Laws of the Blood 2: Partners Read Free Page B

to kill Baker a few times, but they’d put their differences aside in the service of a higher purpose long ago.
    It was because of the reproving look Baker gave him that Haven stood when the woman came toward the desk. Baker’d been trying to civilize him, but Haven preferred to ignore the niceties most of the time. Being polite to a distraught woman seemed like a halfway sensible idea, though if Baker hadn’t been there, Haven would have followed his first impulse and told her to get out.
    Baker closed the door and leaned against it. The woman stopped in front of the desk and said, “My name is Brenda Novak, and I’m with the FBI.” By the time he had the Glock pointed openly at her, she’d sat in the chair across from the desk. She looked at him steadily—at him, not the gun. The worry hadn’t left her expression, but she wasn’t worried about him. “I know who you were,” she told him. “And I don’t give a shit. I know—something—about what you do now, and that’s why I need you to help me find my son.”
    “What do you know?” Haven asked. “Who told you?” How many was he going to have to kill to keep his secrets quiet? He glared at Baker. “I doubt you told her anything,” he said to his partner.
    “He didn’t,” Brenda Novak answered. “I found him.” She spared a quick glance over her shoulder at Baker. “Not an easy task.” She brought her attention back toHaven. “Easier than finding Danny, though. Searching for Danny has led me down some strange roads—and I’m an FBI profiler; I know strange intimately.”
    He’d read about profiling. It was like a kind of officially sanctioned ESP. The government had these people who looked at pictures of crime scenes and predicted what killers would do next and how to catch them. Crazy people got profiled. Haven wasn’t crazy. He kept the gun aimed steadily on the woman and said nothing.
    “I realize telling you about myself is dangerous,” Novak went on. She shrugged. She had the manner of someone with nothing to lose. Jebel Haven understood the look of a spirit at the end of its resources. He knew you had to get there before you could get beyond it, into the realm where he lived. Or you got to the end of the road and you gave up and died. He didn’t have any sympathy for the ones he’d known who’d given up. He didn’t have much sympathy for those who’d died trying, either.
    Baker crossed the room. He put his big, meaty hands on the back of the woman’s chair. “Put the gun away, Jebel. We’re going to listen to what the woman has to say. It’s our kind of business,” he added when Haven flicked his gaze to his partner’s for a moment.
    Haven wanted to think that if this was some sort of trap, Baker would have smelled it. He trusted Baker, and he hated trusting anyone. He didn’t like it, but he sat. He put the gun down, but not away. He left it on the desktop, with his hand close to it. “What are you talking about?” he said to the woman.
    “About finding my son,” she said. “That’s the only thing that interests me.”
    “You’re with the FBI, and you have a missing son. Kidnapped?”
    She nodded.
    “The Bureau takes care of its own. Your kid’s missing, your own people are looking for him.”
    She made one of those sounds that was a little like a laugh but without any amusement in it. She was a good-looking woman, fortysomething, worried, but keeping it together. “The Bureau does not really deal with “X-Files” cases, Mr. Haven. We don’t even use the term profiler in the department, though that is the common—well, the polite—term for what I do. I work for a conservative government bureaucracy. We do indeed take care of our own, but no one wants bad publicity. The Bureau would hang me and my son out to dry if he was caught.”
    “Caught?” Haven asked. “I thought you said he was kidnapped. Feds are responsible for kidnapping cases.”
    “Only if the victim’s transported across state lines,”