Wild Card (31 page)

I texted Tullah to get Matt to do some extra digging.

Definitely find out what Sloan did further back than the ten year history we had, and then build on that. And did he have a boat or a plane? Property or business interests overseas? A pattern of visits to other countries? Especially visits to countries with lax fiscal attitudes.

And, just as a matter of interest, could Matt please find out what Blood Diamonds cost?

Chapter 32

I was about to get an update from Bian on Vera, when the gate intercom sounded at exactly the same time my cell beeped. Someone in a green van wanting to see me, and Alex finally on the phone.

“Don’t let them through the gate yet,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute. Hello?”

“…Ursula at the gate,” Alex said, his voice blurred by background noises. He seemed to be able to hear me okay, but I could barely make him out.

“Are you okay?” Ursula could wait, whatever she wanted. Alex had been supposed to come straight back to Manassah. What had happened?

“Fine. Look…problem.” The signal was breaking up. “…need…right away. Ursula...”

“We got a bad signal here. There’s a problem where? What kind of problem?”

Silence. I tried calling back and got voicemail.

Bian raised a brow.

I shrugged and put my HK shoulder holster on underneath a jacket before going out. Bian slung her katana sheath over her back and joined me.

Ursula was standing impatiently at the gate, ignoring the guards. She looked even bigger in daylight than she had at the cemetery on Monday night. Her wavy, blue-black hair was drawn tightly back, and she had frown lines that seemed permanent over dark, deep-set eyes. Sort of a mix of Xena and Wonder Woman, with a sore head.

“We need to go,” she said, as if that was all that was needed.

“Pleased to see you too. Why and where?”

“Alex should have called and explained.”

“The signal cut out.”

“Felix says it’s urgent. Now you know as much as me.”

I leaned against the gate, not going anywhere, until Bian spoke. “Okay, let’s go. We can try calling again on the way.”

I looked at her in surprise, but there was no clue to her thinking on her face.

“Wasn’t an invite for you,” Ursula said.

Bian smiled. “But he didn’t say I couldn’t come, did he?”

Ursula’s hands flexed like claws for a second. She looked as if she wanted to pull Bian through the bars of the gate, in little bits. I didn’t understand why Bian was goading her, but I was irritated enough by the unexplained summons to play along.

“You were in a hurry?” Bian prompted.

“Come on then,” Ursula growled, and got back into her van.

Bian and I joined her, climbing into the second row of seats before my mind caught up.

What was I missing here? Lack of sleep over the last couple of nights had made my thinking fuzzy. I’d gotten into a van with a Were I barely knew based on a fragment of a telephone call that sounded like Alex. A van, what’s more, that shared the basic characteristics of a van seen outside the horrific murder scene in Wash Park. And a with a Were that was plenty big enough to chew thigh bones.

I didn’t really think Ursula was the rogue, and I had Bian with me, but I really needed to raise my game. Between the rogue and the Nagas, I couldn’t expect second chances.

The interior of the van was a mess of emergency gear. Towing and climbing ropes, axes and shovels along one side, flame jackets and lifejackets on the other. A large red box of medical supplies was bolted to the floor behind our seat. Across the top of the box, National Park Service had been stenciled in white.

Bian reached over and picked up a ranger hat. “Oh, cool. Smokey the Bear. I love these.” She put it on. It was about five sizes too big, and I tried to think of a joke about that.

“Put it down,” Ursula snapped, glaring at us in the rear view mirror.

“This your van?” I asked over her shoulder.

“No. Why?”

“Curious. Why are you driving someone else’s van?”

“Silas borrowed mine.”

“You both work for the Parks?”

“No.” Ursula said. Then so quietly I almost missed it. “Silas is the Park Ranger. I’m a veterinarian.”

“No sick poodles today?”

“I was working when I got the call from Felix. I have a backup. I work with farm animals, not poodles, as if that’s any concern of yours.”

So she could speak in whole sentences, sort of strung together. A veterinarian werewolf. Awesome. I wondered what the animals thought of that.

“Where are we going?” asked Bian.

“The fertilizer factory in Aurora.”

That was as much as we could get from her.

I called Julie and explained where we were, but Alex’s cell remained offline.

From something Alex had said previously, I knew the factory was alongside I-70, so Alex and Ricky would have been coming back that way. Maybe they’d stopped and found something, but what would cause this emergency summons?

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

We came off Colfax, picking up a smaller road that ended at the factory. It was a wholesale and professional supply facility, with a neat, white front and loading docks running down one side. If I hadn’t been looking hard, I would have missed the small sign that told me it was the depot for Larimer Agricultural Fertilizers.

Ursula drove us around to the back, where what appeared to be the original warehouse still stood. It was an old iron framework construction covered with corroding corrugated sheet metal. A man in blue coveralls saw us and heaved on a sliding door, big enough for an eighteen-wheeler to pass.

We stopped just inside. It was gloomy as a cave and, with the echoes of the truck’s engine falling silent, the ungreased squeal of the door runners sliding shut was ominous. Spears of sunlight shone through rust gaps in the walls and ceiling, highlighting the dust in the air and picking out the decomposing hulks of old machinery lined along the side.

We were parked beside Alex’s SUV. He and Ricky were standing at the far end with Felix, Silas and a couple more men in coveralls who I thought I recognized from the Matlal ambush on Monday evening. Underneath a nose-prickling odor of chemicals from the fertilizer factory, there was a smell of blood and violence in the air that made me hurry across to Alex.

We met halfway. I steeled myself and hugged him. There was no reaction from my strongbox, so I held it for a few moments more, letting his warmth seep into me. It wasn’t his blood I could smell.

“The Colonel?” he asked.

“Back at Manassah. His wife was wounded, but Bian healed her. Everyone else is fine.”

“Sorry we couldn’t talk earlier,” he said. “Ricky got a call and we had to come in here. It’s been pretty tense. We stopped—”

He went silent as Felix and the others joined us.

A very unhappy Felix. I wondered if there was any other kind. Then again, I had disobeyed his orders.

“What the hell are you playing at, Farrell?” Felix said.

Bian chose that moment to amble up alongside me. “And what are you doing here?” Felix said to her.

“Chillin’,” Bian said casually. “What’s the big deal?”

I’d seen Bian in action with the katana that she was wearing. Maybe the pack had too, because I could feel the atmosphere changing. The balance felt different with her next to me. I offered up a little prayer of thanks that she’d decided to come along.

“The big deal is spying,” Silas said.

I’d had it with this Were attitude, always expecting me to know what they were talking about; this bullshit superiority; the feeling I was always under some kind of threat from them. They seemed to be forever looking for the ways I didn’t fit with them and never thinking that they might be the cause of it.

“I’m glad you raised it,” I said, “because I’ve got a real problem with betrayals.”

That rocked Silas back.

But what happened next did the same for me. As Silas swelled menacingly, Felix grabbed and held his arm.

“Let’s hear this complaint,” he said, his voice low and quiet.

Felix’s anger wasn’t gone, but he was holding it in check.

“Monday night,” I said. “I was at the restaurant with Ricky, Alex and Olivia. Who else knew?”

Felix shrugged. “The doctor and I, of course. Possibly the guards at Coykuti. Silas and Ursula.” He glanced at his enforcers to see if anyone had any other suggestions. No one spoke. “So why?”

“Which one of you told the rogue?”

Ursula’s face rippled. She didn’t change, but with the movement across it, I caught a glimpse of the wolf-snarl behind. Silas took another step. I felt Bian’s weight come up on the balls of her feet, but nothing more. If it all went south, she had to judge the time—drawing her katana would be provocation, but she needed space to get that blade free. I felt the weight of the HK under my arm, visualized the moves that would draw it and flick the safety off.

And Alex turned subtly from his neutral position to face his own pack.

Oh, shit. All in all, maybe I had pushed too hard.

Of all of us, Felix stayed completely still.

“Olivia told me you’d had trouble,” he murmured. “But she said nothing about the rogue.”

The dynamics shifted again. Ursula and Silas took their lead from Felix and calmed down. Ricky eased back a step.

All of them noted Alex’s new position. Damn, I’d caused him problems again.

“All Olivia knew was my clothes and boots were stolen out of the back of my car.” I met Felix’s eyes and held them. The hell with werewolf dominance posturing; I would not lower my eyes. “Then the next night, those clothes turned up on the rogue’s latest victim. It’s the first time he’s wanted a body discovered immediately,” I paused, “and he dressed her in my clothes. Message, you think?”

I let the silence build a moment.

“So, the whole pack and Altau know I’m working on the hunt; that’s not a secret. My car’s not a secret. But only a handful of people knew where I’d be on Monday night. The rogue didn’t find it accidentally.”

“Your House knew as well,” Felix pointed out.

“You can’t believe one of my House would betray me,” I snapped, without thinking.

“You can’t believe one of the pack would betray you.”

I’d fallen right into that one.

“But I’m not pack. You haven’t accepted me. They all made that plain on Monday after the fight with Matlal’s pack.”

“The fight I explicitly told you not to get involved in.”

The argument seemed to be slipping away from me. I was digging myself in a hole and letting him get out of his.

“You’re going to have to decide whether she’s in or out, Felix,” Bian said. “If she’s not in the pack, why are you trying to tell her what to do? Hmm? And from what I hear, she was an asset on Monday night. But, anyhow, we should get back to who told the rogue. If you’re so sure no one would deliberately tell the rogue, who might have spoken to someone outside the pack? Or had a conversation in the hearing of someone else?”

Thank you, Bian.

Felix exchanged looks with his enforcers. “I’ll question everyone individually and see if they discussed the meeting at the restaurant with anyone.”

“And they can’t lie to you,” Bian said quietly.

“They can’t,” Felix barked. “But it’ll take some time to organize. On the other hand, you can explain
this
right now.”

He gestured. The two in coveralls went and dragged a long, patchwork bag from the shadows where they’d been standing when we arrived.

As they approached, I saw they weren’t dragging a bag by its handles, they were dragging a body by its bound arms. A light body. Female. And that’s where the smell of blood came from.

They thought whoever it was worked for me.

Tullah? Jofranka? Anger surged in me as I shoved them aside and turned the woman over carefully, kneeling down to hold her.

Too slight for Tullah. The skin of her hands too pale for Jofranka. Who the hell?

Her head had been covered in a dirty burlap sack. I untied it and pulled it off.

Melissa blinked up at me. Her face was swollen, bruised and bloody. Her eyes could barely open. She was shivering, I guessed partly from cold and partly from fear. But incredibly, through all that, there was a gleam of satisfaction at seeing me.

I undid the gag.

“Knew it,” she whispered through bleeding lips.

What the hell was she doing here? But that would wait; anger swamped the bewilderment.

“Which of you bastards did this to her?”

“So, you do know her,” Felix said from behind me. “Lucky for her.”

“You call this lucky?”

“The alternative was helping crops grow, so, yes. If she’d just said she was working for you from the beginning, this wouldn’t have happened,” he growled. “But you’d still be here explaining what you think you’re doing spying on us.”

She said she was working for me? Shit.

“My fault,” croaked Melissa. “Di’n’t clear it with Amber. She di’n’t know.”

Alex handed me a bottle of water and I carefully drizzled some into her mouth while I thought furiously.

The pack expected me to have good links with the police and to somehow use that to help in my hunting for the rogue. Even if she was suspended, Melissa had those links, and Agent Griffith wouldn’t be watching her like he was watching José. She was a forensic scientist, if we happened to stumble across clues that needed that. She’d already proved she had some insights, and claimed more. She’d managed to find this place, so she had to have a nose for investigation. Maybe she
should
be working for me.

Against all that, I’d have to keep her from talking to others about anything paranormal that she’d come across. Like a werewolf body disposal facility, for instance.

And she’d not just showed up here, she’d been caught; not what I wanted in a field agent.

Or did it just come down to saving her life?

Indecision, as much as anything else, kept me from saying anything.

“Didn’t clear what?” Felix said.

Melissa cleared her throat. “I’ve been investigating the cases Amber’s working on,” she said. “Independently. I can help, but we didn’t have time to discuss what I was doing.”