“You still think this murderer could be human?”
I swallowed heavily and felt exhaustion wash over me. I had held my face steady through the crime scene and spent the entire drive home digging my teeth into my bottom lip and blinking back tears. This couldn’t be right.
Alex killed the engine and palmed the key. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to tell me, Lawson?”
I shook my head silently. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. If I told Alex that Sampson was back, Alex would ask him questions and Sampson would tell the truth and once he was cleared, we’d able to find the real killers, I reasoned. Or, I told myself, I could tell Alex and Alex would interview Sampson and Sampson would tell the truth and Romero would shoot to kill.
Sampson couldn’t, I repeated silently. He wouldn’t.
“Lawson?” The streetlight picked up the glinting blue in Alex’s eyes and I felt more disconnected, more unsteady. There was Will, there was Alex. There were two heinous murder scenes that pointed to a werewolf—and I had one hiding out across the hall from me. I was normally a good girl. I was normally one-sided and easy and flat.
The old Sophie would hitch her chin and act indignant. The old Sophie would fumble with her gun, go lobster red, and eat an entire sleeve of marshmallow pinwheels.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to you, Alex.”
When I was little, I told everyone that my father was a solider, off fighting in some foreign war. I had an image of him in my mind—he had my unruly, curly red hair and his lips set hard in that weird, straight-line way that mine did. My eyes were my mother’s—though in my memory hers were more distinctly emerald—but everything else that was weird or off or laughable about me came from my father and all of it was admirable and distinctive and inherited from a man who was a hero. A man who saved people by the country-full, who put himself in danger every day because he knew, inherently, fundamentally, what was right.
He never faltered.
He would come back for me one day and I wouldn’t have to wonder if it was him because he would know me by my looks, my mannerisms, because so much of me was so distinctly him.
I told myself this story over and over again before I fell asleep, so often that I believed that even if the details weren’t exactly right it was mostly true—I was like my father and my father was a good man.
And then the whispers—hushed, murmured, caught on the wind—started. My father was bad. Was evil. Was the reason that people died, killed, murdered, tortured. I wasn’t anything like him.
But as I drove away with Alex leaning against his car watching me go and three women murdered, destroyed, cooling in the morgue, I began to wonder if I was just a little bad, too.
If I didn’t have faith in Sampson.
If I let these women die just because I wanted to be right.
Or because I just didn’t care.
I was standing in the hallway outside of my apartment, staring at Will’s closed door. I extended my fist to knock and then dropped it down to my side again. What am I supposed to say to Sampson? I wondered as I gnawed on my bottom lip. “Hey, Sampson, so glad to have you back. And I really am doing everything I can to get you reinstated as head of the UDA, but first things first: have you been ripping human beings apart limb by bloody limb? Just checking.”
My stomach had been a tight knot since we left the house in Pacific Heights. When Alex left me in the monitor room I steeled myself, and eventually followed him into the living room, where I was sure I would be able to easily explain away everything we had seen on the tape: the blob was a rightfully pissed-off gorilla who had escaped animal testing at the Mars factory. It was a steroid-infused Chihuahua left over from a Mexican drug lord. Perhaps a shaggy-legged holdover from the Manson family.
But the scene—and the body left behind—offered no such easy explanation.
The glass door was broken clean through, just as we had seen on the tape. Whatever had torn through the glass had done so with a thick tuft of fur protecting its skin because the majority of blood—so, so much blood—discovered at the scene belonged to the victim, Ms. Tia Shively.