by Marc Daniel
“What does Ivanov have to do with this now? Don’t tell me you need a warrant to search his house as well?! And how do you link the bookie to the wolf attacks?” interrupted Katia, apparently irritated by Salazar’s irrational reasoning. In reality, she was more concerned by the Alpha’s reaction to her involvement in obtaining a search warrant.
Salazar took a breath to give himself time to formulate his reply. “Clemens is a suspected associate of Ivanov,” he said finally. “He lives in the middle of a forest, a much more appropriate location to keep wolves than Ivanov’s residence in River Oaks—”
“This doesn’t even get close to circumstantial evidence, Detective,” interjected the assistant DA. “What you have, at best, is a theory, and no judge in their right mind would ever grant a warrant on such flimsy conjectures. And I would never embarrass myself asking for such a warrant either...”
“This is where Danko comes into play, Ma’am. He may not be linked to the wolf assassinations in any way, but he has known association with the Russian mob, and we are therefore justified in suspecting Clemens could have something to do with the bookie’s disappearance.”
Katia rolled her eyes in a I can’t believe I’m listening to this shit kind of look, but Salazar carried on, oblivious. “Danko has probably never seen a wolf in his life, but it’s irrelevant. He’s just our way into Clemens’ house. One—the bookie has been missing for six weeks. Two—we can establish a link between Clemens and Danko through Ivanov. Three—we now have physical evidence placing a bleeding Danko near Clemens’ property. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to assume Clemens may have something to do with Danko’s disappearance and request a warrant to search his house.”
“I see,” replied Katia thoughtfully. She had dropped the attitude and seemed to be genuinely thinking about Salazar’s request. “You do realize that finding a judge willing to grant a search warrant on a Saturday isn’t going to be a walk in the park, right?”
“We know that, Ma’am, but we need it. With everything that went down yesterday, we think Clemens has become a flight risk, and we need to try and arrest him as soon as possible.”
Katia pondered his remark for an instant before saying, “Let me see what I can do. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have news for you.”
Salazar thanked the assistant DA and took his leave. He was about to close the front door on his way out when he heard Katia say, “And please, say hello to Detective Lewis for me.”
Chapter 131
Peter Clemens hadn’t uttered a single complete sentence since Isabella’s death twenty-four hours earlier. After spending the whole day and night in the woods, the Alpha had returned to what was left of his pack shortly after eight the next morning. The cops were long gone and his wolves had started cleaning out the mayhem inside what a few hours earlier had still been the pack’s command center.
Although he should have been expecting it, Clemens had entered into a destructive fury upon realizing the coroners had taken away Isabella’s body. The survivors of his pack, knowing better than to try to calm their Alpha down, had watched from a distance while Clemens had methodically started destroying the few things still standing in the torn-down building. Once satisfied there was nothing left to destroy, the Alpha had pointed a finger at Karl Wilson. “You come with me.” Then he’d turned towards the others. “Make sure there is nothing incriminating left in this house. Once this is done, go back to your homes. I’ll contact you later.”
“Where are you guys going?” asked Axel Thompkins as Clemens and his second were getting into Wilson’s corvette, but Clemens did not reply.
It was mid-morning by the time they parked the car along the wall on the east side of Ivanov’s estate. The street was deserted, and the two wolves wasted no time looking for a door. In an instant, they had jumped the wall and were among the Texas oak trees, walking at a quick pace towards the mansion’s front door.
No guard could be seen on the grounds surrounding the manor, but as the duo was closing on the house, two Dobermans and three German Shepherds came rushing from various corners of the property. When the dogs were about twenty feet from the two men, they stopped dead in their tracks, turned around and started running for their lives. Unlike bewitched bears, dogs knew when they were outmatched, and their noses had told them all they needed to know about the two trespassers.
Clemens did not bother with the bell and instead gave a powerful kick to the center of the French doors, which went flying off their hinges and landed fifteen feet away on the vestibule’s freshly polished hardwood floor.
The Alpha crossed the vestibule in four strides while Wilson, more cautious, kept an eye open for incoming trouble. No one came to meet them in the vestibule, however, nor in the living room, kitchen, or library. Although the house looked deserted, the two wolves could sense people within its walls, and one of them was Ivanov.
After rummaging through another couple empty rooms, Clemens and Wilson found themselves in the mansion’s west wing standing in front of yet another set of closed French doors. The smell emanating from behind the doors immediately told them they had found what they were looking for. Before they had a chance to push the doors open, an avalanche of bullets erupted from inside the room, reducing the wooden doors to rubble and sending the wolves running for cover.
Most of Ivanov’s forces had perished in their assault against the wolves, but the mobster had surrounded himself with the few he had left to make his last stand. Judging by the look of what a few seconds earlier had been two-inch thick solid wood doors, the mobster’s bodyguards were packing serious fire power.
“You didn’t think killing me would be that easy, did you?” asked the Russian accent-laden voice of the boss, but Clemens did not bother replying. From the direction the voice had come from, he had a pretty good idea of Ivanov’s position inside the room.
He turned towards his second who had pulled his 357 Magnum out of its back holster and was crouching behind a rosewood secretaire.
“I’ll morph, you shoot,” he said in a low voice, before adding, “But Ivanov is mine… no matter what!”
Clemens stripped out of his clothes and quickly morphed into his 300-pound wolf form. A second later, he was storming through the office door, Wilson a few feet behind him.
As soon as the wolf entered the room, the deluge of silver bullets resumed, and several of them reached their impossibly fast moving target, but that did not slow Clemens down as he took a sharp right turn to pounce onto Stanislas Erzgova who was shooting a fifty caliber. The gun—the same model as the one mounted on Apache helicopters—looked gigantic even in the giant’s grip, and when one of its bullets hit Clemens’ chest in midair, it sent the wolf crashing against the opposite wall.
But the shooters, too focused on the nightmarish beast, had overlooked Wilson and when he entered the room, gun in hand, a second behind his Alpha, no weapon was trained towards him. Quickly assessing the situation, he placed a bullet in the heads of the three bodyguards, starting with the one holding the biggest gun, Stanislas, before shooting Ivanov in the right shoulder. Under the impact, Ivanov’s gun dropped to the floor.
As he stood in a corner of the room holding his bleeding shoulder, the corpse of Stanislas Erzgova lying at his feet and his other bodyguards scattered lifeless across the room, Ivanov wondered if letting Clemens have a share of his business wouldn’t have been a better idea after all.
The Alpha lay unconscious on the carpet in a pool of his own blood, a gaping crater in his chest. The hole had already stopped bleeding, though, and Wilson knew the Alpha would be all right… eventually. His gun still trained on Ivanov, the pack’s second in command patiently waited for Clemens to recover while ignoring the mobster’s alternating queries, pleas, and invectives.
It took a full thirty minutes for Clemens to be in good enough shape to get back on his paws, and Wilson had spent the whole time wondering whether the cops, alerted by the shooting, were going to show up, but in the end Ivanov’s house was
far enough from the street and surrounded by enough trees to absorb the sounds of the battle.
Under Ivanov’s bewildered eyes, Clemens finally morphed back into his human form, a nasty scar in the center of his chest. The Alpha then walked towards the mob boss and, grabbing him by the throat, lifted Ivanov two feet in the air before throwing him against the opposite wall like a rag doll.
The impact drove the oxygen out of the mobster’s lungs and he was still gasping for air when Clemens picked him up from the floor and sent him crashing this time through the room’s bay window. Ivanov had barely landed onto the terrace when Clemens was already upon him.
“You shouldn’t have killed my wife,” were the only words the Alpha pronounced before crushing his enemy’s skull against the stone floor.
Chapter 132
The clearing harboring the Clemenses’ devastated cabin was teeming with police officers and search dogs. It had taken Katia Olveda the better part of her Saturday to find a judge willing to sign off on the search warrant Salazar had requested, and the cops had been forced to wait until Sunday to execute the search. The officers had shown up at the break of dawn on Sunday only to find the house deserted.
Out of courtesy, Lewis and Salazar had extended an invitation to David Starks, who had been the one to find Danko’s DNA in the vicinity of the property, and the three detectives were now busy rummaging through the rubble in search of anything incriminating against Clemens and his gang. They had been at work for over three hours, searching through drawers, filing cabinets, and other less likely hiding spots, but to no avail. All they had to show for it so far were two bullet-riddled computers, whose hard drives were conveniently missing, and a collection of suspiciously empty drawers. The only artifact of interest had been a set of titanium shackles found by an officer inside a metal trunk in the garage, but with the exception of David Starks, nobody had grasped its significance.
Outside, special canine units were searching the grounds in ever expanding circles around the house, but the dogs’ behavior was curiously erratic. The hounds were running from one spot to the next, seemingly unable to follow a trail to its end. The handlers, who had never seen their dogs behaving that way, were at a loss for an explanation. To David, however, it was obvious: olfactory overstimulation. The entire perimeter smelled of wolf—and not a lone wolf either. The area was impregnated with the smell of several dozen wolves and the poor dogs simply didn’t know which trail to follow in this olfactory labyrinth. The wolf smell was so pungent and overwhelming that it effectively covered every other scent. In comparison, the faint odors left behind by Danko and Olivia were as noticeable as a cat hair on a Persian rug. In consequence, the officers searching the grounds walked over the underground cache in which Olivia was kept prisoner three times, and three times they failed to notice anything unusual about the clearing’s leaf-covered ground in this particular location.
Chapter 133
Buried twenty feet under the surface, Olivia hadn’t suspected a thing about the swarm of officers who, less than a day earlier, had spent hours searching the grounds directly above her head. Her prison had been designed to be perfectly soundproof, and the proofing worked both ways.
The young woman was slowly starving to death. Between Michael Biörn and the Russian mob, the pack had been too busy to remember feeding its prisoner, who hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink in over a week. Had she still been human, Olivia would have been dead by now, but she was no longer a mere human and her werewolf metabolism was working overtime to keep her alive a bit longer.
Too weak to move, she spent her days lying naked on the bare ground amidst her own feces. She was too frail to morph even involuntarily, and that part brought her peace. Olivia had figured out by now that, against conventional wisdom, werewolves could be found outside overactive imaginations and movie theaters. She was the living proof of it.
For days, she had wished she had followed Michael’s advice and returned to school instead of playing the amateur avenger in a league so far from her own that just thinking about it made her head spin. Those days were gone, however. The only thing she desired now was for death to come and set her free.
The light in the cell suddenly changed quality. It started shining with more intensity and looked somehow cleaner, but she was so disoriented that she did not realize the beams of light were pouring from the opened trapdoor above her head. She only started realizing what was going on when Axel Thompkins landed two feet away from her head and leaned towards her.
“She’s alive,” she heard him say to someone she couldn’t see and who was probably still on the surface, “but it’s a fucking mess in here!”
“I can smell it from here,” replied a voice somewhere above them.
Axel placed her on his shoulders and effortlessly started climbing out of the hole using a rope hanging from the opened trapdoor.
Olivia was in no shape to fight off the muscular man carrying her, but even if she had been, she probably wouldn’t have. What she desired above all was to get out of this stinking cave that had been her home since the fateful day when she’d had the horrible idea of confronting Peter Clemens.
After they reached the surface, the man who had been waiting outside the hole pulled the rope back out, closed the trapdoor, and started covering it in dirt and leaves to make it once again invisible to passersby. In the meantime, Thompkins started carrying the barely moving Olivia to their car parked on a dirt road, two hundred yards from the underground cache.
Once at the car, Olivia was tied up, gagged and unceremoniously tossed inside the vehicle’s trunk.
“And now, let’s go see the boss,” said Thompkins, shutting the trunk on her.
Chapter 134
The doorbell rang and David Starks got up to answer it. He came back to the living room a minute later carrying four extra-large pizza boxes and placed them on the coffee table in front of Michael, who was holding out forty dollars as his contribution to the pizza fund.
“Keep your money,” said David. “It’s my treat tonight.”
Michael thanked him for his generosity and pocketed the two twenties.
Monday night football was playing on the television in the background, but David had muted the sound so they could have a real conversation. Michael had been staying with Sheila since their return to Houston, and if he had driven an hour from her place to David’s beach house in Kemah, it was not to watch football.
“Are you planning to move back into the city at some point?” asked Michael, thinking about the detective’s daily two-hour commute.
“Eventually… but I like living here. I find the proximity of the sea very calming, though the commute is definitely getting to me.” David got up and headed for the kitchen. He came back an instant later with two plates and a roll of paper towels, which he put down next to the pizza boxes.
“Whoever attacked you in Houston has had plenty of time to figure out where you relocated by now,” said Michael, ignoring the plates David had just brought from the kitchen and settling down on the floor in front of an open pizza box. “If they have left you alone this long, it’s probably safe to move back.”
“Whoever attacked me? You don’t think it was one of Clemens’ wolves?” asked David, surprised at Michael’s choice of words.
“There is a very good chance it was, based on what we know so far,” agreed Michael, “but he’s innocent until proven guilty… you know that better than I do.”
“Right!” David sounded unconvinced as he sank his teeth into a slice of all-meat pizza. “So, what’s new on your side?”
Michael swallowed down a piece large enough to choke a horse before answering, “Well, I believe you know most of it. For one, the Houston pack has been seriously downsized in the past week.”
“You told me. And I got firsthand confirmation.”
“Meaning?”
“I was at Clemens’ three times in the past few days and there were never more than eight or nine wolves around. Given the recent eve
nts, the pack should definitely be operating in crisis mode, and therefore the members should stick together most of the time. That means the wolves I saw are probably all that’s left of the Houston pack…”
“That sounds about right,” answered Michael, remembering the handful of survivors who had fled the battlefield after their confrontation in Yellowstone. “But why did you go to Clemens three times these past few days?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard?!” replied David skeptically.
“Heard what?”
“Heard what??! You’re joking, right?” But David could see from Michael’s face he wasn’t joking. “I thought, with a girlfriend journalist and all, you’d keep yourself better informed.”
Displeased by the girlfriend comment as much as by the fact David still hadn’t mentioned what the big news actually was, Michael remained silent and focused an unsettling stare at David.
David finally obliged and related in detail the recent events to Michael. Starting with the attack on Clemens house that had claimed Isabella’s life, the detective then followed with his interview of the survivors before recounting the execution of the search warrant, which unfortunately hadn’t turned up anything incriminating against Clemens. “How did you manage to not hear about this?” he asked finally.
“I have no idea. I guess we’ve been pretty focused on looking for Olivia ever since we got back. And it’s only been a couple days too… Talking about Olivia, have you heard anything? Any lead? The last time I talked to her, she was heading for Clemens…”
“What?!”
In a few words, Michael told David how Olivia had somehow found out about Clemens, and how she had decided to get a job with a maid service agency in order to be sent to the man’s house and get a chance to snoop around.
“I agree with you,” said David once Michael had finished his story. “It would be a miracle if Clemens wasn’t involved one way or another in her disappearance, but we searched the grounds with dogs and they didn’t find her. Of course, that could also be a good sign. That could mean she’s still alive somewhere.”