Page 15 of Red Boar's Baby

There were nods all around, including from Caine, except Diana. “I can feel it just fine.”

“You met her first,” Mavis said. “She might have latched on to you. Parents can feel it most strongly in their own children.”

Diana looked thoroughly discomfited.

“But it’s pretty common with little kids for it to be wildly variable,” Costa said quickly. “It was all over the place with my younger—with my cousins until their shifting settled.” He noticed Diana give him a swift look, but then, she was aware of everything he was talking around.

“You said she’s definitely a shifter,” Caine said, observing Mavis with unnerving steadiness through his dark glasses. The smoked lenses made it hard to tell, but Costa thought he wasn’t blinking. “Are you talking about something other than the usual feeling?”

“Mostly just her reflexes,” Mavis said. She paused for a quick brush of her fingers across the cheek of the baby, who had stopped sniffling against Diana’s shoulder and was now observing the adults with wide eyes, framed with tear-matted lashes. “Are we friends again, beebee? I thought so. You are a very calm one. She’s not unused to being stuck with things,” she told the adults matter-of-factly. “What I meant was that she’s responsive to stimuli in the same way as a shifter. There are differences between us and humans, you know.”

“She—” Diana began, then stopped, looking at Caine.

“Okay, I want us on the same page about this,” Costa said, hands spread. “Azarias, you’re here because I’ve got a job for you tonight. For now, it’s going to stay off the books. I want open sharing of information between the four of us, but I want it to stay out of the reports and strictly need to know for now—okay?”

After there were nods all around, he and Diana began another abbreviated summary of the sequence of events that had ended with Diana showing up at Costa’s place holding an arguably kidnapped baby. At least by now they were getting the retelling down to a science, including why they wanted the baby to stay off-book.

“Winged antelope?” Caine repeated.

“I’d get her to do it for all of you, but she hasn’t shifted since I brought her here.” Diana adjusted the baby. She had moved to the couch, holding the little girl in her lap. “Oh, she’s asleep again. Poor little tyke.”

“Let me take her,” Costa offered. Diana’s arms must be tired. The sleeping baby twitched a little as she was transferred to his grasp, and then settled back to sleep, warm and heavy. Once again he was caught off guard with a gentler version of the way he felt when he looked at Diana with the baby, a soft flood of emotions sweeping through his inner landscape, changing it in some way he wasn’t sure how to deal with.

He became aware that the conversation had stopped and everyone was looking at him. Both women looked uncharacteristically soft. Caine was, as usual, inscrutable.

“What?” Costa said flatly.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Quinn, but if you carry that baby around at work, you’re going to be breaking hearts and exploding ovaries all over the building,” Mavis said.

“Can we—” Costa began in his usual “back to business, people!” attention-getting meeting voice. Everyone wildly hushed him. “—stay on topic,” he finished hastily in a much lower register. “Azarias, I’ve got a to-do list for you that ought to keep you busy on tonight’s shift. You can outsource some of the less sensitive aspects to the interns, but use your discretion about what might be too revealing.”

Caine gave a simple nod.

“Okay. First of all, contact the Seattle bureau and get them to send down their files on the case last year, or maybe it was the year before, involving human experiments on shifters. I want everything they’ve got, and I especially want to know where the principle culprits got off to.”

“Missing kids,” Diana murmured.

“I’m getting to that. I want unresolved missing kid reports pulled up for—how old would you say she is, Mavis?”

“About seven or eight months, give or take a little. Although shifter children are often precocious, which might cause human agencies misinterpret her age. If she was a foster child in a human household, they could take her for a bit older.”

“Okay. Let’s say a year, just in case someone fudged the birth date. Missing child reports for the last year, for any child that could conceivably be her—white or Hispanic, female, born somewhere between six months to a year ago. That’d be a good job to hand off to the interns.

“Third. Find out which agency is working lead on this morning’s plane crash in the Chiricahuas, shouldn’t be hard to find the details, news is probably all over it. Actually, I want that too—news reports, names of reporters writing it up. Another intern job. And start the ball rolling on interagency requests for access to anything they’ve brought in for evidence?—”

He went on with everything else he could think of. Getting access to the evidence and the site. Flight records. When he wound down, he said, “Anyone else got anything to add?”

“You’re going to need to do something with that baby,” Mavis said promptly.

“Oh,” Costa said, his mind going temporarily blank. Right. You couldn’t just park a baby in the garage and feed it twice a day. Babies needed supplies, special food, and high-maintenance, time-consuming care. It was simultaneously not rocket science, something even the least educated person in the world had been able to do since the dawn of time—and totally incompatible with a bachelor’s house and a career that kept him away from it all day. He didn’t even have a dog.

Mavis looked back and forth between Costa and Diana, and then at Caine, who looked equally blank.

“I meant a foster placement,” she said impatiently, and all three of them relaxed, Diana with a little huff of breath—although, just for a minute, Costa thought he caught the briefest flicker of regret on her face. “Oh, come on, you’re all intelligent people, did you not realize there’s an entire infrastructure to deal with this sort of situation?”

“Of course we did,” Diana said, almost huffily. “But this is unusual. We can’t just put her in normal foster care when she might shift at any moment.”

“I know. We don’t have a dedicated shifter social worker here at the Southwest bureau, but the Seattle one does: Nicole Yates. Or I guess it’s Yates-Hollen now. Before I go to bed, I’ll drop her a line. It’s an hour earlier for them right now, so she ought to still be up. Conveniently for you, Quinn, she was also a key participant in the other case you mentioned, the one with shifter experiments. We can see if they’re able to loan her out for a few days, and if not, she can still help us get a local placement for the baby.”

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