Season of the Wolf

by Summers, Robin

  Although it was amusing to watch the police run around like ants that’d just had their anthill kicked over, Billy was not some run-of-the-mill killer who hung around at the crime scene to marvel at his own handiwork, and he had no real interest in this particular police investigation. He was there for one reason and one reason alone.

  He had watched some uniform bring her a bottle of water, watched as she was questioned by first one detective and then another. But his eyes narrowed as the first detective led her over to his car and helped her inside. Billy had not expected that, and it changed things.

  He was not close enough to his own car to follow them, so he would have to improvise. He was good at improvising. He was even better at tracking prey that had escaped his sight.

  *

  Devon sat in a small conference room and watched the flurry of activity on the other side of the window. At least they hadn’t put her in an interrogation room. The small, windowless rooms were good at accomplishing their intended purpose: intimidation. Fifteen minutes in one of those rooms, with the cops hunched over you, flinging questions like accusations, and you were ready to climb the walls. An hour, and you were ready to confess to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln if it would get you out of that room any faster.

  She’d been sitting alone in the conference room for more than twenty minutes, watching the unit’s detectives work their cases, make phone calls and take statements, search through computer records, and write up reports. But most of her attention had been focused on Lieutenant Wayne, who had arrived shortly after she was shown into the conference room by Detective Lawson. The lieutenant had spent some time at his computer—doing what, Devon didn’t know—and now was talking to Detective Lawson on the far side of the squad room. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, obviously, but given their surreptitious glances in her direction, it wasn’t too difficult to determine that they were talking about her.

  Devon rubbed her hands against her arms, trying to ward off the chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the conference room. She couldn’t believe it was happening again. What had she done wrong? How, after all this time, had he found her? Over the past ten years, she had moved nearly a dozen times. She’d changed her name so often she could barely remember the one she was born with. She’d had so many hairstyles and colors that sometimes when she looked in a mirror it took her a few minutes to recognize her own reflection. She’d had more social security numbers than one human being could possibly be expected to remember, only used cash, didn’t have a bank account, and kept everyone at a distance. She carried everything that mattered to her, everything she needed, in her shoulder bag. She rarely went on dates and, if she did, never got past a second date. She had sex on occasion, when the need for some kind of intimacy built to the point that she was crawling out of her skin, but she hadn’t held a woman or let herself be held in too many years to count.

  Devon lived a terribly lonely life, though she almost never allowed herself to think about it. She had no other choice. She had to keep running, keep hiding, keep people from seeing any part of herself that might somehow lead him to her. It was exhausting, this life. Always looking over her shoulder, always keeping herself apart from anyone who might actually come to care about her and about whom maybe she could care in return.

  But despite everything she had done, everything she had gone through and given up, he had found her once more.

  She saw Lieutenant Wayne heading toward her, and she quickly slid her wall back into place. She was Devon James, a simple waitress who had been late to work, hadn’t witnessed anything, and had no story to tell. She would answer their questions and then she would be gone. And she would not look back.

  Chapter Five

  “Hello, Ms. James.” Henry closed the door behind him and sat at the conference table across from Devon. He placed a legal pad on the table in front of him and his pen on top. Beside them, he laid a single manila file folder. Then he moved each item, sliding them carefully around until they were perfectly lined up with the table’s edge. It was part of his routine, an old interrogation technique designed to unsettle a witness. Wasting time on such mundane precision tended to annoy whoever was sitting across the table. It also tended to draw the person’s attention to the file folder and what might lie within. Witnesses with something to hide almost always became fixated on the folder.

  Interrogation was a form of psychological warfare, with every action—from the temperature of the room to the placement of the chairs to the pacing of the questions—designed to get into the witness’s mind. But Henry’s actions at the moment were not about interrogation techniques, or even about routine. Henry was buying a few moments to organize his thoughts.

  He had spent much of the car ride back to the station trying to puzzle out what exactly was bothering him about Devon James. He had no doubt that her recounting of the events that morning was true. She had arrived late, unlocked the front door, found Sally Pendleton’s body, seen the open register, and had not been the one to call the police. She did not go into the kitchen or see Chuck Pendleton’s body, and she did not try to resuscitate Sally.

  Even though he believed her story, he did not believe it was the whole story.

  It was the little things, mostly. When he’d asked her if she went inside, the answer she gave seemed to be different than the one she had started to give. He wondered what she had been about to say.

  When he’d asked her why she didn’t try to help Sally after she saw the woman lying on the floor—an innocuous question intended to do nothing more than confirm she hadn’t touched the body—she gave a completely logical answer about being in shock and seeing the blood and the woman’s lifeless body. But the way she said those things made Henry think she was saying what she thought would be the right response.

  Finally, when he’d asked her whether she went into the kitchen, she’d told him she didn’t want to destroy any evidence. In Henry’s experience, people who just found a dead body, especially of someone they knew, tended to think little about preserving evidence, even in this age of endless forensic shows on television.

  On the surface, Devon was a solid witness, calm and collected with fairly good attention to detail. That, too, was part of the problem. She seemed too composed for someone in her situation, and though Henry knew that not everyone reacted the same way to violent death, it bothered him.

  Still, none of those things were what had made him decide to bring her in for further questioning. It was what he detected beneath those answers and self-possession that troubled him most. Henry sensed fear, and not in the way most people would be afraid after having two coworkers murdered. He sensed a deeply rooted terror beneath Devon’s placid surface, an almost panic beneath her cool demeanor that he would bet came from personal experience.

  What he’d found in her records only confirmed his suspicions.

  Henry couldn’t be sure, and he had little to go on besides intuition honed through years of experience, but he was convinced that somehow, someway, Devon James was the key to everything. And that, if given the chance, she would disappear forever—either under her own power, or someone else’s.

  “Thanks for talking to me a little more. I know it’s been a traumatic day. I just want to follow up on a couple of things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you noticed anyone hanging around the diner in the last few weeks, anyone who maybe didn’t belong?”

  Devon appeared to be thinking. “No, I don’t think so. We get a lot of people coming through there. We have a number of regulars, but many aren’t. I didn’t notice anyone suspicious, though.”

  “No one who stood out?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. And had Mr. or Mrs. Pendleton mentioned anything to you?”

  “About what?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary. Had they noticed anyone unusual hanging around? Anyone threaten them?” Henry asked.

  “Not that I know of. I imagine
Sally would have said something if they had. She wasn’t the type to keep something like that to herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sally tended to say what was on her mind,” Devon said, smiling wistfully. “And she tended to have a lot on her mind.”

  Henry smiled back. “I know the type. My wife, Ella, was the same way. Full of opinions. Of course, her opinions were usually right.”

  “Sally’s too.” Devon’s face softened. “You said was. Is your wife…?”

  “She passed seven months ago. Cancer.” Henry read the sympathy on Devon’s face, and he believed it to be genuine.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He nodded, unable to voice words past the lump that formed in his throat. He was rarely overcome by his grief anymore, though he missed Ella terribly every day. Something in Devon’s expression struck him in the heart. He shook it off. He had a job to do.

  “You’ve been working at the diner for nine months, is that right?” he asked, turning the conversation toward the thing that truly needed asking.

  “Yes.”

  “What about before that?”

  “I only moved to Pittsburgh a month before I started at the diner,” Devon replied smoothly.

  “Oh yeah? Where did you move here from?”

  “A small town in Oregon you’ve probably never heard of. Stanton.”

  It had a ring of truth, but then a good lie always did. He couldn’t say for sure whether she’d been there or not, but Henry suspected if he looked on a map for Stanton, Oregon, he wouldn’t find it. But the answer was well crafted, with the bit about it being a small town planting a subconscious thought that the town wasn’t big enough to matter. Most people would forget the name as soon as she said it, and if they did happen to remember and found it didn’t exist, they would assume they’d just heard wrong.

  “So you moved here ten months ago?”

  “Approximately, yes.”

  Henry opened the manila folder and removed a single sheet of paper. He watched her attention turn to the paper. She showed no outward sign of concern. “That’s interesting. Did you know that before ten months ago, you didn’t exist?”

  Devon stiffened. Her gaze darted away from Henry’s face, dancing across the table in the way that happens when someone is caught in a trap and trying to figure if there’s any way out. Henry waited for her to tell him a story, to make up some kind of excuse or to feign innocence, but she didn’t. She looked again at Henry, her eyes now focused but hollow, like she had reached the inevitable conclusion: there was no way out.

  “You have no arrests, no warrants. No run-ins with the police of any kind, not even a parking ticket. Anywhere. Nothing in Pennsylvania or any other state I could find. One good thing came out of 9/11—it’s a whole lot easier to get public records from across state lines. It’s not perfect, there are still gaps and we still live in a world full of bureaucracy, but…” Henry shrugged.

  “I didn’t realize it was a bad thing to not have a criminal record,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion.

  “No, of course not. It’s a good thing.” Henry lifted the sheet of paper, scanning its contents. “You have no car registered to you, no significant assets. You do have a social security number and a state issued ID, but that’s about it. And see, the funny thing is that before ten months ago, you didn’t even have those things. There was no Devon James.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He leaned closer. “I think you do.” Henry watched her process the information. It was something he’d seen a hundred times, the way the brow clenched and released, the way the cheeks flushed and the body shifted. Henry didn’t think she had done anything wrong, didn’t think she was in any way responsible for the murders. He did think, however, she was hiding something and, more importantly, hiding from something. Devon James had been someone else once, and had left that someone behind before coming to Pittsburgh.

  Henry had caught her in the lie, and now that he had, he thought she would be ready to tell him everything. Instead, she focused on Henry’s face, a steel curtain slamming down between them. Just before it closed completely, Henry glimpsed a flash of something raw and desperate. It appeared to Henry very much like a plea to be saved.

  A knock on the conference room door stopped Henry before he could press any further. His boss waved him out of the room.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” Henry said, covering his frustration at the interruption. He closed the door behind him and walked over to Captain Dwight Buchanan.

  Buchanan headed up the homicide division. He was in his early forties, young to have made captain, especially of a high-profile division like homicide. There were a lot of whispers that Buchanan had only made captain because his uncle was the deputy police commissioner, but Henry knew better. Buchanan had been a first-rate detective, and while his family connections might have moved him to the head of the promotion line, the captain had more than earned his rank in the eyes of the cops that served under him. “Captain?”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Two dead. Looks like a robbery-homicide.”

  Buchanan eyed Henry. “But?”

  “But I believe there’s more to this case than what we know.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on the crime scene and the vics. There’s no sign of forced entry. The man had his throat slit, but the woman was stabbed twelve times.”

  “Maybe she knew the killer.”

  “It’s possible. But I don’t think so, Cap. I can’t explain it, not yet, but I think there’s more to this than a robbery gone bad. For one thing, we found a wheat penny left on the counter.”

  “I haven’t seen one of those in years,” Buchanan said.

  “Exactly. Wheat pennies are fairly rare these days. Not many are in circulation anymore.”

  “What else?”

  “The waitress, Devon James.”

  Buchanan looked over Henry’s shoulder into the conference room. “Is she a suspect?”

  “No, sir. A potential witness.”

  “But she wasn’t there when it happened.”

  “No, sir. She found the victims.” The glimpse of whatever Henry had seen before Devon shut down pulled at him. “But I think she knows more than she’s saying.”

  “Based on what?”

  Buchanan waited for an explanation Henry wasn’t yet prepared to give.

  “Give me some time and some room on this one?” Henry asked. Buchanan studied him for a moment, then acquiesced.

  “All right, Lieutenant. Run it down. But I’m going to need something more than your intuition on this soon. I’ve already gotten a call from downtown. Three other robbery-homicides in the last two months, all with the cash register cleaned out, no signs of forced entry, all with dead bodies on them, and no suspects in sight. The brass is viewing this as number four, and your intuition aside, Henry, I’d have to say I agree. If this is related to the others, we need to find this guy. If this is something else…well, you’ll need to convince me why this takes precedence. Okay?”

  Henry nodded. He understood the pressure the captain was under, but he would bet his home, his pension, and even the watch his wife had given him for their twenty-fifth anniversary that this case wasn’t connected to the others.

  “Good. I’ve got a meeting with the deputy commissioner. Do whatever you need to do, Henry.”

  Henry watched the elevator doors close in front of Buchanan. He looked back toward the conference room, toward the woman with a made-up past, and wondered again what she was hiding from. Who she was hiding from. She had a story to tell, but convincing her to tell it was beyond Henry’s considerable talents. There was a desperation there, and though he had only glimpsed it, he was certain it was born of pain and fear. On the outside, Devon was strong and unflappable. On the inside, Henry would bet she was broken beyond measure. It reminded him of someone he cared deeply about.

  If Henry was right about Devon, and whatever she was hiding
from had found her, then Henry was going to need help. A very special kind of help.

  He hit number one on his speed dial.

  Chapter Six

  Jordan looked down at her faithful friend. Max snorted again, his tail thundering from side to side.

  “Patience never was your virtue, young man,” Jordan admonished. Max’s tail wagged harder.

  With her mother gone until March, Jordan had decided to relocate to the cabin her grandfather had built about an hour outside the city. She’d been slowly fixing it up over the summer months, once she had rehabbed her shoulder enough to do that kind of labor. She’d been going out every other weekend, replacing windows and storm shutters, patching leaky roof shingles, stripping the floors and refinishing them. She had accomplished a lot, but she still had much to do.

  Once the work was completed, she planned to purchase the cabin from her mother and make it her permanent home. She had not yet told her mother or Henry of her plan. It was not a conversation she was looking forward to since the idea that she would buy the cabin from her mother was an ongoing disagreement, the latest installment of which had taken place only two weeks ago.

  Okay, it hadn’t been much of a disagreement, since Jordan hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise, as usual. And truthfully, she knew she was indeed being stubborn, bullheaded, and possibly even a pain in the ass—she refused to dignify her mother’s use of the phrase pain in the patoot—but she would pay for the cabin. Her mom did okay with her teaching pension and her dad’s benefits, but there wasn’t much left over. Beyond that, Jordan knew her mom’s finances had been strained by taking her in and helping in her recovery, whether the woman admitted it or not. At the very least, buying the cabin would allow Jordan to feel like she had paid some measure of recompense.