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“I do not,” Olaf said.
Bobby kept shaking his head and backed away from the bars. “No, I finally started remembering again. I’ve never remembered the wrong thing before.”
“Have you ever hurt anyone before?” Duke asked.
Bobby shook his head. “No, my mentor, my sponsor, was with me from my first full moon.”
“Why did you change form on the dark of the moon? Even a new Therianthrope would have been safe that far away from full,” I said.
Maybe if I could get Bobby talking about something else useful, I could head off the emotions that were all over his face and body language. I’d seen other shapeshifters when they realized that they’d killed someone they loved by accident. The realization was never pleasant, and the shock looked just like this.
Bobby blinked at me as if he was having trouble drawing himself back from whatever was in his head. “What?”
Olaf tried, “Why did you change so far away from the full moon?”
“She asked,” Bobby said, and then he stopped talking as if he hadn’t meant to answer.
“Who asked?”
Bobby just shook his head.
“Who is she?” Olaf asked.
Bobby shook his head again, lips held in a tight thin line as if he were literally holding his lips closed so he wouldn’t say more. He was protecting someone, and I didn’t think it was himself.
“You’re remembering tearing Ray apart, Bobby,” Duke said.
“No, it was a deer!”
“You’re not sure of that, are you, Bobby?” Duke said.
Bobby frowned. “I was.”
“Stop it, Duke,” said Wagner in the other cell.
“You’re on my shit list already, Troy. Don’t pile it higher.”
“No, Duke, you could always do that with Bobby and me and some of the other boys. You could talk us up for a game or talk us down for something you thought we’d done wrong, but this isn’t who threw a ball through Miss Bunny’s window, Duke. This is Bobby’s life on the line. Don’t fuck him over.”
“I should let the staties take you with them when they leave, Troy.”
“What happens to Wagner is up to you, but this isn’t some regular crime, Sheriff. If you get Bobby to confess, he doesn’t get held over for trial. One of us takes him out and fucking kills him,” I said.
“Win should have done that when we were still cleaning up Ray’s body.”
I looked at Leduc, really looked into his brown eyes, gave him some serious eye contact. He met my look with a bored one of his own. I was betting that was his blank cop face; every officer had one if they stayed on the job any length of time. It was the face we used to hide anything we were thinking. Some looked bored, uninterested, distracted, even faintly amused, but we all had a version, like a mask we could hide behind. It was so suspects didn’t know what we were thinking or other cops didn’t read us when we were hiding things. Sometimes all we were hiding was that we were scared, or disgusted about the crime at hand, and to show it would be weak, but sometimes we were hiding things that made us bad cops, and we didn’t want the other cops to find out.
I searched Leduc’s eyes and tried to figure out which reason had made him drop the cop look over his face like a mask. I wasn’t a suspect, but Bobby was, and Leduc had already shown all sorts of emotions in front of him and us marshals. It seemed a little late to be hiding his emotions behind the mask.
Bobby sat down on the bunk in his cell, head in his hands. He was muttering something that I couldn’t understand.
“Sorry, Bobby. I didn’t catch that,” I said.
He looked up. “I remember the deer. It should be in the tree.”
Frankie said, “Maybe Rico missed it?”
Duke said, “I’ve gone deer hunting with Rico. He knows what a deer looks like, and he’s the best shot among all of you deputies.”
