Margo inhaled sharply. She swept the door closed and stood like a guard, almost bristling with protective indignation. As soon as the door shut, the smell of hair spray and unclean raincoat intensified.
“Miss Wilson, Lucy Cavanaugh is dead. I’m sorry.” He sounded sorry, too. His mouth pulled down like he tasted something bitter as he dropped into his own chair and touched the folder. “I’m trying to find out all I can about her, so I can catch her attacker. Can I ask you some more questions?”
The clouds on the table’s surface swirled together, and Sophie’s empty stomach trembled as if she was going to throw up. The air in here was stifling, the walls suddenly shrinking, closing up on her. A rattling started in the center of her head—a buzzing, like copper-bottomed pans striking one another. “Dead?” she whispered.
Somehow, hearing him say it made everything too real. The all-too-familiar pressure of secrets to keep squeezed her entire chest until a black hole of panic opened up in front of her. She had to watch where she stepped, or she would fall off the narrow thread of safety.
Margo stepped close and put a beefy hand on Sophie’s shoulder. The clogging reek of hair spray crawled up her nose, and her eyes flooded.
Oh, Jesus. What do I do now? She looked up from the table’s surface and found the detective watching her avidly, tense like a dog before the leash is unclipped. His fingers drummed once on the folder, and she could see paper stuffed inside it.
There were probably pictures, too.
Sophie did the only thing she could do. She burst into tears.
It wasn’t too hard to break down crying and pretend to be confused. If Sophie was used to anything, it was cops asking her questions. Yes, Lucy was her best friend. No, she hadn’t heard from Lucy all weekend, and what exactly was this about, anyway? Oh, my God, no, not Lucy. No, she had no enemies. Everyone loved Lucy. How could you not love her? Well, except for Mark, but he was angry because Luce had testified during the divorce hearings, and—
The pudgy detective listened, jotted notes on a little tiny steno pad, and patted her shoulder awkwardly once, before Sophie flinched away from the sudden wave of his smell. Margo glowered, arms and legs crossed, in a chair just to Sophie’s left.
It wasn’t that Sophie wanted to lie. But she knew very well what would happen if she started talking about being kidnapped and ranting about vampires and werewolves. She’d end up in the hospital, under “observation,” and Mark would find out and all sorts of Unpleasant Things would happen.
No, if Sophie wanted to stay out of the psychiatric ward and in her degree program, she had to keep her mouth shut hard.
The instinct to hide things from the police wasn’t that far away even at the best of times. She’d spent a long time hiding what Mark did to her.
“Well,” Andrews finally said, “that about covers it. I’m sorry, Miss Wilson. Here’s my card.”
Sophie stared at the rectangle of white paper on the table’s lacquered surface. It looked innocent and two-dimensional, compared to whatever trick of light was making the table run with cloudy streaks. She was too goddamn exhausted to figure out why she was hallucinating. It had to be something wrong with her glasses, or something.
Margo leaned forward and scooped the business card up. “Thank you, detective. You can find your own way out.”
“That I can, ma’am.” He stood and swept the manila folder into a battered leather attaché case. She was suddenly beyond certain that folder had pictures in it, pictures of Lucy.
Fresh sharp grief welled up. The detective shuffled off, and as soon as he closed the door with a quiet click Margo started fussing at Sophie to “let it all out, and here’s a tissue. My, he certainly won’t win any prizes for tact, will he? Oh, sweetheart, you need some lunch. Here, I’ll tell Amy to run down and grab you a sandwich—”
It was actually a relief to give in and let blue-haired Battle-Ax Margo have her way. Sophie finally escaped to the ladies’ room, and the smell in there was almost enough to drive her back out again if she hadn’t needed the sanctuary so badly. She locked a stall door behind her and cried until she threw up the toast she’d managed to force down for breakfast.
The grief keening inside her head was full of black, tar-thick guilt. It shouldn’t have been Lucy on the floor of that alley. The rumpled little detective would never catch her killer. Life wasn’t fair.
And the worst unfairness of all was that it wasn’t a dream. Lucy was really dead.
Now Sophie was truly alone.
Chapter 12
Night fell, cold and windy.
The first problem was the address. It was a strip mall. Or, more precisely, it was one of those little mail shops in a strip mall, the kind of place where you could pay a monthly fee and rent a box. It looked like a street address, and it was the sort of step a woman who needed privacy would take.
Which was interesting. And a dead end.
But he had another card up his sleeve.
I’ve got night school, too. I’m studying to be a social worker. Which meant all he had to do was find out about night classes. A city this size wouldn’t have too many night-school programs, and all he had to do was start with the biggest and work down. Any place she was five nights a week would give him a trail.
He watched the mail stop from a pool of darker shadow across the street for a little while, though, wondering why she had this address on her driver’s license. He hunched inside the denim jacket that had been Kyle’s, always a little too big on his younger brother. It still smelled like him, though, a thorn of guilt spiking through Zach’s chest every few inhales.
He suffered it. They hadn’t had a chance to sing Kyle to the moon yet. He had to hope his brother would understand, that the majir had explained everything—and that Kyle had forgiven him.
He could hope, couldn’t he?
Zach shook himself. Come on. Concentrate on the problem at hand. A maiden name, a mail drop, no friends to speak of, and flinching whenever a husband was mentioned. It added up to a picture, and not a pretty one.
Still, could be wrong. Assumptions, you know. Fastest way to make a situation worse than it has to be.
Yeah, right. He could be wrong like the moon was made of cheese and crackers.
His Family was safe as possible, in a motel at the edge of town with the van just in case. Waiting for him to bring the shaman back. This was the first time he’d been alone in years, and he didn’t like it. There were crowds of prey around, and he had to think this was hostile upir-laden territory. Not to mention he had to keep his temper under control until he found her, but he had to do it without others of his kind around to keep him occupied and remind him he was human.
Most of all, though, he had too much time to brood when he was alone. Too much time to remember, and to think about mistakes.
It had been a cold, gray day of driving as fast as he dared, and the sound of city traffic had sharp edges, burrowing into his tired head. He could go for a couple more days without sleep, but he wanted to bring their shaman back before dawn. God only knew what would happen without him around to defend his Family.
Were the upir after them or after her? He just didn’t know enough.
But why would upir be after her? It was just a random attack by a rabid sucker, right? So why would seven more of them, all too young to know what to do with their new reflexes, go after a group of Carcajou, even a small group with a shaman so new she didn’t know what the hell to do with herself?