Hunter's Trail

I went back to work. Two hours later, I had made actual contact with a total of twenty people. I thought that was a pretty high percentage of the list, all things considered, but the holidays were probably working to our advantage. At any rate, of the twenty people I’d talked to, almost all of them remembered Henry Remus as the “guy with the crazy eyes and the do-it-yourself haircut,” as one chatty lady put it. Her name was Heaven Centuri (for real), and she told me that at their last meeting in October, our boy Henry had given a speech about some alleged wolf sightings in Northern California, suggesting that PAW should send a group up there to stake out “these magnificent creatures.”

“He said ‘magnificent creatures’, like, six times,” Heaven snorted. “I mean, we were at a noodle place in Brentwood, and this guy’s talking about building tree stands out in the woods so we can what? Take pictures? Get a head count? More likely we’d end up getting stuck out there waiting for the wolves to go away again so we could come down. If we even saw them.”

“I take it he wasn’t getting a lot of support,” I said neutrally.

“Ha. No. Everybody thought he was crazy.” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “I mean, the guy’s heart was in the right place, you know. But it was like the more he talked, the more people’s chairs just scooted slooooowly away from him. By the end he was just shouting, and someone from the restaurant came and escorted him out.” There was a bit of awe in her voice, like she couldn’t imagine being so invested in something.

“What about Leah, his girlfriend? Was she there too?”

“I think so,” Heaven said dismissively. “There was a girl with him, anyway. I didn’t get much of a read on her; she was real quiet. Kind of mousy. When Henry got thrown out she just followed behind him silently, like she knew when she got up that morning that she’d be getting thrown out of a restaurant.”

“Did it seem like either of them had any other friends there?”

There was a brief pause while she considered the question. “You know, I think there was another woman who got up and left when they did,” Heaven said finally. “But she may have just been leaving at the same time.”

“What did she look like?” I said eagerly.

“Short, brunette, pretty in a bland soccer mom kind of way. Maybe thirty, but not, like, a well-maintained thirty. I only remember because she looked really edgy, like she was strapped to a bomb or something.”

That was kind of a general description, but it did match Esmé Welch, one of the werewolves on the PAW roster. I thanked Heaven and hung up.

Most of the calls were like that one. Everyone who had attended that meeting remembered Henry getting thrown out and Leah following him, but no one besides Heaven remembered the brunette woman who’d left at the same time. I made a note of it and kept going.

I was done with my list—minus the people who hadn’t answered—by four, so after checking to make sure Jesse was still talking in the living room, I tried calling Eli again. I’d checked upstairs when changing clothes that morning, but there had been no further note or message. It wasn’t like him to just disappear. Had I done something wrong?

You mean besides slaughtering one of his fellow pack members? I thought sourly.

The phone rang five times, and then his voicemail picked up. “Eli, where are you?” I said quietly. I struggled for a way to tell him that I was worried, that it scared me that he hadn’t called. Instead what came out was, “And where the hell’s my breakfast?”

As I hung up, Jesse came yawning into the kitchen. “Need a coffee break,” he mumbled. “You find anything?”

I told him about the October PAW meeting, and the two werewolves I had skipped. “I’ll give them a call,” he said, nodding. “Are you thinking that they told Remus about being werewolves?”

I paused. “You know, that hadn’t even occurred to me. I’m so used to the Old World being so insular . . .” I considered it for a second, then shook my head. “I just can’t see it. But they might have insight into Henry, like anyone else. How did you do?”

Jesse went past me to circle the counter, heading for the coffeemaker. “Well, first I called the two Remus brothers. Supposedly neither of them knows a thing about Henry’s activities. They only see him at holidays.”

I leaned back in my chair, flexing my knee just a little, half expecting a creaking sound. The swelling had gone down some, but the pain was still there. Shouldn’t have sat so long without moving or elevating it. “That’s not very helpful,” I said absently.

His face darkened. “Yeah. I’m not finding out much from the HPA, either. I can’t ask about all the girls without giving them the chance to connect the dots, and we don’t want that. When the LAPD figures out the five missing women are connected, it won’t take them long to find Henry Remus’s name. Then again . . . maybe we want them to.” He shrugged. “Maybe we want to set up Henry as the fall guy now. And by ‘fall guy,’ I mean ‘guy who actually did it.’” He pulled a bag of coffee grounds out of the fridge and held them up. “You mind if I make some coffee?”

“No, go ahead,” I said cautiously. Things had been tense between the two of us all day. And now I had to make it worse. “Look, Jesse, we can’t tell anyone about Henry Remus until after we’ve . . . found him.” If the cops arrested Henry the night before the full moon, Dashiell would have to get involved. I didn’t know much about how he pulled strings in the police department or the city government, but I was betting it wasn’t easy to have someone killed or released from prison on twelve hours’ notice. “Which brings me to the subject of what we’re going to do when we catch up with the guy.”