Page 36 of Bears Behaving Badly
Shrug.
“We get it, darling. You’re determined to cultivate an air of mystery. Pull it back a bit,” Nadia advised.
“I’m glad you’re okay, but do you understand we have to take you back into custody? This isn’t a TV show where a key figure vanishes, reappears, and is then whisked away to a safe place while dedicated civil servants tirelessly risk their professional reputations to get to the bottom of… Why are you two nodding?”
David shrugged. Nadia hummed and looked at the sky, doubtless calculating wind vectors. Annette turned back to Caro, who had arranged herself inThe Thinkerpose. “Are you mocking us? Never mind. We’re going to do that annoying thing adults do when they talk about a youngster like they aren’t well within earshot.” To David and Nadia: “We have to take her to Judge Gomph.”Right? Right.She filled their unhelpful silence with “You remember. The judge? Who ordered us to report to him with Caro’s whereabouts and a progrep?”
“Tomorrow,” David pointed out. “Ordered us to give him a progress reporttomorrow.”
She stared at him for a moment, then turned back to Caro. “We’ve found out everything. We know why you went after Lund.” She gestured to the files she’d been clutching to her chest. “This changes everything for you. You’re safe from Lund, he’s going in the ground. You don’t have to worry. And we can reach out to your family. I’m sure they’ve been in agony, wondering where you’ve been the last two years.”
Caro shook her head. But at which part? Her motive? Her situation? The years of abuse? That she was safe?
That was it. Yes, Caro Daniels was safe…from Lund. But there was almost no chance that fingerless bastard had been running his own private abuse–rape club by himself and for himself. It was a syndicate with an unknown number of members, and perhaps one or more of them worked for ITA or were ITA adjacent; it would explain how Caro got out. There were more than 150 ITA employees and more than a dozen independent contractors, and they hadn’t the first clue who the internal scumbag or scumbags could be. Or whoanyof Lund’s accomplices were. That wouldn’t change for at least a few hours.
“Did you kill him?” Nadia asked, so quietly Annette almost didn’t catch it.
A tear spilled down Caro’s cheek as she shook her head.
“I have to show you something awful.” Annette set the folders on the hood, opened one, and showed the picture to Caro, who blinked at it and wiped away the tear. “I’m so sorry. I—I’d give anything for this not to have happened to you. But it can’t be undone. What wecando is fix it so these duplicitous scumbags don’t do it to anyone else. And I know it sounds corny, but we can’t do it alone.”
Nothing.
“Endearing,” Nadia suggested. “Not corny.”
“Thanks.” Annette got ready to do something not nice. “The situation is clear. We’re going to have to take Dev back in.”
David and Nadia, bless them, picked up on it. “We should’ve done it yesterday,” David snapped. “Kidclearlyknows something. With his jacket, we could prob’ly get Gomph to okay a three-day lockdown in a max cell.”
“Oh dear. I hate to do such a thing—he is so very charming when he wants to be—but at the least, he’s obstructing justice. We’ll have to hope—Ouch!” Nadia rubbed her arm where Caro had leaned over and pinched her. “Quite uncalled for, young lady.”
Caro gave them all a “You guys suck at this. I’m not falling for it” look. Annette had never met anyone whose glares were so eloquent. She sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. “Our options are limited.”
David snorted. “Tell me. We can’t take her to Gomph, we can’t leave her on her own, and we can’t dump her on a fos-fam ’til we know more.”
“He didn’t mean ‘dump,’” Annette told Caro. “He meant…um…gift.”
“Do feel free to chime in anytime, Caro, darling.” This from a sweetly reasonable Nadia, but it had no effect on a willfully silent teenager.
“What if we had Nadia stash her somewhere, and we go back to IPA to let them know we’ve got a missing person lead?”
Annette blinked at David’s suggestion. “And…what? Just see who shows up?”
“Pretty much.”
“Stash her where, exactly? And, again, Caro, sorry to have a discussion that directly affects you without actually discussing it with you.”
The three (four?) of them thought it over, and David was the first to break the silence. “It sucks.”
“It’s not…altogether terrible.” Nadia ignored Caro’s snort. “However, I can’t think of anything better just now.”
“We can get lunch on the way and figure this out. Do we announce Caro’s at my house? Or a decoy locale? Either way, I’ll have to warn Pat. We’ve got safeguards at the house, but Pat needs to know what might be coming. He should have the option to leave.”
“You think if a band of ruffians showed up at your home with lethal intent, Pat and Dev would linger?” Nadia paused. “Of course they would. I had to hear that out loud before I realized what an asinine question it was.”
“Right. So let’s grab some chow and work out the rough spots.”
“It’s all rough spots, David, darling.”
