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“Oh, God, I’d be on my ass so fast!” She laughed. “But no. I’ve never seen Raj or Drew in fur. There are a couple other shifters I’ve seen train paw-to-paw together in the gym, but there really aren’t a lot of shifters—or Nids at all, really, in the FBI.”
“You’ve still got the RPD beat,” I told her. “I think there are four—well, three—no,twoof us. Me and a vampire, since Raj probably doesn’t count and our wolf shifter retired. A handful of Arcs and a witch, but that’s it.”
Cass blinked a couple times. “That’s… pretty sparse.”
“We’ve definitely got our share of MFMs, though,” I remarked, and she flinched.
“Oh, no.”
“Raj didn’t tell you about the time I called him because some asshole from Precinct Four held me at gunpoint and shot at Taavi?”
Her eyes were huge.
“Oh, my God.”
My face contorted into a half-smile, half-grimace. “It’s been fun, let me tell you.”
“That’s horrible!”
“That’s life,” I replied. “Although it is nice to not be the only Nid on a case for once.”
She nodded. “I bet.” Then she turned back to the screen. “You got IDs on any of those canids?”
I looked down at the file Ward and I had put together. “The wolf’s name is Peter Arnov, he’s from Maryland. He was coherent enough to give us a statement, which I can pull from the RPD database. The maybe-coyote was named Ursula, but couldn’t give us much more than that. The last canid is only a probable and was totally incoherent.” He was our guy in the kennel.
“Okay, we’ll just add Arnov to the list… And let’s see what we can get on a female canid named Ursula…” Her fingers few across the keyboard.
* * *
By the endof the day, we’d come up with a likely ID for every victim—spirit and body—in the Manchester warehouse. And Drew had only found two victims who were on the employee list at Cornerstone. Both had contracted Arcanavirus in the last year.
“So, what, they get sick and then their bosses hunt them down?” Kurtz asked, his horizontal pupils focused on Raj’s sour expression as he looked at the file Drew had handed him.
“It looks that way,” Raj replied, his brow furrowed and his golden-brown eyes serious.
“I hate these fucking people,” I muttered, and Taavi chuffed his agreement from next to my feet.
“Agreed,” Raj replied. “What do you have on the employee lists, Kurtz?”
The faun passed him a tablet, which Raj immediately began looking through, his finger trailing along the side as he scrolled. Then he looked up at Kurtz. “You think we can make this happen?”
“On those top two, we should be able to pull financials,” the faun replied, running a hand over his close-cropped hair before tugging on the end of one pointed black horn. “IRS will have records of donations, and we should be able to ask them what they know about it.” He shrugged. “Whether they give us anything is anybody’s goddamn guess. The next two—Drew’s two employee-victims were their underlings. Anybody knows how that shook out, it’ll be them. Your boss finds out you got Arcana and came out of it Nidded and then you go poof? That looks pretty bad—we might be able to flip them on their bosses if we push hard enough.”
“Is that all?”
“Only ones we can do anything with other than the usual bullshit ‘what-can-you-tell-me-about-the-company’ crap,” Kurtz replied.
Raj nodded once. “Fair enough,” he said. “One each? Hart, you can go with Drew and do the talking.” He looked up at me. “Try not to stick your foot in it, Hart.”
Drew nodded, then turned and looked at me.
“Okay,” I agreed. “No promises, though, Tony.”
Raj grimaced, but Cass giggled behind me. I smiled at the tiger shifter, who sighed audibly.
“Sometimes I hate you, Keebler.”
I made a kissy face at him as both Kurtz and Cass laughed.
