Wild Card (Bite Back 3)

by Mark Henwick

  “Sloan wouldn’t have had a problem. You find it uncomfortable because you’ve been raised in a society where that doesn’t happen with strangers. No one writes the rules, but the rules are there. You absorb them from society. You don’t stare into a stranger’s face, you don’t lie, you don’t cheat, you don’t steal. Now, people break the rules all the time, but there’s a cost. You feel bad, your body gets stressed. But not people like Sloan.”

  Mrs. de Vries was clever enough to see where it was going. “But these people, they’re freaks, frighteningly intelligent and so on.”

  “Hannibal Lecter?” I laughed. “No, there’s a lot of things that Hollywood gets wrong. Sociopaths came in all types. The one thing that is common to them all is the absence of the connections that bind us into society. And the scary thing is, even the ones that are just moderately intelligent catch on to that. They put up a front, and we, the rest of humanity, fool ourselves. Because the sociopath looks as if he follows the rules, we think he’s normal. But he isn’t. He doesn’t feel the restraints we do. He has no conscience. The rules do not exist for him.”

  My own voice seemed to be coming from a distance away.

  “We’re blind to them. Because they seem normal, we deceive ourselves. We can’t actually believe they’re abnormal. We deny the evidence of our eyes and the logic of our minds. We invent reasons to explain away their aberrant behavior when it occurs because we can’t believe they would do that. And that’s because we wouldn’t do it. They exploit that. They find that it lets them get away with almost anything for a minimal outlay of faking it occasionally.”

  Was I repeating myself? I felt as if I’d gone around and around in circles about this. Not circles. A spiral. I was traveling a spiral down to an end. I stared out the window without seeing anything.

  “Amber? Are you okay?” Ethel came over and touched my arm. “You’ve gone all pale.”

  Yeah, I probably had.

  I cursed my brain for being so painfully slow. Strands of thoughts were looming up out of my subconscious and colliding with a measured inevitability, like huge ships in fog.

  The Denver pack couldn’t find the rogue Were. They were looking for a stranger and there were no strangers in town.

  Werewolves can’t lie to their alpha. Their whole werewolf society is based on absolute truths like that. Truths they take at face value, assumptions that are wired into their conscious minds so they don’t challenge them.

  The sociopath succeeds in human society because that society depends on assumptions and signals. The sociopath ignores the rules, learns the signals. They lie with their whole body, and their complete lack of conscience allows them to say whatever they want so convincingly that ordinary people simply believe them.

  What if you took a sociopath and made them Were?

  He or she would be able to say whatever served their purposes. Could they learn to control the subconscious signals that told the alpha they were telling the truth?

  Gut feelings exploded through me. Yes.

  I knew the rogue was right here, in the Denver pack all along. Laughing at us stumbling around without any idea of what was happening. Watching them. Watching me. Brain squirming with madness behind cold, calculating eyes.

  Chapter 36

  FRIDAY

  It’s a bad night, that’s all. I interview every Were I’ve met. We laugh and joke. Then I ask them if they’re the rogue and they tug at the skin at the side of their head. Rubber facemasks slip off. Underneath, their expressions are as empty as corpses’. After I dream of Alex, I wake up and go to the bathroom.

  The light is like pale yellow piss. I look tired in the mirror. Go figure. My skin looks unhealthy. I try to massage some life into my cheeks, but my face splits open and the corpse beneath stares blankly out at me from eyeless sockets.

  After that, I did wake up, and went to the study to prepare for meeting the bounty hunters and Silas. It was still a rush job. Time seemed to be slipping through my fingers.

  There was a message from Ingram; he wanted a call. I forwarded it to Julie to handle. I just couldn’t keep any more plates spinning. Whatever was going down at the Ops 4 base, I couldn’t let it distract me from what I had to deal with urgently here in Denver. I had to organize the hunters to find the remnants of House Matlal and their Blood slaves, and they had to find them in a matter of days.

  I’d tell them they were looking for evidence of the rogue as well, but that was going to be my job. My gut feel had only got stronger overnight. The rogue was one of the Denver pack.

  And Silas was going to be there at the meeting.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  They arrived on time, and at 9 a.m. we sat down in a meeting room at the Oxford Hotel. The location was Bian’s sense of humor; it was reputed to be the hotel with the most paranormal activity in Denver.

  Verano and Gray had taken an immense and personal dislike to each other on sight which hadn’t gotten better overnight. Silas, for his part, distrusted them both as outsider Were on his territory. If I allowed any of them time to let their feelings get in the way of their tasks, I’d end up letting everyone down. So I planned to make them work too hard to be able to spare time for rivalries.

  I started the meeting by getting them to describe how they normally worked, so I could double that. It also gave me the chance to watch them closely as they spoke. What common themes could I see in this group of Were. Would I be able to notice a difference in the rogue? A tiny slip that gave him, or her, away?

  Verano went first. With his sunglasses off, he had the palest green eyes I’d ever seen. I’d drunk iced lime juice that was warmer and darker. He spoke calmly and slowly. If I hadn’t know better, I would have voted him the man least likely to be a werewolf.

  His pack had some military-type procedures and decent equipment, including a comms system I could patch into the colonel’s TacNet system. He seemed to be able to control his dislike of both Gray and Silas on the surface, though neither of them were fooled. It was strange, as if he were speaking with two different voices at the same time. Still, it was a decent start.

  Silas went next.

  At six-ten and broad with it, the man was already intimidating. He shaved his head and kept his lean, dark face impassive. His thick woolen jacket was the color of old blood and bulked him up even more. He radiated hostility.

  I’d given my opinion of the Denver pack organization, so his animosity to me wasn’t a surprise. And I was justified. As he went on to describe it, the pack had no standard equipment and no familiarity with procedures. They’d tried coordinating their searches with cellphones and a map back at Coykuti. No wonder they hadn’t found anything. But there were a lot of them and I needed them.

  I held off getting Gray to talk when Silas finished, and concentrated instead on a plan that split up the Verano and Denver packs. The Verano pack were able to slot neatly into six-hour shift schedules, around the clock. The Denver pack’s search had to be carried out with constraints imposed by their normal lives. We ended up with about double the number of two-man teams as the Verano were able to put on the ground, but with shorter shifts. The Veranos were being paid for it, so I wasn’t going to take any complaints.

  Bian had promised equipment from House Altau stores for the pack, including suitable comms, body armor and firearms. Silas didn’t like thinking the pack would owe Altau, but he couldn’t argue it wasn’t necessary.

  The Verano and Denver packs were responsible for their own scheduling and search procedures, but all potential contacts had to be escalated. Bian and I would share that job.

  Which left me with Nick Gray.

  “And what, precisely, are you going to do?” Verano sneered.

  Gray smiled. “It’s a bounty. I’m getting paid on results, not how pretty I do it. Forget all the procedures. Just give me an area to hunt and numbers to call.”

  “What if you miss some?” I said.

  “I won’t.”

  Confident to the point of arrogance.
But if his file from the Dakota House was telling the truth, the arrogance was justified. I hoped so.

  I gave out contact numbers and emphasized again that we weren’t paying them to kill. The Matlal Were were the Denver pack’s concern and the Athanate were Altau’s. Anything else was my decision.

  Finally, Correia had handed over a list of Matlal names during our secret meeting at Haven. Bian had matched most of them to faces, which she’d printed out in flash cards so they could be used on the street to ask people.

  I passed the copies out.

  Verano put his into a neat pile, making sure the edges of the flash cards lined up. Silas glanced at a few. Gray started to shuffle through them, sorting into male and female. The top card on the female side was the one face familiar to me. The silver-haired woman who’d been handing me my ass the night Larry and I had been attacked in Cheesman Park, before the FBI arrived. She was one of Matlal’s elite Athanate team.

  “Someone you know?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Hunch?”

  “Maybe.” His stare was flat and uninformative.

  I’d take that up with him later. If he had hunches, he was going to have to learn to share with me.

  I knew that cut both ways. I wasn’t sharing my hunch about the rogue with them.

  The briefing was over. Verano and Gray took the opportunity to leave quickly.

  Silas waited until the door closed behind them before standing.

  I stayed seated. Ha! Ippon! Point to me.

  He loomed over the table.

  “The rogue is our concern.” His eyes stayed on me, as if he were measuring me, while he fastened the one sided toggles on his jacket. “I need to know any development. Any time, day or night.”

  He pulled a business card from his pocket and slid it across to me.

  And why else might that be, Silas?

  “Anything yet?” he said.

  “I have nothing to share with you at this time.”

  He stared at me, but I’d had lots of practice and I wasn’t going to back down.

  I was sure he suspected I was holding back. It didn’t feel right, but I was going with my gut feeling and I had to keep the pretense up in front of Silas. He was a suspect. Him and any of the Denver pack who were big in their wolf form.

  He rumbled, deep in his chest, then the moment was gone, and he strode to the door.

  “Ricky, Ursula and me,” he said, from the doorway. “Keep us informed.”

  I scratched my head. We had been talking about the rogue. Why did I feel there was a completely different conversation going on at the same time? And what would a conversation with a sociopathic Were feel like?

  I gathered my notes and left. For real progress with the rogue, I needed to talk to Felix, alone. Soon.

  Oh, joy.

  Chapter 37

  Back at Manassah, the colonel stopped me on the way to the study.

  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.”