Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

Paul looked up from the darkness. “The stuff he left for you. It’s inna trunk.”

The mechanic disappeared as if everything was explained—and therefore, off his plate.

As a sense of total disassociation came over her, Lydia scrambled out to where the cars were parked. Hers was the last in the lineup and her hands were shaking as she went to the trunk. Popping the latch, the top floated upward.

Inside, there was a black nylon duffel.

Candy peered in as well. “Okaaaaaaaaaay. At least there’s no bad smell so Peter Wynne’s not in it.”

Lydia shot the woman a stare. Then glanced around. “I can’t open it here. Where?”

“Let’s go back to the WSP. Scene of the crime. Where else.”

“You know, in an Agatha Christie novel,” Candy was saying, “this would be a grand manor house.”

As she closed the door to Lydia’s office, Lydia put the duffel on her desk—which was still swiped-clean from the night before. When she and Daniel had lost control on it. As if she needed the reminder of that? Ever.

Yet here she was with Candy … and whatever Rick had left her.

Please let it not be a bomb, she thought.

“I want to just say,” Candy announced, “that if this is a bunch of vacuum-packed freezer bags full of Peter Wynne, I’m quitting. No paycheck is worth seeing, like, a hand and foot. Maybe an eyeball or two. Part of a leg—”

“Okay, can you quit it with the descriptions? I’m already nauseous.”

Taking a deep breath, Lydia drew back the zipper and parted the nylon folds. Inside … a five-inch-thick binder. That was it. Opening the unmarked cover, she was confronted with a table of contents that detailed each of the twenty or so tabs. As well as two USB drives in a plastic pouch.

“Looks like I’m keeping my job,” Candy muttered. “Until this ship goes under. Now what the hell is all that paperwork.”

Lydia started to work her way through the pages. And when her back ached from leaning over—she was not thinking about the sex with Daniel again, no, really—she shifted around to her chair. When the scent of fresh coffee permeated the air, she had a thought she could use some—

Candy put a mug down in front of her. “Just the way you like it. I’m going to close this door on you, and you’re going to do—whatever the hell you’re doing in here—while I go out and pretend today is a nice, normal day. When you’re done, I expect a report and I deserve that shit. I’m in this with you whether we like it or not. Got it?”

With an absent nod, Lydia took a sip. Then looked up.

“Candy, this is perfect.”

The other woman snorted. “About time something around here went right.”

Four hours later, Lydia got to the last page of what Rick had prepared. Humping the binder’s back cover over, she sunk into her chair and stared into space.

No, she thought. Back at the hotel site, Rick hadn’t intended to blow himself up.

He was just going to make it look that way. So he could disappear and start a new identity—and these documents were his insurance policy. But when she and Daniel had come up on him at the fence line, he’d changed his mind. Maybe because he’d gone as far as he could take his conscience?

She guessed she’d like to believe that, but she doubted it. He was in so much deeper than she’d imagined, and it was hard to see any way out for him.

He had been doing experiments on the wolves. Genetic manipulation attempts to try to introduce human DNA into the animals through a virus host. He’d literally been trying to create a human/wolf hybrid. And the poison had been for those specimens who had been worked on so that no one else could mine the data or find out what was going on, and the traps were a plant to make it look like someone was threatening the whole pack. In fact, Rick had stalked specific wolves, tranq’d them, and presented the tampered meat right in front of them, ensuring the correct specimen was killed.

And Peter Wynne had been paying him to do it all.

The program was incredibly sophisticated, and only partially on-site. The samples had been sent somewhere else for processing, and the DNA/viral load that had been injected had come from somewhere else, too.

The identity of that next layer up was not listed anywhere.

She thought of the floppy disks.

“They were the past.” She put her hands on the binder. “This is the present.”

And in the end, there was only one place to go with it all.

AFTER NIGHT FELL and things got cold, Daniel lit a fire in the campsite’s stone pit. He’d bought a bundle of dried hardwood at the gas station down by the highway—along with a six-pack of Coke, a bag of Doritos, and a carton of Marlboros. He’d paid cash for it all, as well as for the site rental, and by five o’clock, he’d settled in against the rock he planned on using for a pillow.