Werewolf Cop (20 page)

“A kiosk,” said Zach, slowly shaking his head. This confirmed what he already assumed: that his meeting with Dankl at the university—her office there and so on—was all a setup, all a sham. “And you were trailing her the day I met with her.”

“I was. Your arrival was the first thing that had happened that was out of the ordinary. I was excited. I wanted to find out who you were. I knew where Dankl was staying, so unfortunately I made the mistake of following you back to your hotel. Thinking, you know, I'd be able to pick Dankl up at her flat when I was done. Well, I got your name and address from the hotel clerk, all right, but Dankl never returned to her flat after that, and the long and short of it is: I lost track of you both. You didn't meet with her again, did you?”

“No,” Zach lied at once—like her or not, he was not willing to tell her about the half-remembered meeting in the Black Forest.

“Well, after that, as I say, she vanished,” Imogen went on. “I've been trying to pick up her trail ever since, but I've had no joy of it at all.”

Zach was about to say something, about to ask something; but before he could, she held up a finger, and said, “Just . . . ,” staving him off so she could finish.

“I did want to mention too that when I was looking for her in Poland at the beginning of last summer, I came upon another suspicious death attributed to animals: a Switzerland-based financier found torn to pieces in the Notecka Forest—in an old abandoned cemetery there that's believed to be haunted. The Polish media kept it quiet. Protecting tourism, I suppose. It got quite a lot of traffic on
Bizarre!
when I wrote about it, but the news never traveled much beyond our sort of audience. The Polish authorities claimed it was a wolf attack. And there still are some wolves in that area. . . .”

“But you think that was Dankl too?”

Imogen's eyebrows arched, her hands parted as if she were opening a hymn book. “She was in the area at approximately the same time. And also. . . .”

Zach waited for her to continue.

“This is rather tenuous,” she said, “but the Frenchman, the one who was killed, was a man named Reynard. He worked for an international firm called One World Investments, dedicated, according to their prospectus, to ‘progressive strategies for the ethical investor.' Reynard was only a minor player there, apparently, but the company itself was said to have had a hand in several of the currency and market crashes of the last few years. So if you were defending Europe from evil, in other words, Reynard might have made a suitable target.”

Zach didn't bother to try his coffee again. He figured it must've gone cold by now. He sat instead with his chair turned aslant so he could lean his elbow on the table, lean his cheek against his fist. He had been listening to the woman all this while and thinking . . . well, he wasn't sure what he was thinking. He wasn't sure what to make of this story at all, or what to make of this Imogen. He did like her. He felt there was something solid and serious and no-nonsense about her. On the other hand, it did seem strange to him—counter-instinctual—that a person of such obvious intelligence should choose the career she'd chosen: reporting on bizarre legends, sort of making fun of them and sort of not. A kook working for a kooky website, as she herself put it. He supposed there was a story behind it. There always was. Still, it gave him doubts, even though his gut impulse was to trust her.

He straightened in his seat now. “So—let me make sure I have this straight, being an American and having no irony and all. You think Gretchen Dankl is some kind of serial killer, basically. A crazy woman who kills people under the delusion that she's a wolf.”

“That seems to me a reasonable hypothesis.”

“Doesn't all rightly fit together, though, does it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if she's supposed to be defending Western civilization or whatever, you could see why she might take down this Reynard fellow in Poland. But why your fiancé? Seems to've been harmless enough. Why me, for that matter, assuming she was also after me?”

Imogen studied him a long moment. “You're really quite bright, aren't you?”

“For an American? Or a policeman?”

She nearly smiled. “That did sound condescending, didn't it?”

“A mite.”

“Well, to answer your question: I don't know whether it ‘rightly fits together' or not. I suppose mad people aren't very logical, when it comes down to it.”

“Oh, madness has a logic of its own. Pretty much everything has a logic of its own, if you can find it.”

“May I ask
you
something?”

Zach tilted a hand toward her, as if to say
Go ahead.

“Why do you believe me? Bright as you are. I've talked to countless law officers now in countless countries. You're the first to let me get past the word
werewolf
without casting me into the outer darkness. Most of them stopped listening after I told them the name of my website. But you. . . . You've not only listened, you seem to be taking me seriously.”

“Cop instinct, I guess,” he said. “I can see the sort of person you are.”

That was another lie, of course. There was much more to it than that. And Imogen picked up on it. She said, “I'm flattered. But is that all? I don't think it is. I think you know something—something that makes what I'm saying plausible to you.”

She's good,
Zach thought.
A good reporter.
But all he said out loud was “Why'd you come here? Why'd you come to me?”

Imogen Storm's eyes, Zach noticed, were a very attractive shade of brown, a very pale brown that was almost gold. What drew his attention to them now was the emotion that had come into them for the first time since they'd sat down together. Something had broken through her English reserve, and her eyes were suddenly bright with her sorrow and pain. Zach guessed it was the fact that he believed her, or respected her anyway, that he hadn't cast her into the outer darkness, as she'd put it. She was moved to openness, he thought, because after all this time, all this trouble, she had finally found an ally, or at least a willing ear.

“Bernard was a good man,” she told him, her voice still cool and bell-like and steady—defiantly matter-of-fact despite the look in her eyes. “A remarkable man, really, given the challenges he'd faced in life. I loved him very much and I'm not over him. He didn't deserve to die as he did, to be murdered as he was and have it shrugged off, ignored. I find it difficult to let that go. Perhaps I simply can't let
him
go. In any case, you're the last lead I have.”

“But do you think Gretchen Dankl is here? Do you think she's come to America?”

“That's my working theory, yes. I don't know why she chose her victims as she did, but I do think she chose them; and if she chose you, and if you somehow managed to escape her. . . .”

She ended with a gesture, and Zach completed her thought: “. . . she might come hunting for me.”

“And there's one more thing.”

“All right.”

“The moon. The full moon. They say there's always an uptick in crime at that time of the month—”

“Most policemen think so,” said Zach. “The scientists say it's a superstition—like being able to tell when someone's watching you.”

“Well, people with lycanthropy tend to believe in it. Their fits are often associated with full moons—or, to be more precise, those three days a month when the moon is effectively full. Bernard was killed on one of those full-moon nights. So was Reynard. Today is Friday. Sunday will be the first of the three full-moon nights this month. Do you understand what I'm saying, Detective?”

“I do,” said Zach.

“I think you should be careful,” said Imogen Storm. “I think you should be very careful indeed.”

16

LAZARUS

S
unday in church, Zach had a revelation. It was during the sermon and his mind had wandered. In fact, his mind had been wandering all weekend long.

After talking to Imogen Storm, he had had this feeling that everything was somehow better, that every strange and secret thing had been explained away. It was a feeling of relief and release. He thought, ah, these last few weeks with all their weirdness—they had not really been so weird after all. Gretchen Dankl was insane. That was it. She had fits. She thought she was a werewolf. And when Zach had gone to meet her, he had been coming down with this septicemia thing, this fever that caused hallucinations. Her insanity and his delirium had come crashing together in a disastrous confluence, a perfect storm. She had, in fact, attacked him in the woods in a seizure of madness. That part, it turned out, wasn't a dream. She had attacked him and he, in his illness, had seen her transformed, seen her as she believed herself to be. That accounted for all the crazy stuff he half-remembered. And as for the rest? What had happened between them after that? Well, he could only guess. It couldn't have been the way he'd thought it was. He couldn't have killed her. They would have found her body by now, for sure. And she couldn't have wounded him as he'd thought. He would never have healed so quickly. Probably they had struggled and he had escaped and come home—and then collapsed. And that was the story.

And what about his dreams, his visions, the “ghosts,” the giant waterbugs? They were all the results of little relapses, little recurrences of his fever. He would have to go see the doctor next week and talk it over with him. But the effect was sure to pass as he continued to heal. The important thing was: he wasn't going nuts and neither was the world. Everything had a reasonable explanation.

That was how he felt after talking to Imogen. That was how he felt through much of Saturday.

But the problem with reasonable explanations of mysterious things is that they almost never hold up over the long run. New doubts creep in. New questions arise—and then the same old questions return as it starts to become clear that nothing has really been explained at all, but only explained away. Mystery is mystery, that's the whole nature of it. The old questions never really die.

If he hadn't killed Gretchen Dankl, then where was she? If the roaches were an illusion, what had bitten his leg? If the ghost of Dankl was a hallucination, why had Grace smelled smoke? And if she really was a ghost, then she really was dead, wasn't she? And so wasn't it possible he had killed her, after all . . . ?

These were the thoughts—the old questions—to which his mind had wandered that Saturday as he raked leaves with his son and chased his squealing daughter around the back yard. At night, he and Grace had hired a babysitter and gone out to dinner with a couple they knew from church, he an ER doctor and she a part-time pediatric nurse. Grace liked to socialize with people who were not “on the job,” because she felt it helped Zach forget police work for a while. The four of them ate pasta and drank red wine and laughed about raising kids. They discussed the mess in Europe, the spread of radical Islam, the rise of the new fascists, and the resurgence of the violent left. But all the while, Zach was thinking about Imogen Storm and Gretchen Dankl—and about Angela Bose as well.

He had run a check on Angela's story about her father just that morning, a quick check online, hunting down articles and public records. He wanted to make sure that this Herman Bose of hers was not really an alias for Dominic Abend. But no, there was a Herman Bose, in fact, a Dutch shipping magnate, just as Angela had said. He was an impressive man, according to the news accounts. He had worked his way up from the docks until, a decade ago, at the age of sixty-nine, he had taken over the Amsterdam Line and made himself a billionaire. Rich, powerful, yet respected for his life of probity, he'd been married to the same woman for fifty-two years, the girl next door, whom he'd known since their first day of school together.

So much for Zach's instincts and suspicions about the man's daughter. Everything Angela Bose had told them had turned out to be true. So much for the faint whiff of corruption he thought he smelled around the beautiful Long Island recluse. Zach's illness had affected his perceptions somehow, that's all. Reasonable explanations. . . .

Then the old questions returned. That's what had happened that Sunday in church. That was how his revelation got started.

He hadn't been paying much attention to the service. The liturgy drifted in and out of his mind like music on a car radio.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth,” Mrs. Pennyworth was saying from the lectern in her thin, nasal voice. “Tell me, if you have understanding.”

The rest was blah-blah-blah to Zach as he thought about the look in Angela's eyes when she'd examined the photograph of Dominic Abend. She had recognized him. He was sure of it. That wasn't fever or his imagination.

His own gaze drifted around the church. It was a sweet old building, over a hundred years old, dark and solemn with its scarlet carpeting and walnut pews and interior. But the stained-glass windows were the pride of the place: the ascension above the altar, the life of Christ, nativity to resurrection, running along the eastern and western walls. Some old famous someone had done the pictures, Zach didn't know who, but he liked the look of them, especially at this hour in the fall when the sun struck some of them just right and they glowed.

It was that hour now. He was looking at Lazarus on the wall at the end of his row of pews. The Reverend Gray had begun his sermon. “Whoever wishes to become great among you, must blah-blah-blah . . .” he was saying as Zach's eyes wandered over Grace's attentive profile to the stained glass beyond her.

It was just that magic moment—he had noticed it before—when the light from outside filled the Savior's image so that he seemed almost to drift out of the surface of the glass into the air above the aisle, his hand uplifted, his mouth opened on the command:
Come forth.
And Lazarus—this also was a trick of the sun—seemed to be emerging from a darkness that extended backward into space, as if the artist had built the dead man's very tomb into the pane. No wonder the woman—Mary? Martha? One of them, Zach had forgotten which—had fallen to her knees between them with her hands clasped beneath her pale cheeks and her awestruck lips parted.