Lori Handeland - Blue Moon

I dialed his office. A machine picked up. "This is William Cadotte. I’m not in right now, but if you’ll leave a message I’ll call you back as soon as I am. My office hours are Monday through Friday from one to three."

I glanced at my watch. I’d just missed him.

Beeep!

I started at the loud noise. "I… um, this is J—I mean Officer McQuade. We met yesterday?"

I must have sounded as stupid as I felt, because Man-denauer lifted his head from his perusal of the map and contemplated me with a lift of his off-white brows.

I turned my back on him and came face-to-face with Clyde, who stood in the doorway to Bozeman’s office. Sheesh, could I even finish the call before he was on my case?

"I need the totem right away. Call me." hit the end button, then tucked the phone back into its pocket on my belt. "Let’s go!" I called to Manden-auer. "I’ll take you out to the accident site."

"Jessie," Clyde said.

I gave an exaggerated sigh. "Yes."

"I’ll check out Karen Larson’s place. Then you don’t have to."

I gave a sharp nod and escaped the ME’s office. Moments later Mandenauer and I were headed down Highway 199 in my patrol car.

I was still a bit steamed over Clyde’s telling me to stay away from Cadotte. Not that I’d planned on being near him more than was necessary—I may be sarcastic, but I’m not stupid—however, Clyde’s threat only made me want to see Cadotte a few times just for the hell of it. I guess that makes me stubborn, too.

How convenient that Cadotte’s cabin was right on the trail I had been ordered—by Clyde—to show our guest.

Mandenauer was quiet on the drive to the scene of the accident. I glanced at him once. He appeared asleep, his head tilted back against the headrest, but his eyes weren’t all the way closed. I could see the whites beneath his fluttering eyelids.

Creepy. I’d have been afraid he was dead except I could see his sunken chest rising slow and steady.

That would be all I’d need. To have Clyde’s precious Jdger-Sucher turn up dead in my car.

I parked the Crown Victoria on the shoulder of the road. The skid marks from Karen’s SUV stood out dark against the gray pavement. I glanced at Mandenauer. He was awake.

"Is there anything you would like to tell me about the accident? Anything I should know that will help me to finish this as quickly as I can?"

He stared at me intently, as if he could force me by his will alone to spill some secret I was guarding. But I didn’t have any. Except my embarrassing sexual infatuation with the professor. But that wouldn’t help Mandenauer kill the wolf—or most likely wolves by now.

"You read my accident report?"

He nodded. "Before you arrived at the station. Cut-and-dried, as you say."

I thought about the totem, Karen’s strange behavior at the scene, and her even stranger behavior later.

"Or perhaps not?" he murmured.

I considered what I should tell and what I shouldn’t.

It wouldn’t help Mandenauer to find the wolf if I told him about the totem. But I’d already been bitched at enough today for not spilling everything I knew, so I gave him the basics.

"This is what your sheriff was angry about?"

I glanced at him quickly. The door to the office had been closed while Clyde and I talked.

"Sheriff Johnston has a very loud voice and I, despite so many years on this earth, have very good ears."

I shrugged. "I don’t know what the totem means. It could have been there for weeks and have nothing to do with this accident at all."

"Perhaps." Mandenauer got out of the car. I joined him. "Or perhaps not," he repeated.

"You sure are a decisive son of a gun, aren’t you?"

His lips twitched. From what I’d observed of Mandenauer thus far, he was almost snickering. "I like to keep my mind open."

"To what?"

"To all the possibilities that exist. You never know when something you think is irrelevant is in fact quite relevant."

I agreed with him there. Good police work involved observing from every angle and never letting a thing get by unnoticed. Which was why I wasn’t allowing the totem issue to slide.

"Now, if you’ll walk me through the scene, show me where the wolf went and where you lost him, I will be most grateful."

I pointed to the skid marks from Miss Larson’s SUV. "Their length indicates she wasn’t going all that fast, but she didn’t have much warning. I hit a deer once, and it was as if the thing appeared out of the pavement. One minute the road was clear; the next I had venison on my grille."

"Charming," Mandenauer murmured.

Charming. Yep, that was me.

I pointed toward the woods. "Blood trail led this way."

He followed me off the road. Not a car had gone by while we’d been examining the evidence. Nothing new. Peak traffic for Highway 199 was Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Then it would be bumper-to-bumper from here to Stevens Point. Otherwise two cars every hour was a convention.

I inched down the slight embankment and stepped from the bright sunlight into the cool shadow of the woods. There were places in this forest so deep and dank the sun had never penetrated. I didn’t like those places, avoided them if I could, but they were there.

I walked in the general direction of Cadotte’s cottage. The blood trail was long gone, covered by dirt or leaves, erased by rain, perhaps eaten by another animal. If I hadn’t followed the shiny black splotches through the moonlight myself, I would have a hard time believing today that they’d existed at all.

"You are sure this is the way?" Mandenauer was keeping up without even breathing hard. He was in damn fine shape for an old guy.

"I have a pretty good sense of direction."

To be honest, in the light of day I didn’t need my sense of direction or even the blood trail, because there was a footpath leading directly to Cadotte’s cabin. In the dark, even with the moon shining so bright, the forest had seemed overgrown and tangled.

But if I’d been thinking clearly—then and now—I’d have realized Cadotte had to get to his house someway. He couldn’t drive, since there wasn’t a road. He had to park somewhere and walk in.

Just as they had on my previous visit, the trees gave way to the clearing, and there was the cabin. Poof . Mandenauer’s breath caught and he stopped. At least wasn’t the only one who thought Cadotte’s cottage seemed to pop up like something out of a fairy tale.

Grimms’ Fairy Tales, of course. The north woods were a little too creepy and dark to play a part in stories that featured silver-winged fairies and dancing mice. They leaned more toward little-girl-devouring wolves and cannibalistic witches.

"I lost him over here."

I walked across the clearing and down the path a few feet. Mandenauer followed. He crouched and peered at the ground. Picked up some dirt, smelled it, and let the earth sift back through his fingers. Then he sniffed the wind.

I shrugged. Whatever tripped his trigger.

"I need to speak with the owner of the cabin."

Mandenauer nodded, waved his hand in an imperial dismissal, and moved a little farther into the woods.

I returned to the clearing and climbed the steps to the front door. No one appeared to be home, although why I thought that, since there was no car and never had been, I don’t know. I knocked. No one answered, proving my theory.

I shaded my eyes and pressed my nose to the window in the door. A snarling wolf stared back at me.

"Shit!"

I leaped back, heart thundering, breath coming in sharp gasps, palm slapping onto the butt of my gun, any second expecting the animal to crash through the glass and go for my throat.

Nothing happened.

I crept back to the window and glanced inside. The wolf was still there. But the animal wasn’t going to come and get me anytime soon, since it was very, very dead.