Wild Card (Bite Back 3)

by Mark Henwick

  “Okay.” I scribbled my cell and email on one of the restaurant’s business cards and handed it over. “You are different from the others.”

  His nose flared and he let a smile slip, quickly covered.

  I carefully didn’t notice. So the doctor liked being complimented? Being a psychiatrist didn’t mean he couldn’t be vain as well. It was kinda reassuring that he had failings.

  I finished the shrimp and sat back, sipping the wine.

  “So, tell me a little background about your family.” He made a show of turning his attention to finishing his creamy lobster lunch, but I didn’t doubt he’d focus on every word.

  My stomach tensed. I took another sip of wine and willed my body to relax. Why the hell was I so secretive? And could I actually lie to him? Would his wolfy-sense spot it?

  “Denver family,” I said. “Father died when I was fifteen. I left high school before graduation and enlisted in the army. My younger sister went on through college and law school, and she works at the Galliard Associates Law Firm. We don’t get along. Mom remarried. We’re not that close either.”

  Not entirely true. No reaction from Noble.

  And a reminder to myself that Mom had to be mad at me. She’d been back from vacation since Sunday and I hadn’t even called.

  “No brother?” he said, looking up.

  I shook my head.

  “You were a bit of a young tomboy probably.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. A handful of sentences and I felt I’d given him the family secrets.

  He sighed. “It was hasty of me to start so quickly. Well, too late now. I will play the fearsome psychiatrist and tear open those raw, formative childhood experiences.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You worked at being the son you thought your father always wanted. No boy was ever going to be as bold as you, no physical skill was ever going to be beyond your reach. You took part in the things your father enjoyed because you knew that’s what a good son would do.”

  The shrimp sat like lead in my stomach.

  “In the way of these things,” he laid his cutlery down and gestured with his hands, “it ceased to be something that required effort. You became this person that you thought your father wanted.”

  “He never said he wanted a son. He never once said he was disappointed—”

  “I didn’t say that, Amber. I said you thought that was what he wanted.” He tasted his wine appreciatively, his eyes watching me. “Then, having become this person, you accepted the role and responsibility, especially after his death. You left school to get a job. I would guess you supported your family financially?” He waited on my tiny nod. “Then after that, your choice of career only reinforced the characteristics you’d adopted.”

  “I don’t like talking about this,” I said. I was lying. I absolutely hated it. What he knew wasn’t half of it and there was no way I was going to blurt out anything more. Paranoid, much?

  “I’m sorry it’s painful for you. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” I muttered. “What’s it got to do with me becoming a Were?”

  “Because you’re looking at things that impinge on you now and thinking that they stem from what’s happening to you now, but they probably have roots a long way back. I’ll leave out the obvious psychology about not feeling close to your mother after she remarried. Let’s concentrate instead on your sister. When she was a child, you treated her as if you were an older brother, a protector. She probably adored you.” He suddenly jabbed a finger at me for emphasis. “Then you went away. She was what, fourteen, fifteen at the time? She was at the age where she could only relate to events in the way they affected her personally. She was being told by everybody what a wonderful person you were, and you had abandoned her.” He paused. “Now, you think you’re not getting along with her because of everything you’re going through?”

  He had half a point there, unpleasant as it was to realize. But only half. I could have launched into a list of my sister’s shortcomings, but I’d told him enough for one day.

  “All startlingly accurate.” I waved my hand in dismissal. “But how would this relate to talking to you, to becoming ‘adjusted’?”

  “Hmm.” He finished his wine. “I would focus on exploring control and direction. As a simplification, the Athanate seem to me all about rigid control,” He made his hands into tight fists. “Never letting go. The pack, they are all about directing that energy, dissipating it in useful or harmless ways.” He let his hands weave to and fro. “You need to be an expert in the way these instincts conflict, but you need this before you ever face it for real. You must learn to balance and master your different sides, so they do not overwhelm you.”

  He’d summarized it neatly. I didn’t comment.

  He went on. “What I will do is direct you in mental role playing, where you can experience the interaction in a relaxed and safe environment, with me providing suggestions and reinforcements. First, of course, nothing very drastic. We must build trust and progress slowly.”

  I wasn’t sure I had time for slow. Master Liu always said there must be no fast or slow, there must only be the right speed. Did that apply everywhere?

  “And we’re not sharing all this with Felix?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Not Felix, not Alex, not anybody. Doctor-patient confidentiality, even in the pack. All I would ever say is that we’re making progress, or not.”

  The waiter interrupted us to offer dessert menus, but my appetite was gone. I asked for the check.

  Noble smirked. Yeah, asking for the check wasn’t a girly thing to do. But I didn’t do it to fit in with some image of how I should behave. However I’d gotten to this stage, this was me now. That little piece of the puzzle slipped comfortably into place. I’d need to think more on it.

  We argued casually over the check and settled for splitting the cost.

  “Put aside the picture I described earlier,” he said as the waiter walked off. “At best it’s a caricature of you. Nothing so quick, that works on so little data, could be anything else. It gave you a flavor of what can be done. The real work will start next time.”

  I nodded cautiously. There was a matter of who was paying for this.

  He anticipated my question.

  “It’s for the pack, so no charge, of course.” He glanced at his watch. “Do you have to be somewhere? Can I offer you a lift home?” he said.

  “I need to be at Cherry Creek,” I said. “I’ll take you up on that lift if that’s not too far out of your way.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  I settled into his Volvo and buckled the belt as he pulled out cautiously on Arapahoe, heading for I-25.

  His car smelled of leather seats and some strong chemical air freshener.

  “Whereabouts are you living at the moment?” he asked.

  My mental heels dug in. He might have all sorts of reasons for asking, but I wasn’t going to tell the pack where I lived while I wasn’t even a member.

  “Oh, I live half my life out the back of my car.”

  What did that make me sound like? I was starting to get paranoid about what I revealed to him in casual conversation.

  I had the impression he followed my thinking. And he didn’t like it. So much for the first steps of setting up trust.

  Well, suck it up, Doc.

  He drove with care, two hands on the wheel, well under the limit, eyes on the road and mirrors. My mouth twitched at the contrast with Alex. With Noble’s driving style and his solid car, I was probably safer than I’d been for weeks.

  I stifled a yawn.

  He’d given me useful glimpses about the Were. But the whole time I knew that he wasn’t telling me everything. I wasn’t imagining it. Was it because I wasn’t a member of the pack?

  And of course I’d told him everything and been completely honest.

  No. It was like looking into a damned mirror. I’d found someone as secretive as myself.

  The short, top-of-the-line analysis he’d given hadn’t been pleasan
t at all. The image that came to mind was physical exercise after a long time off. Thinking of it that way helped. What I needed was to get to a place where I could deal with the things I had in my head. If I didn’t, I was destined to go off the deep end. Probably spectacularly. So who better to prevent that than the pack’s psychiatrist?

  He stopped in front of the mall, carefully putting the emergency brake on.

  “I understand,” he said softly, seeming to shed the professional persona for a moment. “Trust is that most precious of interpersonal beliefs, and it has to be earned. Look at the times I send you. Pick a few. Let us try.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I will.”

  I watched while he drove off, the big, boxy Volvo gliding away into the traffic.

  There was another voicemail on my cell.

  It was Mom. The exact message I’d anticipated: back from vacation since Sunday, why hadn’t I gone to see her as I promised. I could feel the hurt in her voice, but there were more hard decisions to make there that I didn’t feel up to now.

  Chapter 22

  I found Melissa at Cherry Creek Mall, doing her stretches just by the exit from the parking garage.

  “Run first, talk later,” she said by way of greeting.

  I shrugged and let her lead, tugging my backpack’s straps till it sat comfortably.

  Down on the creek trail, Melissa set a good pace and I fell in alongside her. There was no way she could outsprint me or outlast me, and the pace was easy enough that I could think through some of the implications about what the Doc had told me.

  Aside from the diversion around the Country Club, we stayed on the trail, down next to the creek and away from the traffic. I was enjoying it. It was only about thirty minutes later, when I saw we were getting close to Union Street, I started to wonder what she was trying to prove.

  She came off at Wynkoop, only a couple of blocks short of the Union Street station and I followed her to a café where we got a couple of juices to go.

  We walked back down to the trail.

  Her face was a picture. But beneath the flush from her exertion, there was an odd weight to her narrow-eyed look.

  Damn. My head had been so full of other issues I hadn’t even thought about what was happening. There was no point now trying to pretend I was suddenly tired or winded. It had been only a moderately clever ruse, but I’d been incredibly stupid.

  She downed the juice, her eyes smoky with calculation as she continued to look at me.

  I expected her to start questioning how I was able to run without effort, but she surprised me. She grabbed my arm, stopping me.

  “Did you ever really, really want something, more than anything else in the world?”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t going to go there, but she barely heard me.

  “When I was twelve, my dog died.” She let my arm go and we started walking again. “She was just a young collie. No reason to die, no history of problems. Just died one day. I thought the neighbor had poisoned her, but no one would do anything about it. No one wanted to listen to me. They told me I’d get over it, but I wasn’t like that. So, I got a book on forensics from the library.”

  “Did you prove it?”

  She snorted. “By the time I’d earned enough money from the paper route and bought what I needed to run tests, there was nothing but bones and gunk left. I know. I looked.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  She sighed and looked up at the sky.

  “I went and got another book which covered finding chemical traces in the soil. I worked waiting tables until I realized I would never be able to afford the equipment I needed. I even tried setting up a forensics business in my Dad’s garage.” She shook her head. “Finally my Dad took pity on me and made a connection at a forensics lab, and they let me use their stuff.”

  “And did you prove it then? The poison?”

  “Yeah. I nailed it.” Her eyes shone.

  “What happened to the neighbor?”

  “Huh?” She blinked. “Oh. The neighbor had died a couple of years before. It wasn’t the point any more. I’d gotten over the dog, but I’d found something else. Something really important to me. You know why I joined CSI?” she said. “I need to know. Like other people need to breathe. What, why, who. The facts. Can you understand that? It’s more important to me than anything else.”

  I nodded. I had a good idea what was coming next, and this time I was right.

  “So when a mysterious, ex-special forces, rookie policewoman starts asking questions about some oddball murders and then suddenly takes out the three guys allegedly responsible, I notice. When those bodies then disappear off the slab into some military cloak and dagger facility, I’m pissed. When I’m refused any follow-up information…”

  She laughed; a short, sharp sound without humor, before continuing.

  “I went looking, and the more I looked, the more I found. Interestingly, almost nothing about you, or those three guys, or for that matter, the secret squirrel army facilities.”

  “Must have slipped a cog in your brain, speculating what it was all about,” I said.

  “I don’t speculate,” she said, as if I’d suggested she ate children.

  “Melissa, you’ve got to realize that I can’t tell you all the things you want to know, no matter how much you think you need to know them.”

  “Yeah?” She smiled. “We’ll see.”

  We walked on for a minute, while I reflected how bizarre my life had become when I had conversations like this and they seemed almost normal.

  “You were at the murder scene in Wash Park last night,” she said abruptly.

  “How would you know, if you’re suspended?”

  “I listen to the police radio. Morales and Edmunds getting involved is like waving a huge red flag to me,” she snickered, “especially when they start talking in code.”

  “Okay, so I was there. What about it?”

  “FBI threw you out, and slapped one of their labels on it. Pattern A, whatever. Meaning a homicide where there is apparent evidence of a large canine being involved. They think it’s some cult thing, you know.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “It may or may not be a cult. It certainly isn’t an animal.”

  “I thought you didn’t speculate?”

  “I’m not.” She rolled her shoulders and did some side stretches as we walked. “Tell me, what evidence do you think points to animals?”

  Of course I had a string of cases, some where there had been paw prints, but I wasn’t going to admit knowing anything other than this case.

  “The bite.”

  “The thigh bites.” She laughed. “All those cases that Morales had copied off and given to you. They mention paw prints, too.” She sniffed. “Not a single one mentions any evidence of animals, no DNA for instance.”

  There seemed no point in hiding my knowledge of these cases any more.

  “But there’s a whole report by consultants about what kind of animal,” I said. “Teeth patterns, jaw strength and so on. Those guys were experts.”

  “Yeah. Those guys had their heads up their asses. Too smart for their own good. What kind of canine makes one or two specific bites, in exactly the same location, every time? No evidence of chewing, no bites on other bones. Just crunch, crunch.” She demonstrated with a hand imitating a bite on her neck and thigh. “No others. Not one single instance where the ‘animal’ that did those two bites bit anywhere else. There were other bites on the bodies, but they were all way post mortem. They were little scavengers that couldn’t break a thigh.”

  I didn’t have all the facts memorized, but I’d take her word for it.

  “There was damage to ribs at the scene last night,” I said.

  “Well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t speculate,” she said, enjoying herself, “but cast your mind back to the details if you can and tell me if the bone was broken cleanly or shattered.”

  I thought. “Clean.” Strangely, abruptly severed. She had me going he
re. The ends of the ribs and the shortened breastbone looked odd. Certainly not chewed or fractured.

  She shrugged. “Not a bite, then.”

  “Okay,” I played along. “Not all bodies had neck bites. Those that did, the neck bites were killing bites, and those were like an animal might make.”

  She nodded and shrugged.

  “So if those might be a genuine animal, you’ve got some theory about the other bites—the ones on the thighs?”

  She huffed. “What, in the simplest observation, is the thighbone in comparison to the other bones in the body?”

  “The biggest.”

  “Yup. The biggest, toughest bone. The thigh bites were a test or demonstration of strength. Nothing else.” She peered at me. “That doesn’t sound like an animal to me.”

  It sounded obvious once she’d said it. But why would a Were keep testing its jaw strength?

  “Tell me something else about last night,” she said.

  The image of the body was too fresh in my mind. “The abdominal organs were all missing.”

  “I knew that when you mentioned the ribs. Something else.”

  “She was tied down. Marlin spikes were driven into the floor.”

  “And left there? Oh.” Her nose flared and she nodded. “Well, that fits well with my theory.”

  “Okay, you’ve hooked me,” I said, frustrated. “Tell me your theory.”

  “He’s just flipped them off. That was his goodbye.”

  I had a vague idea where she was going. But she was wrong, though proving that to her would mean giving her more information, and just as I had with Noble earlier, I was getting really worried about how much I gave away when I didn’t mean to.

  “What’s your reasoning?” I asked her instead.

  “You’ve seen cold cases going back five or six years?” She looked at me inquiringly and I nodded. “All of them with some indication of canine involvement? Well, you would have been better off trawling the whole cold case murder list.”

  Her words chilled me.

  “There are more?”

  “Lots more,” she said. “He’s prolific, and I predict there will be even more that we haven’t found and most of them, we never will. The other thing you could have trawled is the missing persons files.”