Wild Card (46 page)

“I know we have to be careful, but you can’t blame me for wanting more, honey.” She sighed in frustration. “It’s just you’re so damned…strong. I’ve never met a less needy person.”

“Huh?” I frowned.

“You like Manassah?” she said, holding her hands up to take in everything. “Clean and spacious. Comfortable beds, big, hot baths. Yes?”

“Of course, yes.”

“But you can live out the back of your car. Hell, you can live in the mountains. You can sleep in a cave and scrub up in glacier runoff. You can make your own fires out of pine cones and patience. And food. You like Carmen’s cooking, but I bet you can live off bugs that you find under the bark of dead trees. You don’t
need
any of this.”

Yeah. I could do that, all of it. I guessed it was my fault for telling her about the survival courses that Ops 4-10 had put us through. But I still wasn’t getting what she was driving at.

“You don’t need any of it,” she repeated. “But there’s one thing you will need. Blood.”

“But it’s not like that—”

“I know. Really, I know. I’m being stupid, but gods, the kick I get from thinking you’ll actually need something from me.” She laughed and wiped a tear away. “Talk about my self-confidence taking a hit.”

I pulled her around until she and I were curled up together like puppies.

“Me too,” I said. “Because I do need you, even without the Blood.”

Our eukori tangled.

“Like I need air,” I whispered, and we both felt the rush of warmth through our bodies.

She kissed my neck. “Your Athanate happy-time pheromones are kicking in.”

I smiled. “I wonder why.” I leaned back and looked down at her. “You’re not scared about being bitten at all?”

“Believe me, I’ve become an expert. I’ve talked to Irene and the twins, and Mykayla as well, just after Bian fed from her. Scared, hell, no. Can’t wait.”

“You don’t feel that’s strange at all?” I said. “Not that it’s something I’ve done with some kind of mind voodoo?”

She snorted. “You persuading me to change? Ha! Boot’s on the other foot.”

“What?”

“Thanks to Pia, I’ve also become something of an expert on what you’ve been going through in crusis. It’s like a half-controlled mental breakdown. And while you were in this vulnerable state, you fell into my evil clutches. Mwa ha ha ha. I took advantage of you. I changed you. I’m the one who’s done the voodoo.”

“Ridiculous.” I tried not to laugh.

“Only as ridiculous as you claiming you’ve done something to me. We both want things we might never have thought we wanted before we met.”

“Hmm.” I happily lost myself in her blue, blue eyes.

And David came in. “There you are. You wanted to see the analysis of the New York operation as soon as I was done.”

Jen squeezed her eyes tight shut and clenched her jaw.

“Yes,” she ground out.

“Boy wonder,” I murmured.

“Boy blunder,” she hissed and got up.

“Oh, and they taste like shit,” I said.

“Huh?” She frowned.

“The bugs you find under the bark of dead trees. They taste like shit.”

She laughed, tossing her golden hair back and trailing fingers over my cheek.

“I’ll be back,” she said, her eyes heavy with promise as she followed David out the door, passing Melissa and Tullah coming in.

“Did we disturb you?” Tullah said, eyes wide and innocent.

“Yes, I am disturbed. What?”

They sat down.

“We thought you’d want an update on today’s searches,” Melissa said.

“I do.” I took a sip of my rum, and put my professional face on.

“Right.” Tullah arranged the files in front of her. “Matt managed to get regional downloads from the national criminal databases, including recent searches based in Colorado.”

I shuddered. Hacking the FBI. I didn’t want to know how. “I hope this was well disguised.”

“Yeah. The advantage should be there are no triggers on the servers that will tell Griffith who we’re looking at or why. If he knows anything, it’ll just be that there’s been a leak of data.”

That was one way of describing it.

“And it’s just
full
of interesting hits,” Melissa said. She picked up a printout and passed it to me. “We were talking about the rogue having access to a place in Denver registered to a different name. Well, one of the searches Griffith’s team has been doing is to find ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“People who have standard data on them, then nothing, or minimal data. Exactly the sort of search that threw your name up as an anomaly. You had plenty of data until you left school, then you joined the army and there’s effectively no data on you for ten years.” She wriggled with pleasure. “It’s a fascinating search. It has all the missing women on my potential victim list, for example. Now, I put in some new filters on the list from stuff Matt was able to find. Home ownership in Denver, with the home still registered and taxes paid. No record of the house being rented out. No record of other people claiming to live at the house. Surprisingly large number of people.”

“And then,” Tullah interrupted. “We linked that with a list of houses that are known to have basements. After what Jo said about noise.”

“Must still be a lot of matches,” I said.

“No. There aren’t many basements in Denver because of the soil type.”

“And then the final filter I put on was for ease of access,” Melissa said.

“How’d you mean?”

“Gated communities, for instance.” Melissa handed over a single sheet of paper with about thirty addresses on it. “Obviously there are some huge assumptions in all of this, but we thought you’d want to treat these as a priority list for a check.”

“I do.” I passed my eyes over the list, but nothing leaped out. “So, you’re saying the original owner of one of these houses may be a victim of the rogue. They’ve gone missing, but no one’s followed up. The rogue has killed them and is using the ghost house, making sure bills are being paid and so on.”

They nodded.

“Okay, I’ll get them checked.” I’d done enough PI work to know the first ideas usually came up blank, but I got a tingle from this. It felt right somehow. “What else?”

Melissa’s glanced at Tullah and sat back.

Interesting.

“We cross-checked everyone on the pack list with everything we could think of about the victims and potential victims.” Tullah nervously tidied the file in front of her. “There aren’t that many, but there are a lot considering that it should be a random selection.”

“And they are?”

She cleared her throat. “Alex, for one.”

I laughed. “Not the rogue, but what did you find?”

“Alex’s company does deliveries to a lot of the hostels many of these people passed through. And Barbara Green did some casual work for the company last summer.”

“Okay, it’s something. But he’s not the rogue. Neither is Ricky, nor Olivia. They were with me the night my clothes were stolen, remember?”

Melissa shifted her position. “Just as a theory, there could be two of them.”

“You were telling me that one is statistically very unlikely, so two would be even more.”

Tullah and Melissa glanced at each other and Tullah moved to the next sheet of paper.

Of course, Alex had left the restaurant for a short while that evening, saying he had to make a business call. Enough time to get to my car. But if my kin were the rogue, my world was going to come crashing down around me. I couldn’t believe it.

“Larimer is a trustee for one of the charities that runs some of the hostels.”

I nodded.

“Silas Falkner and Kyle Larsen live close to a couple of the hostels. They both do volunteer work in the area; the sort of work that would bring them into contact with these people.”

I grunted. I didn’t know Larsen. Silas, well—he seemed all too obvious as a candidate. But that was the rogue all over—hiding in plain sight.

“Ursula Tennyson.”

“What about her?”

“She’s a veterinarian, and she may have attended livestock for six of the missing women. Four of them kept horses for their own riding and another two had dude ranches. All six used Tennyson’s business at some time. Now the business employs a couple of contract veterinarians, so it’s not definite, but it’s possible she met all six.” Tullah handed me a file for Ursula with details of the six women, including copies of their photos.

A female rogue? Ricky and Alex had said there wasn’t any gender bias in rogues.

“I’ll ask her and see what response I get.”

“She also has a criminal record,” Melissa said. “She beat some guy senseless in a bar.”

I looked at the sheet they’d printed. The details were scant and I could think of all sorts of good reasons for hitting guys in bars, but I’d check that as well.

Tullah handed me the last file. “The rest. Anyone with any criminal record. A scatter of assault, solicitation, DUI, minor misdemeanors.”

I raised my brows. They’d turned up a lot of possibilities in a short time.

I was about to get myself another rum when the TacNet squawked.

“Charlie, this is V2. Sighting at trailer park. Looks like five of them. Need to wrap this up.”

“V2, hold off, I say again, hold off.”

One missing?

I grabbed the files, my gun and my jacket, and ran to the car.

Chapter 47

Inside the trailer, it was a like a scene from hell, side-lit with a single weak bulb.

The Matlal Were had been cornered inside and overwhelmed. Their bodies were hardly recognizable. They’d been big men, but the sheer ferocity of the attack and the choking weight of death seemed to have crushed them down into disconnected bags of torn meat and broken bone. The walls of the trailer were sprayed with arterial blood. The stench was gut-turning.

One had tried escaping through the window. His body had been dumped with the rest and cardboard was hastily taped over the hole. The trailer was at the back of the lot. There was a neighboring trailer occupied and a couple who’d got curious were being held in there.

It was an absolute disaster.

And both Gray and Verano were here, their argument about to go supersonic.

They both outweighed me, but there was no time to think. I charged in between them. The cramped quarters gave me a small advantage. Verano fell back over a broken table, sprawling into the ruins.

Before he could get up or his team could respond, Ursula shouldered her way in, tipping the balance my way. I hoped.

I grabbed Gray’s jacket.

“There’s nothing you can do here. Get out.”

The anger flaring in his eyes died down. I did the only thing I could think of and pulled out the list of ghost houses.

“These are top priority. I want them checked tonight for any sign of a marque or any suspicious activity. Go.”

He hadn’t helped here, but this carnage was caused by Verano’s team.

Their leader was picking himself out of the wreckage of the table.

I helped him up by grabbing his jacket and lifting.

“What the hell did you think you were doing? I said to hold off.”

Behind me I felt his pack edging forward, but I wasn’t go to achieve anything by backing down now. Verano’s eyes were still that icy green, but flecked with orange and yellow. I guessed another minute and he and Gray would have fought. What was wrong with them? Couldn’t they see beyond the fallout we already had to deal with?

“They were going to go back out. We might have lost them. Why are you and Gray,” he spat the name, “so bothered?”

“It’s not up to you to wonder why. You’re hired to do exactly as I told you, nothing more. I told you to hold off.”

“They shifted. We had to.”

“They shifted because you came swarming in here. What did you expect them to do?”

He didn’t have an answer to that. His team had come in spoiling for a fight, otherwise they’d never have shucked and shifted quickly enough. And he was smart enough to know I knew that.

I was gambling on him being more interested in keeping his livelihood than playing dominance games with me. As far as he knew, I represented the only Athanate client in the whole of North America. He didn’t dare fight me.

I won. I could see it in his body position.

“Get out,” I said. “Get back to patrol and do not, I repeat, do not engage. You’re there to find and report.”

His head ducked a fraction. Stiff-necked bastard.

I let him gather his team and move.

“Is there someone from your team in the next trailer?” I asked Ursula.

She nodded. “Clean-up crew’s coming too.”

“Not going to be good enough,” I muttered and dug my cell out.

I left the trailer. I preferred the bitter cold to the smell inside.

“Bian?”

“Round-eye. What’s up?” She could tell something was happening just from my voice. I really was barely holding it together.

“Five of the Matlal Were have been killed at the trailer park. The pack’s clean-up crew are just about to get here, but there’s a problem.”

“Witnesses.” She got it immediately. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. Does you clean-up crew have someone who could handle a memory blanking?”

“Normally we would, but we’re running on empty here. Crap. I can’t even leave Haven. Amber, this is a bitch, but you’re going to have to bring them in.”

“For you?”

“Err…no. Naryn got back a few minutes ago.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Sorry, it’s going to be another reason for him to be pissed, but he’s the best we’ve got in the short term, and it’s much better to do it quickly.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I ended the call and turned to see Ursula directing the pack’s clean-up crew.

They drove unmarked green vans, and under the bulky parkas, they were wearing blue coveralls.

I walked up behind her. “Are these only used for clean-up?” I asked pointing at the vans.

She looked down at me. In the darkness, her face was unreadable. “No. Sometimes they use them to ship fertilizer. I’ve used them to transport animals. Everyone in the pack can use them. Even just as moving vans.”

“Who looks after them? Who books them in and out?”

“They move around. Mostly they’re parked at one of the factories. We need them, we just call around till we find them. We don’t keep sign-out sheets. We aren’t Athanate. Why all the questions?”