Her eyes snapped back to him and narrowed. “The Boss told you about that, too?”
“The bruises tole me that,” he retorted, “and the fact that your right hand is swollen to the size of a balloon. I’m guessing you pulled a gun on him, and he disarmed you.”
She turned away from him and started inside. Michael followed her, Turk in between them, his exuberance subdued at the tension between his two favorite humans.
“Ellie told me about what happened,” Michael said after a moment.
Faith frowned and didn’t reply.
“We gonna talk about it?”
She sighed. “Do we have to?”
“Yeah, kinda,” he insisted, “you followed her out of state, confronted her and accused her of being a serial killer. All without talking to me, before or after. If I’m being honest, Faith, the only reason we’re not shouting at each other right now is that we have to work together on this case.”
“If you want to hate me,” Faith replied curtly, “you’ll have to get in line.”
He grabbed her shoulder and turned her toward him. He wasn’t forceful, but the movement still jarred Faith. She batted his hand away and snapped, “Back off.”
He blinked and took a step back, but his eyes remained hard. "We're going to talk about this, Faith. You threatened my fiancé.”
“I didn’t threaten her,” Faith protested. “I just asked her a few questions.”
“Bullshit.”
Turk barked, and the two agents turned to see airport security approaching, attracted by the noise of the argument. Faith lifted a hand in acknowledgment and when airport security reached them, she said, "It's fine. We're just having a friendly disagreement."
“Didn’t sound friendly,” the older of the two security guards observed.
“We’ll save it for later,” Michael replied. “Sorry to disturb you.”
The guards looked back and forth between the two agents and decided it wasn’t worth any more of their time. “Safe travels, folks,” the older guard offered.
Michael turned to Faith, his jaw clenched his shoulders tense. Faith waited for him to resume the argument, but he gestured past her and said, “After you, Special Agent.”
Faith was so used to being hurt at this point that she barely noticed the stab of pain that shot through her chest.
***
The shelter looked like something straight out of a horror movie. The massive concrete doors looked like they belonged on a fallout bunker and not a simple storm shelter. A musty smell wafted from a three-foot-wide crack in the doors, and Faith suppressed a bout of nausea.
"Jesus," Michael said. "Just once, I'd like to visit a normal crime scene without all of the wacko bullshit.”
“Philadelphia PD is hiring,” Faith offered drily.
Even Turk seemed disconcerted. He walked around the front of the door, alternating between sniffing around for clues and shaking his head irritably.
Sergeant Brandon Forster, the Iowa State Patrol officer who met them at the airport and drove them the two hours from Des Moines to the crime scene, was more stoic. He walked straight for the opened door and beckoned for the agents to follow.
He switched on his light, allowing Faith to see a far smaller than expected foyer about eight feet tall by six feet wide by seven feet deep. At the end of the foyer was a second door, this one a far more reasonable size but still of heavy-duty steel construction that reminded Faith of the prison cells she’d seen at ADX Florence when she toured the facility with her class at Quantico.
“What were they hiding from down here?” Michael asked.
“We get some pretty bad storms here,” Brandon replied in a thick Midwest drawl. “Twisters, hail, lightning.”
“Do those storms fire cruise missiles at people?” Michael asked.
Brandon chuckled. “Well, nowadays people just hide out in their basements, but back in the fifties and sixties a lot of people were worried about a nuclear war with the Soviets, so they built these bunkers in case. They registered them as storm shelters because if they called them fallout shelters, they’d have to register with the government, and well, you can imagine how well the idea of government interference plays with people here.”
