Werewolf Cop

by Andrew Klavan

  Then came the Guyland heists. Maybe it had just been a coincidence that the Grimhouse brothers had hit Sea View. Maybe she had heard about the heists and enlisted them. Or maybe the whole burglary spree had been her plan from the beginning. Zach favored the coincidence theory: if the Grimhouse brothers had known Bose was involved, they would have given her up when Abend tortured them.

  So Sea View was hit in the heists, and Bose seized the moment to claim that the dagger had been stolen—when in fact it was probably so well hidden, the Grimhouse boys could never have found it. Abend trusted her. He believed her. He was in a panic. He knew he had to get the dagger back before the full moon faded or the years would catch up with him all at once. He went on a rampage, tracing the goods to the man who had fenced them—Paz—torturing Paz for the names of the Grimhouse brothers—torturing the brothers then. . . . And finally, when he could get nothing out of them, he realized the truth, that he had been betrayed by his lover. Bose—too afraid of Abend to steal the dagger outright—had seized upon the heist to pretend it had been stolen so she could keep it for herself, live on as Abend decayed and died. It was she—and she alone—who had sacrificed the homeless man Zach had found on the table. Then she had run for it, taking the dagger with her. If she could stay out of Abend’s reach for one more day and night, he would die, and the dagger would be hers.

  “Stop,” said Zach aloud to the radio.

  Because there was more static now, louder though still barely audible beneath the wind and engine noise. He wanted it to go away. He was sick and tired of hearing from the dead.

  But they insisted. The radio flared, a loud white sough. He heard the soft voices buried within the hiss, like the cries of a civilization that had been swallowed by a snake. He heard the snicker of fire. Women’s pitiable screams. Children weeping for their mothers. Men gagging out their lives at the ends of ropes. He recognized all of it. It was the soundtrack of the vision he had had while under the influence of Abend’s drug. He hit the radio’s OFF button angrily, but the static didn’t even waver, and neither did the noises within the hiss: entire dying generations calling out to him over the airwaves.

  “I have my own soul and my own sins,” he snapped at them.

  But history flowed through him like animal life had flowed through the wolf. And amidst the static and the violent cries, he realized there were other voices. The dead trying to reach him, trying to tell him something, something he’d missed. In spite of himself, Zach listened. The radio sputtered and hissed. The voices whispered. Something about life. Something about fear. Something he’d missed.

  The radio went silent.

  Zach thought, He who would save his life at any cost must first become the servant of fear.

  It was not his thought. It had come to him . . . through the radio? From somewhere, anyway. He had no idea what it meant.

  All he did know was that there was one more night of the full moon left, one more night for Abend to find the dagger before decay overcame him. That meant Abend had to find Angela Bose before the moon reached its meridian this evening.

  And that meant Zach somehow had to find her first.

  Police everywhere would be on the lookout for that silver-blue Bentley of hers—how difficult could it be to spot? But Abend’s lines of influence ran deep into the police and government at every level. If someone saw Bose’s car, would the law learn about it before Abend did? The answer was by no means certain.

  The long and dreamlike drive took him home again. After four A.M. now as he stepped out of the Crown Vic. Hardly worth going to bed, but he had to. He had to sleep.

  The moment he came into the darkened bedroom, his wife rolled onto her back and put her white arms out to him. He kicked off his shoes and crawled across the mattress to her. He laid his head on her breast while she held him. He drew in that aroma she had, the scent of that other world inside her, that world he yearned for, a country on a far horizon, a homeland he was journeying away from, like the old emigrants on the sailing ships of yore.

  “I was so worried,” she whispered in his ear and kissed him.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You can’t die, you know. You’re not allowed. We need you in this house. You’re our guy.”

  It made his heart ache, because he was not okay, and he would have to die when this was over. There was no other way out that he could see. He had murdered Margo and he would have to die for it, and the best he could hope for was that Grace and his children would never find out what he had done, what he had become.

  He held his wife and told her that he loved her, but that didn’t say half of what he felt. He didn’t have the words for what she was to him. There was nothing on earth to compare it to.

  “Y’all smell bad,” she teased him, tweaking his ear with her fingers.

  “I’ll shower.”

  “Brush your teeth too.”

  He flashed back on the monk writhing in his jaws, the hot blood coursing down his throat. He pressed his wife’s soft, warm body against his own. He pressed his face into her silky neck-skin, and smelled the blood coursing through her jugular.

  “I will,” he said.

  He pushed up off her, giving her one more lingering kiss as he drew away, hesitating then to look down at her, the sweet, faithful face in its tumbling curls, only just visible in the darkness.

  She stroked his cheek. “I know God says we’re not supposed to hate them.” Her soft Texas twang was audible even when she whispered. “Or answer evil with evil. But the things they do. . . .”

  “I know it.”

  “I can hardly listen to the news. I think about y’all out there trying to stop them.”

  “I know.”

  “And when they try to hurt my sweetheart. . . .”

  “Ssh. Don’t say that. They can’t hurt me, baby.”

  “I can’t help thinking if they’d just stop—all the killing and stealing and hurting people—everyone’d be fine.”

  “It’s a fallen world.”

  “I know it.”

  He smiled down at her in the dark, but the terrors of the night came back to him again. He remembered himself crouched above those two kids on the beach. Him—Zach—thinking how fine it’d be to devour them, how good they’d taste. He knew he had been only moments away from losing control of himself and tearing into them both . . . which made him remember the hunks of Satan’s flesh in his gullet. . . . A fallen world? All he wanted just then was to put his head back on his wife’s breast like it was his mama’s and listen to her talk the Bible talk that, sometimes, at times like this, he couldn’t even understand anymore.

  He showered and brushed his teeth, fighting off memories all the while. He bent to spit toothpaste into the sink—and just as he straightened, he caught the face of a dead man in the mirror behind him—that dandy he’d seen by the side of the Long Island Expressway, the one in the blue-and-silver coat. He was standing right behind his shoulder now, staring at him somberly.

  “Holy . . . !” Zach said aloud, startled.

  The dandy had already vanished, but Zach’s heart was beating so hard, he thought he’d never get to sleep.

  But he did. He slept for two hours, his head on Grace, her arms around him. Incredible peace. Even when the alarm woke him, he could feel how good it had been.

  The children were at the kitchen table spooning milk and cereal into their mouths and Grace was pouring coffee for him when he turned on the family computer and saw the headline on the news site: “Super Cop in House of Horrors.” The story of the bodies in Angela Bose’s wine cellar had blasted Margo Heatherton’s picture off the site, at least. There were fresh riots in London too, so maybe with a little more devilish luck, Grace would never find out about Margo’s death at all, never match her face to the woman Zach had spoken to outside the church.

  “That’s you, Daddy!” said little Tom, pointing to the monitor.

  The site had used the old picture from the Oklahoma farmhouse, the one that showed Zach holst
ering his weapon after he’d gunned down Ray Mima, Goulart behind him, the rescued child in his arms. Tom had a copy of that picture taped up on his wall. He was proud of his Dad.

  “Super Cop,” the child said. He was only just learning to read, but he knew those words from his comic books. “Are you the Super Cop, Daddy?”

  “That’s just silly talk,” he said.

  “We’re gonna have to get Daddy a uniform with a big S on it,” said Grace, looking over her shoulder from the coffee maker on the counter.

  “I think my S looks big enough in my jeans,” said Zach.

  Grace rolled her eyes. A moment later, Tom got the joke and snorted milk into his hands. “My S looks big enough in my jeans!”

  “Oh, now look!” Grace scolded her husband, but she could hardly keep from laughing herself.

  Zach ruffled the boy’s soft hair as he stood over him drinking his coffee. He winked affectionately at his daughter, who was giggling because Tom was.

  They could never know, he thought, heavy-hearted. He had to die when this was over, and they could never know what he had become.

  Grace went to the stove now to cook him some eggs, her voice trailing back to him as she moved: “Did you hear about that poor woman got killed by a bear in her own home up in Westchester? Sandy was telling me about it. . . .”

  Before Zach could begin to rattle off the complex mix of half-truths and lies he had prepared for this moment, the phone in his pocket buzzed.

  “I guess I know who that is,” Grace said, clattering a frying pan onto the stove top. And as Zach lifted the phone to his ear, she sang out, “Morning, Rebecca!”

  “You better get in here,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.

  Not her usual self-conscious I’m-all-business tone. Something more than that. Something that made Zach draw in an unsteady breath.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve got a couple of detectives here from Westchester,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell tensely. “They want to talk to you about Margo Heatherton.”

  26

  ROTH AND WASHINGTON

  The detectives—Inspectors, they were called—were named Danny Roth and Alonzo Washington. Except for the fact that one was white and one black, they looked pretty much alike. Both were enormous: six-foot-something top-to-toe, huge shoulders, huge chests, huge bellies. Both had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, baggy eyes, saggy features, mournful and grave. The white guy’s big nose went out and down, the black guy’s big nose went splat across his face. Other than that: cop twins.

  They met with Zach in Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s office. Zach sat on the sofa, his arm across the back of it as if he were relaxed. Roth—the white guy—perched on the very edge of Rebecca’s armchair, as if the broad seat were too tiny for his bulk to squeeze into. The black guy—Washington—sat on the sofa as far from Zach as he could, even drawing his big frame back a little as if to increase the distance.

  Rebecca sat behind her desk, her legs in their navy slacks crossed at the knee, her long chin pinched between thumb and finger-knuckle as she looked on with great seriousness. The TV on the wall was turned off: that’s how serious she was.

  Outside the window, a sky-load of dark gray clouds hulked ominously behind the wedge-topped skyscraper.

  “You understand, you’re not a suspect or anything,” said Washington. He was one of those outsized men who had to breathe hard when he spoke. His tone suggested that they were all reasonable people here, all here to be reasonable. “We know this was a wild animal attack.”

  “We’re just trying to ascertain what exactly happened,” said Roth, who was also one of those heavy-breathing fat guys and also tried to sound reasonable. “So we can make sure there’s no ongoing danger to the community.”

  “We don’t get a whole lot of bear or wolf or wildcat attacks,” Washington explained with a hint of a smile.

  “We don’t get any,” Roth explained, likewise smiling. “Whatever it was.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Zach dubiously—because he knew what interrogating cops were like and he didn’t trust them. Lulling you with their smiles and reason before they brought the hard hammer down. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone and let him get on with the work of catching Dominic Abend?

  The thought struck even him as irrational. He was doing that thing perps do—that thing they do in their minds where they convince themselves they’re innocent even though they’re guilty as hell, where they begin to feel put-upon and hard-done-by. Why are these mean people persecuting me? He was sitting there with his fake-relaxed arm on the sofa back, fish-eyeing his fellow lawmen and feeling basically pissed off that they were wasting his morning—and yet, all the while, he had, in fact, ripped poor Margo to pieces.

  “So what’s this got to do with me?” he said.

  Roth made a two-handed gesture at him as if he were laying his cards face up on the table. As if. “You knew her, right?”

  “I met her.”

  “And you didn’t mention this?” Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell cut in suddenly—again setting off in Zach some vague sense that he was being unfairly hounded by the powers that be.

  “I didn’t hide it. Goulart knew—my partner,” Zach explained to the inspectors. “It just didn’t seem relevant to anything. I met her a couple of times, helped her with research on a book. And yeah, then. . . .” He had already guessed they knew more than this, or they wouldn’t be here. He knew he had to tell them something: but how much? How many suspects, he wondered, had asked themselves the same question when he was pressing himself into their sweating faces in the interview room?

  “Then?” said Washington.

  “Well, she developed some sort of thing for me, I guess. Some sort of fascination. Calling me all the time. Texting me.”

  “Well, you’re a handsome guy,” said Roth.

  “Well, thanks kindly,” said Zach. “But like I told Margo, I’m already spoken for.”

  “You didn’t give her any reason for this fascination,” said Washington. “Other than your good looks, I mean. I mean, there was nothing between you two.”

  Zach snorted as if the idea were absurd. And yes, he did feel a beaded line of sweat arise just beneath his hairline. “In her imagination, maybe, but not in real life, no.”

  Washington gave a soft grunt—doing that cop thing, Zach knew, pretending to be confused, in all innocence, about the puzzling discrepancy between the perp’s story and the facts. So here it came.

  “Thing is—reason we’re here—Miss Heatherton kept a journal. On her computer. Thoughts and events, that sort of thing.”

  “She had her eye on you for a long time, it seems like,” said Roth, his breath laboring.

  “Seems she fell for you when she saw that picture of you that was in all the news stories a few years back,” said Washington. “You walking out of that farmhouse after you shot Ray Mima.”

  “I know the picture,” said Zach.

  “Holstering your six-shooter, all cowboy style.”

  “I know.”

  “I liked that myself,” said Washington heavily.

  “So did she,” said Roth. “She wrote in her journal that you were just the kind of man she wanted.”

  “She devised what you might call a . . . a campaign,” said Washington.

  “To seduce you,” said Roth. “It was very well worked out.” With this, the big man—who was perched precariously so near the edge of Rebecca’s armchair that Zach thought the movement might unbalance him and make him slip to the floor—reached into his jacket pocket and drew out the phone he kept his notes on. “This is her journal entry for September the 17th.” He read off the screen: “‘Success at last! I’ve never known such passion! We were both swept away by it! We couldn’t even make it to the bedroom! He’s mine now, finally!’”

  Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s hand slid from her chin up to cover her eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Zach.”

  “It never happened, Rebecca,” Zach protested—and he genuinely fel
t offended that she would believe such a thing about him—even though, of course, it was true! He continued, as if admitting a painful fact: “I went up there one night. Must’ve been right around then. Around mid-September. She said there was going to be a reading of this book I’d helped her with—”

  “You tell your wife about this?” said Roth in an insinuating tone.

  Zach ignored him, shrugged it off. “When I got there, the reading was canceled and she said she needed a lift home. She made it clear she was available. I didn’t take her up on it. That’s all that happened.”

  Roth and Washington went through their routine. They looked at each other with smirking incredulity. They looked at him with smirking incredulity.

  “Awful pretty woman,” said Roth.

  “But you just turned her down,” said Washington.

  Zach spread his hands, the image of innocence. “That’s what happened, fellahs.”

  Washington nodded. Roth nodded, slipping his phone back into his pocket.

  “So you weren’t there the night she died, were you?” Washington asked.

  “Someone was,” said Roth. “But that wasn’t you?”

  “Of course not,” Zach said. “I would have reported that.”

  “Sure, you would,” said Roth.

  “Of course you would,” said Washington. “Because there was nothing between you two.”

  “So it’s not like you had a motive to kill her or anything,” said Roth.

  “I thought y’all said a wild animal did that,” said Zach. At this point, the sweat beneath his hairline was cold and his whole face felt clammy.

  Washington addressed Roth—more cop stuff—as if they were working out their line of reasoning as they spoke. “Of course, some crazy broad with a rich fantasy life can cause a lot of trouble for a man. Especially a family man. Texting him. Calling him all the time. Claiming they’d had sexual relations.”

  “Some hot babe like Margo showed up at my house, told my wife we did the deed? Wife’d believe her, no question.”