Page 51 of Catnapped

“I would hope you’re not stupid enough to claim the CDC paid you when it did not.”

“Surprisingly, I am not that stupid,” he replied. “I’m just surprised the CDC actively pursued something like that.”

“It’s necessary. The CDC is a pretty common target of fraud, and the company moves a significant amount of money. These papers will bring the CDC into the investigation, which is a good thing for us—mostly. It’s mostly a good thing for us.”

“They have the resources needed to deal with it, and there’s evidence they targeted a CDC employee, which will escalate it in the firm. Since you’re a person-of-interest to Lucifer, that will send it even higher up the chain. Correct?”

“Correct, and if it is decided that I am being targeted to cripple the CDC, it will create issues.” I narrowed my eyes. “I could see Lucifer taking advantage of this to transition me to his employment. He doesn’t really care what happens to the CDC. It’s a tool to him, although it’s often a convenient tool.”

“Won’t poaching you earn the CDC’s ire?”

“That depends. There are a ton of people who would make a great replacement for me. If me working for him makes it easier to deal with the demons and devils, the CDC will embrace him poaching me.” I shrugged. “I’m going to make the Devil pay me extra if he wants me, especially if there’s any evidence he planned it to work out this way.”

“We’re talking about the Devil here. The only time he’s really surprised is when Darlene is involved. He loves when she surprises him, so he absolutely will not peek into the future. Unless he’s really bored, he peeks enough to make sure things will work out in the way he wants. It’s just easier to accept we’re being played.”

“That was my general impression of the situation,” I admitted. “All right. Do we pursue the tax documentation angle?”

“No, but we’ll take pictures of everything if we think it will be useful later. It might have the identifications of those not already in custody, though. Actually, I’ve changed my mind. Yes, we’ll pursue the tax documentation, but only for addresses that aren’t near the lab. We want to catch those who weren’t busted in the operation.” Narrowing his eyes, he checked something on his laptop. “The trailer park was registered as a communal living center, but they were using PO boxes located in Dinsmore. And yes, there is a small post office in Dinsmore. So, if we eliminate all PO boxes in Dinsmore, that should save us some time.”

“Unless we can gain access to those boxes.”

“That’s probably no good. PO boxes are cleared out shortly after a failed payment and transferred to someone else or are no longer receiving mail. The boxes would have been cleared out by now. We can call them in the morning, but the likelihood someone has been paying for those boxes after the bust is slim.” Darian frowned. “But if someone has been paying the renewal bills, that could work. I’d have to use a contact in law enforcement to get access to the post office systems, though. That’s not something I have access to.”

I shuffled through the tax documents, pulling out the few sheets that didn’t have a Dinsmore address and handed them over to Darian. “Next up are standard IOs.”

“IOs?”

“Insertion orders for products and services. Some is for lab equipment from websites, things like that. It looks like they spread this stuff around to a lot of places to hide their activities. It looks like they tried to spread out where they purchased their equipment as much as possible, limiting the bulk orders for places that are specialized. They were definitely doing some form of medical research—and your concern about contagious diseases may have been accurate. They ordered several scanners meant to detect common infections in animals, including rabies, distemper, anthrax, bird flu, and so on.”

“Anthrax?”

“Bacterial infection. It’s a nasty one because it can live on surfaces for a while, so it’s a common terrorism target. It spreads through spores rather than person-to-person transmissions.”

“How do you know all of this?” he blurted.

I pointed in the direction of the bed and the scanner. “I have to be familiar with a lot of contagions, and terrorists like trying to spread anthrax through the spores. It’s something we check for at sites when there’s an unknown illness. There are a lot of really contagious animal diseases found across multiple species. The scanners they ordered are specialized and meant to be used with animals and humans to detect diseases. That they ordered more than one of these implies they were definitely working with some sort of common contagion. Unless I’m mistaken, these models can’t have new diseases loaded into their software or firmware, which means they were working with a well-documented contagion. It’s possible someone could hack them, but it would be difficult—unless they stole the software for the devices from the manufacturer.”

“Always a possibility, especially with an operation of this scale. How much did they spend on the equipment?”

I leaned over to check Darian’s IOs, grabbed my phone, and tallied the entirety of the expenditures. “Just over two million dollars.”

“And they’re all paid in full?”

“Upfront payments on all of them,” I confirmed. “That Kingston guy. Could he afford this sort of payout?”

“I don’t know. Do I think he could get the funding? Yes, with time. He’s pretty charismatic, and there are enough people who are unhappy they’re infected with lycanthropy that they would contribute to such a thing. However, I’m of the opinion Kingston is crazy enough that he’d infect everybody with lycanthropy if it means he gets treated like everybody else.”

“The law isn’t always kind to lycanthropes,” I reminded him.

“And the lycanthropes who pay any sort of attention or take care with their behavior can get by without any problems. It’s the ones who think they’re entitled to do whatever they want that are the problem for the rest of the lycanthropes.”

Ah. I’d found one of Darian’s flaws.

He let his personal opinions and beliefs color his view of the world. On that, I couldn’t really blame him, but it would prevent him from looking at the whole picture. I’d learned early on I needed to leave my personal feelings on work alone, as I might miss something if I allowed such things to get in the way of trying to look at a problem from all angles. “Darian, maybe you should reevaluate your stance on Kingston and start over, this time, without your opinions about lycanthropes judging what he may or may not have done. You probably have opinions about Kingston himself, but you need to forget those when you’re contemplating the options. You can’t figure out as many of the possibilities as possible when you’ve already established someone’s behaviors, patterns, and beliefs. The first step is to figure out all of the possibilities, then you start evaluating which of those possibilities is closer to reality. That’s what we have to do in the CDC when we have a hot case that needs to be solved before people get killed. It’s too easy to let assumptions control our choices.”

“Are you sure you’ve never done any investigating before?”

“I’ve watched people investigate before, but my bosses tend to get upset if I’m anywhere near the front lines for some reason.”