by Mark Henwick
“Right.” Tullah arranged the files in front of her. “Matt managed to get regional downloads from the national criminal databases, including recent searches based in Colorado.”
I shuddered. Hacking the FBI. I didn’t want to know how. “I hope this was well disguised.”
“Yeah. The advantage should be there are no triggers on the servers that will tell Griffith who we’re looking at or why. If he knows anything, it’ll just be that there’s been a leak of data.”
That was one way of describing it.
“And it’s just full of interesting hits,” Melissa said. She picked up a printout and passed it to me. “We were talking about the rogue having access to a place in Denver registered to a different name. Well, one of the searches Griffith’s team has been doing is to find ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“People who have standard data on them, then nothing, or minimal data. Exactly the sort of search that threw your name up as an anomaly. You had plenty of data until you left school, then you joined the army and there’s effectively no data on you for ten years.” She wriggled with pleasure. “It’s a fascinating search. It has all the missing women on my potential victim list, for example. Now, I put in some new filters on the list from stuff Matt was able to find. Home ownership in Denver, with the home still registered and taxes paid. No record of the house being rented out. No record of other people claiming to live at the house. Surprisingly large number of people.”
“And then,” Tullah interrupted. “We linked that with a list of houses that are known to have basements. After what Jo said about noise.”
“Must still be a lot of matches,” I said.
“No. There aren’t many basements in Denver because of the soil type.”
“And then the final filter I put on was for ease of access,” Melissa said.
“How’d you mean?”
“Gated communities, for instance.” Melissa handed over a single sheet of paper with about thirty addresses on it. “Obviously there are some huge assumptions in all of this, but we thought you’d want to treat these as a priority list for a check.”
“I do.” I passed my eyes over the list, but nothing leaped out. “So, you’re saying the original owner of one of these houses may be a victim of the rogue. They’ve gone missing, but no one’s followed up. The rogue has killed them and is using the ghost house, making sure bills are being paid and so on.”
They nodded.
“Okay, I’ll get them checked.” I’d done enough PI work to know the first ideas usually came up blank, but I got a tingle from this. It felt right somehow. “What else?”
Melissa’s glanced at Tullah and sat back.
Interesting.
“We cross-checked everyone on the pack list with everything we could think of about the victims and potential victims.” Tullah nervously tidied the file in front of her. “There aren’t that many, but there are a lot considering that it should be a random selection.”
“And they are?”
She cleared her throat. “Alex, for one.”
I laughed. “Not the rogue, but what did you find?”
“Alex’s company does deliveries to a lot of the hostels many of these people passed through. And Barbara Green did some casual work for the company last summer.”
“Okay, it’s something. But he’s not the rogue. Neither is Ricky, nor Olivia. They were with me the night my clothes were stolen, remember?”
Melissa shifted her position. “Just as a theory, there could be two of them.”
“You were telling me that one is statistically very unlikely, so two would be even more.”
Tullah and Melissa glanced at each other and Tullah moved to the next sheet of paper.
Of course, Alex had left the restaurant for a short while that evening, saying he had to make a business call. Enough time to get to my car. But if my kin were the rogue, my world was going to come crashing down around me. I couldn’t believe it.
“Larimer is a trustee for one of the charities that runs some of the hostels.”
I nodded.
“Silas Falkner and Kyle Larsen live close to a couple of the hostels. They both do volunteer work in the area; the sort of work that would bring them into contact with these people.”
I grunted. I didn’t know Larsen. Silas, well—he seemed all too obvious as a candidate. But that was the rogue all over—hiding in plain sight.
“Ursula Tennyson.”
“What about her?”
“She’s a veterinarian, and she may have attended livestock for six of the missing women. Four of them kept horses for their own riding and another two had dude ranches. All six used Tennyson’s business at some time. Now the business employs a couple of contract veterinarians, so it’s not definite, but it’s possible she met all six.” Tullah handed me a file for Ursula with details of the six women, including copies of their photos.
A female rogue? Ricky and Alex had said there wasn’t any gender bias in rogues.
“I’ll ask her and see what response I get.”
“She also has a criminal record,” Melissa said. “She beat some guy senseless in a bar.”
I looked at the sheet they’d printed. The details were scant and I could think of all sorts of good reasons for hitting guys in bars, but I’d check that as well.
Tullah handed me the last file. “The rest. Anyone with any criminal record. A scatter of assault, solicitation, DUI, minor misdemeanors.”
I raised my brows. They’d turned up a lot of possibilities in a short time.
I was about to get myself another rum when the TacNet squawked.
“Charlie, this is V2. Sighting at trailer park. Looks like five of them. Need to wrap this up.”
“V2, hold off, I say again, hold off.”
One missing?
I grabbed the files, my gun and my jacket, and ran to the car.
Chapter 47
Inside the trailer, it was a like a scene from hell, side-lit with a single weak bulb.
The Matlal Were had been cornered inside and overwhelmed. Their bodies were hardly recognizable. They’d been big men, but the sheer ferocity of the attack and the choking weight of death seemed to have crushed them down into disconnected bags of torn meat and broken bone. The walls of the trailer were sprayed with arterial blood. The stench was gut-turning.
One had tried escaping through the window. His body had been dumped with the rest and cardboard was hastily taped over the hole. The trailer was at the back of the lot. There was a neighboring trailer occupied and a couple who’d got curious were being held in there.
It was an absolute disaster.
And both Gray and Verano were here, their argument about to go supersonic.
They both outweighed me, but there was no time to think. I charged in between them. The cramped quarters gave me a small advantage. Verano fell back over a broken table, sprawling into the ruins.
Before he could get up or his team could respond, Ursula shouldered her way in, tipping the balance my way. I hoped.
I grabbed Gray’s jacket.
“There’s nothing you can do here. Get out.”
The anger flaring in his eyes died down. I did the only thing I could think of and pulled out the list of ghost houses.
“These are top priority. I want them checked tonight for any sign of a marque or any suspicious activity. Go.”
He hadn’t helped here, but this carnage was caused by Verano’s team.
Their leader was picking himself out of the wreckage of the table.
I helped him up by grabbing his jacket and lifting.
“What the hell did you think you were doing? I said to hold off.”
Behind me I felt his pack edging forward, but I wasn’t go to achieve anything by backing down now. Verano’s eyes were still that icy green, but flecked with orange and yellow. I guessed another minute and he and Gray would have fought. What was wrong with them? Couldn’t they see beyond the fallout we already had to deal with?
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“They were going to go back out. We might have lost them. Why are you and Gray,” he spat the name, “so bothered?”
“It’s not up to you to wonder why. You’re hired to do exactly as I told you, nothing more. I told you to hold off.”
“They shifted. We had to.”
“They shifted because you came swarming in here. What did you expect them to do?”
He didn’t have an answer to that. His team had come in spoiling for a fight, otherwise they’d never have shucked and shifted quickly enough. And he was smart enough to know I knew that.
I was gambling on him being more interested in keeping his livelihood than playing dominance games with me. As far as he knew, I represented the only Athanate client in the whole of North America. He didn’t dare fight me.
I won. I could see it in his body position.
“Get out,” I said. “Get back to patrol and do not, I repeat, do not engage. You’re there to find and report.”
His head ducked a fraction. Stiff-necked bastard.
I let him gather his team and move.
“Is there someone from your team in the next trailer?” I asked Ursula.
She nodded. “Clean-up crew’s coming too.”
“Not going to be good enough,” I muttered and dug my cell out.
I left the trailer. I preferred the bitter cold to the smell inside.
“Bian?”
“Round-eye. What’s up?” She could tell something was happening just from my voice. I really was barely holding it together.
“Five of the Matlal Were have been killed at the trailer park. The pack’s clean-up crew are just about to get here, but there’s a problem.”
“Witnesses.” She got it immediately. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. Does you clean-up crew have someone who could handle a memory blanking?”
“Normally we would, but we’re running on empty here. Crap. I can’t even leave Haven. Amber, this is a bitch, but you’re going to have to bring them in.”
“For you?”
“Err…no. Naryn got back a few minutes ago.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Sorry, it’s going to be another reason for him to be pissed, but he’s the best we’ve got in the short term, and it’s much better to do it quickly.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I ended the call and turned to see Ursula directing the pack’s clean-up crew.
They drove unmarked green vans, and under the bulky parkas, they were wearing blue coveralls.
I walked up behind her. “Are these only used for clean-up?” I asked pointing at the vans.
She looked down at me. In the darkness, her face was unreadable. “No. Sometimes they use them to ship fertilizer. I’ve used them to transport animals. Everyone in the pack can use them. Even just as moving vans.”
“Who looks after them? Who books them in and out?”
“They move around. Mostly they’re parked at one of the factories. We need them, we just call around till we find them. We don’t keep sign-out sheets. We aren’t Athanate. Why all the questions?”
“I’m going to have to find out who’s had these out in the last week, but right now, I need two things at the same time. First, I need the couple on the next trailer to be tied up so they can’t move, blindfolded and put in the back of my car. Can you get the pack to do that?”
“Where are you taking them?” she asked.
“To the Altau, to get their memory of tonight blanked.”
She grunted and walked over to the second trailer. Instructions passed on, she returned.
“So, what else?”
“Let’s get in my car, out of the wind.”
We climbed in and I put the interior light on. Ursula had deep-set eyes and they were shadowed as she watched me pull out the file of missing women.
“I want you to go through these and tell me if you know any of them.”
She sat unmoving. She wasn’t stupid. “You think the rogue’s one of us? Me?”
“Ursula, honestly, I don’t know what to think. Everyone’s giving me a different angle.”
“But Felix has spoken to every member of the pack. It’s not us. We can’t lie to him.”
“Everybody keeps telling me that. Just like they told me that Athanate and Were don’t cross infuse.”
She sat for a minute more, just looking at me.
Her team brought the couple out. They dropped the back seat flat and hog tied them in the back of the car, then tossed a blanket over them. The pair looked groggy; they weren’t even struggling.
I bit my lip. They hadn’t done anything to deserve this.
“S’okay,” one of the team said. “We’ve given them some of the booze from their trailer and some downers. Standard practice. They’re out of it, is all.”
When I turned back, Ursula was looking at the file. I’d intended to ask her the questions Tullah had set up for me, but I had to get the witnesses to Haven asap. I’d have to settle for seeing her reactions to these photos.
“This one.” She lifted the sheet out and put it to one side. By the time she’d gone through she’d taken out five of the six that Tullah had said had some connection to her business.
She closed the file and went back to the five.
“This one owns a dude ranch. Her manager called me to look at one of their riding horses that had a problem. She was there, but I didn’t speak to her.”
“What was the problem?” It wasn’t that I was interested, I wanted a feel for Ursula’s reaction.
“Just basic bad treatment. People have no idea. Horses aren’t rental cars.” She pointed at the others. “These also keep horses, but privately. There were the usual problems. Underuse. Overfeeding. Poorly fitted shoes. It’s not my normal business, but they called, and you don’t turn it down.”
I was watching her as she looked through the photos. There was nothing to suggest they were anything other than casual business acquaintances. Her heart rate had risen when we started, but it didn’t vary while she answered.
Unless Ursula was a sociopath, and didn’t have normal reactions.
I tried reaching with eukori, but either it wasn’t working on demand, or she was blank. How had I done it with Sloan at Mrs. de Vries’ house? I hadn’t even tried—it’d just happened.
“Is there anything you can think of that these women have in common?”
“Aside from being one-time clients of mine?” Her mouth twisted. “Not really.” She shuffled through them again thoughtfully and sighed. “I assume I’d be speaking ill of the dead here?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Officially they’re missing. What?”
“They’re all proof of that old cliché,” Ursula said as she opened the car door and got out.
“Which one?”
“You can’t buy happiness.” She closed the door and walked back to the trailer.
Chapter 48
At Haven, Tom met me at the front door. The couple, deeply asleep, were lifted from my car and carried carefully away. Tom guided me back to the familiar little library.
“Naryn will come and see you when he’s finished,” he said. “We’ll do what we can, but I have to warn you, dealing with Basilikos at the exchange hasn’t put him in the best of moods.”
“It went as planned, though?”
“Eventually.”
After he’d left, I browsed the books. They were old-fashioned hardbacks, a strange mix of classics in many languages and books I’d never heard of. Some were in scripts that I didn’t recognize, others in leather bindings that smelled like exotic travel is supposed to smell like. I’d travelled to exotic places with the army and I had different perceptions on that.
Half an hour later, Naryn came in, alone. His mood boiled through the room like a winter storm front.
I gave it my best diplomatic effort. “Diakon,” I said, and dipped my head.
“House Farrell.”
We sat at the table next to the dark
French windows that led to the gardens.
“Are the couple okay?” I asked.
“They’re asleep and drunk. They’re being taken back now and they’ll wake some time tomorrow with hangovers and no memory of this evening, beyond things they’ll think they dreamed about, like wild dogs fighting.”
“Thank you, on behalf of the pack, and from me personally.”
I couldn’t say he was being pleasant, but he was being entirely too controlled for my liking. He stared at me. I stared back and waited him out.
“Farrell, you’re not acting in the interests of Altau,” he said. “Even when you’re make considered decisions, they’re biased with concerns that aren’t relevant to Panethus. Your levels of impulsiveness are a fraction away from the behavior of Aspirants undergoing crusis mania, or rogue Athanate for that matter. I’m willing to countenance that your efforts to fight this may have been heroic, but the fact remains that you’re being driven by the Were changes to your body. Skylur has been willing to risk this and leave you out in the community without support, but I’m not. I’m going to bring you in to Haven and put you under supervision while you work out the balance between Athanate and Were.”
“Have you any—” I started.
“Stop,” he said. “You were brought into a sensitive meeting with the leadership of Basilikos and you practically go rogue during the conversation, with all the fallout that would have had for the Assembly and Skylur’s position in it. Then you’re given control of a hugely expensive search for remnants of House Matlal, on the sole basis that you’ve made an oath to the Denver pack. An oath you had to make, I would point out, because you were unable to provide sufficient security for your kin. In the course of the search you’ve managed to make a commitment for all of Altau, every house in North America, to work with Were. Now you’ve botched a takedown of the Matlal Were and we’ve had to clean up after you.”
“That’s complete bullshit,” I said.
My heart was in my mouth. At the meeting with Correia, I’d seen Naryn and Skylur easily balance a squad of Correia’s security. This wasn’t someone I could push around, but if I let him push me around, I had little doubt I’d end up locked in the basement here. I couldn’t take that; not personally, and not given my commitments. It would drive me insane. Probably literally.