“Good,” Gil said. “Because I don’t care if your liver just fell out your ass. It’s a blue moon tonight, and if you don’t have a death certificate and a note from your mother, I want all hands on deck.”
“I’m getting a head start,” Marlow said. He pointed to Victor Clemons’s file on his desk. “Captain O’Hara asked me to follow up on that complaint. Nothing actionable, but it’s worth keeping an eye on over the next few nights. Acrimonious breakup, and the wolf still sees the house as his territory. His ex disagrees. There’s been a few incidents.”
Gil looked sour. “Breakups like that?” she said. “They’re why I work on my marriage. Divorce isn’t worth that. Add it to the briefing folder and go get some coffee. I don’t want you dying on me halfway through the night.”
“Me neither,” Marlow said with a wry smile.
She snorted and walked away. Marlow stared after her while his mind tangled itself in erratic, suspicious knots. It could have been a chance choice of words, or it could have been a taunt at someone she thought was still oblivious to the plan to kill them. Who better to run a gang of corrupt Night Shift officers than the person who ran the rest of the Night Shift?
Except, Marlow reminded himself, Gil had transferred from Vegas nine months after Piper’s arrest. It didn’t mean she was clean, but it meant she wasn’t in charge. Whoever that was, they’d known Piper. Until recently, they’d worked for him. Or at least kept in contact.
So, he could eliminate Gil from the list of suspects. That just left the rest of the Night Shift. Not a comforting thought.
Marlow pulled the files back up and flicked through the tabs. They were the deaths he’d talked to Cade about, finally collected in one place after Sargeant Windsor in San Marcos unearthed the last one filed in the system with the wrong case number.
People died during the full moon. Not many, not like in the old days, but always a few. Even with the Night Shift on their A-game, they couldn’t stop that.
Mostly nulls. People misjudged their curfew or just wanted the thrill of outrunning a wolf and got caught out on the street. Or they rolled the dice on a wolf picking their home out of all the other houses on the street and didn’t put in proper security.
Wolves died too, though: a bad enough accident, a fight with another wolf that did more damage than their bodies could stitch back together, or a trap. Not often, though. Mostly, if wolves died, it was the morning after. They’d shift back and find themselves naked and somewhere they might not recognize. They didn’t often leave their territory—although there were always a few cases a year of someone who headed north and got as far as LA, or sometimes even San Francisco—but that still left plenty of opportunities to get lost. They woke up in the wilderness and didn’t have the wolf’s survival instincts or healing ability to get home.
So, other than the number of them, most of the deaths weren’t unusual.
Except for Clara Walker. She’d jumped off the Coronado Bridge, and that was weird. Wolves committed suicide during the new moon, not during the honeymoon period after the shift. The wolf was too close to the surface then, and it wanted to live.
In the photo, Clara was a pretty woman with clear brown eyes and curly black hair. Or she had been. The other photos were more brutal, but the autopsy hadn’t shown any sign of foul play.
She’d done it herself. But why?
Marlow read on down through the report. No history of depression, her job had been secure, and while there was a recent breakup, her family said she’d started to date again. Halfway through the transcript of the interview with Clara’s sister, the woman said that the breakup hadn’t been a surprise.
“…they never talked, he was always at work, but she said he’d at least given her a good idea for her podcast.”
Marlow flicked back up and then down to the bottom of the file. There was no other mention of the podcast. He pulled up Google and had just started a search when the door swung open and the rookie stumbled in, laden down with half the squad’s packs.
“I got it!” the rookie said gamely as he headed for the locker rooms. He didn’t look like he had. “It’s okay!”
Marlow closed down the files and pushed himself back from the desk. He intercepted the rookie just as the closed door broke the kid’s forward momentum and his carefully balanced burden started to shift. Marlow relieved him of four packs, one after the other, and stacked them on Bennett’s desk.
“You don’t have to do everyone’s scutwork, you know,” Marlow said as he pulled a rifle slipcover from under the rookie’s arm. “Just your job.”
“Speak for yourself, Marlow,” Franklin corrected him as he loped into the room, big, blond, and genial in a Raider’s hoodie. “Senior officers get to call the training shots.”
“I’m senior to you,” Marlow pointed out.
“Really?” the rookie asked.
“Six months,” Marlow said.
Franklin scowled at him and grabbed his bag off the table. He swung it up onto his back in one easy movement.
“Marlow was Night Shift’s backup choice after I got injured in the line of duty before my first shift,” he told the rookie. “He took my slot, and I had to wait until I was fit for duty again. Same thing that would have happened to you if you’d broken that arm a month ago. So you should count yourself lucky you’re even allowed in here to do scutwork.”
The rookie flushed and hitched his shoulder up to hold the kit bags in place as he scratched at the frayed edge of his cast.
“I do,” he said. “I know I fucked up. I should have been more careful. It’s my fault you’re going out there short-handed.”
Franklin looked conflicted. Marlow had seen the look before, as Franklin’s desire to be a dick butted up against his hatred of the city bureaucracy. The hatred won.
