That was okay. Cade was willing to chew over the sour memory of puke and bile to keep the grudge fresh.
“What about you?” he asked. “Have you toed the line?”
“Unlike you, O’Haraismy boss,” Marlow said. The corner of his mouth tilted up slightly, a flicker of sly humor, and he added, “Of course, Haley’s death is my case. So I’ve put feelers out to see if anyone else has turned up traps or logged any suspicious injuries or deaths after the full moon.”
“And?” Cade asked, his voice clipped and deliberately abrupt.
Marlow pulled an annoyed face. “It’s hard to pin down,” he said. “A wolf wakes up one morning missing half a foot, it could have been caused in an accident, a fight with another wolf, or—”
“Or a trap,” Cade finished.
“Exactly,” Marlow said. “One thing is that there has been an uptick in moon-hangover deaths in the last few months. Three train-related deaths, one suicide, two deaths by misadventure when they took a wrong turn in the desert. More than usual this time of year, but not enough to raise any red flags. I’ve put a request in for their files. If there’s something there, maybe I can pinpoint it. What about you? Anything?”
Cade flicked the images from Lem’s report up onto the screen on the wall. Photos slid over each other and slotted into a rough grid-like pattern of faces pulled from a variety of sources—selfies, work IDs, mugshots. Three women and four men, all of whom had maintained some sort of steady contact with Piper since he’d been in prison.
“Do you know any of these people?” he asked. “Did you ever see any of them around, back in the day?”
Marlow got up and walked over to stand in front of the screen. He absently pulled his glasses off, the smoked lenses and wire frames dangled by one leg from his fingers as he studied the faces.
“Well?”
“It was ten years ago,” Marlow said. He didn’t bother to look around at Cade. “And we didn’t exactly move in the same circles. He didn’t become a crooked cop to hang out with guys working with a rookie’s salary.”
Cade came around the front of the desk and leaned back against it. He crossed his arms and made a soft sound of disgust in the back of his throat.
“He sounds like a great boss,” he said, without any attempt to dilute the sarcasm.
Marlow glanced around at him. A wry smile tugged at the side of his mouth as he raised his eyebrows. “If I asked, would you know the janitor’s name?”
“We don’t have a janitor; we have a cleaning service,” Cade said. He nodded to the screen to redirect the conversation before Marlow could ask what anyone else was called. “Think back. Anything?”
Marlow scrutinized the faces again for a moment. Finally, he shrugged and pointed to two of them, one in the right corner and one just slotted in left of center. One man. One woman.
“These two look familiar.”
The man in the middle was wiry and miserable-looking, with one dull brown eye and three raw-looking scars livid on the right side of his face. He was a wolf, so he’d got them young… same as Cade, and without the chance to hide them. At the top, the woman was bright-eyed and glossy, her face blurred with carefully applied makeup until she looked airbrushed. She had a hard line about her mouth.
“Lance Rilkes and Maria Cafolla,” Cade identified them confidently. The background checks had been thorough; he probably knew them as well as any of their relatives did. “Both nulls. Lance gets a call from Piper once a month, and the next day he gets a grand deposited in his account. Do you have any idea why?”
“No, but I know who he is,” Marlow said. He paused for a moment and then hedged that statement with a shrug. “Maybe. Piper used to tell this story about when he was a kid. Him and a bunch of his friends used to hang out at each other’s houses during the full moon. One night, one of them shifted unexpectedly—an early bloomer. It happens sometimes; puberty isn’t great at schedules.”
The back of Cade’s throat felt raw and itchy, like he’d eaten peppers. He’d been twelve the first time. Early, by most people’s standards, but not his dad’s. The Deacons all shifted early—he’d sworn that up and down and called Cade a bastard when he was eleven and still hadn’t changed. He’d thought that self-preservation could force the turn, and he’d dragged Cade out into the snow naked and left him up a tree. Change or freeze. He’d not cared which.
It hadn’t worked, neither one. The wolf came out when the moon wanted, and his step-mother always cached a key to the front door and one of his coats in a hollow tree stump the day before.
“How many died?” he asked.
“Nobody,” Marlow said. He didn’t look around to catch Cade’s skeptical look, but he shrugged like he’d seen it anyhow. “According to Piper, they all grabbed the kid as it started and tried to drag him outside. They might have managed it, but one of the kids panicked and got all cut up. Piper saved him, led the wolf outside, and they ran straight into the Night Shift.”
The idea of someone touching you mid-shift made Cade’s stomach turn uneasily. He probably wouldn’t remember it, but the thought made the back of his neck itch as if he still had hackles. Cade scrubbed his hand roughly over the bare skin to try and redirect the discomfort.
“Well, that’s an inspirational tale,” he said.
“He told it better,” Marlow said.
Cade curled his lip and mouthed, “he told it better,” sarcastically to himself. The man had tried to kill Marlow, for fuck’s sake; why defend his reputation?
And, Cade reminded himself with resigned amusement as he pushed himself up off the desk, hadn’t he decided not to care what Marlow did anymore? It had been a lot easier to amputate his feelings for people when he’d been young and desperate.
