Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

looking at her. Thinking.
    “I don’t think he’s fae,” he said. “Not our original killer. Why else would he have waited until the fae came out to start killing them?”
    Not our original killer,
thought Charles to himself.
    “I don’t know all of the fae personally,” said Anna dryly. “Maybe they’ve been fae all along.”
    Goldstein shook his head, and Charles agreed with him when he said, “No. This is an escalation of the type of prey the killer hunts.”
    He’s on the scent,
said Brother Wolf, watching the older FBI agent with interest.
    “Hunting the enemy,” said Singh unexpectedly. “Say he’s a Vietnam vet.He goes home and sees Vietnamese—or Asian, which is close enough for him—on his territory. So he goes hunting, just like he did in the war. He switches to boys. Maybe it’s because he likes sex with boys better—but let’s say that it is because he finds them tougher, better hunting. And then he finds the fae—and decides they are more worthy opponents. And, like his original victims, in his eyes they are invaders.”
    “He’s good and he’s smart if he’s killed this many fae,” said Anna. “They tend to be harder to kill than humans. Too bad he didn’t pick the wrong one; we’d never find the pieces of his body. I wonder how he managed that.”
    “He’s killed werewolves,” said Heuter, unexpectedly. Charles had quit paying attention to the Cantrip spokesperson, dismissing him. “Aren’t they harder to kill than the fae?”
    Anna shrugged. “I don’t run around killing fae, myself. But anything as old as some of them are have a few tricks up their sleeves.”
    “Melissa Snow died before you were born,” said Pat. “How did you know she was fae?” It wasn’t what he said, but rather the aggression in his voice, that caused Brother Wolf to take notice that the tenor of the meeting had changed.
    “Family photos,” Anna shot back, curling her lip. “Or maybe I’m older than I look. Does it matter?”
    “You are twenty-five,” said Heuter. “Got your photo on my phone and sent it to home base. They got a hit about two minutes ago. Anna Latham from Chicago, mother deceased, father’s a hotshot lawyer.”
    “So how does
he
know?” murmured Singh, ignoring the Cantrip agent’s attack on Anna. “How does he know they aren’t human? If they’d been out, someone would have noticed he was killing fae.”
    A werewolf could scent the fae, most of the time.
    “Maybe he had some way of watching while his potential victims touched iron. My Scottishgrandmother swore that there were herbal salves you could rub on your eyes to see the fairies,” continued Singh, who didn’t look as though he could possibly have a Scottish grandmother, though Charles could hardly talk because Charles didn’t look very Welsh, either.
    “Turning your clothes inside out or wearing cold iron is supposed to work, too,” said Fisher, who’d been pretty quiet up to this point. Charles rather thought that she was making sure that the Cantrip agents didn’t take control of the meeting again, as she’d spoken just as Heuter opened his mouth to say something else.
    “You said ‘original killer,’” said Anna to Goldstein, and Charles had to fight to hide his smile. He’d thought she’d missed it, but she was just waiting for the right time to spring it on them. “You don’t think we’re still dealing with the same man?”
    “Right,” Goldstein agreed, completely ignoring the Cantrip agents and Singh to focus on the murders. “We noticed some differences in the UNSUB’s killings starting about 1995 that seemed to indicate he’d acquired a partner. Then in 2000 the killings took place over six weeks. Though we—2000 is the first year I caught this case—only found five bodies, the timeline indicated that there might be six victims. As there were six the next year, and every year thereafter his killing window has been six weeks instead of four, we’re pretty sure that there were six victims in 2000 as well.”
    “If the MO didn’t match, how did you know they were still the Big Game Hunter’s victims and not some other killer’s?” Singh asked. He was caught up in the hunt for their killer—even though
his
hunt had started with an entirely different prey: the werewolves. Brother Wolf agreed with Charles’s assessment of Singh: smart and distractible if something more interesting than his current prey ran in front of him.
    Goldstein reached into his briefcase and