Chapter Five
The phone rang on the anonymous shifter tip line at eleven forty-two on a Sunday morning, and Nero answered it on the second ring because he had nothing better to do.
That wasn't entirely true. He had paperwork.
He always had paperwork. The Las Vegas shifter enforcement division generated paperwork the way the city itself generated neon, constantly, unnecessarily, in quantities that suggested someone somewhere was being paid by the page.
But paperwork was not the same as having something to do, and Nero had been on the tip line since eight that morning without a single call, and the boredom was beginning to take on a physical dimension, like a weight pressing on the back of his skull.
His supervisor had told him more than once that he sounded bored when he was on the line.
Nero had pointed out that he was bored when he was on the line, and that the solution was to give him actual cases rather than phone duty, and his supervisor had pointed out that phone duty was where the cases came from, and Nero had conceded the point without conceding the attitude.
"Shifter Enforcement tip line, how can I help you?" He made an effort to sound upbeat. It was not entirely successful.
"Is this where we report shifter on shifter crimes?" The voice was deep, rough, with the flatness of someone trying very hard to sound calm and not quite managing it.
Nero sat up straighter. He grabbed a pen and pulled his notepad closer. "It is. Do you have a crime to report?"
"Yeah. This line's anonymous, right?"
"Right. We don't get names unless you offer them."
While the caller hesitated, Nero listened.
Not to the words, to everything else. Background noise: slots, unmistakable.
The electronic jangle and chime of machines paying out, the ambient roar of a crowd.
A casino floor. That was unhelpful in a town with more casinos than grocery stores.
He strained his ferret ears, sharper than most, tuned for high frequencies, capable of picking up sounds that bigger shifters missed.
There. Under the slots: splashing. Not a fountain, too irregular, too percussive.
A pool. Someone diving in. A casino with a pool close enough to the gaming floor that he could hear the splashing from where the caller was standing.
He made a note: Casino floor. Pool audible. Narrows to maybe six properties on the Strip.
"Good," the caller said. "I can't be connected with this. They'd turn me into chum and laugh while they did it."
Chum. Not a word most people used. But sharks did.
Nero's pulse quickened. Like most of the force, he'd been trying to get something on the sharks for years.
They were the most dangerous shifter group in the city.
Hired muscle was mostly their gig, too scattered and too stupid to run anything organized on their own but lethal when someone pointed them in a direction and paid them to swim.
The Playground bust a few weeks back had taken down the Grizzly and scattered the shark network, but scattered didn't mean gone.
Scattered meant harder to find. Scattered meant freelancing.
"Go on," Nero said.
"Okay, this morning some of the sharks, I'm not sure which ones exactly, kidnapped Amani.
You know, Lady Leo's boy from down at Kinky Kritters.
" The background noise dropped as the caller shielded his voice, and the fear was more evident, real and ragged under the attempted calm.
"They sold him to a crazy old perv out in the desert. That's all I know."
The line went dead.
Nero sat with the phone against his ear for three seconds after the click, then set it down and looked at his notes. Sharks. Kidnapping. Lady Leo's son. Sold to someone in the desert. A caller who used the word chum and was scared enough to keep the call under thirty seconds.
He wrote up his impressions methodically.
The casino background, the pool, the caller's vocal characteristics: male, deep voice, nervous, possibly shark himself based on the language.
The tip line was anonymous and they didn't run caller ID, but the casino details might help later if he needed to track the source.
First things first, though. He had to confirm this was real.
Tips came in on the line that ranged from genuine emergencies to pranks to paranoid fantasies, and chasing a false lead would waste time that mattered if the real thing was happening.
He needed to verify that this Amani was actually missing before he could do anything else.
Nero knew of Lady Leo and Kinky Kritters the way everyone in shifter enforcement knew of them, by reputation, at a distance, with a mix of respect and wariness.
Lady Leo ran the most successful shifter-only kink establishment in the Southwest. She operated within the law, mostly.
She cooperated with enforcement when it suited her and obstructed when it didn't. She maintained her own security network that was better funded and arguably more effective than anything the division could field.
The Playground case had been built in part on intelligence from Lady Leo's people.
She was an asset and a headache in roughly equal measure.
He'd never actually been to the club. Which was surprising, given how much he enjoyed tying people up and watching them squirm.
But work and play didn't mix, and the overlap between the shifter kink scene and the shifter crime scene was wide enough that showing up at KK as a customer would have compromised half a dozen ongoing investigations.
There was no choice, he was going as a cop.
***
The building that housed Kinky Kritters didn't look like a kink club from the outside.
It looked like an unremarkable office building in an industrial stretch near the warehouse district, glass doors, clean lobby, the kind of place where people might expect to find a dental practice or a tax accountant.
The discretion was deliberate and effective.
If someone didn't know what was downstairs, they'd never guess.
Nero pushed through the glass doors and walked into a lobby that was considerably more upscale than the exterior suggested.
Polished floors, subdued lighting, a reception desk where a young woman sat with a computer and a phone and an expression that suggested she had already decided several things about him, none of them favorable.
She was a lioness. He could smell it, the warm, heavy musk of big cat, shot through with something sharper and more personal. Young, early twenties, with her mother's bone structure and her own brand of intensity.
"My name is Nero. I'm with shifter enforcement, and I'm here to see Lady Leo." He kept his voice professional and his badge visible.
She raised her eyebrows. "We don't open for another hour."
"I understand. I received a tip that her son has been kidnapped. I need to confirm whether the information is accurate."
The eyebrows dropped. The professional composure cracked. Her hand was on her phone before he'd finished the sentence. "Mom!" She was practically screaming into the receiver. "There's a cop here and he says something happened to Ami!"
Seconds later an elevator opened and a woman stalked out who made the lobby feel smaller just by standing in it.
She was average size for a woman, not physically imposing the way a bear or a wolf might be, but carrying herself with an authority that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with the absolute certainty that she was the most dangerous person in any room she entered.
Blonde hair in a high bun. Blue silk blouse.
Black tailored pants. Heels that clicked on the polished floor with the precision of a metronome.
She moved like someone who had never in her life had to hurry because the world had learned to wait for her.
Lady Leo.
"You said you know something about my son Amani." Her voice was controlled but her eyes were not, carrying the quality of a parent's fear, which was different from every other kind of fear because it was bottomless.
"I received an anonymous tip approximately twenty minutes ago that your son was kidnapped by sharks and sold to an individual in the desert. I'm here to confirm whether Amani is currently accounted for."
Lady Leo's jaw tightened. One small movement, barely visible, but Nero caught it because catching things was his job. She turned to her daughter. "When did you last hear from your brother?"
"He texted Mom at four twelve this morning." The sister was already scrolling through her phone. Her hands were steady but her face was white. "'Heading home. The frittata was good.' He hasn't answered my texts since. I sent three. I thought he was sleeping."
Lady Leo closed her eyes for exactly one second. When she opened them, the fear was still there, but it had been joined by something hard, focused, and very, very old. The look of a lioness who has just been told that something has touched her cub.
"His apartment," she said. "Bethany, call his apartment. Then call everyone who was in the club last night. I want to know if anyone saw anything after he locked up. Marco was on exterior patrol, start with him." She turned to Nero. "What do you need from us?"
Bethany. Nero filed the name.
"Everything. His route home, his habits, his schedule. A recent photograph. Access to any security footage from the club and the surrounding area. And any information you have about which sharks might have reason to target your son specifically."