He looked… surprised. "We were right?"
I nodded my head. "Now, let me tell you this. It came last night and ripped my trailer to pieces, but it couldn't come in because I didn't invite it. You have to invite evil into your home-that's one of the rules. I shot it four times with my Marlin 444, loaded with silver. I hit it at least three times without even slowing it down. You need to stay away from it. Right now it's in hiding. The rise in violence is just a-a side effect. If you bring it out into the open, there will be a lot more bodies. We're trying to contain it without getting anyone killed. Hopefully very soon."
"Who is ‘we'?" he asked.
"Some acquaintances of mine." I looked him square in the eye and prayed that he'd leave it there. The heavy emphasis I used was straight out of a gangster movie. He didn't have to know how underpowered we were; the police would be even more helpless than Andre and I.
"I promise I won't lie to you about the preternatural community," I told him. "I may leave things out, because I have to, but I won't lie to you."
He didn't like it, didn't like it at all. He tapped his fingers unhappily on the top of the desk, but in the end, he didn't ask more questions.
He got off the desk and walked over to a cabinet mounted in the wall behind my chair. I moved when he opened it and pushed back the doors to reveal a white board in the center and corkboards on the inside of each door. On one of the corkboards someone had pinned up a map of the Tri-Cities and covered it with roundheaded colored pins. Most of the pins were green, some were blue, and a double handful were red.
"This isn't all of them," he said. "A couple of weeks ago a few of us wondered if there was a pattern to the violence, so we pulled all reports of violence since April. The green pins are usual stuff. Property damage, arguments that get a little hot and someone calls them in, someone bangs his girlfriend around. That kind of stuff. Blue is where someone ended up in the hospital. Red is where someone ended up dead. A few of them are suicides." He put a finger on a cluster of red near the highway in Paseo. "This is the murder-suicide at the motel in Paseo last month." He moved his hand to a green pin all by itself near the east edge of the map. "This is your trailer."
I looked at the map. I'd expected to get a list of addresses, but this was exactly what I needed-and not. Because there was no pattern I could see. The pins were scattered evenly around the Tri-Cities. Denser where the population was heavier, light in Finley, Burbank, and West Richland where there weren't so many people. There was no neat ring of pins like you see in the movies.
"We can't find a pattern either," he said. "Not an overall pattern. But the incidences do tend to come in clusters. Yesterday it was East Kennewick. Two fistfights and a family disturbance that roused the neighborhood. The night before it was West Paseo."
"He's moving around," I said. That wasn't good. Where was he keeping Adam and Samuel if he was moving around? "Is there a time of day that the violence is the worst?" I asked.
"After nightfall."
I looked at the pins again, silently counting the red ones. They were short of Uncle Mike's count-and I don't think either of them knew about the family who died during Daniel's experience with Littleton.
"Did you learn anything?" he asked.
"Hunting serial killers is easier on TV," I said sourly.
"Is that what we're dealing with?"
I shrugged, then remembered Littleton 's face when he killed the woman at the motel. "I think so. Of a sort. The incidental violence is really bad, Tony, but this monster likes to kill. If he decides he doesn't need to hide anymore, it would be very bad. What can you tell me about serial killers?"
"I haven't seen one here," he said. "Doesn't mean we don't have one we don't know about-but there are things we watch for."
"Like what?"
"Most of them start with easy victims for practice."
Easy like Daniel? I thought.
"I have a friend in the Seattle PD who tells me his whole department is waiting for someone to get killed. For three years they've had neighborhood pets turn up dead. They're patrolling extra heavily near their at risk populations: the homeless, runaways, and prostitutes."
I shivered. Had Littleton been a killer before he became a sorcerer and a vampire? Had he been a vampire first or a sorcerer? Had he been evil, or had he been made evil? Not that it mattered.
Someone knocked on the door. Tony reached past me to open it.
"Come on in, Sergeant," he said. "We're finished here. Sergeant, this is Mercedes Thompson. Mercy this is Sergeant Owens, our watch commander. This is his office."
Sergeant Owens was lean and fit, an older, more cynical version of the smiling young man in the wedding photo. He held out his hand and I shook it. He kept mine a moment, examining the traces of grease I could never quite get out from under my nails.
"Mercedes Thompson," he said. "I hear that you had trouble last night. I hope there is no recurrence."
I nodded. "I expect they got it out of their systems," I told him with a faint smile.
He didn't smile back. "Tony tells me that you have ties to the werewolf and fae communities and you've agreed to help us out."
"If I can," I agreed. "Though I'm probably more qualified to tune up your cars than to give you advice."
"You'd better be a very good mechanic," he said. "My people put their lives on the lines. I don't need bad advice."
"She fixed Sylvia's car," Tony said. In addition to being Gabriel's mother, Sylvia was a police dispatcher. "She's a very good mechanic, her advice will stand up."
In point of fact, Zee had fixed Sylvia's car, but that was beside the point.
The Sergeant relaxed. "All right. All right. We'll see how it goes."
We were back in the hall, when I stopped.
"What?" Tony asked.
"Take off the pins for the incidents at night. We need the daytime violence," I told him. His very presence would cause violence. "This thing moves around at night, but I don't think he can move during the day."
"All right," he said. "It'll take a while. I'll get a rookie on it. Do you want to wait?"
I shook my head. "I can't afford to. Would you call me?"
"Yes."
I thought he'd drop me back at the waiting room, but he escorted me all the way out. This time the little entryway was empty of students.
"Thank you," I said as I got in my car.
He held my door opened and saw what Stefan had done to my dash.
"Somebody hit that," he said.
"Yep. I have that effect on people."
"Mercy," he said somberly. "Make sure he doesn't hit you like that."
I touched the broken vinyl where Stefan had put his fist. "He won't," I told him.
"You're sure I can't help you?"
I nodded. "I promise that if that changes, I'll call you right away."
I stopped at a fast food restaurant and ordered lunch. I ate a couple of cheeseburgers and a double order of fries, though I wasn't particularly hungry. I hadn't had any sleep, so staying alert meant fueling up-the large, caffeinated soda would help, too.
When I was through eating, I got in my car and drove around, thinking myself in circles. I just didn't have enough information to find the sorcerer, and I needed to find him before dark. Before he killed Samuel and Adam-I refused to believe they might already be dead. He hadn't had time to play with them yet.