Hunter's Trail

Jesse answered the phone without looking. “This is Cruz,” he said, eyes never leaving mine. “Yeah . . . okay . . . sure.” He glanced around the room and crossed quickly to my abandoned pen and notepad, scribbling something in a margin. “Go ahead . . . okay, got it. Thanks, Glo—” He stopped and held the phone away from his ear, peering at the screen. “She hung up,” he said to himself.

“What’d you find out?” I asked impatiently.

He grinned. “We got an address.”

Chapter 41

The Luparii scout, Jesse told me, was staying at a rental condo in Huntington Park, not far from Evergreen Cemetery. According to Jesse’s friend Glory, Terrence Whittaker hadn’t made many phone calls. Shortly after the run-in with Molly and me at Will’s house, however, he had called a handful of numbers in Europe. The last had an area code for Versailles, France, when he must have gotten in touch with the Luparii. After that conversation, all of Terrence’s subsequent calls were to one of three phone numbers. Since there were so few, and she figured Jesse would ask, Glory had tracked down addresses for all three numbers. One was Anastasia’s cell phone, one was Drew Riddell’s cell phone, and the last was a rental property in Huntington Park.

Now that the LAPD had the number it wouldn’t be long before they pursued the lead too, so Jesse spent a few minutes on the phone with someone named Bine, explaining that he was going to check out Terrence Whittaker’s cell phone info himself. The conversation went on for a while, and when he hung up Jesse was shaking his head a little. “She said I’ve got twenty-four hours before she puts someone else on it,” he told me. “I got the sense that she wants to kick me off the case, but whatever Dashiell did to make me a floater is apparently working.”

Next Jesse tried calling the property’s owner to find out who was renting the condo, but the guy didn’t answer his phone. We still had the address, though. I was ready to pretty much get my jacket and go kick in the guy’s door—well, okay, supervise Jesse as he kicked in the door—but Jesse pointed out that we needed, you know, a plan. He went upstairs to retrieve my laptop from my bedroom and sat down next to me on the couch. I entered my password, and he opened a browser and typed in the address for something called Google Maps.

“You’ve never heard of this?” Jesse said disbelievingly, fingers flying on my computer’s keyboard. “What do you even use this thing for?”

“Oh, you know. E-mail. Wikipedia. Looking up movie times.”

Jesse snorted and pulled up a satellite image of the address in question. The rental condo was one of four rectangular buildings clustered around a few green blotches. “Cooooool,” I breathed. “What’s with the giant spears of broccoli?”

“Those are trees, dummy,” Jesse said good-naturedly. Then he frowned. “They’re blocking the satellite from really seeing what the space looks like, but I’m guessing it’s a yard. Or a really big garden.”

I nodded. It made sense that the Luparii scout wanted more space and privacy, especially if the bargest was so big or terrifying that it actually couldn’t pass for a dog. It also kept both of them from being seen by a bunch of hotel employees who might gossip.

“You can’t really see all the entrances and exits, which is a problem,” Jesse observed. “We’ll be going in blind.”

“So what do we do?” I said, sitting back on the sofa.

Jesse looked disconcerted. “I have no idea,” he answered. “I’m not usually on the criminal end of this kind of thing. How does one go about dognapping?”

I thought about it for a moment. We could stake out the guy’s place and hope he’d go out for food or something so we could steal the dog. But if I had a magical creature that my family had perfected after centuries of trial and error, not to mention made using a human sacrifice, I probably wouldn’t let it out of my sight on the day of the full moon, not even for In-N-Out Burger.

Then I grinned. “Jesse,” I said sweetly, “would you be a lamb and run upstairs for my Taser?”

There were still a few more things to take care of. First we went by Jesse’s place so he could get his police uniform. Then we stopped at a pet supply store for an extra large muzzle, a leash and collar, and some dog food. I had no idea what bargests ate—it could be exclusively squirrel livers, for all we knew—but Noring had said the thing was at least part dog. We got the expensive canned stuff that promised to be the most meatlike.

I thought we were done by then, but Jesse insisted on stopping at Home Depot.

“Why Home Depot?” I asked dubiously.

Jesse gave me a mysterious smile. “You’ll see.” Then he said, “Hey, if I keep receipts, will Dashiell reimburse me?”

I waited in the car while he went into the store, mostly because Home Depot is the size of a football field and I wasn’t up for the exercise. When Jesse came out, he wasn’t carrying anything—but he was pulling a big utility wagon, the kind serious gardeners use to pull potted plants around. I could see a roll of duct tape rattling around the back. “Oh,” I said. “Well. Good thing we have the van.” I held up my hand for a high five.

Up until then, we had been pretty cheerful about the whole ridiculous plan, but for the last few miles the mood in the van grew subdued. I was having . . . well, not second thoughts, exactly, but certainly some new reservations, now that some of my initial excitement (and caffeine high) had waned. I didn’t know about Jesse, but I was painfully aware of how tenuous our plan was.