Victoria Nelson - Blood Trail Part 27

She lifted the mallet over her head and the smell of her sweat washed down over him. Peter felt his ears begin to burn and all at once, he came to a decision. He would go to Carl Biehn's barn tonight.

He toyed with the idea of telling his Uncle Stuart and then discarded it. One of two things would happen, either he'd dismiss the information about the gra.s.seater out of hand and want to know what this human was up to, or he'd believe the information and want to receive the proof himself. Either way, he, Peter, would be out of the action.That wasn't going to happen.

He'd tell Uncle Stuart when he had the proof. Present it to him as a fait accompli. That would show the older wer he was someone to be reckoned with. Not a child any longer. Peter's head filled with visions of challenging the alpha male and winning. Of running the pack. Of winning the right to mate.

His nostrils flared. If he came back with the information that saved the family, it couldn't help but impress Rose.

"You the young woman who's waiting to see me?"

Vicki came awake with a start and glanced down at her watch. It was 6:10. "d.a.m.n!" she muttered, shoving her gla.s.ses back up her nose. Her mouth tasted like the inside of a sewer.

"Here, maybe this'll help."

Vicki stared down at the cup of tea that had suddenly appeared in her hand and thought,Why not?

A moment later she had her answer.

Because I hate tea. Why did I do that?

She very carefully set the cup down and forced her scattered wits to regroup.This is the clubroom at the Grove Road Sportman 's Club. So this little old lady in blue jeans must be ....

"Bertie Reid?"

"In the flesh. Such as remains of it." The older woman smiled, showing a mouthful of teeth too regular to be real. "And you must be Vicki Nelson, Private Investigator." The smile broadened, the face around it compressing into an even tighter network of fine lines. "I hear you need my help."

"Yeah." Vicki stretched, apologized, and watched as Bertie settled carefully into one of the gold velour chairs, teacup balanced precisely on one knee. "Barry Wu tells me that if anyone in this city can help, it's you."

She looked pleased. "He said that? What a sweetie. Nice boy, Barry, bound to be in the medals at the next Olympics."

"So everyone says."

"No, everyone says he'll take the gold. I don't. I don't want to jinx the boy before he gets there, neither do I want him to feel badly if he comes home with the silver. Second best in the entire world is nothing to feel badly about and all those armchair athletes who sneer at second deserve a good swift kick in the b.u.t.t." She took a deep breath and a long draught of tea. "Now then, what did you want to know?"

"Is there anyone around London, not just at this club, who can shoot with anything approaching Barry Wu's accuracy?"

"No. Was there anything else?"

Vicki blinked. "No?" she repeated.

"Not that I know of. Oh, there're a couple of kids who might be decent if they practiced and one or two old-timers who occasionally show a flash of what they once had but people with Barry's ability and the discipline necessary to develop it are rare." She grinned and saluted with the cup. "That's why they only give out one gold."

"s.h.i.t!"

The old woman studied Vicki's face for a moment, then put down the teacup and settled back in the chair, crossing one denim clad leg over the other, the lime green laces in her hightops the brightest spot of color in the room. "How much do you know about compet.i.tion shooting?"

"Not much," Vicki admitted.

"Then tell me why you're asking that question, and I'll tell you if you're asking the right one."

Vicki took off her gla.s.ses and scrubbed at her face with her hands. It didn't make things any clearer. In fact, she realized as the movement pulled at the bruise on her temple, it was a pretty stupid thing to do.

She shoved her gla.s.ses back on and scrambled with her bag for the bottle of pills they'd given her at the hospital.There was a time I could make love to a vampire, walk away from major car accident, rush a client to the hospital, stay up until dawn, and spend the day arguing ethics with Celluci, no problem. I must be getting old. She took the pill dry. The only alternative was another mouthful of tea and she didn't think she was up to that.

"Cracked my head," she explained as she tossed the small plastic bottle back in her bag.

"In the line of duty?" Bertie asked, looking intrigued.

"Sort of." Vicki sighed. Somehow in the last couple of minutes, she'd come to the conclusion that Bertie was right. Without knowing more about compet.i.tion shooting, shecouldn't know if she was asking the right questions. Her voice low to prevent the only other occupant of the clubroom from overhearing, she presented an edited version of the events that had brought her to London.Bertie whistled softly at the description of the shots that killed "two of the family dogs," then she said, "Let me be sure I've got this straight, five hundred yards on a moving target at night from twenty feet up in a pine tree?"

"As much as five, maybe as little as three."

"As little as three?" Bertie snorted. "And both dogs were killed with a single, identical head shot? Come on." Setting the teacup aside, she heaved herself out of the chair, pale blue eyes gleaming behind the split gla.s.s of her bifocals.

"Where are we going?"

"My place. One shot like that might have been a fluke, luck, nothing more. But two, two means a trained talent and you don't acquire skill like that overnight. Like I said before, there's d.a.m.ned few people in the world who can do that kind of shooting and this marksman of yours didn't spring full grown from the head of Zeus. I think I can help you find him, but we've got to go to my place to do it. That's where all my reference material is. This lot wouldn't know a book if it bit them on the b.u.t.t." She waved a hand around the clubroom. The fortyish man sitting at one of the tables stroking the cat looked startled and waved back. "Gun magazines, that's all they ever read. I keep telling them they need a library. Probably leave them mine when I die and it'll spend ten or twenty years sitting around getting outdated then they'll throw it out. Did you drive?"

"No ..."

"No? I thought every PI owned a s.e.xy red convertible. Never mind. We'll take my car. I live pretty close." A sudden flurry of shots caught her attention and she strode over to the window. "Ha! I told him not to buy a Winchester if he wants to compete this fall. He'll be months getting used to that offset scope.

Fool should've listened. Robert!"

The man at the table looked even more startled at being directly addressed. "Yes?"

"If Gary comes up tell him I said, I told you so.""Uh, sure, Bertie."

"His wife's down in the pistol range," Bertie confided to Vicki as they headed out the door. "They come by most evenings after work. He hates guns but he loves her so they compromised; she only shoots targets, he doesn't watch."

Bertie's car was a huge old Country Squire station wagon, white, with wood-colored panels. The eight cylinders roared as they headed out onto the highway and then settled down into a steady seventy-five kilometers an hour purr.

Vicki tried not to fidget at the speed - or lack of it - but the pa.s.sing time gnawed at her. Hopefully Donald's wound would remind the wer of why they had to stay close to the house after dark, but she wasn't counting on it. As long as the wer insisted on their right to move around their land, every sunset, every extra day she spent solving this case, put another one of them in danger. If she couldn't convince them to stay safe, and so far she'd had remarkably little luck at that, she had to find this guy as fast as possible.

A car surged past, horn honking.

"I wanted to get a b.u.mper sticker that read, 'Honk at me and I'll shoot your tires out' but a friend talked me out of it." Bertie sighed. "Waste of diminishing natural resources driving that speed." She dropped another five kilometers as she spoke, just to prove her point.

Vicki sighed as well, but her reasons were a little different.

Fourteen.

Bertie Reid lived in a small bungalow about a ten-minute drive from the range.

Ten minutes had anyone else been driving,Vicki sighed silently as she got out of the car and followed the older woman into the house. "May I use your phone, I'd better call -Oh, h.e.l.l, what do I call Celluci? - my driver and let him know where I am.""Phone's right there." She pointed into the living room. "I'll just go put the kettle on for tea. Unless you'd rather have coffee."

"I would actually."

"It's only instant."

"That's fine. Thank you." Vicki was not a coffee sn.o.b and anything was better than tea.

The phone, a white touch-tone, sat on of a pile of newspapers beside an overstuffed floral armchair with a matching footstool. A pole lamp with three adjustable lights rose up behind the chair and the remote for the television lay on one wide arm, partially buried under an openTV Guide.

Obviously the command center.Vicki punched in the Heerkens number and looked around the living room while she waited for someone at the farm to answer. The room bulged with books, on shelves, on the floor, on the other pieces of furniture, cla.s.sics, romances - she spotted two by Elizabeth Fitzroy, Henry's pseudonym - mysteries, nonfiction. Vicki had seen bookstores with a less eclectic collection.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Rose? It's Vicki Nelson. Is Mike Celluci still there?"

"Uh-huh, Aunt Nadine invited him to dinner. I'll get him."

Dinner. Vicki shook her head. That should prove interesting, a little alpha male posturing over the hot dogs. She heard voices in the background, then someone lifted the receiver.

"Great timing, we just sat down. You ready to be picked up?"

"No, not yet. Ms. Reid arrived late. I'm at her place now and likely to be for some time. She doesn't know who the marksman is, but she thinks we can find out."

"How?"

"Anyone as good as this guy is has to have left some kind of a record and if someone made a record of it, she says she has a copy. But," she glanced around the living room, nothing appeared to be shelved in any particular order, "it may take a while to find it."

"Do you want me to come in?"

"No." The less time she spent with him, the less likely he'd re-stage the afternoon's fight and she just didn't want to deal with that right now. Letting Celluci tie her in knots wouldn't help anyone. Her job was to find the killer and stop him, not argue the ethics of the case. "I'd rather you stayed there and kept an eye on things."

"What about Henry?"

What about Henry? She wondered how his absence had been explained. Celluci swore he always knew when she lied so she chose her words carefully. "He hasn't any training."

"Christ, Vicki, these are werewolves; I haven't any training." In her mind's eye she saw him tossing the curl of hair back off his forehead. "And that wasn't what I meant."

"Listen, Mike, I told you what I think of your organized crime theory and I haven't got time to pander to your bruised male ego right now. You and Henry work it out." The best defense is a good offense - she didn't know where she'd first heard it but it made sense. "I'll call you when I get done." She could hear him speaking as she hung up. He didn't sound happy.Odds are he'll repeat it later so I haven't missed anything.

The early evening sunlight stretched long golden fingers into the living room. Almost two and a half hours remained until dark. Vicki found herself wishing she could push that pulsing golden ball down below thehorizon, releasing Henry from the hold of day. Henry understood, unlike Mike Celluci who was trying to apply rules to a game no one was playing.

And wasn't I just thinking it was nice to have Celluci around, lending an aura of normality to all this?

When did my life get so complicated?

"Cream and sugar?" Bertie called from the kitchen.

Vicki shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs. "Just cream," she said, moving toward the voice.

Nothing to do but keep going and hope it all untangled itself in the end.

The second bedroom had been turned into a library, with bookshelves on three of the four walls and filing cabinets on the fourth. A huge paper-piled desk took up much of the central floor s.p.a.ce. The desk caught Vicki's eye.

"It's called a partnership desk," Bertie told her, caressing a gleaming edge of dark brown wood with a fingertip. "It's really two desks in a single piece of furniture." She lifted a pile of newspapers off one of the chairs and motioned for Vicki to sit down. "Ruth and I bought it almost twenty-five years ago now. If you don't count the cars or the house, it's the most expensive thing we ever bought."

"Ruth?" Vicki asked, leveling a s.p.a.ce on the desk blotter for her coffee.

The older woman picked up a framed photograph off one of the bookshelves, smiled down at it for an instant, then pa.s.sed it over. "Ruth was my partner. We were together for thirty-two years. She died three years ago. Heart attack." Her smile held more grief than humor. "There hasn't seemed to be much point in housecleaning without her around. You'll have to excuse the mess."

Vicki returned the picture. "It's hard to lose someone close," she said softly, thinking that Nadine's eyes had held the same stricken look when she'd spoken of her twin. "And I'd be the last person to criticize housecleaning. As long as you can find things when you need them."

"Yes, well ..." Bertie set the photograph of Ruth carefully back on the shelf and waved a hand at the rows and rows of t.i.tles;History of Marksmanship, Rifle Shooting as a Sport, Position Rifle Shooting,The Complete Book of Target Shooting. "Where do we start?"

Reaching into her purse, Vicki drew out the lists of those who used the conservation area with any frequency - both sets of birders, the nature photography club - and laid it on the desk. "I thought we'd start at the top and compare these names with first the Canadian Olympic teams, then regional award winners, then down to local winners."

Bertie bent over and scanned the lists. "Be easier though if you knew who had registered weapons in this group. Doesn't the OPP have ... ?"

"Yes."

The older woman looked a little startled at the tone and the muscles moved around her mouth, but Vicki's expression helped her to hold back her curiosity. After a moment she asked, "Just the Canadian teams?"

"To start with, yes." Vicki took a long swallow of coffee and wondered if she should apologize. After all, it had been her own d.a.m.ned fault she didn't have that registration list. "If they turn up empty, we'll start on other countries. If you have ..."

"I have every Olympic shooting team for the last forty years as well as the American nationals, most of the regionals, and local compet.i.tions from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York."

The Canadian teams were in seven fat red binders. Even ignoring all the statistics, the photocopies of newspaper articles, and the final results, the daunting number of names to wade through started Vicki's head throbbing again.

If this were a television show, I'd have found a bit of shirt caught in that tree that could have belonged to only one man, there 'd have been a car chase, a fight, time out to go to the bathroom, and everything wrapped up in a nice, neat tidy package in less than an hour.She laid the first list of birders beside the first binder and pushed her gla.s.ses up her nose.Welcome to the real world.

A half a dozen times during dinner, Peter changed his mind about telling the rest of the family what heknew. A half a dozen times, he changed it back. They deserved to know. But ifhe could present them with the proof. ... Back and forth. Forth and back.

A part of him just wanted to dump the whole thing on the older wer and let them take care of it but Rose's knee b.u.mping randomly against his under the table kept knocking that thought out of his head. He hardly tasted a mouthful of his food because every time he inhaled, the only thing he could smell was his twin and the only thing he could think of was proving himself to her .

"Peter! The bread?"

"Sorry, Aunt Nadine." He couldn't remember her asking for the bread but her tone made it obvious she had. As he pa.s.sed the plate of heavy black bread up the table he realized that whatever else he decided, he couldn't tell his aunt. To sayIthink I might know who killed your twin without having the proof so she could act would just be worrying at the wound. Besides, she thought he was still a cub and treated him not much different than Daniel. He had to prove to her that he was a man. He hadn't noticed before, but Aunt Nadine smelled very much like Rose.

He couldn't tell his father. His father was wounded. He couldn't even talk it over with his father because his father didn't do anything without talking it over with Uncle Stuart first.

Uncle Stuart.Peter tore at a piece of meat as Uncle Stuart accepted the saltshaker from Rose.He didn't have to touch her. Thinks he's so ... so s.h.i.t hot. Thinks he knows everything. Well, /know something he doesn't.

"Whacha angry about, Peter?" Peter glared at his young cousin. "I'm not angry." Daniel shrugged. "Smell angry. You going to jump on Daddy again?"

"I said I'mnot angry."

"Peter." Stuart leaned around Daniel, brows down and teeth bared.