Crystal led the way to the institute in her bright green Kia. They were halfway there when Trey’s phone rang. He answered immediately with the pickup’s hands-free system, praying it was Samantha calling him.
It wasn’t.
“Nadia wasn’t home,” Trevor said without preamble. “A quick check of her place indicates she hasn’t been there for a few days at least. But we did pick up that sweet scent you described. She’s definitely the vita.”
At least they were right about that much.
“We haven’t found Samantha yet,” Trey said. “We stopped by her place and are on our way to the institute with her friend, Crystal.”
“Okay, let us know when you find her,” Trevor said “We’ve already contacted STAT about Nadia. They’re going to try to find her. In the meantime, Hale and I are heading back downtown. We figured Nadia might be looking for someone to replace the guy you stopped her from killing this past weekend.”
Samantha’s car was nowhere to be seen when they reached the institute, but he and Connor still went inside with Crystal anyway, hoping they’d find something that would tell them where she’d gone.
From how weak Samantha’s scent was in her office, Trey could tell that it had been a few hours since his soul mate had been there. He watched curiously as Crystal logged on to Samantha’s computer, flipping through what he guessed were autopsy records, if the photos of body parts were any indication.
“Samantha and I have each other’s passwords, so we can proofread each other’s reports,” Crystal said without looking up. “This is the institute’s forensic database. Everything entered into the files gets a time stamp put on it for evidence-tracking purposes. It will tell us exactly what Samantha was doing right up until the moment she left work. I’m hoping this gives us an idea of what she might have found and tell us where she might have gone.”
He and Connor stood there, leaning over Crystal’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the endless string of photographs and narrative pages. They all sort of blurred together for Trey, but something must have caught her attention because she kept going back and forth over the last three or four pictures of a tattooed arm and the forms that accompanied them that were mainly description.
“Did you find something?” he prompted as Crystal continued to look at the pictures.
“I don’t know if I found anything, but I think Samantha did,” Crystal murmured, still flipping through the gruesome shots of the amputated arm. “You might have noticed that the narrative pages after each of the photos were stuffed with descriptive details—weights, measurements, skin texture, bruising, etc. That’s Samantha for you—she’s a compulsive notetaker. But when you get to these last four photos, all photos of this arm with the tattoo, there are hardly any notes at all.”
“Maybe she didn’t notice anything worth writing about,” Connor suggested.
Crystal shook her head. “That isn’t Samantha’s style. If there was nothing to note, she’d actually write nothing to note. I’m thinking she saw something in these last few pictures that made her stop what she was doing and log out of the system.”
Trey was tempted to ask what Sam might have seen, but it was obvious it was something they were all missing. “So that’s it? She took these pictures and then left right after that?”
Crystal clicked around Samantha’s computer for a few seconds before shaking her head. “Actually, after logging off the computer in her lab, she came back here and logged into her desk PC to look through Tuesday’s staff meeting files. She must have left right afterward.”
That’s why she’d called and left him a message. She’d seen something on the computer—or in the lab. But what?
They went back to the lab to look around, hoping there would be a clue there that’d tell them something important. While he and Connor looked around, Crystal called Louis to ask if he knew what Samantha had found and where she’d gone after leaving the institute.
Across the room, Trey could hear the panic in the man’s voice when he heard Samantha was missing and possibly in danger. Crystal told her boss everything they’d discovered since getting to the institute, which admittedly wasn’t very much.
While Trey hadn’t expected the older man to know anything, his gut tightened when the chief medical examiner said he hadn’t heard from Samantha.
“Louis is coming in to help me search the lab reports and see if we can find anything,” Crystal said after she hung up.
That was good. They’d take any help they could get.
The search of Samantha’s lab didn’t turn up anything useful, and Trey was trying to figure out what to do next when Connor mentioned they’d passed Nadia’s lab earlier. “Do you think we should take a look around in there?”
Trey seriously doubted they’d find anything that would connect Nadia to her vita lamia identity or where she might be hiding, but he supposed there was no harm in searching the place.
Crystal frowned. “What would be in Nadia’s lab?”
Trey exchanged looks with Connor before turning his attention back to Crystal. “It’s complicated. That said, could you unlock the door?”
Crystal hesitated for a moment, but then nodded. Thankfully, one key unlocked all the labs in this part of the building.
When they walked into Nadia’s lab, Trey didn’t get even a hint of the sweet and dusty scent he’d come to associate with the vita. Then again, there wasn’t much of any scent, unless he counted blood and corpses. It was like Nadia didn’t have much of a smell in her human form, which was strange as hell. For a moment, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed that distinct lack of scent when he’d first met her.
Trey was still trying to figure that out when he smelled something all too familiar. The odor was like a chemical disinfectant, but with a flowery noted blended in. He froze for a moment before following his nose straight toward the sink on the far side of the room.
“You got something?” Connor asked.
Trey was too focused on the plastic pump bottle filled with pink foamy soap on the counter to answer. Picking it up, he gave it a big sniff and almost gagged. It was like someone had dumped a bottle of perfume into a container of bleach. This was definitely it.
He turned and held up the bottle, giving Crystal a questioning look. “What is this stuff?”
“It’s a disinfecting body wash. It’s normally used for cleaning patients prior to surgery, but Nadia uses it to wash her hands. She buys it directly from a vendor in France or someplace fancy like that. It’s ungodly expensive, but she claims it’s the only thing that gets the stench of dead bodies off her skin. She makes a big deal out of having a sensitive nose.”