"That still doesn't explain why you're talking to me." He tried to look around the phone.
She shifted it to keep the phone blocking his view. "Can you identify all the people in this video?"
"That's the parents of our missing boy. Sandy and Walter. They're good people. They own a garage here in town." Stewart knew the family personally then.
"Not Joshua's parents," Elise said. "The people in the background, especially anyone who looks as if they're trying to stay out of camera range."
He studied the screen, nodding. Something she was saying was clicking with something he'd already noticed. "You think that these cultists inserted themselves into the investigation?"
"Yes. These cultists are very good at tricking groups of people into thinking they're trustworthy. Basically X will trust the cultist because of Y; Y will trust them because of X. Their belief loops without any external proof that their trust is well founded. Once the cultists are firmly entrenched, they're assumed to be a trusted member, even in a close-knit community."
At that point, it became difficult to determine who was a puppet and who was simply deluded by pretenses.
He cursed. "Everything went batshit crazy on Friday. There haven't been wolves in this area for nearly a hundred years and then we have two attacks in one day. I was thinking it had to be something like Satanists or something after they found Joe Buckley yesterday. Tied up like that with herbs stuffed in his mouth and his lips sewn shut with thick black thread. Coroner says he was still alive while they were cutting out his heart."
He'd seen Buckley's body, either in person or via forensic photographs.
"You're involved in the case?" Elise asked.
Stewart blushed slightly and studied the tips of his boots. "I---I stuck my nose in when Joshua went missing yesterday. I got all my nieces and nephews into judo. He and his older sister are part of our dojo. They're good kids. Well, she's a firecracker. He's dorky as all hell but he's got grit in spades. Buckles down, does the work, pitches in to help without being asked, avoids fights even when he could clean the floor with the other kid, always where he's supposed to be when he's supposed to be there, or he makes sure people know why he isn't. A really good kid. And he's gone. Just gone. New Hartford police are saying he ran away from home; that's not the kid I know. Something's happened to him. I want to find him before he ends up like Joe Buckley. This cult thing worming their way into a group---that makes sense because the New Hartford PD suddenly can't find its ass with both hands. They 'lost' all the clothes from the crime scene yesterday. They're saying that the clothes might have gotten accidently mixed into the trash and ended up in the incinerator. What kind of idiot does that?"
The clothes hadn't been lost; they'd been used in making the huntsman. The lie was merely to cover that they had been taken. The Wickers definitely had someone on the inside of the New Hartford Police Department. Elise was glad that she hadn't gone straight to them.
"Who do you know at this press conference?" Elise asked.
He tapped on the screen to pause the video. "Like I said, Sandy and Walt. That's their daughter, Bethy."
All three were tall, willowy platinum blondes. Between their butchered last name and fair coloring, she guessed that the family had originally been either Scandinavian or Slavic. Elise couldn't see any family resemblance to Joshua. He seemed too short and mousey to be genetically related.
Stewart continued to name people clustered around Joshua's parents.
"Rob Harpur, he's the guidance counselor at the high school. He and Walt went to school together. Joshua has been working his butt off to get a scholarship to college. William Cosby is our representative; he's up for re-election. That's Dahlia Wakefield..."
"Wakefield, as in Reed Wakefield? The man mauled in his house?"
Stewart nodded. "His wife."
Dahlia was the epitome of a Wicker. She wore a red fox jacket, diamond studded fingernails, and Coach handbag. Wickers had a need to be recognized as powerful and important.
Covens liked to work in groups of three to thirteen people. The members weren't necessarily related. A group of unrelated people moving into an area would raise flags. The coven would use one family name to draw less attention.
"What can you tell me about Dahlia Wakefield and her family?"
Stewart shrugged. "The first eight hours or so, everyone ran in circles, screaming and shouting. None of the kids had any ID on them. They'd changed into costumes for the haunted house. All of their wallets and purses were locked in one of the cars. The kids were so torn apart we weren't sure how many there had been. We spent hours scouring the fields around the barn, making sure a kid hadn't run off wounded and was lying unconscious in the undergrowth."
He must have been part of the search teams since he used "we" in the tone that meant he'd been stomping through the fields personally. "Half the kids in the county were out at one haunted house or another. When the news got out about the attack, every parent who couldn't get hold of their kid showed up at the hospital, freaked out of their mind. It was a circus; only this time the lion act had gotten out and eaten part of the audience. It was well past midnight before anyone got out to the Wakefield house to break the news about their daughter, Daphne. The officer found the front door broken down and Reed Wakefield torn apart in the foyer."
"Had they been living there long?"
"No. They'd just moved in a few days before Halloween. Everything about them seems a bit off but there hasn't been time to find anything out. It's been thirty-six hours since the 911 call about the barn was made and twenty hours since Joshua disappeared and his neighbor was found dead. Three different crime scenes and twelve people dead and one boy missing. There was no sign of a struggle and Joshua wouldn't go without a fight. He might have just wandered off. The first few hours at the hospital, he had no idea what his name was or where he lived. But I think he remembered something from the attack and---and---"
He scrubbed at his hair, looking close to exhaustion. "I don't know. I've been racking my brains trying to figure it out. I've even went back to the barn a couple of times, thinking he might have gone there. Some of the older kids are keeping a vigil at the dojo, although that's a real long shot. It's ten miles from his house to downtown Utica and when he was released from the hospital yesterday, he barely remembered where he lived."
The Wickers had to be walking on eggshells. They had a newborn werewolf roaming loose; one trained to fight. They couldn't be sure what the dead werewolf had told Joshua before he was killed. Their only hope was to take Joshua unaware and cage him before he could react. And they had to act before his pack arrived in force.
Which should have been Friday night. Maybe they were already here.
"Did anyone run the license plate of the mystery BMW?" Elise asked.
Stewart snorted with disgust. "I did after those idiots at New Hartford PD ran in circles all day yesterday. It's leased by a company in New York City. King Properties. It sounds like a real estate firm. I managed to get through to someone this morning. They said that it must have been stolen. Their records show it's supposed to be in a garage on..." He paused to consult his note. "Central Park West."
Elise pressed her mouth tight on a curse. She was glad that he was still looking down; she couldn't keep the dismay off her face. The company existed solely to manage the Wolf King's extensive motor pool and far-flung properties. It meant that the dead werewolf was definitely a Thane carrying out the king's orders.
What did the Wickers do to piss off the Wolf King? Before they killed his Thane? What pulled both the Wickers and the Thane to a barn in the middle of nowhere? Was the Thane there for the Wicker, or was the Wicker there for something the Thane was after? Joshua? How random was it that he was the only one to survive? The boy seemed to think he simply got lucky but this was a Thane, not some random pack wolf. Thane killed anything they set out to kill, as the Wickers found out.
"We're still trying to find the men that were in the car," Stewart said. "T
here's been no sign of them."
"Them?" Elise seized on the most important word in his statement.
"Rob Harpur says that there were two men at the high school Friday afternoon. Big guys in business suits. They felt like mafia to Rob. They came in the BMW and walked around the halls, obviously looking for someone. Rob spotted them at Joshua's locker and tried to get them to leave. He went to call the police. The idiot drama teacher chased them out of the costume room and told them where the kids were."
The two "men" both had to be werewolves because wolves rarely associated with anyone outside their pack. They were probably both Thanes as most wolves didn't bother to dress up. Alexander liked formal wear for his heralds/enforcers. It was as close to a military uniform the wolves could get and remain hidden in plain sight.
Two Thanes and only one was accounted for? What happened to the second one? It put a different light on the two separate attacks.
"Are they sure that Reed was killed by the same wolf?" Elise asked.
"Actually, no." Stewart glanced at his watch. "I'm surprised that it didn't make the news. For some reason, New Hartford thinks there's a second wolf. They're passing around special ammo and doing a blanket search, starting at Wakefield's house in about an hour."
"Special ammo?" Hollow points would only mean pissed off werewolves and dead law officers.
Stewart took a pistol magazine out of one of the leather pouches on his belt. "I don't get this 'special ammo.' Looks like crap to me. I'm sure the hell not going to use it. Nothing about this case makes a whole lot of sense."
The magazine was loaded with silver bullets. The police would stand a chance if they actually used the ammunition. But if they were like Stewart, they'd use their own trusted ammo. At that point, it became Russian roulette for the werewolves. There was no way to get this many silver bullets in thirty hours. The Wickers expected a war with the werewolves and came prepared.
"Wait. The Wakefield house?" Dead Wicker. Silver bullets. Wolf hunt. The witches must have had some kind of magical construct that wounded the Thane. There would be no other reason for the wolf to still be in the area. "Was there a lot of foliage inside the house? Branches and leaves and vines?"
"A shitload of it."
A newborn and a wounded Thane running around loose, both immune to the witches' powers. No wonder the Wickers were working slowly and cautiously. One misstep and they'd be missing limbs.
And lucky her had to find the wounded werewolf before the police department---or the town was going to be mourning a lot of dead cops on top of dead teenagers.
8: Joshua
Winnie had a purple Vespa that matched her hair. It had little violets painted all over it as if someone had sprinkled it with flowers. Joshua had grown up with dirt bikes; to him two wheels and a motor was the essence of masculinity. (His sister rode dirt bikes but she loathed pink and would kick anyone's ass for calling her a "girl." His mom kept to four-wheeled ATVs. His parents' motto seemed to be "a family that gets muddy together, stays together.") There seemed something intrinsically wrong for a scooter to be so girly-girl. He supposed it could be worse; it could be a pink motorcycle.
"Her name is Violet." Winnie buckled on a black helmet with Hello Kitty eyes and whiskers bracketing the visor. She added in a whisper, "She's very temperamental."
"It's leaking oil," he pointed out. "It needs a new gasket and probably new spark plugs."
Considering how much money they'd just won, she could just get a new Vespa. A fleet of them.
"You have a scooter?" Winnie's black leather motorcycle jacket had a Hello Kitty stitched into its shoulder. Just so wrong.
"Dirt bikes. Mostly Yamahas and Kawasakis. Nothing Italian like your Vespa, but they're single cylinder, four-stroke engines." As she continued to stare at him, he added, "My parents are both mechanics. They have their own shop and tow truck. I grew up helping out when I wasn't at school or at the dojo. I could take a dirt bike apart and put it back together before I could do algebra."
His parents would rather show him how to take apart engines and put them back together than help him with his math homework, but that was a different story. Helping out at his parents' garage (better known as "free slave labor") was another reason he wanted to go to college. Customers had this weird idea that his folks shouldn't charge so much for labor, ignoring the fact that his parents needed to pay for the loans on the garage and all their tools, insurance, electricity and an endless list of other incidentals. His parents should have been doing better money-wise but people were constantly bartering with them and bouncing checks. His mom and dad were too nice for their own good. He knew they would love for him to take over the garage but he didn't want to be fighting every day for a decent income.
Could he win a decent living by being a werewolf? What a weird and unexpected benefit. He wasn't sure that what had just happened was repeatable. If it was, it implied an even stranger future than he'd thought.
"So, she just needs a new gasket?" Winnie knelt down to eye the fresh drips of oil under the scooter. "And here I thought she might be possessed. My cousin had a car that was possessed. It constantly tried to kill him but it never needed gasoline."
She swung her leg over the seat and hitched forward to make room for him. "Come on. We've got to scoot!"
"Where are we going?" He wasn't sure that if it was totally wise to run off with a stranger---and Winnie definitely qualified as strange. She did, however, have ten million dollars in her pocket that theoretically belonged to them both. And he didn't even know her last name.
"We're going to my granny's," Winnie said. "We need to do a jam session to find out what's going on with Jack."
* * *
Harrowing was not a word that Joshua had ever considered using before.
No other word, however, came close to describing Winnie's driving.
The only warning he got was when she canted her head to look up at Fred and said, "Fastest route to Granny's, avoiding pigs."
He was about to ask "what pigs?" when Fred flitted away and Winnie took off after the spirit guide at full throttle.
They cut between buildings via passageways barely wide enough for her handlebars. They flashed through intersections against the light. Winnie drove on sidewalks, through parks, and over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the Charles River. Oddly there were no pedestrians in their way, no matter how erratic a path they took. Unfortunately the same couldn't be said of cross traffic. Boston drivers used their horns and curse words that Joshua had never heard shouted before but never their brakes.
After taking several one-way streets in the wrong direction, they cut into a vast parking lot for some kind of warehouse with dozens of tractor-trailer trucks that blared horns at them. Fred led the way through a narrow a hole in a fence, across a pedestrian crosswalk, through a gate that Joshua was sure should have been padlocked shut, and down into an abandoned unlit tunnel.
By then it was fairly obvious that when Winnie said "pigs" she meant the police.
* * *
Joshua's grandmother lived in a big Victorian in Saratoga Springs. Her hair was titanium blond via monthly visits to a beauty parlor and always hair sprayed into a perfect hairdo. She favored turtleneck cashmere sweaters and wool skirts and low-heeled dress shoes.
The fact that they parked in front of a tattoo parlor warned him that Winnie's grandmother was not like his. There was a porcupine drawn in tribal style on the window and the name of the shop wrapped around it: Sioux Zee's Quill Pig Tattoo. Heavy metal music thundered somewhere close by. As they neared the shop, the noise grew louder and he realized that it was coming from within the building.
Winnie opened the door and the music hit them like a wall of sound.
Joshua followed, feeling bewildered and lost. Why was he here? Winnie had swept him up and carried him away like a leaf in a storm wind. Decker had said that as a monster, random chance no longer applied to Joshua. That he'd pulled the winning lottery ticket out of thin air seemed to prove it.
It did seem to indicate that fate had taken him to the one person in Boston who knew all about werewolves. Destiny also gave him ten million reasons why he should stay.
Fate and destiny were the words his AP English teacher used to describe the set up in Macbeth, and that turned out badly for Macbeth.
The tattoo studio's door opened to a large long room with high ceilings. The floor was polished dark oak. The walls were exposed red brick. There were five black leather adjustable chairs set up as tattoo stations with black enameled tool cabinets. On the walls were animals drawn in the same tribal-style as the shop's logo, obviously tattoos, but framed like paintings. In the very back was a metal spiral staircase that led up to the second floor. A sign warned off customers with: Quill Pigs Only, Others will be Neutered.
The artist nearest the door was a girl slightly older than Joshua. She wore her long black hair swept up into a bun that was pinned into place with hummingbird-tipped hairpins. Her halter-top and low rider jeans showed off her full-body tattoo of green and ruby feathers. She glanced toward the door and then focused back on her client, an extremely muscular, metrosexual man. "Ooooh! I should have known!" Hummingbird girl carefully peeled a stencil paper from the man's upper body, revealing the interlocking jagged black lines of a tribal tattoo that wrapped his left shoulder. "Sioux Zee is on the warpath. She just kicked on the metal a few minutes ago."
"Shoot!" Winnie glanced toward the ceiling speaker as if noticing the music for the first time.
"Shape shift nose to the wind," the voice of the male singer growled over heavy bass through vibrating speakers. "Shape shift feeling I've been. Move swift all senses clean. Earth gift. Back to the meaning of wolf and man."