Kathleen Creighton - Danger Signals

As he lay full-length and prone upon the flagstones, he heard a car's engine start up, then accelerate and move off down the street.

With a groan, he rolled over onto his back, then immediately wished he hadn't, as a pair of large stubby paws planted themselves squarely in the middle of his chest, and a long snout terminated by a large wet nose snuffled noisily across his face. Before he could get an arm up to fend it off, a very long, very wet tongue smelling of well-aged liver followed.

"Ah, jeez, Bruno…" This Wade uttered in a constricted wheeze, as the front half of a grossly overweight basset hound settled onto his chest. "Get…off. you lump of lard-your breath would gag a maggot, you know that?" In response to the insult Bruno turned his head away with studied disdain, one ear slapping Wade across the face in the process. "What are you doing out here, you good-for-nothing fleabag? You let some stranger sit right there across the street and spy on me? Some watchdog you are."

As if to contradict that, Bruno lifted his nose to the dawn sky and uttered a halfhearted, "Ah-rooo…" Then he proceeded across Wade's body with all the grace of an elephant climbing over a picket fence.

"Someday…" Wade snarled as a well-padded tail slapped his face in a disdainful wave of farewell. However, the threat went unspoken as his senses picked up an indescribably foul odor wafting back from the animal now waddling unhurriedly off down the flagstone pathway.

"Ah, jeez!" was all Wade could manage while coughing and swearing blasphemously. He fought his way to his feet in hopes of finding some less polluted air, and since the gate was open anyway, he darted through it and down the driveway to the street.

But of course the watcher-if that's who it was- was long gone.

Wade went back to his apartment to shower and dress for work, mad enough to chew up nails and spit out bullets. Not even the shower on full cold did much to settle the steam.

Damn it. he didn't need this! He had a serial-now cop-killer on the loose and a city on full alert, a beautiful psychic giving him nightmares and now he'd picked up a stalker? What the hell was going on?

By the time he'd emerged from the shower and scrubbed himself pink, he'd resolved a couple of things. One: last time he'd looked, by God, the name plate on his desktop said Detective Callahan. So it was high time he got off his ass and started detecting. Which meant getting the answers to a whole lot of questions. And two: he had a feeling the person with the answers to some of those questions was the beautiful psychic, the same one responsible for his most recent nightmares.

Which made his first move of the morning a no-brainer: he needed to talk to the psychic.

He probably shouldn't have been surprised when he wiped the steam off of the mirror and saw a smile on his beard-stubbled face. Well. hell, he thought, whistling tunelessly as he picked up his shaver, it's a terrible job, but somebody has to do it…

"Hi, honey, it's me."

"Cory! Wow it's really early out there. Where are you? What's-is anything wrong? Did you see him? Talk to him? How did it go? For heaven's sake, say something, damn it. I've been waiting all night for you to call."

"Samantha, dearest, I will say something if you'll let me."

"Okay." There was a pause, and some heavy breathing. "I'm shutting up now. Your turn."

"Well then, to answer your questions in order. I'm sitting in a rental car-a Honda Civic. I think-in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. Nothing's wrong. Yes, I saw him. No, I didn't talk to him. and it didn't 'go' at all."

"Okay…and you are about to tell me why, right, Pearse?"

"I chickened out, Sam." His wife, understanding him well and knowing how fragile he was right now, didn't press. He laughed the way people do when nothing's funny, drew in a breath and blew it out audibly. "I feel like a complete idiot, but I couldn't do it. I drove up and parked across the street from the house. I could see a light on in his apartment, so I knew he was home. And I couldn't make myself go in there."

"Oh, Cory."

"The guy's a cop, Sam. Those guys are hard-wired to be suspicious. What's he going to do when some stranger walks up to him and says, 'Hi, I'm your big brother'? A brother he hasn't seen since he was six years old and probably doesn't remember. At this point I have no proof. Nothing whatsoever to back that up."

"What about Holt Kincaid? His files-"

"…Will document a search based on my knowledge that I have four siblings somewhere in this world. Wade Callahan evidently has no such knowledge. According to his employment and school records, he's only got one brother, a year and a half younger, named Matthew. I can't just spring this on him, not until I have something to offer besides my crazy story." He gave a brief snort of laughter. "If I keep up like I've been doing, he's liable to shoot me for a burglar or arrest me for stalking."

"What do you mean, like you've been doing? What did you do?"

"What did I do? I sat in front of his house in my car, that's what I did. And this morning he almost caught me."

"You sat in your car? All night? Good Lord, Pearse, you're an investigative journalist. You've covered wars, revolutions, genocide, interviewed terrorists, dictators, heads of state. And you're telling me-"

"He's my little brother, Sam."

There was a long pause, then a sigh. "I know, love."

"I let him down."

"Cory, you didn't. He was taken away from you. You were a child yourself. What could you have done?"

"I should have found a way. I was supposed to protect them-all of them. And I let them split us up. Now…I've got a chance to get us back together."

"You will, Pearse. I know you will."

"But I have to do this right. I can't screw it up, Sam. This time I have to get it right."

Wade arrived at the downtown station out of sorts and running late, nursing a sore elbow and limping slightly, thanks to the contact-harder than first realized-a couple of his appendages had made with the flagstones during his early morning foray. The task force was assembled in the briefing room, evidently waiting for him, which right away ticked him off.

Ed Francks handed him a black armband when he walked in. then gave him a sideways look that slid down to his gimpy leg and back up again. Being wise and experienced, the older man didn't say anything.

One of the younger detectives, though, an import from the northeast named Rudy…something Italian, apparently wasn't smart enough to follow the veteran cop's lead. He sang out, "Hey, Boss, what happened to your leg?" and for his concern got a glare that would have frozen up Old Faithful.

"In the first place, Detective. I'm not your boss," Wade growled, then expanded the glare to take in the rest of the room. "What is this, kindergarten? You gotta have your teacher hold your hand before you can go to the John?"

There was some uneasy stirring and shifting around, but nobody said anything.

Muttering to himself, Wade turned his back on the lot of them while he slipped the armband up his sleeve. This brought him face to face with the board, upon which the latest crime scene photos had already been posted. Above these, and partly obscuring the most grisly, someone had tacked a large photograph of Officer Alicia Williams in her dress uniform. She was smiling, her slightly slanted black eyes sparkling beneath the brim of her hat, looking like she had the world by the tail and a good life ahead of her.

Damn.

He took a deep breath, tapped the photograph, then turned. "All right, ladies and gentlemen, in case anybody needs reminding, this is why we're here. What may or may not be wrong with my leg is not the business of this task force. Finding a killer-now a cop killer-is. Now, somebody want to be the first to tell me I've got reason to believe we might catch this sonofabitch today?"