Anna woke with a sickly sweet taste in her mouth that spread into her nose and up through her sinuses, deadening anything else her nose might tell her.
Nausea and a rotten headache vied with the silver collar and high-silver-content, medieval-style cuffs and chains for the honors of the most miserable distractions. Anna tried to remember what had happened that had left her chained up like someone's extreme BDSM fantasy in a human-sized cage that hung in a large empty room. It was dark, and she was alone.
She'd been talking to Heuter, who'd been acting weird. And then...jeez. Had they really chloroformed her? Decades-long killing spree, witch's magic, rare old scary fae bloodlines - and they used chloroform. Several times, if her vague memories of waking up in the backseat of a car were accurate.
That just seemed so...mundane.
She rose to her hands and knees - and that was as far as the chains would let her go. She let the burn of the silver and the desperate need to upchuck her dinner keep her from panic as she tried to think around the headache for a plan of attack.
Lizzie had been raped within hours of when they took her. It was almost the first thing that they had done. And that was the thought that made Anna throw up.
As delicious as the food in Isaac's Irish pub had been, it didn't taste very good the second time around. She managed to get most of it out of the cage, but enough lingered on her hair - for some reason having her hands cuffed and chained had impeded her ability to keep her hair out of her mouth - and had spattered on the edge of the floor that it added to her misery.
And then she wondered if she was as alone in the room as she had thought. She hadn't been able to see or smell the fae who'd been guarding Lizzie's prison on the island. Panic threatened and she forced it down because it wouldn't do her any good.
Charles would be looking for her by now. But when she tried their bond, it was closed as tight as it ever had been. Didn't he know she was missing? Isaac would tell him right away. But what if Isaac didn't know? What if Heuter told him that Anna had decided to go back to the condo on her own? But that didn't make sense, because Isaac would be able to tell Heuter was lying - and Heuter knew that. He'd have to stay as far out of the way as he could so he didn't give himself away to the werewolves.
So why hadn't Charles opened the bond between them?
There was noise outside the cavernous room and Anna crouched low, trying to quiet her breathing and slow down her pounding heart so she could hear through the closed doors and the walls. They were talking pretty loudly so it wasn't too hard to get most of it.
"...pretty one. I like the women and the pretty ones best."
"I thought you had decided you were a superhero, Bulldog?" Heuter's voice was mocking.
"It pays well," the stranger said. "Better than janitorial work. Never got a blow job for cleaning a floor; got one for saving that hooker from her pimp. This one we got now is pretty. Isn't she pretty?"
"Not as pretty as the one you let get away," said Heuter.
"Not my fault. Not my fault. That big wolf - he was going to kill me." There was an edge of hysteria in the man's voice and an odd cadence to his speech pattern. "You never said they'd have a monster with them. Killing werewolves isn't hard. I killed all of them Uncle Travis sent me. Why is that one so hard to kill?"
"The witch did something," said Heuter. "Used some kind of magic so the wolf could see you, and it must have made him stronger. The girl we got tonight is his wife."
"He's going to be so mad at me." He sounded scared.
Heuter headed it off at the pass. "He has to find us first. This will be the last one for the year, and then we'll move on."
"I get her first," said the man who wasn't Heuter. Anna was pretty sure that Heuter was not the fae - surely Beauclaire would have been able to tell if he had been. She decided that the other man must be the fae. Neither of them sounded old, and Lizzie had told them that one man was older - and if Anna decided one of the speakers was the fae, no unseen person could be watching her from the shadows.
"I get her first because that wolf hurt me. I get to hurt her. I'm going to take her until she understands who's boss. I'm - "
He continued in that vein, working himself into a frenzy as he used fouler and fouler language to describe her fate in ugly detail. Anna deliberately tuned him out. She'd learned how to do that shortly after she'd been Changed and there had been no Charles to save her from the crazy bastards in the broken Chicago pack.
She couldn't feel Charles. He was going to be too late, and that would destroy him. She tugged on the chains, but they'd held werewolves before and there was no way she could break them. Blowing on her hands to ease the burn, she thought about how Isaac had said that his wolf Otten had been waiting for a chance and the killers hadn't given him one.
She couldn't afford to wait - she had to make her own chance. Because Anna had been a victim once upon a time, and she was damned sure never going to be one again.
Despite her determination, she was scared. Her chances weren't good - these men had managed to kill a lot of people, werewolves and fae, some of them considerably more experienced at protecting themselves than she was.
The sick, acrid smell of her terror burned out the last of the chloroform from her nose and she grabbed her fear, the lingering pain of the headache, and the ache that was seeping into her muscles from the silver. She pitted it all against the metal cuffs that held her - neck, wrists, and ankles - and called on the change.
These were not a pack of werewolves; they were human and fae. Raping Anna when she was a wolf was an entirely different proposition from doing the same to her when she didn't have freakishly sharp teeth and claws that would be a credit to any cougar on the planet.
The change always hurt. Always. And she'd long ago learned to use the pain to bully her way through the freaky feeling of her bones stretching and bunching, of muscles growing and teeth sharpening that was so much more intolerable than mere pain.
This time the change was worse than usual.
Her throat buckled under the pressure of the silver collar. Then it rehealed and buckled again, trapped inside a metal band that was too small to contain it. She thought she'd just stymied her kidnappers by killing herself when something in the more-fragile mechanism of the lock finally broke, sending a piece of metal flying. The collar fell away from her, hitting the floor and bits of chain with a harsh clank.
Sucking in air like a bellows, she still had to hold on to her thoughts and make her arms that were becoming her front legs move at just the right time while her hands were still hands but after her arms had slightly reshaped in order to get out of the wrist manacles. Her wrists bled and she panted, trying to keep quiet, as she dragged herself free of the two-inch-wide silver bands that imprisoned her. She didn't worry about the cuffs on her ankles because they were wider and the wolf would just step out of them.
She waited, but there was no pause in the conversation outside. Either they were too involved to notice, they expected her to be making some noise, or their ears were too human to hear through the walls the way she could hear them.
She lay spent for a moment - then realized that moment was dragging on into the next without any further change happening. Dangerous to stay half-shifted, though some of the most dominant wolves could do it for a while. She scrambled for a way to continue the change, but her body was exhausted, shaking with the need for food and...
They had doped her up with something. Mostly werewolves were immune to drugs and alcohol. Their metabolism just ran through it too fast, but they had given her something, probably a whole lot of something. GHB or Rohypnol, maybe - or some sedative designed to keep her passive. It had been no match for the adrenaline surge that the thought of being helpless in the hands of rapists and murderers had brought - but it had stalled out her shift.
Pain came in waves, because her body wasn't meant to be caught between for this long. Fluids, clear, pink, and bright red, began to leak onto the floor of the cage. She reached out for Charles and found the moon instead.
Tomorrow would come the night of the full moon, when her song was too strong to resist, but tonight she was waxing and full of strength that she lent to her daughter who asked. With a painful jerkiness that scraped chain and manacles loudly on the bottom of the cage as her muscles flexed and tore and reshaped themselves, Anna restarted her change.
CHARLES WAS DEEP into his work. Brother Wolf loved the hunt even when it was on computers instead of in flesh and blood. Both of them could smell their prey, weak and quivering just out of their reach. So the first knock on the door elicited no more than a growl of annoyance.
It was Brother Wolf who noticed something was wrong the second time the knock came. Even buried in the endgame of his hunt, his senses were still on alert, and they told Brother Wolf that the smart FBI lady, the smart FBI man who tried very hard to be underestimated, the fae whose daughter had been hurt, and the local Alpha were knocking on his door - and they were all supposed to be with his mate, who was not here.
Anna. Charles reached for her, but he couldn't touch her through their bond, not even through their pack bond. With his help, his ghosts had well and truly isolated him.
Enraged and terrified for Anna in equal measures, he opened the door knowing his eyes were showing Brother Wolf. "Where's Anna?" he growled.
Isaac was supposed to make sure no one hurt her while Charles worked. The temptation to blame the Olde Towne Alpha rose and was banished. Anna was Charles's; she was his to protect and he had failed. Brother Wolf wanted to charge into the night and kill until they found her; Charles held him back with the knowledge that there were better ways to find Anna faster - and that blood would flow when he did.
"We were hoping you could tell us," Isaac said. "She went to the ladies' room and never came back. You two are mated, right? Can you tell where she is?"
Charles tried again. Right there and then, with the others still standing in the doorway, he tried again to open up the bonds he'd closed to protect her.
Nothing. He tried harder, tried until it hurt worse than the change. He growled and tried again - and felt the ghosts who haunted him howl in triumph. He turned and walked almost blindly until he stared into the big mirror in the bedroom. The ghosts were unrecognizable, having melted into one creature with fifty mouths and twenty hands that were busily tying the ribbon of his bond into knots.
We can kill her no matter how you try to protect her, it told him, its voices high and vicious. Your fault, your fault we died, your fault she dies. One voice started laughing, and then the others continued until there was an unholy cacophony in his head.
There was a drip of blood leaking out of Charles's nose and the whites of his eyes were pink from broken blood vessels - it made his yellow eyes look particularly bizarre.
"Did you try to track her?" he asked Isaac, as Charles continued to stare into the mirror, his voice so low and rough he didn't recognize it as his own. He stuffed his rage into a small icy place and promised it release if it would let him work right now. He would be cold and controlled until he found where they had stashed his Anna - and then he'd take them down into small, bite-sized chunks.
"Yes," the Olde Towne Alpha said. Charles turned away from the mirror to find Isaac watching him warily from the relative safety of the living room as he continued to explain. "I trailed her into the ladies' room and out again. Then she walked about two feet the wrong way if she intended to go back into the party - which she did, because she'd ordered another round of fish and chips according to the waitress who delivered it - and then her scent trail just ends. Like Otten's did."
Isaac must be a good tracker. It was unusual for a wolf that new to be able to trail that well, even in wolf form. No matter how good he was, Charles was better.
The computer hadn't confirmed his guesses yet, but he was only waiting for the final nail. He considered going after the people he had decided were behind the killings - but if he was wrong, it meant Anna would stay in her kidnappers' hands while he chased down the wrong trail. And then there was the problem that the people he was looking at had nearly Bran's resources and he would need -
"What's wrong with him?" Leslie asked in a quiet voice that nonetheless interrupted his thoughts. "Why is he bleeding like that? Do you see his eyes? They weren't like that when he opened the door."
"I don't have a clue," Isaac said in a calm voice. "Look, you two, you don't stand a chance if he loses it. You stay out here, back, out of the way - keep your guns out and watch. If he looks like he is headed your way, just shoot - and make sure your shot counts. If he's the wolf I think he is, he'd rather be dead than have you become collateral damage. And if he's far enough gone that he's taking out civilians, he's not going to be much help to Anna anyway."
"Civilians?" said the male FBI officer, sounding offended. Brother Wolf might have known his name, if he had cared. But his mate was missing and he cared for nothing and no one except for that.
Isaac ignored him - maybe he'd fallen for that tired, worn-looking mien, but Brother Wolf knew better. He recognized a fellow predator in the male FBI agent, even though Goldstein - the name rose up when he called for it - Goldstein was no threat to anything Charles cared about.
"Humans are civilians here," said Charles. To himself he sounded calm. "And you might listen to Isaac, though I don't think I'm far enough gone to hurt our allies. Isaac, I should be able to find her - but I'm not going to be able to use our link tonight." His throat shut down as Brother Wolf fought to the surface in a panic at Charles's admission.
Anna was missing. Anna was in the hands of the people who'd hurt the little dancer. His Anna who'd already survived so much - he'd sworn nothing like that would ever happen to her again when she was theirs. And they had failed, Brother Wolf and Charles, two souls sharing one skin...They had failed their mate.
Charles convinced Brother Wolf that they had a better chance of finding Anna in man-shape rather than as wolf, but it took more willpower than he knew he had to do it.
"He can't find her?" Leslie asked.
"I told you it wasn't a sure thing," Isaac told her. "The mating bond is a very personal thing."
Isaac was doing a good job of keeping his Alpha nature tamped down; his voice was soft and nonthreatening. Brother Wolf liked Isaac, but just now would not be a good time to interest him in proving who was more dominant. People got killed in fights like that - and Brother Wolf was craving violence just now.
"You also said if it didn't work, we might be in serious trouble," said the tough little dancer's fae father. "Because there isn't a person in this city more dangerous than a wolf whose mate is in danger. Are we in serious trouble?"
Yes, thought Charles. He needed to do something urgent - but Brother Wolf's rage was clouding his thoughts. He needed to get to his computer and confirm -
"I don't want those bastards to get Anna," Leslie said. "If Charles can't find her, what about my wish? You said it was dangerous to use except in specific or small ways. But I lost a puppy - and now we're trying to find another one."
Charles narrowed his eyes at her. "What wish?"
Beauclaire ignored him, staring at Leslie with something approaching delight. "Clever," he said. "Oh, that is a clever way to look at it."
"A fae man left me a gift when I was a child," Leslie said to Charles, and she remembered not to look him in the eyes. "To make up for not being there to rescue my puppy, I think. I've never used it - and our expert in fae magic says that I need to be careful with it. But that sounds like a fair exchange to me." She looked at Beauclaire.
Gravely, he nodded. "I think that might be right."
She opened her purse and took out her wallet, and Charles could smell the magic from where he stood. Fae magic strong enough to make him sneeze, powerful enough to give him hope. She pulled out a little white card from her billfold. "I'm not exactly sure how to do this."
"Magic follows intention," said Charles, and Beauclaire gave him a sharp look. "Tell it what you want - and tear up the card to seal the deal."
"Since when did the Marrok's son become an expert in fae magic?" asked Beauclaire - and Charles saw Goldstein look very bland. It was "the Marrok's son" that had done it. Goldstein had heard that term before and now wanted to know what it meant.
"Since when did the fae give up information on the werewolves?" countered Charles silkily. Anna was missing: he didn't care what Goldstein found out. But the fae would do very nicely to sate Brother Wolf's desire to tear into flesh until it bled. Beauclaire, Brother Wolf decided, would be a worthy opponent, and once he killed something, maybe he could think clearly again.
Beauclaire took a cautious step back and Isaac eased between them. "You don't want to do anything rash, Charles," he cautioned. "We're all on the same team here."
"I wish - " said Leslie, drawing Charles's attention away from the fae. "I wish..." She looked at Charles. "One lost puppy for another - but Anna is yours as Toby was mine. So I wish that as I lost my puppy, my dog that I loved, that Charles should find his lost wolf." She tore the card in half and the magic...did something.
Charles's phone rang before he could figure out what the magic had done. Its sudden blaring ringtone that wasn't the song it sang when Anna called him irritated Brother Wolf, who pulled it out of their pocket and crushed it to make it stop.
Everyone in the condo quit breathing - and Charles realized that his ability to speak coherently had apparently given them a false sense of safety.
"How long until it works?" he asked Beauclaire in a soft, soft voice.
The fae sighed. "We don't even know it will work, werewolf. Something happened, but it wasn't my magic in that card. Treasach tended toward subtle magic that snuck up behind you."
Another cell phone rang and Charles growled. Isaac pulled out his phone and started to hit the off button, but paused. "Four-zero-six is the Montana area code, right?"
He answered the phone before Charles replied, and clear as day Charles's father's voice came out of the speaker of Isaac's phone.
"I have a feeling that my son is in a bad place," Bran said. "And I have made a habit of not ignoring my feelings - especially when neither he nor Anna are answering their phones."
Isaac gave Charles a nervous glance. "That's right. Charles is here and Anna's been taken by the murdering bastards we've been chasing. We have the FBI here, the two who've been working with us. And Beauclaire is present as well, the fae whose daughter we rescued yesterday."
It was a very good rundown of what was happening, Charles thought.
"Why isn't Charles chasing down Anna?"
Brother Wolf growled.
"That's not helpful, Charles," Bran said.
"He says he can't contact her."
There was a very long pause and then his father said quietly, "Charles. Is it the same thing that was bothering you before you went to Boston?"
Charles couldn't answer, wasn't human enough to answer. He turned around and stalked to the far side of the room. If he hadn't killed them, hadn't executed those wolves in Minnesota, he'd have been able to find Anna before she got hurt.
"Before Boston..." said Isaac and his voice trailed off. "Oh, I know what you did before Boston, Charles. This could get messy," he said to the others, suddenly decisive. "I think we can work something out, but it might be better if you people, who are a little too easy to hurt, are out of the way. Would you mind waiting in the hall?"
"You have something to talk about that you don't want us to hear," said Goldstein. "You don't have to lie. We'll go wait."
"I never lie to the cops or the FBI," Isaac said. He was being truthful, Charles noted somewhat absently. "Things might get pretty bad before they get better and I don't want you hurt."
Isaac didn't say anything to Beauclaire, but the fae said, "I think I'll wait outside with the others. He'll be easier without me here."
There was a quiet click as his front door was shut and another as Isaac threw the dead bolt.
"All right," Isaac said, and it took a moment for Charles to realize he was talking to Bran. "It's just Charles and me - though Beauclaire hears just fine. He might be able to hear every word we say."
"Acceptable," said Charles's da crisply. "Beauclaire is trustworthy - and he owes us a debt, if you've rescued his daughter."
Trust Da to know Beauclaire.
"Fine," said Isaac. "So am I reading this right and there's something about that fu - " He caught himself, probably remembering someone warning him not to swear around Bran. Charles's father was old, and though he could swear with the best of them (usually in Welsh) he generally preferred to avoid it. He could get pretty scary with underlings who had foul mouths. Isaac continued with slightly milder adjectives. "Screwed-up thing in Minnesota that Charles got stuck with that is somehow interfering with his bond with Anna?"
"I don't know," said Bran. "Charles, is that what the problem is?"
Charles didn't know Isaac well, and talking in front of him was akin to dancing naked in public. But if his father could figure out a way to help - and if he couldn't, then no one could - then he would have stripped off his clothes and run naked down Congress Street in downtown Boston at lunch hour just to get a chance to talk with him.
"They've broken the link," Charles said.
"Who has?" asked Bran.
"The ghosts of the people I've killed who should have lived." He turned to look at his father, but all he saw was Isaac holding his cell phone open.
He smiled grimly at Isaac, who took a step back, and spoke to him. "Another man would probably have a mental breakdown - and blame all sorts of psychoses. But my grandfather was a shaman and he gave me the gift that allows me to see the ghosts of those I've wronged."
"So they are haunting you," Isaac said, his face quiet.
Charles hadn't expected the Alpha to get in his face and call him a liar - Charles was the Marrok's hatchet man, after all. But the simple belief he saw made him remember that Isaac's grandfather could see ghosts, too.
"And they are haunting me," he said, Brother Wolf standing down a little from immediate attack. Brother Wolf approved of Isaac, as long as the other wolf didn't get too pushy.
"Tell him why," Bran said into the silence. His voice was odd, as it got when he was following an impulse he didn't understand. The truth was, Charles got his ability to deal with magic from both halves of his heritage - but it sometimes bothered Bran when magic spoke to him, probably because Bran's mother had made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Cinderella's fairy godmother.
"Because my guilt holds them here," Charles answered Isaac, because Bran thought it might be important. "They should be off wherever dead people go, but I'm holding them here because I can't let them go."
"You feel guilty about what?" Isaac asked, sounding honestly bewildered. "We all know about Minnesota - no one gossips like us Alphas. Three wolves killed some old pedophile, half ate him, and then left him for the civilians to find - and it was some ten-year-old kid who found him. Probably, taking into account what the gossip says and the police reports I saw, the ten-year-old was the kid the old guy was after. The damned fools probably made so much noise fighting over the body that the kid came to investigate. At least they had the sense to run instead of killing the kid, but I think they racked up enough stupidity to register on the Top Five Dumbass Moves list for the next ten years or so."
Charles hadn't known that it had been the child who found the body. His father had told him that his job was to go find out if they had killed the man and left him for humans to find - and, if so, execute them. Brother Wolf had forced their confession - dominant wolves can do that if they are more dominant enough - and then carried out his Alpha's orders.
"Poor boy," murmured Bran. "No one told me it was the boy who found him." Someone, Charles knew, would contact the boy's family and make sure he got counseling. His parents would think it some sort of victim's organization or something. It was one of the jobs Charles used to handle or oversee.
"You feel guilty for executing them," Isaac said, dragging Charles's attention back to him. "I get that. But I don't get why you should. Were they crying like babies? Because that really sucks when they do that. Was it Robert, their Alpha? I heard that garbage he was passing around. Their victim was a bastard who deserved to die. Fine. If they were sure he was guilty, kill him somewhere quietly and get rid of the body. If you ask me, I'd have executed their Alpha, too, for being incompetent enough to let them get so out of control that they left him for civilians to find."
"Had this happened before we came out," Charles said, "I could have let them live."
"Could you?" Isaac said. He shook his head. "If they had been in my pack, I'd have killed them. Now, ten years ago, whenever."
Charles read the truth of that in Isaac's voice.
"It didn't matter to them that the guy was dirt," Isaac said. "If they were after a righteous kill, they wouldn't have eaten him. If they hadn't been hunting in a pack, they probably wouldn't have killed him, either. They were dumbasses. They were out of control. And you can't have dumbass out-of-control werewolves. Not now. Not ever. And it was their Alpha's job to make sure they weren't dumbasses. I know better than to send a pack out hunting when we don't want a bloody mess to result, and I haven't been a werewolf half as long as Robert has been Alpha of his pack. And he couldn't accept the blame - oh no. They were the good guys; he wasn't going to kill the good guys - because he knows it was his fault they needed to be killed in the first place. So Bran must send you out to kill them. I bet that f - " He cast a panicked glance at the phone and bit his lip and finished more quietly, "I bet he said all the right things, all the polite things, and still made you feel like a murderer, right? He did it because he knows it's his fault and he can't admit it to himself so he's looking for someone to blame. And they all know, we all know, that right now we werewolves cannot afford headlines like we've been seeing in Minnesota."
It was truth as Isaac felt it. And it sounded right. Maybe he'd been listening too hard to Robert and not thinking clearly.
Charles took a deep breath. "Anna knows how people work," he said. "She'd have seen it, too. But I don't bring Anna with me anymore."
"It makes sense, though, right?" Isaac said.
"If you weren't already worn-down with the killing," said Bran heavily, "you would have recognized the truth yourself. If I weren't so busy trying to justify something that has less to do with justice than expedience, I would have seen it, too. Just because it was necessary, doesn't mean that it wasn't the right answer anyway."
"One of the wolves had been a wolf for less than two years," Charles said.
"Too bad for them," said Isaac. "They chose to give in to the wolf at the wrong time. They chose to hang out with idiots. They chose to act as they did. They chose their own death and you were just the delivery system."
"I think," said Bran, "that the Minnesota pack needs a different Alpha."
"Agreed," said Isaac.
"Charles," said Bran. "Where is Anna?"
He pointed southwest, unaware until he did so of how accurate a fix he had on her. "Ten miles that direction." He couldn't tell anything else, couldn't touch her mind, but he knew where she was.
"Find her," his father told him. "And take these people down. Avoid killing them if you can - remind your wolf that jail is a much worse sentence than death. If we can help take them down with minimal violence, that would be good."
"Yes," agreed Charles, though his da had already disconnected.
"Are you all right?" asked Isaac.
Charles gave him a shallow bow of respect, one dominant wolf to another. "Better." Not fixed, not anywhere near normal, but he couldn't find it in him to care one way or the other, because now he could find Anna. "I have a lock on her. What's ten miles in that direction?"
"Islington, Dedham, Westwood. Milton, maybe. I know my way around here by road, not as the crow flies. We'll have to consult a map to be sure - and how certain are you of the ten miles?"
"It's close to that," Charles said. He considered just getting into a car and following his link, but it would probably be faster if he knew where he was going. "As the crow flies" directions had some serious issues in a day of fences and roads. Especially when he was pretty sure that he could figure out exactly where she was before they left the condo. He hadn't wasted his time today. "Why don't you let the rest of them back in and join me at my computer?"
He needed the moment it would take Isaac to assemble the others. Charles was shaking, and dominant enough not to want anyone to see. She was alive. It would be enough for the moment.
He sat down at the table and found that his computer had finished the task he'd set for it. He heard them file in but he didn't turn around. He didn't want to risk meeting anyone's eye unexpectedly until he had Anna safe.
"Anna is a nut for police procedurals," he told them as he resized a window so he could see if he'd made any progress. "This morning she observed that serial killers often like to insinuate themselves into the investigations. I initially dismissed it - because you would have noticed something like that after this many years, right?"
"We looked," Goldstein said. "There was no sign of anything."
His script had done its job and he was in through the firewalls - it always was good to have friends on the inside. He could talk and hack at the same time, and maybe it would keep the feds from figuring out where he was. It would probably help that none of them had worked for the IRS - and that the back door he'd gotten in through was low on graphics and high on code.
"I decided that maybe the initial killer, the old one, maybe he wasn't that kind of psycho. But the new guy might be - the mysterious third man. So I went back ten years. And I ran a list of the names of everyone involved in the case for all those years. There were two people who showed up more than three times."
"I assure you, I am not a serial killer," said Goldstein dryly.
"I was pretty sure it wasn't you," Charles agreed. "You want to catch him so badly I can smell it. So I took a look at the other guy first."
Goldstein drew in a sharp breath. "You can't be serious."
Goldstein had been involved in a number of the investigations, and he would know who else had been there with him.
"Someone was present for six of the last ten years," Charles continued. "Giving an interview to the newspaper or the TV news. Helping out at the call center. Assigned as liaison to someone - and once I lucked out and found his photo on the front page paper of where one of the bodies turned up. I was able to confirm that he has been in the right town at the right time for nine of the last ten years in a job that usually moves people around. The other year, when he was assigned halfway across the country, he was on a mysterious vacation at the time of the killings. So I went looking into his background. Called in a few favors. Hacked a few databases. Called a couple of police officers and a retired minister."
"Who is it?" asked Beauclaire, an eager bite to his voice.
Charles hit a button and a photo of Cantrip's poster boy came up on half his screen, leaving him to file through records on the other. "According to a former nanny, the good senator was obsessed that his son be a manly man - Texas-style. And when the six-year-old Les Heuter was discovered playing with his mother's makeup, he was bundled up and sent to spend some manly time with the senator's older brother, the Vietnam War vet and avid hunter Travis Heuter, who lived and still lives in Vermont. Travis Heuter also has houses and properties in a number of the cities where the Big Game Hunter's killing sprees have taken place, as well as a good dozen in places that haven't had killings. In the few places our killer has been active and Travis Heuter doesn't own property, his family owns property or one of his three companies has condos or apartments. He's a little bit crazy, is Travis, so the Heuter family doesn't let him appear at public functions or on TV because he might not be politically correct in his views."
"Heuter." Goldstein spoke with the barest shadow of Brother Wolf's desire to destroy the killer in his voice.
"A senator's son. This is going to be a nightmare of political pressures," Leslie said. "My boss is going to love it."
Charles couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not - probably because she didn't know, either.
"And the nail on the coffin is this - Travis and Senator Dwight Heuter had a younger sister, Helena. In 1981, when she was sixteen, she turned up pregnant - raped, she claimed. She moved in with her big brother and then committed suicide a couple of years later, leaving Travis in charge of her half-blood boy. A retired teacher I talked to told me that the boy was 'different,' not precisely slow or autistic, but definitely odd, with a tendency toward violence. His name is Benedict Heuter and he finds menial jobs, according to the IRS" - this had been the last little bit he'd needed to tie it all up in a bow - "and for the last five years he's been doing janitorial work or maintenance, moving every year or so."
Charles backed out of the IRS database and closed his doorway. Then he slid into a chunk of Darknet - a separate little space of the Internet unseen by search engines and mostly engineered by hackers who'd abandoned the Internet for most of their more questionable pursuits - and pulled up a list of properties from Travis Heuter's tax records, something he'd copied over during an earlier excursion into the IRS database.
"I don't think you're supposed to be able to get at that information," said Leslie.
"Don't look," said Goldstein, peering over Charles's shoulder. "We don't know anything about illegal hacking." He whistled cheerily. "Travis Heuter owns half the world."
Charles searched for Massachusetts and found an address.
"Not that one," murmured Isaac. "That's downtown. You want ten miles southwest of here. Not that one - that's way up north. There. Dedham. One of my college girlfriends kept a horse out there and that's about the right direction and distance."
Charles didn't want to be wrong, so he committed that address to memory, but kept going through the records until his search jumped back to the beginning. It was Dedham or they'd have to follow the bond. Either way, Heuter was done.
Weighing time lost investigating versus lost time, Charles took a moment to look up the address on another Darknet site that specialized in property records official and unofficial - the Darknet was a rather tedious mix of conspiracy theorists, brilliant black hats, and OCD record keepers. Travis Heuter's Dedham property was a largish two-story farmhouse with a barn on four-point-two acres that had sold five years ago for close to a million dollars. Charles printed the house plans and the county record of the last survey of the land, folded them, and shoved them into his pocket.
"One of my pack has a van waiting for us outside," Isaac said. "Shall we go?"
Focused on Anna, Charles had forgotten that they would need a car to get there. It was probably best that he not drive.
