asking. “All we know is that his family is from Shakopee.”
“We don’t even know that,” Annette pointed out. “If you want to get technical, all we know is that Debbie said his family was from Shakopee.”
“What, then?” Magnus asked again. “What can we do? Say it and I will. Anything. She was my friend. Her mate was a good man. And I have a responsibility to their little lass.”
“We can dig around quite a lot more,” Nadia said. She held up a shipping label with the address of a self-storage company. “Starting with where Gulo is keeping his pristine belongings while he transitions.”
Oz broke into a delighted smile. “So that’s why Annette keeps you around.”
“That, and my impeccable fashion sense.”
“No,” Annette replied. “Just the first thing.”
Chapter 43
“I don’t know what’s scarier, the cache of automatic weapons or the fact that you could eat off the floor in here.”
“You don’t have to choose, Annette,” Oz said. “They’re both pretty damned scary.”
Nadia had gone off to track down more files, so Berne had driven his rental and Oz and Annette had taken the other love of Oz’s life to the Burnsville address for ShiftStuff.
Oz and Berne made quick work of the lock, and now they were examining the most immaculate storage space in the history of storage spaces. Annette was still frowning at the paper with the address Nadia had procured. “ShiftStuff? That doesn’t even make sense unless you’re a Shifter. And their company motto is just as insipid. ‘Need to Shift your stuff? We can help!!!’ A single exclamation point is more than sufficient.”
“That all sounds bad,” Oz agreed, “but could we maybe focus on what the hell we’re looking at?”
“War.” Berne sounded grimmer than usual, which was disconcerting. “That’s what we’re looking at.”
If it was an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one. Because there were boxes marked kitchen and bathroom, but there were also boxes marked ammo and 9mm and reloading presses and casings and gunpowder. And yes, it was an ordinary storage space, but it was climate-controlled, and someone had put in extensive, expensive shelving, and those shelves were jammed with boxes of rifles. And instead of a standard ten-by-fifteen-inch slot, Gulo had taken down the wall and doubled his storage space.
“And what’s this?” Annette said, walking over to the bench in the corner, nostrils flared while she tried to parse the jumble of scents.
“Reloading bench,” Berne replied. “Dr. Gulo likes to make his own ammo.”
“I’m flummoxed,” Annette admitted. “This is odd and off-putting.”
Oz could relate. Most Shifters avoided guns, and he’d never known one who loved guns enough to make his own ammunition. And then there were the weapons, enough to be the envy of the prop guy from an R-rated movie about cops and gangsters. Boxes and boxes of rifles, pistols, shotguns.
“He’s not violating the ‘No food, no drinks, no fireworks, no propane, no chemicals’ policy, at least.”
“Jeez, Annette. We’re in a bad guy’s super-duper secret weapons storage chamber and you’re still reading the brochure?”
Annette ignored his excellent point. “But this firepower definitely breaks the ‘nothing worth more than $5,000’ rule. And the boxes are all precisely four inches from the wall. I’m serious, does anyone have a ruler? I swear they’re all exactly four inches. It’s amazing.”
“Sounds exhausting,” Oz replied. “Not amazing.”
“This is damning,” Berne observed after walking around the death room. “I’d think Gulo would be more careful.”
“Naw,” Oz replied. “It actually makes sense that he’d use a place like this. After spending what had to be three months of his life sterilizing it, I mean. There are thousands of storage spots just like this all over the Twin Cities and millions in the Midwest. Without the address, you’d never find it. Plus, if cops are looking for any of this, they can’t come in here without a warrant. So anything they found would be inadmissible.”
“But padlocks? To protect all this?”
“It’s got to look normal from the outside. If he put up a fancy electronic lock or security grid or what-have-you, it would draw exactly the attention Gulo wants to avoid. ‘Gosh, what’s in there that he wants to protect so badly? Let’s look and see!’ But who’s gonna case a place like this and think, ‘I’ll pick that random storage space on the very off chance that it has $100,000 worth of new weapons and ammo in it’?”
Annette was groping the wall next to the bench. “Besides, if someone wants in badly enough, they’ll get in. So he—or they—didn’t waste money on locks, it