Hunter's Trail

Jesse didn’t respond. He had crouched down next to the corpse and was staring intently at her face.

“Jesse?” I asked.

“I know her,” he said softly. “I mean, I know her name.” He looked up at me. “When I went through missing persons reports at the station today,” he went on. “Her picture was attached to one of them. I saw that she was Asian and I clicked past it, but her name is . . . Kathryn. Kathryn Wong.”

“You’re sure?” I asked, and Jesse nodded.

He looked back at the dead girl, peering at the girl’s injuries. “See these?” he said, pointing to the wounds on her shoulders. He moved his hand until he was pointing at her shins. “And these? It’s a progression.”

“What do you mean, progression?” Will asked, frowning.

“He started at the top and worked his way down,” Jesse said absently. “See, the scratches up here stopped bleeding a while ago—they’re even starting to scab over. But the ones on her legs are raw.”

“Oh my God,” Will said, staring. “You’re right.” Will’s eyes unfocused suddenly, calculating.

“What does that mean to you?” Jesse asked, looking at Will’s expression. Will didn’t answer.

I tried not to imagine how the girl’s last moments must have gone, but it was impossible. She must have been in agonizing pain, trying to get away, bleeding. He must have attacked her upper body first, waited a little while, and gone after her torso. Then waited a little longer and come after her legs. It was eerily methodical, like he’d been waiting for something to happen in between each attack.

Playing a hunch, I added, “Will? Is he trying to change them?”

Will’s distant eyes flickered back to me. “It’s definitely a possibility,” he said at last. “I can’t tell if she bled out, or if the magic took her.”

Werewolf magic is contagious, but only through body fluids, and just a little bit won’t usually get the job done. So if somebody gets a single bite or scratch, they’ll most often recover and go about their lives. But the more magic-tinged blood or saliva that a person absorbs, the more the magic gets in. And if enough magic gets in, the body will try to make the transformation. Sometimes it works, and the person becomes a werewolf. Sometimes—more and more often in the last couple of decades—it doesn’t work, and the magic overwhelms the human body, killing the victim.

Jesse and Will were both staring down at the body, unmoving, so I broke in. “Guys?” I said, snapping my fingers. “Body now? Talk later?”

The men looked up at me, and under different circumstances their identical startled expressions would have been funny. “You’re right,” Will said heavily. “We’ve got to get rid of it.”

“Her,” Jesse corrected. “We’ve got to get rid of her.” His voice was loaded with . . . something. Resentment? Anger? I didn’t have time to worry about it. It seemed to me like this was a personal, werewolf-to-werewolf kind of thing, but there was still the chance that the guy who’d done this would call a tip in to the police, planning to frame Will for murder. And Jesse definitely couldn’t be here if that happened. Will and I could probably get clear of something like that with Dashiell’s help, but Jesse’s career would be over.

I stumped over to the duffel bag, which Jesse had dropped inside the door, and pulled out one of my good body bags. Leah Rhodes had seemed like a twisted collection of gore by the time I’d gotten to her, but Kathryn Wong . . . She still seemed like a person. One who had suffered, and one who would now be shoved in a furnace and forgotten. She deserved every bit of respect I could give her.

I instructed Jesse and Will to lay the body bag out next to the body, unzip it, and sort of roll her in. Jesse had seen this done dozens of times on LAPD crime scenes, and Will had covered up more than one murder because of his wolves, so they were both pretty stoic about it—until they flipped her over. The woman’s legs and arms looked like her front, but her lower back was smooth and unbloodied. Instead of a hundred gashes, there was just a single knife wound, about five inches long and scabbed over. It was a loop and a quick slash—a number two.

Jesse paused, squatting down to peer closely at the mark. “This one was a knife, I think,” he said tightly. “It looks like it happened before the other marks.”

When he didn’t move, I gave him a little nudge. He looked up at me, startled, and there was anger in his eyes. “We need to move,” I reminded him gently. I was getting antsier by the minute.

Jesse nodded, and he and Will zipped the girl into the body bag. Will’s face was troubled and thoughtful. “You’re going to the Valley, right?” he asked. “I’ll ride with you. I might have a theory.”

Jesse’s eyes widened, but I just shrugged my acquiescence. We had to come back to Will’s anyway, so Jesse could get his car. Jesse carefully picked up the body bag and carried it outside, to the back of the van. He didn’t wait for me, and by the time I made it back to the Whale, he was closing the built-in refrigerator compartment and hopping down from the vehicle. He gave me a look as I approached, and that one expression was loaded with so many emotions that it seemed to weigh him down, his shoulders slumping forward under the load. I didn’t know if he was upset about the girl’s murder, or how she’d died, or the fact that we were going to destroy her remains, or the fact that he was helping. Maybe all of them. Now wasn’t the time to ask, though.