Werewolf Cop (32 page)

“We don't get a whole lot of bear or wolf or wildcat attacks,” Washington explained with a hint of a smile.

“We don't get
any
,” Roth explained, likewise smiling. “Whatever it was.”

“Uh-huh,” said Zach dubiously—because he knew what interrogating cops were like and he didn't trust them. Lulling you with their smiles and reason before they brought the hard hammer down. Why couldn't they just leave him alone and let him get on with the work of catching Dominic Abend?

The thought struck even him as irrational. He was doing that thing perps do—that thing they do in their minds where they convince themselves they're innocent even though they're guilty as hell, where they begin to feel put-upon and hard-done-by.
Why are these mean people persecuting me?
He was sitting there with his fake-relaxed arm on the sofa back, fish-eyeing his fellow lawmen and feeling basically pissed off that they were wasting his morning—and yet, all the while, he had, in fact, ripped poor Margo to pieces.

“So what's this got to do with me?” he said.

Roth made a two-handed gesture at him as if he were laying his cards face up on the table. As if. “You knew her, right?”

“I met her.”

“And you didn't mention this?” Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell cut in suddenly—again setting off in Zach some vague sense that he was being unfairly hounded by the powers that be.

“I didn't hide it. Goulart knew—my partner,” Zach explained to the inspectors. “It just didn't seem relevant to anything. I met her a couple of times, helped her with research on a book. And yeah, then. . . .” He had already guessed they knew more than this, or they wouldn't be here. He knew he had to tell them something: but how much? How many suspects, he wondered, had asked themselves the same question when he was pressing himself into their sweating faces in the interview room?

“Then?” said Washington.

“Well, she developed some sort of thing for me, I guess. Some sort of fascination. Calling me all the time. Texting me.”

“Well, you're a handsome guy,” said Roth.

“Well, thanks kindly,” said Zach. “But like I told Margo, I'm already spoken for.”

“You didn't give her any reason for this fascination,” said Washington. “Other than your good looks, I mean. I mean, there was nothing between you two.”

Zach snorted as if the idea were absurd. And yes, he did feel a beaded line of sweat arise just beneath his hairline. “In her imagination, maybe, but not in real life, no.”

Washington gave a soft grunt—doing that cop thing, Zach knew, pretending to be confused, in all innocence, about the puzzling discrepancy between the perp's story and the facts. So here it came.

“Thing is—reason we're here—Miss Heatherton kept a journal. On her computer. Thoughts and events, that sort of thing.”

“She had her eye on you for a long time, it seems like,” said Roth, his breath laboring.

“Seems she fell for you when she saw that picture of you that was in all the news stories a few years back,” said Washington. “You walking out of that farmhouse after you shot Ray Mima.”

“I know the picture,” said Zach.

“Holstering your six-shooter, all cowboy style.”

“I know.”

“I liked that myself,” said Washington heavily.

“So did she,” said Roth. “She wrote in her journal that you were just the kind of man she wanted.”

“She devised what you might call a . . . a campaign,” said Washington.

“To seduce you,” said Roth. “It was very well worked out.” With this, the big man—who was perched precariously so near the edge of Rebecca's armchair that Zach thought the movement might unbalance him and make him slip to the floor—reached into his jacket pocket and drew out the phone he kept his notes on. “This is her journal entry for September the 17th.” He read off the screen: “‘Success at last! I've never known such passion! We were both swept away by it! We couldn't even make it to the bedroom! He's mine now, finally!'”

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell's hand slid from her chin up to cover her eyes. “For Christ's sake, Zach.”

“It never happened, Rebecca,” Zach protested—and he genuinely felt offended that she would believe such a thing about him—even though, of course, it was true! He continued, as if admitting a painful fact: “I went up there one night. Must've been right around then. Around mid-September. She said there was going to be a reading of this book I'd helped her with—”

“You tell your wife about this?” said Roth in an insinuating tone.

Zach ignored him, shrugged it off. “When I got there, the reading was canceled and she said she needed a lift home. She made it clear she was available. I didn't take her up on it. That's all that happened.”

Roth and Washington went through their routine. They looked at each other with smirking incredulity. They looked at him with smirking incredulity.

“Awful pretty woman,” said Roth.

“But you just turned her down,” said Washington.

Zach spread his hands, the image of innocence. “That's what happened, fellahs.”

Washington nodded. Roth nodded, slipping his phone back into his pocket.

“So you weren't there the night she died, were you?” Washington asked.

“Someone was,” said Roth. “But that wasn't you?”

“Of course not,” Zach said. “I would have reported that.”

“Sure, you would,” said Roth.

“Of course you would,” said Washington. “Because there was nothing between you two.”

“So it's not like you had a motive to kill her or anything,” said Roth.

“I thought y'all said a wild animal did that,” said Zach. At this point, the sweat beneath his hairline was cold and his whole face felt clammy.

Washington addressed Roth—more cop stuff—as if they were working out their line of reasoning as they spoke. “Of course, some crazy broad with a rich fantasy life can cause a lot of trouble for a man. Especially a family man. Texting him. Calling him all the time. Claiming they'd had sexual relations.”

“Some hot babe like Margo showed up at my house, told my wife we did the deed? Wife'd believe her, no question.”

“Who wouldn't?” said Washington, rounding on Zach again. “Good-looking girl like that.”

“Anyone would believe her,” said Roth. “What red-blooded man would turn her down?”

“Gotta make you crazy,” said Washington. “Being falsely accused like that, and no one taking your side. Be enough to make a man lose his temper.”

Zach looked from one to the other of them, and to Rebecca, who stared at him dolefully now. She had already convicted him—and he could practically see the gears turning behind her eyes as she worked out the political implications of his downfall. With him gone, she might have more power, no universally respected lawman to stand against her. Maybe she could even get rid of Goulart. . . .

“I didn't sleep with her,” Zach said. “And I wasn't there the night she died.” He felt simultaneously convinced of these bald-faced lies as he spoke them, and satisfied at how believable they sounded coming from a man known to be as honest as himself. It was a kind of perp madness that disturbed his heart even as it unstoppably took over his mind.

Now it was Washington's turn to bring out his phone. The gesture made Zach feel claustrophobic. How many poor criminal bastards had felt this suffocating sensation as Zach confronted them with a fresh piece of damning evidence? Wondering: What now? What more did they have?

As Washington thumbed through the phone files, searching for what he wanted, Roth said, “We have a lot of hunters in our area. Ever since they heard there might be a bear or mountain lion on the loose, they've been roaming around the woods with their rifles and crossbows and whatnot, wearing their night-vision goggles and so on, and looking to be the hero who brings the mad creature down. Apparently they found a lot of evidence that some large creature had been through there. Bear probably.”

“Well, there you go,” said Zach.

“Of course, they destroyed the trail, tromping all over it like that.”

“Figures.”

“All lots of fun until someone gets an arrow in his eye.”

Here Washington took up the story, handing his phone to Zach to show him the photo on it. “One of these hunters took this picture last night near Miss Heatherton's house. You recognize that woman?”

Zach was expecting some green-night-lens mess of an image with a blurred figure on it but, dang, this shot was clear as day. And he surely did recognize the woman—a woman sneaking around Margo's tree line on the night after she was slaughtered, the same night Zach was being tortured in Abend's beach house. And just as surely as he knew her, he damn well wasn't going to tell Roth and Washington that he did. Because who she was wasn't half the shock of it. It was what she was doing that hit Zach so hard, that told him so much that he could never explain to these two. That is, she was carrying a gun, a .38 revolver, holstered at her slim hip, visible—and reachable—in the gap between the two panels of her unbelted purple woolen sweater-coat-thing.

“Amazing what they can do with those night lenses nowadays,” said Roth, who must have spotted the surprise and recognition in Zach's eyes.

Zach handed the phone back to Washington. “Not all that clear. Hard to make out her face. Don't
think
I know her, anyway.”

And with that, he stood up. He ran his hand up over his hair—vigilant enough to use his left hand so that, if the inspectors shook his right, they wouldn't feel the sweat on it. He was already getting good at this lying, murderous perp stuff. Didn't take long.

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell lifted her long face—like a horse who's heard a noise in the nearby brush, Zach thought. “Where the hell do you think you're going?”

“Rebecca, y'all may not have noticed, but I am hot on the heels of the man who gives this Task Force its reason for being,” Zach drawled—his stubborn drawl. “This woman was a minor pain in the neck to me. I didn't sleep with her. I wasn't there when the bear or whatever it was killed her. I can't spend any more of my morning like this. I really can't.” He nodded at Roth and Washington. “Gentlemen, I'm sorry. But I've got to go to work.”

Both inspectors stood up.

“We still have some questions,” said Washington.

“Send me an e-mail,” said Zach. “I'll answer when I have time.”

“Sit down,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.

But he did not. Would not. He walked to the door.

“We may have to talk to your wife,” Roth threatened him.

He didn't look back. He pulled the door open.

“Zach,” Rebecca called after him angrily.

He was already in the hall. He slammed the door behind him and kept walking. Off to find the woman in the picture. The woman with the gun.

Imogen Storm.

27

THE TROUBLE WITH IRONY

T
he autumn gloom gathered as the morning wore on. There were rumblings of thunder audible above the rumbling trucks on Tenth Avenue. Zach parked the Crown Vic across from a dreary white brick building—apartments over a liquor store—the address Imogen Storm had scribbled on her
Bizarre!
business card.

He moved to the glass door, which was set in an alcove a step off the sidewalk. He pressed the button over her apartment number. He waited. His nerves were humming like electric wires. He could feel the truth closing in on him like the stone walls of a trap that would smash him flat. The space he could move in was getting smaller and smaller. And every likely outcome was unthinkable. If Abend got that dagger back . . . if Abend found Angela Bose before he did . . . or if Angela Bose got away with the dagger herself . . . or even if he somehow put an end to them and then blew his own brains out with a silver bullet. . . . He could picture his son's face when Mommy explained that Daddy wasn't coming home anymore. His little daughter's face. It was all unthinkable.

Imogen's clipped British tones came over the intercom. “Forget something?”

Despite everything going through his mind, Zach smiled a little, one corner of his mouth lifting. His intuition was firing like a fine machine. Maybe it was a wolf thing. He understood all.

“It's Zach Adams,” he said.

There was a momentary silence—an embarrassed silence, Zach imagined. Then the entry buzzer sounded. Zach pulled the door open and stepped into the dark foyer. The door hadn't even swung shut behind him before his intuition was confirmed. Even there in the lobby, his heightened wolf senses caught the smell of the familiar cologne—and the disease and the desperation—of Martin “Broadway Joe” Goulart.

Imogen was dressed to stay home. Jeans buttoned around her
Stay Calm and Carry On
nightshirt, no bra. She'd put on some lip gloss in a hurry, and some scent. She was hopping on one foot, pulling on her second flat as she opened the door to her apartment.

“Sorry to disturb you, Miss Storm,” he said.

“Not at all. Come on in.
I'm
sorry the place is such a mess. I wasn't expecting company.”

It was a small studio, the floor space nearly overtaken by the unmade sofa-bed. One wall was made of brick, and there were pastel landscapes on the other walls. Not her sort of paintings, Zach knew. There was a narrow corner shelf with knick-knacks, and Zach knew those weren't hers either: unicorns and crystal wizards and God knew what other sentimental crap. The kitchenette was a narrow sliver behind a metal counter. Dirty dishes in the sink.

A small flat-screen device sat on top of a small bureau. It was playing the news. Sometime between when Zach had left home and now, the rioters had set the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, on fire.

“I don't so much mind the animals who did it,” said Imogen Storm. She was standing by his elbow as he watched the flames, hugging herself as if she were cold. “It's the bloody fools cheering for them. What do they think will follow? Peace and freedom?” Her cheeks were pale, her eyes haunted.