Hunter's Trail

“What’s plan A?”

He glanced at the dashboard clock. “We’ve still got thirty-some hours until the full moon rises. Let’s see if we can find the bastard before he tries to attack the public.”

“How?”

Jesse gave me a pleased little smile that said, You’re gonna hate this. “Old-fashioned police work,” he proclaimed.

Yep. I was probably going to hate it.

Jesse explained that we needed to start calling everyone involved with the animal rights organizations to see if they knew where to find Henry. There was a good chance that one of them was hiding him, or knew of a place he would go. Calling almost one hundred and fifty people sounded horrible, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

Since Jesse’s phone battery was low, he suggested we head for the nearest residence that had a landline and where we would be more or less welcome: his parents’ house in Los Feliz. Which would have been fine, except I really didn’t want to meet Jesse’s parents.

“What’s the big deal?” Jesse asked when I demurred. “My dad will probably be in his studio anyway. And my mom’s really nice. And,” he added, “I know you want to see Max.”

Well, he had me there. I had a serious pet-crush on Jesse’s parents’ pit bull mix. But I was also still a little raw from Jesse’s comment the night before about living without my parents, and I didn’t want to see him—or anyone else—being part of a happy family just then. It would hurt too much.

But I couldn’t actually say that out loud, of course. Not my style. “Didn’t you say your brother was in town too?” I objected. “They’ll be distracting. Besides, though I love him, Max will probably knock me down and hurt my leg,” I added piteously.

We were at a red light, so Jesse took his eyes off the road long enough to search mine. I don’t know what he saw there, but his expression softened almost imperceptibly and he nodded. “So we’ll go to Molly’s.”

Oops. We’d been so busy talking to the Remuses that I’d forgotten for a moment that I’d murdered someone at Molly’s the night before. And that Lydia had put Eli and me on a ticking clock. And I still didn’t know where Eli was.

“Scarlett?” Jesse asked impatiently.

I snapped back to the present. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to Molly’s. We’ll need to stay downstairs, though, so we don’t . . . you know. Wake her up.”

Which is exactly what we did. It was after lunchtime, so we picked up sandwiches—well, Jesse ran into the place to buy sandwiches, so I didn’t have to hobble around more than absolutely necessary—and ate in the van on the way. Traffic was still light, so thirty-five minutes after we’d left the Remus apartment, Jesse and I were sitting at Molly’s card table–sized kitchen table with the rosters from PAW and HPA. Jesse gave me the PAW list, keeping the much longer HPA roster for himself. Still, I looked down at the thirty names on the paper in front of me with dismay. “Are you sure we need to do this?” I complained. “I really don’t like . . . people.”

“Too bad,” he said cheerfully.

“What do I even ask?”

“Do they know Henry Remus? If so, do they have any idea where he might hide out? Try to get a sense of who might be lying or holding something back, and we can visit those people in person. Oh, and ask everyone who Henry hung out with at meetings. Hopefully we can get a sense of who his friends were, and then we can go after them hard.”

Ugh. “Who do I say I am?”

He considered that for a moment. “Do the missing persons consultant story. You’re specifically looking into Leah Rhodes’s disappearance. Talking to people about her boyfriend would be a logical move for the police to make.”

“Got it.”

Jesse took the cordless handset into the living room so we wouldn’t be heard in the background of each other’s calls. When I was sure he couldn’t hear me, I dialed Eli’s number. It rang five times and then went to voicemail. Crap. I hung up without leaving a message. There was nothing to do but get to work.

Chapter 37

I’ve never actually wanted to be a cop. Any kind of cop. Up until this point, helping Jesse with Old World investigations had been alternately terrifying, frustrating, and exhilarating, but because of my unique circumstances, it had never really been dull until I started calling the PAW members. Because as it turns out, real police work is boring as hell.

At least, that was my conclusion by our second hour of calling strangers and trying to keep them from hanging up in the first two seconds. Most of the people on the PAW list were women, and those who were able to answer the phone in the middle of the day were not really interested in anything a stranger had to say. A bunch of them snapped at me for calling in the middle of their small children’s nap times. Because I was supposed to just know when that was, apparently.

I did find one interesting new fact, though. When we’d worked on the PAW list the night before, I hadn’t gotten all the way to the bottom—we’d found Remus and gotten distracted. But now I saw that two of the names near the very bottom of the roster looked familiar. I went and borrowed Jesse’s list of the LA werewolves. Sure enough, two of the wolves were on the PAW list: Esmé Welch and Corbin Hurd.

It actually made sense, I realized. Why wouldn’t the werewolves want wild wolves to be protected? If no one was allowed to kill wolves, that made it all the safer for the pack to run around the woods during the full moon. When I looked at it in that light, I was actually surprised that there weren’t more of the pack members on the list. And it wasn’t like either Esmé or Corbin could be the nova—they’d both been werewolves in the pack for years. I shrugged and resolved to call Esmé and Corbin just like they were anyone else on the list. Well, maybe I’d have Jesse call them instead.