Hunter's Trail

What would Jesse say? “Please, Mr. Mailt. Just humor me. I want to do everything I can to help you find your girlfriend,” I said, feeling like a worm.

I felt even worse when he apologized. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he said, holding his hands up deferentially. “I’ve just been frantic. Kate’s never done anything like this. She doesn’t just . . . disappear.” He leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees. “What can I tell you? Ask me anything.”

“Well, why don’t you start by telling me what Kate does for a living,” I said gently.

“Right, right.” He bobbed his head. “Let’s see . . . we both graduated from the film program at UCLA a few years ago. Kate went right into a job at Sony, and I worked for an indie producer. After a couple of years, she decided she didn’t want to deal with the politics, and she started working on some short films. Kate, ah . . .” He hesitated, trying to read my face. “Well, Kate has money. But I don’t get any of it if something happens to her,” he added hurriedly.

He didn’t have to worry. I’d known he wasn’t a real suspect the second he’d hit my radius. “Where does the money come from?” I asked anyway, because it seemed like I should.

“Her grandfather left Kate and her sister trust funds when he died, uhh”—he looked at the ceiling a second, doing some mental math—“six or seven years ago now.”

Okay. That didn’t seem likely to be connected to her death, so I switched tacks, mentally shuffling the index cards Jesse had provided. “Does Kate have a lot of friends? Does she go out a lot?”

He leaned back in his chair, thinking it over. “We hang out with people from college, but nobody really close. Kate’s sister is her best friend, but she’s in San Diego with the rest of the family.”

I remembered Leah Rhodes’s interest in wolves and asked if Kate liked animals. Mailt shook his head. “She’s funny about animals—she’s a vegan, and I think she even used to be in PETA, and now she’s in HPA. But she’s super allergic herself. The family across the hall asked us to feed their guinea pigs once, and Kate couldn’t even go into the condo without sneezing. I had to do it.”

I’d at least heard of Humans for the Protection of Animals, which was one of the big three animal rights groups, along with PETA and the Humane Society. I wondered if there was a connection between Kate being in HPA and Leah being in PAW—but then again, this was LA, where your “activism” could be as much of a status indicator as your haircut or job. I wrote Mailt’s info down just in case.

David Mailt was looking at me with desperate eagerness, just hoping I would ask him a question so he could answer it. Meanwhile, I had helped destroy his dead girlfriend only a few hours earlier. I asked him some more questions about Kate’s activities, and found out that Leah and Kate had gone to different schools, lived in different parts of town, and worked at jobs that didn’t seem like they’d intersect. They weren’t from the same area, or even the same tax bracket. Other than being about the same age, same size, and not all that social, they seemed as different as could be. I was flailing. So much for Jesse’s assurances that I had enough investigative experience to do these interviews.

Finally I ran out of ideas and thanked Mailt for his time. I also promised to call if I got any new information. Which I wouldn’t. As I limped out to the car, leaning on the cane, I started to wonder if Jesse had given me this assignment just to punish me. I wasn’t finding any connections, but I was learning an awful lot about the two victims. Was he trying to make me feel guilty on purpose?

And if so, was it working?

Chapter 18

By mid afternoon, Jesse was beginning to have doubts about his own plan.

With Scarlett working the victim end of the case, Jesse had to try to find the nova by figuring out who’d created him. Jesse also just wanted to talk to the werewolves who had clashed with Scarlett and her roommate. It annoyed him that Scarlett and Molly seemed to be taking the attack as just another part of life. No one should have to live with that kind of threat over their head, much less find it mundane.

Luckily he could do both things at once. Will had given him a list of the nineteen other werewolves in the pack, in rough order of their place in the pack hierarchy. He’d suggested that the nova had been created by either someone very high on the list, or someone very low on the list. The stronger and more dominant a werewolf was, the more likely he’d be to ignore the alpha’s wishes that they not change in between full moons unless they were with other pack members. The pack members who were the lowest on the list, on the other hand, were more likely to have trouble controlling themselves in between moons.

Jesse had figured he’d start with the top three wolves and the bottom three wolves on the list, a group which included Drew Riddell and Terrence Whittaker, two of the wolves who’d ambushed Scarlett. The plan, he’d decided, would be to simply interview the werewolves and try to get a sense of their truthfulness. Jesse wanted to ask the kind of questions that would give him a sense of how each person felt about Will, the pack, and being a werewolf in general, and hope someone gave himself away.

Will had also pointed out that whoever turned the nova wolf had successfully kept it from the rest of the pack without stinking of deceit. He (or she) had to be a world-class liar, but Jesse had had plenty of experience figuring out when suspects were lying. At any rate, it’d be good to get a better sense of wolf pack behavior from the point of view of someone who wasn’t the alpha. So he plotted all six addresses on his phone’s GPS and loaded his backup gun with the silver bullets he’d bought from Tommy Vrapman.