Debbie couldn’t believe Allan hadn’t told her what had happened to his sister and her friend. Was Allan so upset that he felt he couldn’t discuss it with her? She knew whatever he’d been worried about had to be bad, the way that he had been so distracted. Allan had to know she would hear about it eventually.
“Thanks, Rowdy. Can you fill me in on the details?” Debbie asked him.
After he did, he told her about an earlier case that he hadn’t worked—bank robbers found dead at the scene—but he had reviewed it and found it disquieting. “One man was found floating in the lake, naked, dead, near the jumping cliff. And another man had been torn up by a wild animal—confirmed wolf saliva. Not only that, but the tires of one of their vehicles had been bitten into.”
“By…? Wait, the wolf did it.”
Rowdy shrugged. “Any canine could have done it. Since one man had been bitten by a wolf, I assume a wolf also tore up the tires at the crime scene. I read about a case where car tires were regularly being punctured along a stretch of street in front of a housing development. Police tried to catch the culprit for months and finally put up cameras to see who the vandals were, figuring they were kids. But a dog? No one in a million years would have believed it. Seems the owners would walk the dog off leash, and the dog would bite into the tires and puncture them.”
“That’s weird.”
“A couple of months earlier, the dog had been hit by a car.”
Debbie was glad the dog was fine after being hit and could hardly believe it had been attacking tires in revenge. She didn’t blame the dog, and she imagined how the police had felt when they discovered the culprit. “So why would a dog—or should I say, wolf—do that to the perp’s vehicle?”
“To keep the criminals from escaping.”
“So the wolf had been trained to sabotage tires.” She couldn’t believe what Rowdy could come up with. “Wolves don’t normally attack humans.”
“Not usually.”
“Okay, so another scenario?”
“The wolf wasn’t a wolf. And that same wolf or part of its pack killed the one bank robber.”
“Wolves don’t do that. Not normally,” she repeated.
“You’re right. They don’t. But what if they were werewolves?”
“Ah, come on, Rowdy. So the naked man was a werewolf too?” She knew he loved paranormal shows, but this was going a bit far.
“Makes sense. Too many unanswered questions in the case. I would have figured okay, so wolves were involved in this other case too, but a lot of shooting went on.”
“No silver rounds, right?” She wasn’t buying this werewolf business, but if silver bullets had been used, then, yes, she would believe a connection existed between the two cases.
“Correct. No silver rounds. But guess who was involved in the shoot-out.”
“Lori and Rose?” Debbie asked, unable to keep the surprise from her voice. Now that would be a weird coincidence.
“Lori, Paul, Everett, and Allan.”
“They weren’t involved in the killing of this woman.” No way did she believe anything bad about Allan and his friends.
“No, I doubt it. But don’t you think it’s a bit odd that two strange cases that have some similarities come up only a few months apart? First, some of the same people were involved in both, but in any case, they’re all related in one way or another. And second, we have two unexplained naked bodies.”
Debbie folded her arms. “But there were silver bullets in this one and none in the other.” She had been known to come up with some fairly far-fetched notions herself in trying to solve crimes, but this line of reasoning was going way out of the ballpark.
“True enough. So what if in this case, we have werewolf hunters armed with silver rounds, and in the other, they were all wolves, so no one was using silver rounds.”
“Okay, so if they’re all werewolves, why wouldn’t they use silver? They can’t be killed by regular bullets, can they?”
“Maybe they can. And the only ones that don’t know that are the werewolf hunters.”
Debbie shook her head and patted Rowdy on the chest in an appeasing way. “You need to be working with the detectives on The X-Files.”
“I’m just saying you need to watch yourself.”
“Wait. You’re saying that Allan, Paul, and the rest of their family could be werewolves?”
Rowdy glanced at the receptionist, then turned his attention to Debbie again. “You never know. Just…keep your eyes open, consider what I’ve said, and if anything seems…unusual, let me know. I’ve got to run. Take care.”
Werewolves.
Debbie couldn’t believe how Rowdy teased her, though she suspected that making light of something dark sometimes helped him keep from becoming totally numb to the killings he investigated.