I looked at Zerbrowski. "I can't debate the healed scratches thing if I don't know the time line. I need a time."
He opened his mouth, but Dolph answered, "Why, so you can give the perfect alibi?"
"Gee, Zerbrowski, I don't see your hand up Dolph's ass, but it must be, because every time I ask you a question, the answer comes out his mouth." I was leaning across the table now, too.
"His scratches are older than yours, Anita," Dolph said, voice almost a growl of its own, "more healed. You'll never prove in court that they happened at the same time."
"He's a shape-shifter. He heals faster. I taught you that. Remember?"
"Are you really admitting that you fucked him?" Dolph said.
I was too angry to flinch at his choice of words. "I prefer the term made love to fucked, but yeah, we did the nasty."
"If that was true, the marks would have healed completely by now. If you're only human, like you keep telling me."
The headache between my eyes felt like something was trying to stab its way out of my skull. I really wasn't in any mood for this. "What I am, or what I am not, is none of your damn business. But I'm telling you that I marked him up in the heat of passion. More than that, chances are good he was with me when the second murder took place. We can give you times, if you want."
"Times would be good," Zerbrowski had scooted his chair a little farther down the table, but he hadn't deserted his post. He'd stayed closer to all that quivering rage than most people would have.
I had to think about it, but I managed to give him approximate times for the last two days. Truthfully, I wasn't much good on alibiing Jason for the first murder, but on the second, I was pretty sure I had him covered.
Zerbrowski was doing his best to give blank cop face while he wrote down what I said. The entire interview was being recorded, but Zerbrowski, like Dolph, liked to write things down. I hadn't really thought about it before, but Zerbrowski might have learned that habit from Dolph.
Dolph stayed standing near the table, looming over all of us, as I spoke. Zerbrowski asked small questions to nail the times as clearly as possible.
Jason stayed as quiet and still as he could through all of it. His hands clasped together on the table, head down, eyes taking small quick glances at all of us, without moving his head or body. He reminded me of a rabbit hiding in the long grass, hoping that if he just stayed quiet enough, still enough, that the dogs wouldn't find him. The analogy should have been laughable. I mean, he was a werewolf. But it wasn't funny, because it was accurate. Being a werewolf didn't protect you from the human laws, most of the time it hurt you. Sometimes it even got you killed. We weren't in that kind of danger, yet, but that could change.
A shape-shifter accused of murdering a human got a speedy trial and an execution. If a shape-shifter was declared rogue, one that was actively hunting humans, and the police couldn't capture it, then you could get a court order of execution, just like for a vampire. It worked almost the same way. A vampire that was suspected of murder but was still eluding capture and deemed a danger to the public could have an order of execution issued by a judge. Once you had the order of execution in hand you could kill it when you found it. Just insert shape-shifter for vampire into the formula and it worked the same way. There was no trial, no anything-just hunt it down and kill it. I'd done a few jobs like that. Not many, but a few.
There'd been a movement a few years ago to make a magic-using human subject to orders of execution, but too many human right's organizations had kicked a fit. As a magic-using human, I was happy. As someone who had executed people on orders of the court, I wasn't sure how I would have felt about hunting a human being down and killing them. I'd killed humans before when they threatened my life, or the lives of those I held dear. But self-defense, even proactive self-defense wasn't quite the same thing. A human witch or wizard got a trial, but if they were convicted of using magic for murder, it was an automatic death sentence. Ninety-nine percent of the time the witch or wizard was convicted. Jurors just didn't like the idea of people who could kill by magic walking around free. One of my goals in life was to stay the hell out of a courtroom.
I knew Jason hadn't done anything wrong, but I also knew enough about the way the system worked to know that for those of us who weren't exactly human, sometimes innocence didn't matter much.
"Can anyone else verify these times?" Zerbrowski asked.
"A few people, yeah," I said.
"A few people," Dolph said. He looked disgusted, and I didn't understand this emotion either. "You don't even know who the father is, do you?"
That made me give him a deer in headlights blink. "I don't know what you mean."