Leo had been Mateo’s roommate in the east cabin until he’d gone missing several months before. We’d found no sign of him until Abby’d discovered his head hanging on the wall of the hunter’s cabin she’d been lured to back in October.
“And that’s Steve.” She pointed to the hunter on Hargrove’s left in the photo, as if I could possibly have forgotten the man who’d tried to kill her. The man whose throat she’d ripped out, putting her on my radar as an adult for the first time. “This other guy has to be Darren, don’t you think?” She tapped the third man in the photo.
“I don’t want to rule anything out this early, but that’s a good possibility.”
“Check this out.” Abby turned to a set of built-in shelves to the left of the fireplace, where a dozen more photos had been lined up and pushed to the back of the shelf, not like a woman would display them, with artful angles and pretty frames, but likeIwould. That was a bachelor’s work if I’d ever seen it.
“Hargrove’s only in a few of these,” she pointed out. “But every single one of them shows this guy.” She tapped on the face of the unidentified man holding Leo’s front half in that first picture. “This has to be his cabin, right?” I nodded, but she was already pulling another frame from the shelf. “Look. In nearly half of these, he’s wearing a police jacket.”
Sure enough, the picture she shoved at me showed the unidentified man in a navy nylon jacket with the wordpolicewritten on one side.
“Well, that would explain how he knew to remove those photos of you before the rest of the cops showed up. Especially if he was the one who took them.” The implications were startling. A human cop knew about us, but rather than alert the government—or even the internet—he’d decided to hunt us into extinction for his own psychotic pleasure. Which confirmed my longstanding suspicion that most of the world’struemonsters were human.
“Okay, we’re clear.” Mateo stepped into the living room. “No one’s here, and there’s nothing incriminating in either of the bedrooms or in the bathroom. Nothing at all that I can see, except that.” He pointed to the blanket-covered taxidermied stray.
“And this.” Abby showed him the picture of the hunters posing with his roommate’s body.
Teo’s hands curled into fists. “I’m going to rip them intotiny pieces.”
“The council will want to talk to them first, but I’ll do my best to see that we get to carry out the sentence, when the time comes.” But my assurance obviously did little to assuage his rage. “Okay, let’s go through everything and see if we can confirm that the cop is Darren and find a last name for him. Or an address, or something.”
Abby and I took the first bedroom, while Lucas and Teo tore apart the second. Warner started in the kitchen, then moved into the bathroom.
“This sucks,” Abby said hours later, as she sorted the junk in the top nightstand drawer into the “keep” and “trash” piles. So far, “keep” was nearly empty. “What we need is an internet connection. If Darren’s a cop, he can’t be that hard to track down.”
But Darren’s email had been right about the spotty connection, and none of us had managed to get a decent signal. Not that that would matter, without Warner’s equipment.
“As soon as we’re done here, we’ll head back to the lodge and let Warner get started.” But we had to go through everything first. A single receipt or bill could make all the difference in our hunt for the hunters. Unfortunately, we hadn’t found any of those, because their lake cottage obviously wasn’t a primary residence.
I was sorting through a closet full of hunting camo when a hinge squealed from the kitchen. I spun around to find Abby frozen, staring at the open bedroom door. I was sniffing the air, tense and on alert, when something crashed.
Abby lunged for the door, but I pulled her back and stepped in front of her. Teo and Lucas were already there when we got to the kitchen, and Warner was on our heels, coming from the bathroom. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
Teo pointed to the overturned kitchen table, which was propping the busted door open. “Someone just ran out the back door.”
“From where?” Abby frowned as she glanced around the kitchen, looking for some nook or alcove we’d missed. But we’d checked everywhere. There’d been no one in the house to run out the back door, and there was no one in the backyard.
“Could a human make it to the tree line that fast?” Lucas asked, staring out the window over the kitchen sink.
“Only one way to find out.” I shoved the table aside, clearing a path to the back door. “You and Warner go, but stay within earshot of each other. Teo, you shift, then join them.” In cat form, he would be faster, quieter, and have access to much better-developed senses.
The guys left to follow orders, and I righted the table, studying the kitchen for any explanation that made sense.
“There was no one here,” Abby mumbled. “We went through the whole house.” And that had only taken minutes. “Did anyone look in the pantry?” she asked, and I turned to see what she’d already discovered.
The light was on.
“I did, and Warner rechecked,” I assured her. “There’s nothing suspicious in there except the thought of an existence sustained bythatmuch peanut butter, pork rinds, and domestic beer.” One end of the pantry was lined in pine boards stacked on concrete blocks. Shelf after homemade shelf was stacked with canned soup, generic brand sandwich cookies, puffed pork skins, and Miller Genuine Draft.
“Backwoodshaute cuisine.” Abby stepped into the small space and pulled the string to turn off the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. As she was pulling the pantry door closed, she froze, staring at the floor. “Jace,” she whispered, backing slowly away from the pantry.
I followed her focus to the thin line of light showing beneath the cheaply paneled wall directly opposite the door.
“That’s not a wall.” I felt around the edges of the paneled section, then finally pressed in the right place to trigger a crudely fashioned yet well-hidden door. The panel swung backward to reveal a narrow, dimly lit staircase running down and to the left, along what could only be the exterior wall of the house. A wall that had no windows.
“A secret basement?” Abby said, and I nodded. Our backwoods hunters were also amateur craftsmen. “Well, now we know where he was hiding, whoever he is. And it has to be either Hargrove or Darren, right?”
“That’s my guess.” I inhaled deeply. “Do you smell that?”
