Under the Gun (17 page)

I tried to suck in a breath. I tried to keep my knees from buckling, to keep my stomach
from folding in on itself as what remained of Tia—what remained of her mangled body—looked
up at me. Her face was so ravaged that I could only imagine what she must have looked
like in real, non-grainy life. But even in death, her terror—her torture—was unmistakable.

“Oh God,” I breathed.

Alex nodded curtly once, all the blood rushing from his face and leaving it a pasty,
sallow yellow. Romero dropped the corner of the sheet back down. “I thought we’d never
see anything worse than the last one.” He laughed a barking, guttural laugh that had
no joy in it and shook his head. “Guess I should have known better.”

“You have any leads?”

Romero shrugged. “You saw the tape, Grace, same as I did.”

“So what are you calling it?”

“Wild animal attack.”

My mouth felt glued shut. My feet felt rooted to the floor, but I felt like I wasn’t
there, that I was watching the entire scene from above, ready to change the channel,
to turn off the TV at any moment.

Romero jerked his head toward me. “Maybe you should get her out of here.”

I knew I should be angry. I was tired of being meek, of being led away by the elbow
or patted on the head with a patronizing smile, but Tia Shively was more than I could
take. I felt Alex’s fingers close around my arm; I felt for the floor with my toe
as I tried to take a step, and suddenly I stopped.

“Are there any other cameras?” I managed.

Romero blinked. “Uh, no. I mean, she’s got six cameras, and you saw—” He breathed
heavily, the buttons straining on his uniform. “You saw what happened.”

I shook Alex’s hand from my arm. “You think what did this—you’re sure it was an animal?”

Romero scratched his chin. “I don’t want to face the media and tell them that there
is a wild dog loose in San Francisco. A dog—or wolf, or fuck, a wooly mammoth—that’s
doing this kind of thing. People are going to think the police department has lost
it. But you saw the same thing I did. That wasn’t human.”

I licked my lips. “What are you planning on doing?”

Romero swung his head toward the other officers and crime scene investigators in the
room as they brushed for fingerprints and bagged evidence. He leaned in close and
Alex and I leaned toward him. “I’m not a man who believes in any of this hoodoo or
myths, but I saw what I saw. I’m getting my men silver bullets and I’m telling them
to shoot to kill.”

Alex and I were silent as he drove me back to my car. We had just pulled into the
police station parking lot when he looked at me, his face partially obscured by the
moonless night.

“You still think this murderer could be human?”

I swallowed heavily and felt exhaustion wash over me. I had held my face steady through
the crime scene and spent the entire drive home digging my teeth into my bottom lip
and blinking back tears. This couldn’t be right.

Alex killed the engine and palmed the key. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to
tell me, Lawson?”

I shook my head silently. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth.
If I told Alex that Sampson was back, Alex would ask him questions and Sampson would
tell the truth and once he was cleared, we’d able to find the real killers,
I reasoned.
Or,
I told myself,
I could tell Alex and Alex would interview Sampson and Sampson would tell the truth
and Romero would shoot to kill.

Sampson couldn’t,
I repeated silently.
He wouldn’t.

“Lawson?” The streetlight picked up the glinting blue in Alex’s eyes and I felt more
disconnected, more unsteady. There was Will, there was Alex. There were two heinous
murder scenes that pointed to a werewolf—and I had one hiding out across the hall
from me. I was normally a good girl. I was normally one-sided and easy and flat.

The old Sophie would hitch her chin and act indignant. The old Sophie would fumble
with her gun, go lobster red, and eat an entire sleeve of marshmallow pinwheels.

“I don’t know what you want me to say to you, Alex.”

 

 

When I was little, I told everyone that my father was a solider, off fighting in some
foreign war. I had an image of him in my mind—he had my unruly, curly red hair and
his lips set hard in that weird, straight-line way that mine did. My eyes were my
mother’s—though in my memory hers were more distinctly emerald—but everything else
that was weird or off or laughable about me came from my father and all of it was
admirable and distinctive and inherited from a man who was a hero. A man who saved
people by the country-full, who put himself in danger every day because he knew, inherently,
fundamentally, what was right.

He never faltered.

He would come back for me one day and I wouldn’t have to wonder if it was him because
he would know me by my looks, my mannerisms, because so much of me was so distinctly
him
.

I told myself this story over and over again before I fell asleep, so often that I
believed that even if the details weren’t exactly right it was mostly true—I was like
my father and my father was a good man.

And then the whispers—hushed, murmured, caught on the wind—started. My father was
bad. Was evil. Was the reason that people died, killed, murdered, tortured. I wasn’t
anything like him.

But as I drove away with Alex leaning against his car watching me go and three women
murdered, destroyed, cooling in the morgue, I began to wonder if I was just a little
bad, too.

If I didn’t have faith in Sampson.

If I let these women die just because I wanted to be right.

Or because I just didn’t care.

 

 

I was standing in the hallway outside of my apartment, staring at Will’s closed door.
I extended my fist to knock and then dropped it down to my side again.
What am I supposed to say to Sampson?
I wondered as I gnawed on my bottom lip.
“Hey, Sampson, so glad to have you back. And I really am doing everything I can to
get you reinstated as head of the UDA, but first things first: have you been ripping
human beings apart limb by bloody limb? Just checking.”

My stomach had been a tight knot since we left the house in Pacific Heights. When
Alex left me in the monitor room I steeled myself, and eventually followed him into
the living room, where I was sure I would be able to easily explain away everything
we had seen on the tape: the blob was a rightfully pissed-off gorilla who had escaped
animal testing at the Mars factory. It was a steroid-infused Chihuahua left over from
a Mexican drug lord. Perhaps a shaggy-legged holdover from the Manson family.

But the scene—and the body left behind—offered no such easy explanation.

The glass door was broken clean through, just as we had seen on the tape. Whatever
had torn through the glass had done so with a thick tuft of fur protecting its skin
because the majority of blood—so,
so
much blood—discovered at the scene belonged to the victim, Ms. Tia Shively.

The carpet was shredded. The once unblemished leather couch was torn into thin ribbons,
with blood soaked clean through to the cotton and down that poked out from the cushions.
There were bits of fur—five- to-six-inch locks of dark downy hair—that I tried to
examine. But when I reached down to poke at them with my gloved hand I almost couldn’t
stop the burn of the bile as it rose up my throat. The bits of fur were matted with
rust-colored, congealing blood and—and this is where my esophagus betrayed me—chunks
of Tia Shively’s skin. Its edges were already curling as its moisture evaporated.
A crosshatch pattern of wrinkles and scratches were already beginning to show.

I don’t remember backing away, don’t remember stepping away from the scene, but suddenly
my burning skin was awash with the moist cool of the city night and I was in the backyard,
doubled over, hands on hips, my boots making the leaves and twigs crunch underneath
me. Alex’s hand burned at the small of my back and he was murmuring something that
was probably meant to be soothing, but all I could hear was the crash of blood as
it pulsed through my ears, and all I could see were those emotionless eyes, caught
on camera, daring me to catch the monster that did this.

“Tell me you have some sort of lead,” I remembered saying to Alex. “Tell me some band
of terrorists or drug dealers or gangbangers or geo-cachers have taken responsibility.”

But when I looked up at Alex he wouldn’t look at me. “Your guess is as good as mine
is, Lawson.”

His words came burning back into my mind now and my hand went limp at my side. I’d
known Pete Sampson most of my life. He couldn’t have done something like this.

He wouldn’t have.

If he’d known.

I turned away from Will’s door and went to my own, slamming it hard behind me and
sinking down on the carpet. When I’d worked for Mr. Sampson, one of my most significant
job responsibilities had been chaining him up at night. Not just on moonlit nights,
but every night, because, according to Sampson, one could “never be too careful.”
I had considered him noble then and my responsibility simply part of the job. I never
considered that there were things that Mr. Sampson might want to do, might need to
do, might not be able to stop himself from doing if not for the chains. I looked mournfully
over my shoulder, my heartbeat fluttering. Since he’d returned, Mr. Sampson had never
asked me to chain him up. I swallowed down the lump that was growing in my throat.

“You know we have a couch, right?”

I blinked up at Nina, who had soundlessly appeared in front of me. She was barefoot
and dressed in one of those adorable retro jumpers that showed off her pale, flawless
thighs and proud shoulders. Her dark hair was clipped into two long, glossy pigtails
and with her pursed, coral-pink lips she looked like any other twenty-something enjoying
the sudden burst of San Francisco heat. If you didn’t know, it was impossible to tell
that should she step one perfectly pedicured foot out onto the sizzling sidewalk,
she’d burst into flames.

And if you didn’t know that Pete Sampson’s wide, Crest-white
human
smile could turn into snapping jaws with the shade of the moon, you’d blindly trust
him, even when the evidence to the contrary was staring you right in the face.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my chin on them, then blinked up at Nina.
“I think I may have made a huge mistake.”

Just saying the words made my muscles twitch. I felt guilty—for doubting Sampson and
for
not
doubting him.

Nina flopped down on the carpet across from me, folding her legs underneath her. “I
was wondering when you were going to bring this up.”

I swallowed. “You knew?”

Nina nodded. “It was impossible not to, Sophie.” She reached out and brushed her fingers
over my kneecap. Her fingertips were icy, but the gesture was warm. “Did you really
think you were fooling anyone?”

I flopped my head back, letting my skull thunk against the door. “I guess I was fooling
myself. And now”—I closed my eyes—“and now people are dead.”

Nina blinked.

“People are dead?” she repeated, her lips moving slowly.

“Alex and I went to two crime scenes. The teens on the Sutro Point trail, and then
one at a house in Pacific Heights tonight.” I tried to suppress and involuntary shudder.
“It was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen.”

Nina looked genuinely stunned—and horrified. “How did that happen? I mean, it’s been
a long time for me—a very long time—but from what I remember, people don’t usually
die.”

I frowned at Nina. “What are you talking about?”

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Sampson.”

Nina’s coral pink lips dropped into an astonished O; her coal-black eyes followed
suit. “You slept with Sampson, too?”

“What? No!”

She splayed a hand across her chest. “Oh, thank God. I know I told you to loosen up
a little bit, but I didn’t mean that loose.” She blinked. “Wait. What are we talking
about again?”

I pushed myself off the floor and splayed my fingers over my chest. “I was talking
about Sampson coming back and three people dying. Four, if you count Octavia.”

“And I was talking about you having sex with Will.”

I felt all the color drain from my face. “What?”

Nina shrugged, eyebrows raised in that
Yeah, so?
look.

“You know about me and Will?” I stumbled forward when I got goosed by the doorknob
as the front door opened.

“Sorry, Soph,” Vlad said in his unaffected grumble. “Didn’t see you there. What about
Will?”

Nina spun on her heel and went to the kitchen, yanking open the fridge. I heard glass
tinkling and cellophane crinkling as she searched inside. “Sophie slept with him.”

All the color that drained from my face must have gone out through my feet and rooted
me the carpet. For a fleeting second I thought that perhaps if I stayed perfectly
still, I could blend into the apartment landscape and everyone would forget that I
was there—that I had ever been there.

“Way to go, Sophie.” Vlad chucked me on the shoulder on his way to the dining table.
He seemed to lose interest in me the second he sat down and booted up his laptop.
“I don’t like either of them, but I think Will might be the lesser of your two evils.”

“No.” Nina shook her head, straightening up and massaging a blood bag. “I was hoping
she’d hold out for Alex again. I like the whole fallen angel thing.” She hipped the
refrigerator door closed and waggled her sculpted brows. “Doomed love. So romantic.”