Wild Card (37 page)

A day’s rest had done a lot to restore him, but he still looked pale.

“How’s Vera?” I asked.

“Asleep again, but she seems fine.” He shook his head. “It’s incredible. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

I smiled, remembering my own astonishment at Jen’s recovery.

“We have you to thank as well,” he went on. “If you hadn’t got us out…”

I waved it off. “I’m sure I owed you my life a hundred times in 4-10.”

He snorted.

“Have you thought any more about working for the Altau?”

He and Vera weren’t safe while Petersen was still at large. The FBI was moving, and I was sure Ingram moved quicker than most, but it’d take too long. Haven would provide safety from Petersen and I was convinced there was a job there that he’d find worthwhile. And, in my opinion, Altau needed him.

“It’s a hell of a commitment,” he said. “I need to discuss it with Vera when she’s up and ready.”

He’d understood. Skylur needed a particular type of military strategist, and the colonel was the best there was. But Skylur needed security as well. The colonel couldn’t do this job for a few years and retire. Not with his memories intact, and erasing that level of memories would effectively destroy his mind.

“I spoke to Bian and Pia,” he said. “I understand Altau would expect us to be kin.” There was a blip in his pulse as he said that. He had the same reaction as José—an instinctive fear. I suspected it wasn’t the biting itself, but the fear of losing part of yourself, becoming a sort of slave. And he’d be worried about whose kin they were expected to be. I sympathized, but I guess I was coming at it from the other side.

“It’s a problem for you,” I said.

He nodded.

It felt wrong to try and persuade him, but without a trained private army to counter Basilikos, Altau were in trouble. Their security issues wouldn’t mean anything if they were overrun. They needed the colonel more than they needed him and Vera to be kin.

“I can’t take the decision for you, and you’ve talked to Athanate who know much more about it than I do.” I rocked on my heels, thinking. “The best I can do is to try and get you in front of Skylur without a commitment either way. But I think he’ll offer you a place to stay for a while regardless. That’s got to be worth it.”

I could taste the relief in him.

“I’ll go with what you say,” he said. “I owe you, after all.”

Julie came in, looking pleased.

“Just finished talking with Agent Ingram,” she said. “The Ops 4 base was closed down last night. Important thing—no casualties” She ran her fingers through her hair. “You were right about the planes. They’d been wired to blow up. Thank God you thought of it and Ingram managed to get everything grounded yesterday. The bad news is Ops 4-16 were gone and the records and backups were destroyed.”

The colonel smiled. I suspected the Nagas hadn’t found all the records.

“Just came out to tell you. I’ve got to get back on the phone,” Julie said. “Ingram’s letting me talk to Keith.”

She trotted off, leaving me with another worry. Would she stay when Keith got out?

The colonel went off to look in on Vera, and I went to the study to get my team working on the rogue case.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Jen was working in her study upstairs, so David joined us—Melissa, Tullah, Jofranka and me.

The study looked more like an incident room now, and that was what I was calling it. The maps of Denver had color-coded pins for the important case locations. The pinboards had photos and the whiteboards had lists. Every inch of the walls was covered.

I’d never been a detective, never done a briefing on a case like this. But I had been a team leader in Ops 4-10, and I’d gotten good at sensing my team’s state of mind. This team was fidgety and dismayed. The volume of data was daunting and none of it hung together—it all looked random.

“I’ve had my first hunch about this case,” I said. They all went still. I gave them the short version—the rogue was a sociopathic werewolf in the Denver pack, hiding in plain sight.

“Now that in itself doesn’t get us any closer. But what I want today is a brainstorm session,” I said. “There are no dumb suggestions. What I’m looking for is patterns in all this that we can match against information about the pack.”

No one wanted to go first, but I was expecting that and just leaped in.

“First off; no one’s ever reported seeing an abduction. What does that tell us?”

“That maybe they didn’t look like abductions?” Tullah said. “Like, the victims went willingly, without struggling. They trusted the person.”

“Or it looked like something normal, that people expect to see,” Jofranka said. “Like people just getting into a car. Or a couple of guys in coveralls carrying a box.”

“Or the witnesses don’t trust the police,” said Melissa.

Melissa took a pen and wrote ‘+/- trust’ and ‘regular behavior’ on a whiteboard.

“Where did the known victims come from?” I said.

“Refuges, trailer parks, cheap accommodation, SRO hotels,” Tullah said. “Some of them were living on the street. No indication of struggle ever found, so it’s likely they were killed elsewhere.”

“If we have three locations – abduction, murder and dump, then they must have been transported in a vehicle which didn’t attract any attention under different circumstances.” David went to the map with the location of the bodies.

If there was any pattern to be seen, it was simply that the dump sites were outside of Denver and were out of the way.

“People downtown getting into a taxi or a van wouldn’t be noticed,” David said. “But how would you get a van up here?” David pointed at one body location with no roads marked nearby.

“The killer could carry the body,” Tullah said.

David measured the distance from the nearest road. “Twenty minutes if you could go straight from the road. Say thirty minutes at a guess. Carrying a body? Too risky.”

“Pull up a satellite map on the computer,” suggested Melissa.

Tullah swung the screen around, zoomed in and flicked between the road map and the satellite image for the area. There was a trail visible, unmarked on the road map, to within about twenty yards of the body. Close enough for it to be quick to dump the body, far enough that it’d not be seen.

David peered at the satellite image. “Not a van. You’d need an SUV or an ATV to get up there.”

“ATV with a body strapped to the back? No. So, it could be an SUV of some kind that doesn’t attract attention downtown but is strong enough to get up a trail like that. Or two different vehicles, one for the abduction and one for the dump.”

“He’s fanatically careful about forensic evidence,” Melissa said. “Two vehicles is twice the risk.” She shrugged. “But there was a van at Wash Park, so somewhere there’s an SUV.”

“What about the murder site?” I said. “Are any of the body dumps also the murder site?”

“Possibly,” Melissa said. “These weren’t the best-investigated cases, and for most of them, a lot of time had passed before the bodies were found.”

It was frustrating. I understood the pressures on the PD, but just a few more hours spent on any of these murders at the time might provide the clue that cracked the case.

“He has a base somewhere,” Jofranka said. “The place where he kills them?” She looked queasy, and I was going to have to talk to her afterwards. She had to be in on these sessions, but there was no way I was letting her get involved outside.

“With a garage for two vehicles, maybe,” David said. “A closed garage where he can clean the evidence off.”

“His home?” Jofranka again.

Tullah made a face. “Doesn’t feel right, somehow. This sort of fanatical care? I’d say a building that can’t be traced back to him.”

“An industrial unit? A ranch outside the city? Isolated? Somewhere private or well soundproofed,” David said.

“Or a house with a basement.” Jofranka was determined to keep contributing.

“Interesting,” Melissa wrote down a summary of the location options.

I nodded. Nothing as soundproofed as underground.

 We were making progress, but we were inching forward. There was nothing to stop him killing again while we puzzled our way through the clues. The murder at Wash Park was fresh and had to be full of evidence, but Griffith had clamped down heavy security on all details.

Melissa said the rogue’s actions were a gesture at the police and that meant he was leaving.

My gut feel said he might be, but he wanted something first. What was it? More deaths?

If we were going to be able to prevent him, let alone catch him, we had to move faster and smarter. These clues were things that were evident. The FBI would have them too. What did we have that was different?

I turned to Melissa’s list of missing women. She’d pinned up photos next to their names and home addresses.

Tullah saw me staring.

“What?” she said.

“Something about them,” I said. “They’re some kind of group. They share something.”

David came over and looked at them. “They’re at the other end,” he said.

I frowned at him till he went on. “Look,” he started pointing. “Jewelry, hair-dos, make up, branded clothing. The opposite end of society to the victims.”

He was right. It wasn’t what was niggling me, but it did make a clear distinction between the known victims and the potential victims. But one of the things that could mean was just that the rogue realized there would be more investigation on the second group and had hidden their bodies better.

“Imagine them together,” I said to everyone. “What are they doing? Where are they?”

“On holiday somewhere. Sailing. Y’know, fancy yacht where someone else does the work.”

“Expensive shopping.”

“Golf club social event.”

“Opera.”

“Doing some hobby that costs a lot.”

I rubbed my face. All good, but not what I was feeling about them. “What cars did they drive and where did they buy them from? What clubs did they go to? Do they have second homes? Where? What shops do they go to? What are those expensive hobbies?”

Tullah and Jofranka scribbled notes.

“Why them?” I went on. “These are high risk targets. What might he get? Where are the bodies?”

“Risk might be its own reward,” Melissa said. “And disposal? If he’s in the pack, what’s the betting he can dump the bodies into one of the fertilizer factories without anyone else even realizing?”

“I don’t understand about the risk,” Jofranka said, blushing.

“If he’s responsible for all of these,” Melissa said, “he needs to kill on a regular basis as a kind of sick fix. But the thrill of killing is different from the thrill of getting away with it. These ones,” she indicated the list of victims, “they go back six years. These others, if they’re victims as well, started only a couple of years ago. Just killing is no longer enough. The risk profile is escalating. He needs both kinds of thrill now.”

“Culminating in Wash Park?” I said.

“No. That’s a clean break. I still say that’s his farewell.” Melissa made a few more notes on the boards. “Some of that information you were asking about is in the files I brought. I’ve copied them to the computers here.”

I stood back and looked at the board. There was something we were all missing about this group that pulled them together, something I felt from looking at them, but it remained outside of my reach.

“You said at the beginning that we needed to match any pattern against information about the pack,” Tullah said. “When will we get that information?”

“As soon as I can get it.” I was going to have to persuade Felix.

Tullah and Jofranka started running through Melissa’s computer files while I stared at the photos.

“I have a contact we have to go see,” Melissa said. “A guy called Clayton. Used to be a detective. He worked on these cases.”

The name rang a bell, and not in a good way.

“Okay, we could—”

Pia came in. “Urgent call for you,” she said, handing over a landline. “Bian.”

“Round-eye? I’ve been speaking to Skylur and Naryn about the colonel. I gave them the proposal you made, about him running a covert Athanate army. Naryn’s totally bought in.”

“Good.” I hoped it was good. I got the impression Naryn would want exactly the commitment that the colonel wasn’t ready to give.

“Yeah.” Bian’s tone told me I was right to be worried. “You need to bring them in now.”

“But Vera’s still recovering.”

“I know. Naryn said she’ll be in better hands here at Haven than there. I’m sorry. They’ve made some time in their schedule and we’re all just going to have to fit in.”

Chapter 38

The colonel and his wife had already been warned by Pia, and it wasn’t as if they had much to pack. We were on the road in five minutes, most of that taken with Vera thanking me again and apologizing for all the fuss she’d caused, as if it had been her fault.

“Will I meet Ms. Trang today?” she asked as we drove out.

“Probably.”

I could tell she was worried about that—the effect that Bian might have on her. Bian’s scent still clung to her.

I pulled over, short of the highway and took out the two blindfolds Pia had given me.

“Sorry,” I said.

The colonel laughed and put Vera’s on.

“It won’t make a blind bit of difference,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to sleep anyway.”

I tied his and we set off again. In fact, both of them slept until we turned into the gates at Haven. I wished I felt as relaxed as they did.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Bian met us at the main door.

“House Farrell.” She nodded to me. “Colonel and Mrs. Laine, welcome to Haven.”

We were being formal, so she kissed necks with me. She shook hands with them.

Vera kept hold of her hand. “We both wanted to take this opportunity to thank you.” She looked at me as well. “Whatever happens now. To thank both of you and your colleagues as well. And my personal thanks to you, Ms. Trang, for saving my life.” She stopped. “That sounds so awful.”

“It’s Bian, and I’m glad I was able to.” Bian shed her formality and hugged Vera. “Your recovery is thanks enough,” she whispered and then she broke away, and was all formality again. She touched her tiny Haven earpiece.