Chapter 6 Chapter 6

I stopped walking. Some…not all. For all I knew, whoever was texting me was paranoid, lying, or sitting somewhere laughing because I'd swallowed every breadcrumb they'd dropped in front of me without stopping long enough to ask why they were feeding them to me in the first place. Anonymous sources weren't automatically trustworthy because they knew something interesting.

People lied, and people had agendas, and sometimes they gave you ninety percent of the truth because the missing ten percent was the part they didn't want you looking at. I'd learned that lesson the expensive way.

Lowering my gaze toward the recorder in my hand, I turned it over without pressing anything. So what the hell do you want from me?

If they wanted publicity, they could have sent the recording to any news station in Fort Myers, and if they wanted law enforcement involved, they could have walked into a station and handed it over. They hadn't. Instead, they'd found me. Not the studio or the podcast…me. And standing there with my name written across an envelope, an anonymous stranger on my phone, and a recorder in my hand that apparently contained something they wanted me to hear, I couldn't shake the question that followed. Why?

My gaze shifted toward the booth, where months of notes from my investigation sat beside my computer. Owen's name had already crossed my desk before tonight. Maybe that was why. Or maybe somebody wanted me to believe it was.

Returning to the booth, I closed the door behind me and placed the envelope on an empty section of my desk before lowering myself into the chair.

The recorder wasn't anything special. It was small, black, and the kind of thing somebody could've bought almost anywhere.

I turned it over again. Nothing except those three words.

NOT THE FIRST

My phone sat beside the Fruity Pebbles, and when I picked it up, there were no new messages waiting for me, so I typed.

What is on this?

The message went through, but no dots appeared and I muttered, "Now you don't want to talk?" at the same time setting my phone beside the cereal box.

Another few seconds passed, but the anonymous pain in my ass remained silent. I found my gaze once again drawn to the recorder. Every reasonable part of my brain told me to stop, photograph it, bag it and call someone instead of pressing buttons on mystery devices delivered by strangers who knew where I worked. Unfortunately, curiosity had never shown much respect for the reasonable part of my brain.

My thumb settled over the button and I pressed play. For several seconds, nothing came through the tiny speaker except a faint hiss, then a man's frightened voice broke through it.

"I saw them change," he whispered, his words barely carrying over his rough breathing.

My fingers tightened around the recorder. This voice sounded different from Owen's. At least, I thought it did.

The recording I'd received by email had been filled with wind, running, screaming and enough fear to make it difficult to tell much about the man beyond the fact that he'd been terrified. This man wasn't running, he sounded like he was hiding.

I leaned closer as something faint moved beneath his breathing. Water, maybe? Insects? I couldn't tell.

"They weren't animals," he continued, his voice shaking.

I went completely still. What weren't animals? The things chasing Owen? The thing breathing near whatever Owen had dropped?

My fingers tightened as I brought the recorder closer. Several seconds passed before the man sucked in another shaky breath, and a faint scrape moved through the background, then his voice dropped even lower.

"They were men," he whispered.

The recorder clicked off and silence filled the booth. I stared down at it while the words settled somewhere my brain didn't particularly want them.

They were men.

My gaze slowly shifted toward the computer.

Four feet hitting the ground. A growl. Something breathing over Owen's dropped recorder. Then a man's voice telling it to leave it. Now this; I saw them change.

"No," I whispered, shaking my head as I set the recorder on the desk. There were reasonable explanations. There had to be. Maybe the man had seen people wearing something.

Masks. Costumes. Maybe both recordings had been altered.

Hell, maybe somebody had spent an impressive amount of time putting together an elaborate attempt to screw with me. People didn't change into animals. That wasn't a thing.

Florida had certainly produced enough headlines over the years to make the rest of the country wonder whether something had gone terribly wrong down here, but shape-shifting murder wolves seemed excessive even for us.

I picked the recorder back up, setting it down for three seconds hadn't solved anything.

The man's words played through my head again. I saw them change. Not I saw the animals. Not I saw what attacked him. Them.

My gaze drifted toward the open box of Fruity Pebbles beside my phone, and for once, I didn't want another handful. That might have been the most alarming development of the night.

I looked at my phone again. Still nothing.

"You're a real pain in my ass, you know that?" I muttered, staring at the unanswered message.

Whoever was on the other end continued ignoring me.

Leaning back in my chair, I tried to find an explanation that didn't require me to reconsider everything I'd believed about the natural world for the last twenty-seven years. The man could have been terrified enough to misunderstand what he'd seen. Fear did strange things to people, and darkness didn't help, neither did distance or shock.

There were a dozen explanations that didn't involve men turning into animals, and I wanted one of them badly enough that I would've happily accepted something embarrassingly simple.The problem  was the first recording. Maybe I didn't know exactly what had chased Owen, but I knew what I'd heard. Four feet. Not two.

Whatever had followed him hadn't sounded human. Yet whatever happened after Owen stopped screaming had involved at least one human voice.

My thumb rubbed slowly across the side of the recorder. They were men.

A quiet tapping sound came from somewhere outside the booth and my head snapped up and my hand closed around the flashlight as I stood, keeping my gaze fixed on the dark room beyond the glass.

Another tap sounded and my pulse hammered against my throat as I peered toward the cubicles. Nothing moved or shifted between the cubicles, and nobody stood near the outer door. About to dismiss it as nothing, the sound came again, and my gaze finally caught the movement near the front window.

A rush of laughter let loose from my lips as I  took in the loose cord of a blind that tapped softly against the glass each time the air conditioner pushed through the room.

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