Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  I felt another stab of sadness as I pocketed my notebook and thanked Amanda for her time. Leah Rhodes was never going to have a baby. She was never going to have a conversation with her nephew, either.

  You didn’t kill her, I reminded myself. Go find the fucker who did.

  Back in the van, I called Jesse and left him a voicemail describing my interview with Amanda Lewis. Then I headed toward the South Bay to talk to Kathryn Wong’s boyfriend. I was getting the hang of driving with just my left foot, but my injured knee ached even when thrown over the passenger seat, a powerful, insistent wave of pain that was always cresting. It only seemed to recede when I downed one of the Vicodin that Dr. Noring had given me. I was doing my damnedest not to take them, though. Not because I was trying to be a hero, but because the pills made me feel sluggish, like I’d just had an intense workout and two glasses of wine.

  If Leah and Amanda’s apartment had come across as the typical LA early professional habitat, then Kathryn Wong’s place screamed “South Bay Money.” It was a condo one block away from Manhattan Beach, with a spacious emerald lawn that pretty much guaranteed the grass was never greener anywhere else. The air smelled of saltwater and sunshine, and there was careful, minimalist landscaping lining the sidewalks and side of the building. The lobby had been decorated just as carefully, with ornate pots of fresh flowers on glass-tipped end tables in each hallway. However the nova wolf was choosing his victims, it definitely wasn’t for their socioeconomic similarities.

  I hadn’t wanted to make the trip south unless I knew that Kathryn Wong’s boyfriend would be there, so I’d called ahead with my victim support story and David Mailt had agreed to see me. After he’d buzzed me through the entryway, I limped toward a bronze-door elevator and rode up to the fifth floor, careful not to get fingerprint smears on the pretty interior paneling.

  Mailt opened the door of 5E a heartbeat after my knock.

  “Did you find her?” Mailt demanded immediately, before the door had swung all the way open. I felt an instant twinge of disappointment when I felt him in my radius—he was human. It would have been so much easier if he’d just been the nova wolf. I tried to adopt Jesse’s professional cop voice. “I’m sorry, sir. We have no new information on Kathryn.” Liar.

  Mailt sagged against the door frame. He was a skinny white guy in his mid twenties, with narrow square-framed glasses and a look that could be best described as “student filmmaker.” “You’d better come in anyway, I guess,” he said, defeated, and turned around without another word, trudging back into the condo. I followed.

  The interior would have been gorgeous under other circumstances. It was airy and filled with light, all cream-colored walls and light wood-paneled floors. Decorative accents of bright fuchsia, deep violet blue, and emerald green popped out against beige or wood furniture. There were two distinctive work stations in the large living room, each covered with electronic equipment. Mailt pointed me toward a nearby Pottery Barn sofa that would never deign to be dented by a human ass. I perched on its edge just in case I was inadvertently dirty.

  “What can you tell me?” Mailt asked wearily, tugging at his tousled black hair. “Or do you need something from me? Pictures of Kate, or you need to get her fingerprints or whatever?”

  “No, no,” I said, retrieving the pad and smoothing down the blazer. “I’m not in charge of evidence collection. Mostly, I’d just like to check in on how you’re doing, and see if you can tell me a little bit more about who Kate”—don’t say was, don’t say was—“is.”

  Mailt stared at me, and now I could see the bleariness in his eyes from lack of sleep. “How will that help you find her?” he asked bluntly.

  What would Jesse say? “Please, Mr. Mailt. Just humor me. I want to do everything I can to help you find your girlfriend,” I said, feeling like a worm.

  I felt even worse when he apologized. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he said, holding his hands up deferentially. “I’ve just been frantic. Kate’s never done anything like this. She doesn’t just . . . disappear.” He leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees. “What can I tell you? Ask me anything.”

  “Well, why don’t you start by telling me what Kate does for a living,” I said gently.

  “Right, right.” He bobbed his head. “Let’s see . . . we both graduated from the film program at UCLA a few years ago. Kate went right into a job at Sony, and I worked for an indie producer. After a couple of years, she decided she didn’t want to deal with the politics, and she started working on some short films. Kate, ah . . .” He hesitated, trying to read my face. “Well, Kate has money. But I don’t get any of it if something happens to her,” he added hurriedly.

  He didn’t have to worry. I’d known he wasn’t a real suspect the second he’d hit my radius. “Where does the money come from?” I asked anyway, because it seemed like I should.

  “Her grandfather left Kate and her sister trust funds when he died, uhh”—he looked at the ceiling a second, doing some mental math—“six or seven years ago now.”

  Okay. That didn’t seem likely to be connected to her death, so I switched tacks, mentally shuffling the index cards Jesse had provided. “Does Kate have a lot of friends? Does she go out a lot?”

  He leaned back in his chair, thinking it over. “We hang out with people from college, but nobody really close. Kate’s sister is her best friend, but she’s in San Diego with the rest of the family.”

  I remembered Leah Rhodes’s interest in wolves and asked if Kate liked animals. Mailt shook his head. “She’s funny about animals—she’s a vegan, and I think she even used to be in PETA, and now she’s in HPA. But she’s super allergic herself. The family across the hall asked us to feed their guinea pigs once, and Kate couldn’t even go into the condo without sneezing. I had to do it.”

  I’d at least heard of Humans for the Protection of Animals, which was one of the big three animal rights groups, along with PETA and the Humane Society. I wondered if there was a connection between Kate being in HPA and Leah being in PAW—but then again, this was LA, where your “activism” could be as much of a status indicator as your haircut or job. I wrote Mailt’s info down just in case.

  David Mailt was looking at me with desperate eagerness, just hoping I would ask him a question so he could answer it. Meanwhile, I had helped destroy his dead girlfriend only a few hours earlier. I asked him some more questions about Kate’s activities, and found out that Leah and Kate had gone to different schools, lived in different parts of town, and worked at jobs that didn’t seem like they’d intersect. They weren’t from the same area, or even the same tax bracket. Other than being about the same age, same size, and not all that social, they seemed as different as could be. I was flailing. So much for Jesse’s assurances that I had enough investigative experience to do these interviews.

  Finally I ran out of ideas and thanked Mailt for his time. I also promised to call if I got any new information. Which I wouldn’t. As I limped out to the car, leaning on the cane, I started to wonder if Jesse had given me this assignment just to punish me. I wasn’t finding any connections, but I was learning an awful lot about the two victims. Was he trying to make me feel guilty on purpose?

  And if so, was it working?

  Chapter 18

  By mid afternoon, Jesse was beginning to have doubts about his own plan.

  With Scarlett working the victim end of the case, Jesse had to try to find the nova by figuring out who’d created him. Jesse also just wanted to talk to the werewolves who had clashed with Scarlett and her roommate. It annoyed him that Scarlett and Molly seemed to be taking the attack as just another part of life. No one should have to live with that kind of threat over their head, much less find it mundane.

  Luckily he could do both things at once. Will had given him a list of the nineteen other werewolves in the pack, in rough order of their place in the pack hierarchy. He’d suggested that the nova had been created by either someone very high on the list, or someone very low on the list. T
he stronger and more dominant a werewolf was, the more likely he’d be to ignore the alpha’s wishes that they not change in between full moons unless they were with other pack members. The pack members who were the lowest on the list, on the other hand, were more likely to have trouble controlling themselves in between moons.

  Jesse had figured he’d start with the top three wolves and the bottom three wolves on the list, a group which included Drew Riddell and Terrence Whittaker, two of the wolves who’d ambushed Scarlett. The plan, he’d decided, would be to simply interview the werewolves and try to get a sense of their truthfulness. Jesse wanted to ask the kind of questions that would give him a sense of how each person felt about Will, the pack, and being a werewolf in general, and hope someone gave himself away.

  Will had also pointed out that whoever turned the nova wolf had successfully kept it from the rest of the pack without stinking of deceit. He (or she) had to be a world-class liar, but Jesse had had plenty of experience figuring out when suspects were lying. At any rate, it’d be good to get a better sense of wolf pack behavior from the point of view of someone who wasn’t the alpha. So he plotted all six addresses on his phone’s GPS and loaded his backup gun with the silver bullets he’d bought from Tommy Vrapman.

  It was a tenuous plan to begin with, and he just kept striking out. Two of the wolves on his list—Lydia, the lowest werewolf in the pack, and Astrid, the fourth highest—weren’t home when Jesse called on them. Ryker, number eighteen on the list, turned out to be a broody, obnoxiously well-groomed aspiring actor who answered his door shirtless and stayed that way for the whole interview. He came off to Jesse as too vain and one-dimensional to deceive the rest of the pack, and when Jesse pushed him, Ryker immediately cowered into his chair. He was all bluster.

  The next closest werewolf, number seventeen, was a meek Hispanic woman named Rosarita Hernandez who was so grateful that Jesse could speak to her in Spanish that for a moment he thought she might cry. She pushed tamales and iced tea at him and showed him pictures of the cats she used to have before she’d become a werewolf. She was not going to be the one who’d lied about the nova, either.

  An accident on the 10 freeway forced him to slog through forty-five minutes of traffic, and by two thirty, Jesse was tired, frustrated, and really needed to use the bathroom after all the iced tea. The whole endeavor was starting to feel like a waste of time he didn’t have.

  After a pit stop to use the bathroom, though, Jesse found his first real possibility. Drew Riddell, number three on the list, was a short, thick Caucasian man with short, curly hair and a restless energy that practically came off him in gusts. After a few calls to Riddell’s home and office, Jesse tracked him down at a construction site off Fairfax. Riddell was a contractor, and when Jesse walked up, he was deep into a heated argument with an older man in a hard hat with an electrical company logo on the side. Jesse hung back and watched the two men for a few minutes. If you knew to look for it, Riddell’s body language had “dominance” written all over it.

  After the electrician had slunk away, Jesse approached Riddell and identified himself. The shorter man jerked his head toward an RV parked nearby. “Let’s talk in there,” Riddell grunted. He had a hint of an accent, maybe midwestern.

  After a few minutes, conversation with the werewolf, however, Jesse wasn’t convinced that Riddell was the guy who’d turned the nova. He was aggressive, but no more so than most of the LA residents Jesse had pulled over back when he was on traffic duty. Riddell denied changing in between moons and attacking a human. And he didn’t seem to have any particular animosity toward Will.

  “Then why are you trying to . . . I don’t know what the term is . . . overthrow him?” Jesse asked.

  Riddell shrugged his beefy shoulders. “I don’t know that any of us want to overthrow Will, so much as help Ana.” He paused, and then added, “Okay, there are some who want to overthrow Will. Not me, though. I don’t want to be alpha, so I don’t really care who is. But I do want Ana to get her answers.”

  “Even if it meant kidnapping and torturing someone?” Jesse asked, unable to keep the anger out of his voice.

  If Riddell was distressed about being accused of a felony by a police detective, he didn’t show it. “You’re talking about the girl, right? Bernard?” Riddell shrugged. “I’m a werewolf,” he said seriously, his voice low and unapologetic. “And a contractor. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to get what you want.”

  “All the same,” Jesse retorted, his voice hard. “If you go near her again, I’ll arrest you for kidnapping, assault, and conspiracy to commit murder, just for starters.”

  Riddell looked at him speculatively for a long moment, his nostrils flaring slightly, and Jesse realized the other man was searching him for signs of a lie. “I believe you would,” he said at last. “You’d catch hell from Will and Dashiell, but you don’t care about that, do you?”

  Jesse shook his head. There was another long silence, interrupted by the buzz of a table saw just outside the trailer and the traffic noise from Fairfax. “All right,” Riddell said finally. “I’ll leave her alone. Not because I’m afraid of you, but because if I got arrested, Dashiell would make sure I died in jail before the full moon.”

  As he drove toward the next name on the list, Jesse thought back over the interview. The werewolf could have been lying about not attacking any humans, but there was really no reason for it. Why lie about that if he was willing to be up front about conspiring to kidnap Scarlett? And he had believed Riddell when he said he didn’t want to be alpha. The man might be aggressive, but he didn’t seem like a leader.

  Half an hour later, Jesse was knocking on the door of the second name on Will’s pack roster: Terrence Whittaker, another one of the guys that had gone after Scarlett outside of Will’s house. Whittaker lived in one side of a ramshackle old duplex in central LA, on a street with rusted cars parked on every lawn and pockets of loud music blasting out of half the driveways. Whittaker’s lawn, like all the others, was strewn with pieces of litter in varying stages of decomposition. A big, muscled Harley was parked alone on a strip of blacktop next to the paint-thirsty building. Jesse parked behind the Harley and circled the motorcycle to get to the peeling front door. No doorbell, so he raised a fist to knock.

  The door popped open before his knuckles made contact. A thin, shirtless black man in his late thirties opened the door and looked Jesse over, leaning casually into the door frame. Long, thin scars were scattered over his arms, including one on his shoulder that strayed most of the way across his chest. A forty-ounce can of beer dangled from the fingers of one hand.

  “Terrence Whittaker?” Jesse asked briskly.

  “What can I do for you, officer?” Whittaker drawled. He took a long pull from the beer, his eyes never leaving Jesse’s. He was about the same height as Jesse, but he somehow managed to loom over the detective, challenging him. Showing off his dominance, Jesse thought.

  “Detective Cruz,” Jesse corrected. “Will Carling sent me. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  Whittaker’s eyes sparked just a little at the mention of Will’s name. Slowly, he looked over his own shoulder at the dingy living room. Jesse saw a bong and some lighters amidst the trash on the crappy old coffee table. Whittaker turned back to Jesse with a smirk. “Let’s go around back. The house isn’t real presentable.”

  Jesse stepped back to let him pass, then followed Whittaker through the overgrown lawn to the back of the house, where an obviously stolen wooden picnic table stood next to a massive barbecue. Whittaker hopped effortlessly onto the picnic table, sitting on top with his feet on the bench. He took another long drink. “What brings you here, Detective? Noise complaint again? That Spanish mama down the street mad about me revving my bike?” His speech seemed to get more and more choppy, like a gang thug in a bad movie.

  Jesse frowned. He was already sick of this guy. “Cut the ghetto bullshit, Whittaker,” Jesse said brusquely. �
�I looked you up. You have a PhD in astrophysics from Berkeley. Until recently you were a full professor at UC Santa Cruz. I don’t know what happened to you”—he glanced around the tattered backyard, the broken blacktop—“but you’re not fooling anyone with the act.”

  Whittaker’s grin disappeared, and for a second something flashed across his face—real anger. His teeth bared, but then he got control back and glared at Jesse. “I took my three best grad students and a telescope to the desert. That’s what happened,” he hissed, the choppy speech pattern vanishing. He spread his arms wide. “And now this is my kingdom.”

  Jesse contemplated the litter-strewn yard, the blistered house paint. “The kids survive?” he asked quietly. For the first time, Whittaker looked away from Jesse’s face. He took that as a no. “That where you got the scars?” Jesse said, nodding at the man’s arms.

  Terrence shook his head. “Misspent youth.” He looked down at his naked biceps with a wry smile. “I studied in London for a year, took fencing. We thought it was more fun with real blades.”

  Jesse shook his head a little. He may not have always been a werewolf, but Whittaker had been wild for a long time. “Why come here?” he asked, gesturing around the dingy yard. “They fire you?”

  Whittaker jerked his head up in defiance. “Naw, man. But I couldn’t be around students anymore. Wasn’t safe for them. My grandma left me this place.” His fingers twitched emptily, and he dug into the back pocket of his blue jeans, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. After a second of hesitation, he held it out to Jesse, grudgingly. When Jesse shook his head, Whittaker shrugged and pulled out a lighter, tilting his head toward the duplex at the same time. “I own the whole building. Collect rent on the other half.” His fingers shook as he flicked the lighter open. Jesse had seen that kind of tremor many times.