Goldstein had been with the bureau for more than twenty years, Anna recalled. He wasn’t subject to political whim because he wasn’t quite that far up in the bureaucracy, but Charles had told her Goldstein was right on the edge. He could have toppled into high office had he wished it. Leslie Fisher was on her way to doing exactly that.

“Our job,” Leslie said intensely, “the job of the FBI, is to protect the citizens of the United States. We can do that better through an alliance with the werewolves.”

“Who are citizens of the United States,” said Anna.

“Yes,” agreed Goldstein after a damning hesitation. “An alliance between the FBI and the werewolves will make everyone safer.”

Anna wondered if that was true.

“We know an alliance will take time,” Leslie said. “But today is a start.”

Goldstein pulled out another folder and set it beside the other two. “To that end, as a demonstration that you might find us as useful to you as you are to us, we have a mystery for you.”

“There’s a town missing,” said Leslie, pulling a folded-up USGS map out of the folder and laying it on the table. Someone had used a black marker to circle an area, then taped a slip of white paper next to the circle. Written in a neat hand in blue ink were the words Wild Sign.

Leslie tapped the marked space. “A group of people, as few as thirty or as many as forty as best we can tell, went up into the Marble Mountains in Northern California to live off-grid. The first of them set up about two or three years ago. Their settlement was illegal—the mountains are a mix of designated wilderness, federal lands, and tribal lands. Probably they thought they were on federal lands.”

Lots of snow in the Marbles, Brother Wolf told her. And Anna got something that was very nearly a visual from him.

“We have confirmation it was an active site this spring, when one of the Forest Service rangers stopped in to check on them. One of the community wrote to his daughter and gave her this map. It was his habit to write to her regularly, but his last letter was this April—a few days after the ranger stopped by, in fact. When the daughter received no further correspondence, she hiked in and found it abandoned. They were just gone.”

“Like Roanoke,” said Goldstein, “they just all disappeared. Of the names we’ve found, none of them have relocated and none of their relatives know where they are.”

“And this concerns us how?” Anna asked.

“Because it was finally determined that the settlement is not on either federal or tribal lands. It’s on a private parcel owned by Aspen Creek, Inc.,” said Goldstein. “Which is why no one tried to move them along.”

He and Leslie were looking at Anna, and she had no trouble looking blank.