Page 101 of Bears Behaving Badly
They were minutes away from the Minneapolis warehouse district, having fled the funeral home out the back exit to avoid the cops. The family pretending to mourn Lund didn’t hinder them, which was the only nice thing she could say about them.
Annette slumped in her seat and rubbed her temples. “All right, I need to figure this out. So there were syndicate members at the memorial, yes? Had to be. And they know we’ve been trying to expose them.”
“Couple of them must’ve dropped their teeth when we walked in.”
“Right. They’ve been hoping the system—oursystem—would rubber-stamp all of it with ‘case closed.’ And they’re desperate for Lund to take all the blame. That was the point of killing him in the first place. So they could escape detection and start over. So they can keep getting off. But Lund’s motivation was different from the syndicate’s.Theywere in it for their fuckstickesque idea of fun.”
“And Lund was in it for revenge.”
“Lund was in it for revenge.” She heard herself say the words, let her brain sift through them. This was what her brain had been trying to grasp in the Target changing room but had been too distracted by a salmon party dress and David’s mock turtleneck to do so. Lund’s campaign to kidnap, brutalize, and eventually dump juvenile Shifters wasn’t about trafficking at all. Because the most important thing in Terry Lund’s world was his work: exotic pets. He’d told them so himself.
“Caro tried to tell us,” she continued. “Well, she told Mama Mac. Remember?Please also know that I am not a pet. I will hurt anyone who tries to hurt me or mine.”
“Oh Christ.”
“Right. Those photos of abuse… He was breaking Shifter juveniles to be pets.House-breaking them. For syndicate members who wanted their very own pet Shifters. But perhaps also…”
“For Stables. Because what’s more exotic than a werewolf? What could be trendier? It’s the sociopathic version of tropical fish or a potbellied pig.”
Annette felt her gorge think about rising.Knock it off, gorge.“And…and that means that not only are there plenty of Stables in the world who know about us, they’re also happy to subjugate us.”Every time I think this case won’t get worse, it does.
“Which suited Lund fine.”
“More than fine. It’s why he would have thrown himself into providing for the syndicate. Can’t you picture it? Here was the perfect opportunity to show his family he wasn’t worthless. Not that it worked—Brennan was still desperately ashamed of his half brother. And given some of what we overheard at the memorial, he wasn’t the only family member who felt that way. So Lund grew up feeling like he wasn’t one of them. Like he was a genetic joke. Worthless.Stable.”
“He overcompensated,” David added. “Like all these scumbags do. And made his life all about punishing others for what his family did.”
“And because his real motive was so well hidden—even from himself, I think—no one would guess what he was up to. Even people who routinely see abuse. We never thought ‘pet store’ or ‘slavery.’ Hell, we had photographic proof of what he was doing and westillcouldn’t connect the dots.”
“The names.” Scout. Lambchop.
Pet names.
“And if any Stables who weren’t in the syndicate saw the photos, they’d think it was animal cruelty at worst.”
Annette thought about how she’d blithely informed Caro “We’ve found out everything.” And how the girl had just looked at her. Because they hadn’t. And for all Caro knew, they never would. So while in Lund’s grip she’d gone mute out of self-preservation. And out of Lund’s grip, she stayed that way. Because there was no one, no one in the world she could trust. Except Dev. But how could a child—even one with Dev’s, um, gifts—help her?
Even if we catch these guys, will Caro feel safe enough to speak? Ever again?
“Almost there,” David warned as they crossed over into the warehouse district, and not the trendy shops and restaurants section. The dirtier, grittier, smellier section, warehouses built in the late 1880s that most of the population forgot were there.
I’ve gotta deal with customs, oversee the quarantine facilities, clear the charter flights for the imports…
Lund’s warehouse. Because Nadia had seen it the day they found Lund’s files: his apartment wasn’t a home; it was an operating room. The broken-down building ahead that shielded his life’s work…thatwas his home.
Oz’s confusion over the accounts made sense now, too.
The methodology is way off. The setup’s all wrong.
Of course it was, because profits weren’t the name of the game. Secrecy was. Why else buy dilapidated warehouses in a floodplain? Why have an attorney of record when your revolting half-brother can take care of the paperwork?
I can’t think of a legit reason for this random guy to have twenty-two accounts and eleven shell companies.Of course not. Because Oz was, fundamentally, a good man. Lund’s polar opposite in all ways. And her foster brother’s inability to sniff out sadism was one of the reasons she’d wanted him to stay in accounting. But that had backfired; Oz had just dug in. Which she should have foreseen.
Though perhaps she was underestimating him. He was clever enough to suss out some of it, after all, and leave a message for Nadia, who relayed it to them in the dressing room.
Lund was doing all this from somewhere, Annette had said, thinking aloud. He mentioned a warehouse when we spoke with him at the hospital. I’m betting it got the same treatment his apartment did: a casual glance, and then lockdown. Can you check it out?
Nadia had…but somewhere in that time frame, she’d also called the police.
