It’s sort of alarming that I can be so easily swayed by a compliment, but there you have it. I scooped the chopped vegetables into my soup pot and clapped a lid on it. I grabbed my purse off the kitchen counter, snatched a hooded sweatshirt off a peg next to the door, and stepped outside.
The cloud cover was low, the rain was turning to a drizzle, and there was a chill in the air. There were still boats on moorings in the harbor below my house, but their number was significantly decreased from the summer crush. It was definitely fall in New England.
Diesel opened the white picket fence gate that led from my small backyard to the alley where he was illegally parked. He was driving a red Jeep Grand Cherokee that wasn’t new and wasn’t old. Usually, it was mud-splattered and coated in road dust. Today, the rain had washed the top layer of dirt away and it looked almost clean.
I slid onto the passenger-side seat, buckled myself in, and realized Carl was in the back. Carl looked up at me, gave me a finger wave, and smiled a horrible monkey smile. All monkey gums and monkey teeth and crazy bright monkey eyes.
I grew up in suburbia. We had cats, dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, parakeets, and fish. Never a monkey. A monkey was a new, sometimes disturbing experience.
Diesel drove down Weatherby Street to Pleasant, Pleasant turned into Lafayette, and Lafayette took us to the bridge that crossed into Salem. We followed traffic through the center of town, cut off to the north side, parked behind a police cruiser on Braintree Street, and made our way over to where a small crowd was gathering.
This was a mixed neighborhood of commercial and residential. Cop cars, a truck belonging to the medical examiner, and an EMT truck were angle parked in front of a seven-story, yellow brick condo building that looked like it had been built in the seventies. Crime scene tape cordoned off an area in front of the building, and a makeshift screen had been erected, preventing gawkers like me from seeing the body sprawled on the rain-slicked pavement. Thank heaven for the screen. I didn’t want to see the dead guy.
“Do you know his name?” I asked Diesel.
“Gilbert Reedy. He’s a professor at Harvard. My source tells me Reedy came flying through the air and crash landed with a handprint burned into his neck.”
I felt my breakfast roll in my stomach, and my upper lip broke out in a sweat. “Oh boy,” I said. “Damn.”
Diesel looked down at me. “Breathe. And think about something else.”
“How can I think about something else? There’s a dead man on the ground, and he has a handprint burned into his flesh.”
“Think about baseball,” Diesel said.
“Okay, baseball. Am I playing or watching?”
“You’re watching.”
“Am I at the park? Or is it on television?”
“Television.”
Diesel tipped his head back and looked up at a shattered slider, leading to a postage-stamp-size balcony on the fourth floor. I looked up, too.
“I know of only one person who can channel enough energy to leave a burn mark like that on someone’s neck,” Diesel said.
“Wulf?”
“Yes.”
“So you think Wulf pitched Reedy through the window and off the balcony?”
“Everything points to that, but it would be out of character for Wulf. Wulf likes things neat. And this is messy. I can’t see Wulf throwing a guy out a window . . . especially in the rain.”
“That would be more you,” I said.
“Yeah. That would be more me.”
I scanned the crowd on the other side of the crime scene and spotted Wulf. He was standing alone, and he was impeccably dressed in black slacks and sweater. He didn’t look like a man who not so long ago threw someone out a window. His hair was swept back, and his dark eyes were focused on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle.
I felt Diesel move closer, his body touching mine, his hand at my neck. A protective posture. Wulf nodded in acknowledgment. There was a flash of light, some smoke, and when the smoke cleared, Wulf was gone.
“He’s been doing the smoke thing ever since he went to magic camp in the third grade,” Diesel said. “It’s getting old. He really needs to get some new parlor tricks.”
Diesel and Wulf are cousins. They’re related by blood, but separated by temperament and ideology. Diesel works as a kind of bounty hunter for the regulatory agency that keeps watch over humans with exceptional abilities. Wulf is just Wulf. And from what I’m told, that’s almost never good.
“Now what?” I asked Diesel. “Are you going to tell the police?”
“No. That’s not the way we do things. Wulf is my responsibility.”
“Whoops.”
“Yeah, I’m behind the curve on this one.”
I saw a flash of brown fur scuttle past me, and Carl crawled under the tarp that screened the body.
“I thought you locked him in the car,” I said to Diesel.
“I did.”
“What the heck?” someone yelled from the other side of the tarp. “Where’d the monkey come from? He’s contaminating the crime scene. Somebody call animal control.”
Diesel slipped under the tarp and returned with Carl. We hustled back to the car, we all got in, and Diesel took off down the street.