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“He was sent to stay with a wereleopard pack that could train him up, is what I’ve been told by Bobby and everyone else.”
“It’s called a pard, not a pack, when it’s wereleopards. Pack is werewolves,” I corrected him without thinking about it.
“I’ll make a note,” he said.
“So, the domestic help never saw Bobby when he was uncontrollable,” I said.
“Apparently not.”
“Did other people say that Bobby ran around the house in leopard form or was it just the Chevets who said that?”
“Everyone says he had the run of the house in animal form. You know how cats will bring home mice or birds sometimes?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Except for the fact that Bobby brought home deer to stuff in the tree outside his window, he was like an indoor-outdoor cat.”
“Did he have only the one cat form, no bipedal form?” I asked. Bipedal was the new politically correct term for wolfman, or leopardman in this case. Bipedal wasn’t sexist and was about as gender-neutral as it was possible to be.
“No, just a leopard form. He’s actually almost the same size as a regular leopard.”
I stared at Newman. “Wereanimals are bigger than normal leopards.”
“When we get into the study where the murder happened, I can show you pictures of Bobby in animal form with his uncle and his cousin. If he’s bigger than ordinary leopards, it’s not by much.”
“Hmm, I’ve never known a wereanimal that wasn’t larger than its wild counterpart.”
“Well, Bobby did contract the disease in Africa from someone who had lived there all his life. Could it be a different kind of wereleopard from the ones we have here?”
I thought about that for a second or two, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never actually been anywhere out of the country except Ireland, and I didn’t see any lycanthropes in animal form on that trip. Come to think of it, the wereleopards back in St. Louis trace their original lineage to India, not to Africa. I didn’t think it would make a difference in the size of their beast, but maybe I’m wrong. I’ll ask when I get home if there’s a size variant depending on where your strain of lycanthropy originates.”
“If you find out, tell me please, because now I want to know.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I said. I directed the flashlight at the prints for him. “The prints on the downstairs floor and the first few steps are okay, but then about here”—I shone the light on the fifth step—“it’s wrong.”
“You mean the whole foot being on the step,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I noticed that, too.”
“You don’t place your full foot on every step so that it’s perfectly aligned like that,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” Newman agreed.
I shone the flashlight up near the top of the steps. “And then here it goes back to someone walking on the front of their foot, which would be more normal on stairs.”
“It was one of the first things that bothered me,” he said.
“There are a lot of old-school marshals that started out as vampire hunters that wouldn’t have looked at any evidence. They’d have just killed the lycanthrope, and that would have been that.”
“Well, good that I’m one of the new marshals,” he said.
“Yeah, it is.” I was one of the old-school. If it had been me, would I have walked the stairs and really looked at the prints, or would I have just executed the warrant and flown home? The prints might have slipped by me, but the blood on Bobby’s human body, especially placed where it was, would have struck me as wrong. Would Edward have looked for another answer? I knew Olaf as Marshal Otto Jeffries would have executed Bobby by now and been done with it.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Newman asked.
I shook my head. “Let’s look at the hallway upstairs and the room where they found Bobby. Then we’ll go downstairs to the main crime scene.”
