Werewolf Cop (19 page)

It was full night when they parked in one of the angled spaces outside the one-six. Shoulder to shoulder, the two detectives walked wearily across the street and up the three concrete steps to the precinct's front doors. Goulart pulled one of the doors open and went through first—and Zach caught the edge of the door with his hand and was about to follow when he felt someone's eyes on him.

He paused. He turned, the door still in his hand. He saw that woman again—the woman they had spotted watching them days ago, the slender pretty girl with short black hair, wearing her belted purple sweater. She was back. Watching them again—watching Zach, anyway—from just down the sidewalk now, only a couple of dozen yards away.

She didn't hurry off this time. She went on standing there, a little outside the glow of a street lamp. She went on staring at Zach, so that Zach realized she had meant for him to feel it, that she had been beckoning him silently.

Zach called into the building after Goulart, “I'll catch up to you,” and let the door swing shut. He walked back down the steps and headed toward the woman.

She waited for him to reach her. She stood with her hands in her belted purple sweater-thing, her shoulders hunched, her chin tucked in. Maybe she was simply huddling against the cool of the autumn night, but Zach thought she looked nervous too. He felt a little nervous himself, come to think of it. He had that sense again—that sense he had had earlier—that he had seen this woman somewhere before, and that it mattered.

He stepped up to her and before he could say anything, she said, “It's odd that we can do that, isn't it? Feel someone staring at us. Scientists say it's just a superstition but . . . I find it really quite odd.” She had a clear, bell-like voice and a distinct British accent.

“You wanted to speak to me?” Zach said.

“You are Mr. Adams? Mr. Zach Adams?”

“Agent Adams—I am, yes,” Zach said. “And you are?”

“Forgive me—Agent, of course. My name is Imogen Storm. I'm a journalist. I work for a website called
Bizarre!
It's important that I speak with you.”

“
Bizarre!
” Zach repeated, deadpan. He did not know whether to be amused or alarmed. “What do you want to speak with me about?”

The woman drew a deep, unsteady breath. She really was nervous. She said, “I want to speak with you about Gretchen Dankl. The werewolf.”

15

STORM WARNING

S
he seems to have vanished,” said Imogen Storm.

“She seems to have never existed,” said Zach.

They were sitting at a square blond-wood table in a coffee shop on a corner near the precinct. Sitting by the window with the homeward-bound pedestrians rushing past in both directions on the other side of the glass.

“Oh, she existed all right,” said Imogen. She leaned forward, the fingers of both hands wrapped around her cardboard coffee cup. “She murdered my fiancé.”

Zach raised his cup to his mouth but didn't drink from it. He was using it to cover his expression. He didn't want her to see his unbelief or his eagerness to believe—either of them. On the one hand, he was excited and afraid at hearing her speak the impossible thing he had barely allowed himself to think. On the other hand, two people confirming each other's delusions were still deluded—maybe twice as deluded. He wanted to be certain she wasn't simply as crazy as he was before he told her anything about his own experience.

“It's true,” said Imogen, sensing his skepticism. “She tore his throat open. While in her wolf mode, of course.”

“In her wolf mode, sure,” said Zach. “What did you say the name of your website was again?
Incredible?
”

“
Bizarre!
” She took a card from her purse and pushed it toward him. She had scribbled a New York address on it. “We used to have a dead-tree edition as well, but we've gone fully digital now.”

“Congratulations.”

Imogen Storm heard his droll tone clearly enough, but she would not be baited. She was used to this. Skepticism. Sarcasm. Teasing. She always rebuffed it with a composed and professional air. Any sign of agitation only encouraged the hecklers.

“We cover—well, all sorts of things,” she said. “Anything, really, that smacks of the uncanny. We follow up on reports of UFO sightings, strange creatures, hauntings, other paranormal events and so on—and we describe them to our readers in objective, unemotional prose, without sensationalism.”

“So you mean you take them seriously . . . ?”

Imogen weighed her response. “For much of our audience, our dispassionate approach gives our stories a rather cutting-edge tone of irony. Because the subjects are so outlandish, you see, the proofs generally so meager, the witnesses . . . well, they're so eccentric that we only have to describe them accurately for them to seem a joke to many of our readers.”

“I get it.”

“But now and then, it's different. Now and then, we hit on something—something unusual.”

“Like Gretchen Dankl.” Zach had left his cup on the table now, but he was still hiding his mouth, propping his chin on his thumb, draping his index finger across his upper lip. “You're telling me she's really a werewolf?”

Imogen had turned her head to look out the window. Her profile struck him as elfin, what with the boy-cut black hair and the kiss-curl sideburns and the cute turned-up nose and bright brown eyes. Elfin—and yet wistful for a girl in her twenties, or she seemed wistful at the moment as she gazed out at the rushing New York pedestrians and the yellow cabs bunched up together under the traffic light with the white beams of their headlights crisscrossing.

“It's all so normal here,” she said. “You can't know how odd it seems, coming from where I do.” She faced him. “You've heard what's going on in my country—all over Europe?”

“What I catch on the news, yeah.”

“I wonder sometimes. I turned on the television today to see what they were saying about it, and all I could find were stories about a child trapped on a cliff face in North Dakota or somewhere.”

“We're a big country. We've always got plenty to talk about right here at home.”

“The fact is, there may not be an England when I get back. There may not be one now, for all I know—I'm not sure how one tells when a country is gone, how many of its institutions can be transformed before it's no longer the place it was. It's not like it all collapses outright or anything, is it? Nothing of it that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change and all that. Myself, I think that England—that all of Europe—died in World War II, the spirit of it anyway. It's just the corpse rotting now, the maggots devouring the flesh. Rather overwhelming to think about, when I
can
think about it. A whole civilization—Western civilization—Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart, Michelangelo. . . .”

Fatboy Mooch,
Zach couldn't help thinking.

Imogen flicked her fingers off her thumb to indicate a puff of smoke. “Gone like that.”

“You've lost me now, Miss Storm. What's this got to do with Gretchen Dankl?”

“She approached us. Or, that is, she approached Bernard, Bernard Albright, my fiancé, our then-editor-in-chief. This was more than a year ago, before all the troubles started, but it was already pretty clear which way the wind was blowing. She told him there was a gangster named Dominic Abend who was behind it all somehow—the currency collapses, the strikes, the corruption, even the Islamist terrorist attacks. She said he—Abend—was an immortal warlock in league with the devil in some way. Bernard didn't tell me all that much about it. It was just the sort of usual thing we cover.”

“Immortal warlocks in league with the devil.”

“Oh, yes, we must get two or three calls about them a month.”

Zach finally lowered his hand from his mouth to reveal his faint smile. “So . . . just so we're clear. You're telling me this in your—unemotional, objective way, but I'm supposed to catch the cutting-edge tone of irony, is that right? What you're trying to say is that Gretchen Dankl was insane.”

One corner of Imogen's mouth lifted. It was an attractive mouth, Zach noticed, the glossed lips thin but inviting in their prim, self-certain English way. “I forgot. Americans don't have a sense of irony, do they?”

“It's a national handicap, no question.”

“Can't be helped. Mustn't grumble,” she said briskly—and Zach began to like her now. He sensed real intelligence in her; he sensed she was trustworthy. “How if I simply give you the facts and you can decide for yourself, all right?”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“Gretchen Dankl rang up my fiancé Bernard with her story about Abend, and he was intrigued enough to agree to a mysterious evening meeting with her in the New Forest—about two hours outside of London. He never came back from that meeting. They found his body the next afternoon. His throat, as I say, had been ripped open.”

“I'm sorry.”

She didn't acknowledge his condolence at all. She merely continued: “The police were noncommittal, but the tabloids chalked it up to a panther attack, of all things.
Bizarre!
covers quite a lot of those: panther sightings. The Beast of Bodmin Moor and all that. We even get an occasional fuzzy picture of one, like the sort you see of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I don't believe there's ever been a proven case, though. We cover a lot of sightings of ghosts as well.”

“So y'all don't believe it, in other words.”

“When I went through Bernard's computer afterward, I found some notes he'd taken during his phone conversation with Dankl. I gather she told him a rather convoluted tale about a line of werewolves who had allowed themselves to become beasts in order to fight off the evil threatening Christendom or suchlike. The idea seemed to be, you know, that evil can only be thwarted where people are willing to sacrifice themselves to fight it—to sacrifice not only their lives but their very souls.”

“By becoming wolves.”

“There you are.”

“And you think . . . ?” Zach began—but then said, “Well, what do you think?”

“Bernard was an older man—older than I am, at least,” said Imogen. “But he was in absolutely top condition and an accomplished martial artist to boot. I doubt a woman the size of Gretchen Dankl could have done much damage to him.”

“Except in wolf mode.”

“Mm.” Even as she spoke of her fiancé's murder—perhaps because she was speaking of her fiancé's murder—Imogen had become distracted again. Her elfin face had grown wistful again, and she was gazing past Zach's shoulder at the busy scene outside. Zach glanced at the window too. He could see there was something cheerful and comforting about the sight of the people hurrying home through the cool weather. Even the sight of the jammed traffic had a festive and vital air about it. He'd read somewhere that it was bad in London now. People hiding in their houses, afraid to go out. . . .

The young woman shook herself as if waking from a trance. “You've heard the term
lycanthropy
, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh. It means being a werewolf.”

“Or being convinced you're one. It's been recognized as a mental disorder at least since the 16th century. Some even say it was the form of insanity that afflicted King Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel, when he went off to live with the wild animals. That was back in the 6th century before Christ. But the 16th century, that does seem to've been the . . . lycanthropical high-water mark, if you will. Between 1520 and 1630, there were as many as thirty thousand people condemned for being werewolves in France alone. Those sorts of numbers indicate something beyond mere superstition—or they do to me, at least. In fact, there's a professor at the University of Maryland who claims that a fungus, ergot, infected the bread eaten by French peasants, causing them to have hallucinations and delusions, the effects similar to those of LSD. In any case, there have been documented cases of lycanthropy from then on, right up to the present: people who believe they can change into wolves or other animals. Shape-shifters, in other words. Nowadays, many psychiatrists think it's a form of schizophrenia.”

“And you think Gretchen Dankl was suffering from lycanthropy. The mental disorder.”

“Well, if she was suffering from it, she may be still. She's vanished, as I say, but I have no particular reason to think that she's deceased.”

And now, with a feeling in his mind as if a three-dimensional puzzle piece had been dropped into place, Zach remembered where he had seen Imogen before—which, in turn, answered the other question that had been nagging at him: how had she made the connection between Gretchen Dankl and himself?

“You followed her,” he said. “After your fiancé was killed, you started trailing her. I remember now. I saw you on the campus in Freiberg, walking under the trees.”

“You must be a very good detective,” said Imogen Storm without, apparently, any irony at all—though, as an American, he couldn't be sure. “Yes. I did follow her. After reading Bernard's notes, I theorized that she suffered from the delusion that she was a werewolf. And I thought it quite possible that she had killed Bernard in one of her fits, her madness giving her extraordinary strength as madness sometimes does. The police were not convinced, not even interested. My profession made me suspect, for one thing: a kook working for a kooky website and all that. On the record, they claimed to be certain that Bernard had been killed by an animal. A dog or boar, if not some sort of wildcat. Off the record, one of the detectives indicated that they were afraid there was terrorism involved. They didn't want to stir up headlines and trouble. They told me what hotel Dankl had been staying at, but that was as far as they would go. She was long gone by the time I got there, of course. But I was able to pick up her trail and, over the next year, I chased her across four countries. No mean feat, if I say so myself, especially as I had to keep the website going all the while in order to pay my way. It was only last month that I caught up with her in Germany, in Freiberg. She was selling cigarettes out of a kiosk there.”