Cry Wolf

by Charlie Adhara

  Arthur looked at him. “When, do you imagine, it must come up?”

  “I—” Cooper glanced at Park. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  Arthur sighed. “I was born a werewolf, of course, and spent many years living much like many of us do. But pack life never really agreed with me, and when I met Genevieve, an unaware human, I just...left. I’m not in the community anymore. I’m not bound to any pack or alpha. I have a new life, free of that world.”

  Park looked vaguely disgusted. “But you must...shift, right?” Cooper asked.

  “As needed,” Arthur said a bit tersely. “But I don’t linger and I certainly don’t involve my wife. So you see, we’re able to have a perfectly normal human relationship.”

  Cooper felt deeply uncomfortable, but didn’t know what to say.

  “What about James Finnigan?” Park asked finally.

  “What about him?” Arthur asked. “I told you, I never spoke to the man.”

  “You must have known he was a wolf,” Cooper pushed.

  “Yes, and? Why would that require conversation?” Arthur took a long sip of tea. “He’s hardly the first wolf I’ve crossed paths with since my new life. But I haven’t had pack bonds in years. I spend less than a minute in the other form twice a week.” He shrugged. “It seems that at some point my lifestyle started affecting my chemical makeup. Now, as you demonstrated yourself, most can’t pick out my scent, even at close distances. It’s easy to go unnoticed.”

  “Are you saying James didn’t know you were a wolf?”

  “Having never spoken to him, I really couldn’t say.”

  “Mr. Crane, two nights ago you and Genevieve had an argument. You wanted to leave town urgently. Can you explain why?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Arthur said, looking genuinely confused. “I have absolutely no reason to want to leave.”

  The whoosh of the door sounded and Ryan appeared around the hall, breathing heavily. “You’re—you’re FBI, right? Please, help. I think—I think we’ve just been vandalized.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Looks like there is a bookroom after all,” Cooper said quietly to Park. “Or what’s left of one.”

  They stood in the doorway of one of the visitor center’s many upstairs rooms used for classes, meetings and conferences. Now the long table had been flipped over on its side, chairs were cast around the room, and while the shelves were seemingly bolted to the wall, every single book had been taken out and thrown to the floor. Torn, stray pages peppered the mess, and someone had clearly tried to set a fire, though they’d done a pretty slapdash job. The room smelled of wet smoke and the walls were stained with sweeping clouds of black, but only a handful of book piles seemed to have really burned.

  “They managed to put this out quickly,” Cooper noted.

  “Or whoever set the fire only needed it to burn enough to cover their scent trail,” Park said. “A wolf, a human aware of wolves, or just somebody who wanted to make picking up a fingerprint pretty impossible.”

  “Don’t narrow down the suspects too dramatically there,” Cooper said, stepping carefully into the room. “It can’t be a coincidence that we theorized someone being blackmailed by James Finnigan set fire to his apartment and now a fire has been set in the other space we theorized James might have stashed Eli’s recording and whatever he has on this second victim. A second victim we theorized, based on suspicious recent behavior, was most likely Arthur Crane.”

  “Yes, if Neil’s to be believed,” Park said, nudging over a book on the horrors of elephant poaching with his toe.

  Cooper looked at Park, whose face had gone carefully blank. “Do we have any reasons not to believe him?” he asked. Park didn’t respond. “Any reasons that don’t have to do with the fact he’s a dick I used to...dick?”

  “I’m just remaining cautiously skeptical until we can get this ‘suspicious recent behavior’ verified by someone who I didn’t just scent fingering the woman whose husband he’s fingering for murder. Never mind the ethics of engaging in a sexual relationship with someone you’re investigating for embezzlement at all.”

  “I’m not defending him,” Cooper said, crouching to sift through the pile of books that had undergone the worst damage and had thus possibly been where the fire began. “I just want to make sure we’re not thinking with our little heads.”

  “Am I the type to get jealous?” Park protested, sifting through his own pile.

  “Nothing so mundane,” Cooper said. “Protective, though? In the name of a hurt you imagine I’ve been holding on to all these years? Hmmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm.”

  “Hmm yourself,” Park mumbled. “Let’s say Arthur Crane was being blackmailed. We’re back to the question, over what? The embezzlement? That gives Genevieve motive too, if we think they’re in on it together.”

  “It’d be about the only thing they are in on together,” Cooper said. A slightly singed book with a wolf face on the cover caught his eye. My Year with Wolves: Wolf Behavior, Ecology and Mythology Demystified by Niko Hirano. Hello.

  “Could he have been threatening Arthur that he’d tell Genevieve he’s a wolf?” Cooper asked, flipping it open.

  Park was quiet for a moment. “Maybe. I don’t know. That whole situation is...” He trailed off, clearly troubled. “Regardless, we don’t know if Arthur and Eli were the only people James was blackmailing.”

  “Or if whoever did this found what they were looking for,” Cooper added as he skimmed through the book. It was all very animal-specific, of course, and not at all relevant to werewolves. A sort of general coverall directed toward laypeople: the origins of their dogs’ quirks, some basic biology, the decimation of the wolf population by their only real predator—humans—and their loss of habitat. It was all told along the loose thread of Hirano’s thirteen months living in isolation in the Yukon while attempting to follow one particular pack who, she explained in the foreword, first avoided her, then seemed to tolerate her distant observation, but ultimately rejected her, disappearing from the territory after a “particularly antagonistic encounter.”

  And yet Cooper couldn’t put it down. He wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. In a way, it seemed like too weird a coincidence that she had written an entire book on wolves. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t weird at all. She’d already mentioned more than once that they were one of the species she tracked as a documentarian, and wolves were a popular figure in public imagination. He doubted there was much market for the Ecology, Behavior and Mythology of Fisher Cats. And it’s not like she was writing about werewolves.

  Cooper was about to put the book back down when one sentence caught his eye:

  If we dismiss the myth of a single dominating alpha, the question we must ask ourselves is what then binds a wolf pack together? The simplest answer I can offer is a common purpose. What does this—

  “Find something interesting?”

  Cooper gasped and almost dropped the book. Park was standing over him, clearly amused.

  “I was just—Hirano wrote it,” he said, handing the book over to Park, who took it and skipped directly to the back, About the Author, which Cooper wished he’d done himself and avoided being caught entranced by a book on animal wolves like a dickhead.

  “She wrote this ten years ago. It says she had plans to return, to try to relocate the pack she followed.”

  “I wonder if she ever did,” Cooper said. Park flipped back a couple of pages and stilled suddenly. “What? What is it?”

  Park handed him the book. It was open to the acknowledgments page, and Cooper skimmed it, looking for what had caught Park’s eye.

  ...and special thanks to my friend Emily Freeman, without whom I would never have understood that we uncover the answers we go looking for, but must wait for the truth to come find us.

  “What the hell is Freeman doing in
Hirano’s book?” Cooper asked quietly.

  Park shook his head. “Coincidence?” Cooper shot him a look. “When we first met Freeman, she was researching and tracking wolves in Canada. Hirano’s time as a documentarian led to her doing the same. It would be more unlikely if they hadn’t crossed paths in their long careers in the same relatively small field. It’s one mention in a decade-old book. Not a postcard from prison.”

  “True,” Cooper conceded. “But I still think we should talk to Freeman.”

  Park frowned and turned, walking a couple steps away from Cooper. He flipped another book over with his toe. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “What? Why not?” Cooper stood, still holding Hirano’s book.

  “I don’t trust her,” Park said.

  “Really? I was thinking she could officiate our wedding,” Cooper said. Park didn’t look amused. “Of course I don’t trust her either. But there is a connection here. Tenuous, true, but don’t you think it’s worth following up on?”

  Park was silent, thinking. Finally, he sighed. “All right, I’ll call Cola. See if we can arrange an interview tomorrow. In the meantime, you can come up with an opening question besides ‘Read any good books lately?’”

  “Is this what they call the mortifying ordeal of being known?” Cooper asked the smoke-damaged ceiling.

  “As long as you’re already mortified, do you have something to wear tonight?”

  Cooper groaned. “No, god. I can’t believe this is the second time in three days I’m going to have to wear a costume.”

  Park looked at him askance. “What do you mean?”

  “I told you about the sunflower hat Cayla made me, didn’t I?”

  “No, what do you mean second time?” Park clarified.

  “Well, isn’t it a haunted Halloween gala?” Cooper said. “Don’t we—what do you think we’re supposed to wear?”

  “To a black-tie event that cost nearly two grand to get into? A tux,” Park said, biting back a smile. “But if you want to put a different sort of costume on afterward, I suppose I can grin and bear it. In the meantime, we’ll have to buy off the rack, which is unfortunate, but—”

  “I have a tux,” Cooper said.

  Park looked surprised. “Really? Why?”

  “I’ve lived a life before you,” Cooper said. “The occasion arose. The tux acquired.”

  “You’re not going to tell me you were married before, are you?” Park asked, and Cooper laughed at the absurdity of that thought.

  “It was for a case. When I was in undercover.”

  Neil had helped him pick it out, actually. Weird, the way that worked. Cooper remembered being impressed when Neil recommended his personal tailor and thinking that was an older man thing. But now, full grown himself and just as clueless, he realized it was just a rich thing.

  “It probably won’t fit perfectly, but I promise you won’t be too embarrassed to be seen with me in front of your foundation friends.”

  Park laughed. “Cooper, there isn’t a room in the world I would be embarrassed to walk into with you by my side. Not even if you were wearing a sunflower on your head.”

  * * *

  They finished searching the room but found nothing else of note. If James had ever stored blackmail material here, it was long gone. Eventually, Trust agents came to secure the scene—two wolves Cooper had spoken to before, Agents Aanya Roy and Zoe Dionne. They were both friendly enough with him if a little stiff around Park, who wandered toward the back of the room when they arrived, so casually one might believe he actually needed to reinspect the burnt-out shelving if it wasn’t for the way all the three wolves determinedly didn’t look at one another.

  “I could have sworn you weren’t working this case,” Roy said to Cooper lightly, a teasing glint in her eyes as she walked in and surveyed the mess.

  “Can’t a guy spend his day off at the zoo?” Cooper asked innocently.

  “The last time you did that, an infamous rebel pack alpha who’s been missing for a decade went swimming with the fishies,” Dionne said. She had a deep monotone voice that made it hard to tell when she was joking or not. “Now you’re back and there’s a fire. Maybe you should take less time off.”

  “Mmm,” Cooper said. “Speaking of not working, a little bird in the Amazon building just told me you dragged in all their regular set crew for questioning today.”

  “And what brought you and this bird to Amazonia?” Dionne asked. “Another purely coincidental pleasure trip?”

  “Monkey business,” Cooper offered.

  Roy huffed a laugh. “We asked them in to establish alibis. The whole crew was present and waiting to film at time of death.”

  “Waiting for Genevieve Crane?” Cooper asked.

  “Among others,” Roy said. “Genevieve disappeared after the first shoot of the day during what was supposed to be a five-minute break, claims she went home with a headache without telling anyone. One of the head zookeepers supervising filming that day went looking for her. Genevieve’s assistant J.T. Armstrong showed up late and immediately went looking for the keeper. Niko Hirano stepped out to take an urgent call from her partner. No one can remember seeing Arthur Crane at all despite the fact that he hadn’t missed a shoot up until that point. All in all a pretty empty set.”

  Cooper digested that. If Arthur’s whole purpose for shadowing Genevieve was to do with the blackmail, as they’d suspected, had he not shown up that day because he knew the threat was gone? Because he had already decided to leave town, as Neil thought? Or was there some other reason? “So they just waited around with the... What were they supposed to be filming with?”

  “Wolf exhibit,” Dionne said flatly. “Now if you’re done not-working the case, you might want to move date night along to a secondary location quick like. Cola said she’d meet us here.”

  “Cola’s coming? Into the field?” Park asked from the back of the room, clearly surprised their boss was showing up to the scene herself, for the second day in a row.

  There was a definite shift in the atmosphere. Dionne and Roy stood a little taller, looked a little warier. “Yes,” Roy said after a moment’s pause, but didn’t offer anything else.

  Cooper suppressed a sigh. “You get the tox report back yet?” he asked.

  “James Finnigan didn’t test positive for any of the usual suspects,” Roy said hesitantly, sounding a bit awkward. “They’re going to have to go back and test individual toxins.”

  “If it’s poison at all,” Dionne murmured, voice even lower than usual. “And not the punishment of a wolf who’s betrayed his pack for—”

  Roy shushed her partner, then glanced at Park with something almost like fear in her eyes. “We should get to work,” she said quickly. “I really think you should go now. Both of you.”

  Well. There couldn’t be a clearer dismissal than that. Cooper bid them goodbye and Park followed him outside. They called ahead to the restaurant and there was a twenty-five-minute wait for a table, so Cooper and Park decided to take their time and walk there. Park was quiet as they left the zoo—lost in thought, his hands shoved so deeply into his pockets that his shoulders hunched, giving him a sort of wounded, vulnerable look.

  Cooper hesitated, then snuck his hand into the crook of his elbow. Park looked at him, surprised. “What? As long as I’m strolling the streets with my beau, I might as well look it.”

  Park smiled and shook his head, but tucked his arm a little tighter, holding Cooper close. “You’re good with them, Dionne and Roy,” he said after a couple moments of comfortable silence. “They like you.”

  Cooper shrugged. “I excel in short increments. Like a polar plunge.” He felt Park stiffen under his hand.

  “That’s not—do you really think that?”

  Cooper considered. “I don’t know. Maybe. All signs point to yes. You can’t deny most people don�
�t seem to know what to make of me.” Particularly wolves, but perhaps that was just statistics, these days. Park was quiet, and when Cooper glanced up at him, he was frowning faintly and nibbling at the scar on his lip. “Not going to tell me I’m beloved by all?”

  “I can’t tell you how to think of yourself and neither should anyone else,” Park said promptly and with a startling edge of intensity. Cooper wondered if Park had heard the tail end of his and Neil’s conversation in the bar, after all. Or was it just obvious from the outside looking in?

  Park opened his mouth to add something else, then seemed to change his mind. When he spoke next, it was a lot more calm, casual, almost offhanded. “I can’t imagine any amount of time with you that’ll feel like enough. You say too many interesting things.”

  “Er, line check,” Cooper said to the imaginary off-set. “Not that I’m cracking under the pressure of that statement or anything.”

  “Don’t worry. I like you speechless and gasping, too,” Park said primly, then shot him a half-heated, half-teasing look.

  Cooper couldn’t help laughing. “You’re ridiculous,” but pulled Park a little closer all the same.

  It was a genuinely beautiful late October day. That brisk fresh air that just felt clean. Some of the row houses they passed had put up Halloween decorations, and the trees here and there were heavy with warm, jaunty colors, at their peak of brilliance right before death. A sort of melancholic splendor that Cooper had always found a bit enchanting, when he bothered to think of it at all.

  “What about a fall wedding?” Cooper asked abruptly, interrupting Park, who was planning out loud what time they needed to get ready if they were to be primped and present on time at the gala tonight.

  Park looked surprised. “For us?” He smiled and looked down at his shoes. “I like the fall.”

  “Good. That’s one decision made, only a million to go.”

  Park started to say something when Cooper’s cell rang. Unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me. Where are you?” Neil.