"Zee is one of the rare fae who can tolerate metalhis friend is not. Jail would be very painful for most fae."
She tapped the end of her notebook on the table. "So the point of all of this is that you say that a fae who cannot lie told you Zee didn't kill O'Donnell. That won't convince a jury."
"I was hoping to convince you."
She raised her eyebrows. "It doesn't matter what I think, Ms. Thompson."
I don't know what expression was on my face, but she laughed. "A lawyer has to defend the innocent or the guilty, Ms. Thompson. That's how our justice system works."
"He isn't guilty."
She shrugged. "Or so you say. Even if Zee's friend can't lieyou aren't fae, are you? At any rate, no one is guilty until convicted in a court of law. If that's all you have to tell me, I'll go talk to Mr. Adelbertsmiter."
"Can you get me into O'Donnell's house?" I asked. "Maybe I can find out something about the real murderer." I tapped my nose.
She considered it, then shook her head. "You've hired me to be Mr. Adelbertsmiter's attorney, but I feel some obligation to you as well. It would not be in your best interestnor in Mr. Adelbertsmiter's best interestto prove yourself somethingother than human at the moment. You are paying for my services, so the police will look at you. I trust they won't find anything."
"Nothing of interest."
"No one knows that you canchange?"
"No one who would tell the police."
She picked up her notebook and set it down again. "If you have been reading the papers or following the national news, you'll know that there are some legal issues being brought up about the werewolves."
Legal issues. I suppose that was one way to put it. The fae, by accepting the reservation system, had opened up the path for a bill to be introduced in Congress to deny the werewolves full citizenship and all the constitutional rights that came with it. Ironically, it was being proposed as an amendment to the Endangered Species Act.
Ms. Ryan nodded sharply. "If it comes out that you can become a coyote, the court might find your testimony inadmissible, which might have further legal consequences for you." Because they might decide I was an animal and not human, I thought. "Anything you find would be flimsy evidence even if it was admitted. The court is not going to have the same view on your reliability as Zee apparently did. Especially as you will have to declare yourself a separate specieswhich might be a very dangerous thing for you to do at this time." The werewolf bill wouldn't passBran had too much influence in Congressbut I was neither werewolf nor fae, and the same protection might not cover me.
She frowned and moved her notebook restlessly. "You should know that I belong to the John Lauren Society."
I looked at Kyle. The John Lauren Society was the largest of the anti-fae groups. Though they maintained a front of respectability, there had been allegations last year that they had funded a small group of college-age kids who had tried to blow up a well-known fae bar in Los Angeles. Luckily their competence hadn't matched their conviction and they'd only managed to do a little minor damage and send a couple of tourists to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The authorities had caught them rather quickly and found an apartment full of expensive explosives. The kids had been convicted, but the authorities hadn't managed to build a case against the larger, wealthier organization.
I had access to information not available to the authorities and I knew that the John Lauren Society was a good deal dirtier than even the FBI suspected.
Kyle had found me a lawyer who not only disliked faeshe'd like to see them eliminated.
Kyle patted my hand. "Jean won't allow her personal beliefs to interfere with her job." Then he smiled at me. "And it will make a point, having someone so active in the anti-fae community defending your friend."
"I'm not doing it because I believe he is innocent," she said.
Kyle turned his smile to her and it became sharklike. He seldom showed anyone that side of him. "And you can tell the newspapers and the jury and the judge thatand it still won't stop them from believing that he must be innocent or you wouldn't have taken the case."
She looked appalled, but she didn't disagree.
I tried to imagine working a job where your convictions were an inconvenience that you learned to ignoreand decided I'd rather turn a wrench no matter how much better her paycheck was than mine.
"I'll stay away from the crime scene, then," I lied. I wasn't a fae. What the police and Ms. Ryan didn't know wouldn't hurt them. The coyote is a sly beastie and no stranger to stealthand I wasn't about to let Zee's fate depend wholly on this woman.
I'd find out who killed O'Donnell and figure out a way to prove him guilty that didn't involve me telling twelve of my peers that I smelled him.
I picked up a couple of buck burgers and fries from a fast-food place and drove home. The trailer was looking as spiffy as a seventies single-wide could. New siding had made the porch look tacky, so I'd repainted it gray. Samuel had suggested flower boxes to dress it up, but I don't like living things to suffer unnecessarilyand I have a black thumb.
Samuel's Mercedes was gone from its usual spot so he must still be at Tumbleweed. He'd offered to come with me to meet with the lawyerso had Adam. Which is how I ended up with just Kyle, whom neither of the werewolves looked upon as a rival.
I opened the front door and the smell of crock pot stew made my stomach rumble its approval.
There was a note next to the crock pot on the kitchen counter. Samuel had learned to write before typewriters and computers rendered penmanship an art practiced by elementary school children. His notes always looked like formal wedding invitations. Hard to believe a doctor actually wrote like that.
Mercy, his note said with lovely flourishes that made the alphabet look like artwork. Sorry, I am not here. I promised to volunteer at the festival until after tonight's concert. Eat something.
I followed his advice and got out a bowl. I was hungry, Samuel was a good cookand it was still a few hours until dark.
O'Donnell's address was in the phone book. He lived in Kennewick just off Olympia in a modest-sized house with a neat yard in the front and an eight-foot white fence that enclosed the backyard. It was one of the cinder block houses that were fairly common in the area. Recently someone had been of the mistaken impression that painting it blue and putting shutters on the windows would make it look less industrial.
I drove past it, taking in the yellow police-line tape that covered the doorsand the darkened houses to either side of it.
It took me a while to find a good parking spot. In a neighborhood like this, people would notice a strange car parked in front of their house. Finally I parked in a lot by a church that was not too far away.
I put on the collar with the tags that gave Adam's phone number and address as my home. One trip to the dog pound had left me grateful for this little precaution. I didn't look anything at all like a dog, but at least in town there wouldn't be angry farmers ready to shoot me before they saw my collar.
Finding a place to change was a little more challenging. The dog pound I could deal with, but I didn't want to get a ticket for indecent exposure. Finally I found an empty house with a realtor's sign out front and an unlocked gardening shed.
From there, I only had to trot a couple of blocks to O'Donnell's house. Happily, O'Donnell's backyard fence ensured his backyard was private, because I had to change back and get out the picks I'd taped to the inside of the collar.
It was still close enough to summer that the night air was pleasanta good thing since I had to pick the damned lock stark naked and it took me too long. Samuel had taught me to pick locks when I was fourteen. I hadn't done it a lot since thenjust a couple of times when I'd locked my keys in my car.
As soon as I had the door open, I replaced the picks inside my collar. Bless duct tape, it was still sticky enough to hold them.
A washer and dryer were just inside, with a dirty towel laid across the dryer. I picked it up and wiped the door, doorknob, lock, and anything else that might have picked up my fingerprints. I didn't know if they had something to check for bare footprints, but I wiped the floor where I had taken a step inside to reach the towel, then tossed it back on the dryer.
I left the door mostly shut but unlatched, then shifted back into coyote, hunching under the gaze of eyes that weren't there. I knew, knew that no one had seen me go inside. The gentle, gusty wind would have brought the scent of anyone skulking about. Even so, I could feel someone watching me, almost as if the house was aware of me. Creepy.
With my tail tucked uncomfortably close I turned my attention to the task at hand, the sooner to leavebut unlike the fae houses, this one had seen a lot of people in and out recently. Police, I thought, forensic team, but even before they had come there had been a lot of people in the back hallway.
I hadn't expected an obnoxious boor like O'Donnell to have a lot of friends.
I ducked through the first doorway and into the kitchen, and the heavy traffic of people mostly faded away. Three or four light scents, O'Donnell, and someone who wore a particularly bad male cologne had been in here.
The cupboard doors gaped and the drawers hung open and a little askew. Dish towels were scattered in hasty piles on the counter.
Maybe Cologne Man was a police officer who searched the kitchenunless O'Donnell was the sort who randomly shoved all of his dishes to one side of a cupboard and stored his cleaning supplies in a pile on the floor instead of tucked neatly in the space under the sink behind the doors that hung open, revealing the empty dark space beneath.
The faint light of the half moon revealed a fine black powder all over the cupboard doors and counter tops that I recognized as the substance the police use to reveal fingerprintsthe TV is a good educational tool and Samuel is addicted to those forensic, soap operamystery shows.
I glanced at the floor, but there was nothing on it. Maybe I'd been a little paranoid when I'd wiped the place where I'd stood on the linoleum with bare human feet.
The first bedroom, across the hall from the kitchen, was obviously O'Donnell's. Everyone from the kitchen had been in here, including Cologne Man.
Again, it looked like someone had gone through every cranny. It was a mess. Every drawer had been upended on the bed, then the whole dresser had been overturned. All of his pants' pockets had been turned inside out.
I wondered if the police would have left it that way.
I backed out of there and went into the next room. This was a smaller bedroom, and there was no bed. Instead there were three card tables that had been flung helter-skelter. The bedroom window was shattered and covered with police tape. Someone had been angry when they'd come in here, and I was betting it wasn't the police.
Avoiding the glass on the floor as much as I could, I got a closer look at the window frame. It had been one of those newer vinyl ones, and the bottom half had been designed to slide up. Whatever had been thrown through the window had pulled most of the framing out of the wall as well.
But I'd known the killer was strong. He had, after all, ripped off a man's head.
I left the window to explore the rest of the room more closely. Despite the apparent mess, there wasn't much to look at: three card tables and eleven folding chairsI glanced at the window and thought that a folding chair, thrown very hard, might break through a window like that.
A metal machine that looked oddly familiar had left a dent in the wall before landing on the ground. I pawed it over and realized it was an old-fashioned mail meter. Someone had been sending out bulk mail from here.
I put my nose down and started to pay attention to what it had been trying to tell me. First, this room was more public than the kitchen or first bedroom, more like the back door and hallway had been.
Most houses have a base scent, mostly a combination of preferred cleaning supplies (or lack thereof) and the body scents of the family who live in it. This room smelled different from the rest of the house. There had beenI looked again at the scattering of chairsmaybe as many as ten or twelve people who came to this room often enough to leave more than a surface scent.
This was good, I thought. Given the way O'Donnell had rubbed me wronganyone who knew him was likely to have murdered him. HoweverI took another look at the windowthere hadn't been a fae or any other magical critter in the bunch that I could tell. No human had taken out the window that wayor torn off O'Donnell's head either.
I memorized their scents anyway.
I'd done what I could with this roomwhich left me with only one more. I'd left the living room for last for two reasons. First, if someone were to see me, it would be where the big picture window looked out onto the street in front of the house. Second, even a human's nose could have told them that the living room was where O'Donnell had been killed and I was growing tired of blood and gore.
I think it was dread of what I'd find in the living room that made me look back into the bedroom, rather than any instinct that I might have missed something.
A coyote, at least this coyote, stands just under two feet at the shoulder. I think that's why I never thought to look up at the pictures on the wall. I'd thought they were only posters; they were the right size and shape, with matching cheap Plexiglas and black plastic frames. The room was dark, too, darker than the kitchen because the moon was on the other side of the house. But from the doorway I got a good look at the framed pictures.
They were indeed posters, very interesting posters for a security guard who worked for the BFA.
The first showed a child dressed in a fluffy Easter Sunday dress sitting on a marble bench in a gardenlike setting. Her hair was pale and curly. She was looking at the flower in her hand. Her face was round with a button nose and rosebud lips. Bold letters across the top of the poster said: PROTECT THE CHILDREN. Across the bottom, in smaller letters, the poster announced that Citizens for a Bright Future was holding a meeting the November eighteenth of two years ago.