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“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.
