Hunter's Trail

Jesse put both women out of his mind and stepped up to the bodies. Both were nude, with male genitalia. The unforgiving spotlights washed out their skin tones, but Jesse could tell the man on the left had been white and had been shorter than the man on the right, who had been slim and black. They both looked like they’d been chewed and torn and sliced into ribbons of tissue. Jesse had seen a couple serious maulings back when he’d first joined the department, and this looked sort of like a super-powered version of that. The skin on all of the extremities had been shredded. Both bodies also had enormous, gaping torso wounds that must have flooded the ground with blood. The biggest single injury, though, appeared to be facial. Jesse inched even closer, trying to stay out of the worst of the blood splatter, and peered at the bodies for a long moment before his eyes were able to translate what he was seeing.

Both men were missing their lower jaws. It looked like they’d been torn off.

“That’s fucked up,” Jesse said aloud. He glanced around and saw Glory frowning over at him. She had been painstakingly tweezing bloody plant matter into little evidence baggies.

“Did you guys find the jawbones?” he asked her.

“No. But Bine has a team looking,” she said, her voice hushed. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Jesse.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Jesse replied absently. His first thought was werewolf, just based on the savagery. But this didn’t feel like the nova wolf’s kills, which had been methodical, calculated. Cold, but with purpose. This was messier than that. And why would any werewolf, nova or not, take the victims’ jaws?

But if it wasn’t a werewolf, what else could it be? Jesse thought suddenly of the La Brea Park murders, which had been committed by a human nutcase who liked playing with body parts. Those killings had been farther down the spectrum of gruesomeness, much more scattered and frantic than the nova’s previous kills. But these killings just didn’t have the same chaotic, sadistic glee as the La Brea Park murderer. His brow furrowed. Was it possible that this had nothing to do with Old World at all?

Jesse adjusted his weight, preparing to stand, but the movement caused the light to shift on the victim as well, and something shiny caught his eye. He shifted back, then again. There. Amidst the gore, he spotted the shiny surface of deep scar tissue. He played his flashlight over the body’s chest, and then moved the light up so he could stare at the top half of the face.

“What is it?” Glory asked anxiously. The bustle around them was picking up; Jesse was officially in the way of the ME’s people. But he wasn’t paying any attention, because he recognized the corpse.

“Hello, Terrence,” Jesse said aloud.

Chapter 25

Werewolves. Someone had torn up two werewolves.

Once he’d realized that the taller man was Terrence Whittaker, it didn’t take long for Jesse to recognize the shorter, stockier guy as Terrence’s sidekick, Drew Riddell. He’d talked to both of these men just the day before. And now he knew why there was so much blood and gore at the scene. Scarlett had told him that unless you were with a null, werewolves were nearly impossible to kill; they healed too quickly. He knew that Scarlett hadn’t been anywhere near this scene, so whoever had done this had needed to essentially wound these guys faster than they could heal, until they finally bled out.

Could the nova do that? What about Will? After all, Will had openly admitted to there being conflict between him and the other wolves. If Terrence had pushed him far enough, could he have done something like this?

No, Jesse reasoned, if this had been Will, he’d have gotten rid of the bodies himself, or at least called Scarlett, who would have called Jesse to help. Whoever this was didn’t have access to Scarlett’s “services.” But even the nova didn’t leave bodies out in the open, in public. And he still didn’t understand the thing with the jaws.

Jesse got to his feet, getting out of the ME guys’ way, and leaned a bit to put his mouth close to Glory’s ear. “Call Dashiell, tell him it’s Old World,” Jesse told her. “These guys were werewolves.”

“You know them?” Glory said hopefully. “Are you gonna give their names to Bine?”

Shit. Jesse paused, considering. If he told Bine the victim’s ID, she would immediately ask how he knew them. Then again, if he didn’t tell Bine, and in the course of the investigation she found out that he’d talked to both of those guys earlier that day, his career would be over. Worse than that—he might even be a suspect, especially if anyone found out that he’d shot Whittaker in the leg. Jesse cursed under his breath in Spanish, and said, “No. I’m not gonna say anything about the IDs for now. Let’s give Dashiell a little time to work.”

“Jesse, the sun’s coming up,” Glory pointed out.

Jesse glanced up. It was hard to see past the lights of the city, but sure enough, warm pink light was beginning to break over the LA skyline. Dashiell would be dead for the next twelve hours or so. “Oh, come on,” Jesse complained. He stepped away from the body, pulled out his own phone, and called Will, who picked up right away.

“We have a problem,” Jesse said into the phone. He tried to keep his words vague, like Scarlett always did, on the off chance that anyone was listening. Scarlett’s paranoia was really rubbing off on him. “I just got a call from a work friend. Two of your . . . erm . . . family members were killed tonight. The top two on your list.”