Fair Game

‘Lizzie,’ he said, his eyes drifting over her face, down to Brother Wolf and back up, as if not looking at the giant wolf in front of his desk might make the scary thing go away. ‘Her name is Lizzie. She came in about eight and I never saw her leave. Neither did the security tapes.’ He swallowed. Glanced down at Brother Wolf again.

‘Who used the elevator after she came in?’

‘Tim Hodge on the fifth floor. Sally Roe and her partner, Jenny, on the eighth. That is the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.’ He sounded a little apprehensive.

‘And Lizzie is on the twelfth.’

‘That’s right.’

‘How many people use the stairs?’

‘Businesses on the first three floors,’ he answered, frowning at Brother Wolf. She could hear his heartbeat pick up as something instinctual kicked in to tell him that there was a big predator on the end of her leash. Though he continued talking, he took a step back. ‘A couple of the people on the fourth and fifth floor take the stairway down sometimes, but mostly everyone who lives here takes the elevator.’

Brother Wolf took a step forward.

‘And where is the stairway?’ Anna asked, then hissed, ‘Stop that,’ to her mate. If it had been Charles, she would have been certain he was only teasing – the wolf was a different matter.

Brother Wolf turned his head toward her, his eyes half-veiled, and let his ears slack a little in a wolf smile. All of which didn’t mean that he hadn’t been interested in hunting the young man down – just that he also had enjoyed teasing her.

‘Over there.’ The security guard pointed just beyond the police officers. ‘I’ll have to buzz you in. For that, I’ll need some ID.’

‘Do you have to buzz people out?’

He shook his head. ‘Against the fire code, I think.’

The stairs would have been a better way to exit. The door was out of the way and didn’t chime, as the elevator’s doors did, to announce when someone was leaving. She’d take Brother Wolf up that way – if she could talk her way around the ID thing. She hadn’t brought any with her, and wouldn’t have used it if she had. She wouldn’t lie with a false ID, and she had no intention of giving them any more personal information than she could help, not unless Bran told her differently.

‘Do you have a card from Agent Fisher or Agent Goldstein of the FBI?’ Anna asked.

He looked at the small collection of cards on the desk in front of him. ‘Agent Fisher. Yes.’

‘Why don’t you buzz us in and call her. She called me in and I left in a hurry and forgot my purse and ID. She’s expecting me.’

He frowned at her.

‘Really,’ Anna said dryly. ‘Woman with werewolf. It’s hard to mistake us for anyone else.’

The security guard’s eyes widened and he took another good look at Brother Wolf – who slowly wagged his tail and kept his mouth closed. Apparently he’d decided not to torment the young man.

‘I thought they’d be bigger,’ the security guard said, unexpectedly. ‘And … you know. Grayer.’

‘Less civilized, more slathering?’ asked Anna with a smile. ‘Half-human, half-wolf, all monster?’

‘Uhm.’ He gave a quick smile and kept a wary eye on Brother Wolf. ‘Can I plead the fifth on that? You’ll still have to wait until I call for confirmation. If I don’t know you, you don’t get in without ID or an invitation.’

‘Did the police already ask you about the people who came in today?’ Anna asked.

The guard nodded. ‘Everybody. Police, FBI, and possibly a dozen other agencies and people as far as I could tell. Starting with Lizzie’s father.’

‘I don’t need to repeat their work, then,’ Anna said.

He gave her a polite smile, picked up the phone, and called the number from a card resting on top of the desk. ‘This is Chris at the security desk downstairs. I have a woman and a werewolf down here.’

‘Send them up,’ said Leslie Fisher’s voice. She sounded a good deal less calm than she had when she’d called Anna. She hung up without ceremony.

Chris the Security Guard nodded at Anna. ‘I’ll buzz you through. How come you’re taking the stairs? Twelve stories is a lot.’

‘He doesn’t like elevators,’ Anna said. ‘And it sounds like, if she was kidnapped, maybe her assailant would have taken her down the stairway because you’d have noticed him in the elevator.’ She indicated the wolf with a tip of her head. ‘He’s got a good nose. We’ll check it out.’

Chris looked at Brother Wolf with less fear and more interest. ‘It would be good,’ he said, ‘if he could find her fast.’

Anna nodded. ‘We’ll try.’

Brother Wolf trotted up the stairs scenting the people who’d come this way. There were old scents – several people had dogs and someone had the worst cologne … and six or eight fresher scents. As he and Anna moved up at an even and steady pace, the other scents fell away, leaving just a few. He could smell the woman who cleaned here – she came up often – but there was another that overlaid it, fresher by days.

Brother Wolf pinned his ears and stopped, because Charles told him what he was smelling was unlikely.

‘What?’ asked Anna, then, more properly, What?

She came here on her own, without touching the floor. Brother Wolf knew his tone was grumpy, but he could not change what was just because it didn’t make Charles happy. Sliding against the wall about three feet from the floor. Charles says, ‘No.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Anna, her voice soothing his ruffled fur. ‘Momentarily inexplicable evidence in an abduction that possibly involves fae or werewolves isn’t surprising when you think about it.’ She put her hand on his head, between his ears. ‘Arguing with your senses at this point is useless – which is something Charles taught me. There will be an explanation. Let’s see what her condo tells us.’

More cheerfully – because she had taken his side over Charles’ s – Brother Wolf resumed the hunt.

They came, by and by, to the twelfth floor, where Anna held the door open for him. It wasn’t difficult to locate the missing girl’s condo, because, like the building itself, there were police and other people standing around just outside the door.

The woman from the FBI was there, her arms folded and her face set. In front of her was a delicately built man, taller than the FBI woman, but he appeared shorter because of his build. His hair was chestnut and grayed at the sides. Fae – Brother Wolf’s nose could smell it. Some sort of water fae, maybe; he smelled like a freshwater lake at dawn.

He looked so very helpless, this fae, though there was no sense of timidity about him. Brother Wolf couldn’t get a fix on how powerful he was, either. Brother Wolf was no expert on fae, though he’d met his share. But it seemed to him that the ability to hide from all of Brother Wolf’s senses might mean the same thing among the fae as it did among the werewolves. Only Bran could hide what he was so well that Brother Wolf could not immediately discern his power.

‘We are doing what we can,’ the FBI woman said. ‘We don’t know if this case is related to the others – only that our serial killer has been killing fae for a number of years and abducts his prey in a manner similar to this. No one sees or hears anything – though the abduction site is well guarded or well populated.’

‘My daughter is only half-fae,’ said the man. ‘And until Officer Mooney, here, asked me, no one knew it. No one. There is no reason to suppose that your serial killer has my daughter before your forensic people go in to see what they can find. I was in there, and there is no sign of a struggle. We were meeting to celebrate her successful audition – she won a place in a top-flight ballet troupe – and she would not have stood me up. Not without calling to cancel. If there is no sign of a struggle, then she knew her kidnapper and let him get too close. She was a trained athlete and I saw to it she knew how to defend herself. I need to find her address book and you need to start down the line and send people to visit each and every person there while we wait for the kidnappers to call and demand a ransom. We are wasting time.’

This one, thought Brother Wolf, was used to giving orders rather than following them. He might have been tempted to teach him better except for the smell of frantic worry and heartsick terror that the fae was covering with quiet orders.

‘If it is our serial killer,’ said the FBI woman, sounding much more patient than she smelled, ‘then there will