rim.”
She nodded. I had the impression I’d passed the first IQ test. “Okay. If the gunfire has already started, then we should gather up what information we have and get out of here. But what do you think about these discolored holes?”
“I think I don’t want to get in this predator’s way.”
She handed me the flashlight, then stepped outside. I could hear her texting someone, probably reporting to the society.
I shone the light around the enclosure. There were small stones at the front of the truck bed. I got down close and saw they weren’t stones at all. I picked one up. It was half a dog biscuit.
I climbed out of the truck just as Catherine shut off her phone. “Well?”
“They’ll be on their way as quickly as they can. It’ll take hours, though. Probably not until tomorrow night or later. Did you find anything?”
“Just this.” I held up the biscuit. She frowned at it.
“Weird. Do you think they fed a dog to the predator?”
“What are the odds that this predator eats doggy treats?”
She gave me a look that told me I’d failed my second test. She held out her hand and I gave her the flashlight. As she stooped below the hanging door to enter the truck again, she said: “No offense, but I’m going to check your work. I’m the investigator here.”
She was? That was useful information. I’d never met a society investigator before, but I knew they were supposed to look into suspicious situations, file a report, and get out. It was up to the peers—and their wooden men—to do the fighting.
She was inside the truck for just a minute or two, but it seemed much longer. Someone was going to catch us here if we didn’t move on soon.
I looked at the third vehicle and stopped short. No wonder it had caught my attention: it was a Maybach Landaulet, roof closed, naturally. Christ. Someone was rolling in the cash.
Finally, Catherine climbed out of the truck. “I have an idea,” she said. She walked around the truck to the hole in the roof, then began searching the muddy slope. “Look.”
She pointed to an indentation in the mud. It was perfectly round and flat, as if someone had tamped down the earth with a big soup can. There was another nearby farther up the slope, then another and another. They were spaced out like footprints, and there seemed to be a lot of them.
“Are there two predators?” I asked.
“Either that, or it had more than two legs. And look at this.” She shone the flashlight onto a separate set of tracks, this time made by men’s dress shoes. They headed up the small rise and over it, the men chasing the escaped predator.
“Which way do we go?” I asked. “Do we follow the tracks or continue toward the house?” I nodded up the slope at the house lights.
“Can the spell you used to cut the chain out front kill a predator?” she asked, her tone making it clear she didn’t have that sort of weapon.
“It has in the past,” I admitted. To push away the memories that statement churned up, I kept talking. “Whether it will work on this one or not, I don’t know. I don’t even know what we’re facing.”
“Neither do I,” she said.
We trudged through the mud after the footprints. At the top of the rise we saw a long, even, tree-lined slope headed downward. And four bodies.
CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, shit,” Catherine said as she backed away. I moved toward the dead men, more out of a sense of duty than common sense. Apparently, searching the dead wasn’t part of an investigator’s job.
The three men whose faces I could see—one was facedown in the mud—were Asian, and they were all dressed very well. They wore wool three-quarter-length coats and dark suits. One suit had pinstripes, which was a stylish touch. Their hair was neatly cut, and they were all closely shaved.
The nearest man had been shot in the side of the head from very close range. Two others farther down the slope had been shot in the chest; they lay on their backs, Glocks in their hands. The fourth man, the one lying facedown, had at least eleven exit wounds in his back and one in his neck. He also held a gun, but the slide was back. His gun was empty.
There was a little white mark on the side of his face. I crouched down to look at it more closely. It actually looked like the end of a mark, as though someone had rubbed bleach on his face with the pad of a thumb. It ran from his temple down toward his cheek; the rest, however much there was, was covered by mud. I could have seen more if I’d wanted to move the body, but I didn’t.
He had a wallet bulging in his back pocket. It ruined the line of his suit, so I pulled it out for him and opened it up. It contained American greenbacks along with a number of foreign bills. There was an identity card, but it was written in some kind of kanji and I couldn’t read it. The picture showed a very serious Asian man with a crooked nose but no white mark.
Damn. Seeing him with his eyes open, even if it was only on a driver’s license or whatever, gave me a chill. Images swirled in my mind—food, laughter, booze pukes, fucking, boredom in line at the bank—all the memories I imagined would make up his life, all reduced to this lump of dead meat on a muddy hillside.
Catherine was watching me. I held the wallet open to her. “Can you read Japanese, or Thai, or whatever?”
She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. I closed the wallet and slid it back into the man’s pocket. I didn’t take the money, not even the U.S. bills. I wasn’t going to pick a dead man’s pocket in front of Catherine.
