The Skin Trade

By George R. R. Martin

Willie smelled the blood a block away from her apartment.

He hesitated and sniffed at the cool night air again. It was autumn, with the wind off the river and the smell of rain in the air, but the scent, that scent, was copper and spice and fire, unmistakable. He knew the smell of human blood.

A jogger bounced past, his orange sweats bright under the light of the full moon. Willie moved deeper into the shadows. What kind of fool ran at this hour of the night? Asshole, Willie thought, and the sentiment emerged in a low growl. The man looked around, startled. Willie crept back further into the foliage. After a long moment, the jogger continued up the bicycle path, moving a little faster now.

Taking a chance, Willie moved to the edge of the park, where he could stare down her street from the bushes. Two police cruisers were parked outside her building, lights flashing. What the hell had she gone and done?

When he heard the distant sirens and saw another set of lights approaching, flashing red and blue, Willie felt close to panic. The blood scent was heavy in the air and set his skull to pounding. It was too much. He turned and ran deep into the park, for once not caring who might see him, anxious only to get away. He ran south, swift and silent, until he was panting for breath, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. He wasn’t in shape for this kind of shit. He yearned for the safety of his own apartment, for his La-Z-Boy and a good shot of Primatene Mist.

Down near the riverfront, he finally came to a stop, wheezing and trembling, half-drunk with blood and fear. He crouched near a bridge abutment, staring at the headlights of passing cars and listening to the sound of traffic to soothe his ragged nerves.

Finally, when he was feeling a little stronger, he ran down a squirrel. The blood was hot and rich in his mouth, and the flesh made him feel ever so much stronger, but afterwards he got a hairball from all the goddamned fur.

‘Willie,’ Randi Wade said suspiciously, ‘if this is just some crazy scheme to get into my pants, it’s not going to work.’

The small man studied his reflection in the antique oval mirror over her couch, tried out several faces until he found a wounded look he seemed to like, then turned back to let her see it. ‘You’d think that? You’d think that of me? I come to you, I need your help, and what do I get, cheap sexual innuendo. You ought to know me better than that, Wade, I mean, Jesus, how long we been friends?’

‘Nearly as long as you’ve been trying to get into my pants,’ Randi said. ‘Face it, Flambeaux, you’re a horny little bastard.’

Willie deftly changed the subject. ‘It’s very amateur hour, you know, doing business out of your apartment.’

He sat in one of her red velvet wingback chairs. ‘I mean, it’s a nice place, don’t get me wrong, I love this Victorian stuff, can’t wait to see the bedroom, but isn’t a private eye supposed to have a sleazy little office in the bad part of town? You know, frosted glass on the door, a bottle in the drawer, lots of dust on the filing cabinets…’

Randi smiled. ‘You know what they charge for those sleazy little offices in the bad part of town? I’ve got a phone machine, I’m listed in the Yellow Pages…’

‘AAA-Wade Investigations,’ Willie said sourly. ‘How do you expect people to find you? Wade, it should be under W, if God had meant everybody to be listed under A, he wouldn’t have invented all those other letters.’ He coughed. ‘I’m coming down with something,’ he complained, as if it were her fault. ‘Are you going to help me, or what?’

‘Not until you tell me what this is all about,’ Randi said, but she’d already decided to do it. She liked Willie, and she owed him. He’d given her work when she needed it, with his friendship thrown into the bargain. Even his constant, futile attempts to jump her bones were somehow endearing, although she’d never admit it to Willie. ‘You want to hear about my rates?’

‘Rates?’ Willie sounded pained. ‘What about friendship? What about old times’ sake? What about all the times I bought you lunch?’

‘You never bought me lunch,’ Randi said accusingly.

‘Is it my fault you kept turning me down?’

‘Taking a bucket of Popeye’s extra spicy to an adult motel for a snack and a quickie does not constitute a lunch invitation in my book,’ Randi said.

Willie had a long, morose face, with broad rubbery features capable of an astonishing variety of expressions. Right now he looked as though someone had just run over his puppy. ‘It would not have been a quickie,’ he said with vast wounded dignity. He coughed, and pushed himself back in the chair, looking oddly childlike against the red velvet cushions. ‘Randi,’ he said, his voice suddenly gone scared and weary, ‘this is for real.’

She’d first met Willie Flambeaux when his collection agency had come after her for the unpaid bills left by her ex. She’d been out of work, broke, and desperate, and Willie had taken pity on her and given her work at the agency. As much as she’d hated hassling people for money, the job had been a godsend, and she’d stayed long enough to wipe out her debt. Willie’s lopsided smile, endless propositions, and mordant intelligence had somehow kept her sane. They’d kept in touch, off and on, even after Randi had left the hounds of hell, as Willie liked to call the collection agency.

All that time, Randi had never heard him sound scared, not even when discoursing on the prospect of imminent death from one of his many grisly and undiagnosed maladies. She sat down on the couch. ‘Then I’m listening,’ she said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘You see this morning’s Courier?’ he asked. ‘The woman that was murdered over on Parkway?’

‘I glanced at it.’ Randi said.

‘She was a friend of mine.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Suddenly Randi felt guilty for giving him a hard time. ‘Willie, I’m so sorry.’

‘She was just a kid,’ Willie said. ‘Twenty-three. You would have liked her. Lots of spunk. Bright too. She’d been in a wheelchair since high school. The night of her senior prom, her date drank too much and got pissed when she wouldn’t go all the way. On the way home he floored it and ran head-on into a semi. Really showed her. The boy was killed instantly. Joanie lived through it, but her spine was severed, she was paralyzed from the waist down. She never let it stop her. She went on to college and graduated with honors, had a good job.’

‘You knew her through all this?’

Willie shook his head. ‘Nah. Met her about a year ago. She’d been a little overenthusiastic with her credit cards, you know the tune. So I showed up on her doorstep one day, introduced her to Mr Scissors, one thing led to another and we got to be friends. Like you and me, kind of.’ He looked up into her eyes. ‘The body was mutilated. Who’d do something like that? Bad enough to kill her, but…’ Willie was beginning to wheeze. His asthma. He stopped, took a deep breath. ‘And what the fuck does it mean? Mutilated, Jesus, what a nasty word, but mutilated how? I mean, are we talking Jack the Ripper here?’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

‘It matters to me.’ He wet his lips. ‘I phoned the cops today, tried to get more details. It was a draw. I wouldn’t tell them my name and they wouldn’t give me any information. I tried the funeral home too. A closed casket wake, then the body is going to be cremated. Sounds to me like something getting covered up.’

‘Like what?’ she said.

Willie sighed. ‘You’re going to think this is real weird, but what if…’ He ran his fingers through his hair. He looked very agitated. ‘What if Joanie was … well, savaged … ripped up, maybe even … well, partially eaten … you know, like by … some kind of animal.’

Willie was going on, but Randi was no longer listening.

A coldness settled over her. It was old and gray, full of fear, and suddenly she was twelve years old again, standing in the kitchen door listening to her mother make that sound, that terrible high thin wailing sound. The men were still trying to talk to her, to make her understand … some kind of animal, one of them said. Her mother didn’t seem to hear or understand, but Randi did. She’d repeated the words aloud, and all the eyes had gone to her, and one of the cops had said, Jesus, the kid, and they’d all stared until her mother had finally gotten up and put her to bed. She began to weep uncontrollably as she tucked in the sheets … her mother, not Randi. Randi hadn’t cried. Not then, not at the funeral, not ever in all the years since.

‘Hey. Hey! Are you okay?’ Willie was asking.

‘I’m fine,’ she said sharply.

‘Jesus, don’t scare me like that, I got problems of my own, you know? You looked like … hell, I don’t know what you looked like, but I wouldn’t want to meet it in a dark alley.’

Randi gave him a hard look. ‘The paper said Joan Sorenson was murdered. An animal attack isn’t murder.’

‘Don’t get legal on me, Wade. I don’t know, I don’t even know that an animal was involved, maybe I’m just nuts, paranoid, you name it. The paper left out the grisly details. The fucking paper left out a lot.’ Willie was breathing rapidly, twisting around in his chair, his fingers drumming on the arm.

‘Willie, I’ll do whatever I can, but the police are going to go all out on something like this, I don’t know how much I’ll be able to add.’

‘The police,’ he said in a morose tone. ‘I don’t trust the police.’ He shook his head. ‘Randi, if the cops go through her things, my name will come up, you know, on her Rolodex and stuff.’

‘So you’re afraid you might be a suspect, is that it?’

‘Hell, I don’t know, maybe so.’

‘You have an alibi?’

Willie looked very unhappy. ‘No. Not really. I mean, not anything you could use in court. I was supposed to … to see her that night. Shit, I mean, she might have written my name on her fucking calendar for all I know. I just don’t want them nosing around, you know?’

‘Why not?’

He made a face. ‘Even us turnip-squeezers have our dirty little secrets. Hell, they might find all those nude photos of you.’ She didn’t laugh. Willie shook his head. ‘I mean, god, you’d think the cops would have better things to do than go around solving murders - I haven’t gotten a parking ticket in over a year. Makes you wonder what the hell this town is coming to.’ He had begun to wheeze again. ‘Now I’m getting too worked up again, damn it. It’s you, Wade. I’ll bet you’re wearing crotchless panties under those jeans, right?’ Glaring at her accusingly, Willie pulled a bottle of Primatene Mist from his coat pocket, stuck the plastic snout in his mouth, and gave himself a blast, sucking it down greedily.

‘You must be feeling better,’ Randi said.

‘When you said you’d do anything you could to help, did that include taking off all of your clothes?’ Willie said hopefully.

‘No,’ Randi said firmly. ‘But I’ll take the case.’

River Street was not exactly a prestige address, but Willie liked it just fine. The rich folks up on the bluffs had ‘river views’ from the gables and widow’s walks of their old Victorian houses, but Willie had the river itself flowing by just beneath his windows. He had the sound of it, night and day, the slap of water against the pilings, the foghorns when the mists grew thick, the shouts of pleasure-boaters on sunny afternoons. He had moonlight on the black water, and his very own rotting pier to sit on, any midnight when he had a taste for solitude. He had eleven rooms that used to be offices, a men’s room (with urinal) and a ladies’ room (with Tampax dispenser), hardwood floors, lovely old skylights, and if he ever got that loan, he was definitely going to put in a kitchen. He also had an abandoned brewery down on the ground floor, should he ever decide to make his own beer. The drafty red brick building had been built a hundred years ago, which was about how long the flats had been considered the bad part of town. These days what wasn’t boarded up was industrial, so Willie didn’t have many neighbors, and that was the best part of all.

Parking was no problem either. Willie had a monstrous old lime-green Cadillac, all chrome and fins, that he left by the foot of the pier, two feet from his door. It took him five minutes to undo all his locks. Willie believed in locks, especially on River Street. The brewery was dark and quiet. He locked and bolted the doors behind him and trudged upstairs to his living quarters.

He was more scared than he’d let on to Randi. He’d been upset enough last night, when he’d caught the scent of blood and figured that Joanie had done something really dumb, but when he’d gotten the morning paper and read that she’d been the victim, that she’d been tortured and killed and mutilated … mutilated, dear god, what the hell did that mean, had one of the others … no, he couldn’t even think about that, it made him sick.

His living room had been the president’s office back when the brewery was a going concern. It fronted on the river, and Willie thought it was nicely furnished, all things considered. None of it matched, but that was all right. He’d picked it up piece by piece over the years, the new stuff usually straight repossession deals, the antiques taken in lieu of cash on hopeless and long-overdue debts. Willie nearly always managed to get something, even on the accounts that everyone else had written off as a dead loss. If it was something he liked, he paid off the client out of his own pocket, ten or twenty cents on the dollar, and kept the furniture. He got some great bargains that way.

He had just started to boil some water on his hotplate when the phone began to ring.

Willie turned and stared at it, frowning. He was almost afraid to answer. It could be the police… but it could be Randi or some other friend, something totally innocent. Grimacing, he went over and picked it up. ‘Hello.’

‘Good evening, William.’ Willie felt as though someone was running a cold finger up his spine. Jonathon Harmon’s voice was rich and mellow, it gave him the creeps. ‘We’ve been trying to reach you.’

I’ll bet you have, Willie thought, but what he said was, ‘Yeah, well, I been out.’

‘You’ve heard about the crippled girl, of course.’

‘Joan,’ Willie said sharply. ‘Her name was Joan. Yeah, I heard. All I know is what I read in the paper.’

‘I own the paper,’ Jonathan reminded him. ‘William, some of us are getting together at Blackstone to talk. Zoe and Amy are here right now, and I’m expecting Michael any moment. Steven drove down to pick up Lawrence. He can swing by for you as well, if you’re free.’

‘No,’ Willie blurted. ‘I may be cheap, but I’m never free.’ His laugh was edged with panic.

‘William, your life may be at stake.’

‘Yeah, I’ll bet, you son of a bitch. Is that a threat? Let me tell you, I wrote down everything I know, everything, and gave copies to a couple of friends of mine.’ He hadn’t, but come to think of it, it sounded like a good idea. ‘If I wind up like Joanie, they’ll make sure those letters get to the police, you hear me?’

He almost expected Jonathan to say, calmly, ‘I own the police,’ but there was only silence and static on the line, then a sigh. ‘I realize you’re upset about Joan—’

‘Shut the fuck up about Joanie,’ Willie interrupted. ‘You got no right to say jack shit about her; I know how you felt about her. You listen up good, Harmon, if it turns out that you or that twisted kid of yours had anything to do with what happened, I’m going to come up to Blackstone one night and kill you myself, see if I don’t. She was a good kid, she … she …’ Suddenly, for the first time since it had happened, his mind was full of her - her face, her laugh, the smell of her when she was hot and bothered, the graceful way her muscles moved when she ran beside him, the noises she made when their bodies joined together. They all came back to him, and Willie felt tears on his face. There was a tightness in his chest as if iron bands were closing around his lungs. Jonathan was saying something, but Willie slammed down the receiver without bothering to listen, then pulled the jack. His water was boiling merrily away on the hotplate. He fumbled in his pocket and gave himself a good belt of his inhaler, then stuck his head in the steam until he could breathe again. The tears dried up, but not the pain.

Afterwards he thought about the things he’d said, the threats he made, and he got so shaky that he went back downstairs to double-check all his locks.

Courier Square was far gone in decay. The big department stores had moved to suburban malls, the grandiose old movie palaces had been chopped up into multi-screens or given over to porno, once-fashionable storefronts now housed palm readers and adult bookstores. If Randi had really wanted a seedy little office in the bad part of town, she could find one on Courier Square. What little vitality the Square had left came from the newspaper.

The Courier Building was a legacy of another time, when downtown was still the heart of the city and the newspaper its soul. Old Douglas Harmon, who’d liked to tell anyone who’d listen that he was cut from the same cloth as Hearst and Pulitzer, had always viewed journalism as something akin to a religious vocation, and the ‘gothic deco’ edifice he built to house his newspaper looked like the result of some unfortunate mating between the Chrysler Building and some especially grotesque cathedral. Five decades of smog had blackened its granite facade and acid rain had eaten away at the wolfs head gargoyles that snarled down from its walls, but you could still set your watch by the monstrous old presses in the basement and a Harmon still looked down on the city from the publisher’s office high atop the Iron Spire. It gave a certain sense of continuity to the square, and the city.

The black marble floors in the lobby were slick and wet when Randi came in out of the rain, wearing a Burberry raincoat a couple sizes too big for her, a souvenir of her final fight with her ex-husband. She’d paid for it, so she was damn well going to wear it. A security guard sat behind the big horseshoe-shaped reception desk, beneath a wall of clocks that once had given the time all over the world. Most were broken now, hands frozen into a chronological cacophony. The lobby was a gloomy place on a dark afternoon like this, full of drafts as cold as the guard’s face. Randi took off her hat, shook out her hair, and gave him a nice smile. ‘I’m here to see Barry Schumacher.’

‘Editorial. Third floor.’ The guard barely gave her a glance before he went back to the bondage magazine spread across his lap. Randi grimaced and walked past, heels clicking against the marble.

The elevator was an open grillework of black iron; it rattled and shook and took forever to deliver her to the city room on the third floor. She found Schumacher alone at his desk, smoking and staring out his window at the rain-slick streets. ‘Look at that,’ he said when Randi came up behind him. A streetwalker in a leather miniskirt was standing under the darkened marquee of the Castle. The rain had soaked her thin white blouse and plastered it to her breasts. ‘She might as well be topless,’ Barry said. ‘Right in front of the Castle too. First theater in the state to show Gone with the Wind, you know that? All the big movies used to open there.’ He grimaced, swung his chair around, ground out his cigarette. ‘Hell of a thing,’ he said.

‘I cried when Bambi’s mother died,’ Randi said.

‘In the Castle?’

She nodded. ‘My father took me, but he didn’t cry. I only saw him cry once, but that was later, much later, and it wasn’t a movie that did it.’

‘Frank was a good man,’ Schumacher said dutifully. He was pushing retirement age, overweight and balding, but he still dressed impeccably, and Randi remembered a young dandy of a reporter who’d been quite a rake in his day. He’d been a regular in her father’s Wednesday night poker game for years. He used to pretend that she was his girlfriend, that he was waiting for her to grow up so they could get married. It always made her giggle. But that had been a different Barry Schumacher; this one looked as if he hadn’t laughed since Kennedy was president. ‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘You can tell me everything that got left out of the story on that Parkway murder,’ she said. She sat down across from him.

Barry hardly reacted. She hadn’t seen him much since her father died; each time she did, he seemed grayer and more exhausted, like a man who’d been bled dry of passion, laughter, anger, everything. ‘What makes you think anything was left out?’

‘My father was a cop, remember? I know how this city works. Sometimes the cops ask you to leave something out.’

‘They ask,’ Barry agreed. ‘Them asking and us doing, that’s two different things. Once in a while we’ll omit a key piece of evidence, to help them weed out fake confessions. You know the routine.’ He paused to light another cigarette.

‘How about this time?’

Barry shrugged. ‘Hell of a thing. Ugly. But we printed it, didn’t we?’

‘Your story said the victim was mutilated. What does that mean, exactly?’

‘We got a dictionary over by the copyeditors’ desk, you want to look it up.’

‘I don’t want to look it up,’ Randi said, a little too sharply. Barry was being an asshole; she hadn’t expected that. ‘I know what the word means.’

‘So you are saying we should have printed all the juicy details?’ Barry leaned back, took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘You know what Jack the Ripper did to his last victim? Among other things, he cut off her breasts. Sliced them up neat as you please, like he was carving white meat off a turkey, and piled the slices on top of each other, beside the bed. He was very tidy, put the nipples on top and everything.’ He exhaled smoke. ‘Is that the sort of detail you want? You know how many kids read the Courier every day?’

‘I don’t care what you print in the Courier,’ Randi said. ‘I just want to know the truth. Am I supposed to infer that Joan Sorenson’s breasts were cut off?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Schumacher said.

‘No. You didn’t say much of anything. Was she killed by some kind of animal?’

That did draw a reaction. Schumacher looked up, his eyes met hers, and for a moment she saw a hint of the friend he had been in those tired eyes behind their wire-rim glasses. ‘An animal?’ he said softly. ‘Is that what you think? This isn’t about Joan Sorenson at all, is it? This is about your father.’ Barry got up and came around his desk He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘Randi, honey, let go of it. I loved Frank too, but he’s dead, he’s been dead for … hell, it’s almost twenty years now. The coroner said he got killed by some kind of rabid dog, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘There was no trace of rabies, you know that as well as I do. My father emptied his gun. What kind of rabid dog takes six shots from a police .38 and keeps on coming, huh?’

‘Maybe he missed,’ Barry said.

‘He didn’t miss!’ Randi said sharply. She turned away from him. ‘We couldn’t even have an open casket, too much of the body had been …’ Even now, it was hard to say without gagging, but she was a big girl now and she forced it out. ‘… eaten,’ she finished softly. ‘No animal was ever found.’

‘Frank must have put some bullets in it, and after it killed him the damned thing crawled off somewhere and died,’ Barry said. His voice was not unkind. He turned her around to face him again. ‘Maybe that’s how it was and maybe not. It was a hell of a thing, but it happened eighteen years ago, honey, and it’s got nothing to do with Joan Sorenson.’

‘Then tell me what happened to her,’ Randi said.

‘Look, I’m not supposed to …’ He hesitated, and the tip of his tongue nicked nervously across his lips. ‘It was a knife,’ he said softly. ‘She was killed with a knife, it’s all in the police report, just some psycho with a sharp knife.’ He sat down on the edge of his desk, and his voice took on its familiar cynicism again. ‘Some weirdo seen too many of those damn sick holiday movies, you know the sort, Halloween, Friday the 13th, they got one for every holiday.’

‘All right.’ She could tell from his tone that she wouldn’t be getting any more out of him. Thanks.’

He nodded, not looking at her. ‘I don’t know where these rumors come from. All we need, folks thinking there’s some kind of wild animal running around, killing people.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Don’t be such a stranger, you hear? Come by for dinner some night. Adele is always asking about you.’

‘Give her my best.’ She paused at the door. ‘Barry.’ He looked up, forced a smile. ‘When they found the body, there wasn’t anything missing?’

He hesitated briefly. ‘No,’ he said.

Barry had always been the big loser at her father’s poker games. He wasn’t a bad player, she recalled her father saying, but his eyes gave him away when he tried to bluff… like they gave him away right now.

Barry Schumacher was lying.

The doorbell was broken, so he had to knock. No one answered, but Willie didn’t buy that for a minute. ‘I know you’re there, Mrs Juddiker,’ he shouted through the window. ‘I could hear the TV a block off. You turned it off when you saw me coming up the walk. Gimme a break, okay?’ He knocked again. ‘Open up, I’m not going away.’

Inside, a child started to say something, and was quickly shushed. Willie sighed. He hated this. Why did they always put him through this? He took out a credit card, opened the door, and stepped into a darkened living room, half-expecting a scream. Instead he got shocked silence.

They were gaping at him, the woman and two kids. The shades had been pulled down and the curtains drawn. The woman wore a white terry cloth robe, and she looked even younger than she’d sounded on the phone. ‘You can’t just walk in here,’ she said.

‘I just did,’ Willie said. When he shut the door, the room was awfully dark. It made him nervous. ‘Mind if I put on a light?’ She didn’t say anything, so he did. The furniture was all ratty Salvation Army stuff, except for the gigantic big-screen projection TV in the far corner of the room. The oldest child, a little girl who looked about four, stood in front of it protectively. Willie smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.

He turned back to her mother. She looked maybe twenty, maybe younger, dark, maybe ten pounds overweight but still pretty. She had a spray of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. ‘Get yourself a chain for the door and use it,’ Willie told her. ‘And don’t try the no one’s-home game on us hounds of hell, okay?’ He sat down in a black vinyl recliner held together by electrical tape. ‘I’d love a drink. Coke, juice, milk, anything, it’s been one of those days.’ No one moved, no one spoke. ‘Aw, come on,’ Willie said, ‘cut it out. I’m not going to make you sell the kids for medical experiments, I just want to talk about the money you owe, okay?’

‘You’re going to take the television,’ the mother said.

Willie glanced at the monstrosity and shuddered. ‘It’s a year old and it weighs a million pounds. How’m I going to move something like that, with my bad back? I’ve got asthma too.’ He took the inhaler out of his pocket, showed it to her. ‘You want to kill me, making me take the damned TV would do the trick.’

That seemed to help a little. ‘Bobby, get him a can of soda,’ the mother said. The boy ran off. She held the front of her robe closed as she sat down on the couch, and Willie could see that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. He wondered if she had freckles on her breasts too; sometimes they did. ‘I told you on the phone, we don’t have no money. My husband run off. He was out of work anyway, ever since the pack shut down.’

‘I know,’ Willie said. The pack was short for meatpacking plant, which is what everyone liked to call the south side slaughterhouse that had been the city’s largest employer until it shut its doors two years back. Willie took a notepad out of his pocket, flipped a few pages. ‘Okay, you bought the thing on time, made two payments, then moved, left no forwarding address. You still owe two thousand eight hundred-sixteen dollars. And thirty-one cents. We’ll forget the interest and late charges.’ Bobby returned and handed him a can of Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer. Willie repressed a shudder and cracked the pop-top.

‘Go play in the backyard,’ she said to the children. ‘Us grown-ups have to talk.’ She didn’t sound very grown-up after they had left, however; Willie was half-afraid she was going to cry. He hated it when they cried. ‘It was Ed bought the set,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘It wasn’t his fault. The card came in the mail.’

Willie knew that tune. A credit card comes in the mail, so the next day you run right out and buy the biggest item you can find. ‘Look, I can see you got plenty of troubles. You tell me where to find Ed, and I’ll get the money out of him.’

She laughed bitterly. ‘You don’t know Ed. He used to lug around those big sides of beef at the pack, you ought to see the arms on him. You go bother him and he’ll just rip your face off and shove it up your asshole, mister.’

‘What a lovely turn of phrase,’ Willie said. ‘I can’t wait to make his acquaintance.’

‘You won’t tell him it was me that told you where to find him?’ she asked nervously.

‘Scout’s honor,’ Willie said. He raised his right hand in a gesture that he thought was vaguely Boy Scoutish, although the can of Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer spoiled the effect a little.

‘Were you a Scout?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But there was one troop that used to beat me up regularly when I was young.’

That actually got a smile out of her. ‘It’s your funeral. He’s living with some slut now, I don’t know where. But weekends he tends bar down at Squeaky’s.’

‘I know the place.’

‘It’s not real work,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘He don’t report it or nothing. That way he still gets the unemployment. You think he ever sends anything over for the kids? No way!’

‘How much you figure he owes you?’ Willie said.

‘Plenty,’ she said.

Willie got up. ‘Look, none of my business, but it is my business, if you know what I mean. You want, after I’ve talked to Ed about this television, I’ll see what I can collect for you. Strictly professional, I mean, I’ll take a little cut off the top, give the rest to you. It may not be much, but a little bit is better than nothing, right?’

She stared at him, astonished. ‘You’d do that?’

‘Shit, yeah. Why not?’ He took out his wallet, found a twenty. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘An advance payment. Ed will pay me back.’ She looked at him incredulously, but did not refuse the bill. Willie fumbled in the pocket of his coat. ‘I want you to meet someone,’ he said. He always carried a few cheap pairs of scissors in the pocket of his coat. He found one and put it in her hand. ‘Here, this is Mr Scissors. From now on, he’s your best friend.’

She looked at him like he’d gone insane.

‘Introduce Mr Scissors to the next credit card that comes in the mail,’ Willie told her, ‘and then you won’t have to deal with assholes like me.’

He was opening the door when she caught up to him. ‘Hey, what did you say your name was?’

‘Willie,’ he told her.

‘I’m Betsy.’ She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek, and the white robe opened just enough to give him a quick peek at her small breasts. Her chest was lightly freckled, her nipples wide and brown. She closed the robe tight again as she stepped back. ‘You’re no asshole, Willie,’ she said as she closed the door.

He went down the walk feeling almost human, better than he’d felt since Joanie’s death. His Caddy was waiting at the curb, the ragtop up to keep out the off-again on-again rain that had been following him around the city all morning. Willie got in and started her, then glanced into the rearview mirror just as the man in the back seat sat up.

The eyes in the mirror were pale blue. Sometimes, after the spring runoff was over and the river had settled back between its banks, you could find stagnant pools along the shore, backwaters cut off from the flow, foul-smelling places, still and cold, and you wondered how deep they were and whether there was anything living down there in that darkness. Those were the kind of eyes he had, deep-set in a dark, hollow-cheeked face and framed by brown hair that fell long and straight to his shoulders.

Willie swiveled around to face him. ‘What the hell were you doing back there, catching forty winks? Hate to point this out, Steven, but this vehicle is actually one of the few things in the city that the Harmons do not own. Guess you got confused, huh? Or did you just mistake it for a bench in the park? Tell you what, no hard feelings, I’ll drive you to the park, even buy you a newspaper to keep you warm while you finish your little nap.’

‘Jonathan wants to see you,’ Steven said, in that flat, chill tone of his. His voice, like his face, was still and dead.

‘Yeah, good for him, but maybe I don’t want to see Jonathan, you ever think of that?’ He was dogmeat, Willie thought; he had to suppress the urge to bolt and run.

‘Jonathan wants to see you,’ Steven repeated, as if Willie hadn’t understood. He reached forward. A hand closed on Willie’s shoulder. Steven had a woman’s fingers, long and delicate, his skin pale and fine. But his palm was crisscrossed by burn scars that lay across the flesh like brands, and his fingertips were bloody and scabbed, the flesh red and raw. The fingers dug into Willie’s shoulder with ferocious, inhuman strength. ‘Drive,’ he said, and Willie drove.

‘I’m sorry,’ the police receptionist said. ‘The chief has a full calendar today. I can give you an appointment on Thursday.’

‘I don’t want to see him on Thursday. I want to see him now.’ Randi hated the cophouse. It was always full of cops. As far as she was concerned, cops came in three flavors: those who saw an attractive woman they could hit on, those who saw a private investigator and resented her, and the old ones who saw Frank Wade’s little girl and felt sorry for her. Types one and two annoyed her, the third kind really pissed her off.

The receptionist pressed her lips together, disapproving. ‘As I’ve explained, that simply isn’t possible.’

‘Just tell him I’m here,’ Randi said. ‘He’ll see me.’

‘He’s with someone at the moment, and I’m quite sure that he doesn’t want to be interrupted.’

Randi had about had it. The day was pretty well shot, and she’d found out next to nothing. ‘Why don’t I just see for myself?’ she said sweetly. She walked briskly around the desk, and pushed through the waist-high wooden gate.

‘You can’t go in there!’ the receptionist squeaked in outrage, but by then Randi was opening the door. Police Chief Joseph Urquhart sat behind an old wooden desk cluttered with files, talking to the coroner. Both of them looked up when the door opened. Urquhart was a tall, powerful man in his early sixties. His hair had thinned considerably, but what remained of it was still red, though his eyebrows had gone completely gray. ‘What the hell—’ he started.

‘Sorry to barge in, but Miss Congeniality wouldn’t give me the time of day,’ Randi said as the receptionist came rushing up behind her.

‘Young lady, this is the police department, and I’m going to throw you out on your ass,’ Urquhart said gruffly as he stood up and came around the desk, ‘unless you come over here right now and give your Uncle Joe a big hug.’

Smiling, Randi crossed the bearskin rug, wrapped her arms around him, and laid her head against his chest as the chief tried to crush her. The door closed behind them, too loudly. Randi broke the embrace. ‘I miss you,’ she said.

‘Sure you do,’ he said, in a faintly chiding tone. ‘That’s why we see so much of you.’

Joe Urquhart had been her father’s partner for years, back when they were both in uniform. They’d been tight, and the Urquharts had been like an aunt and uncle to her. His older daughter had babysat for her, and Randi had returned the favor for the younger girl. After her father’s death, Joe had looked out for them, helped her mother through the funeral and all the legalities, made sure the pension fund got Randi through college. Still, it hadn’t been the same, and the families drifted apart, even more so after her mother had finally passed away. These days Randi saw him only once or twice a year, and felt guilty about it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You know I mean to keep in touch, but—’

‘There’s never enough time, is there?’ he said.

The coroner cleared her throat. Sylvia Cooney was a local institution, a big brusque woman of indeterminate age, built like a cement mixer, her iron-gray hair tied in a tight bun at the back of her smooth, square face. She’d been coroner as long as Randi could remember. ‘Maybe I should excuse myself,’ she said.

Randi stopped her. ‘I need to ask you about Joan Sorenson. When will autopsy results be available?’

Cooney’s eyes went quickly to the chief, then back to Randi. ‘Nothing I can tell you,’ she said. She left the office and closed the door with a soft click behind her.

‘That hasn’t been released to the public yet,’ Joe Urquhart said. He walked back behind his desk, gestured ‘Sit down.’

Randi settled into a seat, let her gaze wander around the office. One wall was covered by commendations, certificates, and framed photographs. She saw her father there with Joe, both of them looking so achingly young, two grinning kids in uniform standing in front of their black-and-white. A moose head was mounted above the photographs, peering down at her with its glassy eyes. More trophies hung from the other walls. ‘Do you still hunt?’ she asked him.

‘Not in years,’ Urquhart said. ‘No time. Your dad used to kid me about it all the time. Always said that if I ever killed anyone on duty, I’d want the head stuffed and mounted. Then one day it happened, and the joke wasn’t so funny anymore.’ He frowned. ‘What’s your interest in Joan Sorenson?’

‘Professional,’ Randi said.

‘Little out of your line, isn’t it?’

Randi shrugged. ‘I don’t pick my cases.’

‘You’re too good to waste your life snooping around motels,’ Urquhart said. It was a sore point between them. ‘It’s not too late to join the force.’

‘No,’ Randi said. She didn’t try to explain; she knew from past experience that there was no way to make him understand. ‘I went out to the precinct house this morning to look at the report on Sorenson. It’s missing from the file; no one knows where it is. I got the names of the cops who were at the scene, but none of them had time to talk to me. Now I’m told the autopsy results aren’t being made public either. You mind telling me what’s going on?’

Joe glanced out the windows behind him. The panes were wet with rain. ‘This is a sensitive case,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the media blowing this thing all out of proportion.’

‘I’m not the media,’ Randi said.

Urquhart swiveled back around. ‘You’re not a cop either. That’s your choice. Randi, I don’t want you involved in this, do you hear?’

‘I’m involved whether you like it or not,’ she said. She didn’t give him time to argue. ‘How did Joan Sorenson die? Was it an animal attack?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was not. And that’s the last question I’m going to answer.’ He sighed. ‘Randi,’ he said, ‘I know how hard you got hit by Frank’s death. It was pretty rough on me too, remember? He phoned me for backup. I didn’t get there in time. You think I’ll ever forget that?’ He shook his head. ‘Put it behind you. Stop imagining things.’

‘I’m not imagining anything,’ Randi snapped. ‘Most of the time I don’t even think about it. This is different.’

‘Have it your way,’ Joe said. There was a small stack of files on the corner of the desk near Randi. Urquhart leaned forward and picked them up, tapped them against his blotter to straighten them. ‘I wish I could help you.’ He slid open a drawer, put the file folders away. Randi caught a glimpse of the name on the top folder: Helander. ‘I’m sorry,’ Joe was saying. He started to rise. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse—’

‘Are you just rereading the Helander file for old times’ sake, or is there some connection to Sorenson?’ Randi asked.

Urquhart sat back down. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘Or maybe I just imagined that was the name on the file.’

Joe looked pained. ‘We have reason to think the Helander boy might be back in the city.’

‘Hardly a boy any more,’ Randi said. ‘Roy Helander was three years older than me. You’re looking at him for Sorenson?’

‘We have to, with his history. The state released him two months ago, it turns out. The shrinks said he was cured.’ Urquhart made a face. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, he’s just a name. We’re looking at a hundred names.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. He’s a bad piece of business, like the rest of his family. I don’t like you getting mixed up with his sort, Randi. Your father wouldn’t either.’

Randi stood up. ‘My father’s dead,’ she said, ‘and I’m a big girl now.’

Willie parked the car where 13th Street dead-ended, at the foot of the bluffs. Blackstone sat high above the river, surrounded by a ten-foot high wrought iron fence with a row of forbidding spikes along its top. You could drive to the gatehouse easily enough, but you had to go all the way down Central, past downtown, then around on Grandview and Harmon Drive, up and down the hills and all along the bluffs where aging steamboat Gothic mansions stood like so many dowagers staring out over the flats and river beyond, remembering better days. It was a long, tiresome drive.

Back before the automobile, it had been even longer and more tiresome. Faced with having to travel to Courier Square on a daily basis, Douglas Harmon made things easy for himself. He built a private cable car: a two-car funicular railway that crept up the gray stone face of the bluffs from the foot of 13th below to Blackstone above.

Internal combustion, limousines, chauffeurs, and paved roads had all conspired to wean the Harmons away from Douglas’ folly, making the cable car something of a back door in more recent years, but that suited Willie well enough. Jonathan Harmon always made him feel like he ought to come in by the servant’s entrance anyway.

Willie climbed out of the Caddy and stuck his hands in the sagging pockets of his raincoat. He looked up. The incline was precipitous, the rock wet and dark. Steven took his elbow roughly and propelled him forward. The cable car was wooden, badly in need of a whitewash, with bench space for six. Steven pulled the bell cord; the car jerked as they began to ascend. The second car came down to meet them, and they crossed halfway up the bluff. The car shook and Willie spotted rust on the rails. Even here at the gate of Blackstone, things were falling apart.

Near the top of the bluff, they passed through a gap in the wrought iron fence, and the New House came into view, gabled and turreted and covered with Victorian gingerbread. The Harmons had lived there for almost a century, but it was still the New House, and always would be. Behind the house the estate was densely forested, the narrow driveway winding through thick stands of old growth. Where the other founding families had long ago sold off or parceled out their lands to developers, the Harmons had held tight, and Blackstone remained intact, a piece of the forest primeval in the middle of the city.

Against the western sky, Willie glimpsed the broken silhouette of the tower, part of the Old House whose soot-dark stone walls gave Blackstone its name. The house was set well back among the trees, its lawns and courts overgrown, but even when you couldn’t see it you knew it was there somehow. The tower was a jagged black presence outlined against the red-stained gray of the western horizon, crooked and forbidding. It had been Douglas Harmon, the journalist and builder of funicular railways, who had erected the New House and closed the Old, immense and gloomy even by Victorian standards; but neither Douglas, his son Thomas, nor his grandson Jonathan had ever found the will to tear it down. Local legend said the Old House was haunted. Willie could just about believe it. Blackstone, like its owner, gave him the creeps.

The cable car shuddered to a stop, and they climbed out onto a wooden deck, its paint weathered and peeling. A pair of wide French doors led into the New House. Jonathan Harmon was waiting for them, leaning on a walking stick, his gaunt figure outlined by the light that spilled through the door. ‘Hello, William,’ he said. Harmon was barely past sixty, Willie knew, but long snow-white hair and a body wracked by arthritis made him look much older. ‘I’m so glad that you could join us,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, I was in the neighborhood, just thought I’d drop by,’ Willie said. ‘Only thing is, I just remembered, I left the windows open in the brewery. I better run home and close them, or my dust bunnies are going to get soaked.’

‘No,’ said Jonathan Harmon. ‘I don’t think so.’

Willie felt the bands constricting across his chest. He wheezed, found his inhaler, and took two long hits. He figured he’d need it. ‘Okay, you talked me into it, I’ll stay,’ he told Harmon, ‘but I damn well better get a drink out of it. My mouth still tastes like Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer.’

‘Steven, be a good boy and get our friend William a snifter of Remy Martin, if you’d be so kind. I’ll join him. The chill is on my bones.’ Steven, silent as ever, went inside to do as he was told. Willie made to follow, but Jonathan touched his arm lightly. ‘A moment,’ he said. He gestured. ‘Look.’

Willie turned and looked. He wasn’t quite so frightened anymore. If Jonathan wanted him dead, Steven would have tried already, and maybe succeeded. Steven was a dreadful mistake by his father’s standards, but there was a freakish strength in those scarred hands. No, this was some other kind of deal.

They looked east over the city and the river. Dusk had begun to settle, and the streetlights were coming on down below, strings of luminescent pearls that spread out in all directions as far as the eye could see and leapt across the river on three great bridges. The clouds were gone to the east, and the horizon was a deep cobalt blue. The moon had begun to rise.

‘There were no lights out there when the foundations of the Old House were dug,’ Jonathan Harmon said. ‘This was all wilderness. A wild river coursing through the forest primeval, and if you stood on high at dusk, it must have seemed as though the blackness went on forever. The water was pure, the air was clean, and the woods were thick with game … deer, beaver, bear … but no people, or at least no white men. John Harmon and his son James both wrote of seeing Indian camp-fires from the tower from time to time, but the tribes avoided this place, especially after John had begun to build the Old House.’

‘Maybe the Indians weren’t so dumb after all,’ Willie said.

Jonathan glanced at Willie, and his mouth twitched. ‘We built this city out of nothing,’ he said. ‘Blood and iron built this city, blood and iron nurtured it and fed its people. The old families knew the power of blood and iron, they knew how to make this city great. The Rochmonts hammered and shaped the metal in smithies and foundries and steel mills, the Anders family moved it on their flatboats and steamers and railroads, and your own people found it and pried it from the earth. You come from iron stock, William Flambeaux, but we Harmons were always blood. We had the stockyards and the slaughterhouse, but long before that, before this city or this nation existed, the Old House was a center of the skin trade. Trappers and hunters would come here every season with furs and skins and beaver pelts to sell the Harmons, and from here the skins would move downriver. On rafts, at first, and then on flatboats. Steam came later, much later.’

‘Is there going to be a pop quiz on this?’ Willie asked.

‘We’ve fallen a long way,’ he said, looking pointedly at Willie. ‘We need to remember how we started. Black iron and red, red blood. You need to remember. Your grandfather had the Flambeaux blood, the old pure strain.’

Willie knew when he was being insulted. ‘And my mother was a Pankowski,’ he said, ‘which makes me half-frog, half-Polack, and all mongrel. Not that I give a shit. I mean, it’s terrific that my greatgrandfather owned half the state, but the mines gave out around the turn of the century, the Depression took the rest, my father was a drunk, and I’m in collections, if that’s okay with you.’ He was feeling pissed off and rash by then. ‘Did you have any particular reason for sending Steven to kidnap me, or was it just a yen to discuss the French and Indian War?’

Jonathan said, ‘Come. We’ll be more comfortable inside, the wind is cold.’ The words were polite enough, but his tone had lost all faint trace of warmth. He led Willie inside, walking slowly, leaning heavily on the cane. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s the damp. It aggravates the arthritis, inflames my old war wounds.’ He looked back at Willie. You were unconscionably rude to hang up on me. Granted, we have our differences, but simple respect for my position—’

‘I been having a lot of trouble with my phone lately,’ Willie said. ‘Ever since they deregulated, service has turned to shit.’ Jonathan led him into a small sitting room. There was a fire burning in the hearth; the heat felt good after a long day tramping through the cold and the rain. The furnishings were antique, or maybe just old; Willie wasn’t too clear on the difference.

Steven had preceded them. Two brandy snifters, half-full of amber liquid, sat on a low table. Steven squatted by the fire, his tall, lean body folded up like a jackknife. He looked up as they entered and stared at Willie a moment too long, as if he’d suddenly forgotten who he was or what he was doing there. Then his flat blue eyes went back to the fire, and he took no more notice of them or their conversation.

Willie looked around for the most comfortable chair and sat in it. The style reminded him of Randi Wade, but that just made him feel guilty. He picked up his cognac. Willie was couth enough to know that he was supposed to sip but cold and tired and pissed-off enough so that he didn’t care. He emptied it in one long swallow, put it down on the floor, and relaxed back into the chair as the heat spread through his chest.

Jonathan, obviously in some pain, lowered himself carefully onto the edge of the couch, his hands closed round the head of his walking stick. Willie found himself staring. Jonathan noticed. ‘A wolfs head,’ he said. He moved his hands aside to give Willie a clear view. The firelight reflected off the rich yellow metal. The beast was snarling, snapping.

Its eyes were red. ‘Garnets?’ Willie guessed.

Jonathan smiled the way you might smile at a particularly doltish child. ‘Rubies,’ he said, ‘set in 18-karat gold.’ His hands, large and heavily veined, twisted by arthritis, closed round the stick again, hiding the wolf from sight.

‘Stupid,’ Willie said. ‘There’s guys in this city would kill you as soon as look at you for a stick like that.’

Jonathan’s smile was humorless. ‘I will not die on account of gold, William.’ He glanced at the window. The moon was well above the horizon. ‘A good hunter’s moon,’ he said. He looked back at Willie. ‘Last night you all but accused me of complicity in the death of the crippled girl.’ His voice was dangerously soft. Why would you say such a thing?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Willie said. He felt light-headed. The brandy had rushed right to his mouth. ‘Maybe the fact that you can’t remember her name had something to do with it. Or maybe it was because you always hated Joanie, right from the moment you heard about her. My pathetic little mongrel bitch, I believe that was what you called her. Isn’t it funny the way that little turns of phrase stick in the mind? I don’t know, maybe it was just me, but somehow I got this impression that you didn’t exactly wish her well. I haven’t even mentioned Steven yet.’

‘Please don’t,’ Jonathan said icily. ‘You’ve said quite enough. Look at me, William. Tell me what you see.’

‘You,’ said Willie. He wasn’t in the mood for asshole games, but Jonathan Harmon did things at his own pace.

‘An old man,’ Jonathan corrected. ‘Perhaps not so old in years alone, but old nonetheless. The arthritis grows worse every year, and there are days when the pain is so bad I can scarcely move. My family is all gone but for Steven, and Steven, let us be frank, is not all that I might have hoped for in a son.’ He spoke in firm, crisp tones, but Steven did not even look up from the flames. ‘I’m tired, William. It’s true, I did not approve of your crippled girl, or even particularly of you. We live in a time of corruption and degeneracy, when the old truths of blood and iron have been forgotten. Nonetheless, however much I may have loathed your Joan Sorenson and what she represented, I had no taste of her blood. All I want is to live out my last years in peace.’

Willie stood up. ‘Do me a favor and spare me the old sick man act. Yeah, I know all about your arthritis and your war wounds. I also know who you are and what you’re capable of. Okay, you didn’t kill Joanie. So who did? Him?’ He jerked a thumb toward Steven.

‘Steven was here with me.’

‘Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t,’ Willie said.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Flambeaux, you’re not important enough for me to lie to you. Even if your suspicion was correct, my son is not capable of such an act. Must I remind you that Steven is crippled as well, in his own way?’

Willie gave Steven a quick glance. ‘I remember once when I was just a kid, my father had to come see you, and he brought me along. I used to love to ride your little cable car. Him and you went inside to talk, but it was a nice day, so you let me play outside. I found Steven in the woods, playing with some poor sick mutt that had gotten past your fence. He was holding it down with his foot, and pulling off its legs, one by one, just ripping them out with his bare hands like a normal kid might pull petals off a flower. When I walked up behind him, he had two off and was working on the third. There was blood all over his face. He couldn’t have been more than eight.’

Jonathan Harmon sighed. ‘My son is … disturbed. We both know that, so there is no sense in my denying it. He is also dysfunctional, as you know full well. And whatever residual strength remains is controlled by his medication. He has not had a truly violent episode in years. Have you, Steven?’

Steven Harmon looked back at them. The silence went on too long as he stared, unblinking, at Willie. ‘No,’ he finally said.

Jonathan nodded with satisfaction, as if something had been settled. ‘So you see, William, you do us a great injustice. What you took for a threat was only an offer of protection. I was going to suggest that you move to one of our guest rooms for a time. I’ve made the same suggestion to Zoe and Amy.’

Willie laughed. ‘I’ll bet. Do I have to fuck Steven too or is that just for the girls?’

Jonathan flushed, but kept his temper. His futile efforts to marry off Steven to one of the Anders sisters was a sore spot. ‘I regret to say they declined my offer. I hope you will not be so unwise. Blackstone has certain … protections … but I cannot vouch for your safety beyond these walls.’

‘Safety?’ Willie said. ‘From what?’

‘I do not know, but I can tell you this - in the dark of night, there are things that hunt the hunters.’

‘Things that hunt the hunters,’ Willie repeated. ‘That’s good, has a nice beat, but can you dance to it?’ He’d had enough. He started for the door. ‘Thanks but no thanks. I’ll take my chances behind my own walls.’ Steven made no move to stop him.

Jonathan Harmon leaned more heavily on his cane. ‘I can tell you how she was really killed,’ he said quietly.

Willie stopped and stared into the old man’s eyes. Then he sat back down.

It was on the south side in a neighborhood that made the flats look classy, on an elbow of land between the river and that old canal that ran past the pack. Algae and raw sewage choked the canal and gave off a smell that drifted for blocks. The houses were single-story clapboard affairs, hardly more than shacks. Randi hadn’t been down here since the pack had closed its doors. Every third house had a sign on the lawn, flapping forlornly in the wind, advertising a property for sale or for rent, and at least half of those were dark. Weeds grew waist-high around the weathered rural mailboxes, and they saw at least two burned-out lots.

Years had passed, and Randi didn’t remember the number, but it was the last house on the left, she knew, next to a Sinclair station on the corner. The cabbie cruised until they found it. The gas station was boarded up; even the pumps were gone, but the house stood there much as she recalled. It had a For Rent sign on the lawn, but she saw a light moving around inside. A flashlight, maybe? It was gone before she could be sure.

The cabbie offered to wait. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’ After he was gone, she stood on the barren lawn for a long time, staring at the front door, before she finally went up the walk.

She’d decided not to knock, but the door opened as she was reaching for the knob. ‘Can I help you, miss?’

He loomed over her, a big man, thick-bodied but muscular. His face was unfamiliar, but he was no Helander. They’d been a short, wiry family, all with the same limp, dirty blond hair. This one had hair black as wrought iron, and shaggier than the department usually liked. Five o’clock shadow gave his jaw a distinct blue-black cast. His hands were large, with short blunt fingers. Everything about him said cop.

‘I was looking for the people who used to live here.’

‘The family moved away when the pack closed,’ he told her. ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ He opened the door wider. Randi saw bare floors, dust, and his partner, a beer-bellied black man standing by the door to the kitchen.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘I insist,’ he replied. He showed her a gold badge pinned to the inside of his cheap gray suit.

‘Does that mean I’m under arrest?’

He looked taken aback. ‘No. Of course not. We’d just like to ask you a few questions.’ He tried to sound friendlier. ‘I’m Rogoff.’

‘Homicide,’ she said.

His eyes narrowed. ‘How—?’

‘You’re in charge of the Sorenson investigation,’ she said. She’d been given his name at the cophouse that morning. ‘You must not have much of a case if you’ve got nothing better to do than hang around here waiting for Roy Helander to show.’

‘We were just leaving. Thought maybe he’d get nostalgic, hole up at the old house, but there’s no sign of it.’ He looked at her hard and frowned. ‘Mind telling me your name?’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Is this a bust or a come-on?’

He smiled. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘I’m Randi Wade.’ She showed him her license.

‘Private detective,’ he said, his tone carefully neutral. He handed the license back to her. ‘You working?’

She nodded.

‘Interesting. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me the name of your client.’

‘No.’

‘I could haul you into court, make you tell the judge. You can get that license lifted, you know. Obstructing an ongoing police investigation, withholding evidence.’

‘Professional privilege,’ she said.

Rogoff shook his head. ‘PIs don’t have privilege. Not in this state.’

‘This one does,’ Randi said. ‘Attorney-client relationship. I’ve got a law degree too.’ She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Leave my client out of it. I know a few interesting things about Roy Helander I might be willing to share.’

Rogoff digested that. ‘I’m listening.’

Randi shook her head. ‘Not here. You know the automat on Courier Square?’ He nodded. ‘Eight o’clock,’ she told him. ‘Come alone. Bring a copy of the coroner’s report on Sorenson.’

‘Most girls want candy or flowers,’ he said.

‘The coroner’s report,’ she repeated firmly. ‘They still keep the old case records downtown?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Basement of the courthouse.’

‘Good. You can stop by and do a little remedial reading on the way. It was eighteen years ago. Some kids had been turning up missing. One of them was Roy’s little sister. There were others - Stanski, Jones, I forget all the names. A cop named Frank Wade was in charge of the investigation. A gold badge, like you. He died.’

‘You saying there’s a connection?’

‘You’re the cop. You decide.’ She left him standing in the doorway and walked briskly down the block.

Steven didn’t bother to see him down to the foot of the bluffs. Willie rode the little funicular railway alone, morose and lost in thought. His joints ached like nobody’s business and his nose was running. Every time he got upset his body fell to pieces, and Jonathan Harmon had certainly upset him. That was probably better than killing him, which he’d half expected when he found Steven in his car, but still…

He was driving home along 13th Street when he saw the bar’s neon sign on his right. Without thinking, he pulled over and parked. Maybe Harmon was right and maybe Harmon had his ass screwed on backwards, but in any case Willie still had to make a living. He locked up the Caddy and went inside.

It was a slow Tuesday night, and Squeaky’s was empty. It was a workingman’s tavern. Two pool tables, a shuffleboard machine in back, booths along one wall. Willie took a bar stool. The bartender was an old guy, hard and dry as a stick of wood. He looked mean. Willie considered ordering a banana daiquiri, just to see what the guy would say, but one look at that sour, twisted old face cured the impulse, and he asked for a boilermaker instead. ‘Ed working tonight?’ he asked when the bartender brought the drinks.

‘Only works weekends,’ the man said, ‘but he comes in most nights, plays a little pool.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Willie said. The shot made his eyes water. He chased it down with a gulp of beer. He saw a pay phone back by the men’s room. When the bartender gave him his change, he walked back, put in a quarter, and dialed Randi. She wasn’t home; he got her damned machine. Willie hated phone machines. They’d made life a hell of a lot more difficult for collection agents, that was for sure. He waited for the tone, left Randi an obscene message, and hung up.

The men’s room had a condom dispenser mounted over the urinals. Willie read the instructions as he took a leak. The condoms were intended for prevention of disease only, of course, even though the one dispensed by the left-hand slot was a French tickler. Maybe he ought to install one of these at home, he thought. He zipped up, flushed, washed his hands.

When he walked back out into the taproom, two new customers stood over the pool table, chalking up cues. Willie looked at the bartender, who nodded. ‘One of you Ed Juddiker?’ Willie asked.

Ed wasn’t the biggest - his buddy was as large and pale as Moby Dick - but he was big enough, with a real stupid-mean look on his face. ‘Yeah?’

‘We need to talk about some money you owe.’ Willie offered him one of his cards.

Ed looked at the hand, but made no effort to take the card. He laughed. ‘Get lost,’ he said. He turned back to the pool table. Moby Dick racked up the balls and Ed broke.

That was all right, if that was the way he wanted to play it. Willie sat back on the bar stool and ordered another beer. He’d get his money one way or the other. Sooner or later Ed would have to leave, and then it would be his turn.

Willie still wasn’t answering his phone. Randi hung up the pay phone and frowned. He didn’t have an answering machine either, not Willie Flambeaux, that would be too sensible. She knew she shouldn’t worry. The hounds of hell don’t punch time clocks, as he’d told her more than once. He was probably out running down some deadbeat. She’d try again when she got home. If he still didn’t answer, then she’d start to worry.

The automat was almost empty. Her heels made hollow clicks on the old linoleum as she walked back to her booth and sat down. Her coffee had gone cold. She looked idly out the window. The digital clock on the State National Bank said 8:13. Randi decided to give him ten more minutes.

The red vinyl of the booth was old and cracking, but she felt strangely comfortable here, sipping her cold coffee and staring off at the Iron Spire across the square. The automat had been her favorite restaurant when she was a little girl. Every year on her birthday she would demand a movie at the Castle and dinner at the automat, and every year her father would laugh and oblige. She loved to put the nickels in the coin slots and make the windows pop open, and fill her father’s cup out of the old brass coffee machine with all its knobs and levers.

Sometimes you could see disembodied hands through the glass, sticking a sandwich or a piece of pie into one of the slots, like something from an old horror movie. You never saw any people working at the automat, just hands; the hands of people who hadn’t paid their bills, her father once told her, teasing. That gave her the shivers, but somehow made her annual visits even more delicious, in a creepy kind of way. The truth, when she learned it, was much less interesting. Of course, that was true of most everything in life.

These days, the automat was always empty, which made Randi wonder how the floor could possibly stay so filthy, and you had to put quarters into the coin slots beside the little windows instead of nickels. But the banana cream pie was still the best she’d ever had, and the coffee that came out of those worn brass spigots was better than anything she’d ever brewed at home.

She was thinking of getting a fresh cup when the door opened and Rogoff finally came in out of the rain. He wore a heavy wool coat. His hair was wet. Randi looked out at the clock as he approached the booth. It said 8:17. ‘You’re late,’ she said.

‘I’m a slow reader,’ he said. He excused himself and went to get some food. Randi watched him as he fed dollar bills into the change machine. He wasn’t bad-looking if you liked the type, she decided, but the type was definitely cop.

Rogoff returned with a cup of coffee, the hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy, and overcooked carrots, and a big slice of apple pie.

‘The banana cream is better,’ Randi told him as he slid in opposite her.

‘I like apple,’ he said, shaking out a paper napkin.

‘Did you bring the coroner’s report?’

‘In my pocket.’ He started cutting up the sandwich. He was very methodical, slicing the whole thing into small bite-sized portions before he took his first taste. ‘I’m sorry about your father.’

‘So was I. It was a long time ago. Can I see the report?’

‘Maybe. Tell me something I don’t already know about Roy Helander.’

Randi sat back. ‘We were kids together. He was older, but he’d been left back a couple of times, till he wound up in my class. He was a bad kid from the wrong side of the tracks and I was a cop’s daughter, so we didn’t have much in common … until his little sister disappeared.’

‘He was with her,’ Rogoff said.

‘Yes he was. No one disputed that, least of all Roy. He was fifteen, she was eight. They were walking the tracks. They went off together, and Roy came back alone. He had blood on his dungarees and all over his hands. His sister’s blood.’

Rogoff nodded. ‘All that’s in the file. They found blood on the tracks too.’

‘Three kids had already vanished. Jessie Helander made four. The way most people looked at it, Roy had always been a little strange. He was solitary, inarticulate, used to hook school and run off to some secret hideout he had in the woods. He liked to play with the younger kids instead of boys his own age. A degenerate from a bad family, a child molester who had actually raped and killed his own sister, that was what they said. They gave him all kinds of tests, decided he was deeply disturbed, and sent him away to some kiddy snakepit. He was still a juvenile, after all. Case closed, and the city breathed easier.’

‘If you don’t have any more than that, the coroner’s report stays in my pocket,’ Rogoff said.

‘Roy said he didn’t do it. He cried and screamed a lot, and his story wasn’t coherent, but he stuck to it. He said he was walking along ten feet or so behind his sister, balancing on the rails and listening for a train when a monster came out of a drainage culvert and attacked her.’

‘A monster,’ Rogoff said.

‘Some kind of big shaggy dog, that was what Roy said. He was describing a wolf. Everybody knew it.’

‘There hasn’t been a wolf in this part of the country for over a century.’

‘He described how Jessie screamed as the thing began to rip her apart. He said he grabbed her leg, tried to pull her out of its jaws, which would explain why he had her blood all over him. The wolf turned and looked at him and growled. It had red eyes, burning red eyes, Roy said, and he was real scared, so he let go. By then Jessie was almost certainly dead. It gave him one last snarl and ran off, carrying the body in its jaws.’ Randi paused, took a sip of coffee. ‘That was his story. He told it over and over, to his mother, the police, the psychologists, the judge, everyone. No one ever believed him.’

‘Not even you?’

‘Not even me. We all whispered about Roy in school, about what he’d done to his sister and those other kids. We couldn’t quite imagine it, but we knew it had to be horrible. The only thing was, my father never quite bought it.’

‘Why not?’

She shrugged. ‘Instincts, maybe. He was always talking about how a cop had to go with his instincts. It was his case, he’d spent more time with Roy than anyone else, and something about the way the boy told the story had affected him. But it was nothing that could be proved. The evidence was overwhelming. So Roy was locked up.’ She watched his eyes as she told him. ‘A month later, Eileen Stanski vanished. She was six.’

Rogoff paused with a forkful of the mashed potatoes, and studied her thoughtfully. ‘Inconvenient,’ he said.

‘Dad wanted Roy released, but no one supported him. The official line was that the Stanski girl was unconnected to the others. Roy had done four, and some other child molester had done the fifth.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘It’s bullshit,’ Randi said. ‘Dad knew it and he said it. That didn’t make him any friends in the department, but he didn’t care. He could be a very stubborn man. You read the file on his death?’

Rogoff nodded. He looked uncomfortable.

‘My father was savaged by an animal. A dog, the coroner said. If you want to believe that, go ahead.’ This was the hard part. She’d picked at it like an old scab for years, and then she’d tried to forget it, but nothing ever made it easier. ‘He got a phone call in the middle of the night, some kind of lead about the missing kids. Before he left he phoned Joe Urquhart to ask for backup.’

‘Chief Urquhart?’

Randi nodded. ‘He wasn’t chief then. Joe had been his partner when he was still in uniform. He said Dad told him he had a hot tip, but not the details, not even the name of the caller.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know the name.’

‘He knew. My father wasn’t the kind of cop who goes off alone in the middle of the night on an anonymous tip. He drove down to the stockyards by himself. It was waiting for him there. Whatever it was took six rounds and kept coming. It tore out his throat, and after he was dead it ate him. What was left by the time Urquhart got there … Joe testified that when he first found the body he wasn’t even sure it was human.’

She told the story in a cool, steady voice, but her stomach was churning. When she finished Rogoff was staring at her. He set down his fork and pushed his plate away. ‘Suddenly I’m not very hungry anymore.’

Randi’s smile was humorless. ‘I love our local press. There was a case a few years ago when a woman was kidnapped by a gang, held for two weeks. She was beaten, tortured, sodomized, raped hundreds of times. When the story broke, the paper said she’d been quote assaulted unquote. It said my father’s body had been mutilated. It said the same thing about Joan Sorenson. I’ve been told her body was intact.’ She leaned forward, looked hard into his dark brown eyes. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. He took a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, passed it across to her. ‘But it’s not the way you think.’

Randi snatched the coroner’s report from his hand, and scanned quickly down the page. The words blurred, refused to register. It wasn’t adding up the way it was supposed to.

Cause of death: exsanguination.

Somewhere far away, Rogoff was talking. ‘It’s a security building, her apartment’s on the fourteenth floor. No balconies, no fire escapes, and the doorman didn’t see a thing. The door was locked. It was a cheap spring lock, easy to jimmy, but there was no sign of forced entry.’

The instrument of death was a blade at least twelve inches long, extremely sharp, slender and flexible, perhaps a surgical instrument.

‘Her clothing was all over the apartment, just ripped to hell, in tatters. In her condition, you wouldn’t think she’d put up much of a struggle, but it looks like she did. None of the neighbors heard anything, of course. The killer chained her to her bed, naked, and went to work. He worked fast, knew what he was doing, but it still must have taken her a long time to die. The bed was soaked with her blood, through the sheets and mattress, right down to the box spring.’

Randi looked back up at him, and the coroner’s report slid from her fingers onto the Formica table. Rogoff reached over and took her hand.

‘Joan Sorenson wasn’t devoured by any animal, Miss Wade. She was flayed alive, and left to bleed to death. And the part of her that’s missing is her skin.’

It was a quarter past midnight when Willie got home. He parked the Caddy by the pier. Ed Juddiker’s wallet was on the seat beside him. Willie opened it, took out the money, counted. Seventy-nine bucks. Not much, but it was a start. He’d give half to Betsy this first time, credit the rest to Ed’s account. Willie pocketed the money and locked the empty wallet in the glovebox. Ed might need the driver’s license. He’d bring it by Squeaky’s over the weekend, when Ed was on, and talk to him about a payment schedule.

Willie locked up the car and trudged wearily across the rain-slick cobbles to his front door. The sky above the river was dark and starless. The moon was up by now, he knew, hidden somewhere behind those black cotton clouds. He fumbled for his keys, buried down under his inhaler, his pillbox, a half-dozen pairs of scissors, a handkerchief, and the miscellaneous other junk that made his coat pocket sag. After a long minute, he tried his pants pocket, found them, and started in on his locks. He slid the first key into his double deadbolt.

The door opened slowly, silently.

The pale yellow light from a streetlamp filtered through the brewery’s high, dusty windows, patterning the floor with faint squares and twisted lines. The hulks of rusting machines crouched in the dimness like great dark beasts. Willie stood in the doorway, keys in hand, his heart pounding like a triphammer. He put the keys in his pocket, found his Primatene, took a hit. The hiss of the inhaler seemed obscenely loud in the stillness.

He thought of Joanie, of what happened to her.

He could run, he thought. The Cadillac was only a few feet behind him, just a few steps; whatever was waiting in there couldn’t possibly be fast enough to get him before he reached the car. Yeah, hit the road, drive all night, he had enough gas to make Chicago, it wouldn’t follow him there. Willie took the first step back, then stopped, and giggled nervously. He had a sudden picture of himself sitting behind the wheel of his big lime-green chromeboat, grinding the ignition, grinding and grinding and flooding the engine as something dark and terrible emerged from inside the brewery and crossed the cobblestones behind him. That was silly, it was only in bad horror movies that the ignition didn’t turn over, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

Maybe he had just forgotten to lock up when he’d left for work that morning. He’d had a lot on his mind, a full day’s work ahead of him and a night of bad dreams behind; maybe he’d just closed the fucking door behind him and forgotten about his locks.

He never forgot about his locks.

But maybe he had, just this once.

Willie thought about changing. Then he remembered Joanie, and put the thought aside. He stood on one leg, pulled off his shoe. Then the other. Water soaked through his socks. He edged forward, took a deep breath, moved into the darkened brewery as silently as he could, pulling the door shut behind him. Nothing moved. Willie reached down into his pocket, pulled out Mr Scissors. It wasn’t much, but it was better than bare hands. Hugging the thick shadows along the wall, he crossed the room and began to creep upstairs on stockinged feet.

The streetlight shone through the window at the end of the hall. Willie paused on the steps when his head came up to the level of the second-story landing. He could look up and down the hallway. All the office doors were shut. No light leaking underneath or through the frosted-glass transoms. Whatever waited for him waited in darkness.

He could feel his chest constricting again. In another moment he’d need his inhaler. Suddenly he just wanted to get it over with. He climbed the final steps and crossed the hall in two long strides, threw open the door to his living room, and slammed on the lights.

Randi Wade was sitting in his beanbag chair. She looked up blinking as he hit the lights. ‘You startled me,’ she said.

‘I startled you!’ Willie crossed the room and collapsed into his La-Z-Boy. The scissors fell from his sweaty palm and bounced on the hardwood floor. ‘Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, you almost made me lose control of my personal hygiene. What the hell are you doing here? Did I forget to lock the door?’

Randi smiled. ‘You locked the door and you locked the door and then you locked the door some more. You’re world class when it comes to locking doors, Flambeaux. It took me twenty minutes to get in.’

Willie massaged his throbbing temples. ‘Yeah, well, with all the women who want this body, I got to have some protection, don’t I?’ He noticed his wet socks, pulled one off, grimaced. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘My shoes are out in the street getting rained on, and my feet are soaking. If I get pneumonia, you get the doctor bills, Wade. You could have waited.’

‘It was raining,’ she pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to wait in the rain, Willie. It would have pissed me off, and I’m in a foul mood already.’

Something in her voice made Willie stop rubbing his toes to look up at her. The rain had plastered loose strands of light brown hair across her forehead, and her eyes were grim. ‘You look like a mess,’ he admitted.

‘I tried to make myself presentable, but the mirror in your ladies’ room is missing.’

‘It broke. There’s one in the men’s room.’

‘I’m not that kind of a girl,’ Randi said. Her voice was hard and flat. ‘Willie, your friend Joan wasn’t killed by an animal. She was flayed. The killer took her skin.’

‘I know,’ Willie said, without thinking.

Her eyes narrowed. They were gray-green, large and pretty, but right now they looked as cold as marbles. ‘You know?’ she echoed. Her voice had gone very soft, almost to a whisper, and Willie knew he was in trouble. ‘You give me some bullshit story and send me running all around town, and you know? Do you know what happened to my father too, is that it? It was just your clever little way of getting my attention?’

Willie gaped at her. His second sock was in his hand. He let it drop to the floor. ‘Hey, Randi, gimme a break, okay? It wasn’t like that at all. I just found out a few hours ago, honest. How could I know? I wasn’t there, it wasn’t in the paper.’ He was feeling confused and guilty. ‘What the hell am I supposed to know about your father? I don’t know jack shit about your father. All the time you worked for me, you mentioned your family maybe twice.’

Her eyes searched his face for signs of deception. Willie tried to give his warmest, most trustworthy smile. Randi grimaced. ‘Stop it,’ she said wearily. ‘You look like a used car salesman. All right, you didn’t know about my father. I’m sorry. I’m a little wrought up right now, and I thought…’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Who told you about Sorenson?’

Willie hesitated. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘I wish I could, I really do. I can’t. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.’ Randi looked very unhappy. Willie kept talking. ‘Did you find out whether I’m a suspect? The police haven’t called.’

‘They’ve probably been calling all day. By now they may have an APB out on you. If you won’t get a machine, you ought to try coming home occasionally.’ She frowned. ‘I talked to Rogoff from Homicide.’ Willie’s heart stopped, but she saw the look on his face and held up a hand. ‘No, your name wasn’t mentioned. By either of us. They’ll be calling everyone who knew her, probably, but it’s just routine questioning. I don’t think they’ll be singling you out.’

‘Good,’ Willie said. ‘Well, look, I owe you one, but there’s no reason for you to go on with this. I know it’s not paying the rent, so—’

‘So what?’ Randi was looking at him suspiciously. ‘Are you trying to get rid of me now? After you got me involved in the first place?’ She frowned. ‘Are you holding out on me?’

‘I think you’ve got that reversed,’ Willie said lightly. Maybe he could joke his way out of it. ‘You’re the one who gets bent out of shape whenever I offer to help you shop for lingerie.’

‘Cut the shit,’ Randi said sharply. She was not amused in the least, he could see that. ‘We’re talking about the torture and murder of a girl who was supposed to be a friend of yours. Or has that slipped your mind somehow?’

‘No,’ he said, abashed. Willie was very uncomfortable. He got up and crossed the room, plugged in the hotplate. ‘Hey, listen, you want a cup of tea? I got Earl Grey, Red Zinger, Morning Thunder—’

‘The police think they have a suspect,’ Randi said.

Willie turned to look at her. ‘Who?’

‘Roy Helander,’ Randi said.

‘Oh, boy,’ Willie said. He’d been a PFC in Hamburg when the Helander thing went down, but he’d had a subscription to the Courier to keep up on the old hometown, and the headlines had made him ill. ‘Are you sure?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re just rounding up the usual suspects. Roy was a great scapegoat last time, why not use him again? First they have to find him, though. No one’s really sure that he’s still in the state, let alone the city.’

Willie turned away, busied himself with hotplate and kettle. All of a sudden he found it difficult to look Randi in the eye. ‘You don’t think Helander was the one who grabbed those kids.’

‘Including his own sister? Hell no. Jessie was the last person he’d ever have hurt, she actually liked him. Not to mention that he was safely locked away when number five disappeared. I knew Roy Helander. He had bad teeth and he didn’t bathe often enough, but that doesn’t make him a child molester. He hung out with younger kids because the older ones made fun of him. I don’t think he had any friends. He had some kind of secret place in the woods where he’d go to hide when things got too rough, he—’

She stopped suddenly, and Willie turned toward her, a teabag dangling from his fingers. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

The kettle began to scream.

Randi tossed and turned for over an hour after she got home, but there was no way she could sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she would see her father’s face, or imagine poor Joan Sorenson, tied to that bed as the killer came closer, knife in hand. She kept coming back to Roy Helander, to Roy Helander and his secret refuge. In her mind, Roy was still the gawky adolescent she remembered, his blond hair lank and unwashed, his eyes frightened and confused as they made him tell the story over and over again. She wondered what had become of that secret place of his during all the years he’d been locked up and drugged in the state mental home, and she wondered if maybe sometimes he hadn’t dreamt of it as he lay there in his cell. She thought maybe he had. If Roy Helander had indeed come home, Randi figured she knew just where he was.

Knowing about it and finding it were two different things, however. She and Willie had kicked it around without narrowing it down any. Randi tried to remember, but it had been so long ago, a whispered conversation in the schoolyard. A secret place in the woods, he’d said, a place where no one ever came that was his and his alone, hidden and full of magic. That could be anything, a cave by the river, a treehouse, even something as simple as a cardboard lean-to. But where were these woods? Outside the city were suburbs and industrial parks and farms; the nearest state forest was forty miles north along the river road. If this secret place was in one of the city parks, you’d think someone would have stumbled on it years ago. Without more to go on, Randi didn’t have a prayer of finding it. But her mind worried it like a pit bull with a small child.

Finally her digital alarm clock read 2:13, and Randi gave up on sleep altogether. She got out of bed, turned on the light, and went back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was pretty dismal, but she found a couple of bottles of Pabst. Maybe a beer would help put her to sleep. She opened a bottle and carried it back to bed.

Her bedroom furnishings were a hodgepodge. The carpet was a remnant, the blond chest-of-drawers was boring and functional, and the four-poster queen-sized bed was a replica, but she did own a few genuine antiques - the massive oak wardrobe, the full-length clawfoot dressing mirror in its ornate wooden frame, and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Her mother always used to call it a hope chest. Did little girls still keep hope chests? She didn’t think so, at least not around here. Maybe there were still places where hope didn’t seem so terribly unrealistic, but this city wasn’t one of them.

Randi sat on the floor, put the beer on the carpet, and opened the chest.

Hope chests were where you kept your future, all the little things that were part of the dreams they taught you to dream when you were a child. She hadn’t been a child since she was twelve, since the night her mother woke her with that terrible inhuman sound. Her chest was full of memories now.

She took them out, one by one. Yearbooks from high school and college, bundles of love letters from old boyfriends and even that asshole she’d married, her school ring and her wedding ring, her diplomas, the letters she’d won in track and girls’ Softball, a framed picture of her and her date at the senior prom.

Way, way down at the bottom, buried under all the other layers of her life, was a police .38. Her father’s gun, the gun he emptied the night he died. Randi took it out and carefully put it aside. Beneath it was the book, an old three-ring binder with a blue cloth cover. She opened it across her lap.

The yellowed Courier story on her father’s death was Scotch-taped to the first sheet of paper, and Randi stared at that familiar photograph for a long time before she flipped the page. There were other clippings: stories about the missing children that she’d torn furtively from Courier back issues in the public library, magazine articles about animal attacks, serial killers, and monsters, all sandwiched between the lined pages she’d filled with her meticulous twelve-year-old’s script. The handwriting grew broader and sloppier as she turned the pages; she’d kept up the book for years, until she’d gone away to college and tried to forget. She’d thought she’d done a pretty good job of that, but now, turning the pages, she knew that was a lie. You never forget. She only had to glance at the headlines, and it all came back to her in a sickening rush.

Eileen Stanski, Jessie Helander, Diane Jones, Gregory Torio, Erwin Weiss. None of them had ever been found, not so much as a bone or a piece of clothing. The police said her father’s death was accidental, unrelated to the case he was working on. They’d all accepted that, the chief, the mayor, the newspaper, even her mother, who only wanted to get it all behind them and go on with their lives. Barry Schumacher and Joe Urquhart were the last to buy in, but in the end even they came around, and Randi was the only one left. Mere mention of the subject upset her mother so much that she finally stopped talking about it, but she didn’t forget. She just asked her questions quietly, kept up her binder, and hid it every night at the bottom of the hope chest.

For all the good it had done.

The last twenty-odd pages in the back of the binder were still blank, the blue lines on the paper faint with age. The pages were stiff as she turned them. When she reached the final page, she hesitated. Maybe it wouldn’t be there, she thought. Maybe she had just imagined it. It made no sense anyway. He would have known about her father, yes, but their mail was censored, wasn’t it? They’d never let him send such a thing.

Randi turned the last page. It was there, just as she’d known it would be.

She’d been a junior in college when it arrived. She’d put it all behind her. Her father had been dead for seven years, and she hadn’t even looked at her binder for three. She was busy with her classes and her sorority and her boyfriends, and sometimes she had bad dreams but mostly it was okay, she’d grown up, she’d gotten real. If she thought about it at all, she thought that maybe the adults had been right all along, it had just been some kind of an animal.

.. . some kind of animal…

Then one day the letter had come. She’d opened it on the way to class, read it with her friends chattering beside her, laughed and made a joke and stuck it away, all very grown-up. But that night, when her roommate had gone to sleep, she took it out and turned on her Tensor to read it again, and felt sick. She was going to throw it away, she remembered. It was just trash, a twisted product of a sick mind.

Instead she’d put it in the binder.

The Scotch tape had turned yellow and brittle, but the envelope was still white, with the name of the institution printed neatly in the left-hand corner. Someone had probably smuggled it out for him. The letter itself was scrawled on a sheet of cheap typing paper in block letters. It wasn’t signed, but she’d known who it was from.

Randi slid the letter out of the envelope, hesitated for a moment, and opened it.

IT WAS A WEREWOLF

She looked at it and looked at it and looked at it, and suddenly she didn’t feel very grown up any more. When the phone rang she nearly jumped a foot.

Her heart was pounding in her chest. She folded up the letter and stared at the phone, feeling strangely guilty, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. It was 2:53 in the morning. Who the hell would be calling now? If it was Roy Helander, she thought she might just scream. She let the phone ring.

On the fourth ring, her machine cut in. This is AAA-Wade Investigations, Randi Wade speaking. I can’t talk right now, but you can leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you.’

The tone sounded. ‘Uh, hello,’ said a deep male voice that was definitely not Roy Helander.

Randi put down the binder, snatched up the receiver. ‘Rogoff? Is that you?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sorry if I woke you. Listen, this isn’t by the book and I can’t figure out a good excuse for why I’m calling you, except that I thought you ought to know.’

Cold fingers crept down Randi’s spine. ‘Know what?’

‘We’ve got another one,’ he said.

Willie woke in a cold sweat.

What was that?

A noise, he thought. Somewhere down the hall.

Or maybe just a dream? Willie sat up in bed and tried to get a grip on himself. The night was full of noises. It could have been a towboat on the river, a car passing by underneath his windows, anything. He still felt sheepish about the way he’d let his fear take over when he found his door open. He was just lucky he hadn’t stabbed Randi with those scissors. He couldn’t let his imagination eat him alive. He slid back down under the covers, rolled over on his stomach, closed his eyes.

Down the hall, a door opened and closed.

His eyes opened wide. He lay very still, listening. He’d locked all the locks, he told himself, he’d walked Randi to the door and locked all his locks, the springlock, the chain, the double deadbolt, he’d even lowered the police bar. No one could get in once the bar was in place, it could only be lifted from inside, the door was solid steel. And the back door might as well be welded shut, it was so corroded and unmovable. If they broke a window he would have heard the noise, there was no way, no way. He was just dreaming.

The knob on his bedroom door turned slowly, clicked. There was a small metallic rattle as someone pushed at the door. The lock held. The second push was slightly harder, the noise louder.

By then Willie was out of bed. It was a cold night, his jockey shorts and undershirt small protection against the chill, but Willie had other things on his mind. He could see the key still sticking out of the keyhole. An antique key for a hundred-year-old lock. The office keyholes were big enough to peek through. Willie kept the keys inside them, just to plug up the drafts, but he never turned them… except tonight. Tonight for some reason he’d turned that key before he went to bed and somehow felt a little more secure when he heard the tumblers click. And now that was all that stood between him and whatever was out there.

He backed up against the window, glanced out at the cobbled alley behind the brewery. The shadows lay thick and black beneath him. He seemed to recall a big green metal dumpster down below, directly under the window, but it was too dark to make it out.

Something hammered at the door. The room shook.

Willie couldn’t breathe. His inhaler was on the dresser across the room, over by the door. He was caught in a giant’s fist and it was squeezing all the breath right out of him. He sucked at the air.

The thing outside hit the door again. The wood began to splinter. Solid wood, a hundred years old, but it split like one of your cheap-ass hollow core modern doors.

Willie was starting to get dizzy. It was going to be real pissed off, he thought giddily, when it finally got in here and found that his asthma had already killed him. Willie peeled off his undershirt, dropped it to the floor, hooked a thumb in the elastic of his shorts.

The door shook and shattered, falling half away from its hinges. The next blow snapped it in two. His head swam from lack of oxygen. Willie forgot all about his shorts and gave himself over to the change.

Bones and flesh and muscles shrieked in the agony of transformation, but the oxygen rushed into his lungs, sweet and cold, and he could breathe again. Relief shuddered through him and he threw back his head and gave it voice. It was a sound to chill the blood, but the dark shape picking its way through the splinters of his door did not hesitate, and neither did Willie. He gathered his feet up under him, and leapt. Glass shattered all around him as he threw himself through the window, and the shards spun outward into the darkness. Willie missed the dumpster, landed on all fours, lost his footing, and slid three feet across the cobbles.

When he looked up, he could see the shape above him, filling his window. Its hands moved, and he caught the terrible glint of silver, and that was all it took. Willie was on his feet again, running down the street faster than he had ever run before.

The cab let her off two houses down. Police barricades had gone up all around the house, a dignified old Victorian manor badly in need of fresh paint. Curious neighbors, heavy coats thrown on over pajamas and bathrobes, lined Grandview, whispering to each other and glancing back at the house. The flashers on the police cars lent a morbid avidity to their faces.

Randi walked past them briskly. A patrolman she didn’t know stopped her at the police barrier. ‘I’m Randi Wade,’ she told him. ‘Rogoff asked me to come down.’

‘Oh,’ he said. He jerked a thumb back at the house. ‘He’s inside, talking to the sister.’

Randi found them in the living room. Rogoff saw her, nodded, waved her off, and went back to his questioning.

The other cops looked at her curiously, but no one said anything. The sister was a young looking forty, slender and dark, with pale skin and a wild mane of black hair that fell half down her back. She sat on the edge of a sectional in a white silk teddy that left little to the imagination, seemingly just as indifferent to the cold air coming through the open door as she was to the lingering glances of the policemen.

One of the cops was taking some fingerprints off a shiny black grand piano in the corner of the room. Randi wandered over as he finished. The top of the piano was covered with framed photographs. One was a summer scene, taken somewhere along the river, two pretty girls in matching bikinis standing on either side of an intense young man. The girls were dappled with moisture, laughing for the photographer, long black hair hanging wetly down across wide smiles. The man, or boy, or whatever he was, was in a swimsuit, but you could tell he was bone dry. He was gaunt and sallow, and his blue eyes stared into the lens with a vacancy that was oddly disturbing. The girls could have been as young as eighteen or as old as twenty. One of them was the woman Rogoff was questioning, but Randi could not have told you which one. Twins. She glanced at the other photos, half-afraid she’d find a picture of Willie. Most of the faces she didn’t recognize, but she was still looking them over when Rogoff came up behind her.

‘Coroner’s upstairs with the body,’ he said. ‘You can come up if you’ve got the stomach.’

Randi turned away from the piano and nodded. ‘You learn anything from the sister?’

‘She had a nightmare,’ he said. He started up the narrow staircase, Randi close behind him. ‘She says that as far back as she can remember, whenever she had bad dreams, she’d just cross the hall and crawl in bed with Zoe.’ They reached the landing. Rogoff put his hand on a glass doorknob, then paused. ‘What she found when she crossed the hall this time is going to keep her in nightmares for years to come.’

He opened the door. Randi followed him inside.

The only light was a small bedside lamp, but the police photographer was moving around the room, snapping pictures of the red twisted thing on the bed. The light of his flash made the shadows leap and writhe, and Randi’s stomach writhed with them. The smell of blood was overwhelming. She remembered summers long ago, hot July days when the wind blew from the south and the stink of the slaughterhouse settled over the city. But this was a thousand times worse.

The photographer was moving, flashing, moving, flashing. The world went from gray to red, then back to gray again. The coroner was bent over the corpse, her motions turned jerky and unreal by the strobing of the big flash gun. The white light blazed off the ceiling, and Randi looked up and saw the mirrors there. The dead woman’s mouth gaped open, round and wide in a silent scream. He’d cut off her lips with her skin, and the inside of her mouth was no redder than the outside. Her face was gone, nothing left but the glistening wet ropes of muscle and here and there the pale glint of bone, but he’d left her her eyes. Large dark eyes, pretty eyes, sensuous, like her sister’s downstairs. They were wide open, staring up in terror at the mirror on the ceiling. She’d been able to see every detail of what was being done to her. What had she found in the eyes of her reflection? Pain, terror, despair? A twin all her life, perhaps she’d found some strange comfort in her mirror image, even as her face and her flesh and her humanity had been cut away from her.

The flash went off again, and Randi caught the glint of metal at wrist and ankle. She closed her eyes for a second, steadied her breathing, and moved to the foot of the bed, where Rogoff was talking to the coroner.

‘Same kind of chains?’ he asked.

‘You got it. And look at this.’ Coroner Cooney took the unlit cigar out of her mouth and pointed.

The chain looped tightly around the victim’s ankle. When the flash went off again, Randi saw the other circles, dark, black lines, scored across the raw flesh and exposed nerves. It made her hurt just to look.

‘She struggled,’ Rogoff suggested. The chain chafed against her flesh.’

‘Chafing leaves you raw and bloody,’ Cooney replied. ‘What was done to her, you’d never notice chafing. That’s a burn, Rogoff, a third-degree burn. Both wrists, both ankles, wherever the metal touched her. Sorenson had the same burn marks. Like the killer heated the chains until they were white hot. Only the metal is cold now. Go on, touch it.’

‘No thanks,’ Rogoff said. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Randi said.

The coroner seemed to notice her for the first time. ‘What’s she doing here?’ she asked.

‘It’s a long story,’ Rogoff replied. ‘Randi, this is official police business, you’d better keep—’

Randi ignored him. ‘Joan Sorenson had the same kind of burn marks?’ she asked Cooney. ‘At wrist and ankle, where the chains touched her skin?’

‘That’s right,’ Cooney said. ‘So what?’

‘What are you trying to say?’ Rogoff asked her.

She looked at him. ‘Joan Sorenson was a cripple. She had no use of her legs, no sensation at all below the waist. So why bother to chain her ankles?’

Rogoff stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. He looked over to Cooney. The coroner shrugged. ‘Yeah. So. An interesting point, but what does it mean?’

She had no answer for them. She looked away, back at the bed, at the skinned, twisted, mutilated thing that had once been a pretty woman.

The photographer moved to a different angle, pressed his shutter. The flash went off again. The chain glittered in the light. Softly, Randi brushed a fingertip across the metal. She felt no heat. Only the cold, pale touch of silver.

The night was full of sounds and smells.

Willie had run wildly, blindly, a gray shadow streaking down black rain-slick streets, pushing himself harder and faster than he had ever pushed before, paying no attention to where he went, anywhere, nowhere, everywhere, just so it was far away from his apartment and the thing that waited there with death shining bright in its hand. He darted along grimy alleys, under loading docks, bounded over low chain-link fences. There was a cinder-block wall somewhere that almost stopped him, three leaps and he failed to clear it, but on the fourth try he got his front paws over the top, and his back legs kicked and scrabbled and pushed him over. He fell onto damp grass, rolled in the dirt, and then he was up and running again. The streets were almost empty of traffic, but as he streaked across one wide boulevard, a pickup truck appeared out of nowhere, speeding, and caught him in its lights. The sudden glare startled him; he froze for a long instant in the center of the street, and saw shock and terror on the driver’s face. A horn blared as the pickup began to brake, went into a skid, and fishtailed across the divider.

By then Willie was gone.

He was moving through a residential section now, down quiet streets lined by neat two-story houses. Parked cars filled the narrow driveways, realtor’s signs flapped in the wind, but the only lights were the streetlamps… and sometimes, when the clouds parted for a second, the pale circle of the moon. He caught the scent of dogs from some of the backyards, and from time to time he heard a wild, frenzied barking, and knew that they had smelled him too. Sometimes the barking woke owners and neighbors, and then lights would come on in the silent houses, and doors would open in the backyards, but by then Willie would be blocks away, still running.

Finally, when his legs were aching and his heart was thundering and his tongue lolled redly from his mouth, Willie crossed the railroad tracks, climbed a steep embankment, and came hard up against a ten-foot chain-link fence with barbed wire strung along the top. Beyond the fence was a wide, empty yard and a low brick building, windowless and vast, dark beneath the light of the moon. The smell of old blood was faint but unmistakable, and abruptly Willie knew where he was.

The old slaughterhouse. The pack, they’d called it, bankrupt and abandoned now for almost two years. He’d run a long way. At last he let himself stop and catch his breath. He was panting, and as he dropped to the ground by the fence, he began to shiver, cold despite his ragged coat of fur.

He was still wearing jockey shorts, Willie noticed after he’d rested a moment. He would have laughed, if he’d had the throat for it. He thought of the man in the pickup and wondered what he’d thought when Willie appeared in his headlights, a gaunt gray specter in a pair of white briefs, with glowing eyes as red as the pits of hell.

Willie twisted himself around and caught the elastic in his jaws. He tore at them, growling low in his throat, and after a brief struggle managed to rip them away. He slung them aside and lowered himself to the damp ground, his legs resting on his paws, his mouth half-open, his eyes wary, watchful. He let himself rest. He could hear distant traffic, a dog barking wildly a half-mile away, could smell rust and mold, the stench of diesel fumes, the cold scent of metal. Under it all was the slaughterhouse smell, faded but not gone, lingering, whispering to him of blood and death. It woke things inside him that were better left sleeping, and Willie could feel the hunger churning in his gut.

He could not ignore it, not wholly, but tonight he had other concerns, fears that were more important than his hunger. Dawn was only a few hours away, and he had nowhere to go. He could not go home, not until he knew it was safe again, until he had taken steps to protect himself. Without keys and clothes and money, the agency was closed to him too. He had to go somewhere, trust someone.

He thought of Blackstone, thought of Jonathan Harmon sitting by his fire, of Steven’s dead blue eyes and scarred hands, of the old tower jutting up like a rotten black stake. Jonathan might be able to protect him, Jonathan with his strong walls and his spiked fence and all his talk of blood and iron.

But when he saw Jonathan in his mind’s eye, the long white hair, the gold wolfs head cane, the veined arthritic hands twisting and grasping, then the growl rose unbidden in Willie’s throat, and he knew Blackstone was not the answer.

Joanie was dead, and he did not know the others well enough, hardly knew all their names, didn’t want to know them better.

So, in the end, like it or not, there was only Randi.

Willie got to his feet, weary now, unsteady. The wind shifted, sweeping across the yards and the runs, whispering to him of blood until his nostrils quivered. Willie threw back his head and howled, a long shuddering lonely call that rose and fell and went out through the cold night air until the dogs began to bark for blocks around. Then, once again, he began to run.

Rogoff gave her a lift home. Dawn was just starting to break when he pulled his old black Ford up to the front of her six-flat. As she opened the door, he shifted into neutral and looked over at her. ‘I’m not going to insist right now,’ he said, ‘but it might be that I need to know the name of your client. Sleep on it. Maybe you’ll decide to tell me.’

‘Maybe I can’t,’ Randi said. ‘Attorney-client privilege, remember?’

Rogoff gave her a tired smile. ‘When you sent me to the courthouse, I had a look at your file too. You never went to law school.’

‘No?’ She smiled back. ‘Well, I meant to. Doesn’t that count for something?’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll sleep on it, we can talk tomorrow.’ She got out, closed the door, moved away from the car. Rogoff shifted into drive, but Randi turned back before he could pull away. ‘Hey, Rogoff, you have a first name?’

‘Mike,’ he said.

‘See you tomorrow, Mike.’

He nodded and pulled away just as the streetlamps began to go out. Randi walked up the stoop, fumbling for her key.

‘Randi!’

She stopped, looked around. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Willie.’ The voice was louder this time. ‘Down here by the garbage cans.’

Randi leaned over the stoop and saw him. He was crouched down low, surrounded by trash bins, shivering in the morning chill. ‘You’re naked,’ she said.

‘Somebody tried to kill me last night. I made it out. My clothes didn’t. I’ve been here an hour, not that I’m complaining mind you, but I think I have pneumonia and my balls are frozen solid. I’ll never be able to have children now. Where the fuck have you been?’

‘There was another murder. Same m.o.’

Willie shook so violently that the garbage cans rattled together. ‘Jesus,’ he said, his voice gone weak. ‘Who?’

‘Her name was Zoe Anders.’

Willie flinched. ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ he said. He looked back up at Randi. She could see the fear in his eyes, but he asked anyway. ‘What about Amy?’

‘Her sister?’ Randi said. He nodded. ‘In shock, but fine. She had a nightmare.’ She paused a moment. ‘So you knew Zoe too. Like Sorenson?’

‘No. Not like Joanie.’ He looked at her wearily. ‘Can we go in?’ She nodded and opened the door. Willie looked so grateful she thought he was about to lick her hand.

The underwear was her ex-husband’s, and it was too big. The pink bathrobe was Randi’s, and it was too small. But the coffee was just right, and it was warm in here, and Willie felt bone-tired and nervous but glad to be alive, especially when Randi put the plate down in front of him. She’d scrambled the eggs up with cheddar cheese and onion and done up a rasher of bacon on the side, and it smelled like nirvana. He fell to eagerly.

‘I think I’ve figured out something,’ she said. She sat down across from him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘The eggs, I mean. That is, whatever you figured out, that’s good too, but Jesus, I needed these eggs. You wouldn’t believe how hungry you get—’ He stopped suddenly, stared down at the scrambled eggs, and reflected on what an idiot he was, but Randi hadn’t noticed. Willie reached for a slice of bacon, bit off the end. ‘Crisp,’ he said. ‘Good.’

‘I’m going to tell you,’ Randi said, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. ‘I’ve got to tell somebody, and you’ve known me long enough so I don’t think you’ll have me committed. You may laugh.’ She scowled at him. ‘If you laugh, you’re back out in the street, minus the boxer shorts and the bathrobe.’

‘I won’t laugh,’ Willie said. He didn’t think he’d have much difficulty not laughing. He felt rather apprehensive. He stopped eating.

Randi took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. She had very lovely eyes, Willie thought. ‘I think my father was killed by a werewolf,’ she said seriously, without blinking.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Willie said. He didn’t laugh. A very large invisible anaconda wrapped itself around his chest and began to squeeze. ‘I,’ he said, ‘I, I, I.’ Nothing was coming in or out. He pushed back from the table, knocking over the chair, and ran for the bathroom. He locked himself in and turned on the shower full blast, twisting the hot tap all the way around. The bathroom began to fill up with steam. It wasn’t nearly as good as a blast from his inhaler, but it did beat suffocating. By the time the steam was really going good, Willie was on his knees, gasping like a man trying to suck an elephant through a straw. Finally he began to breathe again.

He stayed on his knees for a long time, until the spray from the shower had soaked through his robe and his underwear and his face was flushed and red. Then he crawled across the tiled floor, turned off the shower, and got unsteadily to his feet. The mirror above the sink was all fogged up. Willie wiped it off with a towel and peered in at himself. He looked like shit. Wet shit. Hot wet shit. He felt worse. He tried to dry himself off, but the steam and the shower spray had gone everywhere and the towels were as damp as he was. He heard Randi moving around outside, opening and closing drawers. He wanted to go out and face her, but not like this. A man has to have some pride. For a moment he just wanted to be home in bed with his Primatene on the end table, until he remembered that his bedroom had been occupied die last time he’d been there.

‘Are you ever coming out?’ Randi asked.

‘Yeah,’ Willie said, but it was so weak that he doubted she heard him. He straightened and adjusted the frilly pink robe. Underneath the undershirt looked as though he’d been competing in a wet T-shirt contest. He sighed, unlocked the door, and exited. The cold air gave him goose pimples.

Randi was seated at the table again. Willie went back to his place. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Asthma attack.’

‘I noticed,’ Randi replied. ‘Stress related, aren’t they?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Finish your eggs,’ she urged. ‘They’re getting cold.’

‘Yeah,’ Willie said, figuring he might as well, since it would give him something to do while he figured out what to tell her. He picked up his fork.

It was like the time he’d grabbed a dirty pot that had been sitting on top of his hotplate since the night before and realized too late that he’d never turned the hotplate off. Willie shrieked and the fork clattered to the table and bounced, once, twice, three times. It. landed in front of Randi. He sucked on his fingers. They were already starting to turn red. Randi looked at him very calmly and picked up the fork. She held it, stroked it with her thumb, touched its prongs thoughtfully to her lip. ‘I brought out the good silver while you were in the bathroom,’ she said. ‘Solid sterling. It’s been in the family for generations.’

His fingers hurt like hell. ‘Oh, Jesus. You got any butter? Oleo, lard, I don’t care, anything will…’ He stopped when her hand went under the table and came out again holding a gun. From where Willie sat, it looked like a very big gun.

‘Pay attention, Willie. Your fingers are the least of your worries. I realize you’re in pain, so I’ll give you a minute or two to collect your thoughts and try to tell me why I shouldn’t blow off your fucking head right here and now.’ She cocked the hammer with her thumb.

Willie just stared at her. He looked pathetic, like a half-drowned puppy. For one terrible moment Randi thought he was going to have another asthma attack. She felt curiously calm, not angry or afraid or even nervous, but she didn’t think she had it in her to shoot a man in the back as he ran for the bathroom, even if he was a werewolf.

Thankfully, Willie spared her that decision. ‘You don’t want to shoot me,’ he said, with remarkable aplomb under the circumstances. ‘It’s bad manners to shoot your friends. You’ll make a hole in the bathrobe.’

‘I never liked that bathrobe anyway. I hate pink.’

‘If you’re really so hot to kill me, you’d stand a better chance with the fork,’ Willie said.

‘So you admit that you’re a werewolf?’

‘A lycanthrope,’ Willie corrected. He sucked at his burnt fingers again and looked at her sideways. ‘So sue me. It’s a medical condition. I got allergies, I got asthma, I got a bad back, and I got lycanthropy, is it my fault? I didn’t kill your father. I never killed anyone. I ate half a pit bull once, but can you blame me?’ His voice turned querulous. ‘If you want to shoot me, go ahead and try. Since when do you carry a gun anyway? I thought all that shit about private eyes stuffing heat was strictly television.’

‘The phrase is packing heat, and it is. I only bring mine out for special occasions. My father was carrying it when he died.’

‘Didn’t do him much good, did it?’ Willie said softly.

Randi considered that for a moment. ‘What would happen if I pulled the trigger?’ The gun was getting heavy, but her hand was steady.

‘I’d try to change. I don’t think I’d make it, but I’d have to try. A couple bullets in the head at this range, while I’m still human, yeah, that’d probably do the job. But you don’t want to miss and you really don’t want to wound me. Once I’m changed, it’s a whole different ball game.’

‘My father emptied his gun on the night he was killed,’ Randi said thoughtfully.

Willie studied his hand and winced. ‘Oh fuck,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a blister.’

Randi put the gun on the table and went to the kitchen to get him a stick of butter. He accepted it from her gratefully. She glanced toward the window as he treated his burns. ‘The sun’s up,’ she said, ‘I thought werewolves only changed at night, during the full moon?’

‘Lycanthropes,’ Willie said. He flexed his fingers, sighed. ‘That full moon shit was all invented by some screenwriter for Universal, go look at your literature, we change at will, day, night, full moon, new moon, makes no difference. Sometimes I feel more like changing during the full moon, some kind of hormonal thing, but more like getting horny than going on the rag, if you know what I mean.’ He grabbed his coffee. It was cold by now, but that didn’t stop Willie from emptying the cup. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you all this, fuck, Randi, I like you, you’re a friend, I care about you, you should only forget this whole morning, believe me, it’s healthier.’

‘Why?’ she said bluntly. She wasn’t about to forget anything. ‘What’s going to happen to me if I don’t? Are you going to rip my throat out? Should I forget Joan Sorenson and Zoe Anders too? How about Roy Helander and all those missing kids? Am I supposed to forget what happened to my father? She stopped for a moment, lowered her voice. ‘You came to me for help, Willie, and pardon, but you sure as hell look as though you still need it.’

Willie looked at her across the table with a morose hangdog expression on his long face. ‘I don’t know whether I want to kiss you or slap you,’ he finally admitted. ‘Shit, you’re right, you know too much already.’ He stood up. ‘I got to get into my own clothes, this wet underwear is giving me pneumonia. Call a cab, we’ll go check out my place, talk. You got a coat?’

‘Take the Burberry,’ Randi said. ‘It’s in the closet.’ The coat was even bigger on him than it had been on Randi, but it beat the pink bathrobe. He looked almost human as he emerged from the closet, fussing with the belt. Randi was rummaging in the silver drawer. She found a large carving knife, the one her grandfather used to use on Thanksgiving, and slid it through the belt of her jeans. Willie looked at it nervously. ‘Good idea,’ he finally said, ‘but take the gun too.’

The cab driver was the quiet type. The drive across town passed in awkward silence. Randi paid him while Willie climbed out to check the doors. It was a blustery overcast day, and the river looked gray and choppy as it slapped against the pier.

Willie kicked his front door in a fit of pique, and vanished down the alley. Randi waited by the pier and watched the cab drive off. A few minutes later Willie was back, looking disgusted. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘The back door hasn’t been opened in years, you’d need a hammer and chisel just to knock through the rust. The loading docks are bolted down and chained with the mother of all padlocks on the chains. And the front door … there’s a spare set of keys in my car, but even if we got those the police bar can only be lifted from inside. So how the hell did it get in, I ask you?’

Randi looked at the brewery’s weathered brick walls appraisingly. They looked pretty solid to her, and the second floor windows were a good twenty feet off street level. She walked around the side to take a look down the alley. ‘There’s a window broken,’ she said.

‘That was me getting out,’ Willie said, ‘not my nocturnal caller getting in.’

Randi had already figured out that much from the broken glass all over the cobblestones. ‘Right now I’m more concerned about how we’re going to get in.’ She pointed. ‘If we move that dumpster a few feet to the left and climb on top, and you climb on my shoulders, I think you might be able to hoist yourself in.’

Willie considered that. ‘What if it’s still in there?’

‘What?’ Randi said.

‘Whatever was after me last night. If I hadn’t jumped through that window, it’d be me without a skin this morning, and believe me, I’m cold enough as is.’ He looked at the window, at the dumpster, and back at the window. ‘Fuck,’ he said, ‘we can’t stand here all day. But I’ve got a better idea. Help me roll the dumpster away from the wall a little.’

Randi didn’t understand, but she did as Willie suggested. They left the dumpster in the center of the alley, directly opposite the broken window. Willie nodded and began unbelting the coat she’d lent him. ‘Turn around,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want you freaking out. I’ve got to get naked and your carnal appetites might get the best of you.’

Randi turned around. The temptation to glance over her shoulder was irresistible. She heard the coat fall to the ground. Then she heard something else … soft padding steps, like a dog. She turned. He’d circled all the way down to the end of the alley. Her ex-husband’s old underwear lay puddled across the cobblestones atop the Burberry coat. Willie came streaking back toward the brewery building speed. He was, Randi noticed, not a very prepossessing wolf. His fur was a dirty gray-brown color, kind of mangy, his rear looked too large and his legs too thin, and there was something ungainly about the way he ran. He put on a final burst of speed, leapt on top of the dumpster, bounded off the metal lid, and flew through the shattered window, breaking more glass as he went. Randi heard a loud thump from inside the bedroom.

She went around to the front. A few moments later, the locks began to unlock, one by one, and Willie opened the heavy steel door. He was wearing his own bathrobe, a red tartan flannel, and his hand was full of keys. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘No sign of night visitors. I put on some water for tea.’

‘The fucker must have crawled out of the toilet,’ Willie said. ‘I don’t see any other way he could have gotten in.’

Randi stood in front of what remained of his bedroom door. She studied the shattered wood, ran her finger lightly across one long, jagged splinter, then knelt to look at the floor. ‘Whatever it was, it was strong. Look at these gouges in the wood, look at how sharp and clean they are. You don’t do that with a fist. Claws, maybe. More likely some kind of knife. And take a look at this.’ She gestured toward the brass doorknob, which lay on the floor amidst a bunch of kindling.

Willie bent to pick it up.

‘Don’t touch,’ she said, grabbing his arm. ‘Just look.’

He got down on one knee. At first he didn’t notice anything. But when he leaned close, he saw how the brass was scored and scraped.

‘Something sharp,’ Randi said, ‘and hard.’ She stood. When you first heard the sounds, what direction were they coming from?’

Willie thought for a moment. ‘It was hard to tell,’ he said. ‘Toward the back, I think.’

Randi walked back. All along the hall, the doors were closed. She studied the banister at the top of the stairs, then moved on, and began opening and closing doors. ‘Come here,’ she said, at the fourth door.

Willie trotted down the hall. Randi had the door ajar. The knob on the hall side was fine; the knob on the inside displayed the same kind of scoring they’d seen on his bedroom door. Willie was aghast. ‘But this is the men’s room,’ he said. ‘You mean it did come out of the toilet? I’ll never shit again.’

‘It came out of this room,’ Randi said. ‘I don’t know about the toilet.’ She went in and looked around. There wasn’t much to look at. Two toilet stalls, two urinals, two sinks with a long mirror above them and antique brass soap dispensers beside the water taps, a paper towel dispenser, Willie’s towels and toiletries. No window. Not even a small frosted-glass window. No window at all.

Down the hall the teakettle began to whistle. Randi looked thoughtful as they walked back to the living room.

‘Joan Sorenson died behind a locked door, and the killer got to Zoe Anders without waking her sister right across the hall.’

‘The fucking thing can come and go as it pleases,’ Willie said. The idea gave him the creeps. He glanced around nervously as he got out the teabags, but there was nobody there but him and Randi.

‘Except it can’t,’ Randi said. ‘With Sorenson and Anders, there was no damage, no sign of a breakin, nothing but a corpse. But with you, the killer was stopped by something as simple as a locked door.’

‘Not stopped,’ Willie said, ‘just slowed down a little.’ He repressed a shudder and brought the tea over to his coffee table.

‘Did he get the right Anders sister?’ she asked.

Willie stood there stupidly for a moment holding the kettle poised over the cups. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve got identical twins sharing the same house. Let’s presume it’s a house the killer’s never visited before. Somehow he gains entry, and he chains, murders, and flays only one of them, without even waking the other.’ Randi smiled up at him sweetly. ‘You can’t tell them apart by sight, he probably didn’t know which room was which, so the question is, did he get the werewolf?’

It was nice to know that she wasn’t infallible. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and no. They were twins, Randi. Both lycanthropes.’ She looked honestly surprised. ‘How did you know?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, the chains,’ she said negligently. Her mind was far away, gnawing at the puzzle. ‘Silver chains. She was burned wherever they’d touched her flesh. And Joan Sorenson was a werewolf too, of course. She was crippled, yes … but only as a human, not after her transformation. That’s why her legs were chained, to hold her if she changed.’ She looked at Willie with a baffled expression on her face. ‘It doesn’t make sense, to kill one and leave the other untouched. Are you sure that Amy Anders is a werewolf too?’

‘A lycanthrope,’ he said. ‘Yes. Definitely. They were even harder to tell apart as wolves. At least when they were human they dressed differently. Amy likes white lace, frills, that kind of stuff, and Zoe was into leather.’ There was a cut-glass ashtray in the center of the coffee table filled with Willie’s private party mix: aspirin, Allerest, and Tums. He took a handful of pills and swallowed them.

‘Look, before we go on with this, I want one card on the table,’ Randi said.

For once he was ahead of her. ‘If I knew who killed your father, I’d tell you, but I don’t, I was in the service, overseas. I vaguely remember something in the Courier, but to tell the truth I’d forgotten all about it until you threw it at me last night. What can I tell you?’ He shrugged.

‘Don’t bullshit me, Willie. My father was killed by a werewolf. You’re a werewolf. You must know something.’

‘Hey, try substituting Jew or diabetic or bald man for werewolf in that statement, and see how much sense it makes. I’m not saying you’re wrong about your father because you’re not; it fits, it all fits, everything from the condition of the body to the empty gun, but even if you buy that much, then you got to ask which werewolf.’

‘How many of you are there,’ Randi asked incredulously.

‘Damned if I know,’ Willie said. ‘What do you think, we get together for a lodge meeting every time the moon is full? The purebloods, hell, not many, the pack’s been getting pretty thin these last few generations. But there’s lots of mongrels like me, half-breeds, quarter-breeds, what have you, the old families had their share of bastards. Some can work the change, some can’t. I’ve heard of a few who change one day and never do manage to change back. And that’s just from the old bloodlines, never mind the ones like Joanie.’

‘You mean Joanie was different?’

Willie gave her a reluctant nod. ‘You’ve seen the movies. You get bitten by a werewolf, you turn into a werewolf; that is, assuming there’s enough of you left to turn into anything except a cadaver.’ She nodded, and he went on. ‘Well, that part’s true, or partly true, it doesn’t happen as often as it once did. Guy gets bit nowadays, he runs to a doctor, gets the wound cleaned and treated with antiseptic, gets his rabies shots and his tetanus shots and his penicillin and fuck-all knows what else, and he’s fine. The wonders of modern medicine.’

Willie hesitated briefly, looking in her eyes, those lovely eyes, wondering if she’d understand, and finally he plunged ahead. ‘Joanie was such a good kid, it broke my heart to see her in that chair. One night she told me that the hardest thing of all was realizing that she’d never know what it felt like to make love. She’d been a virgin when they hit that truck. We’d had a few drinks, she was crying, and … well, I couldn’t take it. I told her what I was and what I could do for her, she didn’t believe a word of it, so I had to show her. I bit her leg, she couldn’t feel a damned thing down there anyway, I bit her and I held the bite for a long time, worried it around good. Afterwards I nursed her myself. No doctors, no antiseptic, no rabies vaccine. We’re talking major league infection here, there was a day or two when her fever was running so high I thought maybe I’d killed her; her leg had turned nearly black, you could see the stuff going up her veins. I got to admit it was pretty gross, I’m in no hurry to try it again, but it worked. The fever broke and Joanie changed.’

‘You weren’t just friends,’ Randi said with certainty. ‘You were lovers.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘As wolves. I guess I look sexier in fur. I couldn’t even begin to keep up with her, though. Joanie was a pretty active wolf. We’re talking almost every night here.’

‘As a human, she was still crippled,’ Randi said.

Willie nodded, held up his hand. ‘See.’ The burns were still there, and a blood blister had formed on his index finger. ‘Once or twice the change has saved my life, when my asthma got so bad I thought I was going to suffocate. That kind of thing doesn’t cross over, but it’s sure as hell waiting for you when you cross back. Sometimes you even get nasty surprises. Catch a bullet as a wolf and it’s nothing, a sting and a slap, heals up right away, but you can pay for it when you change into human form, especially if you change too soon and the damn thing gets infected. And silver will burn the shit out of you no matter what form you’re in. LBJ was my favorite president, just loved them cupro-nickel-sandwich quarters.’

Randi stood up. ‘This is all a little overwhelming. Do you like being a werewolf?’

‘A lycanthrope.’ Willie shrugged. ‘I don’t know, do you like being a woman? It’s what I am.’

Randi crossed the room and stared out his window at the river. ‘I’m very confused,’ she said. ‘I look at you and you’re my friend Willie. I’ve known you for years. Only you’re a werewolf too. I’ve been telling myself that werewolves don’t exist since I was twelve, and now I find out the city is full of them. Only someone or something is killing them, flaying them. Should I care? Why should I care?’ She ran a hand through her tangled hair. ‘We both know that Roy Helander didn’t kill those kids. My father knew it too. He kept pressing, and one night he was lured to the stockyards and some kind of animal tore out his throat. Every time I think of that I think maybe I ought to find this werewolf killer and sign up to help him. Then I look at you again.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘And damn it, you’re still my friend.’

She looked as though she was going to cry. Willie had never seen her cry and he didn’t want to. He hated it when they cried. ‘Remember when I first offered you a job, and you wouldn’t take it, because you thought all collection agents were pricks?’

She nodded.

‘Lycanthropes are skinchangers. We turn into wolves. Yeah, we’re carnivores, you got it, you don’t meet many vegetarians in the pack, but there’s meat and there’s meat. You won’t find nearly as many rats around here as you will in other cities this size. What I’m saying is the skin may change, but what you do is still up to the person inside. So stop thinking about werewolves and werewolf-killers and start thinking about murderers, ‘cause that’s what we’re talking about.’

Randi crossed the room and sat back down. ‘I hate to admit it, but you’re making sense.’

‘I’m good in bed too,’ Willie said with a grin. The ghost of a smile crossed her face.

‘Fuck you.’

‘Exactly my suggestion. What kind of underwear are you wearing?’

‘Never mind my underwear,’ she said. ‘Do you have any ideas about these murderers? Past or present?’

Sometimes Randi had a one track mind, Willie thought; unfortunately, it never seemed to be the track that led under the sheets. ‘Jonathan told me about an old legend,’ he said.

‘Jonathan?’ she said.

‘Jonathan Harmon, yeah, that one, old blood and iron, the Courier, Blackstone, the pack, the founding family, all of it.’

‘Wait a minute. He’s a were - a lycanthrope?’

Willie nodded. ‘Yeah, leader of the pack, he—’

Randi leapt ahead of him. ‘And it’s hereditary?’

He saw where she was going. ‘Yes, but—’

‘Steven Harmon is mentally disturbed,’ Randi interrupted. ‘His family keeps it out of the papers, but they can’t stop the whispering. Violent episodes, strange doctors coming and going at Blackstone, shock treatments. He’s some kind of pain freak, isn’t he?’

Willie sighed. ‘Yeah. Ever see his hands? The palms and fingers are covered with silver burns. Once I saw him close his hand around a silver cartwheel and hold it there until smoke started to come out between his fingers. It burned a big round hole right in the center of his palm.’ He shuddered. ‘Yeah, Steven’s a freak all right, and he’s strong enough to rip your arm out of your socket and beat you to death with it, but he didn’t kill your father, he couldn’t have.’

‘Says you,’ she said.

‘He didn’t kill Joanie or Zoe either. They weren’t just murdered, Randi. They were skinned. That’s where the legend comes in. The word is skinchangers, remember? What if the power was in the skin? So you catch a werewolf, flay it, slip into the bloody skin… and change.’

Randi was staring at him with a sick look on her face. ‘Does it really work that way?’

‘Someone thinks so.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone who’s been thinking about werewolves for a long time. Someone who’s gone way past obsession into full-fledged psychopathy. Someone who thinks he saw a werewolf once, who thinks werewolves done him wrong, who hates them, wants to hurt them, wants revenge… but maybe also, down deep, someone who wants to know what’s it like.’

‘Roy Helander,’ she said.

‘Maybe if we could find this damned secret hideout in the woods, we’d know for sure.’

Randi stood up. ‘I racked my brains for hours. We could poke around a few of the city parks some, but I’m not sanguine on our prospects. No. I want to know more about these legends, and I want to look at Steven with my own eyes. Get your car, Willie. We’re going to pay a visit to Blackstone.’

He’d been afraid she was going to say something like that. He reached out and grabbed another handful of his party mix. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, crunching down on a mouthful of pills. ‘This isn’t the Addams Family, you know. Jonathan is for real.’

‘So am I,’ said Randi, and Willie knew the cause was lost.

It was raining again by the time they reached Courier Square. Willie waited in the car while Randi went inside the gunsmith’s. Twenty minutes later, when she came back out, she found him snoring behind the wheel. At least he’d had the sense to lock the doors of his mammoth old Cadillac. She tapped on the glass, and he sat right up and stared at her for a moment without recognition. Then he woke up, leaned over, and unlocked the door on the passenger side. Randi slid beside him.

‘How’d it go?’

‘They don’t get much call for silver bullets, but they know someone upstate who does custom work for collectors,’ Randi said in a disgusted tone of voice.

‘You don’t sound too happy about it.’

‘I’m not. You wouldn’t believe what they’re going to charge me for a box of silver bullets, never mind that it’s going to take two weeks. It was going to take a month, but I raised the ante.’ She looked glumly out the rain-streaked window. A torrent of gray water rushed down the gutter, carrying its flotilla of cigarette butts and scraps of yesterday’s newspaper.

‘Two weeks?’ Willie turned the ignition and put the barge in gear. ‘Hell, we’ll both probably be dead in two weeks. Just as well, the whole idea of silver bullets makes me nervous.’

They crossed the square, past the Castle marquee and the Courier Building, and headed up Central, the windshield wipers clicking back and forth rhythmically. Willie hung a left on 13th and headed toward the bluff while Randi took out her father’s revolver, opened the cylinder, and checked to see that it was fully loaded. Willie watched her out of the corner of his eye as he drove. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘Guns don’t kill werewolves, werewolves kill werewolves.’

‘Lycanthropes,’ Randi reminded him.

He grinned and for a moment looked almost like the man she’d shared an office with, a long time ago.

Both of them grew visibly more intense as they drove down 13th, the Caddy’s big wheels splashing through the puddles. They were still a block away when she saw the little car crawling down the bluff, white against the dark stone. A moment later, she saw the lights, flashing red-and-blue.

Willie saw them too. He slammed on the brakes, lost traction, and had to steer wildly to avoid slamming into a parked car as he fishtailed. His forehead was beading with sweat when he finally brought the car to a stop, and Randi didn’t think it was from the near collision. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, ‘oh, Jesus, not Harmon too, I don’t believe it.’ He began to wheeze, and fumbled in his pocket for an inhaler.

‘Wait here, I’ll check it out,’ Randi told him. She got out, turned up the collar of her coat, and walked the rest of the way, to where 13th dead-ended flush against the bluff. The coroner’s wagon was parked amidst three police cruisers. Randi arrived at the same time as the cable car. Rogoff was the first one out. Behind him she saw Cooney, the police photographer, and two uniforms carrying a body bag. It must have gotten pretty crowded on the way down.

‘You.’ Rogoff seemed surprised to see her. Strands of black hair were plastered to his forehead by the rain.

‘Me,’ Randi agreed. The plastic of the body bag was wet, and the uniforms were having trouble with it. One of them lost his footing as he stepped down, and Randi thought she saw something shift inside the bag. ‘It doesn’t fit the pattern,’ she said to Rogoff. ‘The other killings have all been at night.’

Rogoff took her by the arm and drew her away, gently but firmly. ‘You don’t want to look at this one, Randi.’

There was something in his tone that made her look at him hard. ‘Why not? It can’t be any worse than Zoe Anders, can it? Who’s in the bag, Rogoff? The father or the son?’

‘Neither one,’ he said. He glanced back behind them, up toward the top of the bluff, and Randi found herself following his gaze. Nothing was visible of Blackstone but the high wrought iron fence that surrounded the estate. ‘This time his luck ran out on him. The dogs got to him first. Cooney says the scent of blood off of… of what he was wearing … well, it must have driven them wild. They tore him to pieces, Randi.’ He put his hand on her shoulder, as if to comfort her.

‘No,’ Randi said. She felt numb, dazed.

‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘It’s over. And believe me, it’s not something you want to see.’

She backed away from him. They were loading the body in the rear of the coroner’s wagon while Sylvia Cooney supervised the operation, smoking her cigar in the rain. Rogoff tried to touch her again, but she whirled away from him, and ran to the wagon. ‘Hey!’ Cooney said.

The body was on the tailgate, half-in and half-out of the wagon. Randi reached for the zipper on the body bag. One of the cops grabbed her arm. She shoved him aside and unzipped the bag. His face was half gone. His right cheek and ear and part of his jaw had been torn away, devoured right down to the bone. What features he had left were obscured by blood.

Someone tried to pull her away from the tailgate. She spun and kicked him in the balls, then turned back to the body and grabbed it under the arms and pulled. The inside of the body bag was slick with blood. The corpse slid loose of the plastic sheath like a banana squirting out of its skin and fell into the street. Rain washed down over it, and the runoff in the gutter turned pink, then red. A hand, or part of a hand, fell out of the bag almost like an afterthought. Most of the arm was gone, and Randi could see bones peeking through, and places where huge hunks of flesh had been torn out of his thigh, shoulder, and torso. He was naked, but between his legs was nothing but a raw red wound where his genitalia had been.

Something was fastened around his neck, and knotted beneath his chin. Randi leaned forward to touch it, and drew back when she saw his face. The rain had washed it clean. He had one eye left, a green eye, open and staring. The rain pooled in the socket and ran down his cheek. Roy had grown gaunt to the point of emaciation, with a week’s growth of beard, but his long hair was still the same color, the color he’d shared with all his brothers and sisters, that muddy Helander blond.

Something was knotted under his chin, a long twisted cloak of some kind; it had gotten all tangled when he fell. Randi was trying to straighten it when they caught her by both arms and dragged her away bodily. ‘No,’ she said wildly. ‘What was he wearing? What was he wearing, damn you! I have to see!’ No one answered. Rogoff had her right arm prisoned in a grip that felt like steel. She fought him wildly, kicking and shouting, but he held her until the hysteria had passed, and then held her some more as she leaned against his chest, sobbing.

She didn’t quite know when Willie had come up, but suddenly there he was. He took her away from Rogoff and led her back to his Cadillac, and they sat inside, silent, as first the coroner’s wagon and then the police cruisers drove off one by one. She was covered with blood. Willie gave her some aspirin from a bottle he kept in his glove compartment. She tried to swallow it, but her throat was raw and she wound up gagging it back up. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her, over and over. ‘It wasn’t your father, Randi. Listen to me, please, it wasn’t your father!’

‘It was Roy Helander,’ Randi said to him at last. ‘And he was wearing Joanie’s skin.’

Willie drove her home; she was in no shape to confront Jonathan Harmon or anybody. She’d calmed down, but the hysteria was still there, just under the surface, he could see it in the eyes, hear it in her voice. If that wasn’t enough, she kept telling him the same thing, over and over. ‘It was Roy Helander,’ she’d say, like he didn’t know, ‘and he was wearing Joanie’s skin.’

Willie found her keys and helped her upstairs to her apartment. Inside, he made her take a couple of sleeping pills from the all-purpose pharmaceutical in his glove box, then turned down the bed and undressed her. He figured if anything would snap her back to herself, it would be his fingers on the buttons of her blouse, but she just smiled at him, vacant and dreamy, and told him that it was Roy Helander and he was wearing Joanie’s skin. The big silver knife jammed through her belt loops gave him pause. He finally unzipped her fly, undid her buckle, and yanked off the jeans, knife and all. She didn’t wear panties. He’d always suspected as much.

When Randi was finally in bed asleep, Willie went back to her bathroom and threw up.

Afterward he made himself a gin-and-tonic to wash the taste of vomit out of his mouth, and went and sat alone in her living room in one of her red velvet chairs. He’d had even less sleep than Randi these past few nights, and he felt as though he might drift off at any moment, but he knew somehow that it was important not to. It was Roy Helander and he was wearing Joanie’s skin. So it was over, he was safe.

He remembered the way his door shook last night, a solid wood door, and it split like so much cheap paneling. Behind it was something dark and powerful, something that left scars on brass doorknobs and showed up in places it had no right to be. Willie didn’t know what had been on the other side of his door, but somehow he didn’t think that the gaunt, wasted, half-eaten travesty of a man he’d seen on 13th Street quite fit the bill. He’d believe that his nocturnal visitor had been Roy Helander, with or without Joanie’s skin, about the same time he’d believe that the man had been eaten by dogs. Dogs! How long did Jonathan expect to get away with that shit? Still, he couldn’t blame him, not with Zoe and Joanie dead, and Helander trying to sneak into Blackstone dressed in a human skin.

. .. there are things that hunt the hunters.

Willie picked up the phone and dialed Blackstone.

‘Hello.’ The voice was flat, affectless, the voice of someone who cared about nothing and no one, not even himself.

‘Hello, Steven,’ Willie said quietly. He was about to ask for Jonathan when a strange sort of madness took hold of him, and he heard himself say, ‘Did you watch? Did you see what Jonathan did to him, Steven? Did it get you off?’

The silence on the other end of the line went on for ages. Sometimes Steven Harmon simply forgot how to talk. But not this time. ‘Jonathan didn’t do him. I did. It was easy. I could smell him coming through the woods. He never even saw me. I came around behind him and pinned him down and bit off his ear. He wasn’t very strong at all. After a while he changed into a man, and then he was all slippery, but it didn’t matter, I—’

Someone took the phone away. ‘Hello, who is this?’ Jonathan’s voice said from the receiver.

Willie hung up. He could always call back later. Let Jonathan sweat awhile, wondering who it had been on the other end of the line. ‘After a while he changed into a man,’ Willie repeated aloud. Steven did it himself. Steven couldn’t do it himself. Could he? ‘Oh Jesus,’ Willie said.

Somewhere far away, a phone was ringing.

Randi rolled over in her bed. ‘Joanie’s skin,’ she muttered groggily in low, half-intelligible syllables. She was naked, with the blankets tangled around her. The room was pitch dark. The phone rang again. She sat up, a sheet curled around her neck. The room was cold, and her head pounded. She ripped loose the sheet, threw it aside. Why was she naked? What the hell was going on? The phone rang again and her machine cut in. ‘This is AAA-Wade Investigations, Randi Wade speaking. I can’t talk right now, but you can leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you.’

Randi reached out and speared the phone just in time for the beep to sound in her ear. She winced. ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m here. What time is it? Who’s this?’

‘Randi, are you all right? It’s Uncle Joe.’ Joe Urquhart’s gruff voice was a welcome relief. ‘Rogoff told me what happened, and I was very concerned about you. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.’

‘Hours?’ She looked at the clock. It was past midnight. ‘I’ve been asleep. I think,’ The last she remembered, it had been daylight and she and Willie had been driving down 13th on their way to Blackstone to …

It was Roy Helander and he was wearing Joanie’s skin.

‘Randi, what’s wrong? You sure you’re okay? You sound wretched. Damn it, say something.’

‘I’m here,’ she said. She pushed hair back out of her eyes. Someone had opened her window, and the air was frigid on her bare skin. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I just … I was asleep. It shook me up, that’s all. I’ll be fine.’

‘If you say so.’ Urquhart sounded dubious.

Willie must have brought her home and put her to bed, she thought. So where was he? She couldn’t imagine that he’d just dump her and then take off, that wasn’t like Willie.

‘Pay attention,’ Urquhart said gruffly. ‘Have you heard a word I’ve said?’

She hadn’t. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just… disoriented, that’s all. It’s been a strange day.’

‘I need to see you,’ Urquhart said. His voice had taken on a sudden urgency. ‘Right away. I’ve been going over the reports on Roy Helander and his victims. There’s something out of place, something disturbing. And the more I look at these case files and Cooney’s autopsy report, the more I keep thinking about Frank, about what happened that night.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know how to say this. All these years … I only wanted the best for you, but I wasn’t … wasn’t completely honest with you.’

‘Tell me,’ she said. Suddenly she was a lot more awake.

‘Not over the phone. I need to see you face to face, to show it to you. I’ll swing by and get you. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?’

‘Ten,’ Randi said.

She hung up, hopped out of bed and opened the bedroom door. ‘Willie?’ she called out. There was no answer. ‘Willie!’ she repeated more loudly. Nothing. She turned on the lights, padded barefoot down the hall, expecting to find him snoring away on her sofa. But the living room was empty.

Her hands were sandpaper dry, and when she looked down she saw that they were covered with old blood. Her stomach heaved. She found the clothes she’d been wearing in a heap on the bedroom floor. They were brown and crusty with dried blood as well. Randi started the shower and stood under the water for a good five minutes, running it so hot that it burned the way that silver fork must have burned in Willie’s hand. The blood washed off, the water turning faintly pink as it whirled away and down. She toweled off thoroughly, and found a warm flannel shirt and a fresh pair of jeans. She didn’t bother with her hair; the rain would wet it down again soon enough. But she made a point of finding her father’s gun and sliding the long silver carving knife through the belt loop of her jeans.

As she bent to pick up the knife, Randi saw the square of white paper on the floor by her end table. She must have knocked it off when she’d reached for the phone.

She picked it up, opened it. It was covered with Willie’s familiar scrawl, a page of hurried, dense scribbling. I got to go, you’re in no condition, it began. Don’t go anywhere or talk to anyone. Roy Helander wasn’t sneaking in to kill Harmon, I finally figured it out. The damned Harmon family secret that’s no secret at all, I should have twigged, Steven—

That was as far as she’d gotten when the doorbell rang.

Willie hugged the ground two-thirds of the way up the bluff, the rain coming down around him and his heart pounding in his chest as he clung to the tracks. Somehow the grade didn’t seem nearly as steep when you were riding the cable car as it did now. He glanced behind him, and saw 13th Street far below. It made him dizzy. He wouldn’t even have gotten this far if it hadn’t been for the tracks. Where the slope grew almost vertical, he’d been able to scrabble up from tie to tie, using them like rungs on a ladder. His hands were full of splinters, but it beat trying to crawl up the wet rock, clinging to ferns for dear life.

Of course, he could have changed, and bounded up the tracks in no time at all. But somehow he didn’t think that would have been such a good idea. I could smell him coming, Steven had said. The human scent was fainter, in a city full of people. He had to hope that Steven and Jonathan were inside the New House, locked up for the night. But if they were out prowling around, at least this way Willie thought he had a ghost of a chance.

He’d rested long enough. He craned his head back, looking up at the high black iron fence that ran along the top of the bluff, trying to measure how much further he had to go. Then he took a good long shot off his inhaler, gritted his teeth, and scrambled for the next tie up.

The windshield wipers swept back and forth almost silently as the long dark car nosed through the night. The windows were tinted a gray so dark it was almost black. Urquhart was in civvies, a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, dark woolen slacks, and bulky down jacket. His police cap was his only concession to uniform. He stared straight out into the darkness as he drove. ‘You look terrible,’ she told him.

‘I feel worse.’ They swept under an overpass and around a long ramp onto the river road. ‘I feel old, Randi. Like this city. This whole damn city is old and rotten.’

‘Where are we going?’ she asked him. At this hour of night, there was no other traffic on the road. The river was a black emptiness off to their left. Streetlamps swam in haloes of rain to the right as they sailed past block after cold, empty block stretching away toward the bluffs.

‘To the pack,’ Urquhart said. ‘To where it happened.’

The car’s heater was pouring out a steady blast of warm air, but suddenly Randi felt deathly cold. Her hand went inside her coat, and closed around the hilt of the knife. The silver felt comfortable and comforting. ‘All right,’ she said. She slid the knife out of her belt and put it on the seat between them.

Urquhart glanced over. She watched him carefully ‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Silver,’ Randi said. ‘Pick it up.’

He looked at her. ‘What?’

‘You heard me,’ she said. ‘Pick it up.’

He looked at the road, at her face, back out at the road. He made no move to touch the knife.

‘I’m not kidding,’ Randi said. She slid away from him, to the far side of the seat, and braced her back against the door. When Urquhart looked over again, she had the gun out, aimed right between his eyes. ‘Pick it up,’ she said very clearly.

The color left his face. He started to say something, but Randi shook her head curtly. Urquhart licked his lips, took his hand off the wheel, and picked up the knife. ‘There,’ he said, holding it up awkwardly while he drove with one hand. ‘I picked it up. Now what am I supposed to do with it?’

Randi slumped back against the seat. ‘Put it down,’ she said with relief.

Joe looked at her.

He rested for a long time in the shrubs on top of the bluff, listening to the rain fall around him and dreading what other sounds he might hear. He kept imagining soft footfalls stealing up behind him, and once he thought he heard a low growl somewhere off to his right. He could feel his hackles rise, and until that moment he hadn’t even known he had hackles, but it was nothing, just his nerves working on him; Willie had always had bad nerves. The night was cold and black and empty.

When he finally had his breath back, Willie began to edge past the New House, keeping to the bushes as much as he could, well away from the windows. There were a few lights on, but no other sign of life. Maybe they’d all gone to bed. He hoped so.

He moved slowly and carefully, trying to be as quiet as possible. He watched where his feet came down, and every few steps he’d stop, look around, listen. He could change in an instant if he heard anyone … or anything… coming toward him. He didn’t know how much good that would do, but maybe, just maybe, it would give him a chance.

His raincoat dragged at him, a water-logged second skin as heavy as lead. His shoes had soaked through, and the leather squished when he moved. Willie pushed away from the house, further back into the trees, until a bend in the road hid the lights from view. Only then, after a careful glance in both directions to make sure nothing was coming, did he dare risk a dash across the road.

Once across he plunged deeper into the woods, moving faster now, a little more heedless. He wondered where Roy Helander had been when Steven had caught him. Somewhere around here, Willie thought, somewhere in this dark primal forest, surrounded by old growth, with centuries of leaves and moss and dead things rotting in the earth beneath his feet.

As he moved away from the bluff and the city, the forest grew denser, until finally the trees pressed so close together that he lost sight of the sky, and the raindrops stopped pounding against his head. It was almost dry here. Overhead, the rain drummed relentlessly against a canopy of leaves. Willie’s skin felt clammy, and for a moment he was lost, as if he’d wandered into some terrible cavern far beneath the earth, a dismal cold place where no light ever shone.

Then he stumbled between two huge, twisted old oaks, and felt air and rain against his face again, and raised his head, and there it was ahead of him, broken windows gaping down like so many blind eyes from walls carved from rock that shone like midnight and drank all light and hope. The tower loomed up to his right, some monstrous erection against the storm clouds, leaning crazily.

Willie stopped breathing, groped for his inhaler, found it, dropped it, picked it up. The mouthpiece was slimy with humus. He cleaned it on his sleeve, shoved it in his mouth, took a hit, two, three, and finally his throat opened up again.

He glanced around, heard only the rain, saw nothing. He stepped forward toward the tower. Toward Roy Helander’s secret refuge.

The big double gate in the high chain-link fence had been padlocked for two years, but it was open tonight, and Urquhart drove straight through. Randi wondered if the gate had been opened for her father as well. She thought maybe it had.

Joe pulled up near one of the loading docks, in the shadow of the old brick slaughterhouse. The building gave them some shelter from the rain, but Randi still trembled in the cold as she climbed out. ‘Here?’ she asked. ‘This is where you found him?’

Urquhart was staring off into the stockyard. It was a huge area, subdivided into a dozen pens along the railroad siding. There was a maze of chest-high fencing they called the ‘runs’ between the slaughterhouse and the pens, to force the cows into a single line and herd them along inside, where a man in a blood-splattered apron waited with a hammer in his hand. ‘Here,’ Joe said, without looking back at her.

There was a long silence. Somewhere far off, Randi thought she heard a faint, wild howl, but maybe that was just the wind and the rain. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked Joe.

‘Ghosts?’ The chief sounded distracted.

She shivered. ‘It’s like … I can feel him, Joe. Like he’s still here, after all this time, still watching over me.’

Joe Urquhart turned toward her. His face was wet with rain or maybe tears. ‘I watched over you,’ he said. ‘He asked me to watch over you, and I did, I did my best.’

Randi heard a sound somewhere off in the night. She turned her head, frowning, listening. Tires crunched across gravel and she saw headlights outside the fence. Another car coming.

‘You and your father, you’re a lot alike,’ Joe said wearily. ‘Stubborn. Won’t listen to nobody. I took good care of you, didn’t I take good care of you? I got my own kids, you know, but you never wanted nothing, did you? So why the hell didn’t you listen to me?’

By then Randi knew. She wasn’t surprised. Somehow she felt as though she’d known for a long time. ‘There was only one phone call that night,’ she said. ‘You were the one who phoned for backup, not Dad.’

Urquhart nodded. He was caught for a moment in the headlights of the oncoming car, and Randi saw the way his jaw trembled as he worked to get out the words. ‘Look in the glove box,’ he said.

Randi opened the car door, sat on the edge of the seat, and did as he said. The glove compartment was unlocked. Inside was a bottle of aspirin, a tire pressure gauge; some maps, and a box of cartridges. Randi opened the box and poured some bullets out into her palm. They glimmered pale and cold in the car’s faint dome light. She left the box on the seat, climbed out, kicked the door shut. ‘My silver bullets,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t expected them quite so soon.’

‘Those are the ones Frank ordered made up, eighteen years ago,’ Joe said. ‘After he was buried, I went by the gunsmith and picked them up. Like I said, you and him you were a lot alike.’

The second car pulled to a stop, pinning her in its high beams. Randi threw a hand across her eyes against the glare. She heard a car door opening and closing.

Urquhart’s voice was anguished. ‘I told you to stay away from this thing, damn it. I told you! Don’t you understand? They own this city!’

‘He’s right. You should have listened,’ Rogoff said, as he stepped into the light.

Willie groped his way down the long dark hall with one hand on the wall, placing each foot carefully in front of the last. The stone was so thick that even the sound of the rain did not reach him. There was only the echo of his careful footsteps, and the rush of blood inside his ears. The silence within the Old House was profound and unnerving, and there was something about the walls that bothered him as well. It was cold, but the stones under his fingers were moist and curiously warm to the touch, and Willie was glad for the darkness.

Finally he reached the base of the tower, where shafts of dim light fell across crabbed, narrow stone steps that spiraled up and up and up. Willie began to climb. He counted the steps at first, but somewhere around two hundred he lost the count, and the rest was a grim ordeal that he endured in silence. More than once he thought of changing. He resisted the impulse.

His legs ached from the effort when he reached the top. He sat down on the steps for a moment, his back to a slick stone wall. He was breathing hard, but when he groped for his inhaler, it was gone. He’d probably lost it in the woods. He could feel his lungs constricting in panic, but there was no help for it.

Willie got up.

The room smelled of blood and urine and something else, a scent he did not place, but somehow it made him tremble. There was no roof. Willie realized that the rain had stopped while he’d been inside. He looked up as the clouds parted, and a pale white moon stared down.

And all around other moons shimmered into life, reflected in the tall empty mirrors that lined the chamber. They reflected the sky above and each other, moon after moon after moon, until the room swam in silvered moonlight and reflections of reflections of reflections.

Willie turned around in a slow circle and a dozen other Willies turned with him. The moonstruck mirrors were streaked with dried blood, and above them a ring of cruel iron hooks curved up from the stone walls. A human skin hung from one of them, twisting slowly in some wind he could not feel, and as the moonlight hit it, it seemed to writhe and change, from woman to wolf to woman, both and neither.

That was when Willie heard the footsteps on the stairs.

‘The silver bullets were a bad idea,’ Rogoff said. ‘We have a local ordinance here. The police get immediate notice any time someone places an order for custom ammunition. Your father made the same mistake. The pack takes a dim view of silver bullets.’

Randi felt strangely relieved. For a moment she’d been afraid that Willie had betrayed her, that he’d been one of them after all, and that thought had been like poison in her soul. Her fingers were still curled tight around a dozen of the bullets. She glanced down at them, so close and yet so far.

‘Even if they’re still good, you’ll never get them loaded in time,’ Rogoff said.

‘You don’t need the bullets,’ Urquhart told her. ‘He just wants to talk. They promised me, honey, no one needs to get hurt.’

Randi opened her hand. The bullets fell to the ground. She turned to Joe Urquhart. ‘You were my father’s best friend. He said you had more guts than any man he ever knew.’

‘They don’t give you any choice,’ Urquhart said. ‘I had kids of my own. They said if Roy Helander took the fall, no more kids would vanish, they promised they’d take care of it, but if we kept pressing, one of my kids would be the next to go. That’s how it works in this town. Everything would have been all right, but Frank just wouldn’t let it alone.’

‘We only kill in self-defense,’ Rogoff said. ‘There’s a sweetness to human flesh, yes, a power that’s undeniable, but it’s not worth the risk.’

‘What about the children?’ Randi said. ‘Did you kill them in self-defense too?’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Rogoff said.

Joe stood with his head downcast. He was beaten, Randi saw, and she realized that he’d been beaten for a long time. All those trophies on his walls, but somehow she knew that he had given up hunting forever on the night her father died. ‘It was his son,’ Joe muttered quietly, in a voice full of shame. ‘Steven’s never been right in the head, everyone knows that, he was the one who killed the kids, ate them. It was horrible, Harmon told me so himself, but he still wasn’t going to let us have Steven. He said he’d … he’d control Steven’s … appetites … if we closed the case. He was good as his word too, he put Steven on medication, and it stopped, the murders stopped.’

She ought to hate Joe Urquhart, she realized, but instead she pitied him. After all this time, he still didn’t understand. ‘Joe, he lied. It was never Steven.’

‘It was Steven,’ Joe insisted, ‘it had to be, he’s insane. The rest of them … you can do business with them, Randi, listen to me now, you can talk to them.’

‘Like you did,’ she said. ‘Like Barry Schumacher.’

Urquhart nodded. ‘That’s right. They’re just like us, they got some crazies, but not all of them are bad. You can’t blame them for taking care of their own, we do the same thing, don’t we? Look at Mike here, he’s a good cop.’

‘A good cop who’s going to change into a wolf in a minute or two and tear out my throat,’ Randi said.

‘Randi, honey, listen to me,’ Urquhart said. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. You can walk out of here, just say the word. I’ll get you onto the force, you can work with us, help us to … to keep the peace. Your father’s dead, you won’t bring him back, and the Helander boy, he deserved what he got, he was killing them, skinning them alive; it was self-defense. Steven is sick, he’s always been sick—’

Rogoff was watching her from beneath his tangle of black hair. ‘He still doesn’t get it,’ she said. She turned back to Joe. ‘Steven is sicker than you think. Something is missing. Too inbred, maybe. Think about it. Anders and Rochmonts, Flambeauxes and Harmons, the four great founding families, all werewolves, marrying each other generation after generation to keep the lines pure, for how many centuries? They kept the lines pure all right. They bred themselves Steven. He didn’t kill those children. Roy Helander saw a wolf carry off his sister, and Steven can’t change into a wolf. He got the bloodlust, he got inhuman strength, he burns at the touch of silver, but that’s all. The last of the purebloods can’t work the change!’

‘She’s right,’ Rogoff said quietly.

‘Why do you think you never found any remains?’ Randi put in. ‘Steven didn’t kill those kids. His father carried them off, up to Blackstone.’

‘The old man had some crazy idea that if Steven ate enough human flesh, it might fix him, make him whole,’ Rogoff said.

‘It didn’t work,’ Randi said. She took Willie’s note out of her pocket, let the pages flutter to the ground. It was all there. She’d finished reading it before she’d gone down to meet Joe. Frank Wade’s little girl was nobody’s fool.

‘It didn’t work,’ Rogoff echoed, ‘but by then Jonathan had got the taste. Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.’ He looked at Randi for a long time, as if he were weighing something. Then he began …

… to change. Sweet cold air filled his lungs, and his muscles and bones ran with fire as the transformation took hold. He’d shrugged out of pants and coat, and he heard the rest of his clothing ripping apart as his body writhed, his flesh ran like hot wax, and he reformed, born anew.

Now he could see and hear and smell. The tower room shimmered with moonlight, every detail clear and sharp as noon, and the night was alive with sound, the wind and the rain and the rustle of bats in the forest around them, and traffic sounds and sirens from the city beyond. He was alive and full of power, and something was coming up the steps. It climbed slowly, untiring, and its smells filled the air. The scent of blood hung all around it, and beneath he sensed an aftershave that masked an unwashed body, sweat and dried semen on its skin, a heavy tang of wood smoke in its hair, and under it all the scent of sickness, sweetly rotten as a grave.

Willie backed all the way across the room, staring at the arched door, the growl rising in his throat. He bared long yellowed teeth, and slaver ran between them.

Steven stopped in the doorway and looked at him. He was naked. The wolfs hot red eyes met his cold blue ones, and it was hard to tell which were more inhuman. For a moment Willie thought that Steven didn’t quite comprehend. Until he smiled and reached for the skin that twisted above him, on an iron hook.

Willie leapt.

He took Steven high in the back and bore him down, with his hand still clutched around Zoe’s skin. For a second Willie had a clear shot at his throat, but he hesitated and the moment passed. Steven caught Willie’s foreleg in a pale scarred fist, and snapped it in half like a normal man might break a stick. The pain was excruciating. Then Steven was lifting him, flinging him away. He smashed up hard against one of the mirrors, and felt it shatter at the impact. Jagged shards of glass flew like knives, and one of them lanced through his side.

Willie rolled away, the glass spear broke under him, and he whimpered. Across the room, Steven was getting to his feet. He put out a hand to steady himself.

Willie scrambled up. His broken leg was knitting already, though it hurt when he put his weight on it. Glass fragments clawed inside him with every step. He could barely move. Some fucking werewolf he turned out to be.

Steven was adjusting his ghastly cloak, pulling flaps of skin down over his own face. The skin trade, Willie thought giddily, yeah, that was it, and in a moment Steven would use that damn flayed skin to do what he could never manage on his own, he would change, and then Willie would be meat.

Willie came at him, jaws gaping, but too slow. Steven’s foot pistoned down, caught him hard enough to take his breath away, pinned him to the floor. Willie tried to squirm free, but Steven was too strong. He was bearing down, crushing him. All of a sudden Willie remembered that dog, so many years ago.

Willie bent himself almost double and took a bite out of the back of Steven’s calf.

The blood filled his mouth, exploding inside him. Steven reeled back. Willie jumped up, darted forward, bit him again. This time he sank his teeth in good and held, worrying at the flesh. The pounding in his head was thunderous. He was full of power, he could feel it swelling within him. Suddenly he knew that he could tear Steven apart; he could taste the fine sweet flesh close to the bone, could hear the music of his screams, could imagine the way it would feel when he held him in his jaws and shook him like a rag doll and felt the life go out of him in a sudden giddy rush. It swept over him, and Willie bit and bit and bit again, ripping away chunks of meat, drunk on blood.

And then, dimly, he heard Steven screaming, screaming in a high shrill thin voice, a little boy’s voice. ‘No, Daddy,’ he was whining, over and over again. ‘No, please, don’t bite me, Daddy, don’t bite me any more.’

Willie let him go and backed away.

Steven sat on the floor, sobbing. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch. Pieces were missing from thigh, calf, shoulder, and foot. His legs were drenched in blood. Three fingers were gone off his right hand. His cheeks were slimy with gore.

Suddenly Willie was scared.

For a moment he didn’t understand. Steven was beaten, he could see that; he could rip out his throat or let him live, it didn’t matter, it was over. But something was wrong, something was terribly, sickeningly wrong. It felt as though the temperature had dropped a hundred degrees, and every hair on his body was prickling and standing on end. What the hell was going on? He growled low in his throat and backed away, toward the door, keeping a careful eye on Steven.

Steven giggled. ‘You’ll get it now,’ he said. ‘You called it. You got blood on the mirrors. You called it back again.’

The room seemed to spin. Moonlight ran from mirror to mirror to mirror, diz2yingly. Or maybe it wasn’t moonlight.

Willie looked into the mirrors.

The reflections were gone. Willie, Steven, the moon, all gone. There was blood on the mirrors and they were full of fog, a silvery pale fog that shimmered as it moved.

Something was moving through the fog, sliding from mirror to mirror to mirror, around and around. Something hungry that wanted to get out.

He saw it, lost it, saw it again. It was in front of him, behind him, off to the side. It was a hound, gaunt and terrible; it was a snake, scaled and foul; it was a man, with eyes like pits and knives for its fingers. It wouldn’t hold still, every time he looked its shape seemed to change, and each shape was worse than the last, more twisted and obscene. Everything about it was lean and cruel. Its fingers were sharp, so sharp, and he looked at them and felt their caress sliding beneath his skin, tingling along the nerves, pain and blood and fire trailing behind them. It was black, blacker than black, a black that drank all light forever, and it was all shining silver too. It was a nightmare that lived in a funhouse mirror, the thing that hunts the hunters.

He could feel the evil throbbing through the glass.

‘Skinner,’ Steven called.

The surface of the mirrors seemed to ripple and bulge, like a wave cresting on some quicksilver sea. The fog was thinning, Willie realized with sudden terror; he could see it clearer now, and he knew it could see him. And suddenly Willie Flambeaux knew what was happening, knew that when the fog cleared the mirrors wouldn’t be mirrors anymore; they’d be doors, doors, and the skinner would come …

… sliding forward, through the ruins of his clothing, slitted eyes glowing like embers from a muzzle black as coal. He was half again as large as Willie had been, his fur thick and black and shaggy, and when he opened his mouth, his teeth gleamed like ivory daggers.

Randi edged backward, along the side of the car. The knife was in her hand, moonlight running off the silver blade, but somehow it didn’t seem like very much. The huge black wolf advanced on her, his tongue lolling between his teeth, and she put her back up against the car door and braced herself for his leap.

Joe Urquhart stepped between them.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not her too, you owe me, talk to her, give her a chance, I’ll make her see how it is.’

The wolf growled a warning.

Urquhart stood his ground, and all of a sudden he had his revolver out, and he was holding it in two shaky hands, drawing a bead. ‘Stop. I mean it. She didn’t have time to load the goddamned silver bullets, but I’ve had eighteen fucking years. I’m the fucking police chief in this fucking city, and you’re under arrest.’

Randi put her hand on the door handle, eased it open. For a moment the wolf stood frozen, baleful red eyes fixed on Joe, and she thought it was actually going to work. She remembered her father’s old Wednesday night poker games; he’d always said Joe, unlike Barry Schumacher, ran one hell of a bluff.

Then the wolf threw back his head and howled, and all the blood went out of her. She knew that sound. She’d heard it in her dreams a thousand times. It was in her blood, that sound, an echo from far off and long ago, when the world had been a forest and humans had run naked in fear before the hunting pack. It echoed off the side of the old slaughterhouse and trembled out over the city, and they must have heard it all over the flats, heard it and glanced outside nervously and checked their locks before they turned up the volumes on their TVs.

Randi opened the door wider and slid one leg inside the car as the wolf leapt.

She heard Urquhart fire, and fire again, and then the wolf slammed into his chest and smashed him back against the car door. Randi was half into the car, but the door swung shut hard, crunching down on her left foot with awful force. She heard a bone break under the impact, and shrieked at the sudden flare of pain. Outside Urquhart fired again, and then he was screaming. There were ripping sounds and more screams and something wet spattered against her ankle.

Her foot was trapped, and the struggle outside slammed her open door against it again and again and again. Each impact was a small explosion as the shattered bones grated together and ripped against raw nerves. Joe was screaming and droplets of blood covered the tinted window like rain. Her head swam, and for a moment Randi thought she’d faint from the pain, but she threw all her weight against the door and moved it just enough and drew her foot inside and when the next impact came it slapped the door shut hard and Randi pressed the lock.

She leaned against the wheel and almost threw up. Joe had stopped screaming, but she could hear the wolf tearing at him, ripping off chunks of flesh. Once you get started it’s hard to stop, she thought hysterically. She got out the .38, cracked the cylinder with shaking hands, flicked out the shells. Then she was fumbling around on the front seat. She found the box, tipped it over, snatched up a handful of silver.

It was silent outside. Randi stopped, looked up.

He was on the hood of the car.

Willie changed.

He was running on instinct now; he didn’t know why he did it, he just did. The pain was there waiting for him along with his humanity, as he’d known it would be. It shrieked through him like a gale wind, and sent him whimpering to the floor. He could feel the glass shard under his ribs, dangerously close to a lung, and his left arm bent sickeningly downward at a place it was never meant to bend, and when he tried to move it, he screamed and bit his tongue and felt his mouth fill with blood.

The fog was a pale thin haze now, and the mirror closest to him bulged outward, throbbing like something alive.

Steven sat against the wall, his blue eyes bright and avid, sucking his own blood from the stumps of his fingers. ‘Changing won’t help,’ he said in that weird flat tone of his. ‘Skinner don’t care. It knows what you are. Once it’s called, it’s got to have a skin.’ Willie’s vision was blurry with tears, but he saw it again then, in the mirror behind Steven, pushing at the fading fog, pushing, pushing, trying to get through.

He staggered to his feet. Pain roared through his head. He cradled his broken arm against his body, took a step toward the stairs, and felt broken glass grind against his bare feet. He looked down. Pieces of the shattered mirror were everywhere.

Willie’s head snapped up. He looked around wildly, dizzy, counting. Six, seven, eight, nine … the tenth was broken. Nine then. He threw himself forward, slammed all his body weight into the nearest mirror. It shattered under the impact, disintegrated into a thousand pieces. Willie crunched the biggest shards underfoot, stamped on them until his heels ran wet with blood. He was moving without thought. He caromed around the room, using his own body as a weapon, hearing the sweet tinkling music of breaking glass. The world turned into a red fog of pain and a thousand little knives sliced at him everywhere, and he wondered, if the skinner came through and got him, whether he’d even be able to tell the difference.

Then he was staggering away from another mirror, and white hot needles were stabbing through his feet with every step, turning into fire as they lanced up his calves. He stumbled and fell, hard. Flying glass had cut his face to ribbons, and the blood ran down into his eyes.

Willie blinked, and wiped the blood away with his good hand. His old raincoat was underneath him, blood-soaked and covered with ground glass and shards of mirror. Steven stood over him, staring down. Behind him was a mirror. Or was it a door?

‘You missed one,’ Steven said flatly.

Something hard was digging into his gut, Willie realized. His hand fumbled around beneath him, slid into the pocket of his raincoat, closed on cold metal.

‘Skinner’s coming for you now,’ Steven said.

Willie couldn’t see. The blood had filled his eyes again. But he could still feel. He got his fingers through the loops and rolled and brought his hand up fast and hard, with all the strength he had left, and put Mr Scissors right through the meat of Steven’s groin.

The last thing he heard was a scream, and the sound of breaking glass.

Calm, Randi thought, calm, but the dread that filled her was more than simple fear. Blood matted his jaws, and his eyes stared at her through the windshield, glowing that hideous baleful red. She looked away quickly, tried to chamber a bullet. Her hands shook, and it slid out of her grip, onto the floor of the car. She ignored it, tried again.

The wolf howled, turned, fled. For a moment she lost sight of him. Randi craned her head around, peering nervously out through the darkness. She glanced into the rearview mirror, but it was fogged up, useless. She shivered, as much from cold as from fear. Where was he? she thought wildly.

Then she saw him, running toward the car.

Randi looked down, chambered a bullet, and had a second in her fingers when he came flying over the hood and smashed against the glass. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the center of the windshield. The wolf snarled at her. Slaver and blood smeared the glass. Then he hit the glass again. Again. Again. Randi jumped with every impact. The windshield cracked and cracked again, then a big section in the center went milky and opaque.

She had the second bullet in the cylinder. She slid in a third. Her hands were shaking as much from cold as from fear. It was freezing inside the car. She looked out into the darkness through a haze of cracks and blood smears, loaded a fourth bullet, and was closing the cylinder when he hit the windshield again and it all caved in on her.

One moment she had the gun and the next it was gone. The weight was on her chest and the safety glass, broken into a million milky pieces but still clinging together, fell across her face like a shroud. Then it ripped away, and the blood-soaked jaws and hot red eyes were right there in front of her.

The wolf opened his mouth and she was feeling the furnace heat of his breath, smelling awful carnivore stench.

‘You fucker!’ she screamed, and almost laughed, because it wasn’t much as last words go.

Something sharp and silvery bright came sliding down through the back of his throat.

It went so quickly Randi didn’t understand what was happening, no more than he did. Suddenly the bloodlust went out of the dark red eyes, and they were full of pain and shock and finally fear, and she saw more silver knives sliding through his throat before his mouth filled with blood. And then the great black-furred body shuddered, and struggled, as something pulled it back off her, front paws beating a tattoo against the seat. There was a smell of burning hair in the air. When the wolf began to scream, it sounded almost human.

Randi choked back her own pain, slammed her shoulder against the door, and knocked what was left of Joe Urquhart aside. Halfway out the door, she glanced back.

The hand was twisted and cruel, and its fingers were long bright silver razors, pale and cold and sharp as sin. Like five long jointed knives the fingers had sunk through the back of the wolfs neck, and grabbed hold, and pulled, and the blood was coming out between his teeth in great gouts now and his legs were kicking feebly. It yanked at him then, and she heard a sickening wet crunching as the thing began to pull the wolf through the rearview mirror with inexorable, unimaginable force, to whatever was on the other side. The great black-furred body seemed to waver and shift for a second, and the wolfs face took on an almost human cast.

When his eyes met hers, the red light had gone out of them; there was nothing there but pain and pleading.

His first name was Mike, she remembered.

Randi looked down. Her gun was on the floor.

She picked it up, checked the cylinder, closed it, jammed the barrel up against his head, and fired four times.

When she got out of the car and put her weight on her ankle, the pain washed over her in great waves. Randi collapsed to her hands and knees. She was throwing up when she heard the sirens.

‘. .. some kind of animal,’ she said.

The detective gave her a long, sour look, and closed his notebook. ‘That’s all you can tell me?’ he said. ‘That Chief Urquhart was killed by some kind of animal?’

Randi wanted to say something sharp, but she was all fucked up on painkillers. They’d had to put two pins in her and it still hurt like hell, and the doctors said she’d have to stay another week. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she said weakly. ‘That’s what I saw, some kind of animal. A wolf.’

The detective shook his head. ‘Fine. So the chief was killed by some kind of animal, probably a wolf. So where’s Rogoff? His car was there, his blood was all over the inside of the chiefs car, so tell me … where the fuck is Rogoff?’

Randi closed her eyes, and pretended it was the pain. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘I’ll be back,’ the detective said when he left.

She lay with her eyes closed for a moment, thinking maybe she could drift back to sleep, until she heard the door open and close. ‘He won’t be,’ a soft voice told her. ‘We’ll see to it.’

Randi opened her eyes. At the foot of the bed was an old man with long white hair leaning on a gold wolfs head cane. He wore a black suit, a mourning suit, and his hair fell to his shoulders. ‘My name is Jonathan Harmon,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen your picture. I know who you are. And what you are.’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘A lycanthrope.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘A werewolf.’

‘Willie … what happened to Willie?’

‘Steven is dead,’ Jonathan Harmon said.

‘Good,’ Randi spat. ‘Steven and Roy, they were doing it together, Willie said. For the skins. Steven hated the others, because they could work the change and he couldn’t. But once your son had his skin, he didn’t need Helander anymore, did he?’

‘I can’t say I will mourn greatly. To be frank, Steven was never the sort of heir I might have wished for.’ He went to the window, opened the curtains, and looked out. ‘This was once a great city, you know, a city of blood and iron. Now it’s all turned to rust.’

‘Fuck your city,’ Randi said. ‘What about Willie?’

‘It was a pity about Zoe, but once the skinner has been summoned, it keeps hunting until it takes a skin, from mirror to mirror to mirror. It knows our scent, but it doesn’t like to wander far from its gates. I don’t know how your mongrel friend managed to evade it twice, but he did … to Zoe’s misfortune, and Michael’s.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘You will not be so lucky. Don’t congratulate yourself too vigorously, child. The pack takes care of its own. The doctor who writes your next prescription, the pharmacist who fills it, the boy who delivers it… any of them could be one of us. We don’t forget our enemies, Miss Wade. Your family would do well to remember that’

‘You were the one,’ she said with a certainty. ‘In the stockyards, the night my father …’

Jonathan nodded curtly. ‘He was a crack shot, I’ll grant him that. He put six bullets in me. My war wounds, I call them. They still show up on X-rays, but my doctors have learned not to be curious.’

‘I’ll kill you,’ Randi said.

‘I think not.’ He leaned over the bed. ‘Perhaps I’ll come for you myself some night. You ought to see me, Miss Wade. My fur is white now, pale as snow, but the stature, the majesty, the power, those have not left me. Michael was a half-breed, and your Willie, he was hardly more than a dog. The pureblood is rather more. We are the dire wolves, the nightmares who haunt your racial memories, the dark shapes circling endlessly beyond the light of your fires.’

He smiled down at her, then turned and walked away. At the door he paused. ‘Sleep well,’ he said.

Randi did not sleep at all, not even when night fell and the nurse came in and turned out the lights, despite all her pleading. She lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, feeling more alone than she’d ever been. He was dead, she thought. Willie was dead and she’d better start getting used to the idea. Very softly, alone in the darkness of the private room, she began to cry.

She cried for a long time, for Willie and Joan Sorenson and Joe Urquhart and finally, after all this time, for Frank Wade. She ran out of tears and kept crying, her body shaking with dry sobs. She was still shaking when the door opened softly, and a thin knife of light from the hall cut across the room.

‘Who’s there?’ she said hoarsely. ‘Answer, or I’ll scream.’

The door closed quietly. ‘Ssssh. Quiet, or they’ll hear.’ It was a woman’s voice, young, a little scared. ‘The nurse said I couldn’t come in, that it was after visiting hours, but he told me to get to you right away.’ She moved close to the bed.

Randi turned on her reading light. Her visitor looked nervously toward the door. She was dark, pretty, no more than twenty, with a spray of freckles across her nose. ‘I’m Betsy Juddiker,’ she whispered. ‘Willie said I was to give you a message, but it’s all crazy stuff…’

Randi’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Willie … tell me! I don’t care how crazy it sounds, just tell me.’

‘He said that he couldn’t phone you hisself because the pack might be listening in, that he got hurt bad but he’s okay, that he’s up north, and he’s found this vet who’s taking care of him good. I know, it sounds funny, but that’s what he said, a vet.’

‘Go on.’

Betsy nodded. ‘He sounded hurt on the phone, and he said he couldn’t… couldn’t change right now, except for a few minutes to call, because he was hurt and the pain was always waiting for him, but to say that the vet had gotten most of the glass out and set his leg and he was going to be fine. And then he said that on the night he’d gone, he’d come by my house and left something for you, and I was to find it and bring it here.’ She opened her purse and rummaged around. ‘It was in the bushes by the mailbox, my little boy found it.’ She gave it over.

It was a piece of some broken mirror, Randi saw, a shard as long and slender as her finger. She held it in her hand for a moment, confused and uncertain. The glass was cold to the touch, and it seemed to grow colder as she held it.

‘Careful, it’s real sharp,’ Betsy said. ‘There was one more thing, I don’t understand it at all, but Willie said it was important. He said to tell you that there were no mirrors where he was, not a one, but last he’d seen, there were plenty up in Blackstone.’

Randi nodded, not quite grasping it, not yet. She ran a finger thoughtfully along the shiny sliver of glass.

‘Oh, look,’ Betsy said. ‘I told you. Now you’ve gone and cut yourself.’

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