“This kind of thing is supposed to happen when you live in an apartment,” Kyle told me, crumpling the latest note in his hand. “Not in a four-thousandsquare-foot house on three-quarters of an acre.”
“We need to have a paintball game in the backyard,” I told Kyle. “I could invite the pack.”
“Escalation is not a solution,” Kyle said, though he’d smiled at the thought. He’d seen some of our paintball games. “Right now the city is on our side. We want to keep it that way.” Since Mr. Francis moved in, the folks in city hall, the police department, the zoning commission, and the building code enforcement office had all grown to know us by name.
“I know,” I groused, unlocking the front door. “As long as we act like adults, there’s nothing he can do to us.”
Kyle followed me into the foyer. His house was the first place I’d ever lived that was big enough to have a foyer.
“I could move,” he said reluctantly.
“Nah,” I rubbed his head affectionately—Kyle loved his house. “You’d miss Dick and Jane.”
Dick and Jane were the life-size naked statues in the foyer. The woman was currently wearing a little Bo Peep bonnet he’d found somewhere and a green silk sari that had belonged to his grandmother. Dick was still sporting the knitted winter hat with the long tail and a poof ball on his pride and joy because Kyle hadn’t found anything he thought was funnier yet.
“We could move back into your apartment.”
That apartment was a point of contention. He said I was keeping it because I didn’t believe that he really understood he was sleeping with a werewolf. He also said I was being stupid because he was mine as long as I never lied to him again, werewolf or not. Kyle was a smart man. He was right about why I kept it—but I wasn’t sure he was right about the rest. So I hadn’t given up the apartment yet.
Proposing a move back to it showed that Mr. Francis was getting to him. If so, the time might have come to quit playing nice.
My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and took a look. It wasn’t a number I knew, but that wasn’t unusual anymore—I was starting to get a little work from people unconnected to the law firm.
“Warren here,” I said.
“This is Nadia,” said the witch’s niece. “Listen, Aunt Elizaveta wants me to go talk to the dead woman’s husband tomorrow. I can do that, but I thought it might be useful if you came along. You can tell when someone’s lying, right?”
“I can,” I agreed. “But won’t that arouse the wrong people’s interest if you’re out questioning people?” Wrong people like the police. I’d thought she intended to do a little magical forensics and leave the questioning to me.
“That’s one of the things I’m good at,” Nadia said. “People don’t remember me asking them things if I don’t want them to. If no one reminds him, he’ll eventually even forget I came by.”
I thought about that a moment, not entirely happy about what she said.
“I can’t do it to you,” she said anxiously. “Or anyone who is alert for it. It’s an uncommon talent—that’s why Aunt Elizaveta picked me to be one of her students.”
“I was just thinking that I have a few people to question as well,” I told her. “How ’bout I go out with you and then take you with me? We can have a cooperative investigation.”
“Cooperative investigation,” she said. “Sounds good to me.”
“Let me pick you up,” I told her. “If I leave my truck here another day, it’s liable to be towed or have all the tires slashed.”
Nadia laughed because she thought I was kidding, and we made arrangements to meet the next morning.
NADIA’S HOUSE WAS AN F HOUSE IN A SEA OF ALPHABET HOUSES IN RICHLAND. The government had done Richland a favor with all the World War II–era carbon-copy houses: kept it from looking like all the other well-heeled towns I’ve seen. A stranger to the Tri-Cities would be justified in thinking that it was the poorest of the cities rather than arguably the wealthiest, at least in absolute house values. The F houses were small, two-story, Federal-style houses that looked somewhat regrettably like the houses in a Monopoly game.
I wondered if Nadia chose her house because it disappeared into the woodwork the same way she did. I drove up her narrow, bumpy driveway and she ran out the door.
“Aunt Elizaveta is not happy,” she informed me a little breathlessly as she fastened herself in. “I hope we find something today.” She was lying about the last part, which puzzled me a little.
“What’s wrong with your great-aunt?” I asked, pulling out into traffic.
“She couldn’t find any magic signature on the body or the clothes the zombie was dressed in, except for mine and hers. That means there’s a witch or priest out and about who is skilled enough to hide from my aunt.”
There was just a hint of a smile on her face; I reckon it wouldn’t be easy to be at Elizaveta’s beck and call. Might be fun to see her stymied once in a while. That would explain the earlier lie.
“Where are we meeting Toni McFetters’s husband?” I asked.
“At his house. He’s on compassionate leave.” She gave me the address. “The children are at his in-laws’ house. He told me that when I called him yesterday and told him we’re investigating his wife’s disappearance. Our questioning should just blend in with that of the police if I can manage it right. It helps that he’ll be the only one to work on.”
Toni’s husband’s house was only a couple of blocks from Nadia’s, in a newer neighborhood—no alphabet houses at all. It was a big house, not as upscale as Kyle’s house, but not an inexpensive property either.
I pulled up in front and turned off the truck. “We can keep this short. All we need is to find out if he killed her or knows who did. And if he’s noticed anything suspicious.”
“Why don’t you do the talking?” she said. “I’ll work better if all I have to do is the magic.”
I didn’t like it, this business of messing with someone’s mind, any more than I had liked lying to Kyle before he knew that I was a werewolf. But I’d lost my innocence a long time ago.
The man who let us in smelled of desperation. He matched his wife in good looks—or would have with a few more hours of sleep—but showed none of the signs of vanity that a lot of good-looking men display, men like Kyle for instance. McFetters’s haircut was basic; his clothes were off the rack and fit indifferently.
Before I asked a single question, I knew that he had had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.
“Mr. McFetters, thank you for speaking to us,” I told him, refusing his offer to come in and sit down. “This won’t take long.”
“Call me Marc,” he said. “Has anyone found out anything?”
“No,” I said. It was a lie, but in a good cause. “Did anything happen in the past few weeks—before your wife disappeared—that caught your attention? Strangers in the neighborhood, someone your wife noticed when she was out jogging?”
He rubbed his hands over his head as if to jar his memory. “No,” he said, sounding lost. “No. Nothing. I usually jog with her, but I got a late start that morning; we’d . . . Anyway she has an extra hour before she has to be at work. She says she can’t think without her morning run.”
“What was she wearing?” I asked, and listened to a detailed rundown that proved that whoever said that straight men don’t pay attention to clothes was wrong.
“She was wearing a pink jogging suit we’d picked up in Vegas—it was her favorite, even though the right knee had a hole from where she fell a few weeks ago. She had size-eight Nikes—silver with purple trim. She likes her green running shoes better, but they clash with the pink. She wore the topaz studs I got her for our anniversary in her ears, and her wedding ring . . . white gold with a quarter-carat Yogo sapphire I dug up when I was eighteen and on a family vacation.” There was a sort of desperate eagerness in his voice as he went on without prompting to describe their usual running route; as if he believed that somehow, if he could only
manage to give enough details, it would help him find his wife.
He ran down, eventually, and, almost at random, his gaze focused on Nadia. He frowned. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I? What was your name again?”
“Nadia,” she said.
“Did you go to Richland High?” He rubbed his hair again and tried to find the proper social protocol.
“Along with half of Richland,” she said in a gentle voice. “It’s not important right now, Marc.”
“Did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?” I asked as gently as I could, pulling him back to important things. He hadn’t. I’d have bet my life on it, but for Elizaveta, I’d get absolute proof.
“No.” He blinked at me, as if the thought were too strange to contemplate. He wasn’t angry or offended, just bewildered. “No. I love Toni. I need to find her but I don’t know where to look.” Bewildered and terrified. “Where should I look?”
I SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND US AND WAITED WHILE NADIA MUTTERED A little under her breath and dropped a few herbs she had in a baggie on the steps.
“Well?” she asked after climbing in beside me.
I drove away from Toni McFetters’s house before I answered her. Churning in my gut was the understanding that if I hadn’t been with Kyle last night when the zombie came, I’d be in much the same state as Marc McFetters.
“We need to find who did this. That man doesn’t deserve the police jumping down his throat.”
“He didn’t kill her,” she said, but it was more of a question than a statement. I couldn’t believe that she’d been in the same room I had and hadn’t recognized the man’s innocence. Witches don’t have a wolf’s nose, I suppose.
“Absolutely not.”
“Good,” she said. “He was right, we did go to high school together. A geeky kid, but a real sweetie.” She shifted nervously in her seat as if she felt uncomfortable. “So that leaves us where?” Her question was a little fast. Maybe she’d liked Marc McFetters more than she was comfortable with me knowing. He seemed like a good man.
“We’re going to have some conversations with a few people who are very unhappy with Kyle.”
THERE WERE FOUR PEOPLE I WANTED TO CHECK OUT. IT MIGHT SURPRISE people who knew him that the list wasn’t longer: Kyle did not make friends of the opposition in the courtroom. He was, however, fair and honest—which meant that most of the opposing lawyers got over their anger pretty fast.
I’d decided somewhere along the way that the zombie animator had been hired to assassinate Kyle. Gut instincts were always important to the detectives in the movies, but they were more so to werewolves. Mostly, gut instincts were just little bits of information floating around that resolved themselves into the most likely scenario.
That meant that we were looking for two different people. The one who did the hiring, and the one who was hired. Motive. My license might be new, but I was old. I’d survived because I understood what moved people, why they acted and why they did not. Old werewolves aren’t that common; most of us who survive the Change die in fights with other werewolves shortly thereafter, because most werewolves don’t understand body language. They also don’t think. They trust their fangs and claws—even though other wolves have fangs and claws, too. I watched and learned.
Motive was easier to find than an assassin for hire. I’d find the man who wanted Kyle dead, and then I’d find the killer. That was why my list wasn’t longer. Today we’d try the people who hated Kyle and could still afford to hire an assassin after Kyle got through with them in court. If I didn’t find a likely suspect, tomorrow I’d leave Nadia at home, call in the pack, and go hunting for someone who’d hate me enough to kill the man I loved.
I’d called Sean Nyelund’s office and made an appointment to see him under the name of my pack Alpha—Adam Hauptman—before I picked up Nadia that morning.
Nyelund worked in a newer office building in Kennewick, making money with other people’s savings. He was good at it. Very good.
What he had not been good at was taking care of his own. He got the possession down fine, but not the concern for their welfare that should have gone along with it. His wife had sneaked out of his house in her underwear and hid in a neighbor’s garage for three hours before they’d found her. It was the first time she’d been out of the house in two years. Now she lived in Tennessee with her family, a good chunk of the money her husband had made in his life, and a new husband who was good with his guns.
Nyelund hated Kyle, and he certainly had the money to hire an assassin. The only question was—had he?
Sean’s receptionist was a pretty young thing not long out of high school. She had a bright smile to match the bright voice I’d talked to on the phone. Her eyes were frightened.
“Just a moment, let me announce you,” she told me. Then she picked up her phone. “Mr. Hauptman to see you, sir.”
A human wouldn’t have heard the quiet “Send him in.”
He had his back to us when we entered his office, typing rapidly on a keyboard. It was a power play that worked against him because I shut the door and used a little pack magic to keep the noise confined to this room. We wolves don’t have much magic other than the shifting itself, but what we do have is good for keeping our business private.
He turned around, “Mr. Haupt—” and then he saw who I was. He stiffened subtly, his hand hidden by the desk—and then he noticed Nadia. His hands were suddenly both clearly visible on the top of his desk. “Ah, I see. Mr. Smith, using pseudonyms now? I wasn’t aware you had enough money to invest. Perhaps the lady?”
Nyelund looked like a slightly overweight soft-bodied, soft-minded kind of guy, the kind who should be out saving puppies on the street corner. He had dimples and good manners. It was his eyes that gave him away, cold and assessing. If he hadn’t been smart, he’d already have been in jail.
“I thought it would save some time,” I said. “Did you order a hit on Kyle Brooks?”
“Would I do such a thing?” he asked, spreading his hands out. Just a good ol’ boy, that was Sean Nyelund. “I don’t know where you came up with that idea.”
I questioned him for twenty minutes or so and couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. It could mean that he’d done it. It could mean that he was thinking about doing it—or that he enjoyed the hell out of frustrating me. Hard to tell.
Finally, he said, “Go away, Mr. Smith. You bore me. Come back if you have money to invest.”
“You take care, now,” I said, tipping an imaginary hat. “I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”
He grunted and turned back to his computer.
Nadia worked her magic under the cover of my opening the door, and then we strolled out past the receptionist.
“He pulled a gun on you,” Nadia said, belting in.
“I saw it,” I told her. “You saved me, darlin’ girl.”
She laughed. “Or reassured him that you weren’t about to attack.”
“Could be,” I acknowledged, but thought that Nyelund would happily have shot me if he could have gotten away with it. Something to keep in mind.
“What did you learn?” she asked. “I couldn’t tell anything about him.”
“The jury is out on Nyelund,” I told her. “He makes such a point of not answering questions, he might as well be fae.”
“Does he know that you’re a werewolf?” she asked. “And that werewolves can smell lies?”
I shook my head, relatively certain of my answer. The public might know about werewolves—but I wasn’t taking out advertising. Kyle knew, but he was pretty much the only human who did. Using Adam’s name might make Nyelund suspicious—Adam had become a celebrity once the word got out that he was the local pack Alpha. If I were Nyelund, though, I’d bet that the celebrity part was why I’d used Adam’s name, not the Alpha-werewolf part. And should he think I was a werewolf anyway, he couldn’t prove anything and it just might make Kyle a mite safer.
If Nyelund was smart and subtle, Phi
llip Dean, the next man on my list, was a different kettle of fish. He’d done some time after Kyle worked his magic in court—but only because he was stupid and talked his way into jail by threatening the judge. Dean was a nasty brute who’d inherited his father’s money a couple of years ago. The money wasn’t really enough to hire anyone—but he had the contacts, and it was only a matter of time before he killed someone. He’d almost managed to make it his ex-wife and wouldn’t mind at all making Kyle Brooks his first kill.
He also, as it turned out after I made a few phone calls, was vacationing in Florida—Disney World.
“Doesn’t mean it isn’t him,” I told Nadia. “But he’s kinda a long shot anyway. Doesn’t think ahead very well, though he’s cunning enough when cornered.”
“So? Where to now?”
“Ms. Makenzie Covington.”
“A woman?”
I smiled at her. “Most of Kyle’s clients are women, but he takes on cases for men, too. Ms. Covington is a real piece of work; tried to pose as the abused wife so that she could take her ex to the cleaners—she was not happy when Kyle proved that she inflicted her bruises herself. Her ex-husband’s bruises were also her doing. She lost visitation rights—not that she cared about the kids, but it humiliated her in front of her friends. Two years from now, she’ll be off tormenting her third or fourth husband, and wouldn’t make my list. Six weeks after her divorce, though, her ire is still focused pretty hard on Kyle.”
“Why not on her ex?”
I smiled a bit grimly. “By the time she got through with him, all he could say was ‘Yes, dear’ and look at the ground. Kyle was the one who humiliated her and protected her victim.”
Makenzie Covington worked at home—which was currently a condo in South Richland. She was striking rather than beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, and strong features, she looked like a passionate woman who lived life to its fullest. Which was sort of true. She didn’t recognize me when she answered her doorbell.
I introduced myself and Nadia.
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