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tripped all over them.
    “They wanted to send two Homeland Security agents, too, but I put my foot down.” Nick scowled at the phone as if it were to blame for annoying him. “Special Agent Craig Goldstein, who was involved in three earlier cases with this same killer, finished the most urgent of his cases and so is breaking loose from Tennessee to come help us.” She’d never met Goldstein, but knew that Nick had, and that he liked him—which was enough of a recommendation for her. “I want him to talk to our werewolf. I wanted two of my agents in there with him—but I got outvoted. Two Trippers, one Homeland Security agent”—his voice dropped coldly—“who has no business whatsoever in this case. And Craig and you.”
    “Why me?” she asked. “Len could go. That way you could include the police.” Len was the local Boston PD officer who worked on their task force. “Or Christine—she’s done a few more serial murder cases than I have.”
    Nick sat back and stilled, pulling all his energy in the way he did when they got a good lead on someone they’d been looking for. “A friend of mine called me and gave me a heads-up. He knows Hauptman—more importantly, Hauptman knows he is a friend of mine. Hauptman called him to give me some more background.”
    Leslie’s eyebrows went up. “Interesting.”
    “Isn’t it?” Nick smiled. “My friend told me that Hauptman said I might want to be careful who I sent. Someone low-key, good with body language, and absolutely not aggressive.”
    He looked at her and she nodded. “Not Len, not Christine.” Len was smart, but hardly low-key, and Christine had a competitive streak a mile wide. Leslie could hold her own, but she didn’t need to rub people’s noses in it.
    “That lets me out, too,” Nick admitted. “Angel and you are probably the best fit, and Angel is just a little too green to send out on his own against the bad guys just yet.” Angel was fresh out of Quantico.
    “I’ll take good notes,” she promised.
    “Do that,” Nick said. His fingers were doing the little impatient dance they did when he was thinking among friends—like he was conducting invisible music.
    Leslie waited, but he didn’t say anything.
    “So why are we making this extra effort to get along with the werewolf?” she asked.
    Nick smiled. “My friend told me that Hauptman said that the people we’d be meeting might be persuaded to give us a little more concrete help if the person we sent was someone they felt they could trust.”
    “People?” Leslie leaned forward. “There’s more than one?”
    “Hauptman said ‘people.’ That didn’t come through official channels so I saw no reason to pass it on.”
    Nick was very good at cooperating. Cooperation solved crimes, put the bad guys behind bars. Cooperation was the new byword—and itworked. However, put Nick’s back up, and cooperation might mean something…a little less cooperative. He might disparage the Trippers in private, but it didn’t hinder him at all in the field. Homeland Security, on the other hand, tended to set his back up rather more forcibly because they liked to forget that the FBI had jurisdiction on all terrorist activity on US soil. Nick reminded them of that whenever necessary and with great pleasure.
    “I would very much appreciate,” Nick said, “if we could use our consultant or consultants in the field.”
    “It would be interesting to see what a werewolf could do at a crime scene,” Leslie said, considering it. From what little she knew about werewolves, it might be like having a bloodhound who could talk—instant forensics.
    Nick showed his even white teeth in a heartfelt grimace. “I don’t ever want to see another waterlogged child’s body with a livestock tag in his ear. If a werewolf might make a difference, get them on board, please.”
    “On it.”
    LESLIE PUT HER hands flat on the hotel conference table. Her nails were short, manicured, and polished with a clear coat