Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  “Go ahead. You’re welcome to see Roosevelt too, if you want?”

  “He’s still here?”

  “Nobody’s come to pick him up yet.” She nodded towards the hallway. “He’s in the garage.”

  Maggie led the way into the garage and popped the overhead light on. A Chrysler Reliant took up most of the space, asleep under a layer of dust. Maggie cinched her cardigan tighter against the drop in temperature and shuffled past the car to the stack of garbage cans. “Been two days since I called and it’s damn outrageous it’s taken you people this long, I don’t mind telling you. Leaving me to sit with the poor dog and him two days dead.”

  “Animal services should have picked him up by now.”

  Maggie turned, looked at him. “Ain’t you animal services?”

  “No ma’am. I’m a police officer.”

  Her brow arced in a veneer of disapproval. “You forget your uniform this morning, young man?”

  “No. I’m a detective. We get to dress a little better than the beat cops.”

  “Detective? Now that’s more like it.”

  Settled next to the recycling bin was a plastic storage tub with a fitted lid. Gallagher pointed at it. “Is this it?”

  “Yes.” Maggie turned away, waving her hand as if to call it all off. “You help yourself, if you don’t mind. I don’t need to see that again.”

  She crossed to the single window in the garage and burnished a clear spot from the grime on it. Gallagher snapped off the container lid. A garbage bag folded inside. He folded back the plastic and turned his head from the rank smell that wafted up. Poor Roosevelt was a tangled mass of fur and pokey ribslats. What fur was left was dark with blood. It was hard to even recognize the carcass as canine.

  Snapping on the latex gloves, he turned to the dog owner at the window. “It’s awfully cold out here, Maggie. Why don’t you go back inside. I’ll put everything back as I found it. I’ll call animal services and get them to come for Roosevelt right away.”

  “Thank you.” She shuffled back to the door and stopped before going inside. “Terrible way to go,” she said, nodding to the bin at his feet. “Man or animal, no one deserves to die like that.”

  He agreed and waited until she went back into the house. Turning back to the makeshift tomb, he spread out some old newspaper across the floor and lifted out pieces of the carcass. He laid them over the paper, the severed legs and crushed torso of exposed ribs, the head flopping loose like a rag. Laid out on the floor, he examined the wounds in the hide and the scoring on the snapped bones. A chill rippled down his backbone.

  He’d seen marks like this before.

  Winter in Portland. What little snow there was slurred into a grey slush along the curb. The cold was damp and bone-seeping, not crisp like the open country but Lara Mendes breathed it all in. She passed faces along the sidewalk, looked up at the festive lights strung from lampposts and the tinsel garlands in the shop windows and realized again how much she missed her old home. A sharp tug at her heart over these simple things that she had exiled herself from. A girl half her age at her side, linked at her arm as she pointed out at this particularly window display or that cyclist outfitted in a full Santa costume, the red felt material mottled dark from the slushy streetspray. Portland with its fabled citizenry of artists, shamans, fools and iconoclasts, each denizen determined to outwit the last in eccentricity and all of it washing the streets in a miasma of gleeful oddity. Lara relished every step, awestruck at how homesick she was for a city she had so often complained about.

  “Oh, I love this store.” Amy pulled her into another oddly painted shop with a bizarre window display. Inside, the aisles were narrowed by racks of vintage clothes and the air cloyed with burnt patchouli. Amy flipped through the hangers and plucked out a shirt, holding it up for inspection. “This is cool. It would look great on you. Where’s the change room?”

  Lara removed her shades and looked the item over. Honestly touched at Amy’s suggestions at first but now, the fifteenth or thirtieth time, she could muster no more sincerity. “I can’t look at anymore, Amy. Why don’t you finish your Christmas list. I’ll wait outside.”

  The girl’s face fell and she re-examined the item. “You don’t like it? It’s your color.”

  Lara unzipped her coat, stifled in the humid confines of the store. She peeled off her hat and shook out her hair. “I’ve hit my limit.”

  Amy wondered if she’d done something wrong. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I just need some air. You go on.” She shooed the girl along and wound through the tight aisles for the door.

  Lara stood under the canvas eaves of the shop and drew breath through her nose. The wind smelled clean after the suffocating reek of hippie perfume, steam-drying and mothballs. She watched the cars trundle past, tires splaying a brownish sludge onto the sidewalk. A car horn blared up North Mississippi, followed by the bellowing of some irate driver and Lara peered down the causeway to see a cab driver arguing with a bike courier. Some things never change.

  Pedestrians moved around her, shoulders up against the cold and sidestepping the puddles of slush. Shoppers rushing home with their treasures.

  “Lara?”

  Lara froze, too afraid to turn and face the voice but it was too late not to. She had forgotten to put the hat and sunglasses back on before hitting the street.

  “Lara Mendes?”

  Lara turned. Charlene Farbre stood before her with a look of disbelief dropping her face. Detective Charlene Farbre, her old friend and colleague from Assault Detail. Lara scrambled for some ruse or lie but her mind tangled in too many threads until it was overruled by one simple urge. Run.

  Charlene took a step closer but remained wary, as if some elaborate prank was playing around her. “Lara, it’s me, Charlene. My God, I can’t believe it’s you…”

  Lara watched the woman’s eyes search her own for some tick of recognition and Lara remembered that she looked different now. Some gaunt phantom of herself and this was what Detective Charlene Farbre was trying to parse.

  “Perdón?” Lara blurted up without thinking. Then, rolling with the ruse, she said “No hablo Ingles.”

  Charlene leaned back as if she’d touched something hot. She reached out for Lara’s arm. “Lara, stop. It’s me. Where have you been? Everyone searched--“

  “No me toques.” Lara snatched her arm back but her heart stung at the hurt look on her old friend’s face. She turned and marched away, bootheels clicking dully on the wet pavement. She didn’t look back as Charlene called after her. Amy, still in the shop, would wonder where she’d gone. She’d explain later. Lara turned down the first corner and broke into a run.

  Charlene Farbre stood on the slushy sidewalk calling out to an empty street. It didn’t make any sense. The woman had looked so much like her missing friend and yet, not quite. Altered somehow. The Spanish had thrown her and all she could surmise was that this woman bore an eerie resemblance to Lara Mendes. But Lara was Hispanic…

  Charlene trudged back to her car, wondering why on earth her old friend would pretend not to know her. Turning the ignition, she saw a young woman rush out of a store and look frantically up and down the street as if she’d lost something. Charlene hit the wipers to get a better look at the girl before she ran off in the same direction as the mystery woman. She knew this girl. Had in fact met her this summer. Her name was Amy. The teenaged daughter of Lara’s former partner in Homicide Detail.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LARA RAN FOR cover, shelter, anything. She didn’t know what she was running to until she saw it. A small clapboard church on Skidmore, the door illuminated by a single naked bulb.

  The door groaned as she pushed against it. The nave was dark, the only light glowing from a dozen candles at the feet of the virgin. The smell of polished wood and candlewax was strong and it tripped childhood memories. For a tiny moment, Lara idly wondered if she would burst into flames stepping foot inside a church. She closed the heavy door behind her, took anoth
er step towards the pews and nothing happened. God was too busy to incinerate a tiny monster such as herself.

  The pew was solid but comfortable. She studied the enormous cross suspended over the altar, the wooden figure twisted and bleeding on the crosstree. Coming back to Portland had been a mistake. What did she think was going to happen? A happily ever after with Gallagher? An insane notion. There was no place for her here. She should have ran the moment she spotted Gallagher. Further into the wilderness, deep and remote to someplace where there were no roads, no people, no life save that of rocks and trees.

  She would go. There was just no other choice. The last two days had been so good. Some small scrap of normalcy. Not being alone. Being able to talk to someone without guarding her words. Sitting over a cup of coffee listening to John and Amy nanner across the breakfast table. The thought of leaving it behind again broke something inside her.

  A noise rang out, echoing over the vaulted ceiling. She wasn’t alone.

  Four pews up the aisle before her, a figure rose and sat up. Some intransigent sleeping off a drunk on the church pew. The man leaned back and stretched his elbows on the backrest of the pew. His boots came up and propped upon the pew before him, crossed casually at the ankles.

  “You see what I mean now,” the man spoke. “Suicide becomes the viable option.”

  Lara slid down the pew as if pricked with a needle, deflating from a slow leak. She knew who it was before he even spoke. Who else could it be?

  Grissom didn’t look back at her. His head tilted up as he studied the cross in the sacristy. “Sorry it didn’t work out for you. You almost smell happy to me.”

  Lara patted her pockets for a weapon but there was no weapon. Grissom didn’t move, his feet up like he was at a baseball game. She watched his back. A clear, easy headshot. If only she had something to shoot him with.

  “That was a hell of a shot you took at me.” Grissom tilted his head slightly. “Silver-tipped bullets? Goddamn girl, where’d you get those? You got any idea how hard it is to dig those slugs out of your leg? I’m still limping.”

  She cast her eyes back to the door. If Grissom had a game leg, she could probably outrun him.

  “I’m guessing your boyfriend there had the silver loads. He knows what you are, doesn’t he?”

  “Why did you follow me?” Lara kept her timbre steady. Don’t show fear. “My answer hasn’t changed.”

  “You know you can’t stay here. I’m giving you one last chance to set things right.”

  She looked at the door again but said nothing.

  “You got three options, honey. I’m offering you one. The second is to do yourself in, which I guess those silver-tips might come in handy. But if you stay here, I guarantee you you will lose control and the wolf will kill everyone you know.”

  “That’s supposed to scare me?”

  “Who do you think the wolf will go for first? Those closest to you. The scents she knows. You want that?” His boots thudded to the floor and he tilted off the pew and stood. He pivoted and finally looked at her. “There’s a rest stop out on highway five, just outside of north Van. You meet me there tonight and we’ll leave without rustling a leaf and your people will be safe. If you don’t show, I can’t guarantee their safety. Simple as that.”

  Lara felt every muscle constrict, like a spring coiling. Fight or run.

  “It’s unusual to hold out this long,” he said. “To walk that thin line between wolf and human. But you got to go all the way, Lara. Become a true wolf. The pack needs you.” Grissom made a slight bow and sauntered to the rectory door. He disappeared behind a curtain and then she heard a door click shut. He had limped the whole way, favoring his left leg.

  Gallagher clocked out, wondering how long it would take Lieutenant Cabrisi to read him riot for his lax hours. He’d deal with it when it came. For now, he was fixated on the wreckage of the dog carcass and the fact that three calls home had gone unanswered. Lara wouldn’t pick up but Amy was supposed to be home.

  Cutting through the parking garage to his space, he heard the heavy door slam open behind him. Heels ringing smartly off the concrete.

  “Gallagher?”

  Turning, he saw Detective Farbre marching up. “Hey Charlene. What’s up?”

  “I think I just saw Lara Mendes,” she said.

  He froze, feigned surprise. “What are you talking about?”

  “North Mississippi, just standing on the street. I swear to God it was her. Has she contacted you?”

  “No.” Keel this easy, he thought. “Are sure it was her?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like her, but different. Like she was ill.”

  “When was this? What did she say?”

  “She spoke nothing but Spanish to me. But I swear to God she knew it was me. I think she’s been here in town all this time, hiding.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She was involved in Lieutenant Vogel’s death. Maybe she’s hiding something.”

  “You knew Lara as well as I did. Better even. Does that sound like her?”

  “I don’t know, John. The woman vanished into thin air three months ago and her skinny doppelganger shows up wandering the streets. I don’t know what to make of it but we need to find this woman.”

  He started for his truck, keys jingling his hand. “Okay, we will. But right now I gotta run home. Keep me posted, okay?”

  “Gallagher, what the hell?” Charlene’s eyes bugged from their sockets. “Your missing partner is out there somewhere and you don’t care?”

  He climbed behind the wheel. “Course I do. But I got something right now.”

  She stopped the door from closing. “John, has she contacted you?”

  “No.”

  She zeroed in on his eyes and he knew he had to pull this off but Charlene Farbre was a detective. She was lied to on a daily basis and her internal bullshit-detector was damn near faultless. The jig was already up. Charlene’s face had gone from suspicion to hurt. “You know. How could you keep this secret? After all this.”

  Gallagher took a breath and squared her with a look of his own. “Charlene, please. I can’t explain. Just stay out of it for now.”

  The look on her face was terrible. Shock, hurt, betrayal. He slammed the door shut, fired the ignition and pulled out of the parking space. He’d have to deal with it later. Could Charlene be trusted if he told her the truth? Could she help? Or would she, like any sane person, go running in the opposite direction?

  Wheeling onto Multnomah, his phone went off. He fished it up, hoping it wasn’t Farbre.

  “Dad?”

  “Amy, I’ve been calling the house all afternoon. Where are you?”

  Silence on the other end. Ambient street noise in the background.

  “Amy? What’s wrong?”

  “Lara’s gone. Dad, I’m sorry. I’ve lost her.”

  “Okay, slow down. What happened?”

  Twinkling lights whooshed over the windshield as he listened to Amy’s rushed, fumbling train of events. He told her to calm down then asked where she was.

  “I’m still here on Mississip, looking for her. Do you think she’s at home?”

  “Stay where you are. I’ll stop at the house. If she’s not there, I’ll come find you. Go inside somewhere, stay warm. I’ll call back in five minutes.”

  He hung up, pushed the accelerator and gunned for home.

  Amy pulled the hood of her coat up as the snow fell around her. Trudging two blocks west and still searching for Lara, she stood under a streetlamp trying to decide whether to keep going or to double back, vainly hoping the missing woman would return.

  “You’ll catch your death out here in this damp.”

  Amy turned. A tall man in a dark coat stepped into the streetlamp’s pool of light. He turned his collar up against the chill and smiled at her. “I hate winter in this city. Too wet, too damp.” He nodded at the grey slush around Amy’s feet. “Too goddamn mucky.”

  Amy didn’t react. Chatty s
trangers were nothing unusual, especially on this street. The man didn’t seem like trouble, didn’t have the twitchy look of the crazy nor the unsteady stagger of the dead drunk. There was something about his face however, that kept pulling her gaze like a magnet. Not necessarily good-looking but something that drew her in.

  The man tilted his face to the falling snow. “How many days until Christmas?”

  “You don’t have a calendar?” Amy said.

  “I kindly gave up on ‘em.”

  “Uh-huh. So how do you know what day it is?”

  “Who cares what day of the week it is? Or the artificial number the calendar dictates. You need to know the season is all.”

  Amy scanned the street for movement but nothing moved. Even the traffic seemed to have given up and gone home. “Season, huh? Must be hell keeping a dental appointment.”

  He watched her eyeballing the deserted street. “Looking for somebody?”

  Amy gave him a once-over. She had pretty good instincts for creeps and weirdos but the man didn’t trip any of her Spidey-senses. Still. “My dad’s picking me up. He’s a cop.”

  “You’re old man’s a Johnny Law?” The stranger’s brow arced in genuine surprise. “Well ain’t that the drizzling shits.”

  Amy took a step back, a tiny Spidey-sense tingling like a finger plucking a piano wire. Maybe the guy knew her dad. Was in fact some perp that her father had busted. She peeled her eyes to the street, willing the old Cherokee to appear.

  “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t respond, other than to take a step away, her feet freezing in her boots.

  “Will you give your old man a message for me?”

  She stamped her feet. This was getting weird. Where was Dad?

  The man just kept grinning at her. “You tell him you can’t keep a wild animal. It don’t work.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Means you can’t take something wild and make it a pet. You keep it inside and it will sicken and die. Worse, it will turn on you.”