Written for telesilla, at the sticksandsnark Rodney/Teyla Thing-a-thon 2009 on LJ. Her prompt was "AU, Teyla and Rodney investigate supernatural events (cameos by other SGA characters a plus!)"
This was my first SGA fic fit for public consumption and at first I was hoping just to get something down that a) fit the prompt and b) met the minimum word count. And then I wound up with this. Which totally happens all the time, right? (Comments and criticism would be A++, btw :)
HUGE THANK YOUs go to aelora, cidercupcakes, and julie_reads for looking this over at various stages and inkdot for putting up with my flailing (♥ x 4), and to The X-Files, Harry Potter, and Arrested Development for some blink-and-you'll-miss-'em references. (HUGE APOLOGIES go to Calgary and the entire field of ornithology for all mistakes and misinformation in the story - the closest I've ever been to either is Google.) Title from The Owl by Barry Cornwall (Bryan Waller Procter).
And, of course, I can't thank telesilla enough for the prompt that birthed this monstrosity.
"Weir wants to see us as soon as we get in to the office this morning," Teyla announced when Rodney stumbled into the kitchen and stuffed a stack of files into his laptop bag.
He ignored her and shuffled toward the coffeemaker.
"We are out of the Kona beans," she said as he popped the top off his travel mug. "All that was left was the -"
"Oh God, don't tell me I have to drink your 3-in-1," Rodney groaned.
Teyla pretended to turn her attention back to the newspaper so he would not see her smile. "You do not," she told him. "The Maxwell House is in ample supply."
He beamed at her like she had just admitted to loving nothing more than organizing field notes into something approaching comprehensibility and filled his mug to the brim. The next few minutes were punctuated with the rustle of the paper and his mumbling to himself as he checked voicemail. When the timer dinged on the microwave, Teyla crossed the room and pulled two bowls from the cupboard.
Rodney dropped into a chair at the table, turned off his cell phone, and grabbed a spoon when she set his bowl in front of him. "Radek got the results back on Jiménez. D'you think I have time to swing by the lab before we see Weir?" he asked through a mouthful of oatmeal.
"It is better that we do not risk it, I think. Her email was very tersely worded."
He humphed and stirred more syrup into his bowl. "Any idea why she wants us first thing?"
"The email did not say."
Teyla tried not to roll her eyes in exasperation when he pointed his spoon at her and cried, "Ha! I bet it's about that requisition you filed to replace the cedar bark. I told you it was a mistake to have offered so much to that shaman."
"I do not wish to revisit that conversation, Rodney. We have both said more than enough on the subject."
To his credit, he looked somewhat chastened and redoubled his efforts to inhale his breakfast. Teyla followed his lead, albeit at a much more sedate pace, and before long he was rising from his seat to collect their empty dishes. When he leaned over her shoulder to pick up her bowl, she laid her hand over his and squeezed. He said nothing but dropped a kiss on the top of her head, apparently content to let bygones be bygones for the moment. She topped up both of their travel mugs and switched off the coffeemaker while he loaded the dishwasher.
Getting out of the house proved to be as hectic as ever with Rodney rushing around looking for things he had somehow misplaced in the ten hours since he had left the office. Teyla backed the car out of the garage and idled next to the back door for a full five minutes before giving in to her irritation and honking the horn. Rodney emerged less than thirty seconds later, a flurry of papers and jangling keys as he wedged himself into the passenger seat and tried to slide his bag into the backseat without braining either of them or upsetting the coffee he had clutched in one hand.
Traffic was light on the drive to the outskirts of Pegasus City, with most of the cars headed in the opposite direction - toward downtown and the west side, where innumerable office parks had sprung up in the last few years. She did not care for the bland beige edifices and sprawling parking lots where trees and meadows had stretched between horizons, but her distaste for them was nothing compared to the scorn Rodney showed whenever they drove past on the way to or from the airport.
Rodney, who had spent most of their first night in the new house in a snit about how many autumn leaves carpeted the grass in the backyard before she had distracted him to the point of no longer remembering what a rake was. Sometimes she wondered how she had fallen in love with such a prickly and fussy man -- then he would rant about clear-cutting and destroyed habitats. The look on his face was more than a reminder; it was a reason to fall for him all over again.
She kept the radio on low as it cycled through the satellite news stations. She did not want to alarm Rodney unduly, but she felt uneasy about the summons from Weir. She shared a somewhat comfortable and friendly relationship with the head of Atlantea Investigations, as she did with most of the upper echelon of the Starr/Gates Group, and early-morning emails never boded well. While there had been nothing of interest in any of the usual websites nor in the newspaper that morning, she felt certain that whatever awaited them would be unwelcome, to say the least.
No matter what happened, though, she did not regret the cedar bark.
Once they arrived at the Atlantea building, Rodney made only one protest about stopping to speak with Radek as they waited for the elevator. It was a half-hearted attempt that signaled to her that he was as worried as she about the meeting. He tried to distract them both with idle chatter on the ride up to the twelfth floor. Just before the doors opened, Teyla let him goad her into an argument about the vending machines in the break room.
Chuck, Weir's assistant, was away from his desk when they arrived. Rodney looked ready to bolt at any minute, so she wrapped one hand around his forearm and knocked with the other.
Instead of Chuck or Weir like she would have expected, John Sheppard opened the door. Teyla dug her nails into Rodney's arm as a warning to keep quiet. After the last time the two of them had attempted to out-stubborn each other, she did not want to take any chances. The interns were still gossiping about the fallout from the Arcturus case, when Rodney had violated all manner of company directives in order to destroy a nest of chupacabra, taking out most of a sacred burial ground with it.
Weir rose behind her desk and smiled, waving them to sit in the chairs immediately opposite her. "How are you settling in at the new house?" she asked.
"More to the point," Sheppard drawled when neither of them answered right away, "how have you managed not to kill your husband yet?"
Rodney blew out an irritated breath, already swelling with either indignation on her behalf or at the insinuation that he was anything less than the perfect person with whom to share living quarters.
"I think that will remain my secret, John," Teyla answered, quickly, before Rodney could work himself up to a reply. "Although, I will say that the household chores flowchart has been a great help."
Sheppard looked pained and Weir hid a smirk behind her hand. Rodney, on the other hand, puffed out his chest and gave her one of his lopsided smiles.
Before he could get started down the path of bragging and baiting Sheppard, Teyla asked, "Why have you called us in today?"
Both Sheppard and Weir quickly composed themselves. Weir shuffled through some papers on her desk, then slid two bulging folders toward them. Rodney leaned forward to take both, handing one to Teyla as he sat back. She flipped through the file, ignoring the pages of notes for the photographs paper-clipped to the back cover. They were all of cars abandoned on roadsides and in ditches, with the driver's and passenger doors flung wide open. In all but one, a single trail of blood was smeared across to the other side of the road and onto the verge where it stopped as abruptly as if someone were dragged into another vehicle. However, none of the photos showed any evidence of a second car, or of any tire tracks at all through the grass.
"We have a bit of a sticky situation," Weir said as Teyla flipped through the images. "I received a call very late last night from Ambassador Caldwell-"
Rodney snapped his fingers. "Caldwell, why do I know that name?"
"He's the guy we did the exorcism on a few years back," Sheppard reminded him. "You remember, President Hayes' buddy with the impressive sailor's vocabulary? He's the ambassador to Canada now."
"And he needs our help." Weir pressed a button on her keyboard and swiveled the monitor so everyone could see it. A map of North America filled the screen, dotted with blue and orange from Coeur d'Alene to Bismarck and north into Canada all the way to the Yukon.
"The blue dots represent cases Caldwell thinks are involved; the orange represents everything that Cadman's team has dug up that fits the same parameters, though those are obviously unconfirmed at this point."
As they watched, another swath of orange dots popped up across Saskatchewan.
"Wait, hold on. All of the disappearances are married couples?" Rodney asked as he looked up from the notes he was reading.
His voice rose a little at the end of the question and Teyla snapped her gaze to him. His knuckles were white on the hand holding his copy of the file, but his face was rapidly turning red. She flipped quickly back to the front of her own dossier and scanned through the handwritten notes.
"Not all of them," said Weir. "But a statistically significant portion of the cases Caldwell identified involve married couples, yes."
"Look," Sheppard interjected. "With Ford going out on recuperation leave and Dex not scheduled to transfer back from the Sateda office until next month, we already needed to shake up duty assignments a bit. This case just lights a little bigger of a fire under our asses."
"You are not going to use us as bait," Teyla said, keeping her voice as even and mild as she could. The notes were hard to decipher, many of them written by hands shaky with too much coffee or adrenaline or fear. The lab reports were easier to follow: copious amounts of blood from only one donor were left at each scene. In each case, there was enough blood present that the victim's survival without immediate medical attention was unlikely.
She looked up to see Weir and Sheppard exchange a look before Weir spoke again.
"I realize what this looks like but we absolutely are not using you as bait, Teyla," she said. "The two of you are the most senior investigators we have on staff at the moment and, before your marriage, you made a pretty damn good team. Now, you know I don't like to send you out in the field together, but for this we have no other choice."
Sheppard took over when Weir seemed to falter under Teyla's stare. "Chuck's taking Beckett, Bates, and Lorne to the airport right now. They'll establish a base of operations in Coeur d'Alene - that's where the first American case happened - and then fan out through the area to start digging in on the backgrounds. You two are going to head up to the Great White North to come at it from that end. McKay's dual citizenship will get you both in without raising any red flags, thankfully. We're flying so far below the radar on this one it's not even funny."
"Why?" Teyla asked.
Another look passed between their supervisors and Teyla was hard-pressed not to turn to Rodney to see if he looked any more comfortable with the situation than she felt.
"The RCMP and the FBI are operating under the assumption that we're looking at a ritualized serial killer striking in both countries, or possibly a pair working in tandem," Sheppard said.
Rodney scoffed. "That's hardly an unfair assumption given the circumstances of the disappearances."
This time, Weir spoke without looking at either of them. "Based on trace evidence found in a handful of the vehicles, they believe it's Michael Kenmore."
"I guess it explains why Caldwell called in the cavalry," Rodney said, finally.
They were sitting in his office on the eighth floor, ostensibly to go through the files in more detail and begin working on their itinerary for the case. Instead, they were sitting side by side on the narrow couch and staring out the window. The remains of their picked-over lunches were scattered across the low table in front of them.
Teyla murmured something that she hoped he would take as agreement and laid her head down on his shoulder. "I had hoped that we had heard the last of Michael by now. Burying him twice should be enough."
"Look, we don't know that it is Michael doing this. There're a thousand different things that could be responsible: shapeshifter, pontianak, adhene, spring-heeled jack, tavara.... We could even be looking at a standard demon taking the guise of various departed souls." Rodney shifted deeper into the couch and wound an arm around her waist. "They've only found Michael's hair and fingerprints in a few of the cars, and it looks like the samples were pretty degraded. Maybe he had some contact with them in one of his last two incarnations, or it's possible that-"
She closed her eyes and let his words settle around her. She was comforted by his resistance to the simplest explanation. In all the time they had worked and lived together, he had been a strict adherent to Occam's razor. For him to discount the prevailing theory meant that he was troubled by the lack of evidence, even if it meant reaching for a more outlandish explanation. His intuition - although he would hardly describe it as such, preferring as he did to rely on facts he could prove - had led them out of danger more than once.
Reluctantly, she sat forward and took up the case-file again when he finally ran out of words. She flipped through the photographs slowly, willing any sort of a clue to leap out at her from among the smears of blood and the blank, empty car windows. Rodney finished off the remaining half of his sandwich while he looked over her shoulder.
She withstood his chewing in her ear as long as she could, then reminded him he still had to go downstairs to get the Jiménez results from Radek before all hell broke loose.
Rodney rushed out of the office then raced back in long enough to steal the last handful of fries from her lunch and press a kiss to her forehead. "Call me when you're ready to go!" he said as he took off again.
She stayed in his office for nearly two more hours, consulting with Cadman in Research and rearranging the case notes and photos so that she could review them in chronological order. The earliest cases in Caldwell's dossier had been investigated by the local law enforcement more than six months earlier; the RCMP did not get involved until the disappearances moved into another province, the FBI still later once someone realized they were working the same string of cases on both sides of the border. In addition, Cadman and her team had already found dozens more that predated all of them, some stretching back into the late 1970s and as far south as Flagstaff.
Since Weir and Sheppard were sending them to Canada, Teyla decided to concentrate only on the official investigations there. The trail started near downtown Calgary and swept north by northeast. The frequency of the disappearances was inconsistent: the first five had happened in quick succession but between the later instances were lulls of several weeks. She logged in to the network and entered the dates and locations into HERMIOD, Dr. Novak's new pattern recognition database. If there was any sense to be made of the information, any way to use it to predict where the next victims might be, Novak would find it.
Chuck came in at some point and handed her two packets filled with all their necessary paperwork: gun permits, car and hotel reservations, and their passports. She turned down his offer of a ride to the airport when she realized that neither she nor Rodney had their travel bags with them: Rodney's was lying at the bottom of the basement stairs where he had left it when he came home earlier in the week and she still had not repacked from her last trip. Chuck pulled a PDA from his pocket and changed their flight reservations to the following morning, then walked with her down to the printer to pick up the new tickets.
After a final check with Cadman, during which the researcher uploaded the bulk of their gathered information to Teyla and Rodney's laptops, she made her way to the weapons locker and then put in a requisition for more specialized supplies to be delivered to them in Calgary. Halling did not bat an eye when she handed over the five-page itemized list, and she thanked for the umpteenth time whatever had brought him to Atlantea in the first place. He had a gift for procurement; she did not know a single investigator who did not have a story of how he had saved them from certain doom with an overnight shipment of some obscure artifact.
On her way down to the third floor lab, she stopped off in her own office long enough to grab spare laptop batteries and the camera bag. She ignored the red message light blinking on her phone. There would be plenty of time to catch up on administrative minutiae later.
Radek and Rodney were engrossed in the flashing lights of a boxy display when she knocked on the observation window. Rodney leaped to his feet and rushed over to key the door open for her, upsetting a small wastebasket that a lab assistant quickly righted.
"I apologize for taking him away from you again so soon," she said to Radek.
"Is no problem," he replied with a quick smile that caused his glasses to slide down his nose. "The device will still be here when you return."
"If we return," Rodney muttered, not quite under his breath.
"Yes, yes, if. We are all very familiar with your standard what-would-they-do-without-me routine, Rodney. Now go, get out! Some of us have work to do while you are out chasing monsters."
"Ha!" Rodney barked, and waved a finger at the room at large.
Teyla pushed him out of the lab before he could say something to bring the wrath of Radek and his assistants down on their heads.
"I forgot my laptop," he said as they stepped into the elevator. "We should probably go back up."
"I have it," she assured him.
"Plane tickets? My passport?" He swallowed quickly when she gave him a look. "Right, of course you have all of that. What about our marriage license? Do you think you'll need that in case you get stopped by immigration?"
"My passport and identification have already been updated to reflect the change, as you should remember from this exact conversation we had three weeks ago when you drove me to the airport."
"Oh. Right." He lapsed into silence when the doors opened again, letting them out into underground parking garage. "What time's our flight?"
"We depart at 0800 hours tomorrow with a layover in Minneapolis, which will put us in Calgary just before lunch local time. Chuck has already made the car and hotel reservations for us."
"And you're sure you have all the documentation we'll need-"
"Rodney," she said with deliberate calm as she unlocked the trunk and started to deposit their bags inside, "there will be plenty of time for you to second-guess me before this case is over. I suggest you do not use it all up now, before we have even begun."
"Sorry, sorry. I'm just... trying very hard not to betray my cool exterior right now."
She turned to him and took his face between her hands, leaning forward to rest her forehead against his. "I know," she said and rubbed her thumbs over his temples. "I am doing much the same."
"You're a lot better at it than I am."
Teyla drew back just far enough to brush a kiss across his lips. "As in so many things," she teased.
Their flights were uneventful, if overlong and more than a little boring. Turbulence had Rodney scrambling for extra airsick bags as they flew over Lake Michigan, right on schedule. He ended up using them all to jot down notes when Teyla deflected his attention by asking a question about the weaknesses of tavaras. She ignored the curious stare of the man sitting in the aisle seat and prodded Rodney into reviewing the supply list she had given to Halling to see if she had left out anything vital.
The packets Chuck had prepared indicated that a rental car would be waiting for them when they arrived in Calgary. She let Rodney lead the way, preferring to keep an eye on their surroundings as he navigated through the terminal and out through the departures area. The wind was bitter and cold with the scent of impending snow when they crossed the road and went into the car rental center.
The line inside was mercifully short and within moments they were cramming their baggage into the absurdly small trunk of the car. Teyla unfolded a map of Calgary and the surrounding countryside that she had already marked, using a printout of the display they had seen on Weir's screen. She studied the meandering route that would take them past most of the crime scenes without much overlap or doubling back.
"I think we should start with the couple who disappeared after leaving the bird sanctuary," she told Rodney, who was still cursing and trying to fit their bags into the trunk. "Of the cases identified so far, they predate all of the others in this country."
"Fine, whatever you want to do," he said and pulled her laptop case out again. He laid it on the ground at his feet then went back to studying the jumble of luggage.
She watched as he heaved another heavy suitcase into the trunk and struggled to slide it between two others, as far back as it would go. The wind was picking up, bringing with it scattered flakes of snow and heavy gray clouds unfurling overhead, but his neck and hairline were slick with sweat. Teyla unlocked the car and tucked the map under the sun visor on the driver's side, then hefted the last of the smaller bags into the back seat. With a sigh, Rodney conceded defeat and slammed the trunk lid shut. She tossed the keys at him over the roof of the car and walked around to the passenger side.
"I get to drive?"
"You are the native here. It seems only fair."
"But you never let me drive!" He grinned at her over the top of the car, his whole face alight.
It was easy to smile back at him, to delight in his joy at so simple a thing and to ignore the creeping sense of unease that still plagued her. He bounced a little in his seat and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and dashboard as he careened the car around corners and down narrow side streets. A glance every now and again at the map she had spread across her lap kept them moving in the right direction, though he pretended to be tapping into some latent Canadian gift of navigation that led him unerringly to their destination.
There were few cars in the lot once they reached the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. Rodney circled around the lot in order to park near the entrance to the visitor center. He fidgeted impatiently while she unlocked the weapons case but did not protest when she handed him his revolver in a shoulder holster that would fit under his jacket, then strapped on her own.
When they walked into the long, low building, they were greeted by a plump woman wearing a blue cardigan and a sunny smile. The name printed on the volunteer pass around her neck was Ann and there was a gaudy gold owl-shaped pin adorning her lapel. She tried to hand them each a map of the grounds.
"Oh, we're not here for bird-watching," Rodney told her as he barrelled past her outstretched hand.
Teyla accepted the map from the confused woman and resisted the urge to follow Rodney across the room and kick him. "I am very sorry. Long flights make him even crankier than normal."
"I heard that!" Rodney cried from the other side of the room where he was examining a bulletin board covered with photos and a map of the Americas.
Ann laughed, a high, shrill giggle, and waved off her words. "Don't you apologize for him, honey! I've got one of my own at home and I know full well that would wind up a full-time job."
"I am Teyla, and that is my husband, Rodney. We are working on a travel book," Teyla explained, reaching back into her past for a cover story that had served her many times over. "A man we met in Cape Breton last month told us what a wonderful preserve this is, and since we were already planning to visit Banff, we thought we would take the time to stop here first." She pulled a slim silver case from her jacket pocket and thumbed the power switch on. "Do you mind if I record our conversation? I find it much more convenient than deciphering my shorthand."
"Oh, sure, of course! But maybe you'd want to talk to David, he's our naturalist. He could give you a much better picture of the place than I can."
"I am sure that is not at all true!" Teyla assured her. "We are more interested in what goes on behind the scenes in places like these. The focus of our book is more on the people one meets while traveling than on the places one goes. Have you been working here for very long?"
Ann coughed and said, "I've been volunteering for more than ten years now. You're lucky we were open today, though. Thursdays are my usual day to help out but I've been- We've all had to cover extra days recently. If someone can't make it in, we end up having to stay closed for the day. Not an ideal way to run the place but we do what we can."
She raised a hand to fiddle with the pin on her cardigan. Teyla glanced down at the device in her hand. It doubled as both a voice-activated recorder, as she had led Ann to believe, and as an energy sensor which did many things she did not fully understand and which both Radek and Rodney were too impatient to explain. The LED on the face of the device was green but blinking. While she was not an expert on the device, she did know that when she saw the blinking green light, it was safe to press harder.
"Why is that?" she asked. "Have you had a change in staff?"
"You could say that, I guess. Well, that was a couple of months ago really, but one of our full-time interns just started school again and the education coordinator is on paternity leave. The schedule's gotten a little bit more hectic that it was even after.... We've had to close the center a few days here and there when we can't find anyone to cover shifts."
Teyla wanted to push but Ann was pressing her lips together and continually playing with the pin on her sweater. In any case, it was not strictly necessary: she had the bare bones of the story in one of the folders tucked into her carry-on bag. Margaret Anderson had been a volunteer at the park, and she and her husband were the first disappearance in Canada that could be tied to the others. No one had reported them missing until she failed to show up for her next shift at Inglewood almost a week later. By the time police found their car, it had been stripped down to the sheet metal.
Instead, she commiserated with Ann, telling her a mostly fabricated story about being made to do more than what she considered her full share and did not bother to correct the woman's assumption that the culprit had been Rodney. She asked a few more questions about the facility and the volunteers' duties, attempting to lull her into answering more probing questions. She need not have bothered; her every attempt at turning the conversation back in the direction of the missing woman or any suspicious activities on the grounds was met with an uncomfortable silence or an awkward deflection. When Ann coughed again, sounding as if she had something caught in her throat, she wondered if perhaps the woman were recovering from an illness - it would explain her distracted air, at least. But no matter the reason, between the frustrating course of their conversation and Rodney's occasional interruptions in the form of questions yelled across the room, Teyla was ready to declare the visit a loss and move on.
She checked the device again; this time the light was a solid amber, giving her an excuse to retreat. She thanked Ann and called to Rodney, who had almost completed a full circuit of the room.
He sighed impatiently and cocked a thumb over his shoulder at the bulletin board displays as he joined them by the information desk. "Do you have anything that's not so ... childish?"
"Perhaps we should see some of the trails before it gets too late," Teyla said before he could further insult their surroundings. When he started to protest, she held up the silver case so he could see the amber light and said, "I have run out of room on my recorder and I fear I have monopolized Ann's time enough as it is."
Ann said goodbye cheerfully enough as they went back out into the cold, gray day, but Teyla saw her hurry toward the back of the building as soon as the door closed behind them.
"The yellow light's interesting. What were you asking her about?" Rodney asked as they started down one of the well-marked trails that wound down toward the river.
Teyla hesitated before answering. She was not sure when the device had first displayed the warning light because she had been too focused on getting Ann to talk about more than black-capped chickadees and visiting schoolchildren.
"I am certain that she is hiding something," she said, sidestepping his question, "though I could not even begin to guess at what that may be. If time permits, perhaps I will return on my own later to see if she is more forthcoming when you are not with me. This may come as a surprise but I do not believe she likes you."
"She's probably just intimidated by my manly physique," he said airily as he scanned the woods on his side of the path.
Teyla laughed as she bumped her shoulder into Rodney's arm and reached out to take his hand. "Yes, I am certain that is the case."
He gave her a lopsided smile, then said, "We can pull the data from the sensor-recorder tonight and send it to Radek. If her reluctance to talk has to do with a spirit or something here, there should be indications."
"It is probably something much more mundane. She did not seem agitated or afraid, merely unwilling to open up to me."
They did not linger on the trail. The snow that the wind had promised earlier had still not arrived, but the temperature had plunged and they were not wearing sufficiently warm clothing for a long ramble among the trees. They turned back after spending a few moments on one of the many observation decks throughout the sanctuary, and Teyla hoped they would be able to return, perhaps once the case was closed. Being cooped up in the office as often as they were, she relished any and all opportunities to enjoy the sharp, clean scent of growing things and the feel of grass under her feet. While the chill of Calgary meant that she would have to forego that pleasure, she wanted to walk hand-in-hand with Rodney and let her worries float up into the sky with the birdsong.
It was not until they were skirting the visitor's center on their way back to the parking lot that she realized the woods had been as quiet as death.
When they got back to the car, Rodney gave her the keys and pulled his laptop out of the backseat. "You drive - I need to double-check something," he told her.
"Would you like to check in to the hotel or should we visit a few more sites first?"
"Honestly? I want a steak as big as my head, a hot shower, and a bed for the next 16 hours. I'll settle for the steak and the shower, though."
She turned at the next light and headed into downtown while Rodney searched for some of the photos Cadman had uploaded. Teyla took her eyes off the road long enough to see what he had pulled up on the screen.
"That is the Anderson woman, is it not?" she asked as Rodney double-clicked one of the thumbnails.
"Yeah, I saw her in a couple of photos on one of those bulletin boards." He clicked on something else and made a displeased noise. "Didn't we get any other pictures of them? I could have sworn I saw... There! Look at that!"
He turned the laptop to face her. On the screen, she saw a group of men and women in casual outdoor clothing, with the now recognizable Inglewood visitor center behind them. Margaret Anderson, a tall woman with sunburned cheeks and red hair, was at the center of the frame and Ann was standing off to one side. A tall man with short black hair crowded in close to Margaret on the other, with one arm slung around her shoulders. Neither of the women were looking at the camera: Margaret's face was tilted down toward the ground, while Ann's gaze was directed at the man.
Teyla turned her attention back to the road just in time to see the driveway for their hotel flash past. "Who is the man?" she asked, and pulled into a parking lot across the street to turn around.
"Dr. David Mason, naturalist-in-residence for the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary," Rodney declared, and pulled the laptop back to face him. "And, according to the incredibly professional handwritten biography tacked up on the bulletin board under his photo, until about six months ago he was the executive director of a wildlife rescue center near Coeur d'Alene."
She nearly missed the driveway a second time.
Their hotel was more of a motel, and a crappy one at that, at least according to Rodney's standards. He spent the first ten minutes in the room inspecting the towels and sheets, then haranguing the front desk clerk over the phone until the woman agreed to send up a maid with new linens.
Teyla ignored most of his complaints as she powered up her laptop and unfolded the map across the desk. A quick search of her files turned up no further information on David Mason beyond his presence in several of the photographs of Margaret Anderson. Ann was also in each of them, often staring at the doctor. Not that Teyla blamed her; he was extraordinarily good-looking, with high cheekbones, well-muscled arms and legs, and dark, piercing eyes. In all but one of the photos, his mouth was stretched wide in a bright smile, his teeth straight and even.
"Here, smell this," Rodney demanded as he thrust a mini bottle of shampoo under her nose. "Does that smell citrusy to you? Why can't these places list the ingredients on their products?"
"It smells a bit citrusy, yes, but I put your shower things in my travel kit. You can get rid of that."
He dropped the bottle in the tiny trash can next to the desk and leaned in to peer at the folders she had open on her computer. "Find anything?"
"Dr. Mason does not appear to be connected to any of the other cases, including the ones in Idaho. I will send an email to Cadman to ask her to dig a little deeper if she can."
"Good, okay. I'll call Beckett and have him ask around at this wildlife center. There's a gap of almost two months between Mason resigning there and turning up here; maybe someone he worked with knows what he was up to."
Rodney went back into the bathroom with her travel kit tucked under his arm, presumably to replace any other offending toiletries and make his call. She listened to his half of the conversation without hearing much while she sent the email to Cadman and a short status report to Weir's attention, then checked her own inbox. There was an automated message from HERMIOD acknowledging her database request and a personal one from Novak saying she should have a preliminary projection ready by the end of the day. Another arrived while she was still logged in to the network: a one-line note from Halling that their supplies were ready for pickup at a local print and ship center. Attached was a scanned copy of a map with their hotel and the printing place connected by a thick black line, and a note scribbled along the edge that read close enough so that even Rodney cannot lose his way.
"Lorne and Beckett are headed out to the wildlife place now," Rodney called from the bathroom. "Can we go get some lunch?"
"I am ready whenever you are." She closed the lid of her laptop and stood, then raised both hands above her head and arched her back to feel the stretch of muscles beginning to protest their long journey. Her shirt pulled tight across her shoulders and chest, coming free from the waistband of her trousers to expose the skin of her stomach.
"Ah, on second thought," Rodney said from much closer this time, with a familiar tone coloring his words, "let's order room service."
Teyla signed for the food while Rodney was in the shower. The bellboy eyed the length of her legs below the hem of her robe as he waited for her to clear the map off the narrow desk. She tipped him a few dollars, remembering at the last minute to use the Canadian loonies instead of the American bills she had grabbed first.
She felt like she had not eaten in days by the time she managed to wrest all the cling wrap off her plate, although it had been only a few hours since they had shared a snack in the Minneapolis airport. The hamburger was topped with a wilted piece of lettuce and too many condiments, but the beef was as juicy and thick as the menu had promised. She made short work of it then sat back on the bed with her laptop to read through the replies to the emails she had sent earlier.
By the time Rodney emerged from the bathroom dressed in warmer clothes than they had left the house in that morning, she was instant messaging with Novak.
"If your steak is too cold now, I will gladly finish it," she said, then laughed when Rodney hurried over to the desk with a panicked look on his face.
He sagged into the chair with a relieved sigh when he saw that the cling wrap was still intact over his lunch.
"You are too easy sometimes."
"I take all threats to my meals very seriously," he reminded her as he peeled the layers away from the plate. He picked up his knife and gestured at her computer. "Anything interesting?"
"Novak says she will have the report ready in a few hours, but early indications are that another attack may be imminent."
"How does she figure that?" he asked through a mouthful of steak. "Oh, this is incredible. You want a bite?"
"No, thank you. The hamburger was more than enough." Teyla scrolled back through the chat history. "HERMIOD has apparently flagged a number of partial weather cycles and migration patterns that correspond to the attacks on this side of the border, and Novak is confident that the next run-through of the data will yield a definitive match."
Rodney hummed but seemed much more interested in finishing his steak than in Novak's methods.
"I also ran the diagnostic on the Sneakoscope and sent the file to Radek," she told him, ignoring his snort at the name everyone else used for what he still called the sensor-recorder. "Once I am dressed, we will have to pick up Halling's delivery before we go to the next crime scene."
He waved a hand at her, which she chose to interpret as a hurry-up gesture and signed out of the network. She dressed quickly, piling on the layers in anticipation of the temperature drop once the sun set. By the time he was finished with his steak, they were both armed to the teeth and the empty weapons case was locked away in the safe built into the wall of the closet. Rodney secured their laptops in his suitcase, with the locking mechanism that was a product of one of the more secretive arms of the Starr/Gates Group. He shouldered the camera bag and held the door for her as they went out.
It was a short drive to the shipping store where they collected the packages from Halling, then to the next location marked on her map: a narrow road that cut through a wooded area on the south bank of the Bow River. She circled the site, the blood still visible on the road when seen from the right angle, and took pictures of everything within view. Rodney fielded a call from Beckett, who had struck out in Idaho, then another from Sheppard asking for a sit rep.
By the fifth stop they made on their way through the city, Teyla was cold, tired, and more frustrated than ever. Night was advancing rapidly and it was becoming increasingly difficult to pretend she knew what to look for as they surveyed each site. As Rodney pulled the car over to the side of the road and engaged the hazard lights, she switched out the memory card in the camera and checked to make sure the flash worked properly.
He looked over when she sighed and rubbed the back of her neck where her muscles were starting to tense. "Let's make this the last one for tonight, eh? We should spend a couple of hours going through these photos and whatever Novak's managed to pull out of thin air, anyway."
"Fine," she agreed. "Although I do not believe these photographs will be of any use to us. I have not seen anything that differs from the original crime scene images, except for fewer leaves on the trees."
"I'm still not getting anything on the sensors either: no ley lines, no ectoplasmic residue, no strange energy signatures." He worked his jaw briefly then burst out, "Which means it's probably definitely not Michael. I mean, if he'd resurrected again, he'd be leaving a trail even Sheppard could pick up."
Teyla chose to ignore the slur on their supervisor's not inconsiderable skills as a tracker and investigator. "I believe you are right. I have not had a single premonition about this case, or about anything else," she qualified before Rodney could leap to the wrong conclusion. "The hair and fingerprints they found must be coincidence."
"Knowing the FBI, it was probably cross-contamination in the lab," Rodney grumbled as they got out of the car.
She had to force herself to be thorough in her documentation of the scene when all she wanted was to return to the warmth of the car. She paced the perimeter, taking care not to venture too close to the treeline, and worked in a spiral inward to the termination of the blood smear where it intersected the grassy shoulder. The flash lit up the scene in nightmarish bursts, illuminating Rodney standing a few feet away taking readings, then farther out. The wind picked up, setting the few remaining leaves to rustling, and she pulled up the hood of her coat.
She circled through the grass to get closer to the dark patch on the road and started to kneel down for another picture when something crunched under her foot. She angled the camera down and snapped a quick shot, using the flash to see that it was a large raptor pellet. A tuft of fur blew up on a draft and she crouched down to see what was left. The penlight she had tucked into her pocket threw a thin beam of light onto the ground, and Rodney jogged over.
"What did you find?" he asked, then made an exaggerated noise of disgust when she moved the grass aside for him to see. "Okay, if you wanted to look at vomit, we could have just gone down to one of the bars by the Saddledome."
"I only wanted to see what I had stepped on," she said and put the penlight away.
Rodney followed behind her, rattling on about avian flu and myriad other viral and bacterial dangers of handling animal byproducts as she finished her circuit of the site. By the time she snapped her last photo and replaced the lens cap, he had wound down to only a muttered "Ha! And what about Giardia? Wouldn't want to get that in the middle of a case. Or ever, really."
"Did you never dissect an owl pellet in biology class, Rodney?"
He sniffed. "Lab conditions are a completely different thing altogether. And, anyway, biology was what you took if you couldn't get into-"
"Could not get into what?" she asked. She could just barely make out the outline of his head and shoulders against the darker night sky.
He shushed her. "Did you hear that?"
Teyla wanted to protest that she had heard nothing when she noticed it: a faint noise above the wind. It sounded like drumbeats, slow and from not very far off. Rodney grabbed her hand and started pulling her toward the car. She lengthened her stride to match his and whispered, "What is it?"
Before he could answer, a high, piercing cry rent the air and something hurtled down to the pavement less than thirty feet away.
They ran for the car, neither hesitating for even a split-second. In some still-working corner of her mind, Teyla was proud of herself for letting her training overcome her instinct. The car was unlocked; they each wrenched open a door and threw themselves inside. Rodney had the keys out but had landed in the backseat, so she grabbed them from his hand and crawled over the gear shift to get behind the wheel. He threw himself over the back of the passenger seat and slapped the power lock switch. She had to fight back a hysterical bubble of laughter that he thought locks would keep the thing out as she jammed the key into the ignition and fired the engine.
"Can you see it?" Rodney asked, looking through the windshield. "Where did it go? Is it still in front of us?"
Teyla fumbled to turn on the headlights. When they flared to life, illuminating the road ahead, she caught only a glimpse of an immense dark shape, at least as large as their car, before it leaped off the pavement and wheeled up into the sky.
She turned to look at Rodney, who had collapsed against the backseat. "What was that?" she breathed.
He shook his head. His lips pressed into a tight line and his breathing was labored, but his hands were steady as he pulled his cell phone out of a coat pocket. "I think maybe we should call Cadman," he said faintly.
-cont'd in chapter two-