“What happened to the sickle?” Adam asked.
“I destroyed it.” Zee’s lip curled. “It was crude old black craft. Witchcraft.” He paused as if reconsidering his opinion. “Effective,” he allowed. “But still crude.”
“Bodies slashed as if they were harvested wheat,” George said. “That’s how I’d describe the boy last night. But you destroyed the sickle.”
“I destroyed a sickle,” Zee said. “One that was presented to me as the murder weapon. It was not the sickle I’d come here to find.”
A thoughtful silence followed his words.
“I should have heard about them,” George said with certainty. “Paperwork or no paperwork, people saw the bodies. Whoever hushed it up did a good job.”
“And yet”—Adam’s voice was careful—“we have a movie.”
“Yes,” Zee said. “We have a movie. Based on whatever stories an old policeman told his grandson. Outside of the broad strokes—a killer controlled by a cursed sickle—the movie is completely fictional.”
“Huh,” I said. “I guess I’m going to have to go to the movies.” I looked at Adam. “Date night.”
He nodded but didn’t look happy about it. Slasher-type horror movies were not healthy fare for a werewolf. Sudden noises, too much tension, and a theater packed with fear-laden people was a recipe for disaster.
“You could take Tad instead,” suggested Zee. “When I told him this morning that the story of the Harvester was based on an actual occurrence, he sounded as though he planned on watching it a second time.”
“The kid at the grocery store could certainly have been killed with a sickle,” George said, not to be distracted by a movie. His phone chimed and he looked at it. “Tony says he’s ready to leave the Kennewick crime scene to the forensic people. If we go now, Tony will meet us at the grocery store in Pasco.”
I eyed Zee. “How would you like to come with us to look at a crime scene?”
Zee shook his head. “No.”
“You are staying here,” Adam told me firmly. “Your feet hurt.”
We all went, of course.
“Alpha werewolf meets coyote,” murmured George gleefully from the back of Adam’s SUV as I hopped in. “Fae—”
“Stop,” said Zee, climbing in beside him.
George didn’t lose his grin, but he quit talking. George was not stupid.
The grocery store was closed.
“We don’t want to hinder any investigation,” the manager said as he locked the front doors behind us.
He was a solidly built man in his late forties or early fifties, his hair the silvery-wheat color of a platinum blond going gray. He had a rounded, Santa Claus–type face, an impression that was enhanced by a short white beard. He’d given me a sharp look but hadn’t said anything.
“You need to find out what happened to that poor boy.” He sounded a little fierce.
“Was it you who saw something in your rearview mirror?” Adam asked.
He shook his head. “Nope. That was Andy. Andy Vargas.” He paused, keys halfway to his pocket. “Andy isn’t someone you’d think would make things up,” he said soberly. “He’s an honest man, and he was terrified last night.” He shrugged. “Today he’s mortified and regrets saying anything to anyone. He is convinced it was someone in a costume.”
I put my nose to the floor and did a quick sniff around the entrance. There were a lot of scents, nothing that stood out as unusual to me.
“Excuse me,” the manager said, a little diffidently, “is that a coyote?”
Adam nodded. “It is. She’ll give us a little more insight into what happened.”
“You didn’t bring one of your—” The manager fumbled to a stop as Adam looked at him. It’s uncomfortable for a man used to being in charge to meet someone like Adam.
My mate smiled, and the manager relaxed. “I didn’t think you needed any more monsters here,” he said.
“You aren’t monsters,” said the manager unexpectedly. “I live out in West Pasco. Your wolves took down that zombie cow not a hundred yards from my house, and my grandchildren were home visiting.”
Adam’s head tilted. “Thank you for that. Let’s say, I didn’t want to scare anyone any more than we had to, then. And she’s better for something like this anyway.”
“A coyote?” asked the manager.
“Mostly.” Adam considered me. “Let’s go directly to where the boy was murdered first. Then see if she can track the killer either backward or forward.”
The manager led us directly to the back area and stopped in front of a wide swinging door. “It’s just beyond here,” he said with a nervous smile. “I’ll leave you to it. If you need anything, I’ll be up in the offices doing paperwork. Otherwise, when you’re done, you can leave via any of the exit doors—they lock automatically.”
“Thank you,” George said. “We’ll be fine.”
The manager’s sigh of relief as he walked away would probably not have been audible to a normal human. We followed George through the door to the murder scene.
It was, I supposed, exactly what anyone would expect the loading bay of a grocery store to look like. A forklift was parked in one corner next to a stack of orange traffic cones and a bunch of tent-type signs leaning against the wall. The one I could see read Caution: Wet Floor.
A bay roll-up door large enough for a semi was flanked by two more doors. On the far side, between the big door and the wall, was a second roll-up door, this one sized for a forklift. The nearer door was a push-bar type with an Exit sign overhead. Next to that door, covered with warning signs, was a machine used to flatten cardboard boxes for recycling. I knew that because it was full of flattened cardboard boxes, now drenched in blood.
Fenced off by crime scene tape hung over plastic delineator posts, the forklift, the push-bar door, the nearest walls, and about a ten-foot square of concrete floor were also covered with dried blood. Some of it pooled on the floor, but a lot of it was scattered around in sprays of various heights on walls.
Looking at the blood-spattered area, I recalled Lady Macbeth’s line: Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? I was a predator and I killed—mostly mice and rabbits. Blood usually didn’t bother me. But there was something about the blood spray here that made me feel less like a predator and more like prey.
I’d been with packs of werewolves when they took down elk and once a moose. Both of those had a lot more blood volume than a human-sized body did. And yet . . .
“It’s as though whoever did this wanted to spread the mess as far as they possibly could,” said Adam. “A lot of this is blood cast from the weapon the killer used. I’ve seen something like this before, when I went into the jungle with Christiansen a few years ago—”
David Christiansen had been Changed at the same time as Adam. David ran a small group of mercenaries who specialized in rescuing ransom victims.
“We were after a drug lord over there who killed people in particularly gory ways in order to terrify people—his followers as much as his enemies.” Adam’s eyes drifted high up on the wall. “It worked.”
“We’ve been asked to stay outside of the taped area,” George said.
Zee dropped down to squat on his heels in a way that no one who looked as old as Zee did should be able to and examined the room. He tipped his head so he could see the high spatter on the walls.
“Four cuts, you said”—Zee stood up again—“as the body fell.” His arm made a different motion than George’s had when he’d been describing the killing blows. George had been graceful and quick. Zee’s were also quick, but they were jerks back toward himself rather than a fluid figure eight.