The Judah Black Novels: Boxed Set of books 1-3

by E. A. Copen

Zoe opened her mouth and took a half step toward Sal but Andre grabbed her and pulled her back gently. He smirked and touched a protective hand to Zoe’s pregnant belly. “If you need anyone to testify to his violent nature, detective, you know where to find us.”

  Tindall and Quincy led Sal to Tindall's car and gently helped him duck into the back seat. Before the car was even out of sight, I was making arrangements with Chanter to leave Hunter there and go sort things out at the station.

  Zoe again pulled herself away from LeDuc. “Why defend him?” Zoe asked me coolly. She had her arms crossed but I could see curiosity in her face. “You don't even know him.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I know my son. If Hunter says he didn't leave all day, then I believe him.”

  “You put a lot of faith in the words of a child,” Andre chimed in with a sly smile. “They say the heart of a child is the purest thing. I hope you're right.”

  Zoe looked was unmoved. She was too busy sizing me up, giving me hard, angry looks “You have no idea what it’s like,” she said in a low tone. “This place is going to eat your pretty little face up, you and him both.”

  “My dear,” said Andre, stroking her chin, “do try not to dwell on old memories. All that stress would be bad for your complexion.”

  I wanted to punch them both on the spot but I didn't get the chance. Chanter strode up and crossed his arms, somehow managing to make himself look bigger and more threatening. “Zoe, I swore I wouldn't get involved in this mess between you and Saloso. Do not make me go back on my word. If you force my hand, I promise you that there will be no bodies to find.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Zoe said, drawing back.

  Chanter’s snarl made her jump. “I don't waste my time with threats.”

  Maybe it was the stupidest thing I could have done, but I stepped between Zoe and Chanter. “I have some follow-up questions, if you don't mind, Ms...” I deliberately trailed off.

  She hesitated, looking at LeDuc first before answering me. “Mathias. Now that we’re divorced, I use my maiden name.”

  LeDuc pressed in closer. “Unless you have a subpoena or a warrant, she doesn't have to answer any of your questions.”

  “It's all right, Andre,” said Zoe, waving him away. “I've got nothing to hide. Ask your questions.”

  “How well did you know the Summers family?”

  She shrugged. “Not at all. Werewolves and fae don’t interact. I may not be a wolf but that apparently doesn’t excuse me from the same ostracism and afflictions they face.” She glared straight at Chanter as she spoke the last sentence.

  “How about Elias Garcia? Did you know him?”

  Zoe shook her head. “I heard the name a few times, but it’s been several months since I’ve interacted with the Silvermoon pack. I’m only in town to get some of my things.”

  “Yeah, I noticed you still had a bunch of boxes at Sal’s place,” I noted. “Most exes I know want to get their stuff out a little quicker. Seems to me you might want some excuse to hang around.” She opened her mouth to speak but I didn't give her the chance. “So, you would deny the allegation that you were ever inside of the Summers' residence? How about your boyfriend? Has he ever spoken with Donald Summers? Been inside the house?”

  “What an odd line of questioning,” she said with a false laugh. “I've already told you that I didn't know them.”

  “And yet you knew exactly where Sal would be tonight. How was that?”

  Zoe shrugged and her voice grew cold. “I know where the pack holds their funerary rites.”

  “How did you even know that was happening?” Chanter snarled at her and I raised a hand to calm him before he bounded over me to tear out her throat.

  Zoe's eyes flashed with renewed rage and, I swear, her blue irises paled a shade. “Because I was married to Saloso long enough to know that you people prefer a fast burial and an even shorter period of mourning.”

  LeDuc came and put his arms around Zoe. “Come. That is enough. Don't strain yourself any further over him.” She relaxed against him and then nodded weakly as he led her toward the car.

  “Just one more thing,” I shouted after them. “Don't either of you leave the county. You're a material witnesses now. Wouldn't want anything to happen to you.”

  LeDuc helped Zoe into the car and shut the door behind her before turning to flash me a perfect white smile. “Oh, we wouldn't miss this for the world.”

  Zoe, LeDuc and their Jaguar tore out of the driveway but not before I was able to scribble down their plate numbers.

  “Do you think he did it?” I asked Chanter when they were gone.

  Chanter frowned at the way the moonbeams reflected off the curtain of dust hanging in the air. “I think that if Saloso had wanted to kill someone, his victims of choice would not have been Donald and Teagan Summers.” He turned to me, worry lining his features. “Go. Find what you can but hurry. No cell will hold him if he doesn't wish to be held.”

  If I'd ever doubted anything Chanter had said, I didn't doubt that. I'd seen the jail cells in the station and they were made of iron, not silver. Werewolves didn't tolerate being in a cage very long. If I didn't get a handle on this and fast, there were likely going to be even more bodies. More people would die, all because someone somewhere did something stupid enough to piss off a werewolf in custody. It wasn't a matter of if it would happen. It was when.

  The borrowed truck purred to life, and I patted it on the dash before muttering, “Hi-yo, silver. Away,” and tearing out of the driveway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was nearing four a.m. when I pulled into the desolate lot at the police station. There were two cruisers, a mo-ped and Tindall's Cadillac parked there with no sign of Andre's Jag. Or, Zoe's Jag. Same difference. I don't know why I expected them to be there, waiting on me, but I was glad they weren't. I parked and went inside. It had taken me an extra long time to get there because I took a wrong turn and didn't realize it until I was halfway to Eden. Sal had already been put through the ringer of prints and mugshots by the time I got there. Tindall had him in one of those stuffy, windowless interrogation rooms but hadn't yet gone in to talk to him.

  Good, I thought, as Quincy gave me the rundown at the door. That gives me time to do a little research. I went into my office and got my dinosaur of a computer running and connected to BSI's databases. Then, I got to work.

  The first file I pulled up was Sal's to confirm what Zoe and LeDuc had said about him. There it was in black and white, uncontested on all accounts. When he was twelve, he'd been tried on two counts of voluntary manslaughter. He was acquitted but only because the state of Montana mishandled some of the evidence and a key witness recanted. His family relocated to Texas after that, probably in an attempt to start over. They weren't there a year before Sal's mother hung herself. Chanter, who was his uncle, officially adopted him and neither of them showed back up on the radar until Sal enlisted.

  I did the math. He would have been in Iraq when all the supernaturals came out here in the states ten years ago but BSI didn't tag him until he offered what we call a voluntary surrender of status. In other words, he came to us, told us what he was, and we did the paperwork. The timing of that correlated almost directly with him filing for a marriage license with one Zoe Mathias. That wasn't odd. The state of Texas required that everyone applying for a marriage license presented proof of BSI testing. In fact, nothing in his file other than the early stuff was unusual and even that wasn't too far out there. I didn't have the details of the case but, from what I gathered reading legal documents and such, it looked like he hadn't picked the fight. He just finished it.

  Zoe's file was even cleaner. She wasn't a supernatural, not in any sense of the word, and her background check revealed nothing more than a few speeding tickets, a joint filing with BSI for a breeding permit that got approved and, shortly thereafter, her petition for divorce. So, I thought with a frown. It was her that left him. It wasn't exactly important news, but it did tell me the
state of their current relationship. He had plenty of reason to be angry at her and she at him.

  Finally, I put Andre LeDuc's name into the computer. The only thing that came back was an international block, one that I couldn't get past without sixty miles of red tape and a month of trying to convince the Canadian government that his file was pertinent to my investigation, which I couldn't yet prove. I cursed, printed out Sal’s file and stood to head downstairs.

  As if it could sense that I had something better to do, my phone rang. I sighed and sank back down to the floor cross legged to answer it. “Black.”

  “I have your preliminary results,” Doc said excitedly into my ear.

  “Hey, Doc.” I glanced down at the clock on my computer. I hadn't expected him to call me so early. Then I realized that my clock was flashing three minutes after eight. Damn. “Tell me you're calling with good news.”

  “Depends on what you'd call good news. The blood samples were negative for the standard round of stimulants and benzodiazepines. He was clean of anything a home drug test would have picked up. However, I had the lab run another set of tests and got a hit back on something else.”

  “What is it?” I asked, frantically searching through the remains of my office in search of a pen and paper. In the end, I resorted to a crumpled post it note and a pencil stub.

  “That's the thing. I've never seen anything like it. Whatever it was, his blood was completely inundated with it, down to the cellular level. Reaction with colloidal silver in some samples was reduced by almost thirty percent!”

  He went on in excited jargon for nearly thirty more seconds before I got him to stop. “Doc, please. Slow down and explain that to me. What does it mean?”

  “Well,” said Doc slowly, “it suggests very strongly that Elias Garcia was being exposed to some kind of treatment that reduced his silver allergy. Possibly other symptoms of werewolfism as well.”

  I blinked. That made sense. The voice in the vision had said he was trying to save Elias. I hadn't thought of it at first but maybe someone was trying to save him from the monster inside. Someone was trying to cure him. The implications of that research if it was successful were boundless. If werewolves and other shifters could be cured, then why not vampires? Why not everyone? It meant that things like BSI and the Paint Rock reservation could soon become obsolete. More than that, it meant that maybe Hunter didn't have to change. I could save him.

  I tried to hide the shakiness of my voice as I spoke into the phone. “Someone is trying to cure werewolves of being werewolves?”

  “They're likely still quite far off from a full blown so-called cure. At least, based on these samples they were. Still, a twenty-eight percent reduction is a twenty-eight percent reduction. Double it and silver might not even be an effective means of termination. Combined with a treatment of tranquilizers and some advanced gene therapy, in ten years’ time there may not be any werewolves.”

  I thought about that for a minute. Whoever was developing this cure needed a lot of things. They needed a sterile laboratory and a ton of money. They also needed test subjects. You'd have to be pretty desperate to sign up for an under the table series of treatments that might not even work. You'd have to be someone like Elias, I thought. Someone so desperate to escape the reality he lived in that he turned to drugs. What if this was his way out? This was the hope he held onto. He believed he could change. But how did that connect to the missing children if at all?

  “Judah?”

  “Yeah, Doc. I'm here.”

  He cleared his throat. “About the Summers' case.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and tried to steel myself for the blow that was coming, whatever it was. “Yes?”

  “I... They didn't have any family or next of kin to speak of.”

  “I'll see to the expenses,” I said. I hung up and suddenly realized how exhausted I was. I hadn't pulled an all-nighter since college and it was starting to wear on me. Still, I couldn't afford to get any rest now. The killer was still out there and Sal was about to take the fall for them. While I couldn't explain why I knew he was innocent, I somehow just knew.

  Tindall and Quincy were both in the interview room with Sal, asking him questions about Donald and Teagan Summers that he wasn't answering. I watched through the one-way mirror as they made mistake after mistake with him, pushing him closer and closer toward the edge. Sal was sitting in one of those uncomfortable stools without any padding, arms crossed, glaring straight ahead. Tindall would have read that as defiance. More likely, he was trying to keep his cool after Tindall took up a superior posture, sitting on the table so that his head was higher than Sal's. Quincy didn't even sit. He was standing dangerously close to Sal, shoving pictures of the scene in his face. Tindall's not stupid. He had to have known that was the kind of dominance that would set off a werewolf. They were deliberately trying to provoke him, force him into a fit of anger so that he'd make a confession. With human prisoners, it works. With werewolves, it gets them mad, mad enough that they'd probably need a power washer to clean the room afterward.

  I should have interrupted it as soon as I realized what they were doing but the line of questioning they were on made me hesitate. “We've got ironclad eyewitness testimony, Sal,” accused Tindall, grabbing the photo away from Quincy and putting it on the table. He slammed a thumb at it, somewhere toward the center. “You raped her and made him watch. You killed them and cut out his tongue, boxed it up and put it on Black's front porch for her to find. I got enough evidence to put all of this on you. Every last bit of it. Just tell me why.”

  Sal said nothing.

  Tindall retrieved the photograph and passed it to Quincy. “Fine. Keep your trap shut. We'll go and arrest your pack mates one by one until one of you cracks.”

  Tindall tiptoed one step beyond the line of what Sal was willing to let slide. I saw the change in his eyes and ran for the door to the interrogation room, meaning I missed some of the action but it wasn't hard to deduce what had happened when I opened the door. Tindall and Quincy were both backed against a wall, hands frozen inches above their guns. Meanwhile, Sal had overturned his chair and shoved the table against the opposite wall, which was now sporting a new vertical crack. The scene paused like a movie when I opened the door and growled, “Tindall. Quincy. Outside. Now.” No one moved. “Sal, do you really want to add two counts of assault on idiot police officers to this mess?”

  “No,” he growled after a long pause.

  “Then cool your tee-pees, Tanto.”

  He looked at me, his eyes almost completely gold. I thought he might try lunging at me next so I scowled back at him. Somehow, my crappy attempt at a tough girl act cut through all the raging testosterone in the room and Sal managed a laugh. “Good thing you came in when you did,” he said darkly. “I think Detective Quincy needs a change of pants, don't you detective?”

  Quincy turned a shade of red usually reserved for beets, then lowered his head in shame and sulked out. Tindall followed. I started to go and close the door behind me but thought better of it. “This mess had better be cleaned up when I come back in,” I said in my best mom voice and then slammed the door.

  “We almost had him,” Tindall growled and pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket to stick it in his mouth. “Son of a bitch.”

  “What you almost had was a close encounter of the werewolf kind,” I said. “That is not how you interrogate a suspect, detectives, and it's not how you interrogate an angry werewolf.”

  “You're only saying that because you think he's innocent. You're too close to this, Black. You need to back off.”

  “You've got your nose so far up this case that you can't feel the sun burning your feet,” I screamed. Several officers down the hall paused what they were doing and looked up. Tindall glared at me and I at him. He thought he had the upper hand, but I knew better. I lowered my voice and leaned in closer to Tindall. “When I went to see Donald this morning, he mentioned being interviewed by an overdressed woman who drove a white
Jag. Does that sound like anyone you know?”

  Tindall's jaw worked. He crushed the cigarette between his teeth. “Son of a bitch!”

  “She was posing as a BSI agent. I can make the connection. I can prove she got access to the house before.”

  “Doesn't explain how she got back in there to take the kid,” Quincy scoffed. “And it doesn't explain why the neighbors saw Sal's ugly mug leaving instead of her.”

  “I'm working on how she got access a second and third time,” I admitted. “As for your eyewitnesses, they might not be as reliable as you think. Glamors are cheap on the black market.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Tindall repeated and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Fuck all this magick shit, Black. How are we even supposed to prove that? And what kind of motive does some Vegas lounge singing ex-wife have for kidnapping and murder?”

  I glanced back in at Sal, watching him rearrange the room the way it had been before he wrecked it. “I'm working on that, too. In the meantime,” I said and pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket that contained the license plate number for the white Jag and shoved it at Tindall. “I need someone to go through three days’ worth of video footage that's sitting on my hard drive and match plates with this.”

  He took the paper and rotated it clockwise. “What's this?”

  “Zoe and Andre's license plate number. I need to know exactly when they arrived.”

  “We're not your errand boys,” Quincy started and moved forward but Tindall put a hand on his partner's shoulder.

  “Quincy,” he said, handing the scrap of paper off to him. “You get this. I'm going to go see what I can dig up about this Maria character Valentino mentioned. Maybe the cameras got her once or twice, too.” He glanced in at Sal with a frown. “You sure you can handle this by yourself?”

  “Or die trying,” I muttered. With that, I opened the door to the interrogation room and slipped back inside the room.

  I smiled to myself when I came back in to see that Sal had, indeed, pushed the table back where it was supposed to be and turned his stool right. He'd even picked up the photographs he'd inadvertently dumped and placed them neatly back in the file folder for me. I pulled out the chair and sat down across from him, lifting one leg over the other and folding my hands in my lap. Sal still had little gold flakes in his eyes but they were fading visibly.