Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Do you need help, or . . . ,” Jesse began, but he noticed Scarlett trying to suppress a smile. “What?”

  “He wants us to go ahead so he can heal, dummy.” Scarlett held out her arm. “Be my cane,” she commanded.

  Jesse holstered his Glock, keeping his service gun in his injured right hand after making sure Scarlett had put the safety back on. His fingers could barely close tight enough to hold it. He slid his left arm around Scarlett’s waist, bending awkwardly to compensate for their height difference, and guided her through the unlocked back door, which opened right into a kitchen. It was tidy but well used, and surprisingly homey: shining hardwood floors and rustic cabin-type accents made the room feel like the kind of place where you could have a cup of coffee and share secrets. Jesse helped Scarlett to the solid oak table, which was clearly used hard, often and lovingly. When she was settled in a chair, he went back out to put the Beretta away in his car’s glove compartment, retrieving Scarlett’s cane from where she’d dropped it just outside the sedan.

  “How’s your arm?” Scarlett asked him when he returned. She looked shaky and a little pale.

  “It’ll be sore as hell tomorrow, but I don’t think she broke it.” He took the chair next to hers and held open his good left hand. She took it without a word, wrapping both of her hands around his.

  They sat in silence for another moment, and then Will entered the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a simple blue pullover. Scarlett drew her hands back into her lap. If Will saw it, he didn’t comment.

  “Did you guys want anything to drink?” he said tiredly. “Coffee, beer, water?” They both accepted a glass of water, and Jesse took a long gulping drink from his, feeling dehydrated after all the soda.

  “What happened tonight?” Scarlett said to Will. “Why did Anastasia attack you?”

  Will sighed heavily. He showed no signs of injury now, but he still had the strung-out weariness that Jesse had noticed earlier. He sat down in an empty seat next to Scarlett.

  “It wasn’t our most constructive pack meeting,” he muttered.

  “You met with them tonight?” Scarlett asked, raising her eyebrows quizzically. “On New Year’s Eve?”

  Will shrugged, wincing at the movement. “You saw how things have been; it couldn’t wait. The bar started clearing out a little after midnight, so I just put out the Closed sign and told the pack to meet in the woods.” He tilted his head in the direction of the national park that met his backyard. “There’s a clearing about a mile in, which we consider the beginning of the pack’s territory in the park. That’s where we start to run on full moon nights.”

  “Why not just meet here at the house?” Scarlett asked.

  Will hesitated, searching for words. “We don’t . . . we try not to have too much conflict here, partly because the house is a place of peace, and partly so if someone loses their shit, they’ll be far away from humans. If it seems like there’s going to be some kind of big argument, we go out in the woods.”

  “What happened at the meeting?” Jesse asked.

  “There was a lot of tension,” Will admitted. “I tried to explain that Eli was unavailable without going into too much detail. Some of them believed me, I think, or just didn’t care either way. Eli’s made calls to them, but Ana’s got them all stirred up that he’s being forced to lie or something. She’s got half of them convinced about this cure, and we kept arguing, getting nowhere. Finally she challenged me to a fight for alpha.”

  Jesse’s jaw dropped, and he saw Scarlett looking just as incredulous. “But . . . ,” Scarlett began. “I mean, Ana’s not a delicate flower or anything, but did she actually think she could win?”

  “No,” Will said flatly. “Ana’s not stupid. Even if I wasn’t the alpha, I could take her. This wasn’t about winning, though. She knew I wouldn’t kill her, so she put me in a position to look bad. If I refused the challenge, I was weak. If I fought her, I was beating up on a weakling.”

  “That’s kind of brilliant,” Jesse observed.

  “Yes, it is,” Will said matter-of-factly. “So I told her I would fight, but the rest of the pack had to stay human, so they couldn’t interfere. And as soon as we changed I moved the fight away from them.” He shrugged. “I was going to just let her tire herself out, and then change back and try to have a serious conversation with her. But she went after you.”

  “Why?” Scarlett asked. “I thought you guys didn’t usually attack humans. I mean, Jesse hadn’t, like, cornered her.”

  “No,” Will agreed. “I suspect it was a calculation. She figured she’d either distract me enough for her to really hurt me, or she’d kill Jesse, which would hurt you.”

  “Oh,” Scarlett said in a small voice. Without looking at him she reached over and grabbed his good hand again. Jesse wasn’t sure she even knew she’d done it. He squeezed her hand briefly and didn’t let go.

  “Things are getting worse,” Jesse said quietly.

  “Yes,” the alpha agreed. “And it’s only going to get worse the closer we are to the full moon.”

  “What happens then?” Jesse asked, alarmed. His stomach was already churning from the adrenaline and soda, and the anxiety wasn’t helping.

  “The nova will have to change again,” Will explained. “We all will.”

  And he’ll attack more women, Jesse realized.

  Will was looking back and forth between the two of them. “I take it the stakeout was unsuccessful.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse acknowledged. “It was a long shot anyway.”

  “What else have you come up with?” Will asked tiredly. “I noticed Terrence Whittaker was limping badly tonight. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Uh . . . yeah . . . ,” Jesse said uneasily. “About that.”

  Chapter 23

  Will wasn’t thrilled with Jesse’s decision to shoot Terrence Whittaker. Jesse couldn’t really blame him. When the werewolf finally calmed down and they had filled him in on the rest of the investigation, Jesse noticed Scarlett’s eyes drooping and proclaimed that they needed to go get some sleep. He dropped Scarlett off at her van and headed back to his apartment.

  It was after three in the morning, but when Jesse climbed into his bed he found himself staring at the ceiling, his brain churning as fast as his stomach. He was still jittery from all the caffeine and adrenaline, not to mention the pain in his wrenched arm. Jesse got out of bed and went over to the kitchenette, where he swallowed three Advil and a liter of water, before making himself a couple of sandwiches. Then he sat down at the little card table that served as his dining area to think about the case.

  They needed to make progress before things got any worse for the werewolves—not to mention before the nova wolf had time to change again and kill anyone else. There had to be some sort of logic to the nova’s choice in victims, Jesse reasoned. There had to be. Will had said that the nova would try to create a mate first. And you wouldn’t just go to the Grove, point at a woman, and say, there’s my mate for life, right?

  But how would you pick a mate? Or more importantly, how would a man who’d just been turned into a werewolf pick a mate?

  That line of thinking got Jesse exactly nowhere, so he went back to trying to figure out how the two victims might be connected. He spent the next hour on his laptop, trying to match both Kate and Leah to the same school, gym, church, anything. It was endlessly frustrating. There was plenty of information on the Internet, but there were also plenty of potential connections that he couldn’t look into. They might have just used the same dry cleaner as the nova werewolf or something.

  Jesse paged through Scarlett’s notes again. Both women had been involved in an animal rights groups: Leah had been in PAW, which—judging by the amateur website—was a fairly small, local thing. The PAW members had a web page and a Facebook group, and they got together in person once a quarter to discuss the wolf situation in America. Jesse got the sense from their site that it was mostly about getting together to drink coffee and bitch about legislatu
re.

  Kate, on the other hand, had been part of Humans for the Protection of Animals, which was enormous. Jesse spent some time investigating whether the two groups had worked together on anything—a fund-raiser, volunteer opportunity, charity work. There was nothing online to suggest the two groups had so much as encountered each other.

  He sent both PAW and HPA a message identifying himself and requesting that a senior member of the group contact him immediately. Then, bleary-eyed and still sore, he pushed the laptop away and finally fell into bed around four thirty.

  Just two hours later, however, his phone began to vibrate insistently on the nightstand. Jesse was only dimly aware of its buzzing, and he felt a sleepy surge of gratitude when it finally danced its way off the table and fell to the cheap carpet with a dull thump. But seconds later it began to buzz from the floor, and with a groan Jesse reached down and fished around for it. He cracked his eyelids open and squinted at the screen, seeing a small picture of Glory. That was unusual enough to get his eyelids all the way up. Gloria “Glory” Sherman was the lead forensic pathology technician at Jesse’s LAPD station. She was also the only other human Jesse knew of who was aware of the Old World.

  He answered the phone with more of a grunt than an actual greeting.

  “Jesse,” Glory said in a low voice. “I’ve got one that you need to see.”

  “One what?” he mumbled.

  “One murder?” Glory answered, her voice slightly annoyed. “It’s weird. And our mutual acquaintance told me that I was to report anything really weird to you.”

  “He did?” Jesse said, digging the heel of his hand into his eye socket, trying to wake up. It was a stupid question. Of course Dashiell was using Glory as a scout for Old World trouble. Most of the time, Jesse had been told, humans who learned about the Old World had their minds pressed to forget, and then went about their lives. If time or trauma didn’t allow for that, though, they were given a choice: join the Old World or be killed by it. Since the odds of successfully turning into a vampire or werewolf had gotten so low, this was often a death sentence, regardless of what they chose. Dashiell was willing to allow Glory to remain alive and human, however, in exchange for the occasional forensic favor. But he also kept leverage—he’d made it clear to Glory that he knew everything about her two children, including where to find them. If Dashiell had told Glory to keep Jesse informed of weird homicides, that’s exactly what she would do.

  “Yeah. After that car accident case last month, remember?”

  Sitting up now, Jesse gritted his teeth. The car accident in question had been part of the Olivia Powell investigation, nearly two weeks earlier, but he’d agreed to help Scarlett destroy crime scenes only a few days ago. The cardinal vampire was playing the long game. Typical. “How could I forget,” Jesse said wryly. “But I can’t come in right now, Glory. I’m on leave.”

  “Just trust me, okay?”

  A thought pinged in his tired brain. “Was it a woman? Mauled, or scratched, or something like that?”

  “No,” her voice had lowered, and he could just picture her cupping one hand around the receiver. “Not a woman.”

  Probably not the nova, then. “Glory . . . ,” he complained. “I’ve had about two hours of sleep, and I’m on leave anyway—”

  “Hang on,” she interrupted, a new tone in her voice. “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  There was a muffling on the phone, and then another familiar voice said, “Hey, Jess.”

  All trace of sleepiness vanished when Jesse heard his ex-girlfriend on the phone. “Runa?” he said stupidly, like they were playing This is Your Life.

  “Yeah. Listen, you gotta get down here.”

  “I’m supposed to be off,” he said, hesitation in his voice now. Runa Vore was a witch who had taken a job as a crime scene photographer, partly in order to get closer to Jesse. Things had been deeply awkward between the two of them since he’d learned who she really was and broken up with her, so if she was willing to talk to him now . . . Jesse kicked off the covers and started for his dresser.

  “Who’s in charge of the scene?” he asked, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could dig for clothes.

  “D1s McHugh and Bine,” she replied, and Jesse almost whistled. He’d heard of McHugh, a veteran Homicide Special detective who was a couple of pay grades above Jesse. Bine must be his partner. Homicide Special usually took the really weird cases, so it was possible that their presence was just a coincidence. It was also possible, though, that Dashiell had gotten Homicide Special assigned to the case to prove to Jesse that he could. “Bine’s a friend; I’ll get you in,” she went on, urgency in her voice. “I’m texting the location. Hurry up.”

  She hung up the phone, and Jesse went to get his gun.

  Chapter 24

  For a moment Jesse thought Runa’s text was a prank. Leaving a dead body—or in this case, two—at a graveyard seemed too much like the beginning of a joke. Something about cutting out the middleman. But she wouldn’t do that, and so ten minutes after the phone call had ended Jesse found himself driving toward Evergreen Cemetery.

  Jesse had been there once as a kid, for the funeral of one of his mother’s cousins. It was enormous, nearly seventy acres, but, although it was the oldest graveyard in LA, it lacked the star power that drove tourists to Hollywood Forever or Forest Lawn. There were some historical heavyweights among the three hundred thousand graves, but what was local history compared to global celebrity, especially in Los Angeles?

  He followed his phone’s GPS instructions to the ornate concrete pillars that marked the entrance to Evergreen, showing his badge to one of the two uniformed officers guarding the gates. Passing through, he headed toward the island of bright lights and activity he saw in the south end of the graveyard, winding past row after row of silent graves.

  At last, Jesse arrived at the end of a long trail of department vehicles parked on the right side of the road. All of the police activity was on his left, marked by crime scene tape circling enormous metal spotlights on tripods. The bulk of the cemetery that Jesse had just driven through lay beyond the bodies. He pulled the sedan over as far as he could behind a patrol car that was still flashing its red and blues, probably to discourage curious onlookers who might otherwise wonder if the bright spotlights indicated a film shoot.

  As he approached the closest uniformed officer, Jesse registered the unusual size of the cordoned-off area. It was enormous, more than twice as big as what Jesse was accustomed to. He could hardly see the bodies themselves, fifty yards away behind a throng of technicians in overalls and booties. But there were definitely two of them, which was all Runa had mentioned. Why cordon off so much area if the bodies were way over there?

  He reached the first cop outside the caution tape, a pear-shaped African American woman with Waters stenciled across her right breast. “Sir—” she began, but he showed her his badge. She didn’t move to lift the tape, shaking her head slightly.

  “Detective Cruz from Southwest robbery-homicide,” he said, in case she was having trouble making out the words. The spotlights weren’t doing much at this distance. “You from Hollenbeck?” he asked, naming the nearest division station.

  “Yes, sir. But they want as few people within the tape as possible,” she explained, with professional pity in her voice. Jesse had used the same tone many times. It’s not my rule, sir, the boss just makes me enforce it. Lowering her voice, Waters added, “There’s blood all over the place.”

  That explained why the technicians had cordoned off so much of the cemetery. They would want to collect samples of all the blood. Jesse nodded, hoping Runa had done whatever she needed to do to get him in. “I’m looking for Runa Vore, the photographer. She asked me to come.”

  Waters nodded, no expression on her face, and automatically turned her head away to speak into her microphone in a low inaudible voice. Jesse had done that plenty of times too and wasn’t offended. She listened for a moment and said t
o Jesse, “She’s coming to get you.”

  Jesse nodded and took a few steps back and to the side, giving Waters room to see her assigned area. While he waited, he studied the area behind the tape. The whole scene almost looked like a blast radius, like a bomb had gone off in the cemetery. He’d never seen anything like it. Blood pebbled on the gravestones, saturated the grass in wide swaths, dripped down the sides of shrubbery. The blood splatter experts were going to be here for days.

  “Who found the bodies?” he asked Waters.

  Her eyes flicked back toward him with benign interest, like she’d forgotten all about him. “Neighbors, sir. They reported strange noises two hours ago.”

  Jesse nodded and went back to surveying the crime scene. He realized that it wasn’t actually a blast site, but almost an optical illusion: the center of the taped-off area hadn’t been leveled by an explosion; it was just a wide, flat clearing created by four rows of in-ground placard markers, the kind that everyone said were easier for the cemetery groundskeepers. It had just been hard to see them at first because of all the blood.

  The boundary dividing the rows of placards and the skewed rows of gravestones was an enormous monument, a great rectangle that would have reached Jesse’s chest, topped with a stone tiger the size of a beagle. When he looked closely Jesse saw the red blood streaking down the side of the monument, splattering the tiger’s back like so many stripes. His eyes moved down to the bodies just in front of the tiger’s perch, and beyond them to scan the in-ground grave markers more carefully.

  Many of them had been cracked in half. Most of them were splattered with blood. There were little numbered evidence cards scattered over the markers and the ground around them. Marking more blood.

  What the hell could crack in-ground grave markers?

  One of the technicians in coveralls and paper booties hurried over, and Jesse saw that it was Runa, a black camera strap around her neck, her corn silk pigtails backlit by the spotlights. Jesse’s heart ached for a moment. She was so beautiful, even in the stupid coveralls: lithe and poised, stepping with her feet turned out slightly like a dancer. “Jesse, hi,” she said, speaking fast. Tension saturated the air between them for a moment, and Jesse struggled to push through it. Runa solved the problem by reaching across the caution tape to hand him a pair of booties. “Put these on and come with me.” To Waters, she added, “Bine wants him to look at the bodies close up.”