Special Agent Ortiz led me out of the police station. I saw early morning light drawing an outline over the mountains in the distance, like a glowing white pen. The agent stood five-foot-four in sensible shoes, but her grip on my arm felt like somebody twice her size. She was pressing her thumb into the tender spot above my elbow, making sure the pain radiated down to my wrist, where the cuffs cinched tight enough to make my fingers feel numb.
A maroon Chevy Blazer was parked in the loading zone. She opened the back door and leaned into me. Whispering.
“Brace yourself. Yakima’s only so big.”
She yanked my arm back just as some primal instinct clicked inside my head. I dropped my right shoulder. Too late. Her tight fist connected with my solar plexus, doubling me over. I gasped, staring at the ground, and felt my stomach convulsing.
“Cute dog,” she said.
I turned my head, still struggling to breathe, and saw Madame running from the station’s front door. A blue rope was tied around her neck. Joiner held the other end, jerking it. But the dog pressed forward anyway. Choking. Just like me.
Ortiz shoved me into the Suburban’s backseat. I leaned my forehead against the cage wire that separated the front seat. My esophagus was opening and closing like a baby bird begging for food.
Ortiz put Madame in the back, then jumped into the driver’s seat. She turned the key.
Joiner stood at her open window. “What about those Mexes in the cell?”
“Let me guess. You caught them cleaning motel rooms.”
“No papers is no papers!”
“Call INS.”
Immigration.
“But you said I should always call you first.”
“Next time. Don’t you listen? I said call me next time. This is this time.”
She burned rubber out of the parking lot. I heard Madame’s claws scrabbling. I turned my head. The rope was still around her neck. It reminded me of the nooses Rosser packed up in the state lab. But all I could do was stare out the side window, watching dawn orchestrate ochers and pinks and diaphanous blues. By all appearances, a day of promise. Only I knew better.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
She sat close to the steering wheel, probably so she could get her short legs to the gas pedal. “Agent Stephanson.”
I nodded.
“And you’re lucky that guy back there didn’t shoot you.”
I wasn’t about to get into my philosophy of luck right now. Not with this woman.
“Joiner’s trigger happy?”
“Joiner’s problems go way beyond that. I meant those freaks on the Handler ranch. That’s where he picked you up. Right?” Her dark eyes stared into the rearview mirror.
I nodded. “But I didn’t see any weapons out there.”
“Wake up and smell the enchilada.” She pulled a hard right turn.
I leaned against the door, listening to Madame slide across the plastic floor mat. “Our background check on Handler didn’t show any violent priors.”
She lifted her dark eyes again. “I’ve been watching them for two years. Ever heard of Elf?”
I remembered the tattoo on the dreadlocked woman. Elf. “Yes, I met her.”
“What?” Ortiz pulled herself up, hands on the steering wheel like she was going to rip it off the dash. “You what?”
“Elf. The redhead. I saw her tattoo.”
“And I’m the one stuck in the sticks,” she muttered. “Hey, big shot, ELF is an acronym. Equine Liberation Front.”
I closed my mouth.
“Haven’t you heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“Think PETA on steroids. They’re totally nuts. ELF bombed a research building a couple years ago. University of Washington. Killed a grad student. The lab tested mechanical devices on animals—equipment that would be used for amputees. But these nuts don’t care about people. Only animals. They later fire-bombed a pharmaceutical lab in Oregon. It was using equine placenta for a potential cancer drug.”
She stepped on the gas. Madame’s claws sounded like scuttling crabs.
When it seemed safe to speak, I said, “Why would they be on Handler’s ranch? He’s breeding racehorses.”
“Because racing goes against the animal rights philosophy?” Her eyes seemed to glitter in the rearview mirror. “It’s a cover. I’m convinced. They want us to look the other way.”
The residual spasms in my solar plexus said Special Agent Ortiz didn’t look the other way for anyone, or anything. I tried to be grateful that she’d hauled me away from Joiner. But it wasn’t that simple. She was small, but built for war. She met my gaze in the mirror.
“If you’d called me,” she said, “I could have told you all this.”
“I’m working undercover at Emerald Downs racetrack.”
“That’s why you were at Handler’s?”
“A horse was kidnapped.”
She took the exit for central Yakima, speeding through the city. It looked flat and empty at this hour. A lone man walked down a sidewalk, leaning as though fighting a strong wind, although the litter in the gutter lay motionless.
“It doesn’t fit with animal rights,” I said. “They left a note. They’re going to kill the horse in forty-eight hours.” I couldn’t see my watch but pressed my face into the cage, trying to read the dashboard’s digital clock. “That was about forty hours ago.”
“What did the note say exactly?”
“‘Forty-eight hours, then we start killing.’”
She turned into a parking lot next to a square white building. Two cars were in the lot, both the standard-issue sedans typical of law enforcement. Ortiz drove the SUV. Which meant she probably managed the Yakima field office’s equipment, or she had some rural specialty. Migrant workers, immigration. That would explain why Joiner thought she was coming for the other women in the cell. She tapped in a code on the remote clipped to her visor. The building’s garage door rose. She parked by the elevator.
“Do I need to brace myself again?”
Her grin was too large for her face. “That was for your benefit. Not mine.”
She grabbed something off the front seat and hopped out. When she opened my door, I saw a briefcase in her hand. She grabbed my elbow, flung me from the car, and smiled.
“I wouldn’t want to ruin your cover,” she whispered.
Madame barked. Stuck inside the vehicle. Ortiz let her out, then used my elbow to steer me to the elevator. Madame followed, her tail hard and straight, like a billy club. Ortiz glanced at the dog.
“She’s cute, but she’s mean,” she said.
We never see our mirrors, I decided.
On the second floor, she led us down a bare hallway to an unmarked door with a security pad. Ortiz typed in the code and pushed the door open with her foot. Madame walked in first, scoping the space. The field office’s interrogation room. Metal table bolted to the floor. Cheap chairs on either side. Acoustic tiles on the ceiling, with the smoked-glass dome protruding. The somewhat concealed camera.
Ortiz unlocked my cuffs, and despite the numb fingers, I managed to slip the rope off Madame’s neck. She thanked me with a wag, then lay at my feet under the table, eyes on Ortiz. The agent didn’t sit. She kept a military at-ease posture, hands clasped behind her back. There was a certain percentage of agents who came to the Bureau through the armed services, and I was certain she was among them. And something else. Like every kid who’d been told they’d never amount to anything, Special Agent Ortiz was proving her worth, constantly, bitterly, making sure that accusation was wrong.
“Two and a half years ago,” she said, snapping open the briefcase, “a guy smashed a truck into a pet store. One of the big chain stores. The alarm went off. But he didn’t want the money. He ran through the store opening cages. Dogs, cats, parrots, gerbils. He released them all. Except the fish.” She removed manila folders from the briefcase. “By the time Yakima PD showed up, he was gone. The truck was in the front window, and with all those animals running around, their first priority was to round them up. Snakes, he released snakes. They never found the guy.”
She opened the top folder.
“They ran prints on the truck and the animal cages, but came up empty. They called us because the expensive breeds added up to grand larceny. I ran the prints through our database and got a match.” She tapped the folder. Her nails were short and straight, no polish. “Same prints left behind at the UW bombing. ELF.”
“But you didn’t tell the local PD.”
“Trust a guy like Joiner? He wears a uniform because he wants power, not because he cares about right and wrong. No, I called the Seattle office. They connected me to the Portland office because our guys down there had just picked up a woman who broke into the zoo. Tried to set the animals free. She coughed up six names.”
“Just like that.”
“Revenge.” Ortiz gave a big smile. “Her boyfriend dumped her.” She picked up the photograph. “Here’s the guy. Thor.”
The image was grainy. “What kind of name is Thor?”
“Nickname. Nobody uses real names in ELF. They live like squatters and only work for cash. No records.”
I squinted at the photo. Like most images lifted from video surveillance, it was mostly smudges. But I could see glasses. Dreadlocks. A beard. And a pole-thin body that, with all that hair, made him look like a mop wearing granny glasses. “Not my idea of a ladies’ man.”
“I told you, they’re nuts.”
“What happened to the source in Portland?”
Ortiz sneered. “Her parents lawyered her up. She got off with community service. But before she stopped talking, she said Thor built the bombs. He’s some kind of mechanical genius, majored in engineering at UW. But without a real name or even his age, we couldn’t get school records.”
Ortiz handed me another photograph. “The girl in Portland. Brain of a beetle.”
Her dark hair was tucked messily behind large ears. Her blue eyes were dull and sloped down at the outer corners in an expression of perpetual melancholy. The lost soul.
I handed the photo back to her. She adjusted her posture, rolling her shoulders. Army, I decided.
“And somehow you tied Thor to Handler’s ranch?” I asked.
“Not ‘somehow.’ I went to a lot of trouble.”
I nodded. Certain of it. “How did you do it?”
She gave her first indication of melting. “I ran that picture from the security camera in the Yakima Herald-Press. It said there was a five-hundred-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest. Two days later a hay distributor called me. Claimed he saw this same guy working at a place called the Dark Horse Ranch.”
“He identified him from that photo?”
“He was positive. But when I ran the usual six-man lineup, our so-called witness got squishy. Basically he saw a white kid with glasses and dreadlocks. No judge is giving me a search warrant based on that.” She almost sighed, but I doubted she knew how. “So I’ve been watching that place. Waiting. I know they’re there.”
There were more grainy shots of Thor. Blurs, mostly, as he raced to the cages.
“Do you mind?” I touched a second folder, underneath.
She shook her head.
Case notes from Portland. I glanced over them, flipping through the pages. There was a scanned copy of a color photo. Not as grainy as the surveillance images. I saw young people standing in a field. Some kind of picnic. Posing for the camera like a team photo. I felt some sympathy for the “squishy” witness. All those dreadlocks made them difficult to distinguish. But one girl had short hair. The ends were uneven, like she’d hacked it off with a pair of kindergarten scissors. Coppery hair. Her thick arm dangled around a friend’s shoulders. Face covered with freckles. I lifted the photo, reading the data sheet stapled to it. Sketchy information. Sally Jamison? was one guess for the short-haired girl. Beneath that, other guesses. Univ. of Wash.? Social work? I flipped the photo back over, staring at her face. I followed her arm. To the wrist.
“I saw her at Handler’s ranch.”
“Really?” Ortiz sounded almost happy.
“Just about positive.”
She straightened. “Oh. I get it. You think a positive ID’s going to make up for what happened tonight.”
I felt a temptation half spawned by sleep deprivation. I wanted to tap my thigh and sic Madame on her. But Ortiz would probably shoot the dog. Or me.
“Actually,” I said slowly, “that never crossed my mind. It was this mark on her wrist.” I tapped the photo. The mark was just a dark smudge in the picture but in the same spot. “I saw it. It said Elf. But she’s got dreadlocks now.”
Ortiz snatched the photo from my hand. “Five-seven?”
“Around there.”
“Her nickname is Rain. Rainy?”
I shook my head.
“Rainbow?”
“Wait,” I said. “I heard a guy call her Bo. Short for Rainbow?”
Ortiz had picked up a data sheet, searching for more information. I glanced at my watch. My eyes were dry and struggling to focus.
“I know this is important,” I said. “But I’ve also got to find that horse. Forty-eight hours is almost gone.”
Ortiz shook her head. “You still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“Animal rights.”
“I got it.”
“No, you don’t,” she said.
I was so wrung out, so tired, that my mind was on time delay. I could feel a thought pressing forward through the fog. But it was taking too long. And Ortiz wasn’t the patient type.
“The horse is fine,” she said. “Wherever he is. They won’t hurt him. People. That’s what you need to worry about. People. Because ELF actually likes killing people.”