"Hey partner, got some news you might not want to hear."
"So spit it out, Illie. I haven't the time for games right now."
"We found another body in Kathryn Douglass's apartment.
It was cut into pieces and shoved into the upright freezer."
"How did the street boys manage to miss that?"
"Well, the body parts were covered by regular meat trays and weren't immediately recognizable."
"I would have thought a severed human head would be immediately recognizable."
"A human head?" Sam asked, eyebrow raised in query.
He noted with interest that the electricity in the air seemed to fade away once her interest was caught elsewhere.
"Well, it was at the bottom of the freezer, and it was only after undoing the black plastic around the parts that we realized what we had."
"So how did you manage to be in the freezer in the first place?" Raiding the freezer when a murder seemed pretty straight forward wasn't normal practice. If there could be considered such a thing as normal practice for SIU officers.
"Well, rules say we have to do a thorough search of the premises, but it was curiosity that had me looking deeper into the freezer. Douglass was apparently a vegetarian, so what was a veggie doing with a freezer full of meat?"
"Have you sent the remains to the labs for analysis?"
"Yeah. Finley's checking it out as we speak. Thought you might want to be there for his initial report."
He frowned. "Why would I want to do that?"
"Because if the head was anything to go by, the dead woman is the spit of Douglass herself. Only a little younger."
Surprise rippled through him. "Did she have a sister?"
"No immediate living family. There're two cousins and an aunt now living in the United States, but that's about it."
"I'll head over to headquarters now. Anything else?"
"Not offhand. I'm still digging into her past."
"What about Blaine?"
"That's a big, fat zero. The military is not forthcoming with information, either."
No surprise there. "Continue both investigations, and let me know if you find anything." He hit the end button, put the phone back into his pocket, and met Sam's curious gaze. "They found another body at Douglass's apartment. One that seems the spit of the murdered woman."
"She was a twin?"
"According to the records, she had no immediate family."
"Which suggests that one of the dead women is either a clone or a shapeshifter. But don't shifters resume their own form when they die?"
"They do normally, but nothing in this whole mess is what it seems." Including her, he thought, and saw the same thought reflected in her eyes. He drew his car keys from his pocket and gave them to her. "Go back to the hotel and get some sleep. I'll make arrangements to get Mary transferred to a safe house and then go talk to Finley."
She took the keys from him, her fingers touching his only briefly, yet they sent an electric charge through his entire body.
A charge reflected briefly in her eyes.
"And our discussion?" she said softly.