Shifting Shadows

There was just a hint of a smile on her face; I reckon it wouldn’t be easy to be at Elizaveta’s beck and call. Might be fun to see her stymied once in a while. That would explain the earlier lie.

“Where are we meeting Toni McFetters’s husband?” I asked.

“At his house. He’s on compassionate leave.” She gave me the address. “The children are at his in-laws’ house. He told me that when I called him yesterday and told him we’re investigating his wife’s disappearance. Our questioning should just blend in with that of the police if I can manage it right. It helps that he’ll be the only one to work on.”

Toni’s husband’s house was only a couple of blocks from Nadia’s, in a newer neighborhood—no alphabet houses at all. It was a big house, not as upscale as Kyle’s house, but not an inexpensive property, either.

I pulled up in front and turned off the truck. “We can keep this short. All we need is to find out if he killed her or knows who did. And if he’s noticed anything suspicious.”

“Why don’t you do the talking?” she said. “I’ll work better if all I have to do is the magic.”

I didn’t like it, this business of messing with someone’s mind, any more than I had liked lying to Kyle before he knew that I was a werewolf. But I’d lost my innocence a long time ago.

The man who let us in smelled of desperation. He matched his wife in good looks—or would have with a few more hours of sleep—but showed none of the signs of vanity that a lot of good-looking men display, men like Kyle for instance. McFetters’s haircut was basic; his clothes were off the rack and fit indifferently.

Before I asked a single question, I knew that he had had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.

“Mr. McFetters, thank you for speaking to us,” I told him, refusing his offer to come in and sit down. “This won’t take long.”

“Call me Marc,” he said. “Has anyone found out anything?”

“No,” I said. It was a lie, but in a good cause. “Did anything happen in the past few weeks—before your wife disappeared—that caught your attention? Strangers in the neighborhood, someone your wife noticed when she was out jogging?”

He rubbed his hands over his head as if to jar his memory. “No,” he said, sounding lost. “No. Nothing. I usually jog with her, but I got a late start that morning; we’d . . . Anyway she has an extra hour before she has to be at work. She says she can’t think without her morning run.”

“What was she wearing?” I asked, and listened to a detailed rundown that proved that whoever said that straight men don’t pay attention to clothes was wrong.

“She was wearing a pink jogging suit we’d picked up in Vegas—it was her favorite, even though the right knee had a hole from where she fell a few weeks ago. She had size-eight Nikes—silver with purple trim. She likes her green running shoes better, but they clash with the pink. She wore the topaz studs I got her for our anniversary in her ears, and her wedding ring . . . white gold with a quarter-carat Yogo sapphire I dug up when I was eighteen and on a family vacation.” There was a sort of desperate eagerness in his voice as he went on without prompting to describe their usual running route; as if he believed that somehow, if he could only manage to give enough details, it would help him find his wife.

He ran down, eventually, and, almost at random, his gaze focused on Nadia. He frowned. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I? What was your name again?”

“Nadia,” she said.

“Did you go to Richland High?” He rubbed his hair again and tried to find the proper social protocol.

“Along with half of Richland,” she said in a gentle voice. “It’s not important right now, Marc.”

“Did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?” I asked as gently as I could, pulling him back to important things. He hadn’t. I’d have bet my life on it, but for Elizaveta, I’d get absolute proof.

“No.” He blinked at me, as if the thought were too strange to contemplate. He wasn’t angry or offended, just bewildered. “No. I love Toni. I need to find her but I don’t know where to look.” Bewildered and terrified. “Where should I look?”

•   •   •

I shut the door behind us and waited while Nadia muttered a little under her breath and dropped a few herbs she had in a baggie on the steps.

“Well?” she asked after climbing in beside me.

I drove away from Toni McFetters’s house before I answered her. Churning in my gut was the understanding that if I hadn’t been with Kyle last night when the zombie came, I’d be in much the same state as Marc McFetters.

“We need to find who did this. That man doesn’t deserve the police jumping down his throat.”

“He didn’t kill her,” she said, but it was more of a question than a statement. I couldn’t believe that she’d been in the same room I had and hadn’t recognized the man’s innocence. Witches don’t have a wolf’s nose, I suppose.

“Absolutely not.”

“Good,” she said. “He was right, we did go to high school together. A geeky kid, but a real sweetie.” She shifted nervously in her seat as if she felt uncomfortable. “So that leaves us where?” Her question was a little fast. Maybe she’d liked Marc McFetters more than she was comfortable with me knowing. He seemed like a good man.

“We’re going to have some conversations with a few people who are very unhappy with Kyle.”

•   •   •

There were four people I wanted to check out. It might surprise people who knew him that the list wasn’t longer: Kyle did not make friends of the opposition in the courtroom. He was, however, fair and honest—which meant that most of the opposing lawyers got over their anger pretty fast.

I’d decided somewhere along the way that the zombie animator had been hired to assassinate Kyle. Gut instincts were always important to the detectives in the movies, but they were more so to werewolves. Mostly, gut instincts were just little bits of information floating around that resolved themselves into the most likely scenario.

That meant that we were looking for two different people. The one who did the hiring, and the one who was hired. Motive. My license might be new, but I was old. I’d survived because I understood what moved people, why they acted and why they did not. Old werewolves aren’t that common; most of us who survive the Change die in fights with other werewolves shortly thereafter, because most werewolves don’t understand body language. They also don’t think. They trust their fangs and claws—even though other wolves have fangs and claws, too. I watched and learned.