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“I hope you set the gimbals before you transported him this way!”
    Not only did I not set the gimbals, I neglected to shut down his computers. I had started to inform All Bent of that when he yanked open the rear door.
    “Ugh! What’s that stink? And what is this?”
    Before I could stop him, he swiped a finger over EEEK’s foot pedal.
    “It looks like . . . Oh, God! Is this . . . ? Is this . . . ?”
    “ ’Fraid so.”
    His face went dead white. His eyes rolled back in his head. Next thing I knew, his three hundred plus pounds were stretched out at my feet.
     
     
    IT took a while to get down to business after that somewhat inauspicious start. Plus, I refused point blank to review or release any data until I’d showered and changed into a clean uniform.
    Mitchell was waiting with a cup of the herbal tea Pen badgered us all into drinking instead of coffee. His expression was so carefully neutral that I had to laugh.
    “Gawdawful, isn’t it?”
    He glanced around, saw Pen wasn’t within earshot, and grinned. “And then some.”
    Whoa! Someone should tell the man to smile more often. That simple rearrangement of facial features softened the hard line of his jaw and crinkled the squint lines at the corners of his eyes.
    Charlie! Remember Charlie!
    It was my personal call to arms. My own version of Remember the Alamo. I chanted it whenever I needed a reminder of the last time I let my hormones get the better of me. I repeated the mantra again, dragged in a deep breath and assembled my team.
    “Agent Mitchell wants to . . .”
    “Mitch,” he corrected.
    There it was again. That crooked grin. Dammit all to hell.
    Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!
    “Mitch,” I informed my team, “wants to review the signals and imagery EEEK transmitted last night.”
    Our software guru, O’Reilly, whistled through his teeth. “We’re talking twenty or thirty million gigabytes. It’ll take all day to download it.”
    “Even longer to interpret,” Rocky added. “Our data synthesizer employs a simplified digital filter with sigma-delta quantized tap coefficients,” he explained earnestly, “but it’s a simple off-chip loop filter.”
    Mitchell looked at me. I looked at the ceiling.
    “I’m only interested in sequences captured immediately before and after Lieutenant Spade’s encounter with the victims.”
    O’Reilly’s frown evaporated. “No problemo. I know just where to look. I inserted a marker when she radioed in, screaming about how she’d tripped over some dead bodies.”
    “I may have been a tad excited,” I conceded, “but I didn’t scream.”
    “Ha!”
    O’Reilly snorted, Cassidy huffed, Rocky twitched, and Pen let loose with a high-pitched neigh that caused Mitchell to blink and hunch his shoulders.
    “You screeched like a ’69 Impala in urgent need of a ring job,” O’Reilly announced. “My ears still hurt.”
    “About that data . . .” I said pointedly.
    Thus adjured, my team got to work. Even with the marker, however, it took hours to download and synthesize the data EEEK had transmitted.
    We then listened to an electronic chorus that included the owls, the mockingbird, the yipping coyotes, a squeaky cry that sounded like kil-dee, kil-dee. Pen identified it as emanating from a Killdeer. That’s a bird, she informed me when I looked at her blankly. I didn’t ask how a bird could kill a deer. I’d had enough gore for one night.
    We also listened to me. I won’t bore you with a repeat of my transmissions right after I stumbled across the victims. I’ve already admitted those weren’t my finest moments.
    Although . . .
    A couple of my more colorful expletives did produce another grin from Mitch. This one was so wicked I completely forgot my ex’s name.
    I remembered it right about the time Mitchell’s cell phone pinged. He flipped it open and identified himself. I thought I recognized the feminine voice on the other end as belonging to Agent Garcia.
    My guess proved correct when Mitchell