house for someplace to put it."

He took her into the reception area, which still could pa.s.s as a living room, and showed her his office. He took her upstairs to peek into Max's master bedroom suite, large enough almost to be an apartment. The guest room. The second-floor laundry. The exercise room, which she shook her head at and commented, "Too many rooms to be filled in any way possible," and he nodded.

He opened the door to his bedroom. "This is my room when I stay in town."She went in and he followed. She poked her nose into every corner, laughing at one point at the closet full of black T-s.h.i.+rts.

"I wear them constantly," Ukiah said, defending them. "Look, they have 'Private Investigator'

written on the back, big and bold, so you can see it from a hundred feet. You don't know how many times it has kept me from being shot. People can recognize me from the back as one of the good guys."

"I was laughing because they look like the FBI jackets I wear on busts."

"Well, Max took the idea from those jackets."

"I'm glad he takes such good care of you." She came and leaned her head against his chest. "I love listening to your heart beat. It's so strong and steady."

He held her tight, breathing in her scent. Her warm hands ran under his s.h.i.+rt to touch his bare skin, and she kissed his neck, his chin, and then slipped her tongue into his mouth. He groaned softly, the gentle torture of loving her and being afraid of losing her. He returned her kisses with pa.s.sion, lost in the heat, until she guided him to his bed. He hung back, shaking his head. "Oh, Indigo, there are things we should talk about. There are things I need to tell you. Things that after you hear, you might not want me."

"I think I know, and I don't care."

"You can't know. This is impossible, crazy stuff that I can barely believe."

"They did the autopsy on Wil Trace. He died of a viral infection, and throughout his body were exit wounds, where animals had eaten their way out of him without a trace of how they got into him. They tried to take blood samples of the Ontongard, but the samples all disappeared, and there were strange invasions of mice and bugs. Janet Haze was a halfway point between the two. Her body showed signs of infection, and all her blood samples vanished. Pack knows Pack. The Ontongard and Pack hate each other on sight."

Ukiah looked at her, stunned. "Yes. That's the beginning of it."

"And Pack knew you in the park at night. The Ontongard knew you in a room full of cops. All your blood samples at the hospital vanished, contaminated mysteriously with bugs."

He startled. "They were?"

She nodded. "I checked last night, after you left. Whatever Pack and Ontongard are, you are too.

And that's not completely human, is it? That's what you suddenly realized yesterday. I saw you being taken away to be killed, and you weren't as rattled as you were last night. It hit me after I tried to figure out why.

Once you approach it with the right mindset, all the clues are there, waiting to be seen."

He nodded. "I thought I was different because I was raised by wolves. Then last night, I realized how blind I had been. The Pack had set it all up, spelled it all out, even underscored a few points, but I didn't get it."

"I've had all night and all this morning to think about it, Ukiah. I don't care what you are. I love you.

I want to be with you. It was agony to think I might never see you again."

"Are you sure? Our children would be Pack too, and their children too."

"If we have any." She looked pained. "If you're not human, there's a chance that we won't have any."

She had considered more of this than he thought possible. He stroked her cheek. "I was created to have children with a human. The problem will probably be not having kids with you."

"That is an age-old human problem I can cope with." Indigo murmured and pulled him onto the bed.

While still sprawled on his bed, they ordered Chinese to be delivered. It was a small feast with pints of General Tso's Chicken, Mopo Tofu, Orange Beef, Stir-Fried Shrimp Rice, Won Ton Egg Drop Soup, andCrab Ragoon. While Indigo was in the shower, the bags of food were delivered. Ukiah carried it to the attic game room and unpacked them onto the coffee table.

Indigo followed his calls up to the attic and laughed in surprise. "This is pig heaven. I should have guessed." She walked out to stand under the basketball hoop. "Is this regulation height?"

"Yeah." Ukiah served himself out of every container. "Max put it in this spring after one too many jokes about the ceiling at the Super Bowl party."

She came to check out the wall of electronics. "Max sure loves techno toys." She fingered the edge of the seventy-two inch flat screen TV. "This must be amazing to watch."

"Since Max put the system in, he has gotten kind of 'volunteered' to host football parties." Ukiah sat back into the leather couch, balancing his plate as he watched her explore the room. Indigo had only put on one of his black tracking T-s.h.i.+rts and her panties. She looked so s.e.xy he considered forgetting about the food.

She stopped by the bookcase and eyed Max's collection of photo alb.u.ms. "Are any of these of you?"

"I'm in the last two alb.u.ms, there on the bottom."

Indigo pulled the last two and came to slide into his lap. She flipped the first open and Max's wife looked out at them. Ukiah reached out and flipped quickly through the book. "I'm toward the end somewhere. I really don't look at this one much."

They hit the photos of the wrecked car and Indigo stilled his hand. "This is the accident, isn't it?"

"Yeah." He slid his fingers from the cold vinyl. "Max took pictures after they pulled it out of the lake."

Black muck and slimy trails of algae covered the crumpled Porsche. Max had taken almost a whole roll; twenty-three compulsive shots, walking a slow circle about the car. It made the car somehow lurk on the page. Five pages of death on wheels. The twenty-fourth photo took a page by itself, even though there had been two empty slots after the car. According to the nearly invisible counter at the bottom, it was actually taken prior to the pictures of the car. It was of the fresh grave with the ma.s.sive headstone. "Aileen Bennett, Beloved Wife, 1965-1998" and "Max Bennett, Beloved Husband, 1965-"

Indigo s.h.i.+vered in his arms and flipped the otherwise blank page. The next page was also blank.

"No more?"

"He skipped a few pages." Ukiah flipped over the next five empty pages. "I think he has a roll of film he never developed that he left s.p.a.ce for. Here, this is where the pictures with me start." He tapped the first photo, him looking unsure at the camera, looking only twelve. "I remember Mom Jo giving him this photo the first time he came to the farm, so I think this was what he used as a reference when he worked my case."

"Who is this kid with you here?" She pointed to the second photo, taken at a party.

"Johnny Libzer, the first case that I worked on with Max. The family asked us back a week later for this party. It was kind of embarra.s.sing how much fuss they put up."

The initial few pages, he noticed for the first time, focused on the people they had found.

Sometimes Ukiah was in the frame, sometimes not. They were stilted, forced, posed things that Ukiah vaguely recognized as a typical snapshot. Max, though, liked to take "unguarded moment" pictures, and took them in quality par to a professional. Slowly Max's normal photos drifted in and took over-and for a while they focused only on Ukiah. Ukiah on a lookout point, eyes closed in focus, nose to the wind that blasted back his hair. Ukiah lost among the giant hemlocks of Cook Forest, looking at the camera with wolf intensity through a screen of ferns. Ukiah supporting one of the Boy Scouts he rescued from the Yellowstone wildfire, both covered with black soot. Ukiah on one of the large stone outcroppings at McConnell's Mill, muddy from two days of searching the creek bottoms, asleep, half-curled about recentlyfound, blonde moppet Sarah Healy.

"These are beautiful," Indigo whispered as she reached the last page. "Do you think I could get copies?"

"I guess so." Ukiah handed her the next alb.u.m. "I'm afraid I took a lot of the photos in this one, and it shows."

In the second book, Max expanded first to Ukiah's family and then to their range of friends. Mom Lara asleep on the front porch with Cally in her arms, the sunlight brilliant in her hair. Mom Jo perched in the tree house. Chino blending with the woodwork. Janey, regal and proud. Kraynak breathing smoke like a dragon. Their Friday night poker gang, lit only by the hanging light, caught in midlaugh.

Ukiah's photos were clumsy imitations. He had tried for Max's style but missed somehow. Looking at them now, Ukiah realized that one of his mistakes had been that he tried too often for a subject in motion.

Parts were blurred, details were lost. He needed to catch the subject in a moment of stillness, wait until they stopped.

The last photos had actually been taken by a professional. They were used in a magazine, accompanying a story on the agency. He and Max had taken the photographer on a search-and-rescue into a freshwater marsh. On black-and-white film, he had caught the marsh's stark eeriness and the grueling nature of the track. Ukiah had had to all but crawl through every inch of the trail, and only Max's backup from a punt-boat had kept him going until they found the missing girl. They were, Ukiah realized, the only pictures of Max and him working together.

Indigo shook her head. "It's strange to flip through the two alb.u.ms and see Max come back from the dead." She opened the first book and then laid beside it the second one. The gravestone on a sterile page. Max leaning against the Cherokee, laughing as Ukiah sprawled muddy and exhausted on the hood.

"You love him, don't you?"

Ukiah nodded. "When I was young, going to church, doing stuff with the scouts, playing baseball, I saw the other kids with their dads and I wanted"-he scrambled for the right word-"needed so bad to have a father too. I'd make up stories for myself about what my father was like." He shrugged. "Maybe it was like a chick imprinting. Max was the first guy to show up and feed the need. Somewhere along the way, he's become all the father that I wanted, needed." He grinned and whispered. "But don't tell Max. It's not a manly thing to talk about."

"Sometimes," she whispered back as she kissed his neck, "it really shows that you were raised by two women."

It was nearing two o'clock when they disentangled themselves from the couch.

"Are you going to be in trouble for taking such a long lunch?"

Indigo shook her head. "I've been pulling fourteen-hour days this week so far. When I said I was taking a long lunch, the only thing that they said was not to go out alone. They've tightened up security on the offices and are double-teaming everyone. Things are tense right now."

Ukiah considered his new memories. "This is really weird for the Ontongard. Normally they would do anything not to attract attention to themselves. They have time and patience usually to do things right.

It's how they've stayed invisible for so long."

Indigo shrugged. "Statistically, they couldn't stay invisible forever. Wil Trace almost disappeared mysteriously with his death blamed on the Pack. They didn't count on the speed trap. They didn't expect you to be at the police station. Those two points are the only things that brought them to the forefront."

"And Doctor Haze."

Indigo's eyes narrowed as she considered the dead robotics engineer. "Doctor Haze is a tricky mystery. If you a.s.sume that the Ontongard were going to use her, the question becomes how. She wasworking on several top-secret projects with broad military applications, but the more we looked at those, the less likely they were the target. Her family is comfortably wealthy, but not the Rockefellers. She has an uncle who is a judge on the state court, but his caseload has nothing of importance right now."

"The Ontongard work in the far future. They might have been setting up with something five years from now being the target. What are the projects she was working on?"

Indigo winced slightly. "I can't discuss them with you. I can tell you that they're years from being in a working prototype stage, and Doctor Haze was barely involved in them until recently. She was only b.u.mped up the promotion ladder a few weeks ago when her immediate supervisor was killed."

A Pack memory clicked and whirled in Ukiah's mind, and he almost spilled Indigo onto the floor when he bolted up.

"What is it?" She studied his face. "Are you all right?"

He took her hands. "What I say to you next is part of not being human. Rennie didn't tell me anything-well, not much. What he did was give me his memories. Doctor Haze's supervisor was Doctor Sam Robb. Rennie killed him because he was an Ontongard. Rennie screwed with the gas main on the Robb's house, and it blew up."

She nodded slowly, no doubt on her face. "It did. We suspected arson, but the explosion destroyed most of the evidence."

"Rennie was in Schenley Park when Janet Haze was killed because he suspected that the Ontongard might approach her. He had come to check her out, and the place was crawling with police. He followed the chaos into the park and found us before the police."

"Then the company is the focus."

Ukiah nodded, wis.h.i.+ng Indigo could tell him about the projects. Pack memory might be triggered again. "They must be interested in one of her projects."

Indigo looked at the ceiling for several minutes, thinking hard. "This looking into the future is difficult. A band of alien terrorists like the Ontongard could be interested in any one of the projects, depending on their having the patience to wait through development. I can't see the connection, though, of taking the FBI agents."

"Haze's company hasn't finished any projects?"

She looked at him. "You think it might be something already developed, in place, and shelved?"

He shrugged. "They hurried with Haze. It was just a week or two between her supervisor being killed and her first being approached." He remembered the books on immortality, and the photograph. "And they approached her, courted her, instead of just taking her. What they're doing with the FBI agents is their normal procedure."