Patricia Briggs - Fair Game

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.

Anna was panting with the pain of shifting, and her muscles shook at random for what she told herself was the same reason. She felt weaker than she’d ever been while in wolf form and she smelled wrong, too. Sick or drugged, maybe.

The other man, the one who was not Les Heuter, was still ranting in the other room about what he would do to her in very explicit language … which meant that either her shift had been Charles-fast or he had been talking for fifteen or twenty minutes. She was betting on the latter.

Heuter encouraged the other man, whose name evidently was Benedict, adding ugly details or making fun of him, whatever it took to goad him to new heights. Heuter probably thought that she was cowering in the cage listening.

‘Do you remember what we did to that girl in Texas?’ Heuter asked.

‘The one with the butterfly tattoo?’

‘Not that one; the tall one—’

Anna came to her feet and shook like she was throwing water off her fur in an attempt to get her muscles working – and so she would not look as though she was cowering in her cage, afraid of them before they’d even done anything to her. She did her best to tune them out, turn them into background noise like an unpleasant song on the radio.