Werewolf Cop (33 page)

Zach, meanwhile, found himself calculating the effect on the news cycle. He knew it was only the telegenic flames that kept the programmers interested in the burning building for now. As soon as the Parliament building was charred black or completely in ashes, they'd go back to the Super Cop in the wine cellar full of bodies—and from there, how long would it be until they got the word that Westchester was questioning Super Cop about the dead bear lady? The fire thirty-five hundred miles away had given him a little time to act without the press corps dogging him, but it wouldn't be long.

He and Imogen both watched silently a moment, their thoughts their own. The voice of the TV reporter was the only voice in the room.

Then Imogen stepped forward and switched off the device. “I can't watch any more. Let me make some space for us.”

Zach helped her fold the bed back into the sofa. Imogen's scent had masked it on her own body, but the smell of Goulart was almost over-rich on the blankets. The smell of sex was growing stale on the sheets. His partner had worked fast, Zach thought. But then there had been a connection between these two from the get-go, plus he could guess Imogen's weakness, and Goulart would have been able to guess it too.

“It's one of those online exchange flats,” Imogen said by way of excuse as she picked the sofa cushions off the floor and tossed them over the folded mattress. “It serves my turn, but there's not a lot of breathing room.”

By the time she was finished, Zach, pivoting back and forth on his heels, focusing in that way he sometimes did, had spotted the small canvas bag buried under laundry on the floor of her half-opened closet.

“Coffee?” said Imogen. “It's already on.”

“Thanks.”

She was on the other side of the kitchenette counter, her back to him as she filled his mug. When she turned to put the mug down in front of him, he slipped the canvas bag onto the counter beside it.

“I'm guessing if I opened that, I'd find an illegal firearm,” he said.

“Milk and sugar?”

“A little, thanks.”

She was as Brit-cool as he would have expected. He sank himself onto one of the counter stools while she rooted in the refrigerator for the milk carton. Her nose buried in the bright box, she said, “Aren't there some sort of rules about searching a person's domicile in this country, or have we abandoned all those niceties now that we're burning Parliaments and all?”

“Some hunter took a picture of you at Margo Heatherton's house last night. The gun was visible in the shot. That might make probable cause, but it doesn't matter much. The gun isn't why I'm here.”

She set the milk before him as the fridge swung shut. She leaned her elbows on the counter and met his gaze. Cool as he'd expected, but more intense, more ferocious than he'd realized up till now. Those brown eyes of hers—so pale, they were nearly golden—fairly gleamed with her determination. Her thin lips with their hurried purple gloss were pressed together tightly. Well, her fiancé was one of the victims of this whole business. Not to mention her country. Zach still couldn't help liking her. He poured a dollop of milk into his coffee.

“Why
are
you here, then?”

“I'd like to know what you were doing up at Margo's house last night.”

“I think whoever killed her killed Bernard,” she said, as if this was obvious. “So I went up to do a little investigating of my own, having got no joy from—” she tipped a hand at him “—the local constabulary. I'm a reporter, remember. What did you think I was going to do? Say ‘Thank you ever so much for your time, Agent Adams,' and quietly go home?”

Zach raised his mug to his lips and sipped the steam off the surface. He'd had enough coffee this morning and didn't really want any more. His eyes shifted toward the bag. “If I opened that and took the gun out. . . .”

“As I say, there are rules. . . .”

“And if I emptied the gun onto the counter. . . .”

Imogen stopped talking. Her expression went serious. She had only now caught up to him, only now begun to see where he was heading.

“I'm guessing I would find it loaded with silver bullets.”

She drew a sharp breath through her nose—that was her only response.

“You went up there at night, the second night of the full moon,” Zach said. “You weren't investigating, Miss Storm. You were hunting. You've been hunting all this time. You wouldn't have been doing that if you were only after Gretchen Dankl. You'd have left her to the police. But the police don't have the right weapons, do they?”

“You
are
a good detective,” said Imogen—and her lips pressed together. To make the
M
sound, Zach thought, his instincts humming. To say
Martin told me you were
. But she stopped herself.

“Call me a dumb old American,” Zach said, “but the trouble with irony is that you never really have to commit yourself, do you? Your
Bizarre!
website—y'all might be making fun of things or you might not. You play it both ways. But you never have to take a stand. You never have to tell people what you believe and what you don't.”

“It's called ‘Negative Capability—'”

“It's called ‘yellow' where I come from.” He set his mug down and flicked a finger toward the canvas bag. “All that psychological lycanthropy stuff. . . . Why didn't you tell me you were after a genuine werewolf?”

She pushed off the counter, standing straight across from him. “And what would you have said to that, Agent? ‘Ah, good, let me get my silver bullets. Plus a cross and garlic in case we run into any vampires.' You'd have treated me like a crank and sent me away. You nearly did as much as it was.”

“But that's the truth, isn't it? Irony aside. You believe you're after a werewolf.”

“I identified Bernard's body,” said Imogen Storm. “The police were right. No human being could've done that. No animal that lives in Britain could have either.”

“And so your plan is to hunt Dankl down and shoot her.”

“To hunt down the creature who killed Bernard, yes.”

“And the whole Dominic Abend side of it. . . .”

This was the first time she broke eye contact with him, looking at the floor almost as if she were ashamed. “Not my department,” she said tersely.

“Even though Dankl said he was evil. That she was trying to stop him before his corruption destroyed everything she loved.”

“Well . . . that's her excuse for being what she is, isn't it? ‘Tore a man to pieces? Ah, well, so sorry, too bad. But heigh-ho, it's all in the service of fighting evil.' It won't wash.”

He kept silent until she glanced up at him again. “Except you do believe her, don't you? I saw it when you were watching Parliament burn. Everything that's happening over there, it all leads back to him and that dagger somehow. That's what she was trying to tell your fiancé.”

She leaned forward, her expression ferocious, her hand splayed on the countertop as if she'd slapped it down. “I don't care. I loved Bernard. She killed him. She has to be stopped.”

Zach nodded slowly. “And no one will help you.”

“No one will believe me,” she said bitterly. “Who would?”

“Only Broadway,” said Zach. “Only Goulart. He believes you, doesn't he?”

She drew up, as if offended. Regarded him with stern, haughty eyes and pinkening cheeks—a girlish change in her pixie features that made Zach feel protective toward her.

“That's right,” she said. “Martin believes me.”

She said it with pride and fierce certainty, but Zach could hear that she felt defensive, that she wasn't certain at all. Because that was her weakness: her need to find someone to believe her, a man, preferably, preferably a man with a gun and a badge. That was her weakness, and she knew it. Sure, she did. She was a smart girl. Loyal, brave, determined, and very smart. She knew herself well enough to know where her vulnerabilities lay. After the heat and comfort of having Goulart in her fold-out bed with her, in the calm that followed, it would have occurred to her that she might have been played. Pretending to believe her, pretending to take her seriously, was the sort of thing a man
would
do if he was on the make. A good instinctual detective like Goulart—he would know that that was the fastest way into her.

“So you called him—Goulart—after you went to Margo's house,” said Zach.

Imogen was embarrassed and angry now. She strode from behind the counter. “This is none of your business.” She stationed herself at the front door, arms crossed beneath her breasts. Poised to throw him out. But she didn't throw him out. “You're lucky he does believe me, you know,” she said. “If he didn't. . . .” She stopped herself before she'd finished.

If he didn't believe a werewolf had killed Margo, he would suspect it was you.
That's what she had been about to say. But Zach let the words trail off to nothing. He didn't want her to think about it too much. As things stood now, Imogen was so intent on finding Dankl, had been hunting Dankl so ferociously and for so long, that what seemed so obvious to Zach hadn't even occurred to her yet: that Dankl was gone; that she, Imogen, was hunting someone else now; she was hunting him.

He stood up from the stool and came to her. “Did you find something? At Margo's? Is that why you called Goulart? What did you find?”

“Don't patronize me. I know you think I'm a nutter.”

“Did Goulart tell you to keep it secret from me?”

“He just told me not to waste my breath on you, that's all.”

“What did you find, Imogen?”

Arms still crossed defiantly, she frowned and said “What are you, looking for a good laugh? Is that it?”

Zach grimaced. It was the first time she'd sounded as young as she was, as fearful and alone as she obviously was. “Come on,” he said. “What did you find?”

A moment more, then she confessed it: “I found Abend.”

Zach tried not to let her see him react. “Abend was there? Last night? At Margo's place?”

“I'm almost sure of it.”

“You didn't see him, then?”

“He was in the house. It was dark in there. But I'm almost certain I caught a glimpse of him through the window, and also I. . . .”

“You what? What else?”

Again, she was defiant. Frowning, silent a long moment, before she hurled it at him like a challenge. “I felt him. I felt the . . . the presence of evil.” When he did not laugh at her, she was bold enough to add, “It's not the first time I've felt it, either.”

He still didn't laugh at her, or roll his eyes, or make any of the stonily sardonic expressions she'd seen on the faces of policemen across the continent of Europe and here. And she, weary of standing up to him, uncertain of Goulart, desperate to be believed, finally dropped her crossed arms and her defiance and moved with slumped resignation into the central part of the room. She sank down onto the sofa. She was facing away from him. She wanted it that way.

“I've been following Gretchen Dankl for over a year now. During that time, I've crossed paths with Abend twice. Once in Vienna, outside the opera house. Once on a back street in Prague. Both times, it was just for a moment. We passed each other. I wasn't even sure who he was. But both times, I felt . . . something. A shock of darkness. A terrible emptiness. As if I were walking along and suddenly found myself on the edge of a pit, staring down into a black abyss.”

“Yes,” Zach murmured. He had, of course, felt it too, once in that hallway in Long Island City, and once in the beach house.

“After that first time, I realized, I always felt him near when I got close to Dankl. That part of what she says is true, at least. She is hunting him. Him and his dagger. She does believe. . . . Well, it was all in Bernard's notes. She believes the dagger is a kind of doorway. It's a passage into life for something that can't live otherwise. A force that can't become real without a human will to embody it.”

“That was in Bernard's notes? I thought the baselard was just supposed to give Abend eternal youth or something.”

That is what she told herself at the end.
The words of the ghostly executioner came back to him.
Many have told themselves something like it at the end. But she knew better. We all know better.

“No, it's more complicated than that,” said Imogen Storm. “Youth—health—that's the reward he gets. That's the bait, as it were. For using the dagger. But, in fact, it's the dagger that's using
him!
I mean, think about it. Abend is nothing but a . . . a low-level Nazi thug, after all. He could never have corrupted our politicians and our police and our bureaucrats if there weren't some other force that had rendered them all ripe for the taking. Everything that's happening now back home . . .” she nodded her head at the flat-screen on the bureau, conjuring the burning building no longer visible on the black surface, “. . . Abend didn't do that alone. He couldn't have. But when he uses the dagger, it releases the force that does.”

Zach stayed where he was, behind her, letting her gaze away from him into the room. “So what you're saying: after following Professor Dankl all this time, you've come to believe her. You believe that what she told your fiancé was true.”

Her voice was hollow. “Yes. More or less.”

“And that she really was . . .
is
trying to stop this. To stop Abend. To find the dagger. And that somehow, for some reason, she can only do those things in the form of the wolf.”

“That's right.”

“But you still want to kill her. You want to kill her anyway.”

She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder, miserable. He saw what Goulart must have seen, what she hid behind the clipped accent, the intelligence, and the irony: her solitude and her uncertainty. She had started out on a mission of revenge, but now. . . .