Kitty Takes a Holiday (Kitty Norville 3)

“How’s Cormac?”

“Stoic. He’s Cormac. There’s something else. They’ve ID’d the body. The skinwalker. Miriam Wilson. She’s the twin sister of John Wilson, the werewolf that Cormac shot. The one that got me. A missing person report on her was filed three months ago.”

As if we needed the situation to be any more complicated. I tried to imagine a state of affairs where a brother and sister would become the things they were, and wreak the havoc they had.

“Brother and sister? One of them a werewolf and one of them a skinwalker. What’s the story behind that?”

“I wish I knew.”

“And her family reported her disappearance to the police, but they hired Cormac to hunt down the brother?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know that it was her family that filed the report. I’m guessing they didn’t send Cormac after her because she wasn’t a werewolf. We don’t know if they knew what she was. We don’t know anything. Christ, I’m going to have to go buy a suit. I left all my clothes in my car back in Farmington. I can’t go to court without a suit.” He was currently wearing his coat over jeans and a T-shirt, like he’d been wearing for the last week.

“We’ll go buy you a suit in the morning. Is there anything else you need to do? Can we get out of here?” I wanted to get him out of this place, with its unhappy smells and atmosphere of confrontation.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

That started a very long night. Ben used my laptop and spent hours looking through online legal libraries for precedents and arguments that would spring Cormac. He scratched out notes on a notepad. I watched, lying on the sofa, wondering how I could help. He grew more agitated by the minute.

“Ben, come to bed. Get some sleep.”

“I can’t. Too much to do. All my work is back in my car, I have too much to review, I have to catch up.” He glared at the screen with a frantic intensity.

“How much are you going to be able to help him if you’re falling asleep in the courtroom?”

He took his hands away from the keyboard and bowed his head. I could see the fatigue radiating off him. When he came to the sofa, I sat up, made room for him, and pulled him into an embrace. My body was healing, finally, but still sore. I didn’t complain. He needed me to comfort him, however much I wanted someone to comfort me. We stayed like that a long time, his head pillowed on my shoulder, until the tension started to seep out of him. I got him out of his clothes, into bed, and held him close, curled up in my arms, until he finally fell asleep. He never fully relaxed.

The next morning, we went to buy a suit. We weren’t going to find anything fancy in Walsenburg. This put Ben even further out of sorts. But we managed, somehow.

He changed clothes in the car on the way to the Huerfano County Courthouse, where Cormac’s first hearing was scheduled to take place. The suit didn’t fit quite right, it didn’t make as slick a picture as he might have wanted. I brushed his hair back with my fingers, straightened his tie, smoothed his lapels. Like I was sending him to the prom or something.

Ben looked like I was sending him to an execution. He was still holding himself tense, shoulders stiff, like the raised hackles on a nervous wolf.

“You going to be okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. This is just a formality. The judge will look over his statement, the witness statements, and throw out the case. That’s all there is to it.”

He headed into the building alone to meet with Cormac before the hearing. I made my way to the courtroom. In other circumstances I might have admired the hundred-year-old building, made of functional gray stone and topped by a simple decorated tower. They built them to last in those days.

I didn’t know what I expected—some kind of dramatic, busy scene like in a courtroom drama on TV. But the place was almost empty. Marks stood off to one side. A couple of people in business suits conversed quietly. Fluorescent lights glared. The whole place gave the impression of dull bureaucracy. I sat in the first row behi

nd the defense side. I was sure this would be educational if I weren’t so nervous on Ben and Cormac’s behalf.

Without any preamble, a couple of bailiffs guided Cormac into the courtroom. He’d had a chance to shave, which made him look slightly less psychotic than he had last night. A point in his favor, and that was probably part of the strategy. It was a shock, though, to see him in an orange prison jumpsuit, short-sleeved, baggy, unflattering. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding.

Ben followed, and both of them positioned themselves behind one of the podiums before the bench.

The whole procedure followed in a kind of haze. The judge, Heller, a middle-aged woman, brown hair pulled into a bun, wearing a no-nonsense expression, came into the room and took her place. Ben and Cormac remained standing before her. Across from them, one of the business suits, a surprisingly young man—no older than Ben and Cormac—shuffled papers on the desk in front of him. George Espinoza, the prosecutor. His suit was neat, his dark hair slicked back, his expression viperish. A crusader. No wonder Ben was worried.

The prosecutor read the facts—and just the facts, ma’am. The time and place of Cormac’s arrest, the nature of the crime, the probable cause. The charge: murder. Not just murder, but first-degree murder. That was serious, way too serious.

Espinoza explained: “The accused was heard to say that he had tracked the victim, had in fact been focused on her for quite some time with the intent to kill her. He was seen in the area of Shiprock, New Mexico—the victim’s hometown—on several dates over the last month. He was, in fact, lying in wait for the victim’s appearance. This presents a clear display of deliberation, meeting the requirement for a charge of first-degree murder.”

Cormac had been tracking her. He had meant to kill her. Which made the whole thing murky. I was glad I wasn’t the lawyer.

This wasn’t a TV show. Nobody shouted, nobody slammed their fists on the tables, nobody rushed in from the back with the crucial piece of information that would free the defendant, or pound the final nail in the prosecution’s case.

They might have been lecturing on economic theory, as calmly and analytically as everyone spoke. It made it hard to concentrate on the words.