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I chased it.
I chased it through dinner and into my second cupcake, which I put down abruptly. “Holy fuck, are you fuckingkiddingme?”
“What?” Raj wanted to know.
Julep Howell was not, in fact, how her mother had accessed the records. Interestingly, I now would have bet a good deal of money that either Julep had no idea what her mother did on her weekendsorshe wasn’t speaking to her mother… because her husband was a member of the Howlers.
The Howlers were a canid shifter organization that claimed to help other canids ‘find their pack.’ There was a lot of back-to-nature spiritualist bullshit on their website about getting in touch with your inner canine and seeking out a pack where you could belong. But, more practically speaking, they helped provide canid shifters with housing, food, and jobs.
“Taavi,” I said softly. “Do you know about the Howlers?”
He looked up at me and chuffed. There was frosting on his nose. I reached out and brushed it off, then let him lick it off my fingers.
“Raj—all four North Carolina Nids were canid shifters.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Were they?”
I nodded. “Yep. Canid shifters are pretty common, so I didn’t think about it, since we’ve got canids from elsewhere, too.”
“What’re you saying?”
“Taavi, you stayed in a Howler hostel in Raleigh, didn’t you?”
This chuff was cut with a whine.
“Hart—”
I held up a hand to stall whatever it was Raj had been about to say.
“Dunn’s son-in-law is a Howler,” I said. “He works in the job placement division.”
Raj paled a little, his dark skin turning ashy. “You don’t think—”
“No, I don’t, actually,” I cut him off. “I think his evil bitch of a mother-in-law is trying to break up his marriage, and she’s doing it by turning in his friends.”
I turned my laptop around and showed Raj theHelp Find Carlospost on Luke Howell’s social media page.
“Carlos Verdejo is one of our victims. But he’s got no known family, so we didn’t have anyone to call.”
“Fuck,” Raj breathed.
The post showed several pictures of two smiling men, one big and blond—that was Luke Howell—and one slightly shorter and Latino—Verdejo. There was a third man in the photos, tagged in the image as George Bruce.
Bruce’s social media had shared multiple infographics about missing shifters, including Verdejo.
“You know about this?” I asked Raj, clicking over to George’s page.
Raj took my laptop from me. “How many are on our list?” he asked me, his voice rough.
“Nine. Three of them our North Carolina victims.”
“So how did Cornerstone get ahold of their information?” he asked.
I clicked over to the last website, the one that had made me put down my cupcake.
It was the staff page for Spotless Janitorial Services. Among the various headshots was one of a middle-aged woman in a light blue button-down shirt with the Spotless logo on it—the same shirt everyone wore in their photos. But this woman hadalsobeen on Louise Dunn’s social media feed, her arm around Louise in a post where the two women had been toasting glasses of wine with the caption “Time to wind down after cleaning up!”
I showed Raj that, too.
