“I won’t. One last thing. Keep your eyes open when you’re crossing the lobby. If you think you see something moving, like out of the corner of your eye, you’re not imagining things. You may not be able to see it, but something could be there.”
“Something?”
“Something it takes special training to see, yeah. I’m not joking or teasing you, Nathan. Chaotic forces generate some strange phenomena. At times they produce things that look like little animals. They’re not alive, strictly speaking, but they can carry information back and forth.”
Nathan stared at me. Since teaching him how to throw a Chaos ward would have taken weeks, I fell back on ancient lore.
“You don’t have anything with you that has a Star of David on it, do you?” I said. “A tie clasp, maybe?”
“No, I don’t. What are you talking about?”
“Wards. Things that repel Chaotic forces and beings.” I considered for a moment. “If I drew a Star of David on a piece of paper, would you keep it in your breast pocket?”
Nathan sighed and looked upon me with the reproachful stare. “Oh, very well,” he said at last. “If it’ll make you feel better.”
“It would. Definitely. And watch your back.”
“That’s always good advice.”
Once Nathan had his improvised ward, he left, and I settled down with Pat’s last two journals. These I read carefully and slowly. I even took notes on a scratch pad as a number of things began to fall into place. Once I finished, I went to my computer and logged on to the Agency to file a thorough report via TranceWeb. By the time Nathan returned, I had plenty to tell him.
Thanks to the first splatter of rain, he arrived damp, crabby, and lugging his sample case and a brown paper sack of groceries. Apparently black lettuce didn’t appeal to him. While I put away the high calorie stuff he’d bought, he hung up his wet jacket on the shower rail, then returned to sit at the kitchen table and watched me.
“While I was at the office,” he said, “I didn’t see anything invisible.”
“Good.” I ignored the sneer in his voice. “You’re lucky.”
“Did you find anything new in the journals?”
“Yeah, a motive for Pat’s murder.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled the tiger’s smile, not his boyish grin. “Brilliant!” he said. “Tell me.”
What I’d pieced together revolved around this mysterious DD, initials for a pseudonym, I assumed. At first he’d been all flattery as he tried to interest the Hounds in whatever his “something big” amounted to. Despite his protestations of piety and spiritual longing, they’d been wary and refused to take the bait. He’d withdrawn, leaving them all feeling “unclean” as Pat put it, as well as in danger. How had he known what they were and where to find them? DD never divulged that answer.
My poor brother had decided to try to find out. With the blessing of the group he pretended to be interested in DD’s hints. They fenced back and forth for a while, with Pat fishing for information and DD doling out scraps. Finally DD admitted that he belonged to another secret organization, one devoted to a personage he called “the ruler of this world.” All of Pat’s well-trained Christian alarms went off. DD tried to convince him that this ruler operated as an agent of God, but Pat heard “Satan” loud and clear. He broke off all contact with DD, or so he thought.
“By then,” I finished up, “DD must have figured that Pat knew too much about his secret group, not that he could have gone to the police about it.”
“Why not? For that matter, doesn’t your church have ways of dealing with such things?”
“It’s not my church anymore, but Satanism’s not illegal in the United States. DD didn’t have to worry about the police on that score.”
Nathan looked honestly surprised. “After all I’ve heard about your preachers and their television shows, I’d assumed something quite different.”
“Oh, they’d love to start a crusade, but they can’t, thanks to the Constitution. There was an openly Satanist group in San Francisco for years. My aunt told me that when she was a girl, their high priest used to drive around in a beat-up station wagon with an elderly lion in the back, behind one of those dog grates like Kathleen has in her SUV.”
Nathan blinked, opened his mouth, stared at me for a moment, then finally spoke. “You’re not joking, are you?”
“No.”
“I was afraid of that. Very well, then. This group DD belonged to—they must have something else to hide.”
“Yeah, something that can get them into trouble so big that it’s worth killing for. Pat hinted about it in his journals. He was going to go to the police, but the full moon intervened. It gave Johnson three days, is my guess, to shut him up permanently.”
“Which he did.”
“Yeah, but Pat must have told the other Hounds. If we can make contact with them, we might be able to answer a lot of questions. If this Grampian has a brain in his head, he should be scared enough to tell us what he knows. He’s probably next.”
“Quite so. He knows that the police suspect him, so you’re the one who has to make the contact.”
“At least at first, yeah.”
Nathan looked away and thought something through. “Another thing that troubles me,” he said at last. “How did DD discover the Hounds in the first place? Did your brother ever find that out?”
“No, but I can make a guess. Chaos calls to Chaos. Werewolves are essentially Chaotic. The Hounds are rowing upstream against a torrent, trying to control that side of their natures. Pat’s journals make that very clear. DD—or maybe even Johnson—could practically smell them out on the aura field.”
“You’re assuming there’s two of them?”
“Well, of course. DD couldn’t have shot the Romero girl.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has to be a werewolf, too. Why else would he have tried to join the Hounds?”
Once, thanks to a variety of odd circumstances, I’d been forced to break a bottle of beer over a man’s head. He had looked at me with the same expression of aggrieved surprise as Nathan did, but unlike the other guy, Nathan did not fall forward onto his face. He merely said something in Hebrew in a tone of voice that told me it wasn’t a phrase from the Bible.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Is everyone in this sodding case a sodding werewolf?”
“They run in packs, Nathan. They find each other and revert to type. So, yeah, I’d expect the major players in this game to suffer from lycanthropy or be involved with someone who does.”
I waited for him to answer. He fixed me with the reproachful stare but kept quiet.
“Okay,” I continued. “We also have Jerry’s evidence about the Chaos lights and the well-dressed guy by the windmill. Jerry was convinced he was a Chaotic.”
“By saying that he gave him the creeps, you think it was?”
“Yeah. It certainly suggests Chaos on the move.” Something struck me. “And this may be why the forces of Harmony saddled me with you. It could be that Johnson and company are responsible for the Chaos breaches. My handler thought there had to be a connection, and he may have been right.”
“Saddled you with me? That’s insulting.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
“Oh, very well,” Nathan said. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“You do, yeah. Now, I want to go talk with the Agency’s other stringer. Annie, her name is. She lives out in the Sunset district, that is, about twenty blocks west of here and then ten or so south. Think that’ll be safe enough?”
“If I’m with you.”
“Okay. We’ll take a cab.”
“No, we won’t. It’s too dangerous. But I’m driving.” He looked as if he were hiding a smile. The secrecy intrigued me enough to keep me from arguing.
“Will you try to drive like a sane person instead of James Bond?” I said instead.
“I do not drive like someone in those wretched movies.”
“No, you’re worse. In the movies they use highly trained stunt drivers.”
He set his hands on his hips and glared at me.
“I’ll call Annie and make sure she’s there.” I decided I might as well give in. “It might be one of her Senior Center days.”
Annie answered the phone and told me to come right over. I relayed the information to Nathan.
“Good,” he said. “I was hoping she’d be willing to see us right away.”
“The Agency owes her money, and she needs it.”
I got my burgundy trench coat and umbrella from the bedroom. I figured that I might as well be well-dressed if I was going to die in a car accident. When I came out, I noticed that Nathan had put on a gray V-neck sweater over his shirt and under a shabby khaki raincoat that looked like old Army issue with all the insignia removed, which, as he admitted when asked, it was.
He needed that extra layer, too, when we left the apartment. The rain pelted down, unusually heavily for the beginning of March, but then, we’d had an unusual amount of rain already this year. As we walked, I was looking around for the Audi, but I never saw it. Nathan led me around the corner to a squarish black sedan. When I looked in I saw a red, white, and blue light bar on the dashboard and what appeared to be a full radio-phone as well.
“This is a squad car,” I said.
“Unmarked, but yes.” He was grinning at me. “Which is why I can’t let you drive it.”
“Okay, but where did you get it? I can’t believe the cops would just let you have one.”
“Connections. That’s all.”
I decided that forcing the issue would be out of line and got myself and my trepidation into the car. The drive over rattled my nerves, but not quite as much as I’d been dreading. Whenever we got into any kind of traffic, Nathan flipped on the car’s siren, and other drivers got out of our way, thus saving themselves as well as us from death or dismemberment.
Annie lived in a quiet neighborhood where the streets stayed empty all day, which meant we could park without one of Nathan’s tire screeching flourishes. Annie’s studio apartment, if you could call that cheap and illegal rathole a studio, had originally been a garage. Like most garages in the Sunset district, this one stood underneath the square-built Thirties stucco house it belonged to. Similar Art Deco cubical houses, painted in various dull colors, mostly grays and whites, lined both sides of the street. The only color came from the tiny squares of green lawn beside each driveway.
“Bleak neighborhood,” Nathan said.
“Very,” I said. “Especially when it’s foggy, and it usually is out here. Today’s rain counts as fog relief.”
I opened a narrow wooden door that led to an equally narrow concrete walk down the side of the house. Barking greeted us.
“That’s Duncan,” I told Nathan. “Kathleen gave him to Annie. He does a good job on watch.”
Annie had seen us coming from her tiny side window. With the fox terrier at her side, she stood in her doorway, a gray-haired woman with thick glasses. She wore faded jeans rolled up around her ankles and a blue sweatshirt so baggy you could have hidden a watermelon under it. A battle with breast cancer had cost her thirty pounds and her life savings.
“Come in, come in!” she said with a glance at Nathan.
I introduced her, and we followed her and Duncan inside. First thing, she took my umbrella and put it into the kitchen sink to drip. She kept her one long room as spotless as Aunt Eileen’s house. It reeked of the same cleaning products. At the back end, by the window that looked out into a halfhearted garden, she sat us down at the round oak table and chairs that she’d owned since her better days. We squeezed ourselves in between the table and the tiny refrigerator and stove.
“Can I offer you some tea?” she said.
“None for me, thanks,” I said.
I didn’t want her spending any of her food money on us, and Nathan either didn’t like tea or had caught my mood, because he said no as well. Fortunately the Agency had put plenty of cash into my bank account, thanks to the State Department dumping Nathan onto us. When I handed Annie five twenties, she looked as if she might cry, just for a moment, before she put on a brave little smile.
“I only invoiced you for eighty.” She peeled off one of the twenties and held it out.
“I invoiced the Agency for more on your behalf.” I grinned at her. “Keep it, and I’ve got more work for you.”
“About those Chaos lights?”
“You saw them, then.”
“Yes, I certainly did.” She paused to put the money away in her jeans pocket. “I was trying to clear out some of the weeds in back when they floated over, heading north. They were on the TV news last night, too. Someone driving by took pictures of them with his cell phone. It really is amazing, what you can do with a phone these days.”
“That’s for sure. Did you pick up anything about them?”
“They were here because of someone. That’s all.”
“Jerry told me the same thing.”
“You know, I had the oddest feeling about Jerry last night.” Annie frowned and looked away. “That he knows something you need, but he doesn’t know you need it, and so, of course, he didn’t tell you.”
“That could be real important. Thank you. He’s probably up in the stratosphere by now, though. I paid him the money the Agency owed him. You can guess what he did with it.”
“Oh, yes, his drug problem. It’s really too bad—”
Annie’s face stiffened into a mask. She half-rose from her chair, propped herself palms down on the table, and stared down the length of the room into the shadows at the far end. I slewed around in my chair but saw nothing but her neatly made daybed and her collection of framed prints and posters.
“What is it?” I made my voice as soft as I could.
“Persian white.” Annie sat back down with a little sigh. “Do you know what that means? Some breed of cat, maybe?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a top grade of heroin.”
Nathan made a small choking noise of agreement.
“Well, I think,” Annie said, “that Jerry either just bought some, or found out where to get it, or some such thing. I think that’s what he has to tell you, but I’m not sure.” She turned to Nathan. “I’m sorry to be so vague, but you know how these things work.”