"You can't attack head-on." Talin leaned forward, desperate. "If they think you're getting too close, they might kill Jon." Hope, she thought, hope. Johnny D was still alive.
"I know." Max tapped the saltshaker. "That's where you were supposed to come in. You have a legitimate 'in' at Shine. I was going to ask you to go in, be my eyes and ears."
"But now she's been warned off, it's too dangerous." Clay slid his arm down to rest around her waist, his hand curving over her hip in a blatantly territorial gesture. "There's no question of her going in."
She bristled. "Hold on. You don't get to dictate - "
"He's right," Max interrupted. "If it is a mole and not a case of the entire organization being dirty, that mole has to be pretty high up. The bastard clearly has access to preliminary contact reports from around the country. He or she will either make sure you don't see anything useful or shut you up for good."
"Men," she muttered, agreeing with them but loath to show it, given Clay's arrogant pronouncement. "Okay, even if I don't go in, we need information from the inside somehow."
"Anybody you trust there?" Max asked.
"Dev - Devraj Santos," she said without hesitation. Clay's hand tightened on her hip. She retaliated with a scowl. "He's a good guy."
"He's also the director." Max's face was grim.
"No. He'll help us." She turned to Clay. "You know what I mean. Tell him."
After a taut second, he nodded. "Talin's instincts about people are pure gold."
His support warmed her even as she realized he was calling her Talin again. They had only been together a day and already she knew that meant trouble. A strange exhilaration in her gut, she returned her attention to Max. "That's not everything, is it?"
Max nodded. "First thing - absolutely no one but me, the medical examiner, and a couple of detectives I trust - knows this. The bodies were all missing some organs."
It was too much. Her heart felt frozen in her chest.
"Which organs?" Clay's hand stroked over her hip, jerking her out of her shell-shocked state and firmly back into the present. "Could we be talking black market?"
Talin saw where he was going. While the world had come a long away in the field of artificial and cloned organs, certain parts of the human body continued to defy medical science's efforts to create perfect replicas. Added to that, a small subsection of society preferred donor organs over cloned ones. "Did they take the heart or eyes?" It was impossible not to remember those eyes filled with laughter and hope.
Max nodded. "But I think those removals were a front for the real goal, red herrings to divert our attention in exactly this direction."
"I don't understand." Talin frowned. "Hearts are the most expensive and difficult to clone and eyes follow close behind."
Clay suddenly went predator-still. "There's one other very complicated organ you haven't yet mentioned."
Talin watched the men's eyes lock, felt the murky truth pass between them. But her mind refused to make the connection. "What?" she asked, frustrated.
"The brain, Talin." Max's tone was full of quiet grief. "All the victims found early enough to perform a soft tissue analysis were missing their brains."
Clay sensed Talin's shock, her driving pain. It threatened to tear the heart right out of him. "How good was the surgery?" he asked, holding her tighter.
"Top of the line. This is an organized operation, not some lone whack job, especially if you factor in the geographical spread of the victims, the schedule of body dumps, and the lack of evidence - the kids had literally no trace on their bodies but for a single fiber."
"It help narrow things down?"
"Not to a specific location, but the material is used in high-tech surgical labs." Max shoved a hand through his hair. "The victims were taken to some kind of medical facility, and I'm betting it was the same one in all cases, which means they were transported across state lines without raising any alarms. Smacks of organization."
"Were they tortured?" Talin's voice was raw, as if she'd been screaming silently.
Clay's leopard flexed its claws, disliking the scent of her anguish. "Come on, Tally. You don't need to know that."
"Yes, I do." She swallowed and when she looked up, he saw that her eyes were dull gray, that exotic ring of fire muted to pale bronze. "It might tell us why these particular kids were taken, the deviance driving the killers. If we know, we can narrow down the list of other children who might be at risk."
"What the hell. I'll send you everything I've got." Max pushed aside the peanuts he'd spread on the table, his fist clenched. "You know these kids, the way they think - you might pick up something I've missed."
"What about the search for Jon?" It broke her heart, but Di, Mickey, and the others were already dead. Their justice could wait. "He has to come first."
Clay brushed his lips over her hair. "Leave Jon to me." It was a promise. "I don't particularly want you looking at Max's files, seeing what was done to the victims," he admitted, tone rough, "but you need to go through them. It might help us locate the boy."
She didn't even trust Max to fight for Jon, but it was frighteningly easy to fall into her old rhythms with Clay. "Okay." He would never allow harm to come to a child.
"That'll leave me free to follow up the Shine connection." Max rubbed at his eyes. "I just pray to God they don't grab any more kids before we figure this out."