Bite Back Box Set 1

by Mark Henwick

  My thoughtful delay hadn’t calmed their nerves. I flipped open the executive summary and started to read, with a suppressed smile at the situation. A year ago, the thought that I would be getting reports from a couple of apprentice PIs would have made me laugh. Now, I shared their nerves.

  It wasn’t just the paranormal aspects of our relationship. Was I doing the right thing for my PI company? There wasn’t enough of me to go around. I was gambling on being able to crack this case, using them, while I hunted the rogue and fought off whatever stumbling blocks the paranormal community and Nagas dumped on me.

  The trouble was, I was probably gambling with the future of my little company.

  The file gave me the summary background on the de Vries case, filling out what Mrs. Harriman had told me when she hired me.

  The de Vries, Schalk and Suzannah, had come to Denver in 2000. He’d made his fortune in South Africa, but had decided to emigrate. With his resources, it was relatively easy for him to engineer a move to America under the banner of inward investment. But his company here, Auradamas, didn’t much resemble what he’d created in Africa. It was what was sometimes called a ticket company, not just because he’d used it to make the move to America but because it was designed simply to support his lifestyle here, with the minimum impact on that lifestyle. He might have worked two days a week. When he felt like it.

  Auradamas was a trader in gold and gems, mainly diamonds. De Vries had good contacts back in South Africa with firms like the de Beers and AngloGold Ashanti corporations. He’d set up buddy contracts, he imported valuable raw goods, and sold them in the States at a markup. His company had a dozen people in a small office tucked away behind the Alameda shopping center, a few minutes’ drive from his house. The company’s profits had been a few hundred thousand a year, most of which had gone in dividends to the shareholders. That was mainly Mr. and Mrs. De Vries, but Ethel Harriman and Lloyd McIntire held shares.

  The setup was about as simple as you could get.

  They’d settled in, made friends with the right people, joined clubs, supported the ballet company, done good works.

  Then he’d died twenty months ago, at the age of 49, of a heart attack.

  Mrs. de Vries had promoted Forster Sloan, the relatively new vice president, to run the company, and from the numbers, it had been a smart move. Turnover had risen steeply and profits had gone up 45% in tough times.

  Their relationship had moved from professional to personal.

  And Mrs. Harriman had called me on a gut instinct about a friend who was going through a difficult emotional time and might have made some poor choices.

  She wanted to be right, but there was nothing in the summary to support her concerns. The worldwide diamond business was run by de Beers, and they had a vested interest in dealing with people they trusted. Practically every diamond of any significant size was logged on the de Beers database and traders were locked into contracts with de Beers. A trader stepping outside of that contract would suddenly lose their supply and simultaneously find every other business that wanted to stay on good terms with de Beers would refuse to deal with them. It was more efficient than government regulation and Auradamas was in de Beers’ good books.

  On the legal side, Auradamas played by the rules as far as I could see: businesses importing goods like these attracted federal attention and the company had been looked over very thoroughly. Squeaky clean.

  I checked the last date of government review. Only eight months ago. What could you do in that time?

  I skimmed to the end of the file.

  Knowing my preferred format for internal reports, Tullah had put in photos.

  Schalk de Vries had been a big, red-faced man with floppy dark hair and a loose smile. He looked like the sort of guy that had been large and loud in life. Suzannah de Vries, in contrast, was blonde, petite and looked quiet. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’d lay good money on her being overshadowed by him when he was alive. Had she just flourished out of his shade? Was Mrs. Harriman’s worry based on a change in her friend that would have happened anyway?

  I looked at the last photo. Forster Sloan I loathed on sight. He had the sort of bright, shiny look that made me wary of insurance salespeople and television evangelists. I stomped on that. Maybe it had influenced Mrs. Harriman as well.

  I tossed the file back on the desk and looked at my apprentices.

  “So much for the overview. I’ll get into the detail section later.” I sat back and crossed my legs. “Give me your gut feelings.”

  “Like it says, straight up and down from everything I’ve been able to find,” Tullah said.

  “Sloan’s personal background?”

  “Vague. Nothing big one way or the other. Not a saint, not a sinner. Moved around in different jobs. Worked in the gems and import businesses. All recent stuff, within the last ten years.”

  Oh yeah?

  But Tullah didn’t go any deeper. Jofranka hadn’t said a thing yet, but I wasn’t going to push hard. I was interested to see how Tullah would handle this.

  “I don’t like vague,” I said, as neutrally as possible.

  “Yup. So, I thought, first off, we should get a close view.” Tullah wriggled a little.

  I sighed. I should have known. The fact that they were in front of me and I wasn’t picking them up at the police station suggested the closer view had gone all right.

  “And?”

  “We set up a fake company. Head and neck massages at work. It’s cool. All the big companies are offering it to their staff.”

  “And you went and offered them a free trial?”

  Tullah nodded apprehensively.

  I snorted. Not bad.

  “How’d it go?”

  She relaxed. “We got a meeting room set aside and we got most of them in there on their own. We massaged them and they talked.” She shrugged. “But same old. Not everyone likes him, he works them hard, he brought the business in big time last year. No one had anything really bad to say.”

  “He works hard too?”

  “Long hours. A couple of them actually mentioned it as a good contrast to Mr. de Vries.”

  I turned the file on the desk back to Sloan’s picture. If he’d been a runner, I would have had him down for sprints, not marathons. He didn’t look like a long hours man. Not without his own good reasons.

  I didn’t let my thoughts show. “So we have nothing other than what might turn up in the accounts?”

  Tullah shook her head. Her face was as innocent as ever. And she was waiting for something.

  Jofranka sat silently. Her whole body radiated disagreement.

  “Did you get to massage Sloan himself?” I asked.

  “I did,” Jofranka said.

  “Who chose?”

  “He did.”

  Now that might be interesting. Why Jofranka? Both of them were attractive. What basis did he use and could I draw any conclusion from it?

  Or alternatively, why was I expecting that there was a reason for it? That photograph had biased me.

  Tullah exuded a sense of confidence. Jofranka was a lot stronger and more self-sufficient than you’d realize from looking at her. But home life had given her mannerisms she hadn’t cast off yet—the eyes slid down when she met someone, the head wasn’t held as high as Tullah’s. She looked the more vulnerable of the two.

  Could I base any reading of Sloan’s motivation on it?

  I waited until Jofranka’s eyes came back up to mine.

  “And?” I prompted her.

  “I don’t know what you expect of me,” she said, glancing over at Tullah. “You’ve done this sort of thing before. You have…skills. What does it matter what I—”

  I held up a hand. “Jo. Just tell us what you think.”

  Her lips thinned and she frowned. “He’s a slimeball,” she said.

  We waited.

  “Nothing obvious.” She looked frustrated. “This is just a gut feeling. I can’t expect you to rely on that.�
�� She stared up at the ceiling. “Oh, one thing. He’s supposed to have some problem with his leg. He says he’s supposed to use a cane to walk. It’s fake.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I watched him in the reflection off his window when he thought I couldn’t see him. There’s nothing wrong with his leg.”

  “Okay. But ‘slimeball’, Jo. What made you so sure about that? Did he say something?”

  “No. He asked about my family and my job. Hobbies. Just ordinary questions, but…” she trailed off.

  “But you sensed something?”

  She nodded.

  And ‘ordinary’ questions about family and job; I shuddered at what conclusions someone trained, someone like Ben-Haim or Doc Noble for instance, could make from a few seemingly innocent questions and answers.

  “Then we need to go to the next level,” I said. “I don’t want vague background and gut feelings. I want you to go back and dig until you’re satisfied, because until you’re satisfied you can’t expect me to be satisfied.”

  “Is it okay to use Matt?” Tullah asked.

  “As long as he does the digital ninja stuff and leaves no trace.”

  From the gleam in her eyes, this had gone exactly the way Tullah had wanted. And she’d be expecting me to cap off the meeting with a message to underline the lesson.

  “Good call,” I said to her, knowing she’d understand I was talking about her whole presentation here today. “And Jo, we don’t draw conclusions on gut feelings, but sometimes it’s all we have to point us in the right direction. It’s not something that can be taught, so your gut feelings are as valid as ours.” She sat straighter and smiled for the first time that day. “That’s not to say it can’t be developed. Taking in lots of difficult, boring background detail gives your gut much more to work with.” I closed the file. “This was a good start. Along with clearing up that vagueness, I want you to visit Mrs. Harriman. She was the first one who got a gut feeling about this, and there’ll be stuff she noticed that will give you leads. I want to know anything she says, whether you think it’s relevant or not—what he said to her about the arts that Mrs. de Vries supports, how he talks to different types of people, what his hobbies are, who his family are. Everything.”

  I paused and held their eyes. “We good on everything?”

  There was no hesitation from either of them. Jofranka’s anxiety from the start had gone. Maybe that’s all that was needed—to show that this was business and she had a valid part to play in it. I was still going to need to talk to them and make sure Jofranka completely understood the position we were in. But not today.

  “Now get going, the pair of you,” I said. “And stay safe. Call me tomorrow.”

  When they’d gone, I flicked through the shareholder company accounts that Mrs. Harriman had been able to get me.

  Forster Sloan had reinvigorated the company, pushing it out of the quiet tickover that Mr. de Vries had set up. There wasn’t any huge trick to what he’d done. He’d gambled the company’s money on buying more stock at better margins. He’d delivered the new sales that justified it. That all fed the additional margin straight into the profit line.

  Take a gamble, albeit with someone else’s money, then work hard for long hours to make it pay. Well done, Mr. Sloan. The relationship with the founder’s widow? Just one of those things that might happen when people work together.

  Why was my gut feeling so dead against him?

  I went back to the photo.

  A sprinter, not a marathon runner.

  How long was he going to keep it up?

  And then back to the last audit. Eight months ago. How much could you achieve between audits? How long could you bypass de Beers’ rules before they noticed? What if you didn’t care about the long-term future of the company? What if, like Petersen, you were in the endgame?

  The accounts showed the heavier buying pattern was continuing. The profit figures weren’t available yet, but some of the marginal data suggested profits weren’t as high. What difference was I talking? Half a million? A million? Diverted into an offshore account?

  I slumped back in my chair. It wasn’t chickenfeed, but it didn’t seem enough of a prize. Not for the smiling man in the photo who’d burrowed himself into such a good position.

  I wanted to go digging myself, but needed to get back on track with my own investigation. Those blank boards in the study were still reminding me that I had no gut feeling in the hunt for the rogue, and no progress.

  I slipped the de Vries folders back into the cabinet and locked it. That didn’t quite get the case out of my mind.

  If, if he was bypassing his existing contracts on buying with de Beers and AngloGold Ashanti, what better margins could he be getting elsewhere to boost the value of that prize?

  Stolen goods could be bought at a tenth of their face value, but that would leave a big trail and bring a huge additional risk into it.

  Gold was difficult; forget AngloGold Ashanti. Gems were uncertain.

  But diamonds…diamonds were small and light in relation to their value. There were all sorts of legal barriers here in the States to importing diamonds from anywhere other than approved sources. But if you didn’t intend to stay, they were relatively easy to smuggle to places that didn’t care so much where they’d come from.

  I texted Tullah to get Matt to do some extra digging.

  Definitely find out what Sloan did further back than the ten year history we had, and then build on that. And did he have a boat or a plane? Property or business interests overseas? A pattern of visits to other countries? Especially visits to countries with lax fiscal attitudes.

  And, just as a matter of interest, could Matt please find out what Blood Diamonds cost?

  Chapter 32

  I was about to get an update from Bian on Vera, when the gate intercom sounded at exactly the same time my cell beeped. Someone in a green van wanting to see me, and Alex finally on the phone.

  “Don’t let them through the gate yet,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute. Hello?”

  “…Ursula at the gate,” Alex said, his voice blurred by background noises. He seemed to be able to hear me okay, but I could barely make him out.

  “Are you okay?” Ursula could wait, whatever she wanted. Alex had been supposed to come straight back to Manassah. What had happened?

  “Fine. Look…problem.” The signal was breaking up. “…need…right away. Ursula...”

  “We got a bad signal here. There’s a problem where? What kind of problem?”

  Silence. I tried calling back and got voicemail.

  Bian raised a brow.

  I shrugged and put my HK shoulder holster on underneath a jacket before going out. Bian slung her katana sheath over her back and joined me.

  Ursula was standing impatiently at the gate, ignoring the guards. She looked even bigger in daylight than she had at the cemetery on Monday night. Her wavy, blue-black hair was drawn tightly back, and she had frown lines that seemed permanent over dark, deep-set eyes. Sort of a mix of Xena and Wonder Woman, with a sore head.

  “We need to go,” she said, as if that was all that was needed.

  “Pleased to see you too. Why and where?”

  “Alex should have called and explained.”

  “The signal cut out.”

  “Felix says it’s urgent. Now you know as much as me.”

  I leaned against the gate, not going anywhere, until Bian spoke. “Okay, let’s go. We can try calling again on the way.”

  I looked at her in surprise, but there was no clue to her thinking on her face.

  “Wasn’t an invite for you,” Ursula said.

  Bian smiled. “But he didn’t say I couldn’t come, did he?”

  Ursula’s hands flexed like claws for a second. She looked as if she wanted to pull Bian through the bars of the gate, in little bits. I didn’t understand why Bian was goading her, but I was irritated enough by the unexplained summons to play along.

  “You were in
a hurry?” Bian prompted.

  “Come on then,” Ursula growled, and got back into her van.

  Bian and I joined her, climbing into the second row of seats before my mind caught up.

  What was I missing here? Lack of sleep over the last couple of nights had made my thinking fuzzy. I’d gotten into a van with a Were I barely knew based on a fragment of a telephone call that sounded like Alex. A van, what’s more, that shared the basic characteristics of a van seen outside the horrific murder scene in Wash Park. And a with a Were that was plenty big enough to chew thigh bones.

  I didn’t really think Ursula was the rogue, and I had Bian with me, but I really needed to raise my game. Between the rogue and the Nagas, I couldn’t expect second chances.

  The interior of the van was a mess of emergency gear. Towing and climbing ropes, axes and shovels along one side, flame jackets and lifejackets on the other. A large red box of medical supplies was bolted to the floor behind our seat. Across the top of the box, National Park Service had been stenciled in white.

  Bian reached over and picked up a ranger hat. “Oh, cool. Smokey the Bear. I love these.” She put it on. It was about five sizes too big, and I tried to think of a joke about that.

  “Put it down,” Ursula snapped, glaring at us in the rearview mirror.

  “This your van?” I asked over her shoulder.

  “No. Why?”

  “Curious. Why are you driving someone else’s van?”

  “Silas borrowed mine.”

  “You both work for the Parks?”

  “No,” Ursula said. Then so quietly I almost missed it, “Silas is the Park Ranger. I’m a veterinarian.”

  “No sick poodles today?”