“Scarlett?” Jesse asked impatiently.
I snapped back to the present. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to Molly’s. We’ll need to stay downstairs, though, so we don’t . . . you know. Wake her up.”
Which is exactly what we did. It was after lunchtime, so we picked up sandwiches—well, Jesse ran into the place to buy sandwiches, so I didn’t have to hobble around more than absolutely necessary—and ate in the van on the way. Traffic was still light, so thirty-five minutes after we’d left the Remus apartment, Jesse and I were sitting at Molly’s card table–sized kitchen table with the rosters from PAW and HPA. Jesse gave me the PAW list, keeping the much longer HPA roster for himself. Still, I looked down at the thirty names on the paper in front of me with dismay. “Are you sure we need to do this?” I complained. “I really don’t like . . . people.”
“Too bad,” he said cheerfully.
“What do I even ask?”
“Do they know Henry Remus? If so, do they have any idea where he might hide out? Try to get a sense of who might be lying or holding something back, and we can visit those people in person. Oh, and ask everyone who Henry hung out with at meetings. Hopefully we can get a sense of who his friends were, and then we can go after them hard.”
Ugh. “Who do I say I am?”
He considered that for a moment. “Do the missing persons consultant story. You’re specifically looking into Leah Rhodes’s disappearance. Talking to people about her boyfriend would be a logical move for the police to make.”
“Got it.”
Jesse took the cordless handset into the living room so we wouldn’t be heard in the background of each other’s calls. When I was sure he couldn’t hear me, I dialed Eli’s number. It rang five times and then went to voicemail. Crap. I hung up without leaving a message. There was nothing to do but get to work.
Chapter 37
I’ve never actually wanted to be a cop. Any kind of cop. Up until this point, helping Jesse with Old World investigations had been alternately terrifying, frustrating, and exhilarating, but because of my unique circumstances, it had never really been dull until I started calling the PAW members. Because as it turns out, real police work is boring as hell.
At least, that was my conclusion by our second hour of calling strangers and trying to keep them from hanging up in the first two seconds. Most of the people on the PAW list were women, and those who were able to answer the phone in the middle of the day were not really interested in anything a stranger had to say. A bunch of them snapped at me for calling in the middle of their small children’s nap times. Because I was supposed to just know when that was, apparently.
I did find one interesting new fact, though. When we’d worked on the PAW list the night before, I hadn’t gotten all the way to the bottom—we’d found Remus and gotten distracted. But now I saw that two of the names near the very bottom of the roster looked familiar. I went and borrowed Jesse’s list of the LA werewolves. Sure enough, two of the wolves were on the PAW list: Esmé Welch and Corbin Hurd.
It actually made sense, I realized. Why wouldn’t the werewolves want wild wolves to be protected? If no one was allowed to kill wolves, that made it all the safer for the pack to run around the woods during the full moon. When I looked at it in that light, I was actually surprised that there weren’t more of the pack members on the list. And it wasn’t like either Esmé or Corbin could be the nova—they’d both been werewolves in the pack for years. I shrugged and resolved to call Esmé and Corbin just like they were anyone else on the list. Well, maybe I’d have Jesse call them instead.
I went back to work. Two hours later, I had made actual contact with a total of twenty people. I thought that was a pretty high percentage of the list, all things considered, but the holidays were probably working to our advantage. At any rate, of the twenty people I’d talked to, almost all of them remembered Henry Remus as the “guy with the crazy eyes and the do-it-yourself haircut,” as one chatty lady put it. Her name was Heaven Centuri (for real), and she told me that at their last meeting in October, our boy Henry had given a speech about some alleged wolf sightings in Northern California, suggesting that PAW should send a group up there to stake out “these magnificent creatures.”
“He said ‘magnificent creatures’, like, six times,” Heaven snorted. “I mean, we were at a noodle place in Brentwood, and this guy’s talking about building tree stands out in the woods so we can what? Take pictures? Get a head count? More likely we’d end up getting stuck out there waiting for the wolves to go away again so we could come down. If we even saw them.”
“I take it he wasn’t getting a lot of support,” I said neutrally.
“Ha. No. Everybody thought he was crazy.” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “I mean, the guy’s heart was in the right place, you know. But it was like the more he talked, the more people’s chairs just scooted slooooowly away from him. By the end he was just shouting, and someone from the restaurant came and escorted him out.” There was a bit of awe in her voice, like she couldn’t imagine being so invested in something.
“What about Leah, his girlfriend? Was she there too?”
“I think so,” Heaven said dismissively. “There was a girl with him, anyway. I didn’t get much of a read on her; she was real quiet. Kind of mousy. When Henry got thrown out she just followed behind him silently, like she knew when she got up that morning that she’d be getting thrown out of a restaurant.”
“Did it seem like either of them had any other friends there?”
There was a brief pause while she considered the question. “You know, I think there was another woman who got up and left when they did,” Heaven said finally. “But she may have just been leaving at the same time.”