I stared at her. “Gosh, I don’t know what to say, Bibiana.”
Victor came back from his side of the room, clipping the phone back into his pocket. “I’ve got extra men around Father, and I’ll up the security on our clubs, just in case.” He looked from one of us to the other, frowning. “Did I miss something?”
Bernardo laughed.
Crispin said, “Chang-Bibi offered you to Anita in marriage.”
“Mother!”
“You may never meet another queen of her power, Victor.”
“She belongs to another master vampire. It is against every rule to interfere in that.”
“I am your mother and your queen. It’s my job to interfere.”
“Leave Marshal Blake alone, Mother.”
Bibiana smiled at us both, and it was that smile you never want to see on anyone’s mother’s face. That look that says they’d welcome you to the family in a hot second, if only their son would cooperate.
Bernardo saved me. “When can you bring the weretigers to the station for questioning?”
“We need to do it carefully.” He looked at us. “I will admit this here, but never publicly. It would go better if the police in full gear went with us from weretiger to weretiger. If they are good enough to lie to us like this, then I won’t be able to lie to them about why we want them to go to the police.”
“I’ll talk to the Vegas police.” But I wondered how hard it was going to be to keep them from being a little trigger-happy as we hunted the weretiger that had killed one of their own? Everyone had been calm, almost unusually calm, about it all. It was almost like the pause between storms.
“You look worried,” Victor said.
“How many weretigers on this list?”
“Five,” he said.
“Six,” she said.
“Mother…”
“You would leave the woman out, but she is powerful, and she is under six feet.”
He nodded. “You’re right, I would have left her off. I’m sorry. You get a team of your people ready, and I’ll try to have them gathered in one place. I can’t lie well enough to take them to the station for you, but I think I can arrange something.”
“It might be better to take them in their homes,” I said.
“Take them, you mean kill them.”
“No, I really need this guy, or girl, alive. We need to question them about Vittorio, to find out his daytime resting place. If we get this weretiger and make him or her talk, then we could execute Vittorio before nightfall.”
“We will give you the addresses, but if you want to question them, you will need Victor or me present.”
“Why?” Bernardo asked.
“Because we can do things to make them talk that you cannot,” she said.
“If it’s illegal, I don’t think…”
“He killed, or helped kill, police officers. Tell me that you can’t get everyone to look the other way for just a few minutes?”
I looked at Victor and met his eyes in their gold glasses. I would have liked to defend my fellow officers, but frankly, if roughing up this guy would find us Vittorio before dark, I’d disable the cameras in the interrogation room personally. Was it wrong to admit that? Only on record. Which was another reason I was still more assassin than cop.
37
WE WERE IN the parking lot of an elementary school. It was long enough after hours that the school was empty, no children to peer out of the windows at the show outside. Because when I say we, I mean Las Vegas Metro SWAT, Edward, Olaf, Bernardo, Undersheriff Shaw, a bevy of homicide detectives, and some uniforms and cars that would eventually close off the streets so no one drove by at the wrong moment. Victor was in one of the cars because Shaw had kicked a fit about him being in on the planning. The powers that be had insisted he be nearby to maybe talk the weretiger down, like getting the wife on the phone to talk to someone who’s taken hostages. At least Victor was sitting in air-conditioning unlike the rest of us. But it wasn’t just people that made for the show. It was every SWAT operator’s SUV or truck. It was the huge white RV that would be the command center. The big, black shape of the B.E.A.R., which I would have called huge if the RV hadn’t been sitting near it. There was a BearCat, like a smaller brother of the B.E.A.R. It was Sergeant Hooper, who had the biggest sticky notes I’d ever seen laid out on the hood of his truck. The huge sticky notes held notes incorporating everyone’s information. Notes from the small laptop that was hooked directly to the huge white RV, where Lieutenant Grimes and his tech team were shooting them all the information they could find on Gregory Minns, the first weretiger on our list.