“I heard that,” Ger said, rolling his eyes.
Before Ian could blink, Ger and Robert spun on their heels and looked to the path that came up from behind the house, from the small dock where he and Trisha had been planning to land last night.
Ian tensed as he watched Ger and Robert narrow their eyes and smell the air, nostrils flaring. Then, they relaxed, and Ian saw Father Edlow and Grace coming up the path. The priest and the lorekeeper. It was really a party now.
“You should probably organize us all now,” Ian said to Trisha once Father Edlow and Grace had joined the group now clustered around Trisha.
She nodded and looked at them all in turn.
“So,” she began, clearing her throat. “This is a bit of an unusual way of processing a crime scene for me, but I would like to keep it as true and detailed as I can. Ian and I will begin by going into the house and assessing what we have on our hands and taking care of the obvious things and any other relevant evidence. While we are doing that, I’d like for Doctor Nasir to prepare whatever he needs for any examinations that we will need done.”
She paused to clear her throat again, and Ian noticed a slight strain in the faint lines around her eyes, and he knew what she was going to say next.
“After we are done in the house, we’ll need to carry the bodies out to where Doctor Nasir will be.” Her glance flickered to Robert and Ger, who nodded understandingly at her.
“I’ll help with that,” Father Edlow said quietly. Trisha looked surprised but seemed to accept his aid.
“Also,” she continued. “Given the nature of Perk’s crimes, you all should be prepared for…other discoveries. In this type of case, there are usually either bodies or body parts hidden in the house. We will need to remove these and…inter them, I suppose.”
Ian felt his stomach roll just a little. He had seen a lot of horrific things in his job, but he had a sick sense that he hadn’t seen anything yet.
“Grace,” Doctor Nasir addressed the blonde woman. “I would like your help with the examination of the bodies, if you please.”
Grace’s expression tightened for a fraction of a second, then went smooth and calm as she nodded. Ian had known Grace all her life, and he was fully aware of why Grace wasn’t looking forward to this task. She wasn’t one of those squeamish women. Hell, she’d probably take all the body parts in stride. It was the use of her abilities that she wasn’t looking forward to, and remembering the pain they caused her, Ian couldn’t blame her.
Father Edlow patted Grace on the shoulder, and she raised an eyebrow at him. His lips quirked slightly, and so did hers. He quickly removed his hand from her shoulder, and Ian noticed he shook out his fingers surreptitiously just as Grace swallowed, her face remaining carefully neutral.
Great, now who was being the profiler?
“What are you going to do with the bodies?” Trisha asked Doctor Nasir. “Not that I really want to know. Plausible deniability and all that. Still, I am…curious.”
Doctor Nasir looked at Robert, who reminded Ian of an unforgiving stone statue, tall, fierce, and unmovable in the snow.
“We will dig,” Robert said simply. “And, we will bury them. Today.”
Trisha shivered against Ian then stepped out of his arms.
“All right then,” she said. “Come on, McDade, we got a crime scene to hide.”
Chapter 28
Daylight changed everything.
Thank God.
Trisha stepped into the frozen kitchen, avoiding the bloodied footsteps and smears on the floor. Sunlight managed to push its way through the dirty window over the sink. It was cold enough inside now that she could see her breath in little white puffs. Which reminded her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since yesterday, and damn, she really wanted one, and damn if they weren’t all soggy on the bottom of the ocean somewhere.
Taking in a quick, deep breath, she turned and looked at the two bodies on the floor. Their blood had spread and pooled between them, now frozen in a dark pond.
Sarah Hawkins lay stiff and blue on her back, blood having absorbed into the nasty cotton of her faded robe like a grim chintz. Perk was sprawled out facedown, his naked body shriveled by death, cold, and blood loss, making him seem mummified already. Thankfully, his throat was somewhat hidden by his position on the floor. That was one wound she was not eager to see.
“Well,” Ian said quietly. “It’s up to you, Blacke.”
“Right,” she replied, snapping out of her gruesome reverie. “Start checking for knives and other carving implements. We’ll need to trash those.”
Ian got to work, and she began carefully moving, flexing her fingers in her gloves and preparing to play peekaboo with a dead cannibal’s kitchen. The cabinets were sparse but extremely orderly. Clean, too, inside and out. The counters, except for the spatter from last night, were clean as well. So was the sink. No garbage disposal unit, she noticed. Just as well. She didn’t want to have to look in that for remains. The kitchen trash was empty, no new bag put in.
“He must have taken out the trash yesterday,” she said. “We should probably go through it. His last killing was recent enough that there might still be evidence in there.”
“Ger’s gonna love doing that,” Ian said wryly.
“Are you sure we can’t get Sean out here to do that?” she quipped. “Seems right up his alley. He loves being helpful.”
Ian laughed. “You got him pinned down, all right. Rushing in where angels fear to tread.”
Trisha smiled but kept going with her exploration. There was a pantry stocked with canned food and soup. Cereal. Crackers. Bottles of condiments and sauces. Sensible enough for living on an island and being stranded occasionally by storms. The only thing odd about them was the way all labels were turned to face front, and the cans were stacked and organized by brand then flavor, alphabetically.
She knew she couldn’t put off the inevitable any more. She moved to the fridge and opened the top door of the freezer before she could stop herself by thinking too much.
“You know,” she said between clenched teeth. “They never do this right in the movies.”
“What is it?” Ian asked, looking up from Sarah Hawkins’s body.
“Oh you know, the stereotypical frozen head wrapped in plastic,” Trisha said, desperately reaching for her sarcasm to keep from throwing up.
Ian immediately scrambled to his feet and carefully made his way over to her. She was standing on her own two feet just fine, but all the same, it was nice to feel his arms come around her waist and hold her close.
“Don’t look now,” he murmured in her ear. “But, I think there’s a frozen hand next to it.”
“Yeah,” she said flatly. “There is. Didn’t see that before.”
“It’s okay. The head kind of gets your attention first.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
She shut the freezer door, closed her eyes, and opened the door to the fridge. She felt Ian’s chest expand with an intake of breath, and she opened her eyes.
“I wonder what he was marinating them in?” she said in the same flat voice that was all she could manage.
“Probably something store-bought. From a bottle.”
“Yeah. He has a lot of those in the pantry.”
“There’s a lot of stuff in here. Look, even regular food.”
“Feeding his mother? Condiments? Is that chicken?”
“I’m not sure. We should probably bury it just in case.”
“Poor chicken,” Trisha murmured, feeling that she would be thankful for her blank, dissociated state if she could actually feel anything. Something prickled at her through her fog, an idea of something missing. She peered into the fridge, holding her hand in front of her mouth and nose just in case.
“Ian,” she said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“He’s got everything in here except organs.”
She looked up to see Ian flushing somewhat guiltily. “What? What is it
?” she demanded.
“Well, from what Ger tells me…when wolves hunt, and uh, get their prey, they eat the organs first.”
“Ger…you mean in his wolf, um, form, he hunts animals?” The bottom of Trisha’s world had fallen out from under her so many times in the past two days, she hadn’t thought she could be shocked again. Apparently, she was wrong.
“Rarely,” Ian replied quickly. “But, there was a time when they would have to stay in wolf form for extended periods in order to fight and protect the town. They had to eat. We, uh, couldn’t exactly go chasing them down in the woods with raw steaks and grilled chicken.”
“Forget I asked,” she managed to say between stomach rolls. “I’ll get over it. I think. It’s just a lot right now.”
Ian pulled her roughly to him and kissed the top of her head, holding her tightly. The solid human touch warmed her soul and revived her mind somewhat. Basic psychological shock recovery treatment. Warmth. Focus on simple things. Small things. Real, tangible things. And right now, his love and caring felt more real and tangible than this kitchen with its blood and Formica and bottles of barbecue sauce.
“Come on, Blacke,” he said gently but firmly, cupping her face and looking deep into her eyes. “Let’s get this done. Unless you’re not up for a real crime scene and wanna leave it for us yokel bumpkin police.”
The tickles of an impending smile quirked her lips upward. “Fat chance, McDade. You know you’d be nowhere without me.”
He kissed her lips with a bruising force and grinned. “Ain’t that the truth. Come on.”
They made a pilgrimage through the rest of the house, but there was nothing in the rest of the rooms that caught her attention, really. She wasn’t surprised that the laundry room had bottles and bottles of bleach stacked up everywhere. She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t find anything in Perk’s room. His mother had been mobile enough to get herself to the bathroom, obviously, and therefore could have investigated his room, potentially discovering anything incriminating.
They were finishing up with another look around the living room. Trisha revolved in place, taking in the shabby furnishings, rugs, and tables that all seemed to blend into various shades of fungus. She frowned.
“What’s up?” Ian asked as he rifled through a desk littered with overdue bills.
“Where are the trophies?” she wondered. “There’s something we are missing here. He will have kept trophies of his kills. Not so much because of the kills but because they would be reminders of his power, his dominance, his ability to thwart his mother and gain satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, through cannibalizing his victims.”
“What kind of trophies are you talking about?”
“Small pieces of jewelry, hair clips, underwear, a sock, a shoe. Nothing big. Just something. They would be easily accessible to him, as well. He would need to be able to see them, touch them, use them to fuel his fantasies, and initially, they would have helped prolong his cooling-off period.”
Ian rubbed his jaw with his hand, and Trisha felt a tingle of desire—completely inappropriate desire at an inappropriate time—rush down the small of her back, tickling her spine and lighting little sparks in her pussy. He hadn’t shaved, and the stubble made him look even more rough and rugged, just how she liked him.
He glanced up at her, and she saw his eyes darken with his own desire. And just in case she missed it in his eyes, he flashed her a salacious grin that had her toes curling with anticipation. So inappropriate.
Better inappropriate desire, she decided, than dry heaving and being hysterical at the things she had seen in the kitchen.
Suddenly, Ian’s expression shifted from lusty to enlightened. He pointed at her and started making for the backdoor in the kitchen.
“Storm cellar,” was all he said.
She knew, then, that this would be where the trophies were. The last little trinkets of these women, their lives, those last moments. Miserable tokens of a miserable end. A rush of welcome rage flowed through her, clearing her mind and reaffirming her purpose in this life.
Screw werewolves and demons. There were real monsters in this world, and she would never give up hunting them down.
Never.
Except…
Where did that leave her heart?
* * * *
It had been universally and silently agreed upon that nobody wanted lunch.
Not after what they had all seen.
All of them had seen bloodshed in one form or another. One couldn’t live in Blue Moon and not know the taste of violence. Especially if one were a wolf.
Even Ger had had to harden his heart and force himself not to gag when he had helped Father Edlow and Robert carry the bodies from the house. Worse than bodies, though, had been everything else. Everything. Else.
They had all managed a grim smile when Ian and Trisha had explained that they couldn’t be sure if the remains in one of the bowls were human or chicken, and that it had better be buried just in case.
Then, there had been the digging. At first, he, Robert, and Father Edlow had wielded shovels to move the snow and crack open the frozen ground. Once the ground had been broken, though, they had agreed it would be more efficient to dig as wolves with their powerful paws against the somewhat softer undersoil.
He and Robert had soon grown tired, their injuries from the night before clearly still affecting their strength. It had been Father Edlow who had tirelessly finished digging, completing the task with his shovel in human form to create the appropriate shape for Sarah’s and Perk’s bodies. They then dug another hole well away from Perk, smaller though no less deep, for the remains of the victims. Nothing would mark these graves. A risk like that could not be taken, yet the injustice of these women lying forgotten and unmarked on this forbidding island ate at him.
The sun was starting to slink down from its zenith as he finally went over to where Trisha was sitting on the stoop of the kitchen steps, methodically going through a pile of notebooks and scraps of paper, a covered shoe box by her feet.
He eased himself down next to her, feeling the sun on his face and being grateful for his woman’s warmth beside him.
Still, his thoughts troubled him more than he had anticipated. He glanced over at Trisha’s serious countenance as she concentrated on the papers. She was a psychologist, wasn’t she? She dealt with these things all the time. Perhaps she would listen and have some advice. He felt no shame in asking. He had never encountered anything like this before, and he didn’t know exactly how to put it into the jigsaw puzzle of his life. This was her strength, and if he didn’t trust her strength, how could he treasure her vulnerability?
“I don’t understand all this,” he said finally, reaching over and taking one of her hands in his. “Perk…Perk was one of us. A wolf. A brother. He fought with us. He saved our lives just as we saved his, so many times. Seeing him today like that…it was like looking at a completely different creature. He didn’t look like Perk, like anything Perk had ever been.”
Trisha had looked up at him when he started to speak, her eyes gentle, but her brow slightly creased with her focus.
“Were we blind?” Ger mused, looking out to the woods beyond the cemetery. “He never seemed different. I know the standard answer is that there is nothing we could have done to prevent this, but I also know that you won’t insult my intelligence with that. I want to know the truth, because a difficult truth is easier to live with than the slow death of knowing you’ve been told a lie.”
Trisha rubbed the tip of her nose and sniffed, tilting her head to the side a little and letting her gaze wander off.
“There’s no way to say for certain if there was anything you could have done,” she offered finally. “Unless you were specifically looking for certain signs in his behavior, or unless you were a trained criminal profiler, there’s no real guarantee you would have ever seen anything. He was a highly organized killer. He was clever enough to avoid capture for several months. It fed his ego to believe h
e could fool all of you, and to that end, he probably would have put a lot of effort into maintaining his facade of ‘grumpy, old, put-upon Perk with the mean mother.’”
Trisha squeezed his hand, and he lifted her fingertips to his lips.
“Eventually you might have noticed something off,” she went on. “His cooling-off periods would have continued to get shorter and shorter, and that’s the time when these kinds of killers start making mistakes. From that point, it spirals downward for them and ends either in capture or death. My coming here and playing his game accelerated the spiral and allowed us to catch him.”
“What makes a man do this kind of thing?” Ger asked, the sense of alienation from a man who had been one of his own kind still lingering.
Trisha shrugged. “Entire doctoral dissertations have been written about this question, and a lot of people at the BSU are working hard on researching this in terms of psychology, neurology, biology, sociology, and so on.” She paused, biting her lip.
“In some ways,” she said. “You and Perk were not so different. Both cursed or whatever with being wolves, trapped in Blue Moon for the rest of your lives, limited career choices, limited romantic relationship choices, overbearing mothers and withdrawn or nonexistent fathers, incredible amounts of constant stress fighting the, um, demons. It wouldn’t take much to push an already precariously-balanced mind over the edge. In fact, I have been wondering if it was the lifting of the curse that might have done it to him.”
Ger started in surprise.
“I can’t imagine that,” he said. “I can’t see how.”
“It completely changed the game for Perk. It rattled his routine, altered his purpose in life, and left him at very loose ends. He wasn’t a protector of Blue Moon any more. The one thing that had made him feel good about himself was gone. On the other hand, it meant he was free of the town if he wanted to be, only, it’s hard to run away with an invalid mother, no skills, no education, and no money. However, being able to roam away from Blue Moon in short bursts unfortunately enabled him to begin experimenting and finally acting on a fantasy he had been cherishing and evolving for a very long time.”
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