Patricia Briggs - Fair Game

She was here to meet a consultant. Though there was the occasional perfectly innocent computer geek or accountant, in her experience, consultants were quite often bad guys who had made deals so that the good guys could catch bigger bad guys: rewarding the smaller evil so that the big monsters got stopped.

Five people dead in the last month: an old woman, two tourists, a businessman, and an eight-year-old boy. A serial killer was hunting. She’d seen the boy’s body, and to catch his killer, she’d have met with Satan himself.

In her time in the FBI, she’d dealt with former drug dealers, an assassin already serving a life sentence in jail, and any number of politicians (some of whom should have been serving life sentences in jail). Once, she’d even consulted a self-proclaimed witch. In retrospect, Leslie hadn’t been nearly as afraid of the witch as she should have been.

Today she was talking to werewolves. To her knowledge, she’d never met a werewolf before, so it should be interesting.

She considered the table they’d all be sitting around. The FBI offices or a police station would have given her side the home advantage – her side being those who fought for law and order. Meeting with people on their own turf, in their offices or homes, lost her that advantage, but sometimes she’d used it to get information she wouldn’t have gotten if the people she was interviewing hadn’t felt comfortable and safe. Prisons, oddly enough, gave the home-court advantage to the prisoner, especially if she brought a nervous greenie along with her.

Hotels were neutral territory – which was why they were meeting here instead of the office.

‘Why me?’ she’d asked her boss yesterday when he told her she was going alone. ‘I thought the whole team was going to talk to him?’

Nick Salvador had grimaced and stretched his large self uncomfortably behind his desk – a space where he spent as little time as possible. He preferred being in the field. ‘FUBAR ahead,’ he said, which was his code for politics. When Leslie had come into the Boston office, the previous person who’d had her desk had taped a list of Nick-speak to the bottom of her drawer with a note that said he’d had it faxed from Denver, where Nick had last been posted. There was a full page of swearwords, and ‘FUBAR ahead’ had been first on the list. It wasn’t that Nick couldn’t dance gracefully with the powers that be if necessary; it was that he didn’t like doing it.

‘I put in the request and word was we were going to talk to Adam Hauptman. He’s done a lot of consults – been guest speaker at Quantico a couple of times. Thought we could get information to help us with the case and pick up a bit besides.’ He twisted his chair around and his knee hit the canvas side of one of his go-bags. He had a number of them stashed around his office. Leslie had three herself – each packed for different jobs. Hers were color-coded; Nick’s were numbered. Which made sense – there were more numbers than guy colors (his bags were khaki, khaki, and that other khaki) and he needed more go-bags than she did because his job was broader reaching. She didn’t have to keep a suit on hand, for instance, because she was unlikely to get called upon for television interviews or congressional hearings.

‘Hauptman has a good rep,’ Leslie said. ‘I have a friend who sat in on one of his lectures, said it was informative and pretty entertaining. So what happened to that plan?’

‘Got a call yesterday morning. Hauptman’s not available – you remember that monster they found in the Columbia River last month? Turns out it was Hauptman and his wife who killed it, mostly his wife – that’s for our information only.’ Not classified, but not to be advertised, either. ‘She apparently got busted up pretty badly and he can’t fly out. Hauptman found us a replacement, someone higher up. But no more than five people can come to the meet – and we have to hold it in neutral territory. No name, no further official information.’ He pursed his mouth unhappily.

Nick Salvador could play poker with the best of them, but with people he trusted, every last thing he thought bloomed on his face. Leslie liked that, liked working with him because he was smart – and never, ever treated her like the token black female.

‘That’s not FUBAR,’ she said.

‘FUBAR is hearing that the werewolf consultant is “higher up” – makes it all sorts of interesting to a lot of people other than the FBI,’ he said.

‘Hauptman is Alpha of some pack in Washington, right?’ Leslie pursed her lips. ‘I didn’t know there was a higher-up than an Alpha.’

‘Neither did anyone else,’ agreed Nick. ‘I don’t know what the deal is, but I’ve been informed that two Trippers are coming to the party.’

Trippers, in Nick-speak, were agents from CNTRP. The acronym stood for Combined Nonhuman and Transhuman Relations Provisors, the new agency formed to deal with the preternaturals. They pronounced it ‘Cantrip.’ Nick called them Trippers because whenever they involved themselves in an investigation he was in, he tripped all over them.

‘They wanted to send two Homeland Security agents, too, but I put my foot down.’ Nick scowled at the phone as if it were to blame for annoying him. ‘Special Agent Craig Goldstein, who was involved in three earlier cases with this same killer, finished the most urgent of his cases and so is breaking loose from Tennessee to come help us.’ She’d never met Goldstein, but knew that Nick had, and that he liked him – which was enough of a recommendation for her. ‘I want him to talk to our werewolf. I wanted two of my agents in there with him – but I got outvoted. Two Trippers, one Homeland Security agent’ – his voice dropped coldly – ‘who has no business whatsoever in this case. And Craig and you.’

‘Why me?’ she asked. ‘Len could go. That way you could include the police.’ Len was the local Boston PD officer who worked on their task force. ‘Or Christine – she’s done a few more serial murder cases than I have.’

Nick sat back and stilled, pulling all his energy in the way he did when they got a good lead on someone they’d been looking for. ‘A friend of mine called me and gave me a heads-up. He knows Hauptman – more importantly, Hauptman knows he is a friend of mine. Hauptman called him to give me some more background.’

Leslie’s eyebrows went up. ‘Interesting.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Nick smiled. ‘My friend told me that Hauptman said I might want to be careful who I sent. Someone low-key, good with body language, and absolutely not aggressive.’

He looked at her and she nodded. ‘Not Len, not Christine.’ Len was smart, but hardly low-key, and Christine had a competitive streak a mile wide. Leslie could hold her own, but she didn’t need to rub people’s noses in it.

‘That lets me out, too,’ Nick admitted. ‘Angel and you are probably the best fit, and Angel is just a little too green to send out on his own against the bad guys just yet.’ Angel was fresh out of Quantico.

‘I’ll take good notes,’ she promised.

‘Do that,’ Nick said. His fingers were doing the little impatient dance they did when he was thinking among friends – like he was conducting invisible music.

Leslie waited, but he didn’t say anything.

‘So why are we making this extra effort to get along with the werewolf?’ she asked.

Nick smiled. ‘My friend told me that Hauptman said that the people we’d be meeting might be persuaded to give us a little more concrete help if the person we sent was someone they felt they could trust.’

‘People?’ Leslie leaned forward. ‘There’s more than one?’

‘Hauptman said “people.” That didn’t come through official channels so I saw no reason to pass it on.’