Skin Trade

“You may never meet another queen of her power, Victor.”

“She belongs to another master vampire. It is against every rule to interfere in that.”

“I am your mother and your queen. It’s my job to interfere.”

“Leave Marshal Blake alone, Mother.”

Bibiana smiled at us both, and it was that smile you never want to see on anyone’s mother’s face. That look that says they’d welcome you to the family in a hot second, if only their son would cooperate.

Bernardo saved me. “When can you bring the weretigers to the station for questioning?”

“We need to do it carefully.” He looked at us. “I will admit this here, but never publicly. It would go better if the police in full gear went with us from weretiger to weretiger. If they are good enough to lie to us like this, then I won’t be able to lie to them about why we want them to go to the police.”

“I’ll talk to the Vegas police.” But I wondered how hard it was going to be to keep them from being a little trigger-happy as we hunted the weretiger that had killed one of their own? Everyone had been calm, almost unusually calm, about it all. It was almost like the pause between storms.

“You look worried,” Victor said.

“How many weretigers on this list?”

“Five,” he said.

“Six,” she said.

“Mother…”

“You would leave the woman out, but she is powerful, and she is under six feet.”

He nodded. “You’re right, I would have left her off. I’m sorry. You get a team of your people ready, and I’ll try to have them gathered in one place. I can’t lie well enough to take them to the station for you, but I think I can arrange something.”

“It might be better to take them in their homes,” I said.

“Take them, you mean kill them.”

“No, I really need this guy, or girl, alive. We need to question them about Vittorio, to find out his daytime resting place. If we get this weretiger and make him or her talk, then we could execute Vittorio before nightfall.”

“We will give you the addresses, but if you want to question them, you will need Victor or me present.”

“Why?” Bernardo asked.

“Because we can do things to make them talk that you cannot,” she said.

“If it’s illegal, I don’t think…”

“He killed, or helped kill, police officers. Tell me that you can’t get everyone to look the other way for just a few minutes?”

I looked at Victor and met his eyes in their gold glasses. I would have liked to defend my fellow officers, but frankly, if roughing up this guy would find us Vittorio before dark, I’d disable the cameras in the interrogation room personally. Was it wrong to admit that? Only on record. Which was another reason I was still more assassin than cop.

37

WE WERE IN the parking lot of an elementary school. It was long enough after hours that the school was empty, no children to peer out of the windows at the show outside. Because when I say we, I mean Las Vegas Metro SWAT, Edward, Olaf, Bernardo, Undersheriff Shaw, a bevy of homicide detectives, and some uniforms and cars that would eventually close off the streets so no one drove by at the wrong moment. Victor was in one of the cars because Shaw had kicked a fit about him being in on the planning. The powers that be had insisted he be nearby to maybe talk the weretiger down, like getting the wife on the phone to talk to someone who’s taken hostages. At least Victor was sitting in air-conditioning unlike the rest of us. But it wasn’t just people that made for the show. It was every SWAT operator’s SUV or truck. It was the huge white RV that would be the command center. The big, black shape of the B.E.A.R., which I would have called huge if the RV hadn’t been sitting near it. There was a BearCat, like a smaller brother of the B.E.A.R. It was Sergeant Hooper, who had the biggest sticky notes I’d ever seen laid out on the hood of his truck. The huge sticky notes held notes incorporating everyone’s information. Notes from the small laptop that was hooked directly to the huge white RV, where Lieutenant Grimes and his tech team were shooting them all the information they could find on Gregory Minns, the first weretiger on our list.

Part of that info was the layout of his house. In St. Louis they have to scout the actual house, but in Vegas, because of the huge number of cookie-cutter housing developments, the two operators had found out which model Minns’s house was, and scouted an identical one blocks away. They’d gotten the information without any chance of alerting the weretiger, which was a lot harder to do than it sounded.

“We know that wereanimals can smell our scent, which is why we’re paying attention to the prevailing winds,” Hooper said.

“You mean you’re sneaking up on the house as if Gregory Minns were big game, and you were in the jungle,” I said.

Hooper seemed to think about it, then nodded. “Not a hunt in the traditional sense, because we’re hoping to take the suspect alive, but yes.”

I looked at Edward. He said, “They’ve done this before, Anita.”

“Sorry, Sergeant, just not used to working with this many people who actually seem to understand that lycanthropes aren’t human, but still have the same rights as regular humans.”

“We know our job,” Hooper said.

“I know that, Sergeant. I’ll just shut up now.”

He almost smiled, then went back to his notes.

“How do you get around the fact that they can hear your heartbeat from yards away?” Edward asked, and I knew by his tone that he was actually wondering if they’d figured out a solution. When Edward asks someone else a question like that, there is no higher praise.

“No one can be quiet enough to stop their heartbeat,” Hooper said.

I thought, Vampires can, but I didn’t say it out loud. It wouldn’t have helped anything. No police force in the United States allowed vampires to join up. If you were a cop and “survived” an attack and became a vampire, you were fired. I had a friend back in St. Louis, Dave, who’d been a cop until he became a vampire in the line of duty, but instead of a fancy cop funeral, he got kicked out. The police honor their dead, as long as they aren’t still able to walk around.

Bernardo said, “They can’t all hear a heartbeat from yards away, and they hear better in animal form than human.”

I looked at him and couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. He grinned at me. “You look surprised, so I must be right.”

I nodded. “Sorry, but sometimes the flirt act makes me forget that there’s actually a pretty good mind in there.”

He shrugged those broad shoulders but looked pleased.

Harry, who was the assistant team leader (ATL), was younger than Hooper, but older than most of the others. SWAT was a young man’s game, and the fact that the team had this many people over forty was impressive, because I knew they kept up or they got out. He said, “The last visual we had of the subject was human form, so the hearing, sense of smell, all of it isn’t that much above human-normal from a distance, and once we’re in the room with him, he can smell us all he wants, we’ll be on top of him.”

“What’s your policy if he’s shifted?” I asked.

Hooper answered, with no glance at anyone, “With an active warrant of execution, if they shift, it’s a kill.”

We all nodded.

“It is easier to kill them in human form,” Olaf said.

The operators looked up at him, and he was the only one of us that they had to look up to, by even an inch. “We’re hoping to get the location of the serial killer’s daytime lair, Jeffries, which means we need Minns