“Focus on the names then,” Tucker said. “Do you recognize any of them?” His laptop sat open in front of him, his mug steaming next to it as he Googled one of the women on the list, who had no D in parentheses next to her name. He was trying to determine whether or not she was still alive.
“I’ve never met any of these women,” Austin said. “At least, I don’t know the names. But it’s possible that Yvette met some of them? She did travel for work, occasionally.”
“But if they were all infected in different places, over a span of several years, what makes us think they’d be connected to Yvette? Couldn’t their connection be to the killer?” Bishop asked.
I nodded, privately impressed. “In fact, I’d say that’s probable. But we’re trying to cross all our Ts.”
Austin sipped from his mug. “There isn’t enough information here for me to know much. But, since we’re crossing Ts, as well as confronting coincidence in a murder investigation, is there any chance that Megan Myers is related to Doug Myers? The guy who gave me a ride tonight?”
“Surely not…” I breathed.
“On it.” Tucker’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and a social media page appeared on his screen, with Doug Myers’s face smiling out at me awkwardly from the user profile. He clicked on the family section, where a mother, two sisters, and four cousins were listed. “Um…can we confirm that Megan Myers was a resident of Macon, Georgia when she died? And that she was twenty-eight years old?”
“I can confirm that she died in a hospital in Macon,” I said, with a glance at the printout on the table in front of me. “And that she was not quite twenty-nine,” I added, after a second for some mental math.
“Then yes, there’s a good chance she was the Megan Myers listed here as Doug Myers’s youngest sister. Her page has been memorialized, which means someone has submitted proof of her death to the site.”
“Oh my god.” I dropped the list, and it drifted onto the table.
“Austin’s sister Yvette. Nolan’s sister Emily. Doug’s sister Megan.” Vance counted them off on his fingers. “That’s more than coincidence.”
“And that may not be the end of it,” I told them. “Nolan said he didn’t know Brittany Heller, but that he used to know an ‘old man Heller’ who ran on the common grounds years ago.”
“Just a second.” Tucker started typing again, and Brittany’s profile came up quickly, because he’d been on it recently. He clicked on her pictures and scrolled through them until he found a four-year-old image of an old man with a grizzly gray beard and a prominent scar over his left eye. He swung the laptop around so the others could see it. “That could be an ‘old man Heller,’ right? It’s from a post she wrote when her dad died a few years ago.”
“Oh mygod.” My hands shook. I stood and set my coffee down so I couldn’t drop it. “Tucker, go wake Nolan up and show him that picture. Find out if it’s the old man he remembers. Everyone else, get out your phones and laptops. Find out how many of these women are—or were—related to shifters. Cross reference every single contact on any of their socials with any name in the census, for all three zones of the Mississippi Valley Pride. I’ll ask Titus for a list of all the natural born shifter families he knows of. And I’ll…make more coffee.”
Instead, I headed straight for my office. I closed the door and sank into my chair, where I stared at the wall until my hands stopped shaking. Then I pulled open my bottom desk drawer and took several gulps straight from the tequila bottle. When my insides were almost as steady as my hands, I plucked my phone from the charger and dialed Titus.
He answered on the first ring, probably because I never called him before five in the morning.
“From Titus.” I slapped a purple sticky note onto the table. On it were written the surnames of every natural-born werecat he could think of: all of the US Alphas and their various progeny. There were fewer than I’d expected.
Because very few female werecats are born, the population never really increases. Titus joked privately to me once that they must keep very careful genealogy records, to make sure no cats too closely related were…mingling. And Jace once told me that every couple of decades, there’s some sort of shuffling of eligible bachelors between the US and Canada, in an attempt to keep the gene pool fresh.
I’ve always found the entire concept—the shifter population conundrum—both terrifying and sad. But the bright side was that we only had a handful of names to add to our search.
Tucker took the sticky note and began comparing it with the names on the list from Spencer. “No matches,” he said.
I shrugged as I sank into the chair Vance had vacated in order to cook breakfast. “That’s not terribly surprising.” I was proud of how steady my voice sounded. How normal I suspected I looked, despite the cacophony of terror and dread pelting me from within my own head. “Those guys—” I pointed at the note. “—are born shifters. Very few of them marry and start families, because there aren’t enough shifter women to go around. The occasional child conceived accidentally with a human woman would almost certainly take the mother’s surname. Which means it’ll be much harder for us to know if any of their relatives are among the victims.”
“Wait, I don’t get it,” Bishop said. “What does that mean?”
I sighed. Strays had a very uneven knowledge base about shifter science and social structure, because most of us had been infected by accident. “We really have to start an orientation class, to teach people the basics,” I said with a glance at Tucker.
“You know I agree!” Vance called from the kitchen, above the sizzle of bacon on the griddle. “But unless you make attendance mandatory, it won’t do much good.”
“What the hell are they talking about?” Bishop demanded with a glance at Austin.
He shrugged. “No idea.”
“The quick version is this,” I said. “And keep in mind, I’m not a scientist, and if I ever heard the proper scientific terms for any of this, they went in one ear and out the other. But basically, all of us—every stray in the world—has a purebred werecat ancestor somewhere down the line. Often way, way back. We have to, or scratch fever would kill us.”
Sometimes it did anyway, even for men.
“Wait, seriously?” Austin’s eyes were wide.
“Yeah. Humans who get bitten but don’t have that gene can’t become shifters. They just die of the infection. But if you have a dormant werecat gene and you get scratched or bitten, that gene basically gets activated, and if you survive scratch fever, bam! You’re one of us.”
