Fair Game

is this—Travis and Senator Dwight Heuter had a younger sister, Helena. In 1981, when she was sixteen, she turned up pregnant—raped, she claimed. She moved in with her big brother and then committed suicide a couple of years later, leaving Travis in charge of her half-blood boy. A retired teacher I talked to told me that the boy was ‘different,’ not precisely slow or autistic, but definitely odd, with a tendency toward violence. His name is Benedict Heuter and he finds menial jobs, according to the IRS”—this had been the last little bit he’d needed to tie it all up in a bow—”and for the last five years he’s been doing janitorial work or maintenance, moving every year or so.”
    Charles backed out of the IRS database and closed his doorway. Then he slid into a chunk of Darknet—a separate little space of the Internet unseen by search engines and mostly engineered by hackers who’d abandoned the Internet for most of their more questionable pursuits—and pulled up a list of properties from Travis Heuter’s tax records, something he’d copied over during an earlier excursion into the IRS database.
    “I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to get at that information,” said Leslie.
    “Don’t look,” said Goldstein, peering over Charles’s shoulder. “We don’t know anything about illegal hacking.” He whistled cheerily. “Travis Heuter owns half the world.”
    Charles searched for Massachusetts and found an address.
    “Not that one,” murmured Isaac. “That’s downtown. You want ten miles southwest of here. Not that one—that’s way up north. There. Dedham. One of my college girlfriends kept a horse out there and that’s about the right direction and distance.”
    Charles didn’t want to be wrong, so he committed that address to memory, but kept going through the records until his search jumped back to the beginning. It was Dedham or they’d have to follow the bond. Either way, Heuter was done.
    Weighing time lost investigating versus lost time, Charles took a moment to look up the address on another Darknet site that specialized in property records official and unofficial—the Darknet was a rather tedious mix of conspiracy theorists, brilliant black hats, and OCD record keepers. Travis Heuter’s Dedham property was a largish two-story farmhouse with a barn on four-point-two acres that had sold five years ago for close to a million dollars. Charles printed the house plans and the county record of the last survey of the land, folded them, and shoved them into his pocket.
    “One of my pack has a van waiting for us outside,” Isaac said. “Shall we go?”
    Focused on Anna, Charles had forgotten that they would need a car to get there. It was probably best that he not drive.

CHAPTER

12
    Anna was panting with the pain of shifting, and her muscles shook at random for what she told herself was the same reason. She felt weaker than she’d ever been while in wolf form and she smelled wrong, too. Sick or drugged, maybe.
    The other man, the one who was not Les Heuter, was still ranting in the other room about what he would do to her in very explicit language…which meant that either her shift had been Charles-fast or he had been talking for fifteen or twenty minutes. She was betting on the latter.
    Heuter encouraged the other man, whose name evidently was Benedict, adding ugly details or making fun of him, whatever it took to goad him to new heights. Heuter probably thought that she was cowering in the cage listening.
    “Do you remember what we did to that girl in Texas?” Heuter asked.
    “The one with the butterfly tattoo?”
    “Not that one; the tall one—”
    Anna came to her feet and shook like she was throwing water off her fur in an attempt to get her muscles working—and so she would not look as though she was cowering in her cage, afraid of them before they’d even done anything to her. She did her best to tune them out, turn them into background noise like an unpleasant song on the radio.
    She needed something else to focus on.
    Her night vision as a human was pretty good. In her wolf form, it was even better. Her cage hung about two feet off of a polished floor that looked more out of place than the cage itself did in the big open room. There was a lingering scent of horses to tell her that this had originally been a barn, but someone had repurposed it into a dance studio. On the far end of the room, on the short wall, a bench held a couple of pairs of