Anna followed Charles out of the hotel, trying to figure out what had happened with him and why so she could decide how to proceed.
Charles led the way out of the hotel and turned in the direction of the condo where they were staying. Charles, the Aspen Creek Pack, and the pack's corporation had condos all over the place. The one in Boston belonged to the corporation. It made travel more discreet, no hotel charges, no strangers coming in to clean every day.
"Wait a minute," she said.
Charles turned back. The expression on his face was exactly the same as the one he'd had when they left their house yesterday, heading for the airport so he could fly them to Seattle, where they had caught the commercial flight. But he felt so different.
When Charles had chosen to frighten all those poor people at the airport so she'd win her bet, she'd thought she'd detected mischief in his eyes. But it had been so long since he'd laughed - or teased her with his sneaky sense of humor - that she'd been afraid to hope. After all, they had been patting him down pretty thoroughly, something that could have ticked him off enough to growl, and the timing could have been accidental.
And even the meeting...it had been necessary, if the feds were to believe she was the one with the information, for him to feed it to her. And the best way to do that was for him to open the bond between them. Bran didn't want the feds scared of werewolves, and Charles, especially the past few months, was really scary.
If he were just doing it for business's sake, he would have closed their link down when they left the hotel, but he hadn't. And he'd touched her.
Bran, it seemed, had indeed found a cure - or at least a bandage - for his son.
"What?" Charles asked. Evidently she'd been staring at him too long. He reached up and tucked a flyaway piece of her hair behind her ear.
She wanted to grab his hand and hold it to her, wanted to climb into his arms and feel them close around her. But she was afraid if she drew his attention to it, he'd close her off again. So she kept her hands to herself and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet a couple of times instead. She needed to keep him off his game, keep him thinking about other things - and she had just the thing to do it with.
"Let's go exploring." She pulled the city map she'd taken from the hotel's lobby this morning out of her pocket and opened it up.
"I know Boston," said Charles, with a slightly pained look around to see if anyone had noticed the map. It was bright orange and highly unlikely to evade even the most casual glance.
"But I don't," she told him, enjoying the expression on his face. Being mated to a wolf two hundred years her elder meant that she seldom got to see him disconcerted. "And since I want to do the exploring..." He would take her to interesting places, she knew. Tomorrow that would be good, and doubtless she'd enjoy it more than anything she found herself. But today she wanted to be more...spontaneous.
"If you run around with that bright orange map in your hand," Charles told her, "everyone will think you're a tourist."
"When was the last time you were a tourist?" she asked archly.
He just looked at her. Charles, she had to agree, was not tourist material.
"Right," Anna told him. "Buck up. You might even enjoy it."
"You might as well have 'hapless victim' tattooed across your forehead," he muttered.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him across the street to King's Chapel and the oldest graveyard in Boston - according to her map.
TWO HOURS LATER, she was vying for food in the North Market building of Faneuil Hall Marketplace with what felt like four hundred tourist groups while Charles waited nearby with his back against the wall. The three feet of empty space around him was probably the only space open in the whole place - but that was Charles; people just didn't crowd him. Smart people.
Since most of the tourists in front of the booth where she'd chosen to grab lunch came all the way to Anna's waist, she was pretty sure she was in no danger, but you couldn't tell it by the focused attention her mate aimed at the children.
If you can't tell that I'm looking at something on you that is precisely on level with the little ones' heads - his voice in her head had a rough purr - then you need your eyes checked.
Her jaw dropped. Was he flirting with her? Anna turned her head to meet his gaze, which dropped immediately to her rear end. She jerked her head back before he saw her smirk - or her red cheeks. He had been checking out the crowd. She'd seen him do it, seen him take a good long look at each of the kids.
But Charles certainly wasn't lying to her, either, so all the rest had been automatic, but checking her out had been on purpose. She smiled and felt her wolf relax into the rightness of flirting with her mate.
She had plenty of time for her cheeks to cool. It took a while before she managed to order food - mostly because she took pity on an overwhelmed teacher who seemed to be in charge of a million kids all by herself. Anna escaped at last with a pair of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of water and let Charles escort her outside the building to hunt for someplace to sit and eat.
"We could have gone into a real restaurant," Charles said, taking a bottle of water she handed him. "Or waited for the starving hordes to disperse before joining the fray." He sounded serious, as always, but she knew better, knew because their bond conveyed his amusement.
"They were all of seven years old. I was confident that I was unlikely to end up on their plate when there were hot dogs and ice cream to be had."
"If they weren't predatory, you shouldn't have had to manhandle them," he said, making tracks toward an unoccupied seating area. Anna saw at least one other person start for the same place, then notice Charles and turn away, but at least he didn't look panicked.
"They couldn't see over the counter to the food," she told him. "We had a deal. They didn't bite me and I'd lift them up so they could see." She'd expected them to be shyer, but they'd really seemed to have had fun. Maybe they'd been too young to be worried about strangers. The teacher had been too busy lifting up her half of the class to worry about Anna. Apparently the mothers who were supposed to be helping had wandered off to the ladies' room.
"All of the children?"
"Half. One at a time. It's not like they weighed very much. And I had help."
"Hmm." Charles raised an eyebrow. "There was some pretty intense jockeying for position considering that the prize was hot dogs and sandwiches and not priceless art treasures. I saw you elbow that woman."
"She cut in front of a seven-year-old little boy," Anna told him indignantly. "Who does that?"
"Ladies wearing four thousand dollars in diamonds, apparently." He cleared the table of the remains of someone else's meal and tossed it in a nearby trash can.
"I don't cut in front of children and I have four thousand dollars' worth of diamonds." She plopped on a narrow bench and put her food on the minuscule table, hoping it wouldn't wobble and dump everything on the ground.
"Do you?" Charles asked mildly, taking a seat on the other side. The one-person benches, unlike the table, looked sturdy enough and didn't creak beneath his weight, though she saw him rock a little to make sure it would hold. "Except for your ring, you don't wear them. And the ring is not worth four thousand."
"That one necklace, right? Wearing it wouldn't make me cut in front of some poor, hungry kid." He was playing with her, he was, teasing her because she was afraid to wear the jewelry his father had given her when they were married. Her wolf wanted to wiggle in joy and go hunt something to celebrate. Anna took a bite of sandwich. "Though maybe I'd have to put on the bracelet, too."
"No," he said. "Just the bracelet would do. But you don't wear them."
Her necklace was covered in at least twice the number of diamonds and several larger stones. She absorbed the idea of the bracelet itself being worth more than four thousand dollars, and was doubly grateful that she hadn't worn them. She tended to play with anything hanging around her neck - what if she broke the necklace?
"There's a time and place for stuff like that." Anna tried not to show him how appalled she was at the value of the jewelry. She preferred to downplay the material changes in her life since she'd met and mated with Charles. They weren't the important changes - if occasionally she found them more difficult than the real ways her life had altered. "When you're going shopping isn't a good time for jewels, especially if that makes you think that pushing around little kids is okay."
He raised his eyebrows. "Oh? When were you planning on wearing your diamonds?" Charles sounded amused. He knew that she was planning on never wearing them now that she knew what they were worth.
"Maybe if we were meeting the Queen of England." She thought about it for a moment. "Or if I really needed to outshine someone I didn't like." She took a few more bites of a sandwich that needed a little something...onion or radish, maybe. Something with a bite.
She really couldn't imagine a situation dire enough to risk wearing something like that set, especially not if the bracelet was worth four thousand dollars. What if the clasp gave way?
"Ah. That would be never?" It didn't seem to bother him one way or the other.
Anna thought about it seriously. "Maybe if I needed to intimidate someone - like if my brother decided to remarry and my dad told me he didn't like her so I had to fly to Chicago and drive her off. I would even cut her in line for a hot dog while I was wearing them. But she wouldn't be seven, either."
Charles smiled. It wasn't a laugh or a grin. But it wasn't his you're-going-to-die-before-you-breathe-your-next-gulp-of-air smile, either, which was as close to a real smile as she'd seen on his face for a while.
She gave a contented sigh and tapped the toe of her boot against the leg of his suit. They'd have been more comfortable in casual clothes, but then they'd have had to go change. And she was afraid that going back to the condo would give him an excuse to shut down again.
"It's all right," he said. "We can go change and do some more touristy stuff."
He was reading her through their bond. Hiding the warm fuzzies that gave her behind a distrustful look, Anna took a bite of her sandwich and then said, "Okay. But only if you'll agree to do this with me." She took her now-bedraggled map out of her pocket and tapped a finger on an advertisement.
Charles looked, heaved a long sigh. "I should have known we wouldn't get out of here without doing the imitation trolley car cemetery tour complete with costumed ghouls."
"Not in my territory," snarled someone behind her.
As it seemed an unlikely response to Charles's pseudo-reluctant agreement, Anna initially assumed it was directed at someone else. But Charles tilted his head and lowered his eyelids, the muscles tightening subtly in his shoulders, so Anna turned around in her seat to see who had spoken.
In rows along the outdoor marketplace were dozens of dark green wagons, resembling nothing so much as the covered wagons in her father's beloved old Western movies. The wagons served as kiosks where people sold T-shirts, purses, or other small portable goods. Standing on the top of the one nearest them was a young-looking black man, fine-boned and slight, watching them - watching Charles, anyway - with yellow eyes as the strings of beading supplies hanging from hooks all over the wagon swayed unsteadily.
From photos, she recognized him as Isaac Owens, the Alpha of the Olde Towne Pack - Boston being the Olde Towne, complete with the final Es. He wasn't in the habit of running around on the tops of unlikely perches or he'd have been in the local paper a lot more than he already was.
"You're attracting attention," said Charles in a conversational tone designed not to carry to human ears. Isaac, being a werewolf, would hear him just fine despite being a dozen yards away. "Do you really want that?"
"I'm out. They know who I am." Projecting his voice to anyone who cared to listen - and people were starting to pause what they were doing to listen - Isaac raised his chin aggressively. "What about you?"
Charles shrugged. "In, out, it doesn't matter." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "No more does your declaration. You lost control of the situation that brings me here when you chose not to report the deaths in your territory. You have no say over what I do or don't do."
"We didn't kill anyone," Isaac declared, and pointed at Charles. "And you will have to go through me to take any of my pack."
Isaac was new, Anna remembered. New at his job, new at being a wolf - and, like her, he'd been a college student when he'd been Changed. Normally it would have been years before he was Alpha, no matter how much potential dominance he had. But the Olde Towne Pack had lost its Alpha last year in a freak sailing accident and Isaac, who had been second, had stepped in to do the job. His second was an old wolf who probably didn't know anything at all about this stunt.
The woman who was working the kiosk - her body bestrewn with hand-beaded jewelry and tattoos in a bewildering mixture of color and texture - was backing slowly away, trying not to draw attention to herself. Not a bad strategy for someone caught between predators, though less glittery jewelry might have helped - another reason for Anna not to wear the diamonds.
"If no laws were broken, no one is at risk," said Charles, and Isaac sneered.
"Get off the stupid wagon before that poor lady calls nine-one-one," Anna said, exasperated. "Come introduce yourself, Isaac, and see what happens." She said it loud enough that she was clearly audible to the crowd of people that was forming a ring around them - close enough to see what was going on, not so close as to get involved. That meant she was speaking almost as loudly as Isaac had been.
The local Alpha looked at her for the first time and frowned. His nostrils flared as he tried to catch her scent - which would have been impossible to filter from the rest of the people nearby except that she smelled like an Omega wolf.
After a rather long pause, Isaac shrugged his shoulders to loosen the muscles and walked off the end of the wagon - a good nine-or ten-foot drop. He landed with flexed knees and turned to the proprietor of the shop, who'd stopped when Anna had drawn attention to her.
"My apologies," he told her. "I didn't mean to scare you." He smiled and handed her a card. "A friend of mine runs a pub - stop by and have a meal on us."
The woman took the card with a rather shaky hand that steadied as Isaac's smile warmed. She glanced down and her eyebrows rose. "I've eaten there. Good fish and chips."
"I think so, too," he said, gave her a wink, and strolled over to where Anna and Charles sat.
"Nice PR," Anna said. "Though considering what went before, I'm not inclined to give you an A for it."
He studied her, ignoring Charles's brooding presence. "Ayah, nah," he said, exaggerating his Boston accent into incomprehensible nasal sounds before he dropped most of it to continue more clearly. "What in the hell are you?"
"Good to meet you, too," Anna said. "I bet that card was your second's idea, wasn't it? To make up for your lack of manners?" She dropped her voice and added a touch of Boston to it. "Oops - sorry I destroyed your car. Here, have a meal on me. Was that your dog I ate? Oh, sorry. Have a drink at my friend's pub and forget all about it."
Isaac grinned, a sudden, charming expression that showed white, white teeth in his blue-black face. "Caught me, darling. But you didn't answer my question."
"She is mine," said Charles. His aggressive answer didn't show up in his voice, which was low and calm. "We have a meeting scheduled tomorrow, with you and your pack. There was no need for this..." He glanced around. People were still watching them, but they were pretending not to. "Theater," he finished.
"This is Boston, hoss." Isaac bent his knees and squatted, putting his head on a level with theirs. "That's 'thee-ah-tah.' We're all about theater here." He pronounced the second "theater" just as Charles had. He wasn't native to Boston, she remembered. She thought he was from Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Anna gave him a gimlet eye and spoke to Charles. "He was probably walking by and spotted us. Decided he couldn't wait until tomorrow to throw a hissy fit."
"And aren't you one to burst everyone's posturing?" Isaac's dark eyes considered her. Then, in a more down-to-earth tone, he looked at Charles and said, "As a matter of fact, she's right." Then his face and his voice went very, very serious. "I meant what I said. To get to my wolves, you'll have to go over my dead body."
"If you do your job, he'll never have to do his." Bitterness made Anna's tone sharper than she meant it to be.
"She make all of your words, kemosabe?" Isaac asked Charles.
Charles raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion and pointed his chin at Anna as if waiting for her to answer for him. He never used his fingers to point. It was, he'd told her, very bad manners among his mother's people.
Speaking of bad manners..."Where's our card for a free meal?" Anna demanded. "I think you owe us one. Cogita ante salis, my father would tell you. You should think before you leap."
Charles murmured, "Before you depart. Sally forth. Close enough."
Anna was never sure how many of the Latin phrases she knew were right, and how much her father simply had made up on the spot. She'd quit speaking it in front of Bran because he'd get this pained look on his face. Charles seemed mostly to find it funny, a joke they shared. He claimed not to speak Latin, but apparently Spanish and French were close enough to allow him to comment.
"Charles is not here to enforce justice, at least not on you or yours." She nodded at Isaac. "We were coming to you to ask for information. There are dead werewolves and the FBI and police apparently don't have anything but bodies. We were sent here to help them. We were coming to ask you the questions the FBI probably already have in the hopes you could answer differently for us. How were our people taken and killed? Where were they taken from?"
"Information on the dead guys?" Isaac raised his chin and met her eyes. He waited for her to drop hers - and when that didn't happen, he frowned thoughtfully. Likely he'd never met a wolf before that he couldn't either stare down, or felt driven to bow before.
The Omega part tended to confuse a lot of wolves who were used to immediately sizing up others when they first met them. Is this wolf more dominant or less? Will she do as I ask, or do I have to do what she tells me? Are we close enough in rank that I have to worry about a fight to determine who rules and who is ruled, who protects and who is protected? Anna didn't register at all on the obey-or-be-obeyed scale - and she apparently came with something that made all the dominant wolves need to protect her.
Finally Isaac shook his head. "My take is that it is some seriously powerful fae, vampire, or something of that ilk. I don't know about the other two - I can give you the addresses of their hotels and their stated businesses. But they've been here before, lots of times. Neither was in the habit of causing trouble, so I don't have them shadowed anymore. But my boy, Otten, he was taken right while he was out jogging along the Charles River about five in the morning."
Isaac glanced over his shoulder as if he could see the river from where they sat, though it wasn't possible. "That's early; I know that's early. But there are other people, and damn, he's a werewolf, right?" And Anna realized he'd turned his head so they couldn't see the expression on his face. "Still, no one saw anything. No sign of a struggle - and Otten, he's pretty old, right? Old, tough, and a fine scrapper in wolf or human form. He knew how to watch his back. Not someone to be surprised. Pack bonds hit me hard about three hours later, dropped me right down and out - he was hurt that badly. But there was so much static I couldn't get a fix on him when I woke up."
He focused on Charles, meeting his gaze for longer than she'd ever seen anyone outside of his father. "They cut him. Raped him and killed him while they cut into him." His voice was raw with rage, and golden embers sparked in his dark eyes despite the tears on his cheek.
"They," said Charles intently. "How many?"
Isaac looked startled at the question, and then surprise jerked his head up and he frowned. "Two? Two...is wrong; there was a third. I just got impressions. Mostly pain. Didn't think the shadows I got were important. Let me think." He closed his eyes and tilted his head, a wolflike motion that was familiar. They all did it, now and again. If Anna's nose quit working, she'd still know a werewolf when she met him, just from that motion.
Isaac frowned and shook his head.
They cut him, Isaac had said. The FBI had shown them only select views of the later victims, as if to hide damage that had some significance they hadn't wanted to share. Or else they were trying not to shock a civilian consultant who might pay so much attention to the dead body, he failed to see anything else. But cutting...She knew a kind of creature who might cut up a werewolf before killing him.
"Were the cuts random?" asked Anna. "Or were they in a deliberate pattern?"
Isaac caught on to where she was going. "Witches? You think witches are behind this?"
Charles shrugged. "This is the beginning of our hunt, Isaac. I try not to think anything at this point."
Isaac nodded and looked at Anna. "Could be the cuts were deliberate. Or it could just have been someone playing, like a cat with a mouse - they seemed to enjoy it. The bond between an Alpha and his wolves isn't a mating bond - I just caught the worst of what he was experiencing here and there." Something unhappy grew in his face, and his eyes widened as he kept the tears in. "He wasn't scared, you know? Even when the pain was bad. Otten was a cool one, just waiting for his chance - but they didn't give him one."
"I knew him," said Charles, and his voice said a lot more than the words. It acknowledged and agreed with Isaac's assessment of the man and told Anna - and Isaac - that the dead man had been someone Charles respected and liked. "Thank you for talking to us, Isaac. You've helped. We'll stop them, and when we do, you'll know that you helped."
"You find those bastards" - it came out in a low growl from Isaac's belly, a command by one who was used to giving orders - "who killed Otten..." He sucked in his breath and looked abruptly away and down. Anna glanced at Charles but she couldn't see the expression on his face that Isaac had responded to; it was already gone.
When the Boston Alpha spoke again, the command was gone from his voice. "You find them, and I would take it as a personal favor if you called me for backup."
He handed Anna a card. It had only a phone number below his name, so she put out her empty hand demandingly. He lowered his lids and stared at her as she met his gaze unflinchingly - then wiggled her fingers. "Gimme."
He laughed, wiped the tears from his face with both hands, and looked at Charles. "What is she?" But without waiting for a reply - that wasn't forthcoming anyway - he handed Anna a pair of cards that had The Irish Wolfhound embossed on them. "Don't bend 'em all up. We reuse them."
Anna snorted as he popped up to his feet and jumped on top of the wagon he'd been on before in an easy leap. With a half wave of his hand, he took off, moving fast without giving the appearance of fleeing. He lightly hopped from one kiosk to the next, rocking them but not enough that anything fell off the shelves.
Charles rose unhurriedly, but without any wasted motions, either, and gathered the debris of their meal. "Let's go while he's still distracting everyone."
THEY WALKED BY the Old State House on their way to the condo. It was sitting right in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers, looking like a bright gold and white anachronism in the middle of all the dark glass and chrome of its near neighbors. Boston...Anna'd been expecting something like Seattle, since so many people compared the two. And there were some things that reminded her quite strongly of the Emerald City - the ocean, for instance - and the whole educated-and-liberal feel to the place. But Boston was different, at least the part of it that she had seen.
It wasn't just older; it felt older - and somehow still fresh and brash and still moving on. New World - ish, maybe. Built by people unsatisfied with their lives who crossed an ocean, risking and giving their lives for a new start, right here.
There was the architecture, too. So many buildings here had historic import; they'd been left where they were, no matter how inconvenient. Barricaded on the left and right by busy roads and huge modern buildings, the Old State House was polished and painted and cared for in a way it probably hadn't been back in the colonial days when Crispus Attucks and four other men were shot on the street next to it in the Boston Massacre.
Little narrow colonial roads had mostly disappeared into the wide modern streets, but still popped up here and there - holding such treasures as antique stores and old bookshops. The end effect of massive steel and glass buildings standing guard over their smaller and more delicately built forerunners was eclectic and charming.
"Do you think the killers are werewolves?" Anna asked as they briskly walked back to their condo.
"Werewolves?" Charles considered it and shook his head. "No. Isaac would have known if Otten had been hunted down by werewolves."
They walked about half a block in silence; then Charles shook his head again. "Maybe...maybe Isaac wouldn't have picked up on it if the killers had been werewolves. He's young. But the hunt is wrong for werewolves. No one is eating these victims. A werewolf who is hunting like that...Other werewolves could smell the sickness of spirit on them." He paused. "I could smell it on them. There is no wolf in the country who was alive forty years ago that I have not met since the time the killings began. But it could be vampires - or witches."
"Five thirty this time of year is pretty light for a vampire," Anna said. "But if he's been hunting this long, successfully killing fae and werewolves alike, he's got to be some kind of supernatural, doesn't he? I can't imagine that a vampire wouldn't also drink from the victims - and if that was the case, no one is telling us."
Charles shrugged, dodging around a small tour being led by a man in a powdered wig wearing Revolutionary fashion and carrying an unlit lantern on a stick. Anna dodged the other way and caught a bit of the tour guide's spiel.
"Revere did not ride alone that night, nor was he, in his own time, famous for the act. Paul Revere is famous because his name is the one Longfellow, nearly a hundred years later, chose to use in his famous poem instead of my good friend William Dawes, who was the other rider out warning of the British invasion." Before his voice was drowned in the sounds of a busy city at midday, Anna noted that he had a fruity British accent pasted over a Southern drawl: not a Boston native.
Charles continued their conversation as if he'd never paused at all. "It could be an organization of people who hate the fae and werewolves - like Bright Future or the John Lauren Society. Or a bunch of hunters who see us as a challenge."
"Or a group of black witches, if there was more than one killer."
"Right," agreed Charles. "I don't know enough yet. The FBI were pretty careful about what information they gave us."
"I noticed none of the later victims' crime scene photos show their faces," Anna said thoughtfully. "We saw enough of them that the oversight couldn't have been an accident."
"No faces, no uncovered front torsos or backs, either. Also no means of murder. Were they strangled? Stabbed? I should have asked Isaac."
"You think the FBI will call us in to help?" She thought so, but was afraid to trust her judgment when she wanted in as badly as she did. The eyes of the victims stayed with her.
Charles shrugged. "Yes. Fisher looked at us like we were candy. But it doesn't matter. If they don't, we'll involve ourselves. It'll be easier if they ask."
They walked awhile in silence. Well, Charles was silent. Anna's shoes made a brisk click-click-click on the sidewalk. She could have walked more quietly, but she liked the way the noise she made blended with the sounds of the city, almost like music.
She bumped Charles as a pretty woman in a business suit and torturously high heels walked past them. "Did you see that? Look at her legs. Look at all the women who are wearing dresses - and look at their legs. Their calves are all bigger around than their thighs."
"They call Boston 'the walking city' for a reason." Charles rumbled as he opened the door to the building of their condo. As soon as he was inside, the faint aura of danger he emitted eased down. Evidently Charles had been in this building often enough that he didn't view it as enemy territory.
"How soon do you suppose the FBI will be calling us?" Anna asked. "If they decide to call us."
"Bored?" He took them to the stairs and, after her previous ride in the slick, modern, very slow elevator, Anna was happy to trot after him.
"Nope. I just want to make sure we have time to do the haunted tour tonight."
He gave her a look and Anna grinned, happily sinking into the warm, safe relationship that had somehow been restored after better than a year of fragmentation. It was too easy; she knew it. But she was going to enjoy it while she could.
"Maybe the FBI will call," he said hopefully. She wasn't buying it; he'd have as much fun running around old cemeteries as she would - he just wouldn't admit it.
"I've got my cell phone," she pointed out. "You've got yours. Get changed and let's go."
He growled.
AFTER THE MEETING with the werewolves, Leslie ate an early lunch at a nearby soup and bread place before walking the rest of the block or so between the hotel and her office. She used the time to mentally process what she'd seen and heard so she could give a coherent, organized version of the highlights for Nick. She finished the last little bit as she rode the elevator up so she was ready before she hit the office.
The office watchdog, known only to Leslie's group as the Gatekeeper, nodded at Leslie and buzzed her in. Leslie headed to her desk but a sharp whistle from her boss's office changed her trajectory.
Nick looked tired. They'd been chasing after two different bank robbers and something that might be a terrorist cell - or might just be a bunch of broke students rooming together - before this serial-killer thing hit their radar. The terrorist cell had top priority over everything. However, one of the bank robbers had been doing his best to put himself on the top of the list. He wore a distinctive motorcycle helmet with a small sticker on top that had given him the nickname the Smiley Bandit. Lately he'd begun working with another faceless, helmeted man who liked to carry a gun and shoot it at lights and cameras after aiming it at people. One of these days really soon now he was going to start shooting people. Their team was short a few since Joe and Turk had been transferred out. The job got done, but all of them were a little light on sleep.
"How'd it go?" Nick asked after she closed the door behind her.
Leslie thought about it. "Interesting on many levels."
He gave an impatient snort. "Share. Please."
She started with a rundown on who was there. Nick grunted when she told him Heuter had come. It was a grunt she couldn't interpret. She couldn't tell if he liked Heuter or disliked him - or if he was just acknowledging that Cantrip had sent in their golden boy.
Leslie told him about the biggest revelation. "Our UNSUB has been killing mostly fae - we think for the past twenty-five-odd years - and no one noticed until a werewolf told us, a werewolf who wasn't even born when the first murders began. Cantrip claims she is Anna Latham. I'll run the name and see if I agree with them on her identity, but she didn't deny it."
"There have been rumors, if you know where to listen, that werewolves may share a trait or two with the fae. That their ability to heal damned near anything also keeps them from aging."
Leslie absorbed that. "If that's so, I peg our Anna at sixteen and her husband at ten thousand and change."
Nick laughed. "Impressed by him, were you? Craig was, too. He gave me a call as soon as the meeting was over to tell me that he was headed over to see Kip at the Boston PD. He was hoping the police might have someone familiar with the fae they can take the photos to, so we can get a confirmation."
"If you talked to Craig already, why have me do a basic report?" she asked, a little annoyed.
"He said he'd leave the briefing for you to deliver, as he was the senior field agent," said her boss equitably, and then got back to the business at hand. "If it's true, that so many of the victims have been fae, why didn't anyone in the fae communities say anything?"
Leslie shrugged. "Why do the fae do anything, Nick? Maybe they don't want to draw attention or encourage a copycat. Maybe they didn't notice."
"So the killer was out shooting fae and decided to hit a couple of werewolves, too."
"That's the latest theory Craig and I subscribe to."
"What about the werewolves? Will they help us? Do we want their help?"
Leslie tapped the side of her foot on the floor. "The guy is Native American and big. He stood back and didn't say a word he didn't have to. All of us in that room were doing everything we could not to pay attention to him because he was that scary."
"Scary how? Cold? Crazy?"
Leslie frowned at her boss. "Like you get when you are trying to intimidate someone we're questioning - only not so deliberate."
"Thousand-yard stare?"
"Yeah," Leslie agreed. "He's seen some blood somewhere." And the thing that had been bothering her about the pair of werewolves coalesced. "The girl who is his wife, she looks so sweet she ought to be attracting honeybees. Innocent. Even Jim Pierce was feeling protective around her; you could see it in his body posture - and Dr. Singh deliberately distracted the Cantrip agents when they got in her face and tried to intimidate her. And you know Singh."
"You think she was faking it?"
Leslie shook her head. "No. Not really. But both of the werewolves looked at photos of dead bodies and didn't bat an eyelash. Granted we didn't show the bad ones in full color, but the old police black-and-whites are pretty nasty."
"You think they've spent some time looking at dead bodies," Nick said. "You think they're killers."
She nodded. "Him, yes. He has that...that look. You have it. A lot of the armed forces guys have it. I think he could have killed us all and not given it another thought. As for her..." She frowned, trying to get a better handle on it. "Have you ever worked with Lee Jennings? The guy the Behavior Analysis Unit sends to interview the nasty guys in prison?"
Nick frowned. "Yes."
"He's pretty unremarkable. I like him a lot, and so does everyone else who's worked with him. And the reason they send him into the prisons with the scum of the earth and the crazies is because they like him, too. They fall all over themselves to give him whatever information he asks for."
Nick raised his chin and his face went still. "Right. She's like that?"
Leslie nodded. "Her husband didn't say more than two or three words, but he dominated the room. The only one not intimidated was Craig - and he just wasn't looking. I'd bet Charles Smith is an Alpha of some pack we don't know about."
"Intimidating."
She nodded again. "He was playing muscle, I think. But she didn't treat him that way." Why did she think that? "He came in late with coffee for all of us - she'd sent him out so she could explain to us how to make the matter easier for him."
"To keep everyone safe?"
Leslie shook her head. "She said so, but I got the distinct impression she was a lot more worried about him than she was any of us. It was the standard stuff - don't meet his eyes if you can help it. No aggressive moves. The only new thing was that we weren't supposed to try to touch her at all. I expected a wild-eyed maniac, and the man who came in was tight, controlled, and at ease. He looked like he conducted meetings with the federal government every day of his life."
"And that made you think he was running the show behind the scenes?"
"No. That's not all of it. Body language said she respected him and deferred to his judgment. She was in front, but he was more than just backup."
"So do we invite them in?"
"She pointed out that our killer took out werewolves. Taking out werewolves, I gather and surmise, is akin to taking out a SEAL team. This UNSUB has been hunting fae and coming out - as far as we know - unscathed. Do we have a choice?"
"The FBI has some fae on payroll. We have a choice. You met them and you're damn near the best agent I have for reading people. What do you think?"
Leslie sighed loudly. "I like her. I told you. And he is...competent - he's got that air. The one that says, 'I've seen a lot and made it out alive.' They won't cost us anything, so the budget will be happy. But" - she held up a finger - "he's not going to take orders."
Nick nodded his head and did his finger-hand-talk thing for a good half minute before blowing out a breath of air. "There's a couple of people at the BAU who are familiar with the Big Game Hunter. I'll give them a call and see what the profilers say might happen to our killer if the media knows we have werewolves hunting him. You and Craig can pick up information on werewolves as you work with them. Let me think about implications for the rest of today, and if nothing strikes me as too stupid, I'll give you a go tomorrow."
