"What are we going to do if we find the killer?" David said.
"Call 911?" Then she grumbled, "Ignoring for a moment the fact that I didn't bring my cell phone and I'm betting you don't have one . . . we tell the police what?"
"I don't know. I thought you were the one with all the answers. "
Ha. Why did everyone think that again? Just because she ran her mouth more often than not was no reason to actually put any faith in her.
She had no desire to get closer to this murder scene, and the killer's trail was fading.
"Let's go," she said, and took off at a jog. After a moment's hesitation, David followed her.
Made her wonder, just for a moment, what it would be like to have a pack again. The thought made her lonely, so she shook it away. The thing now was to find this killer. Figure out a way to throw him at the cops. Or to stop him, if it came to that.
The guy was on foot. If he had left footprints, the falling snow covered them. They tracked by scent alone, but the smell of human blood was strong. Not exactly subtle. Nothing about these murders was subtle. Kitty could tell that much by the police response, without even seeing the bodies. She didn't have to be a trained profiler to tell these were unplanned. He was lashing out, haphazard.
David must have been thinking along the same lines. Briskly, they walked side by side, following the trail that the police hadn't found yet. "He's racking up a body count, isn't he? That's what this is about. Whoever he is, he's gone postal. "
"Looks that way," Kitty said.
"We're going to have to kill him if we find him, aren't we?" David said.
"No. " She shook her head. "I don't want to get in the habit of killing people. Even if they are bad guys. I don't think you want to get into that habit either. "
He pursed his lips and nodded sharply.
When they spotted another house up ahead, lit by the yellow circle of a lamp by the door, Kitty's stomach sank. They'd found his next target.
It wasn't really a house, but a weather-beaten single-wide mobile home, white aluminum siding rusting at the edges, sitting by itself at the end of a long dirt road. The minimum of what could be called a homestead. But it had a fenced-in yard with spinning plastic sunflowers sticking out of the snow, and a TV dish attached to the roof, which was outlined in colored holiday lights. Somebody loved this place and called it home, and the killer had headed right for it.
She tugged on David's arm and broke into a run. Dodging around the fence, they went to the front door. The place seemed peaceful. Soft, shaded light shone through the fogged windows. Faintly, the sound of Christmas carols played on a radio, muted. Maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe they'd made a mistake.
They hesitated at the base of a trio of steps leading to the front door. Their breaths, coming fast after the effort of running, steamed in the chill air. David glanced at her.
"What do we do?" he whispered.
"We knock on the front door," she said, shrugging. "If nothing's wrong, we can sing 'Jingle Bells. '"
He actually chuckled. The boy was coming around.
She mounted the steps first, raised a fist to knock on the door - and saw that it already stood open a crack. Shit.
Then she thought, what the hell, and pushed open the door all the way.
Her nose flared with the scent of blood at the same time she saw the spray across the linoleum floor of the entryway before her.
Wolf's senses sprang to the fore, the instinct to Change and defend herself ripping through her gut. She swallowed back bile and forced that feeling down, told herself to keep it together, stay human, keep that beast locked away. Her gut clenched, but she didn't shift.
Still, she looked over the scene with a hunter's gaze, and a growl burred in her throat.
Standing over his prey, the man looked at Kitty with surprise. He was tall and thin - unnaturally thin, like he hadn't eaten well in some time. His clothes hung oddly on him. He wore a green canvas jacket, w
hite T-shirt, threadbare jeans. All shone wet with blood. He was covered with red, presumably from his previous two stops. She could smell violence on him, illness, like an animal that had gone out of control, that no longer worked by instinct, but by madness, striking out at everything. His pale eyes gleamed with it. His ear-length hair was matted, uncombed, and an uneven beard grew around his slack mouth. His whole body was rigid.
He loomed over two people, a middle-aged man and woman, husband and wife probably, who lay in the middle of what passed for a living room - a plush sofa shoved up against one wall and a large TV in the opposite corner. They were both a little worn-out and overweight, both wearing jeans and T-shirts - they matched the trailer, Kitty thought absently. They were trussed up like a holiday meal. That was the only way Kitty could think of it. Each had wrists and ankles bound fast in front of them with thin twine. Both were gagged with strips of cloth, so tightly their teeth were bared, their lips stretched back in grotesque smiles. Their eyes glared large and white with fear. Bloody marks shone on their heads, as if the killer had subdued them by hitting them with something. But they were alive, trembling, pressing themselves away from the killer even while bound.
He'd started with her, slashing her arms, spilling blood everywhere. He held an eight-inch-long serrated knife, dull-looking, something that might rip like the teeth of an animal. It dripped blood onto the floor.
The scene froze as the killer regarded Kitty and David.