Rachel Vincent - Blood Bound

“Since when?”

Another shrug. “Couple hours ago? Maybe less. You didn’t get the message?”

Son of a bitch . I’d left Cavazos a couple of hours ago. It had to be one of his men.

Cam’s frown deepened. “I haven’t checked my phone.” He stood and shrugged to me. “Doesn’t matter, though. You’re not marked.”

But it wasn’t that simple. Eventually someone who outranked Cam would demand a more thorough search, and then I’d be screwed. We both would.

“We’re done here, right?” I asked, already headed back to the bathroom.

“Yeah.” Cam pulled the grunt to his feet while I squatted in front of the bathroom sink to check for cleaning supplies. Nothing but an extra roll of toilet paper and a half-empty quart of bleach. But that was good enough.

“What should I report?” Nick asked, still sniffling blood while I stuffed one of Hunter’s soiled rags into an extra quart bag from my pocket, then dropped the rest of them in the wastebasket.

“The truth,” Cam said. “She’s here on a freelance job, for a private party, and I’m assisting. You checked her, she’s unmarked, and I’m personally vouching for her. If they want to know any more than that, they’ve got my number.”

He was vouching for me. Shit. I couldn’t let him do that—it could get him killed, if something went wrong—but I couldn’t make him take the words back without telling him I was bound to Cavazos. And if I admitted that now, Nick would try to haul me in front of Tower, and Cam would try to stop him, and that would lead to more violence and spilled blood, and then we’d both be on the run from the entire Tower syndicate. Which would make it really hard to search for a murderer who lived west of the river.

That slope was slippery, but unavoidable.

Trying to swallow the bitter lump in my throat, I opened the bottle of bleach and poured it into the trash can at arm’s length, to keep from splashing my clothes. Then I used the bottle itself to press the whole bloody mess down into the liquid that had pooled at the bottom.

Bleach doesn’t erase all evidence of blood, as any crime-scene technician will tell you. But it does destroy the energy signature that pulls a Tracker to it.

I wasn’t worried about anyone else looking for Shen’s killer—the human police couldn’t track like a bloodhound, and Anne wouldn’t hire anyone else, with me and Cam already on the case. But if Cam’s superiors found out about my mark from Cavazos, it wouldn’t be hard for them to deduce that we were tracking Eric Hunter, and they could use his blood to follow our trail.

Thanks to the bleach, though, all they’d have to go on was his name, which cut their chances of tracking him in half. At least.

When I left the bathroom, Nick was gone, and Cam was in the kitchen, labeling the thug’s blood sample with a black Sharpie. When he was done, he handed it to me, and I dated Hunter’s bloody bandage, then labeled it with his first name and last initial only, for security. It’s much harder to find someone—through either traditional or Skilled searching methods—without a last name.

“We need to talk,” I said, while he blew on the print to dry it.

“Agreed. We also need to get something to eat and find Eric Hunter. Let’s wrap things up here.” He shoved the sealed tissue back into his pocket, then brushed past me on his way to the bedroom. “You look for a filing cabinet, I’ll check his computer.”

“What are we looking for?” I already had a more recent—if weaker—blood sample.

“His full name. Or as much of it as we can find.” Because the Skilled rarely used either of their middle names on official documents. But then again, they also rarely left a pile of bloody rags lying around for someone to find. “Look for documentation. A traffic ticket, an insurance card, an old college ID or even a magazine subscription. It’s a long shot, but I’ve gotten lucky like that before.”

Eric Hunter had no filing cabinet, and I couldn’t decide whether that meant he was smart enough to store all his dangerous personal information under lock and key elsewhere, or stupid enough not to keep track of it at all. But based on the shoebox full of unfiled receipts under his bed—an organizational method I was well acquainted with, personally—I was betting on the latter.

His kitchen trash —so glad I brought a pair of gloves—held an unopened bank statement, a two-week-old copy of Car and Driver addressed to Eric R. Hunter, several pieces of junk mail addressed to Resident and … a hospital bill, wadded into a tight, angry ball of crumpled paper.

Hmm … Yet another piece of Eric Hunter’s life that didn’t fit the profile.

Still wearing my gloves, I took the bank statement into the bedroom, where Cam sat at Hunter’s desk, clicking away at his laptop. “What’cha got?” he asked, without looking up.

“Couple of interesting things …” Unwilling to sit on the bed, I leaned against the door facing and unfolded the statement. “One of Eric Hunter’s middle initials is evidently R. And until last week, his personal financial crisis made the national debt look like small potatoes.” Four bounced checks all with twenty-five-dollar fees attached.

Cam finally looked up. “What happened last week?”

“He received a fifty-thousand-dollar wire transfer. I’m assuming that’s the up-front portion of the hit on Shen.”

“That must have turned his frown upside down. Where’d it come from?” Cam was already typing again, but the frustrated lines in his forehead said he wasn’t having much luck.

I shrugged. “There’s just an account number. Can you trace that?”

“Not without a crash course in criminal hacking and a few decades to practice. I might know someone,

Though….”

“One of your friendly neighborhood gangsters?” I asked, not quite surprised by the accusatory tone of my own voice, and Cam looked up at me again, his expression cautious, and difficult to read.

“I never said I wasn’t bound.”

“You never said you were, either.” I folded Hunter’s bank statement and stuffed it back into the envelope. “You made me show you my arm, but you never bothered to mention that you’re three chain links up Jake Tower’s ass.”

“We don’t have time for this right now.” He turned back to the screen, shoulders tense, forehead drawn low. “Did you find anything else?”

I had to clench my teeth to keep from yelling at him, and I only bothered because he was right—the longer we spent in Hunter’s apartment, the better the chance that Nick’s report would send one of his superiors our way.

“Just this.” I held up the bill, still wrinkled in spite of my best attempt to flatten it. “Hunter went to the E.R. for a broken arm four months ago and still hasn’t paid his bill.”

Cam frowned. “Why would he go to the E.R.?”

“Exactly.” Skilled people almost never go to the hospital, because of the compulsive blood-drawing policies and the staff’s utter refusal to let you incinerate your own biological waste onsite. Evidently setting fire to a medical wastebucket is a strict no-no.

Instead, we had our own doctors—certain legitimate private practices with access to all the same equipment as a public hospital, but run by people in the know. People who routinely gather everything you might possibly have bled on into one plastic bag and won’t look at you strangely if you take that bag home to burn in the privacy of your own apartment.

For the convenience of certain criminal elements, there were even private practices that were willing to overlook the legal requirement that they report gunshot wounds and other brow-raising injuries—for the right price. Or to comply with the binding that had provided the funding to open that specific practice in the first place. Syndicate-sponsored clinics were all the rage.