Skin of the Wolf (16 page)

A
s Charlotte and Framingham trotted back down Donna’s front steps, Framingham said, “Do I get the feeling your friend Donna was hiding something, or is she just being an Indian?”

Charlotte shook her head. “I hate to admit it but I agree with you. Michael Bonnard felt so lousy after he was mugged that he didn’t go to work, but instead of staying home in bed he decided to come up to the effing Bronx on a crappy cold morning like this—and all he wanted to do was to introduce his friend to Donna? And all they did was sit around and chat? Bullshit.”

“Why aren’t we taking her downtown?”

“Donna? Based on what? That we think she’s lying about what she talked about with a guy we have no reason to suspect of anything? I mean, no reason besides his cultural curiosity and our racial profiling. And have you ever tried to lean on an Indian? We close up tighter than a duck’s ass. I need to get some angle on what she’s hiding and then I can take it to her. She won’t respond to a fishing expedition, and God knows, not to intimidation. But if I ask her straight on she might talk to me. Anyway, I want to ask
you
something.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. How did you do that?”

“Do what?” Framingham asked innocently.

“‘Do what.’ You knew Spencer George was an art collector and what he collects. You couldn’t have found that out between when he told us his name and when you came back and sprang it on him.”

“You don’t think I’m just good like that?”

“You may be, but the department system isn’t. It might have told you if he was known to us, but not anything else about him. Did you Google him?”

They stepped over a pile of last week’s snow. Framingham grinned. “Yes, and no, and that’s what’s interesting. I Googled him before and got nothing. That e-mail I just got? That was Interpol.”

“Before what? Interpol? What are you talking about?”

“After Dr. Warner told me about Michael Bonnard, I thought I’d check him out.” Framingham slid into the car. “I found two photos of him at events with this Spencer George. So I thought I’d check
him
out.”

“I didn’t find anything like that. All I saw was the Rockefeller U. links.”

“You probably didn’t look for misspellings of his name.”

They reached the car and got in. Charlotte started it and steered out onto the Bronx street. “Not too shabby,” she admitted.

Framingham snapped his fingers. “See, I
am
all that. Spelled with one
n
, with a
t
, all kinds of things. Told you I was bored. I found him twice with this Spencer George guy and that was enough to get me interested. You have to admit, they don’t look like they belong together.”

“Love is blind.”

“You got that feeling, too?”

“I did, and by the way, it makes Bonnard less of a suspect in our killing.”

“If you’re still thinking crime of passion, sure. But that wasn’t what interested me.”

“What was?”

“At first, I was just bored. Like you said, I was fishing. But I didn’t catch anything. I couldn’t find a thing on Spencer George anywhere. No Wikipedia entry, no Google hits, no nothin’. He has no online presence. The photos with Bonnard were it and both of them get his name wrong, too. One spells ‘Spenser’ with an
s
and the other gets it backwards. George Spencer. He probably doesn’t know they exist or he’d make them go away, too.”

“He’s scrubbed out?”

“Thoroughly. He must pay a service to do it, untag photos and so on, though I’ll bet there wasn’t much to begin with. That kind of thing’s expensive. Now I ask myself, why would someone do that?”

“To protect their privacy?”

“That’s a lot of trouble to go to so no one knows you went to an art opening. So on a hunch I ran him through Interpol.”

“And?”

“He’s almost invisible there, too.”

“Almost?”

“Now, you can’t laugh at me.”

“Matt, laughing at you makes my life worth living.”

“When will you learn?” Framingham paused dramatically. “He’s been scrubbed from Interpol, too.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I don’t think so. My guy there—a Brit, by the way, a fifteenth cousin on the Framingham side—”

“A cousin? Really?”

“Who knows? But it’s like Indians, like your clan system. We upper-class Brits are all related and since we’re under attack from all sides—”

“Jesus, Matt!”

“We stick together, I’m trying to say. Please don’t crash this department vehicle. He just e-mailed me, my cousin whose name isn’t Framingham. He found a short obscure line in a long obscure bulletin alerting departments worldwide to an endless list of persons of interest, including one Spencer George, a collector on the run from Rome after the bust-up of a scheme to rob the Vatican.”

“Rob the
Vatican
? Matt, you’re insane!”

“I’m just reporting. Come on, Charlotte, think about it. Even if there was no such plot, if some agency ever thought there was, shouldn’t there be more paperwork? A cybertrail, I mean. One little bulletin, that’s it? Interpol’s just a fancy cop shop. Cops are all alike. Everything in triplicate, nothing thrown away. If the guy was referred to once, he was referred to a dozen times. If there’s a bulletin, there are lists the bulletin’s on. There’d be surveillance shots, photo arrays, progress reports, false sightings. Something. And”—he thrust a triumphant finger in the air—“there’d be a record of his arrival here.”

“Here? The U.S.? There isn’t?”

“No, there isn’t. But he seems to be here, doesn’t he? This guy who got himself erased from the Interpol system. Here, and hanging around with a man who was disappointed in a seven-million-dollar mask a few hours before a woman was killed in a violent and unexplained way in a room with same. Admit it. Something strange is going on.”

“All right,” said Charlotte slowly. “You might have a point. We
should look into it. As long as you don’t put the flying leap across Seventy-first Street back on the table.”

“You know”—Framingham put on the innocent face again—“there are some animals that could make that leap. Not regular normal animals, of course.”

“Oh, no. No, no, I know you don’t mean—”

“Just sayin’. Special ones. A special kind of wolf, or deer. An eagle could have flown.”

“Special ones. Matt. Please tell me you’re not saying what I know you are. My God, you are. You think she was killed by a werewolf. Shit. You are out of control.”

“Your people say shapeshifter, don’t you? Now, Dr. Bonnard, he looks like a normal human specimen, but Spencer George strikes me as a guy with sharp pointy teeth. I should’ve told him a knock-knock joke, so he’d have smiled and we could’ve seen them.”

“The jokes you tell, that would never work.” Charlotte looked over at him. “Oh, crap. You’re pulling my chain, aren’t you?”

“Well, hell.” Framingham grinned broadly. “You make it so easy.” He settled back with a satisfied air. “Really, I’m just asking you to keep an open mind.”

“The fact that I haven’t chucked your skinny white-boy upper-class Brit ass into the East River proves how open my mind is.”

“Of course it does. But Charlotte? About that leap being back on the table? As far as I’m concerned, it was never off.”

H
is long gray braids drawn back by the wind, Abornazine stood on the bluff looking over the river. The Hudson, he’d learned as a child to call these magnificent waters, this river that flowed two ways. He’d called it that before he’d understood the mortifying arrogance of naming things that had names already.

He’d been born Peter van Vliet, to the descendants of colonizers, a child of power and privilege. And wealth: oh yes, a good deal of wealth. The injustice of his position had disquieted him from the time he understood it. As he grew so did his shame in what he had and his guilt in the ways his ancestors had acquired it. His family lived the empty life of the idle rich: travel and parties and fretting about the delicate parsing of their ranking among other equally meaningless people. No one paid any regard to the young boy, cringing at every gift of gem-encrusted jewelry and each invitation to a benefit gala in aid of some group trampled by those dancing and dining on its behalf.

Sent away to school with others of his caste, he was repelled by the easy certitude of his fellows that they did, indeed, own and rule, and that it was right and just that they should. He was drawn to
solitude, to the forests. Spreading tracts of woodlands surrounded his home, others encircled the school, and what time he could steal he spent among the trees and the creatures who lived there, learning their ways. Often he’d sleep in the woods; the school did not approve, but his mother, who in the general way showed no particular interest in her son, coolly informed the institution that she would prefer if they left him to pass his time however he pleased, including the time he spent sleeping, providing he fulfilled his academic obligations. He therefore made a point of succeeding in his course work on a high level, and his athletic skills also grew, if only in the solitary sports: running, swimming, riding, shooting.

He spoke little, but became a magnet for the few others like himself who understood the catastrophically wrong course on which the entire world had been set when Europeans conquered this beautiful land. His small group would sit in clearings in the forest, telling tales of the people who used to walk these woods, live easily on this earth; and tales of what the world should be like, what it would be like if the afternoons they were spending could stretch to encompass their entire lives.

In classes, he learned that the conquerors write history, though that wasn’t the intended lesson. And then on the day he turned sixteen, as he sat in a course labeled “Diversity”—an earnest, condescending survey of ethnic traditions around the world, “ethnic” meaning any civilization not their own—he was hit by a figurative bolt of lightning. He understood he had been shown his meaning and his purpose. He understood who he was.

He’d been born among the colonizers, yes, but he wasn’t of them. He was of the people. The Native people, who had lived on these hills and by these rivers for millennia in ways so inextricably woven into the life of the earth that their souls and the souls of the
other living creatures were able to touch. The Native people, who had been so downtrodden, so dominated, exploited, and abused, that it was only right that one such as he should devote his life—and his power, and his wealth—to raising them up again. The Creator had sent him, born Peter van Vliet, to learn and to serve.

To become Abornazine. Keeper of the Flame.

A
s Livia steered the car around a wide curve Michael watched the great house rise into view in the distance. He’d fought the idea that he couldn’t drive up here alone, objecting to both the company and the helplessness. But the three of them—Spencer, Thomas, and Livia—had ganged up on him and they’d been right. He couldn’t have managed the car. Even now, just sitting for an hour as they rode beside the ice-pocked river, his shoulder was stiffening, pain stabbing down to his fingers and up his neck with every jolt in the road.

Livia Pietro had been appointed chauffeur. She’d rented a car and she’d been good company on the drive up. By which Michael meant, good Indian company: she hardly spoke. She left him to his own thoughts, which were few. He cleared his mind and concentrated on seeing. The silver river, the changing grays of the sky, the black lace branches on bare trees.

Livia had been chosen because Spencer, as it turned out, didn’t drive. Michael had been both amused and relieved by that. He wouldn’t have let Spencer come; this way there was no anger and no arguing. Well, little arguing. Spencer had protested, but turnabout is fair play and a gang-up can work in more than one direction.
Grudgingly, Spencer had accepted the plan, especially once Thomas suggested a useful line of research that he and Spencer, as historians, could follow.

Michael’s argument, that his first choice would’ve been to go alone, and since that wasn’t possible he’d accept a driver but not an entourage, was true but incomplete. It angered Michael when Spencer asked if Edward had ever killed anyone besides Brittany Williams but the truth was, he didn’t know. He did know this: in his own Shifted state he’d hunted, many times. The compulsion to finish a kill, to chase down and devour escaped quarry whose blood he’d already tasted, was formidable. In this, his needs and Edward’s were the same. While he understood that there was no harm Edward could do to Spencer that couldn’t eventually be undone, “eventually,” from what he’d learned over the past twelve hours, could be a long, long time.

They’d only been together a few months, he and Spencer. If each had been a normal man, their differences of background, of age, of culture, might have doomed the relationship in any case. Under the circumstances, that they’d found each other was almost laughable; but then, that either of them existed at all was beyond most people’s ability to take seriously. Whether they had a future together, especially since their definitions of “future” were so different, was unknowable. If they did, though, Michael—the one of them whose time was limited—would rather not spend years of it waiting for Spencer to regenerate himself. Or whatever the process was called.

Watching the sliding clouds, he wondered what the process
was
called. The Noantri had their own vocabulary. Their Community had organization, it had laws and traditions. Had Shifters once been the same? Had they been a separate, hidden band within the tribe
and clan structures of the continent’s First Peoples, known only to one another, recognizing and welcoming each other when they met?

He wanted to know. He wanted, badly, had always wanted, not to be alone. To know there were others like him beyond his twin, people who understood and shared his singular way of being in the world. That was where his work was; that was what his research had always been about. Though even if he succeeded, his achievement would be now and its outcome would stretch forward from the present. He’d never understand what it had been like before. But knowing that the future would be different—maybe that would be enough.

Michael roused himself, sharpening his focus as something moved through the woods beside the road. Something pale and quick, running toward them. It broke from the trees and onto the roadway. Livia slammed on the brakes and pain shot through Michael’s shoulder as the car jolted, fishtailed, and stopped. The figure froze, then turned and sped away back into the woods.

“I’m sorry,” said Livia. “I didn’t see it in time. But . . . What
was
that?”

“It must have been a deer.”

“It looked . . . upright. And pale.”

Livia eased the car forward again, driving slowly until they emerged from the canopy of trees. Before them, winter-frosted grass sloped up to a tall portico. White columns fronted a lodge whose roof levels kept changing. The house looked accrued, amassed, the way wealth would be. Piled up, collected because it was possible, not because it was needed.

The lawn, that broad sweep, though, was surprising. Even now, in winter, sheep dotted it, foraging for what they could find. In spring their dung no doubt would turn this slope into a glorious
expanse of green; but as Michael took in the sheep pen, the rail fence surrounding stubbled corn rows and tripod beanpoles waving last year’s leaves, as he heard a cock crowing from inside what had clearly been built as a three-car garage, he wondered if the van Vliet ancestors were happy with the rustic turn their stately home had taken.

It hadn’t been hard to locate Abornazine. Donna had been right: even in this enclave of Gilded Age mansions—most in new-money hands now, though a few original families still clung to moldering brick and flaking plaster—all he’d had to say was “long hair” and “turquoise” and the affable kid behind the butcher shop counter was pointing to a road leading east off the town’s main street.

“You mean Mr. van Vliet. His place is up that way. It’s called, I don’t know, Air House or something. What’s going on up there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—” He flushed, as though he suddenly realized he might have gotten it wrong. “You’re an Indian, right?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s what I thought.” The kid grinned again. “Lots of Indians up there. Maybe a hundred since fall, living in tents and stuff, and now a bunch more in the last couple of weeks. It’s like a powwow or something?”

Michael wanted to say,
In winter?
but the kid’s ignorance wasn’t his fault. “When I find out, I’ll let you know. Thanks for the help.”

Now, at the wrought iron gate that stood just beyond a bend in the drive, they stopped and Michael spoke to a short, round man who came out of a stone booth.

“Michael Bonnard. Abenaki.”

“Lee Stearns. Choctaw.” Stearns glanced briefly into the car. Michael made no move to introduce Livia, but said, “I want to speak to Abornazine.”

“He’s expecting you?”

“No.”

Stearns went back inside the booth and made a call. Through the window, he waved them in. The gate slid open.

“What would we have done if that hadn’t worked?” Livia asked, driving on.

“It was bound to work. The butcher’s kid said Indians are still arriving.”

“Those might be people van Vliet’s invited. People he knows.”

“Then his curiosity would be killing him. You haven’t met these wannabes. Any Indian who shows interest in them, they’ll follow him like a baby duck.”

Livia pulled up to the portico and stopped the car. Michael got out and leaned in the window. “Thanks,” he said.

“Are you sure—”

“Yes. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

“You really think you can just walk in and out? He tried to kill you.”

“He’d Shifted.”

“How do you know he hasn’t Shifted now?”

Michael didn’t answer her. He straightened, turned, and headed for the wide green door.