by Bianca D'Arc
“Dmitri could help.” Sally guessed the vampire might have skills beyond theirs. He might be the answer to finding Jimmy alive.
Jason’s mouth thinned, but he punched the buttons on his cell phone. Sally wasn’t too surprised to find that Jason had the local Master Vampire on speed dial. Jason filled Dmitri in on the situation in a few short sentences. He didn’t look happy at whatever Dmitri said in reply. He hung up quickly and turned back to Sally.
“He’ll help, but he won’t leave home before Carly rises. Damn newlyweds.”
“Give me your cell number.” Sally was thinking fast, planning and figuring how to best utilize their capabilities. She took out her phone and was punching buttons to set Jason up on speed dial. He dictated the number and it was done. “I’m going to Carly’s. I can be of more use where I have computer access. Does anybody you know have a police scanner?”
“One of the cubs has one,” Jason said as he dialed another number. “I’ll have him bring it to you at Carly’s office.”
“Good. And leave me a few computer experts. I may need a hacker or two. I’ll call when I have news. I’m taking the SUV, okay?”
Jason smiled for the first time in an hour. “I don’t need it. Joanna will escort you back to the car. I’d take you myself, but I need to get these guys organized…” He looked around at the wolves, many of whom still had their noses to the ground.
“I understand.” And she truly did. She’d be safe enough in the forest. Even the wolf escort wasn’t quite necessary, but she’d take it if it made him more comfortable. The blonde wolf he’d called Joanna moved close to them, no doubt having heard her name. “Nice to meet you, Joanna. Ready to go?”
The wolf barked once and waited. Jason moved close to place a quick kiss on Sally’s lips, surprising her. “Be careful, sweetheart.”
“You too.” She set off without further delay, the wolf following along at her side. Sally ran, the wolf keeping pace easily.
Though she’d never spent any time in dense woods, Sally had no problem finding her way. The trees greeted her as she passed with a flutter of their leaves and a slight change in the pitch of their song. If she’d had time to enjoy the phenomenon she would have, but the circumstances were dire. A child had been abducted and because of the nature of both the child and the abduction, they couldn’t involve the human police. Not really. That went without saying.
But Sally might be able to utilize their resources. She’d try her best, at any rate. There were a lot more human cops out there on the roads in the cities and farmland. Maybe she could use that to her advantage.
The SUV came into sight and the wolf bounded ahead to sniff all around the vehicle before she’d let Sally pass. Good idea. The SUV had been left unattended for a while. Anybody could’ve come by and done anything to it while they’d been occupied elsewhere. The wolf barked the all clear while Sally asked the trees if anyone had been nearby. Both sources confirmed the vehicle was safe.
Sally climbed in and waited to see if the wolf would accompany her farther. When Joanna stayed on the ground, Sally shut the door, rolling down the window again so she could hear the forest song, if needed.
“Thanks, Joanna.” She waved to the wolf as she drove off, hearing the yip of acknowledgment as she sped away. She saw Joanna in the rearview mirror for a moment, watching her a bit before fading back into the woods.
Sally made good time back to Carly’s. By the time she pulled up in front of the big house, night had fallen fully and Carly was awake. Dmitri and she were waiting at the door for her arrival. Sally filled them in on the bare facts of Jimmy’s abduction and she could see from Dmitri’s expression that the man was torn. There was no question that he would help search for the boy, but the worried looks he kept throwing at Carly spoke volumes—even to a woman who couldn’t read his mind.
Sally put one hand on his arm, stilling him for one key moment.
“You should go. Don’t worry. I’ll look after Carly. I plan to put her to work with the contingent of wolves in the office. We’re going to hack into police databases and do some research.” Carly’s eyes lit up with excitement, as Sally knew they would. The girl was a geek through and through. “She’ll have a dozen werewolves and one very determined, and armed, cop watching over her. We’ll be okay. I promise.”
Dmitri regarded her steadily for a timeless moment. “Thank you,” he finally said, moving toward the door. Carly followed him and they shared a smoldering kiss before he disappeared into the night.
Sally didn’t hear a motor start. Her brows lowered in question as Carly turned back to her.
“Is the bat thing true, then?”
Carly laughed. “I suppose he could become a bat if he really wanted to.”
“He turns into other things?” Sally began walking toward the office part of the structure, Carly next to her.
“Yeah. It’s pretty awesome,” Carly admitted. “He can even do mythological creatures like dragons. It’s way cool.”
“I bet.” Sally would ponder that another time. For now, a missing boy occupied her thoughts. “Can you hack into the local police network?”
Carly made a rude noise. “Of course. Ask me something hard.”
They entered the office and a dozen eager faces popped up over cubicle dividers. Sally almost laughed, and would have if the situation wasn’t so dire. They looked like meerkats popping up out of their burrows. Or maybe prairie dogs, all looking to her, awaiting orders. Maybe there was something to this Alpha stuff after all. She kind of liked being in charge.
Sally wasted no time. She found the kid with the police scanner and had him set it up in Carly’s office. She needed a large desk to spread out on and the conference table at one end of Carly’s office would do. She set Carly and her favorite geeks to work on the hacking part in computer nirvana at the other end of the spacious office.
“As soon as you get into the network, let me know and I’ll take it from there.” Carly nodded at Sally’s directive.
She assigned tasks to each person. A few were asked to listen to the scanner and write down the calls, even if they didn’t know what they meant. One of the computer guys said he could get a list of police codes and Sally let him have at it. The locals might speak a slightly different language than the code Sally was used to. The list would be helpful.
“We’re in,” Carly reported a few minutes later. She backed away from the computer and let Sally have her seat.
At that point it was going to take some deductive reasoning and there were too many people hanging over her shoulder. She shooed out most of the wolves, asking a few to get some food for the rest of the staff. Sally had hardly eaten all day and her stomach was beginning to growl. They’d need the calories to continue the hunt.
“What are you looking for?” Carly asked quietly from Sally’s side. Carly’s presence was comforting rather than distracting, like some of the kids who worked for her.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Sally admitted, studying the screen. Her fingers whirled over the keys as report after report spilled onto the display.
“Dude,” Carly said. “You’ve really increased your computer skills since college.”
“When I made detective, a lot of my job turned to research and desk work. It was either keep up or lose out.” Sally didn’t stop typing her queries into the police system as she spoke. She’d also become a really great multi-tasker. “Ah. Here we go.”
Carly leaned in closer at her side and Sally was vaguely aware that one or two of the wolves were at her back, reading over her shoulder. She didn’t mind. As long as they kept quiet so she could think and start to see connections, they were okay.
“How many real estate agents in town?” Sally asked.
It was Seth who answered. “About a dozen different human firms. There’s also one shifter who helps us when we want to buy land.”
“Okay. One of you call the shifter and ask nicely if they’ve sold any property to a human in the past two or three weeks. The rest
of you—get help from the guys outside.” She nodded toward the office proper where a half-dozen wolves waited for further orders. “Each of you take one real estate company and do your best to access their sales records for the past month. Print out a list of the new owners and former addresses if you can, then bring them to me.”
Scurrying behind her and out in the office told her the kids were on the case. Carly still sat at her side.
“What are you thinking?” Carly asked quietly.
“I’m thinking that if they abducted the kid instead of just killing him outright, they had to have a motive. I don’t think they’d run with him. It feels more personal than that. Like they want to make a point with the local wolves. Therefore, they’d need a place to take him. It would have to be someplace they wouldn’t easily be either seen or heard, so that means someplace outside of town most likely, or on the outskirts.”
Carly pulled out a laptop computer and fired it up. She didn’t speak further, concentrating on inputting commands. It was good to have Carly working on this with her. Sally was competent with computers, but Carly was a genius. She could hack any system but skirted away from doing anything illegal unless absolutely necessary. This was one of those times when the laws of man would prevent them from carrying out true justice. Sally knew she should feel more of a conflict, but after what she had seen over the years, she preferred to carry out justice when possible, even when the rule of law might not approve.
When this was all over, she would have to reexamine whether or not she could continue as a cop. Too often, her hands had been tied when it came to real justice. It had left her feeling frustrated and burnt out. This vacation was supposed to be a reprieve from all of that. Instead, this situation had brought the conflict within her into sharp focus. As soon as they saved Jimmy, she had some hard thinking to do.
“I think I found something,” Carly said from beside her while Sally was tracing known associates of the two men who had been arrested the day before.
Sally turned to the smaller screen Carly was working on. There were a few different windows open on a multitude of databases. Carly’s genius at work.
“What am I looking at?”
“This is a money transfer from an account Dmitri has been watching. He believes it belongs to a Venifucus agent in the local area named Alvin Sanders. Since I became aware of it, only small amounts have been coming and going from that account. Normal living expenses. But this one…” She pointed to an entry on the screen. “This is going into an escrow account at this law firm.” She tapped another window open to the side of the first. “This law firm held it for a few days and then transferred it to Hilltop Bank. Hilltop Bank transferred it to another escrow account at another law firm, and they transferred it to Bill Jeremy’s real estate agency.”
“Who’s looking at Bill Jeremy’s?” Sally yelled out to the office area. A blonde head popped up from behind a cubicle wall. Seth. Good boy.
“I just got into his system. What do you need?” he asked.
“Do you have a sale on the fourteenth? Or anything that week?” Sally shot back.
“Yeah. There were two on the fourteenth and nothing else that whole week.”
“Print out the details—anything you can find—on both transactions, and bring them over please.”
Seth nodded and popped back down into his cubicle. In the background, Sally heard a printer power up out in the office a few moments later. She turned back to her screen and pulled up what she could about the name on the bank account that had originated the transaction.
“Dmitri thinks this guy is part of that Venifucus group?” Sally asked Carly as she dug up what she could about him in the official law enforcement databases. She sent everything to the printer in Carly’s office. If nothing else, Dmitri could look through the information. Maybe it would help in some way.
“Yeah,” Carly answered, picking up the pages as they spit out from the printer. “He’s suspected based on information from the other Masters in North America and some from a few different were groups. This guy popped up on the radar in our area, so we’ve been keeping an eye on him and his business dealings as best we can. I think this police data will help us fill out the file we started. Thanks, Sal.”
“I can’t find a connection to say that he is definitely involved in the immediate case. My gut says the hunters were solely responsible for abducting Jimmy. But the money trail is clear. He bought a place, and it’s a good bet, if they’re all part of the same club, he’s letting them use it. At the very least, it has to be searched in order to be eliminated as a possibility.”
Carly nodded. “But you don’t know exactly which property it is, right?”
“Well the odds here are much better than they would be in a big city. Only two real estate closings around the date in question. Only two places to check. Believe me, it could’ve been a lot worse.”
Seth loped in with a handful of papers and handed them to Sally. She scanned them, relating the information to what she’d already learned. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell which property was a better choice for the kidnappers. And both sales had been handled by the same attorney and the same bank, so no help there.
“We’re going to have to check both of these,” Sally said aloud. “Let me call Jason and see if they’ve found anything that might help narrow down our choices.”
She hit the speed dial on her cell and only dimly noted the way Seth’s eyebrow rose. Yes, she had the Alpha on speed dial. Why should the kid be so surprised?
Jason answered before the first ring had time to complete. “Have you found anything?”
“I think so. Two possible locations where they might be holding Jimmy.”
“Thank the Lady. Because we’re turning up big fat zeros here.”
“I was afraid of that, considering they knew enough to mask their scent.” Sally glanced at the papers and relayed the two addresses.
“We’ll have to check both of them,” Jason said on a sigh. “We don’t have anything that would make me choose one over the other right now. They’re almost on opposite sides of the county. Hang on.” Jason conferred with someone on his end, then came back on the line. “Dmitri is going to take the property down by the lake. He can get there faster than any of us. We’ll head for the closer address on Bush Hollow Road. It’ll take us about twenty minutes to get there because of the terrain. It’d be about the same whether we were coming on four feet or two. I’ll take those with vehicles by road and the rest will go across country.” It sounded like he was issuing the order even as he spoke to her.
“Judging by the map, I can be there in about fifteen minutes,” she offered.
“Don’t, Sally. Let us handle this.” His voice was a growl but she wasn’t backing down. She could growl with the best of them.
“I’m a cop, Jason. Don’t you dare tell me how to do my job.”
“You’re not on duty here—” he began, but she was ready for that argument.
“You want to tell that to Jimmy? Sorry, kid. Sally could have saved your life but she was on vacation. I don’t think so.” She didn’t give him a chance to answer that one. “I’ll meet you there.”
She disconnected the call, knowing he was probably cursing her out wherever he was. Fine. Let him blow off steam. They both needed to be level headed when they confronted the kidnappers.
When Sally stood, slinging her dark jacket over her shoulder, Seth blocked her path out of Carly’s office. The look on his face was grim.
“I promised the Master that I would look after you both. I know for a fact the Alpha doesn’t want you going. We all heard him on the phone just now.”
Damn werewolves and their keen hearing. Sally had just about had enough of this overprotective crap.
“You can look after Carly, but I’m going. Don’t you dare stand in my way.”
Seth’s eyes met hers for a few moments, but in the end, the kid backed down. He didn’t look too happy about it.
“The Alpha wil
l have my hide if anything happens to you,” he said glumly.
“And I’ll skin you alive if you let anything happen to my friend.” The kid perked up. “You promised the Alpha and now I want you to promise me, that you’ll keep Carly safe. She’s not combat-trained, or even very good at confrontation.” Carly rolled her eyes but smiled at Sally’s assessment. “You will stay here and if anything nasty comes calling that you can’t handle, you phone me or your Alpha right away. Got that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Seth said with renewed conviction. “But shouldn’t maybe some of us go with you?”
“Absolutely not. Your job is here. Guarding the Mistress. I’m armed and the rest of your Pack is going to be right on my heels.” She spoke as she headed out of the office, the rest of them trailing behind her. “I’ll have plenty of help when I need it. I’m just scouting ahead to make sure nothing happens to Jimmy before they get there.”
She swung up into the SUV and started the engine. With a quick wave to Carly, she set out as fast as she dared go on the gravel drive. When she hit the pavement of the road, she sped up, pushing past the speed limit on the quickest route to the nearby farmhouse.
It was a good location for bad deeds. There wasn’t much cover because the fields were empty, dry stalks from last year’s corn popping up at regular intervals. But nothing had been planted this year. Probably because the property had changed hands.
Sally had to leave the SUV parked in the last row of trees before the open pasture. She crept toward the house on foot, crouched low so anybody looking out would have less chance of seeing her approach. The half moon was behind clouds and there were no lights around for miles, so that helped. She wore her dark jacket and blue jeans. Black boots couldn’t be seen against the dark ground. Only her face and hands shone in the darkness, but she’d put her hair down to cover what she could, and kept her hands low, one holding one of her handguns. The other gun remained holstered for now, as a backup. She’d taken the ankle holster out of her suitcase that morning and put her backup gun in her boot. Just in case something went sideways.
