Chapter 2
Carnivorous Deer
“HOW’D THE new guy settle in last night?
” Harding asked as Gideon poured his coffee.
The coffee station at the SCTF was pretty swank.
No cappuccino machine, but a choice of creamers, flavors, a French press, and hand grinders—caffeine was the blood in their veins, and Harding made sure it ran sweet and true while Gideon helped by finding the super fancy stuff.
Not necessarily sugar, but the choice imported beans, the richest creamers, syrups instead of plain white granules—although there were plenty of those.
And the coffee cups had become a tradition.
Only Harding and Gideon would know this.
For a short time, during a dangerous joint task force deployment in covert ops, Harding had been Gideon’s CO.
They’d been far away, in the Afghani desert, living in a big tent with the other ten guys from their unit.
Harding had provided them with a coffee station then too; nobody knew how he’d done it.
Coffee and books—their unit had them when nobody else did.
There were even (oh dear God!) cookies. Oreos and E.L. Fudge.
Gideon, one day when the boredom of “hurry up and wait” had been killing him, had asked his stepmom, Trish, if she could ship coffee mugs to the middle of the goddamned desert.
He could never explain how he’d gotten the idea, but something about the depersonalization of the OD green and desert camo had worn on him worse than the heat.
He listened to the men’s conversations, their music, their discussion of books, their families.
They were individuals, even Harding, who kept the best stone face on that Gideon had ever seen.
But still… Gideon had caught him laughing at jokes somebody texted him every morning.
He’d seen him read every book in the lending library, and he and Gideon had discussed some of them at length.
They both enjoyed political thrillers, because—as they both said often—nothing in the books was as scary as what they knew about real politics.
And on a daily basis, they donned native clothing and slipped into the desert to do dangerous things, and if they got killed doing them, nobody would ever know who they were, what they’d done, or what sort of men had died protecting their country.
He felt like they needed something to say “an individual was here.”
His stepmom—sweet woman from whom he’d never asked a thing until that moment—had asked for specifics and had come through.
He would never forget the day the case had arrived. Each cup had been wrapped with exquisite care, and the coffee cups were the sturdiest she could buy. There was a funny cartoon or inscription to match each man in the unit but no names.
They spent the day playing “match the coffee cup” and setting up the box they’d come in to hold them between uses. It was a wooden crate, and there was a hope the cups would sustain the periodic shelling that happened in their area.
Two weeks later, they’d gone out on a mission and had come back short one man. Garfield Molloy had died in Chadwick’s arms while Harding tried to bandage together what was left of his chest, and they were both hollow eyed and empty as they walked into their tent.
Then Harding saw the coffee cup, and for the first time in their yearlong deployment, Chadwick saw fury cross his features.
He strode up to the coffee station, picked up the cup and stared at it, jaw working, and for a moment, Chadwick thought he’d shatter it on the hardpacked dirt beneath their feet.
He hadn’t, though. After a moment, his face had relaxed a little, and he’d allowed profound sorrow to cross his craggy features.
He held up the cup. It featured the orange cat from the comics, standing on the scale in bewilderment, accusing it of lying. While whippet lean, their Garfield had often contested facts like that. ”Naw, it can’t be this cold in the desert. The thermometer must be lying.”
“To Garfield,” he’d said softly.
“To Garfield,” the rest of the men said. Very carefully he set the cup down in the wooden crate, and it wasn’t taken out again.
They lost three more men before that mission was complete. Before the remaining eight men shipped home, they sat outside on camp chairs around a bonfire that they’d earned by making the area safe from insurgents and toasted their friends with their coffee cups—but this time filled with wine.
After the last toast, they hurled the cups at the rock they’d camped behind, one after another, the fragments and dust mingling, because they all knew that their friends were not the only parts of themselves they’d leave in the desert.
Harding and Chadwick had gone their separate ways then.
Harding retired from the Marines and joined the FBI for five years, while Chadwick had finished his stint and gone on to earn the post-graduate degrees he’d contemplated before he’d signed up, and that done to join the BAU.
When Harding secured the funding to start the first branch of the Special Crimes Task Force, designed to piggyback off the FBI’s infrastructure but answerable to and run by Harding himself, Chadwick had been the second person he tagged after his own partner in the FBI, Natalia Denison.
Between the three of them and their previous experience, they’d brought in computer genius Kylie Grant and—fresh out of FLETC—former NCIS officer Gail Pearson.
And with the acknowledgment it was only until they could recruit two or three more officers, a slight, gentle-looking man named Harman Blodgett, who had worked for the FBI as a consultant—Gideon had used his services on occasion—and whose day job of all things was as an ER doctor.
And who, Chadwick had quietly deduced, had been Harding’s romantic partner for at least three closeted years.
Nobody said anything about it, although Natalia was very open about her wife and two children, one of whom had been born right before she’d accepted Harding’s invitation to this very new experiment.
The five of them had spent some time scouring reports of various stars of the ATF, FBI, and NCIS corps, searching for an indefinable something that would make somebody want to put their career on almost permanent hold to come work for a unit that was designed to protect the victims more than it was designed to make spectacular busts.
In the meantime, Harman Blodgett and Clint Harding had been called in to help a Chicago flatfoot who thought he had a serial killer on his hands and who couldn’t get a single goddamned person in his department willing to help him hunt the guy down.
After Crosby had brought the guy in single-handedly, his department had turned on him and had set him up to either be as corrupt as they were or to die, along with his bleed-blue parents.
Crosby had rejected that scenario too, but he’d needed a hand out of the windy city if he was going to survive.
And Chadwick had gotten word from a colonel who’d taken some of his criminology classes about a Green Beret who had defied orders to protect a village and like Crosby had practically earned a death sentence from his former colleagues for doing the right thing.
Harman Blodgett’s last day had been the day Joey Carlyle had enrolled in FLETC. Crosby arrived from his own training the day after.
Harding said the unit still needed three to five more people, but they had enough, and enough of them were highly trained and super intuitive enough to make do until then.
But Chadwick had taken a personal interest in making sure their new recruits landed.
It was like those goddamned coffee mugs in the desert; sometimes simple kindness, simple smiles, simple acknowledgments of human beings under the uniforms and the orders, could make the difference between somebody coming back from an op or never coming home.
And knowing that if you didn’t come home, your brothers would remember you.
Harding hadn’t commented on the assortment of mugs that Chadwick brought in.
He’d just taken his “Don’t make me talk about my feelings” mug and given Chadwick a nod.
Natalia had spotted her “Goddess who smites” mug—complete with a lightning strike and pentagram—immediately.
Kylie—who had recently become engaged at the time—smirked at the “Here comes the bride” cup with a sardonic twist of her full lips, and Gail had cackled at the cartoon cat holding the knife.
Gail’s docket contained very classified details about Gail’s work in covert ops. She was disturbingly good with knives.
Harman had taken his mug with the teddy bear in scrubs with a stethoscope with a raised eyebrow at Chadwick, who had winked.
One of Chadwick’s clues to Harm’s and Harding’s relationship was that he’d heard Harding use the word Barchen to refer to Harm under his breath.
It meant “bear” and had obviously been an endearment.
Gideon had wanted Harm to know that the secret was safe with him.
So now he had two recruits to buy coffee cups for. It was actually not a bad task; it forced him to connect with people, to study them, not just as a subject as he had in the BAU, but as a friend.
He and Harding had doubts that Crosby would be there that long.
The kid was good. He’d tracked down a serial offender on his own using personal intuition, street smarts, and a sort of dogged integrity that had also gotten him kicked off the Chicago force and almost killed for reporting a very unrighteous shoot by his racist partner. But he was also… well, sweet.
Gideon hadn’t wanted to say anything, but he’d seen the open admission in Crosby’s face that he wouldn’t have even dreamed about a unit like the SCTF, much less thought about applying.
This kid had been born and almost died thinking Chicago flatfoot was the be-all and end-all of his existence, and frankly, Harding’s little experiment needed people to dream bigger than that.