"Anyone think to check on Bowen's group?" she asked Vaughn. Her leopard hadn't sensed deceit in Bowen. Power, yes. A determination that could make a man do many things, yes. But not deceit. However, the leopard wasn't infallible.
Her fellow sentinel nodded. "They're clean - they're helping us look for the missing in their section of the city. Stupid not to use a crack team when we've got them sitting there."
Mercy glanced at Riley to see how he was taking this. He raised an eyebrow. "I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Quiet tone, but the wolf was in his eyes - she knew the anger was directed at the bastards who'd dared harm those under their care.
Feeling that same sense of violation, she slid her hand into his before returning her attention to Vaughn. "Are you sure the missing are still in the city?"
"No," the jaguar said, making her stomach sink. "Dorian's working airport and highway surveillance; SnowDancer's checking satellite footage; Faith's running telepathic scans. We'll leave no stone unturned, Mercy."
She swallowed, nodded. "What do you need from us?"
"We want you two visiting all known Alliance sites. I've already sent people through but you know their movements better than anyone else."
"What makes you think this is connected to the Alliance?" Riley asked.
Vaughn shoved a hand through his unbound hair. "One of the Rats was partying Above and he's almost certain he saw Grey get into a van with a human. But the Rat was more than a little tipsy, so I'm covering all our other bases, too - Sascha even woke up Nikita to ask if this was a Psy op. Nikita says no."
"She's not exactly trustworthy," Mercy muttered, "but this has the smell of the Alliance. Psy teams don't like to attract attention."
Riley nodded in agreement as they headed off, deciding to take the car since they had a lot of ground to cover and others were already working the streets. They came up blank at the Embarcadero warehouse, and in the Tenderloin, though they got out and traversed the entire suspect section on foot. All other known sites yielded the same result.
Panic threatened to twist Mercy's heart into a knot. It was all she could do to keep it together. "Where else?! God damn it!"
Sweating despite the cold air as they stood beside the car, Riley tried to think. That was his strength when it came to chaotic situations. Right now, the mating dance was playing havoc with his mind, but with Mercy beside him - even a distraught Mercy - he found a measure of control. "Let's go back to the basic facts," he said. "Our grid covers the Alliance. So we work on the assumption that the Alliance did this. No ifs, no buts."
She nodded, eyes full of fire.
"Then, the next question becomes - why would the Alliance take them in the first place?" he said. "It's very deliberate - three SnowDancers and four leopards."
"Either a declaration of war," Mercy muttered, kicking at a tire, "or a big fat 'fuck-you.' "
He considered that.
"Riley, the killings - there have been two confirmed cases in Tahoe. What if - ?"
"Damn." He reached out to brush sweat-damp strands of red off her face. "I forgot to tell you in the mess yesterday - one of the comm techs forwarded me a bulletin. Seems the two victims were lovers. Enforcement's charged the husband."
The sheer banality of the crimes seemed to shock Mercy out of her burgeoning panic. "Oh." A quick nod, a jerky breath. "Okay, okay." She shoved her hands through her hair and he could almost see her pulling her sentinel skin around herself.
"If we can't answer the why, let's try the how." She placed a hand against the hood. "I can see how your three boys might've been taken - pretty girl distracts them, another spikes their drinks, then the girls 'helpfully' lead them out. Everyone thinks they're drunk boyfriends, nothing sinister. But our kids were out having dinner, not in a club."
Riley nodded. "If it was me, and I had to get four sober people to do what I wanted, I'd grab one while he or she was separated from the group, then force the others to follow by threatening the one I had."
"The thing is, you know about how loyal we are - would the Alliance?"
"They've proven to be smart. They study the enemy before striking."
"So your scenario is a possibility." Mercy's claws were out, though she didn't seem to realize it. "But unless there were a lot of attackers, it'd be hard to control that many changelings, especially once you had them in a van or truck."
"Unless you use the threat of death against one to force the others to behave" - his brain made a cognitive leap - "or to dose themselves with a tranquilizer." Every single captured changeling would've tried to find an escape hatch, but if someone was holding a gun to the head of a friend, they wouldn't have dared risk an action that didn't promise a hundred percent chance of success. Packmates did not sacrifice one to save many. The Psy called that a weakness. Riley thought it their greatest strength. "But even if they're all knocked out, what then?"
"Exactly." Mercy began to pace up and down the street, both of them deliberately ignoring the fact that the tranq doses in their scenario could've been fatal. "If it's a message, we need to receive it. Otherwise, we don't know who did it, and they don't get credit. And the Alliance likes to make a splash."
"We need to factor in another thing - the kidnappers need time to get away after delivering the message." The wolf in him saw a hint of possibility. "We need to be searching isolated places where the missing wouldn't immediately be found, but where they wouldn't not be found in a reasonable amount of time."
Mercy apparently located a hair tie in her pocket because she began to pull the flowing strands of her hair into a messy ponytail. "They're not totally familiar with this city, so they won't go far from their 'circle' of movement."
"We need to dumb the search down." Riley straightened, seeing the truth. "We've been searching in places they probably have no clue how to even find."