CHAPTER 10 ARCH
ARCH
Being Saturday, I’d expected the office to be quiet, but it was not to be.
Lee was supposed to have the phone forwarded to her for the weekend in case we got a tip, but instead of relaxing at home, she was here in the conference room with four members of the wolf pack.
The three who were wolves had a laptop and a stack of papers, and the fourth one, a magic carrier, was typing on his phone.
We’d brought in several of the pack members who had the most security experience to back up the Hunters who were moving three busloads of displaced Wonders from Mexico to Texas.
The cartel wars in their area had become too intense, and they’d had multiple close calls of not only nearly getting killed or injured, but of the cartel members seeing their natural forms. Their District Monitor had reached out to get them relocated to TWIST, the Wonder rescue organization near San Antonio.
Eventually TWIST would find permanent homes for all of them, but at least they were safe for now.
I stuck my head inside the conference room door. “Hey, what’s up?”
Lee looked surprised to see me, but not guilty. Fuck, I hated second-guessing my team. She scrunched up her eyebrows. “What’s up? What’s up with you? Aren’t you off today?”
“Yeah, but Dominic wants a report by Monday, and if I do it now I won’t have it hanging over my head all weekend.”
She nodded as if this made perfect sense, though if she thought about it, she knew Dominic wasn’t the type to demand a formal report first thing on Monday when an informal verbal briefing would get him the information he needed.
I waved at the pack members. “Hey, everyone.” Cassandra and Harrison, red-haired and green-eyed siblings, waved.
Lester, a gray-haired wolf with a scar across his cheek, jerked his chin at me, as did the magic carrier, a short, dark-haired man whose name I was pretty sure was Niall.
I’d met all of them before, and they’d seemed trustworthy. “What are y’all working on?”
Lee smiled. “I asked for volunteers to help with reaching out to District Monitors in other states who might have groups of Wonders of the types we’re trying to relocate. The faster we can find places for them to go, the faster they can get settled in their new homes.”
Was it horrible of me to immediately realize that if Lee knew where all the displaced Wonders were going, she could tell the traffickers? I pushed the thought to the back of my brain. “Good thinking. And good luck. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”
I walked, unhurried and relaxed, around the corner and into my office. I shut the door behind me, grateful for the soundproofing we’d had installed when the office was set up. Hunter hearing was good, but it had nothing on wolf shifter hearing.
I wasted no time booting up my computer. Had I known Lee would be here, I would’ve done this from home with my laptop, but at least here I had three monitors and faster access to the server.
The rescue last month when we’d freed Oz had happened before we’d opened the office in Houston, so everyone on my old team had been present.
And, to be fair, Dominic and I were only assuming the leak was one of the Hunters now assigned to my trafficking task force.
It could be someone who’d stayed behind.
Once our team had surrounded the facility, gained entry, and fought the guards who hadn’t slipped away with their leader, each of us had worked to release all the captives and get them medical attention.
I’d been in charge of making sure everyone was freed, Fortnell had triaged everyone for medical evaluation, and Ross, who hadn’t joined my task force, had made sure all the freed Wonders were interviewed.
He’d provided us a summary of the key information the next day, and I reread that first.
Forty-three Wonders were recovered, all alive.
They all reported being kidnapped from their hometowns, all outside of Texas.
None of them had been sold yet, although each had been photographed.
None reported seeing any other captive Wonders who had not been freed.
None reported seeing more than ten total guards, all Wonders. None knew who the guards reported to.
And there it was. None of the freed Wonders knew who the guards reported to. Which implied that at least some of them had been asked.
Except Oz hadn’t been. He hadn’t been interviewed at all.
I opened the spreadsheet of the interview notes.
Each interviewer had a tablet with a form to fill out, and at the end it would get sent to populate this spreadsheet.
The form had a few preset questions and then several free text boxes where the interviewer could add anything else of interest. The preset questions did include one asking how many guards the abductee had seen and another request for anything else they had learned about who was running the auction or the trafficking ring.
If Oz had been asked that question, he would’ve answered it. And if he was right about how blatant the auctioneer had been walking around and letting the captives know who he was, then more of the freed Wonders should’ve told us.
I tabbed over to the column in the spreadsheet that held the answers to the question about who was running the auction and the trafficking. Forty-three responses stating variations of “I didn’t see or hear anything.”
The questionnaire didn’t track who had interviewed each Wonder, a situation I would remedy first thing on Monday.
I scrolled down the list of the Wonders’ names.
There he was. Oswald Schmidt, kidnapped from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
According to the questionnaire, he’d been held captive for over three weeks.
I could verify that, but I decided to wait until I knew whether I had other information I needed from him.
The documentation said he’d been transported in the back of a box truck with several other Wonders for two days until they’d all been put in cells in the warehouse where we’d found them.
That was entirely plausible, but if Oz said he hadn’t been interviewed, then whoever had filled out this form had extrapolated the information from other Wonders’ experiences.
Several of the abductees had been able to provide us with phone numbers for their loved ones, which we’d used to reunite them. I texted several, asking them to have the rescued Wonder contact me for a brief follow-up interview, but only if they felt up to it.
We’d found out about the upcoming auction because we’d been monitoring the phones and emails of several less-than-upstanding billionaires. I was reviewing that evidence when my phone rang with a Chicago area code.
“This is Archer Jones.”
“Oh. Um, hi. This is Cressida Povlovitz. You wanted to ask more questions about my kidnapping?”
“Yes, hi, Cressida. Thank you for contacting me. If you’re comfortable with it, I’d like to ask you about what you saw and heard while you were being held. You may have already been asked some of these questions before, but—”
“No. I wasn’t. I’m actually glad you called, because at the time I thought it was strange they only asked me my name and where I was from.”
“Yes, I’m so sorry. Things were a little more chaotic than we’re used to.
” I went through the questionnaire with her, and while she got a little emotional at times, she was able to answer all of the questions.
Other than her name, where she lived, and when she was taken, all of the answers were different than what had been submitted at the time of the rescue.
I was able to speak with four more of the rescued Wonders, and they all told the same story.
No one had asked them the questions on the questionnaire.
Each of them reported giving their name to the Hunter who released them from their cell, and then they were placed in line to be seen by a medic. And that was it.
Dominic had put me in charge of the rescue, but Fortnell had made the plan for the medical triage of the abductees, and Ross had been in charge of the interviews.
Well, it looked like I needed to be a plan-ahead type of captain.
I emailed Fortnell and Ross to let them know I wanted to consult with them on Monday to make sure the team here had kits ready to go for any future rescues since we might not get as much notice the next time.
I forwarded the email to Simpson and Kraus to ask if either or both of them wanted to be in charge of planning supplies for the rescue part of any upcoming operations.
Lee was tied up with the Mexico relocations, but I could ask her for her thoughts on the plans the others put together.
It would be enough reason to find out where she’d been stationed during the last rescue.
Pleased with how innocuous, not to mention actually useful, it sounded.
I shut my computer down and left my office.
I’d update Dominic when I was in my truck.
Lee’s meeting had wrapped up, the conference room empty.
Lester and Niall had gone home, but Harrison and Cassandra were chatting with Lee, standing just outside the main door to the office.
After making sure Lee didn’t need to get back inside, I locked up. Lee headed down the sidewalk, as she could walk to her apartment from here. I trailed the two wolves to the parking lot.
“Have any fun plans for the rest of your weekend, Captain?” Harrison bounced his eyebrows up and down, and damn if my thoughts didn’t go directly to Manny and Oz.
“I’ve got a work errand first, and...” Wait a minute. “Hey, are y’all free right now? I’ll buy you lunch if you’ll help me with something.”
They paused. Cassandra ventured cautiously, “I could eat, but what are we agreeing to?”
I grinned. Smart wolf. “I’ve been thinking about the warehouse where the Wonders were being held last month. We didn’t diagram it, and I want to search for hidden rooms. You’d be able to tell if there was a lot of foot traffic in unusual places, right?”