Harry squeezed it before dropping to the raised hearth in front of the fireplace. “We need to figure out who sent Keegan that anonymous tip.” He was damned if he even knew where to begin. He’d never been in trouble in his life, nor could he remember anyone hating him so much they’d want revenge. He was a nerd, for Christ’s sake.
“Swear it, as sure as I sit here before you, Harry, if I find out who did this, I’ll kill them myself. Pack laws be damned,” Marty spat, running a weary hand over her eyes.
His head throbbed when he dropped it into his hands. “I keep going over and over it in my mind, and I can’t even come up with one person who could have seen what happened that night. The whole damn place was deserted. Even Cal had gone home for the night,” Harry said, referring to the janitor at Pack. “I saw him on my way down to the lab.”
“I’ll tell you this much, dude. Whoever the fuck this is, it’s the same assclown who took the kids and Carl. I can smell it,” Nina said, pulling Carl to the small window seat and handing him the duct tape to practice.
“It makes sense, but it doesn’t make any sense. Where did this grudge for me and Mara, or whatever we’re calling it, suddenly come from?”
“Hey, Harry?” Marty’s head popped up. “Question? Did we ever ask you why you were in the lab? I mean, you’re in accounting. What were you doing in the lab to begin with?”
Huh. He’d never given thought to that. How could he have missed it? “I was meeting Jeff Grandy. He texted me and asked me to meet him there so he could pass on an expense report to me. Said he was too wrapped up in a project, and didn’t want to leave the lab. You know how the lab group is—always wrapped up in one thing or another. They get in deep. Jeff and I worked out together all the time at Pack’s gym. He was always talking about his projects.”
“And where was Jeff when all of this went down?” Wanda asked, her hand cupping her chin. “Where is Jeff now, for that matter? Did you ever see him that night?”
Harry bolted off the hearth, startling Carl. Shit. “I never saw him that night. I’d just finished working out, which is why I had the vitaminwater. I dropped into the lab to find all the lights on, but nobody home. Went to Jeff’s desk to see if maybe he’d left it there, but nothing. That was when I drank the baby-making juice by mistake.”
Marty sat up straighter, tucking the pillow closer to her chest. “And have you seen Jeff since that evening? Since you’ve been back at work?”
Shit. Sounds of alarm clanged in his head. “No. No, I haven’t.” He reached for his phone with hasty hands, scrolling back to the texts for that night. It had definitely come from Jeff’s phone.
Whether he’d been the person using that phone was another story. “Let me text him now and see if we get a response. I forgot all about it with everything else going on.” He sent off a text to Jeff and waited, clutching his phone with tight fingers, pacing once again.
Marty scrolled her phone, her brow furrowed. “I’m checking to see if Jeff’s been in this week.”
Shit, shit, shit. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner? He’d been so wrapped up in his own bullshit he never considered he hadn’t seen Jeff since this began.
His phone remained silent. Damn it.
Marty slid to the end of the couch, the pillow dropping from her lap. “Jeff hasn’t been in since the night of your accident, Harry.”
“Christ,” Harry murmured, running his hand over his jaw.
“But wait,” Marty interjected, her face smoothing from a frown to a smile. “Jeff has the flu, according to his mother who called him in sick. Phew. Okay, then. All’s well. Bet he’s just in bed and not answering texts. That makes sense, right?”
“Well, it would.”
“I feel a fucking ‘but’ coming on, Harry. So say it,” Nina ordered.
Harry took one last hopeless glance at his phone before shaking his head. “But . . . Jeff’s mother is dead. She died when he was in college.”
* * *
MARA laid her head against the cottage door before opening it, loving the smooth surface of it, the reflection of the lights pouring through the oval stained glass in the center.
All of her hard work, all of the long nights she’d spent renovating a space to call her own would be replaced by a dank, square cell in werewolf prison, if the news from the council was even close to correct.
Maybe she could be like the Bill Nye version of Martha Stewart while she served out her sentence? Teach her fellow inmates about DNA strands and evolution? Because learning was so popular in prison.