by Tanya Huff
Rose giggled, thrust her sundress into Vicki’s hands and Cloud took off after them. They raced around the yard for a moment or two then, working as a team, Cloud and Storm cut the larger wer off and jumped it. Shadow, still barking whenever he managed to find a spare breath, threw himself on the mix of tumbling bodies.
A moment later, Nadine looked up out of the pile of multicolored fur, tossed the frisbee to one side and grinned at Vicki. “So, you about ready for lunch?”
“We found tracks, not five hundred yards from the house.” The words were almost an unintelligible growl. The silence that followed them took only a few seconds to fill with answering anger.
Nadine crossed the kitchen and clutched at her mate’s arm. “Whose?” she demanded. “Whose tracks?”
“We don’t know.”
“But the scent. . . .”
“Garlic. The trail reeks of nothing but garlic.”
“How old?” Peter wanted to know.
“Twelve hours. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less.” Stuart’s hair was up and he couldn’t remain still, pacing back and forth with jerky steps.
If Ebon had been shot from that tree in the woods, as all evidence seemed to suggest he had, five hundred yards and twelve hours meant the assassin had come within range of the house sometime last night.
“Maybe you’d all better stay at a hotel, in town, until this is over,” Vicki suggested, knowing even as the words left her mouth what the reaction was going to be.
“No!” Stuart snapped, turning on her. “This is our territory and we will defend it!”
“He’s not after your territory,” Vicki pointed out, her own voice rising. “He’s after your lives! Take them out of his range, just for a time. It’s the only sensible thing to do!”
“We will not run.”
“But if he can get that close, you can’t protect yourselves from him.”
Stuart’s eyes narrowed and his words were nearly lost in his snarl. “It will not happen again.”
“How do you propose to stop it?” This was worse than arguing with Celluci.
“We will guard. . . .”
“You haven’t been guarding!”
“He has not been on our territory before!”
Vicki took a deep breath. This was getting nowhere fast. “At least send the children away.”
“NO!”
Stuart’s response was explosive and Vicki turned to Nadine for help. Surely she’d understand the necessity of sending the children to safety.
“The children must stay within the safety of the pack.” Nadine held a solemn looking Daniel very tightly, one hand stroking his hair. Daniel, in turn, held tight to his mother.
“This coward with a gun does not run this pack.” Stuart yanked his chair out from the table and threw himself down on it. “And his actions will not rule this pack. We will live as we live.” He jabbed his finger at Vicki. “You will find him!”
He wasn’t angry at her, Vicki realized, but at himself, at his perceived failure to protect his family. Even so, the heat of his gaze forced her to look away. “I will find him,” she said, trying not to resent the strength of his rage. Let’s just hope I find him in time.
Lunch began as an assault; meat ripped and torn between gleaming teeth, an obvious surrogate for an enemy’s throat. Fortunately for Vicki’s piece of mind, things calmed down fairly quickly, the wer—especially the younger wer—being incapable of sustaining a mood for any length of time when distracted by the more immediate concerns of who forgot to take the butter out of the fridge and just where exactly was the salt.
The entire family ate in human form, more or less in human style.
“It makes it easier on the kids when they go back to school,” Nadine explained, putting Daniel’s fork into his hand and suggesting that he use it.
The cold mutton accompanying the salad was greasy and not particularly palatable, but Vicki was so relieved it was cooked that she ate it gladly.
“Ms. Nelson went to see Carl Biehn this morning,” Peter announced suddenly.
“Carl Biehn?” Donald glanced over at Stuart, whose ears had gone back again, then at Vicki. “Why?”
“It’s important I talk to the neighbors,” Vicki explained, shooting a look of her own at the dominant male. “I need to know what they might have seen.”
“He hasn’t been around here for years,” Nadine said emphatically. “Not since Stuart ran him off for frightening the girls. Jennifer had nightmares about his God for months.”
Stuart snorted. “God. He wouldn’t know a real God if it bit him on the butt. Old fool’s a grasseater.”
Vicki blinked. “What?”
“Vegetarian,” Rose translated.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Didn’t have to.” Stuart cracked a bone and sucked out the marrow. “He smells like a grasseater.”
Donald tossed a heel of bread onto the table and dusted his hands off against his bare thighs. “He stopped me in town once and pointed out the evils of giving life to animals only to kill them.”
“He did it to me once too but I pointed out that killing animals was easier than eating them alive.” Peter tossed a radish up into the air, caught it between his teeth, and crunched down with the maximum possible noise.
“Like majorly gross, Peter!” Jennifer made a disgusted face at her cousin, who only grinned and continued devouring his lunch.
“You don’t think it’s old man Biehn, do you, Vicki?” Rose asked quietly, pitching her voice under the general noise level around the table.
Did she? Living so close, Carl Biehn had opportunity to both accidentally discover the wers’ secret and access the tree the shots had come from. He was in good physical condition for a man his age and deeply held religious beliefs were historically a tried and true motive for murder. He had, however, expressed an abhorrence for killing that Vicki believed and, besides a sneaker tread he shared with all and sundry, no evidence linked him to the crimes. The fact that she’d liked him, as subjective as that was, had to be considered. Good cops develop a sensitivity to certain personality types that, no matter how carefully hidden, set off subconscious alarms. Carl Biehn seemed like a decent human being and they were rare.
On the other hand, the next likeliest suspect was a police officer and Vicki didn’t want to believe that Barry Wu was responsible. She glanced down the table at Colin who, while larger than his uncle and father, was still a small, wiry man and probably wouldn’t have made the force under the old size requirements. He looked like someone had a knife in his heart and was slowly twisting the blade. He hadn’t said two words since he’d sat down.
Did she think it was old man Biehn? No. Nor did she want to think it was Colin’s partner. Nor could she completely rule either of them out, not until the murderer was found. A great many people had access to the woods, however, and in spite of the statistics, the most obvious suspects didn’t always turn out to be guilty.
She turned back to Rose, waiting predator patient for an answer.
“Until I get more information, I have to suspect everyone, Rose, even Mr. Kleinbein. This is too important not to.”
Having cleared the table of anything remotely like food, the wer were rising and going their separate ways. Donald had already changed, padded out to the porch, and collapsed in a dark triangle of shade. Shadow, with permission from his mother, had taken a bone into a corner and, holding it between his front paws, was chewing it into submission.
Vicki stood as Colin did, but he turned and headed out of the kitchen without acknowledging her in any way.
“Colin!” Even Vicki stiffened at the command in Stuart’s voice and Colin stopped dead, shoulders hunched. “Vicki wants to talk to you.”
Slowly, Colin turned, canines gleaming.
“Colin. . . .” The name was a growl, low and menacing.
The younger wer hesitated for a moment, then his shoulders dropped and a curt motion of his head indicated Vicki should follow him.
“It’s too hot to walk outside, so we’ll talk in my room,” he said without turning. “Then the kids won’t interrupt.”
Vicki wasn’t so sure of that, given the wer sense of privacy but, if it made Colin more comfortable, they could talk on the roof for all she cared.
His room was one of three in the addition built on over the woodshed and the door next to his was the first closed door Vicki had seen in the house.
“Henry,” Colin said by way of explanation as they passed. “He bolts it from the inside.”
“It’s not a bedroom. . . .”
“No. It’s a storage closet. But it doesn’t have a window, and if we shuffle stuff around there’s room for a cot.”
Vicki brushed her palm over the dark wood and wondered if Henry could sense her in the hallway. Wondered what it was like, lying there in the dark.
“I haven’t seen the sun in over four hundred years.”
She sighed and entered Colin’s room. He threw himself down on the bed, fingers laced behind his head, watching her through narrowed eyes. Despite the outwardly relaxed position, every muscle in his body hummed with tension, ready for fight or flight. Vicki wasn’t sure which, nor did she want to find out.
“I used to get the laundry to do mine, too,” she told him, nodding at the half dozen clean uniform shirts hanging on the closet door, still in their plastic bags. Pushing a pair of sweatpants off a wooden chair, she sat down. “I had better things to do with my time than iron.
“So,” she leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, “do you think your partner did it?” Colin’s eyes narrowed further and his lips drew back but before he could move she added matter-of-factly, “Or do you want to help me prove he didn’t?”
Slowly, his eyes never leaving her face, Colin sat up. Vicki accepted his puzzled scrutiny with her blandest expression and waited. The next line was his.
“You don’t think Barry did it,” he said at last.
“I didn’t say that.” She rested her chin on her folded hands. “But I don’t want to believe he did it and you’re the best person to prove he didn’t. For Chrissakes, Colin, start thinking like a cop, not a . . . a sheepdog.” He flinched. “Did he have the opportunity?”
For a moment she wasn’t sure he was going to answer her, then he mirrored her position on the edge of the bed and sighed. “Yeah. We were working days both times it happened. He knows the farm and he knows the conservation area. We got off at eleven last night and he could have easily come out here after shift and made those tracks.”
“Okay, that’s one against, and we know he has the skill. . . .”
“He’s going to the next Olympics, he’s that good. But if he’s casting silver bullets I couldn’t find any evidence of it and, believe me, I looked.”
“Does he have a motive?”
Colin shook his head. “How should I know? If he’s doing it, maybe he’s crazy.”
“Is he?”
“Is he what?”
“Crazy? You spend eight hours a day with the man. If he’s crazy, you should have noticed something.” She rolled her eyes at his bewildered expression and used her voice like a club. “Think, damn it! Use your training!”
Colin’s ears went back and his breathing sped up but he held himself in check and Vicki could actually see him thinking about it. She was impressed by his control. If a stranger had used that tone on her, she’d have probably done something stupid.
After a moment, he frowned. “I wouldn’t swear to this in court,” he said slowly, “but I’d bet my life on his sanity.”
“You are betting your life on his sanity,” Vicki pointed out dryly, “every time you walk out of the station with him. Now we’ve settled that, why don’t we concentrate on proving he didn’t do it.”
“But. . . .”
“But what?” Vicki snapped, getting a little tired of Colin’s attitude. She recognized that he was in a terrible position, torn between his family and his partner, but that was no reason to shut off his brain. “Just tell me about the man.”
“We, uh, we were at the Police College together.” He ran his hands through his hair, the cropped cut accentuating the point of both chin and ears. “I wouldn’t even be a cop if it wasn’t for Barry, and I guess he wouldn’t be one if it wasn’t for me. He was the only ‘visible ethnic minority’ cadet there and I was, well, what I am. We ended up together to survive. When we graduated, we managed to stay together—well, mostly, it’s not like we’re mated or anything. . . .”
Vicki wasn’t surprised by Barry’s philosophical reaction to his partner’s actual race. In the “us against them” attitude that the job forced police officers to develop, finding out that one of “us” was a werewolf could be dealt with, at least on an individual basis. Can I depend on my partner to back me up? was the crucial question, not, Does my partner bay at the moon? And now that she thought about it, Vicki had known a number of cops who bayed at the moon.
“. . . and the night I got shot. . . .”
“Wait a minute, you what?”
Colin shrugged it off. “We surprised a couple of punks during a holdup. They came out shooting. I took a slug in the leg. It was nothing.”
“Wrong. Very wrong.” Vicki grinned. “Barry was there?”
“Course he was.”
“He saw you bleed?”
“Yeah.”
“You probably talked later about dying, about how you thought you were going to be killed?”
“Yeah, but. . . .”
“Why would Barry shoot at the wer with silver bullets—expensive rounds that he’d have to make himself, risking discovery—when he knows that good old lead will do the job?”
“To throw us off his trail?”
“Colin!” Vicki threw her hands up. “That would take a crazy person and you’ve already told me Barry is sane. Trust your instincts. At least when you’ve got enough facts to back them up.”
Colin opened his mouth, closed it, and then shuddered as if a great weight had been lifted off of him. He leapt to his feet, threw back his head, and howled.
Vicki, who had pretty much forgotten that he was naked, found herself suddenly made very aware of it. The wer might react sexually to scent and therefore not react at all to humans, but humans had a visually based libido and Vicki’s had just belted her in the crotch.
Oh, lord, why me? she thought as huge black paws came down on her shoulders and a large pink tongue swept vigorously across her face.
After Colin had galloped off to confront his pack leader—he needed Stuart’s permission to finally speak to Barry about what had been going on—Vicki spent the early part of the afternoon on the phone, confirming that the game warden had, indeed, been up north since the beginning of August and had, in fact, been there on the two nights of the murders, his location supported by a bar full of witnesses. That done, and his name crossed off her list, she changed her clothes and had Rose and Peter drive her into London.
Storm spent the entire trip with his head out the window, mouth open, eyes slitted against the wind, ears flat against his skull.
The membership lists of both bird-watching clubs were relatively easy to get. She merely showed the presidents of each her identification and told them she’d been hired to find a distant relative of a very rich man.
“All I have to go on is that they once lived in the London area and enjoyed bird-watching. There’s a great deal of money involved if I find them.”
“But are you looking for a man or a woman?”
“I don’t know,” Vicki looked peeved. “He’s lost almost all his marbles and that’s all he can remember. Oh, yes, he mumbled something about this relative being a marksman.”
Neither president rose to the bait. If the killer was one of the birders, he or she hadn’t mentioned his or her interest in firearms to the executive of either club.
“You don�
��t have a third cousin named Anthony Carmaletti, do you?” Vicki crossed her fingers as she asked. If either of them did have a third cousin named Anthony Carmaletti it was going to blow her rich, dying relative story right out of the water.
She received one definite no with a twenty minute lecture on genealogy, one “I’ll ask my mother, can you get back to me tomorrow?” from an octogenarian, and both lists. And Celluci says I’m a lousy liar. Ha.
“Now what?” Rose asked as she got back into the car after the second stop.
“Now, I need the membership list of the photography club, but I doubt the YMCA will just hand it over, and I need the OPP list of registered firearms, which should be a little easier to get . . .” Cops tended to cooperate with their own. “. . . but right at the moment, I need to talk to Dr. Dixon.”
First impressions said Dr. Dixon could not have been the killer. He was a frail old man who wouldn’t have made it to the tree, let alone climbed it carrying a high-powered rifle and scope.
They had a short but pleasant visit. Dr. Dixon told Vicki embarrassing stories about Rose and Peter when they were children, which the twins paid no attention to as they were busy in the next room decimating his record collection.
“Opera,” the doctor explained when Vicki wondered what was going on. “Every wer I’ve ever met is crazy about it.”
“Every wer?” Vicki asked.
“Every wer I’ve met,” he reiterated. “Stuart’s old pack in Vermont prefers Italian, but they’re close enough to civilization they can afford to be picky. Most of the rest, at least in Canada, particularly the pack just by Algonquin Park and the lot up by Mooseane, are glued to the CBC Sunday afternoons.”
“How many packs are there?”
“Well, I just mentioned four, and there’s at least two up in the Yukon, one in northern Manitoba. . . .” He frowned. “How the hell should I know? Enough for genetic diversity. Although at some point they seem to have inbred for opera. Can’t get enough. I lend this lot records and,” he raised his voice, “occasionally they bring them back.”
“Next time, Dr. Dixon,” Peter called. “We promise.”
