Werewolf Cop Read Free Page B

of the BLK anyway, and all the rest.
    Back in Europe, journalists and academics had heard of the Brotherhood, though no one had yet seemed to grasp its pervasive dominance. But the fact that the organization had now come to America—this was unknown to the media and the professoriate alike. Evidence, testimony, reports, and statistics simply did not reflect the BLK’s mushrooming influence in the U.S.
    But law officers in all the major cities sensed it nonetheless, the way family doctors sense a new, more drug-resistant strain of an old disease. Coast to coast, the law dogs confided in one another: criminal operations were proceeding with heightened brutality and smoother efficiency. Gangs were harder to penetrate, their transactions harder to detect. Old capos, lieutenants, and muscle-men were vanishing without a trace. Suspects who once would have betrayed their mothers for a plea bargain suddenly preferred to take the fall. A new silence seemed to underlie the tips of even the most reliable confidential informants. None of the cops was certain, but they all felt it: a new cancer of corruption was eating into the country. The underworld was on the rise.
    All of it was linked to Abend. In lawman legend, at least, Abend was the source and controlling genius of the invasion.
    Dominic Abend was a German-Russian billionaire of unknown occupation and murky antecedents. He had gone invisible after the USSR collapsed, and then risen into the consciousness of Western law enforcement as more shadow than light, as an empty Dominic-Abend-shaped space at the center of what little information they had about him. There were a few old photographs of him. A few mentions of him in criminal testimony. Some hints from tipsters here and there. An occasional sighting. And, most recently, a digital snapshot taken by an ambitious plainclothesman working the crowd at Times Square on New Year’s eve one year back. That last suggested Abend, like the BLK, might himself be in the country.
    So little Mickey Paz’s statement that Abend—the international criminal mastermind—had been personally present at the scene of a mass murder turned Zach Adams’s blood hunter-hot with excitement. Because Abend and the BLK were the reasons Task Force Zero had been formed in the first place. Finding them—stopping them—destroying them: this was Extraordinary Crimes’ underlying commission.
    Zach’s mind was called back to the moment by his phone buzzing in his jacket pocket—a text message, judging by the length of the vibration. He began to reach for it but stopped with his hand hovering in front of his sternum as something new developed on the Observation Room monitor.
    The little boy in the Interview Room had begun speaking English. He had slipped into it unconsciously, it seemed, as April Gomez’s warmth and gentleness slowly soothed and relaxed him.
    â€œThey kept saying to him again and again, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’” said Mickey Paz, the fingers of one hand absently massaging his Teddy bear’s ear as if to comfort it. “But Papa didn’t know. He said, ‘I don’t know. I swear.’ He kept saying that to them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
    â€œWhere is what?” said April Gomez, who slipped into English just as smoothly as the boy in her effort to keep him comfortable. “What were the men looking for, Mickey? What were they trying to find? Did they say?”
    Zach noticed the little boy’s eyes shift to the left—which might possibly mean he was trying to access an auditory memory. Zach also noticed that the kid went on fiddling with the Teddy bear’s ear—it was touching; pathetic.
    Then, haltingly, the boy said, “Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.”
    â€œBastard?” suggested April Gomez. “Stupid bastard?
    â€œNo!” whispered Zach