I asked, “Four priests?”
He shook his head no, which looked so funny I had to force a laugh down. And then I figured out what he was saying. My heart sank.
“Four Lost Boys.”
He nodded, waiting.
This was going to be a game of Q&A. I wished Unit Eighteen had bought the button thingy, where a dog could press a button and get a word spoken aloud. We hadn’t planned to use the boss-boss as a working dog. Hindsight and all that.
“Was one my brother? Half brother?”
He nodded once, his glowing yellow eyes on me.
“Was it vampires that killed Gad Purdy?”
He nodded. Tapped the ground five times. Five vampire priests. He had their scent.
“Can you track them all?”
FireWind nodded and shook his head. I took that for a maybe and figured it depended on a lot of factors. He grabbed the mic of his comms in his teeth and pulled on it just as Occam reached us.
Occam dropped low, onto one foot and the other toe, looking from the comms to the wolf. “You want a comms set with a GPS on it? So we can follow you on a tracking app?”
FireWind nodded.
“Okay. I’ll stick a GPS device on it.”
FireWind nodded. His tongue lolled.
Occam carried FireWind’s rolled handful of clothing and shoes to our vehicle and rummaged in his largest gear bag. A minute later he returned to the boss-boss wolf and threaded a GPS device onto the gobag near the comms system around FireWind’s neck.
“Do us a favor,” Occam said. “Stick close to roads as much as possible. Assuming they didn’t have a vehicle close by and disappeared in that, Jones and Dyson should be able to follow you as you track them. If you get close, make a sound so we’ll know to find you on foot.”
FireWind made a chuffing-woofing sound.
I tapped my mic. “JoJo? You got that sound? You ready to track?”
“Affirmative. FireWind, can you hear me?”
FireWind made a different sound. Kinda like a low-pitch, basso whistle.
“You can call in your team and we’ll take them down,” Occam said. “We’ll stay close. If you run into trouble, you make a third sound. We’ll come weapons drawn.”
FireWind growled, low enough to make my chest vibrate.
“Copy that,” Occam said.
Jo said, “It’s got a range of one square mile, boss. If we lose you, you may not know it, so I’ll check in every three minutes. If three minutes go by and I don’t check in, backtrack until you hear me.”
FireWind made the basso whistle of affirmation and trottedinto the woods. Behind us, two different CSI teams pulled up and parked. Occam said, “I’ll stay and work the scene. You follow FireWind.
“Jo?” he said. “If they get more than five miles away, inform me and I’ll stop here and follow.”
“Copy that, Occam,” she said.
“Jo?” I said. “Now that we know these are church boys—men, I guess—and all but one are eighteen, there’s no way to create a missing person report, is there?”
“Their families can.”
