Cougar Undercover

by Terry Spear

  “Everything was sold off. I didn’t keep any of it. Not when I was moving around so much.”

  “Except you used the storage facility to retrieve things that you used to vanish the first time you disappeared after you were shot,” Dan reminded her.

  “Yes, but other than some of my dad’s things—weapons, another protective vest, a safe house of sorts, well, just stuff, I don’t remember anything else that would have been evidence of an incrimination.”

  “No one knew of it, right?” Dan asked.

  “No. That’s why it was still there when I went to it.”

  “Was there any secret hiding place in the storage unit? Was it part of a storage facility, or on private grounds?” Dan asked.

  “It’s privately held land, but it’s mine.”

  “Then anyone could have found it,” Bridget said. “And gone over it with a fine-tooth comb, looking for it.”

  “It was under a company name that we used. Remember, it was our way out, to vanish, so that no one would discover it. No one. It even has a kitchen, bathroom, and loft bed, if I needed to really hide out. We just called it a storage facility, but it’s more like a combo storage and safe house.”

  “Where is it? We need to search it, just in case,” Bridget said.

  “Cheyenne, Wyoming. It’s not a place where my family ever lived and we never told anyone. We would go through there on our family vacations—after Alicia was gone, and my dad would tell me every time what supplies he had and what they were for. He never said anything about having any evidence of wrongdoing at the FBI. It requires numerous passcodes to get in.”

  “Then when are we going?” Bridget asked.

  “I’m coming,” Carl said, as if he would be invited to tag along.

  “We’re seeing Ricky in a minute and then we’re heading out of here,” Dan said.

  “You’re not going alone,” Bridget said.

  “No. We’ll take a guard force with us,” Dan said.

  “And I’m coming. Leyton and Travis are off on a mission. I’m not going to sit here and do nothing,” Bridget said.

  “All right, you’re coming,” Dan said.

  “And me,” Carl said. “If we find evidence of wrongdoing, I can give it to the press. I might not work for one of the newspapers now, but I still have a lot of contacts. I can reach them, and we can turn the evidence over to them and they can run the story.”

  “All right,” Dan said, hoping he wasn’t making a grave mistake in bringing him with them. “We’re going in to see Ricky at the clinic, and then we’ll make arrangements to leave.”

  Addie was carrying the pastries into the clinic and then they entered Ricky’s room. Kolby was sitting there with him, talking away. “Whoa, what’s this?” Kolby said, taking the box of treats and looking them over.

  “For the two of you,” Addie said. “How are you doing, Ricky?”

  “Much better, thanks.” Ricky picked a chocolate pastry from the box. “These look great. When can we go back to investigating things?”

  “No time soon,” Dan said. “You’re staying in bed for another couple of days, and some more time after that when you return to the ranch with Hal and Tracey.”

  “What about that reporter? Did you lock him up and throw away the key?” Kolby asked, grabbing a blueberry pastry.

  “He’s at the jailhouse,” Addie said.

  After they spent a little time with Ricky, Dan told him to behave himself and then they left. Dan started organizing some people to come with them in another vehicle, just in case they needed the backup.

  “What if we find nothing there that will prove what my mother had discovered?” Addie asked.

  “Then we don’t. If we do find something there, maybe we can stop this now.”

  “What about Carl? Won’t he be a problem? He won’t have a lot of control over his shifting. What if he decides he wants to sell the story to the highest bidder?”

  “He won’t be able to. We’ll be with him at all times. Someone will always have an eye on him.” Dan got a call from Mrs. Fitz, and said, “Yes, have you got any news?”

  “No, but I heard about that reporter.”

  “Yeah, he’s now one of us and we have to find him a foster home until he has more control over his shifting.”

  “I’ll take him in. If he doesn’t know how to bake, I’ll teach him. I have all the weapons training I need to keep him in line, and if push comes to shove, I can take him down as a cat,” Mrs. Fitz said.

  “Are you sure?” Dan was really surprised she’d want to take him on.

  “Yeah, I can use another baker, and in the business I was in, I was often the handler. I’m trained for it, and it’ll be fun for me. I’ll have someone to talk to. Maybe later, he can work for the newspaper, if the Havertons wouldn’t mind hiring him. In the meantime, I’ll take him in.”

  “Okay, right now he’s going with us on another mission, but when we return, I’ll turn him over to your care. And thanks, Mrs. Fitz. We sure appreciate you stepping up to the plate to help out.” Dan hoped it wouldn’t be a mistake. He could see her teaching him to bake and him burning all her pastries. Or turning into a cougar in the middle of the kitchen while he was supposed to be baking treats.

  “You’re welcome, Dan. Anything I can do to help.”

  Dr. Kate’s receptionist, April Hightower, told Dan before they left the clinic, “You told us to be on the lookout for those FBI agents. It looks like they’re here—dark suits, black SUV, side arms under their jackets. I was just in the breakroom, and saw them getting out of the vehicle.”

  Dan got on his cell and called Chase. “I need you and Bridget here at the clinic pronto. I’ll need you to watch over Addie. The feds are here to pick up the bodies at the morgue.” Dan didn’t want Addie to go down to the morgue in case the men had plans to eliminate her if they saw her.

  “We’re on our way.”

  Dan escorted Addie to the breakroom. “Stay here until Chase gets here.”

  “If these guys are trouble…” Addie said.

  “If you hear shooting down in the morgue, you can come down and rescue us.”

  Addie shook her head and hugged and kissed him.

  Dan heard April talking to the men and telling them where to reach the elevator to the morgue. “Stay here. I don’t want Kate down there, just in case.”

  He needed to wait for backup, but he wasn’t risking Kate’s life if these guys weren’t legit. Dan headed for the stairs and saw Bridget and Chase rushing into the clinic. “Addie’s in the breakroom, Chase. Stay with her, all right? Bridget, with me.”

  He and she raced down the stairs to the basement, but Kate was already there. Damn it.

  Kate greeted them and they saw the two men in black suits waiting for her to release the bodies. One of the bodies was lying on the autopsy table.

  Dan recognized one of the men as the agent who had suddenly vanished while supposedly guarding Addie’s room. Dan said under his breath, “Leipheimer.”

  “What’s the trouble?” the other man asked Kate, eyeing Dan in his sheriff’s uniform.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Dan asked Leipheimer, pulling out his gun. “You were supposed to be protecting Addie at the hospital.”

  Leipheimer held up his hands in truce. “Hey, Sheriff, I’m one of the good guys, all right? My relief came and I left.”

  Even though that could have been a reasonable explanation and his replacement was a bad guy, and Leipheimer was perfectly innocent, Dan thought both men looked and smelled nervous. Why be nervous around a local sheriff, when they were FBI agents? Unless the men really weren’t federal agents, or they were so new on the job that they were just worried they’d screw up their assignment. Why send two men who were both new?

  Then he recalled what Briggs had said—he didn’t know Addie was in the hospital so he hadn’t sent anyone to watch over her room.

  “I need to see your credentials.” Dan motioned to the bodies. “These guys posed as FBI agents
and we need to make sure you guys are the real deal.”

  They showed him their ID and it looked legit. “Now give me the name of your boss so I can verify he sent the two of you and you can take the bodies. Can’t be too cautious you know.”

  The men looked at each and Bridget pulled out her gun and yelled, “They’re not federal agents!”

  Kate ducked for cover behind the autopsy table. Dan hadn’t wanted to shoot the men, certainly not with Kate in the morgue. “Let me see both your hands!”

  Both men reached into their suit coats and they drew their weapons. Dan and Bridget dove for cover behind the autopsy table, not a whole lot of cover, but more than the men had. He thought about shoving it at them, but the wheels were locked in place, and they’d lose what little cover they had, even if he ran the table into the men. They fired at the men from the sides of the table, taking them both down as the pretend agents’ rounds ricocheted off the metal tables. A couple of their rounds struck the corpse on top of the autopsy table.

  “Is everyone all right?” Dan asked Kate and Bridget, pissed that this business would continue and put his whole town at risk.

  “I’m fine.” Bridget ran to check out the men, kicking their weapons aside. Then she knelt, and pronounced, “They’re dead.”

  At the same time, Dan went to help Kate, who looked a little pale, lying close to the floor, out of harm’s way. “Yeah, I’m fine,” Kate said, “as long as the corpses don’t start shooting back.”

  Smiling, Dan helped her up from the floor. “Glad everyone’s fine. Except for those two.” He helped Bridget find any more weapons on the two men, another gun a piece, knives. “Fake badges, fake IDs.”

  “The man who called you about these men coming, is he involved in this?” Bridget asked. “Or did these men arrive—”

  “What the hell,” Chase said, barreling into the room with his gun out.

  Addie was right behind him ready to shoot someone. She frowned at the two dead men. “Don’t tell me—they’re not really FBI agents.”

  Kate was already getting DNA samples from them, and Bridget took pictures of their faces.

  “Hey,” Calvin said, coming into the morgue, then spied the dead men on the floor. “Hell. Who are they? There are two men upstairs who say they came for the bodies. April wanted me to check out the situation because she heard all the shooting right before the new ‘feds’ arrived.”

  “Send them down.” Dan hoped the hell these guys were legit. “Can you run by the sheriff’s office and ask Amy to give you the fingerprint kit and bring it back here?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Calvin said.

  Dan wanted to make sure they could identify these men once the feds took them away.

  14

  When the two agents arrived at the morgue, they were facing an armed Addie, Chase, Dan, and Bridget.

  “That’s how we do business here in town,” Kate said, asking to see their ID while the others held their weapons on them. Twenty minutes later, Calvin joined the party with the fingerprint kit and Chase took the fingerprints of the dead men.

  “I’m calling Briggs and if he’s not your boss, you’re dead men. Just saying.” Dan got on his phone and talked to Briggs. “Okay, tell me something you know about each of the men that imposters won’t know.”

  “Having some trouble?” Briggs asked.

  “You’re damn right we have. The body count went up from two to four.”

  “Iverson has a chipped front right tooth from playing a game of baseball with some of the guys. He still needs to get it capped. And Rogers has a new baby girl and he carries a picture of her in his wallet. All the guys give him a time about it because he doesn’t have one of his wife.”

  “Okay, thanks.” To the one man, Dan said, “Open wide.” Once he saw the chipped front tooth, he figured the men were the right ones this time, but he asked to see Rogers’s pictures in his wallet.

  He looked a little red-faced and showed a picture of an infant all dressed in pink.

  “No picture of your wife?” Dan asked.

  “She hates having her picture taken. But I’ve got one of her with the baby on my phone.”

  Dan didn’t need to see it, but he decided it wouldn’t hurt. When he saw the picture, he nodded. “They’re both beautiful. Tell her so. Okay, the bodies are…” Forgetting about Bridget, he glanced at her.

  She nodded, letting Dan know the men were the real deal, after she’d read their thoughts.

  “They’re all yours. All four of them.”

  “You guys mean business,” Iverson said.

  “Yeah, and so did they,” Dan said, showing them the arsenal the men were carrying.

  “All we’ve got to say is we want to get whoever’s behind this as much as you do,” Rogers said. “We take care of one of our own.” He glanced at Addie as if to say he meant her.

  “No longer an agent,” she said. “Not until this is all over and cleared up.”

  Dan sure as hell hoped she didn’t want to get back into the business once they knew who was behind this and stopped them. He was happy serving as the sheriff of Yuma Town and he had no intention of trying to become an agent with the FBI to join Addie.

  Addie came to take his hand and smiled up at him. “I’m not leaving, no matter what happens with this business.”

  He let out his breath, relieved.

  “We’ll give you a hand with the bodies,” Chase said, and then he and the rest of the men hauled the bodies in bags to a refrigerated unit to take them back to their headquarters.

  “Thanks,” Iverson said, shaking Dan’s hand.

  Rogers did the same thing.

  “Good luck,” they said to Addie.

  “Hope we catch these people,” Rogers said. “Or you do.”

  Then they were off and Dan was glad they were able to take care of all the bodies. So was Kate. She didn’t have dead bodies in her morgue very often. The ones they had to eliminate in the past—they’d buried.

  “Don’t anyone tell Leyton what happened here today,” Kate said, looking sternly at everyone gathered there. “He’s got to concentrate on his mission, and he and Travis need to remain focused. No one was hurt, other than the bad guys, and I’ll tell Leyton what happened when he and Travis have taken down the bad guy. All right?”

  Her cat, Sheba, wound around her legs, and she leaned down to pick her up. “Glad you weren’t in the morgue with us.”

  That was the thing about having a cougar-shifter clinic. Sheba was loved by all the shifter patients and the hospital staff and welcome there.

  “We need to head out to Cheyenne to investigate that storage facility,” Dan said. He called Stryker and gave him his orders. He deputized Calvin and another couple of men to help out with sheriff duties. It was late afternoon when Dan and the others picked up Carl. Then Dan, Addie, Carl, and Bridget got on the road, while Chase and Hal came to ride shotgun in a second vehicle.

  “I heard there was another ‘incident’ involving the taking down of more men posing as federal agents,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, just once, I’d like to have someone who was still alive to question at the end of all the shooting.” Dan glanced at Bridget to learn what she knew about the men from listening into their thoughts. He wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss it in front of Carl, but she could say she’d tell him later if she didn’t.

  “All I know is they were trying to figure out how to come up with a story that would fit, then they assumed the only way they could get out of there with the bodies they’d come after was to shoot their way out,” Bridget said.

  “They wanted to get rid of the evidence,” Dan guessed.

  “Yes, and that someone higher up is really furious already over the botched-up job. They were worried they’d fail too.”

  “Which they did and earned their just rewards,” Addie said.

  “They weren’t worried about us as much as about a boss who would eliminate them if they made a mistake?” Dan really thought they were nervous about them
learning they were frauds before they could leave with the bodies. Leipheimer, or whatever his real name was, had to have been shocked to see Dan arrive at the morgue.

  “Yeah, imagine that? They must take us for pussy cats, not wild cougars,” Bridget said.

  “Their fatal mistake,” Addie said.

  “Okay, so just how did you come by all of this?” Carl asked Bridget.

  She smiled sweetly at him. “I can read minds.”

  Carl stared at her. Then he smiled. “Sure, you can.”

  “Earlier, when you and I were doing research on the computer at the sheriff’s office, you were thinking how hot I was. Don’t let my mate know you think that, by the way. You might think you’re a real lady’s man in Denver, but in our part of the world, we were born cougars. You’re newly turned, and trouble.”

  Carl’s ears turned red.

  Everyone was quiet for a long while.

  Then Addie let her breath out and asked Carl, “Which newspaper do you plan to send the information to if we do find evidence of wrongdoing within the Bureau?”

  “The Washington Post. I have a friend there who’s an investigative reporter. She’d gladly take the case on and present it to her editor.”

  “An old girlfriend,” Bridget said, as if trying to prove to Carl she really could read his mind.

  Dan was glad she was with them on this trip.

  Carl frowned at her. “Yes, an old girlfriend, but if I have a story, I’ll send it to her. She investigates it and writes up the story. And then she pays me as her source.”

  “We can’t have anyone see you, Carl, just in case you can’t stop the inevitable and have to shift. Which is why we brought the cage for you in the hatchback. Not to confine you because we’re afraid you’ll hurt us, but because others will wonder why we’ve got a cougar riding as a pet in an SUV,” Dan said. “That means trying to get in touch with your old friends isn’t going to work.”