He wasn’t used to this. Patience wasn’t something you had to practice much in Night Shift. From the minute he clocked in until he finally handed his kit over to the armory, he was either in motion or asleep. Marlow had spent a few nights, as he dragged banged-up bones from one incident to another, wishing for boredom. Now he had it, and it sucked.
It hadn’t been that long. Hours, not days. The closer they got to the moon rising, though, the slower time seemed to pass.
The click of a key in the front door interrupted his self-pity. He turned, one hand halfway to the gun that wasn’t there, and had a second to think he should have been careful what he wished for and plot the quickest path to the knives in the kitchen.
“Yeah, hold on,” Cade said as he let himself in, a bag of fast food in one hand and keys in the other. He had the burner phone he’d picked up tucked between his shoulder and his ear. “Let me put you on video.”
He dropped the paper bag on the coffee table and lowered the phone.
Marlow let the breath he’d held out on a ragged sigh. He went over to move the food before it marked the finish on the table—the memory of his gran’s fingers sharp on his ear—and Cade set the phone down in the middle of the table.
“… limb to go out for some guy you’ve known a month,” Lem said.
“Lem,” Cade snapped.
“He’s not wrong,” Marlow said. “But it’s too late to change your mind now. So what did you find?”
Cade gave him a wry look for that as he sat down, but it was true. The smart move would have been to turn Marlow in and hope Franklin would take that as a truce. Instead, here they were. Marlow appreciated not being locked up—or dead—but he couldn’t fault Lem for looking out for his brother.
“I run the company and my life,” Cade said. “I didn’t ask for anyone else’s opinion. Lem, you said you found other cases that fit Clemons’s pattern in Portland and Vegas?”
“Nope,” Lem said.
“Do I sound like I’m in the mood for you being a smartass?” Cade asked.
Marlow shook his head and walked around to perch on the arm of the couch next to Cade. He was too tense to actually sit down, but this seemed like a good compromise. “You found something, though?” he said.
“See?” Lem said. “That’s how you do it, Cade. A little bit of theater, let me showcase how smart I am.”
“Yeah,” Marlow said. “I worked with Franklin for years. He needed to let his ego out for a run before he told you anything too.”
“Kind of spoiled it now,” Lem said, “but that’s fine. I didn’t find cases that matched Clemons’s MO—what we think is Clemons’s MO—in Vegas and Portland… But I foundcasesthat matched in Vegas, Portland, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and San Jose. Five dead wolves over ten years. Six, if we count San Diego on the list. Every one follows the pattern you laid out: break-up, complaints about a wolf with a fixation, dead wolf found the morning after the full moon in the ex-boyfriend’s kitchen. Always the kitchen. Maybe he lured them in with his signature pasta.”
Lem laughed at his own joke and then stopped. “Sorry,” he said. “This is just… Do we think this guy is a serial killer? That we unmasked a serial killer?”
He sounded like he couldn’t decide whether to be stunned by or skeptical of his own research. Marlow could sympathize. He’d just wanted to provehedidn’t kill Barney Lyons. Now he could do that…ifhe could pin a murder on a man who’d gotten away with five of them.
“And Clemons was never a suspect?”
“He was always a suspect,” Lem said. “Well, Clemons, Williams, Butler, and so on were suspects. Never the same name, never a name that tracked outside of the city it started in. Every time, though, he was quickly ruled out because he had an air-tight alibi. He swiped into work before sunset, there was security camera footage of him getting on a train that afternoon, and one time he’d gotten himself arrested and spent the night in jail. I can send through the news reports I pulled.”
“Yeah,” Cade said. “Do it.”
“Send it to Bennett too,” Marlow said. “If you can spoof your ID enough she can’t track it back to you.”
Lem gave him a dirty look. “She’ll think the tooth fairy sent it. If I send it?”
The question was for Cade, who scowled as he looked at Marlow. The fact he thought it was a lousy idea was obvious. He could be right. Marlow still gave an insistent nod, and Cade gave in with a growl.
“Her too,” he said. “You need her email?”
Lem snorted his opinion of that and hung up. Cade leaned back and raised his eyebrows at Marlow.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” he asked. “Even if Bennett’s not involved, she could go straight to Franklin.”
“She’s not stupid,” Marlow said. “The minute she realizes there’s a chance I didn’t kill Lyons, that means Franklin could be a liar.”
Of course, that didn’t answer the first part of the question. Was it a good idea? Fuck if Marlow knew, but Franklin hadn’t expected her that night in Clemons’s house. So at the very least, he didn’t think he could trust her either. Not if he went too far.
