Fair Game

police officers who awaited them and wondered if it was the serial-killer angle—or something about the missing girl’s father—that had brought out the big guns on a missing person’s case where the victim had been gone for only a few hours.
    “Yes,” Anna said, answering the FBI agent’s question. “Whoever took her is fae…or has some access to fae magic. He concealed himself in her bathroom and waited for her to come to him.”
    After gesturing the waiting forensic team into the condo, Leslie took out a small spiral notebook and began scribbling things down in it. She didn’t look up when she said, “What else did you find?”
    “He came up unobserved. A pure-blood fae could have come up looking like anyone else, probably someone who actually lives here,” Anna told her. It was speculation, but that was what she’d have done if she could conceal herself the way the fae could. They had several variants of the “don’t look at me” magic that were stronger than pack magic was, but glamour, the power that all fae shared, was more than that—a very strong illusion. “However he arrived, he left with his prey in a gym bag and carried her down the stairs.”
    Leslie looked up at that. “He carried her down? Twelve flights of stairs?”
    “Without dragging her,” Anna said, putting a finger on the hallway wall about the height that Brother Wolf had been tracing. If he had been carrying her with his arms hanging down…he was more than human tall. Anna didn’t say that, though, just told Leslie the facts. “Our perpetrator doesn’t leave a scent, so we were pretty confused at first.”
    She glanced at the missing woman’s father, who stood at parade rest, his gaze on the floor. “Because he didn’t leave a scent, it might have been someone who had been to the apartment before, someone she knew—but it didn’t have that feel. He took her by surprise in the hall in front of the bathroom. She fought him—fought hard. There’s a pretty good ding in the drywall next to the bathroom door. But she was no match.”
    He used a drug,
Charles said.
I caught a hint of it in the bathroom.
    “What did the wolf just tell you?” asked Alistair Beauclaire. His voice must have been quite an asset in the courtroom, cool, even, and beautiful. If she had been human, without her senses to tell her better, she’d never have known that her words had hit him hard—he’d been hoping it was someone he could track down.
    “The kidnapper drugged her.” She looked at Charles. “Do you know what he gave her?”
    Smelled like ketamine to me,
said Charles.
But it isn’t my area of specialty.
    She related his answer and caveat to their listeners while she thought about how to get Lizzie’s father alone to discuss matters away from human ears.
    “I am sorry we cannot be of more help,” Anna said. “As you know, we have a stake in this—and no one wants another person dead. Perhaps if we knew more about the fae who took her or what exactly the killer was doing to his victims.” She paused and said delicately, “Or is that ‘killers’?”
    Agent Fisher gave her an assessing look while Mooney, the only regular police officer left on scene, cleared his throat harshly. Beauclaire looked at her with interest.
    Anna met his gaze and said with no particular emphasis, “We’ll find him, but the more we know, the faster we can be.” She turned back to the FBI agent and told her, “If you need to get in touch and my phone rings through, you might try Charles’s.” She rattled off the number, which had a Boston area code because Bran thought that advertising they were from Montana was a mistake.
    Leslie Fisher’s face grew speculative before it returned to neutral. She’d caught that Anna’s slip had been on purpose, but she didn’t comment out loud.
    “You might as well go home,” Fisher said. “If you think of anything else, give me or Agent Goldstein a call.”

CHAPTER

6
    Anna locked their door and took the collar off Charles, laying both it and the leash on a small table against the wall.
    “If her father is an old and powerful fae, why can’t he find her?” Anna asked.
    Perhaps his power doesn’t lie in that direction,
answered Brother Wolf.
Or there is something blocking him. I do not know a lot about fae magic, other than to say that no magic has answers for everything. It is a tool. A hammer is a good tool, but not useful for removing screws.
    “All right,” she said. “I’ll buy