Draw One In The Dark(69)

She pulled up at her house, and opened the front door, half expecting to find her house as ransacked as Tom's apartment. But everything inside looked normal and was in its usual place. She locked the door, picked up the mail that the carrier had pushed through the mail slot on the door. Junk, junk, and bills. Which seemed to be the modern corollary of death and taxes.



She went all the way to the kitchen, and saw her chair still under the door to the back porch. Had it really all happened? Had the little porch, which had been her main reason for renting this house, truly been destroyed?



She pulled the chair away, unlocked the door and looked at the broken windows, the glass on the carpet, the . . . mess. Then she turned on the light and walked into the room.



Rafiel had said that there was green powder on this carpet, like there was green powder on yesterday's corpse. She hadn't noticed. But now, by the light of dawn and the overhead light, she could see it—glistening on the carpet. It was even more visible because it must have rained sometime during the night when she wasn't paying attention to the outside—and the rain had puddled it into little rings and patterns on the beige carpet.



She wondered what it all meant, but couldn't even think straight. And she wasn't about to call Rafiel and ask him. Not right now, she wasn't.



Instead, she retreated to the kitchen, locked the door, and slipped the chair underneath. She wished the door were somewhat stronger than the hollow-core, Seventies vintage door it appeared to be. But it couldn't be helped. She was certainly not going to fashion a new door before going to bed. And she needed to go to bed.



She took a hurried shower, with torrents of hot water, and felt as if the heat and the massage on her sore muscles were reviving her. Coming out and drying her hair, she noted that Tom had hung up his towel very neatly on the hook at the back of the door. For some reason she'd expected it tossed on the floor.



As soon as she went into the bedroom, the phone rang. It was a cheap, corded affair and it was plugged in there because it was the only phone plug in the entire house. Possibly because the entire house was not hard to cross in twenty hurried steps.



Normally the only calls she got—at least since she'd got on the telemarketers do-not-call-list—were from Frank, asking if she wanted to come in and work extra hours. And if this were Frank right now, he could go to hell. There was no way Kyrie was about to turn around and go work another shift. Not with those beetles in the parking lot, and she didn't even care whether they were real or a product of her imagination.



But the voice on the other end of the phone wasn't Frank's. It was a voice that purred with masculine self-assurance.



"Kyrie?" it said, though she didn't remember giving Rafiel permission to call her by her given name.



"Yes."



"I have information on the victim."



So, he was going to call her every time he had information? But she bit her tongue and said, "Yes?" because she knew that anything else could start a debate or an argument and that would mean talking on the phone longer and staying awake longer.



"He was Bill Johnson. A roofer by trade. And apparently a coyote in his shifter form."



"A . . .?" How had Rafiel found that out? It wasn't exactly the sort of thing you could ask people about? Or . . .



"His wife had pictures."



"Pardon me?" Kyrie asked finding this, in some way, stranger than giant beetles in the parking lot of the Athens.



"His wife had pictures of him as a coyote. Lovely lady, I would judge about ten years older than him but looking and acting much older. A grandma type. She pulled out pictures, to show us, of what her husband looked like in his coyote form. She said he got the shape-shifting ability from his Native American ancestors and that he was, like their coyote of legend, a bit of a trickster. And then she said— "



"Showed us pictures?" Kyrie asked, as her mouth caught up with her brain in horrified wonder.



"Oh yes. She called him in to missing persons and Officer Bob and I and our one female officer, Cindy, all went along to take her statement and see if she had any pictures of the deceased. Because if it wasn't him, we didn't want to put her through identifying the body. Cindy came along on the principle that the lady might need a female shoulder to cry on."



"And?"



"And she took out the pictures and showed them to us. And the other two looked at each other and then at me as though they thought the poor lady was totally out of her mind with shock and all that. Which she probably was, of course. But still . . ."



"But still, he was a coyote. And she knew. And didn't mind."