He laughed, and I wanted to stab the sound right out of him, because it hadn’t changed.Everythingin my life changed when he left, yet he could still laugh exactly the same way he used to. As if losing me meant nothing.
“What can I do for you, Charley?”
“It’s about Silas Morelock.”
Silence descended over the line, like a blanket smothering us both.
Finally, Eamon cleared his throat. “What about him?”
“Where are you?”
“Montana,” he said, taking my apparent change of subject in stride. “There aren’t many places I’m allowed to be, as you may recall.” Because the US Prides recognized only two remaining free zones.
I wished I had some way to verify his claim, because as I sat there, trying to decide how little I could say and still get the information I needed from him, it occurred to me that he fit the killer’s profile perfectly. He’d been around longer than three years, and he knew the community well even before there was a real Pride. Before Titus had named him Marshal. People had trusted Eamon. Told him about their lives and families.
He knew about the genetic component necessary in order to survive infection. And hecertainlyknew about Silas Morelock and his crimes.
“And you haven’t left the Montana free zone in the past twenty months?”
“Not since the day I arrived. Why?” he said, and I could practically picture his frown. That asymmetrical dip of just one brow, tugging on the scar that bisected it. “What’s going on?”
“We have a situation. And I have to warn you,” I added, leaning hard on the professional tone in my voice. “We will have to verify that you haven’t been in the Mississippi Valley territory since you left.”
“Fine. Verify away.” But there was a slightly cooler note to his voice now. “Just tell me what’s going on. What you need from me. We can still be friends, can’t we Charley?”
No. No we could not.
“We’ve got a serial.”
“What? A serialkiller?” Springs creaked over the line as he sank onto a piece of furniture I had no mental image of. He’d left most of his shit here, so I had no idea what his home looked like. How he’d furnished it.
“We don’t think murder is actually his goal. Just like with Silas. We think it’s either a copycat or someone who worked with him originally. Someone who’s carrying on what he started.”
“And I fit your profile, because I knew about Silas.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see that. “Not many people do. But there’s more. The victims are blood relatives of members of the northern zone.Allthe victims.”
“Which means it’s one of our guys.”
“Myguys,” I snapped, without meaning to. He was pushing my buttons. He’d always been good at that. “They’remyguys, Eamon. But you knew them well enough to know about their families. Which means you do, in fact, fit the profile.”
“Okay. Do what you’ve got to do to verify that I haven’t left Montana. But in the meantime, let me help. What do you need?”
“Information. Our working theory is that we’re looking for someone connected to Silas, but we can’t find much about him.” We hadn’t thought we needed to know much about him before, other than how to find him, then where to bury him. “He never owned any property or registered a car in his own name, and—”
“I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. Silas was a bit of a…conspiracy theorist, I guess, where the government was concerned. He wouldn’t have registered anything with the state.”
“We also haven’t found any family members. Tucker’s looking for birth certificates, though, so—”
“Don’t bother. His parents are dead, and Silas was an only child.”
“No kids of his own?”
“He had a son,” Eamon said, and a jolt of possibility shot through me like a bolt of lightning. Every hair on my body stood on end. “At least, he claimed the kid was his son. Boy named Denny. But Silas wasn’t married to the mom, so I have no idea whether his name was on the boy’s birth certificate. Nor do I know the kid’s last name. He’d be twenty-two or so, now.”
“Is he a shifter?”
More silence, and I could practically see Eamon sitting there with his eyes closed, trying to figure out how to say something that was going to thoroughly piss me off.
