“I have connections with one unit, but that’s in case something comes my way by accident. Any hint of organized Islamist activity, and I turn it over to them.”
“Well, there we are.” He made a fist with his right hand and punched it into his left palm. “That’s really all I can tell you.”
“I don’t like working in the dark. I’ll contact my handler and tell him to end our involvement.”
Again the stare. His Subliminal Psychological Profile registered the highest level of stunned disbelief I’d ever run across.
“I mean it,” I said.
“I can see that.” He hesitated, glanced at the door, glanced back at me. “Oh, very well! It’s because of the gaps in the itinerary. We have no idea of how he got from Israel to Syria, from Syria to Iran, and from Iran to here. For all we know he could have made ten other stops in between, and none of our stringers or operatives saw him—or so they say.”
I could recognize that signal and link it to a remark he’d made during the briefing. His superiors suspected that traitors or moles in their network were suppressing information or supplying disinformation or maybe both. Nathan had been assigned to do an end run around them by working backward from San Francisco.
“I think we’re touching on something that’s none of my business,” I said.
Nathan nodded and sighed in a brief puff of relief.
“Except for one last thing,” I said.
He winced.
“Why my agency?”
“I honestly don’t know. I asked my immediate superior about that last night. He hemmed and hawed and talked all around the point.” Once again he slammed his fist into the palm of the other hand. “I had the distinct impression that he wasn’t completely sure himself. The higher-ups suspect something peculiar is at work, but they don’t know what.” For a brief moment he looked furious. “I’m the one who’s working in the dark, actually.”
His SPP indicated these doubts were genuine.
“As to why I’m here personally,” he went on, “and not some other agent, my language skills may have had something to do with the assignment. I can get by in a number of foreign languages besides English. It allows me to work for Interpol, which I quite legitimately do. Interpol keeps its eyes on terrorism, you know, and I’ve some experience with that.”
Since this matched what our contacts had reported, I believed him there as well.
“Lucky old you.” I gestured at the couch. “Have a seat.”
Nathan sat down on the couch. I pulled the computer chair around to face him across the coffee table.
“About this werewolf business,” he began.
“Let me start with Pat’s friends,” I said. “He belonged to a group of werewolves, a pack, I’d guess you’d call it. That’s one thing I’ve learned from his journals. Let me check something here.”
The printout of the police report still lay where I’d dropped it. I felt my stomach twist as I picked up the folder and opened it. The victim was Mary Rose Romero, a student at the local Catholic college.
“And I bet that this poor girl,” I said, “belonged to it, too. Someone’s on the prowl for werewolves, and just maybe my brother was the first to die.”
Nathan crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me.
“Let me tell you what I know.” I set the report back down. “I was out of town at the time, unfortunately. Every month when the moon started to get full, Pat would get this urge to run through wild country. It got stronger and stronger as the change came on. So he’d go to some wilderness area for the big night itself. Luckily there’s a lot of open country around here.”
“I noticed that, yes, when my plane was circling to land.”
“So that particular month, he was visiting one of my sisters out in Marin County. He went out for the full moon night and never came back. When she went to look for him, she found a dead wolf. He’d been shot a couple of times, but with ordinary bullets, so he didn’t change back.”
Nathan held up one hand in the stop position. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you and your sister aren’t nutters or liars,” he said. “Why was she so sure the corpse was your brother?”
“Because there aren’t any real wolves within hundreds of miles of Marin County.”
“Oh. Did she call the police?”
“Of course not! Do you think they’d have listened? They would have reacted just like you’re doing. The only thing she could do was call the SPCA.”
“You’re having a joke on me, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“No, I’m not.” I was wiped out as well as grieving all over again, and tact lay beyond me. “Listen, you stubborn bastard, do you know how insulting you’re being?”
At that he had the decency to wince.
“The SPCA did try to find out who was shooting at wildlife out of season. The shooter couldn’t have had a permit, either.”
“You’d need a permit?”
“Of course. California wolves are an endangered species, and because of that, some animal rights groups took up the case. They assumed, of course, that Pat was a real wolf, one that escaped from a zoo or something, but they never found any missing wolf reports. They figured someone must have been keeping him as an illegal pet, a dope dealer or someone like that.”
Nathan leaned back and rested his head on the back of the couch so he could stare at the ceiling.
“Now what’s wrong?” I snapped.
“I’m trying to believe you.” He sounded personally affronted. “Missing wolf reports!”
“Okay, Mr. Smartass. Let me show you something. My brother Sean put this together for me. He knew I’d want to know the details.”
I’d kept the album Sean had made about Patrick’s death in the hopes of one day finding out what had really happened to him. It occurred to me, as I dug through my underwear drawer, that the day might have finally come. I retrieved the black album from under a pile of bras and stood up to find Nathan in the doorway, lounging against a doorjamb and watching.
“Nice bedroom,” he said.
“Just get back in the living room, will you?” I shoved the album into his hands. I was tempted to shove him, as well, but fortunately he grinned at me and left to sit down on the couch like a good boy.
I enjoyed watching his face when he opened the album. The first thing in it was a page from the Independent Journal, a local Marin newspaper, with pictures of my dead brother and the headline “GIANT WOLF SLAIN NEAR SAN ANSELMO.” Lycanthropy doesn’t produce instant weight loss. The wolf had weighed the same as Patrick, 150 pounds, and it stretched 5’9” from nose to tail, dimensions that shocked local wildlife experts. Because of that angle, the whole ghastly affair had gotten a lot of coverage in the San Francisco papers. Sean had clipped every article and pasted them in, weeping the entire time, or so he’d told me.
Nathan turned the pages slowly, carefully, reading every single yellowing page. Besides the information about the wolf, the album contained a couple of small articles about the missing persons report my mother had filed on Patrick in human form. She’d stayed in denial for months over his death. When Nathan reached the end, he shut the album with a snap and stared at me.
“Well?” I said.
“I’m trying to figure out,” he said, “how anyone could have worked this up for a hoax, and why they’d bother.”
“You stinking—”
“No, wait!” He held up a hand again. “My conclusion is that no one could have done that. I hate to admit this, but I’m starting to believe you. Look, I didn’t mean to sound so callous about your brother’s death. I just had my doubts about the werewolf business, that’s all.”
His SPP told me that he was apologizing as much as it was possible for him to apologize, but I had no intention of forgiving him. Apparently he hadn’t expected me to.
“These animal rights groups.” Nathan vaguely waved the album in my direction. “They wanted the police to find the shooter. I take it the
police refused.”
“The Marin sheriff asked around. He agreed that shooting anything out of season was some sort of misdemeanor, but that’s all he saw it as. Who could blame him?”
“You’ve got a point.” He laid the album down beside him on the couch. “You said your sister found the body. I’d like to talk with her. Is that possible?”
“I suppose so. Why?”
“Because you might be right about Johnson being the shooter. Local law enforcement’s treating him as a serial killer because the MO of the Romero murder matches the two Israeli cases. I have to agree. It could be that he’s got some sort of psychosis and thinks he sees werewolves everywhere.”
“It could be that he does see them.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
Another concession, and I wondered if anyone else had ever gotten two from him in the same day. “If I weren’t so tired,” I said, “I’d drive you out to Kathleen’s right now.”
“Well, you can sleep in the car, and I’ll drive—”
“No, you won’t. I don’t want to wake up dead. If you’ll just go away till, say, one o’clock, I’ll take a nap, and then I’ll drive you out.”
“Oh, very well.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go confer with the local police, anyway. Interpol has its protocols, and I need to keep up my cover. One o’clock it is.”
As soon as I’d gotten him out of my apartment, I went to bed. The coffee had no effect on me. I slept, and if I dreamed anything significant, I forgot it when the alarm went off. I staggered into the shower and finished waking up in the water, then combed out my wet hair and got dressed—in a denim pencil skirt and a striped blouse—before calling my sister.
We’d had to share a room when we were growing up, Kathleen and I, and we hated it and each other. We fought over space, plush toys, doll paraphernalia, books—anything and everything. She used to borrow my clothes without telling me, too. At one point I even put down a stripe of masking tape to divide the room into halves and dared her to step over the line. She did, of course. It took both of our older brothers to break up the resulting fight.
Looking back, I’m amazed that we both lived to grow up. But we did, and the old feud died somewhere around the time she asked me to be maid of honor at her wedding.
When I punched in her number, Kathleen answered immediately.
“Hi, Nola,” she said. “Aunt Eileen told me you were back.”
“I figured she would have.”
“You might have called me before this.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that. I was working into a new job and finding a place to live and all that stuff. Look, are you going to be home this afternoon? Something important’s happened.”
“Yeah, I will be. Important how?”
“I’ve been contacted by Interpol—that’s the international police agency, you know? They’re looking into Pat’s murder.”
I could hear her gasp, then a long silence before she answered in a shaky voice. “After all this time?”
“Yeah. There were two similar cases in Israel, is why. The cop in charge of the investigation wants to interview you.”
“Okay, bring him over. Just make sure you don’t let any of the cats out when I buzz you in.”
“I’ll be extra careful. Promise.”
There was a time when Marin County was a place of dairy farms and fishing villages and little country towns with quaint wooden houses and truck gardens, but no more. To buy in there now you need serious money, despite the shabby genteel optique that many wealthy Marinites favor. Kathleen had married very well indeed. Although their house, in San Anselmo a couple of miles behind Red Hill, had started life as a Victorian farm-house, over the years it had sprawled out into something much grander. It sat on four landscaped acres, with a pool and various outbuildings, all surrounded by a eighteen-foot-high chain-link fence.
When we got out of the car, Nathan retrieved his gray suit jacket from the back seat. As he shrugged into it, he noticed the fence. “Is there a reason for that?”
“Several.” I pressed the electric buzzer on the fence lock. “You’ll see.”
One reason greeted us at the gate in the form of six dogs, all rescued mutts, barking and leaping. Over the bobbing canine heads and flapping ears I could see up the flagstone path between the rhododendron bushes to the big white house. The front door eventually opened and Kathleen wandered out, dressed in her usual dirty jeans and a white shirt that, judging from the perfect cut and the way it fit, must have come from a name designer. She stood on the steps and yelled over the dog noise.
“Nola, is that you?”
“Yeah,” I called back. “With the police officer I told you about.”
“Okay.” She whistled to the dogs, who immediately canned the cacophony and raced back up the path.
“At least they’re well trained,” Nathan muttered.
“Uh, well, yeah,” I said. “Sort of.”
Kathleen pressed the electronic gizmo she was holding. The gate lock buzzed, and I opened the wire panel.
“Hurry!” I said to Nathan. “Get in before any of the cats get out.”
He obligingly darted inside, and I followed. I shut the gate fast and pulled till I heard the lock click. As we started up the path, I kept an eye out for more dogs, but Kath had sent her pack around the house to the garden. It’s not that she can talk with animals like Dr. Doolittle, rather that she communes with them, or so she describes it. She understands them, they understand her, and they do what she wants. When the wolf-form took Pat over, she was the only family member who could reach his actual mind within the wolf-mind.
“How many cats does she have?” Nathan said.
“Don’t ask,” I said. “I hope you’re not phobic or anything.”
“No. Just curious.”
On the way up to the porch I spotted a couple of feline faces among the shrubbery, plus one tabby lounging on the sunlit walk, who fled at the first sight of us. An elderly gray Persian sat on the porch and sneered as we climbed the steps.
“That’s four,” Nathan said.
Kathleen greeted me with a hug. Although all the O’Gradys are good-looking, Kath is one of the two beauties of the lot of us, with wide dark blue eyes and perfectly straight black hair that falls to her always slender waist. When we were teenagers, I had an additional reason to hate her beyond our having to share a room. All the boys flocked around her and never noticed me, or so I thought at the time.
“This is Inspector Ari Nathan,” I said. “From Interpol.”
“Cool.” Kath glanced his way. “Hi.”
“How do you do?” Nathan said.
She ignored him and led the way into the house. After the bright sunshine outside, the wood-paneled hallway was dark enough to make me blink. I nearly stumbled into the Louis Quinze writing desk that stood by the door into the living room. Kath switched on the Tiffany desk lamp. By its light I noticed that some feline vandal had ignored the forest of scratching posts in the hall and clawed one of the desk’s legs nearly through.
Cats scattered ahead of us or raced up the staircase beyond the living room. Nathan counted under his breath but stopped when he reached fifteen. I could catch the whiff of cat boxes on the air.
Despite its white walls, the living room lay in semi-darkness, thanks to the trees right outside the windows and the dark blue velvet furniture. Kath gestured at a couch, and I sat down at one end. Nathan paused to look at the Childe Hassam winter landscape—an original, of course—hanging over the mantel of the natural stone fireplace. He started to sit down on the middle cushion of the couch, but just as he was about to lower his seat onto the seat, something yowled and he yelped. He stood up fast as a gray and black striped cat shot off the sofa.
“Archie!” Kath intoned the name like a priestess in some ancient rite. “You know you’re not supposed to sit on the furniture in here. Go to your room!”
The cat stalked out, tail held up, a flag of defiance.
??
?Uh, sorry,” Kath said. “I hope he didn’t claw you.”
“No, no,” Nathan said. “It’s quite all right.”
“You’re a Brit?” Kath gave him a stiff smile. “At least they like animals.” She turned away before he could answer and glanced around the living room. “I guess the rest of the guys are somewhere else. Jack hates it when he sits on a lot of cat hair.”
“Especially when it’s still attached to the cat,” I said.
She grinned at me and flopped down into an overstuffed armchair opposite the sofa. “I’d offer you drinks,” she said, “but the police aren’t supposed to have them, are they? When they’re on duty, I mean.”
“Quite so.” Nathan reached inside his sports coat and brought out a small black box. “Now, Mrs. Donovan, is it?”
“That’s right.”
“This is a tape recorder. Do you mind if I record your answers?”
“Not at all. I’m just glad someone’s taking my brother’s murder seriously.”
“You’re sure it was murder?” Nathan clicked the recorder on. “And not accidental?”
“Nobody puts three bullets into an animal by accident.” Kath’s beautiful eyes filled with tears. “Sorry.” She wiped them away on the sleeve of her shirt. “It’s been a year, but just thinking about it—I get so mad—and the stupid sheriff wouldn’t do anything.” She glanced at me. “He knows about the lycanthropy, right?”
“Of course,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m sorry to make you relive the painful memory.” Nathan put on a professional sort of voice, calm, a little clipped. “But since the local law enforcement refused to file a detailed report, I’m relying on the newspaper accounts, and they’re never as accurate as they should be. I understand that you found the body out in the hills. May I ask how you knew where to find it?”
“Whoever shot him didn’t make a clean kill. Pat almost made it back to our meeting place. He used to come out here a lot for the full moons. I’d drive him up to the park and let him out of the car at the turnout, and then I’d go back and get him a couple of days later.”