Part 2 (1/2)
”I have an idea,” said Adam slowly. ”About that task you had for me-”
”I'm not sending him to deal with the FBI,” said Bran, appalled. ”Even before...this, Charles would not be the right person to send.”
”He's not a people person,” agreed Adam, sounding amused. ”I imagine the last year and more hasn't helped that any. No. Send Anna. Those FBI agents won't know what hit them-and with Anna as a cus.h.i.+on, Charles may actually do them some good. Send them in to help as well as consult. One of us can tell the cops a lot about a crime scene that forensics can't. Give Charles something to do where he can be the good guy instead of the executioner.”
Let him be a hero, thought Bran, his eyes on the Ivanhoe in his bookshelf as he hung up the phone. Asil had been right to point out that there was nothing wrong with a little bit of romance to cus.h.i.+on the harsh realities of life. Adam might have given him the Band-Aid he needed to help his youngest son. He devoutly hoped so.
CHAPTER 2.
Special Agent Leslie Fisher stared out of the window that looked out over downtown Boston. From her vantage point she had a lovely, veryearly-morning view. Traffic was still light, and though it would get a lot heavier as people came to work, lack of parking kept the streets from being as crazy as Los Angeles, the last place she'd been a.s.signed. In the FBI, she got to move every few years whether she wanted to or not, but she'd always thought of Boston as home.
The hotel was old and expensively elegant. Tasteful, striped, satiny paper covered the walls of the meeting room in authentic Victorian style. The smallish room was dominated by the large mahogany table with padded chairs that looked more like they belonged in a dining room than a boardroom. It was a hotel, though, no matter how well decorated, and it lacked even the hint of personalization that managed to break through the government drab in her own office cubicle.
She was here to meet a consultant. Though there was the occasional perfectly innocent computer geek or accountant, in her experience, consultants were quite often bad guys who had made deals so that the good guys could catch bigger bad guys: rewarding the smaller evil so that the big monsters got stopped.
Five people dead in the last month: an old woman, two tourists, a businessman, and an eight-year-old boy. A serial killer was hunting. She'd seen the boy's body, and to catch his killer, she'd have met with Satan himself.
In her time in the FBI, she'd dealt with former drug dealers, an a.s.sa.s.sin already serving a life sentence in jail, and any number of politicians (some of whom should have been serving life sentences in jail). Once, she'd even consulted a self-proclaimed witch. In retrospect, Leslie hadn't been nearly as afraid of the witch as she should have been.
Today she was talking to werewolves. To her knowledge, she'd never met a werewolf before, so it should be interesting.
She considered the table they'd all be sitting around. The FBI offices or a police station would have given her side the home advantage-her side being those who fought for law and order. Meeting with people on their own turf, in their offices or homes, lost her that advantage, but sometimes she'd used it to get information she wouldn't have gotten if the people she was interviewing hadn't felt comfortable and safe. Prisons, oddly enough, gave the home-court advantage to the prisoner, especially if she brought a nervous greenie along with her.
Hotels were neutral territory-which was why they were meeting here instead of the office.
”Why me?” she'd asked her boss yesterday when he told her she was going alone. ”I thought the whole team was going to talk to him?”
Nick Salvador had grimaced and stretched his large self uncomfortably behind his desk-a s.p.a.ce where he spent as little time as possible. He preferred being in the field. ”FUBAR ahead,” he said, which was his code for politics. When Leslie had come into the Boston office, the previous person who'd had her desk had taped a list of Nick-speak to the bottom of her drawer with a note that said he'd had it faxed from Denver, where Nick had last been posted. There was a full page of swearwords, and ”FUBAR ahead” had been first on the list. It wasn't that Nick couldn't dance gracefully with the powers that be if necessary; it was that he didn't like doing it.
”I put in the request and word was we were going to talk to Adam Hauptman. He's done a lot of consults-been guest speaker at Quantico a couple of times. Thought we could get information to help us with the case and pick up a bit besides.” He twisted his chair around and his knee hit the canvas side of one of his go-bags. He had a number of them stashed around his office. Leslie had three herself-each packed for different jobs. Hers were color-coded; Nick's were numbered. Which made sense-there were more numbers than guy colors (his bags were khaki, khaki, and that other khaki) and he needed more go-bags than she did because his job was broader reaching. She didn't have to keep a suit on hand, for instance, because she was unlikely to get called upon for television interviews or congressional hearings.
”Hauptman has a good rep,” Leslie said. ”I have a friend who sat in on one of his lectures, said it was informative and pretty entertaining. So what happened to that plan?”
”Got a call yesterday morning. Hauptman's not available-you remember that monster they found in the Columbia River last month? Turns out it was Hauptman and his wife who killed it, mostly his wife-that's for our information only.” Not cla.s.sified, but not to be advertised, either. ”She apparently got busted up pretty badly and he can't fly out. Hauptman found us a replacement, someone higher up. But no more than five people can come to the meet-and we have to hold it in neutral territory. No name, no further official information.” He pursed his mouth unhappily.
Nick Salvador could play poker with the best of them, but with people he trusted, every last thing he thought bloomed on his face. Leslie liked that, liked working with him because he was smart-and never, ever treated her like the token black female.
”That's not FUBAR,” she said.
”FUBAR is hearing that the werewolf consultant is 'higher up'-makes it all sorts of interesting to a lot of people other than the FBI,” he said.
”Hauptman is Alpha of some pack in Was.h.i.+ngton, right?” Leslie pursed her lips. ”I didn't know there was a higher-up than an Alpha.”
”Neither did anyone else,” agreed Nick. ”I don't know what the deal is, but I've been informed that two Trippers are coming to the party.”
Trippers, in Nick-speak, were agents from CNTRP. The acronym stood for Combined Nonhuman and Transhuman Relations Provisors, the new agency formed specifically to deal with the various preternaturals. They p.r.o.nounced it ”Cantrip.” Nick called them Trippers because whenever they involved themselves in an investigation he was in, he tripped all over them.
”They wanted to send two Homeland Security agents, too, but I put my foot down.” Nick scowled at the phone as if it were to blame for annoying him. ”Special Agent Craig Goldstein, who was involved in three earlier cases with this same killer, finished the most urgent of his cases and so is breaking loose from Tennessee to come help us.” She'd never met Goldstein, but knew that Nick had, and that he liked him-which was enough of a recommendation for her. ”I want him to talk to our werewolf. I wanted two of my agents in there with him-but I got outvoted. Two Trippers, one Homeland Security agent”-his voice dropped coldly-”who has no business whatsoever in this case. And Craig and you.”
”Why me?” she asked. ”Len could go. That way you could include the police.” Len was the local Boston PD officer who worked on their task force. ”Or Christine-she's done a few more serial murder cases than I have.”
Nick sat back and stilled, pulling all his energy in the way he did when they got a good lead on someone they'd been looking for. ”A friend of mine called me and gave me a heads-up. He knows Hauptman-more importantly, Hauptman knows he is a friend of mine. Hauptman called him to give me some more background.”
Leslie's eyebrows went up. ”Interesting.”
”Isn't it?” Nick smiled. ”My friend told me that Hauptman said I might want to be careful who I sent. Someone low-key, good with body language, and absolutely not aggressive.”
He looked at her and she nodded. ”Not Len, not Christine.” Len was smart, but hardly low-key, and Christine had a compet.i.tive streak a mile wide. Leslie could hold her own, but she didn't need to rub people's noses in it.
”That lets me out, too,” Nick admitted. ”Angel and you are probably the best fit, and Angel is just a little too green to send out on his own against the bad guys just yet.” Angel was fresh out of Quantico.
”I'll take good notes,” she promised.
”Do that,” Nick said. His fingers were doing the little impatient dance they did when he was thinking among friends-like he was conducting invisible music.
Leslie waited, but he didn't say anything.
”So why are we making this extra effort to get along with the werewolf?” she asked.
Nick smiled. ”My friend told me that Hauptman said that the people we'd be meeting might be persuaded to give us a little more concrete help if the person we sent was someone they felt they could trust.”
”People?” Leslie leaned forward. ”There's more than one?”
”Hauptman said 'people.' That didn't come through official channels so I saw no reason to pa.s.s it on.”
Nick was very good at cooperating. Cooperation solved crimes, put the bad guys behind bars. Cooperation was the new byword-and it worked. However, put Nick's back up, and cooperation might mean something...a little less cooperative. He might disparage the Trippers in private, but it didn't hinder him at all in the field. Homeland Security, on the other hand, tended to set his back up rather more forcibly because they liked to forget that the FBI had jurisdiction on all terrorist activity on US soil. Nick reminded them of that whenever necessary and with great pleasure.
”I would very much appreciate,” Nick said, ”if we could use our consultant or consultants in the field.”
”It would be interesting to see what a werewolf could do at a crime scene,” Leslie said, considering it. From what little she knew about werewolves, it might be like having a bloodhound who could talk-instant forensics.
Nick showed his even white teeth in a heartfelt grimace. ”I don't ever want to see another waterlogged child's body with a livestock tag in his ear. If a werewolf might make a difference, get them on board, please.”
”On it.”
LESLIE PUT HER hands flat on the hotel conference table. Her nails were short, manicured, and polished with a clear coat that matched the sheen of the wood she claimed under her hands. Territorial rights were important. She had a degree in psychology and another in anthropology, but she'd understood it since Miss Nellie Michaelson had gone puppy-hunting in Mrs. Cullinan's backyard.
She'd come early because that was a way to turn neutral territory into hers. It was one of the things that made her a good agent-she paid attention to the details, details like gaining the home-court advantage when dealing with monsters-especially ones with big, sharp teeth.
She'd done a boatload of studying since Nick dropped this on her yesterday.
Werewolves were supposed to be poor, downtrodden victims of a disease, people who used the abilities their misfortune granted them to help others. David Christiansen, the first person to admit to being a werewolf, was a specialist in extracting terrorist hostages. She was sure that his being incredibly photogenic had not been an accident. Leslie's oldest daughter had a poster up on her bedroom door of that famous photo of David holding the child he'd rescued. Other wolves who had admitted what they were tended to be firemen, policemen, and military: the good guys one and all.
She could have smelled the spin-doctoring from orbit. Spin-doctoring wasn't lying, not precisely. David Christiansen's little group of mercenaries had a very good reputation among the people Leslie had talked to. They got the job done with minimal casualties on all sides and they were good at what they did. They didn't take jobs from the bad guys. Because of that, Leslie was keeping an open mind-but because she was naturally cautious, she also was keeping a pair of silver bullets (hastily purchased) loaded in her carry gun.
The door opened behind her and she turned to see a young woman enter the room who looked like she should still be going to high school. Leslie felt that way all too often when she met the new recruits fresh from Quantico. The girl's light reddish brown hair was braided severely in an attempt to make her look older, but the effect wasn't enough to offset the freckles that burst across her pale cheeks or the innocent honey brown eyes.