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“And to avoid killing him if he’s innocent of the crime,” Newman added.
“That, too,” I said.
Newman went for his phone to call the judge who’d put his name on the warrant. I went to get the last cup of coffee out of the pot. Maybe I could persuade Leduc to make a second pot. We were going to get to see the sunrise, and no one was talking about sleep. We were going to need more coffee.
25
LEDUC MADE COFFEE, and we helped him finish off a second pot before Newman got anyone to answer a phone at any of the numbers that he had for this area. They were all still asleep an hour past dawn on a Sunday, lazy bastards, and we still hadn’t gotten the actual judge on the phone. Clerks were useful, but they couldn’t change the parameters of the warrant; only the judge who signed it could do that. In all the time I’d been hunting monsters, I’d never tried to get a judge to change a warrant, so I had no idea how it worked or even if there was a step in the legal system to cover it. Surely there was, or if not, there needed to be, but I honestly didn’t know. I wasn’t used to this much downtime when I was hunting monsters. It had given me enough time to text Edward and let him know Olaf was here. Since he hadn’t texted back or called, I had to assume he was on a plane on his way here.
Olaf came to stand next to me against the wall. I tensed up, waiting for something creepy, or at least sexist, but he asked, “Do you normally just wait like this?”
“Wait like what?”
He motioned with his coffee mug at Newman trying yet another phone call and Kaitlin trying to get the images of the two very different footprints up on the computer so they could be sent to the judge when he finally returned the call. Livingston and Duke were talking quietly together in the far corner.
“While they gather evidence and talk to lawyers, do you just wait and do nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
He frowned down at me.
“I’ve never been on a case like this. I come into town, round up the bad guys, hang ’em high, and get out of Dodge.”
His frown became a scowl. “You meant that as a metaphor of some kind, didn’t you?”
I had a minute to remember that his first language wasn’t English, though he spoke it perfectly now. The one thing that travels least well between languages is slang. I’d grown up watching old Westerns, and he probably hadn’t.
“Even I have never hung one of my victims,” he said.
I sighed. He just couldn’t help himself; he always had to push it to the next level of disturbing.
He noticed my expression and knew it wasn’t happy. “Have you hung one of yours? Vampires can’t even die from suffocation. It seems very inefficient even for shapeshifters.”
I shook my head. “No, I have never executed anyone by hanging them. What I meant is that we’re like Old West lawmen. We ride into town, shoot the bad guys, and then we leave. I’m not used to waiting around like this either.”
“Ah,” he said, and took a drink. I think he drank to give himself time to think about what he wanted to say next. He cared about how I reacted to him. He didn’t always care in the way I wanted him to, or the way that a non–serial killer would, but within his limits he was trying.
“The monster is locked up and maybe innocent. I’ve never had that happen before.”
“The way the law is written, his guilt or innocence doesn’t matter,” he said.
“If you mean the warrants of execution are worded in such a way that we could kill him and not go to jail, you’re right. If you were any other fellow marshal, I wouldn’t say this, but it’s not about covering our asses legally. It’s about doing what’s right.”
“You do not think I have a sense of right and wrong?” he asked, his voice low, and I realized that to the rest of the room, we looked like Livingston and Duke: just two cops talking shop.
“I think your sense of right and wrong isn’t the same as most people’s.”
“That is true,” he said.
“I want to kill the person who killed Ray Marchand, not the person who was framed for the crime.”
“So, you agree with Newman that it’s about not allowing the murderer to use you.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What is the other part?”
“I took this job believing that if I killed the monster, it would save the lives of all their future victims. Killing the monsters keeps the rest of us safe. But killing someone that hasn’t gone rogue doesn’t save lives. It just takes a life.”
