“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
The 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.
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 th
e 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 ma
ke. 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?”