Blood Bound (Mercy Thompson #2)(68)

Tony sat on the edge of the desk, set a manila file folder he'd been carrying beside him, and waved me vaguely to one of the chairs against the wall. "You look like something the cat dragged in," he said.

I shrugged. "Rough morning."

He sighed and tapped his finger on the folder. "Would it help if I told you I have here a report from a concerned citizen who called in at 7:23 this morning. It seems that her nice young neighbor, one Mercedes Thompson, had to fire her rifle in order to drive off a bunch of hooligans last night or early this morning. One of our patrolmen stopped by to see the damage." He gave me a somber look. "He took pictures."

I gave him a wry smile. "I was surprised at how bad it was when I saw it this morning, too."

"Is this because someone saw you talking to me yesterday?"

It would have solved a lot of problems if I let him think that-but I prefer not to lie. Especially when that lie might start a fae  -  hunt.

"No. I told my neighbors it was probably just kids-or someone angry with my work."

"So they came after your trailer with can openers? How long were they there before you came after them with the rifle?"

"Am I under arrest?" I asked brightly. Shooting a rifle where I lived might be illegal, I'd never checked it out.

"Not at this time," he said carefully.

"Ah," I settled back in the uncomfortably chair. "Blackmail. How fun." I tried to see the best way through this. Honesty was always the best policy.

"Okay," I said finally, having decided how much I could tell him. "You were right. There is something that's causing people to become violent. If I tell you what it is, however, I won't live to see tomorrow. Also, even if you know what it is, you won't be able to do anything to stop it. It is not a werewolf, and not a fae. Nor is it human, though it might appear that way."

He looked... surprised. "We were right?"

I nodded my head. "Now, let me tell you this. It came last night and ripped my trailer to pieces, but it couldn't come in because I didn't invite it. You have to invite evil into your home-that's one of the rules. I shot it four times with my Marlin 444, loaded with silver. I hit it at least three times without even slowing it down. You need to stay away from it. Right now it's in hiding. The rise in violence is just a-a side effect. If you bring it out into the open, there will be a lot more bodies. We're trying to contain it without getting anyone killed. Hopefully very soon."

"Who is 'we'?" he asked.

"Some acquaintances of mine." I looked him square in the eye and prayed that he'd leave it there. The heavy emphasis I used was straight out of a gangster movie. He didn't have to know how underpowered we were; the police would be even more helpless than Andre and I.

"I promise I won't lie to you about the preternatural community," I told him. "I may leave things out, because I have to, but I won't lie to you."

He didn't like it, didn't like it at all. He tapped his fingers unhappily on the top of the desk, but in the end, he didn't ask more questions.

He got off the desk and walked over to a cabinet mounted in the wall behind my chair. I moved when he opened it and pushed back the doors to reveal a white board in the center and corkboards on the inside of each door. On one of the corkboards someone had pinned up a map of the Tri-Cities and covered it with roundheaded colored pins. Most of the pins were green, some were blue, and a double handful were red.

"This isn't all of them," he said. "A couple of weeks ago a few of us wondered if there was a pattern to the violence, so we pulled all reports of violence since April. The green pins are usual stuff. Property damage, arguments that get a little hot and someone calls them in, someone bangs his girlfriend around. That kind of stuff. Blue is where someone ended up in the hospital. Red is where someone ended up dead. A few of them are suicides." He put a finger on a cluster of red near the highway in Paseo. "This is the murder-suicide at the motel in Paseo last month." He moved his hand to a green pin all by itself near the east edge of the map. "This is your trailer."

I looked at the map. I'd expected to get a list of addresses, but this was exactly what I needed-and not. Because there was no pattern I could see. The pins were scattered evenly around the Tri-Cities. Denser where the population was heavier, light in Finley, Burbank, and West Richland where there weren't so many people. There was no neat ring of pins like you see in the movies.

"We can't find a pattern either," he said. "Not an overall pattern. But the incidences do tend to come in clusters. Yesterday it was East Kennewick. Two fistfights and a family disturbance that roused the neighborhood. The night before it was West Paseo."

"He's moving around," I said. That wasn't good. Where was he keeping Adam and Samuel if he was moving around? "Is there a time of day that the violence is the worst?" I asked.

"After nightfall."

I looked at the pins again, silently counting the red ones. They were short of Uncle Mike's count-and I don't think either of them knew about the family who died during Daniel's experience with Littleton.

"Did you learn anything?" he asked.

"Hunting serial killers is easier on TV," I said sourly.

"Is that what we're dealing with?"