Fair Game

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 a

‘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 cha

Nick was very good at cooperating. Cooperation solved crimes, put the bad guys behind bars. Cooperation was the new byword– and it worked. However, put Nick’s back up, and cooperation might mean something

a little less cooperative. He might disparage the Trippers in private, but it didn’t hinder him at all in the field. Homeland Security, on the other hand, tended to set his back up rather more forcibly because they liked to forget that the FBI had jurisdiction on all terrorist activity on US soil. Nick reminded them of that whenever necessary and with great pleasure.

‘I would very much appreciate,’ Nick said, ‘if we could use our consultant or consultants in the field.’

‘It would be interesting to see what a werewolf could do at a crime scene,’ Leslie said, considering it. From what little she knew about werewolves, it might be like having a bloodhound who could talk – instant forensics.

Nick showed his even white teeth in a heartfelt grimace.‘I don’t ever want to see another waterlogged child’s body with a livestock tag in his ear. If a werewolf might make a difference, get them on board, please.’

‘On it.’

Leslie put her hands flat on the hotel conference table. Her nails were short, manicured, and polished with a clear coat that matched the sheen of the wood she claimed under her hands. Territorial rights were important. She had a degree in psychology and another in anthropology, but she’d understood it since Miss Nellie Michaelson had gone puppy-hunting in Mrs Cullinan’s backyard.