Bayou Blues (28 page)

The sudden flood of light meant I had to let my eyes readjust, but when they did, I was struck immediately by two conflicting thoughts:

Jackpot.

I’m going to puke.

I used to think I had an iron stomach, but since coming to Franklinton, my gag reflex had been getting a real workout.

A bare bulb cast the small concrete room in garish shadows. The smell of bleach was like a slap in the face, so dense I would have gladly welcomed the magnolia blooms back. But even with the intense cleaning that must have been done here, the floor was still mottled with black, and beneath the chlorine reek was the unmistakable smell of blood.

Three cages were lined up side by side along the back wall, wedged together so tightly that if anyone had been inside, they would be able to reach into the cage next to them. Another cage, one I recognized from Deerling’s video, was placed atop a grate in the floor.

Hanging on the back wall was a huge wolf pelt, a stunning russet brown. It was too big to belong to a natural wolf.

I choked back a sob, tears flooding my eyes so quickly they stung.

When a werewolf dies in wolf form, they shift back to their human figure. In order for someone to have skinned the pelt off a werewolf, they would have needed to remove the fur while the wolf was still alive.

“My God,” Wilder whispered, placing a hand on my shoulder.

I wanted to turn into his comfort, to let him hold me so I didn’t have to see the fur and
know
how it came to be hanging there. But I had to see it. Taking my eyes off that skin would be diminishing the suffering endured by whichever werewolf had been held here before Hank.

Instead I crossed the room in two wide steps, buried my fingers deep in the wiry fur and yanked it down off the wall. I held it against my chest, breathing in the fading smell of dirt and pine, knowing this used to be a female. Middle-aged, judging by the natural gray in the fur. It was different from mine. My streaks, to hear it told, were white, not gray.

“I’ll get you home.” I didn’t know who she’d been or what pack was missing her, but I would bring her back among the wolves. We’d bury her fur and give her a proper farewell.

Glass boxes and jars adorned the shelves nearby. A large skull, this one from a real wolf, was illuminated under a spotlight. There were jars of teeth and claws, and a full wolf paw floated in jar full of murky yellow liquid.

This was worse than murder. I’d thought what he was doing to Hank in that video had been hard to stomach. This was sickening and maddening, and for a flicker of a second I didn’t know if I could bring Deerling to Cain in anything other than a body bag.

If I got my hands on him, I might just show him what a live flaying felt like.

And then the thought was gone, replaced with a more sensible one. “Do you have your phone?”

Wilder nodded, still dumbstruck by the horror surrounding us. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a smartphone that had seen better days.

“Film it,” I instructed, hugging the fur tighter. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to comfort the ghost of the dead woman, or I needed her to comfort me.

“What?”

“Film it. Film it all. We can’t broadcast his confession down here, but people need to know what he’s done.” My voice shook. “They need to see this.”

“It will look like hunting trophies,” he reminded me.

“That’s exactly what they are.”

He turned on his phone and started to film. I followed him, trying to keep steady, and narrated exactly what we were looking at. I explained the various artifacts. I said aloud the things I’d only let run through my head. Without screaming or crying, I explained to the world precisely how these items would have needed to be removed to maintain their current form. When Wilder panned to me, I held up the fur.

“This was a person. It was a woman you might have known. She could have worked at your bank. She might have taught Sunday school or art. She might have run marathons or raised money for charity. We are
not
animals. Anyone who could do this to another person is the animal.” I hugged the fur back to my chest again, and when I started to cry, Wilder shut off his phone.

Footfalls sounded overhead, interrupting my moment of sadness.

“Upload it. Send it to YouTube, or Facebook, or Dropbox. Whatever. Just make sure it’s out there. We need to know people are going to see it even if we… Even if things don’t go according to plan.”

At this point Wilder had spent enough time with me he didn’t ask for my reasons. He pushed a few buttons on his screen then slid the phone back into his pocket.

“You ready for this?” he asked me.

I ran my fingers through the red-brown fur in my hands and stared up at the ceiling.

No
.

“You bet your ass I am.”

It wasn’t Timothy Deerling waiting for us when we got to the main floor. As Wilder had predicted, the police had arrived instead. But not the
real
police.

“Sheriff McGraw.” I nodded curtly when we got back into the main worship area. I was still holding the pelt. I wouldn’t let it go again until I had it back on pack land.

He heaved a sigh that carried all the weight of the world on it and holstered the weapon he was carrying. “Miss McQueen. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You mind telling me what the Sam hell it is you think you’re up to? Robbing the church?” He gestured to the fur.

“This doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“I think Pastor Deerling would beg to differ.”

“Let’s not play dumb here, Sheriff. One of your deputies was all too willing to do this same thing to me last night, and I think he did it with your blessing. So if you could cut the bullshit, I’d appreciate it.”

If anything, it looked like he was reconsidering going for his gun.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if you’d like to file a formal complaint, I’d be glad to take you both down to the station. You can fill out the form while we book you for trespassing, destruction of property and criminal mischief. Oh, and theft.”

“This. Doesn’t. Belong. To him.” I snarled.

“If the girl wants that old smelly rug so bad, she’s welcome to it. It makes me sick to look at it anyway.” Deerling’s voice came from the back of the room. It was so sweet and smooth I wasn’t surprised at his popularity in the church. The serpent in the Garden of Eden probably fooled Eve with a voice like that.

“Does it make you sick because you remember what you did to get it? How did you manage to keep her alive the whole time? That’s what I want to know. Were you shooting her up with adrenaline? Or did you have her so sedated she didn’t know what was happening?” I shook my head, answering my own question. “No, if she’d been sedated, she might have shifted back. You couldn’t risk that. There’s no trophy in it for you if she’s human. Only crazy people hang human skins from their rec room walls.”

I was shouting in the general direction of his voice, but he appeared out of the darkness, strolling down the center aisle of the church looking as well-groomed and tidy as he did in his video. Deerling was like an evil Ken doll who only came out of his packaging when people needed to see him in public. Like a weird android or something.

Man, if that had been the reality of it, I might have been relieved. Killer AI would be so much less repulsive to my mind than knowing a human being had been able to do this to another person.

Plus a robot could be put down by taking out his power source.

Though, I supposed, a human could be stopped the same way. It was just a bit bloodier.

“Human skins? My goodness, Sheriff, she does have an imagination on her, doesn’t she? Signs of a mental and emotional unbalance, I’d say. I’d recommend a psyche evaluation when you take her into custody. She could be a danger to herself or others.” He smirked at me.

Wilder hadn’t spoken since Timothy appeared, but I felt him now, close at my back. His presence alone calmed the flare-up of nerves I was feeling.

So Deerling and the sheriff wanted to play dumb? Fine. My boyfriend was a lawyer, my sister worked for an FBI task force, and my uncle was a goddamn king. I’d been raised to outsmart assholes like these.

As far as I could tell, neither of the men had realized the cameras were rolling. They were mounted far enough away from the pulpit the ready lights wouldn’t be obvious, and the crowd-facing camera was hidden so well even I didn’t know where it was.

If I could keep them focused on us long enough to get even a flimsy confession, that would be my best-case scenario.

“Was she pretty?” I held the fur up. “Did she have red hair, like your kids?”

Deerling stopped walking. His smirk faded.

Maybe I should have built up to the secret-family card, but I was in no mood to play games anymore. If he wanted to pretend I was crazy, I’d show him how crazy I could get.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Six super cute kids. Beautiful mother. I bet the woman this fur came from looked a lot like her. I bet it made you mad, seeing a werewolf who looked so much like someone you loved, isn’t that right? How dare an
animal
make you feel things only a woman could? Was that it, Tim?” I used a dismissive nickname, hoping it would show him how little of my respect he was entitled to. “Maybe you had urges you didn’t like. Did you lust after her, the werewolf bitch?” I shook the fur at him, and he recoiled from me like I’d spit in his face.

This was working, but I didn’t know if it was enough to make him speak. I had to get him mad enough to lose control. So angry he would stop thinking and start shouting senseless threats.

I needed him to be so mad he got stupid.

“I know you like tying them up. That’s what you had them do to me. Did you tie her up so she couldn’t move, couldn’t fight you? Did you touch her?” Tears streamed down my cheeks, but I ignored them. I was disgusted by the thought of what he might have done to this woman, but the honest-to-God truth was my imagination had its limits, and those limits stopped short of what the real horrors probably were.

“Do I look like I would touch a filthy were-
bitch
?” he snapped. He lunged at me like he might rip the pelt out of my hands, but Wilder pulled me back, out of Deerling’s reach. I held tight to the fur. “Your kind isn’t worth the wood it would take to burn you. That’s what they did in the Middle Ages, you know? They burned witches and freaks. Cleaned the earth of scum like you.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Cleansing the world? Making it pure?”

“If I could rub the stain of your sin from the face of history, I would.”

Not quite. It was close, it was an acknowledgment, but it wasn’t a confession. I felt sick to my stomach subjecting myself, and anyone listening, to this hate speech. But it needed to be out there.

“You know the funny thing about the burnings you’re talking about? A lot of innocent people died, mistaken for something they weren’t.”

“Sacrifices are made in any war.”

“Tim…” The sheriff had his hand on his gun, but it remained in the holster for now. “I think I should take them in, and we can call it a night, okay?”

Deerling wasn’t listening. “Wherever there is victory there is death.”

“I bet that’s what you told the human girl who died here. You probably said her death would be noble, that she would be carried off to heaven because she was doing righteous work.” I thought of the artifacts in the basement, all the nails and teeth. “You knew just what to do to her to make it look like one of us too.”

“I know what you monsters are capable of. And soon the world will see you for the killers you really are.”

No no no.
He was still so intent on projecting his own blame on to us, I was starting to think he might believe he was innocent. If he thought werewolves were nothing but animals, he probably didn’t see the torture and murder of one as a crime.

Getting him to admit to killing his human parishioner should have been easier. He had to understand the difference.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Animals don’t have names. Even domesticated ones.”

I bristled. Wilder squeezed the back of my neck, and the gesture was as much a sign of comfort as it was a reminder he could hold me back if I tried anything stupid.

“I meant the girl who died. The human girl.”

This gave Deerling pause, and the sheriff saw his moment to take control. “All right, that’s enough of this nonsense. You two are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used—”

“Carmel.”

The sheriff, mid-Mirandizing, said, “For fuck’s sake, Tim.”

Oh, he definitely knew what had really happened. “I bet you both knew her. I bet you saw Carmel at barbeques and picnics and whatever bullshit community-building stuff your town did before it lost its soul to this psycho. Then she was just a sacrifice to be made.”

“True believers—”

“Shut up,” the sheriff snapped at Deerling. “Can’t you see what she’s doing? No one talks this much unless they’re trying to trip you up. Don’t be an idiot. Just
shut up
.” He pointed his gun at me.

“You going to shoot me, Sheriff? I thought gutting were-girls was how you people liked to do things.” I’d brought the hunting knife I’d taken from Anderson with me, but I wasn’t stupid enough to flash a blade when a guy was pointing a gun at me. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I didn’t have a death wish.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “How fucked up are you that you’re okay with what he’s done? If you want to pretend werewolves aren’t people, that’s…well that’s shitty, but whatever. But he
killed
Carmel. I can tell you exactly how he did it, since you were too busy arresting us to see the real show. From what I can tell, he probably used his knowledge of werewolves to meticulously dismember her the way he thought a werewolf would. And you let it happen. A human died on your watch because you’re too much of a useless coward to see this guy for what he really is.”