Page 100 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

“Tell him that,” Jackson said. “Let him know you want more of them.”

“Speaking of….” Cody let out a breath.

As they’d been talking, the elevator had let them out on the basement floor, and Jackson had begun leading him through the echoey, chill, and labyrinthine corridors of the basement floor.

Now Jackson took that right, directly into Toby’s offices, where Josh, the assistant, and Toby huddled over what appeared to be a prehistoric desktop computer.

“Jackson, hold on a sec,” Toby said, without glancing up. “I know you’re on a deadline, and I almost have your information.”

Jackson and Cody exchanged glances. “Toby, doesn’t the rest of the hospital have tablets and shit?”

“Nobody wants to give money to dead people,” Josh said, proving once again that he had the tact and diplomacy of a doctor who needed to be nowhere near the living.

“He’s right,” Toby said, hitting a key on the keyboard repeatedly. “As my son keeps telling me—”

“Parker?” Jackson asked, because that was the gay son that Toby had been trying to set him up with for years.

“No, the youngest. Niles.”

“Isn’t Niles ababy?” Jackson asked, appalled.

“He’s in high school,” Toby told him, rolling his eyes. “And he’s very smart for his age. Anyway, he tells me repeatedly that the morgue is not a consumer-driven business, so it doesn’t get consumer-appropriate equipment.”

Jackson blinked. “High school, you say?”

Toby gave him a rather wolfish grin over the computer monitor. “Terrifying, isn’t it?” He stepped away from the desk with a “Keep working on it, Josh,” while he pulled out his phone and tapped frantically.

“And we need the computer why?” Jackson asked as Toby approached.

“I’mtrying,” Toby said with some frustration, “to get you amap.”

Oh. “A map ofwhat?”

Toby glared up at him, all hints of playfulness gone. “A map of the location where a friend of mine was training cadaver dogs last month and found the bodies of three teenaged boys at the bottom of an old mine. It’s up in Gold Country somewhere, not too far from Twain Harte.”

Jackson blinked slowly. “Near Sonora?” he asked carefully.

Toby gave him a grim nod. “You expected this?”

“Let’s just say the place keeps coming up, and….” He let out a sigh, thinking about Caleb and his suspicion from the very first that the boy wouldn’t be found alive. “Well, there was a reason I asked you. But….” He swallowed. “Three?”

Toby nodded and didn’t force him to ask. “In various stages of decomp, I’m afraid. And on a tricky bit of land.”

“Tricky?”

“Well, this is why I wanted the damned map,” Toby said. “See, this area hassomereally nice houses, often placed by one of the small lakes in the area. But it’s also got some desolate stretches of oak trees with absolute bupkiss. Sometimes there’sfarms, sometimes there’s mansions, sometimes there’s forest land, and sometimes there’s fuckall, you understand?”

Jackson’s eyes widened. “Great,” he said. “Because I’m sort of a city/suburb cat myself. Cody, you?”

Cody was peering over Jackson’s shoulder as the doc tried to show Jackson the map, and it might have been super crowded, but Cody was tall enough to make it feel not quite so claustrophobic.

“I’ve got some backwoods experience,” he said. “There’s no snow there this time of year, but there sure is a lot of mud.”

“Well, I’m wearing hiking tennies,” Jackson said. “And we’ve got rain gear in the car.” He peered at Toby’s phone and played with the picture for a minute. “Okay,” he said softly. “This here—what’s this?” He pointed to what appeared to be a residential road, but one that was solidly in the middle of nowhere.

“That’s a property,” Toby told him. “Josh, did you look up the address?”

“Yup. It’s 22000 Ward Lake Road,” Josh said. “It’s one of those big mansions that front the lake, but you can see the fire roads and such in the rear of the property. That backs up against federal woodland.”

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