Hunter s Moon - By Lori Handeland Page 0,37

had a point. I picked up the papers and started to read.

Albert Fish - 1935 Stanley Dean Baker - 1970 Omaima Nelson - 1993 Nathaniel Bar-Jonah - 1996

And, of course, Jeffrey Dahmer, the man who made Milwaukee famous.

The accounts were gruesome, nauseating, thorough. I read them anyway. When I was done, I shoved the papers back across the desk, unwilling to hold on to them any longer. My fingers felt slimy already.

"What exactly are we trying to find?" I asked.

"Hell if I know. Something out of the ordinary."

"In there?"

Everything I'd read had been far from ordinary.

"I noticed one thing," Jessie continued. "Before World War Two, there were very few serial killers."

"Maybe it was just harder to catch them then."

"Could be."

"You don't think so."

"Do you remember what happened in World War Two, Leigh?"

"Wanna be more specific?"

"What happened that involves us?"

Oh, that.

During the war Edward had been a spy. He'd discovered that Josef Mengele had been doing more than experimenting on the Jews at Auschwitz. He'd also had a secret lab deep in the Black Forest.

There he'd manufactured monsters. Hitler had demanded a werewolf army, among other things.

Edward's mission had been to eliminate everything Mengele had made. By the time Mandenauer reached the lab, the Allies had hit the beaches and Russia was closing in. Mengele panicked and released all his creations into the world. They had been multiplying, mutating, spreading, ever since.

Edward, being Edward, was still following the orders he had never completely carried out.

"You think the increase in serial killers has something to do with the Nazis?" I asked.

"You got a better idea?"

I thought about it. We didn't know to this day everything Mengele had been manufacturing in his lab.

Sure, there had been monsters before he started making them. History was full of 'em. But after - there'd been a whole lot more.

"What's your theory?" I asked.

"Maybe some of these cannibals were werewolves, too. Maybe they can't control themselves even when they're human."

"Maybe."

Or they could just be nuts.

"What does that mean to us?" I asked. "Here and now."

"Maybe this Weendigo started out as a human."

"They all started out as human."

"Let me finish. Instead of being bitten, he was cursed by his lust for flesh. He became a beast, like the legend. But even in beast form he can't stop being a cannibal."

She was making a weird sort of sense.

"I still don't see how we're going to figure out who it is that we're searching for."

"What if there's a suspect in a cannibalistic serial killer case who suddenly disappeared?"

"Yeah?"

"And what if a lot of dead, half-eaten wolves had turned up in the same place?"

She could be on to something, except -

"Edward said there'd been no incidences of cannibalistic werewolves but this one."

Jessie cursed. There went her theory.

But something tickled at the back of my mind. "Wait."

I held up my hand, tilted my head, thought hard, and suddenly there it was. "What if he's been soothing his need for cannibalism in human form and he just started satisfying that particular peculiarity in wolf form?"

Jessie stared at me as if I'd just said something very interesting. "I guess it couldn't hurt to get information on open serial killer cases."

"Right. But we don't want the FBI showing up here. They never can manage to blend in."

"Who has a contact at Quantico?"

"Mandenauer," she said, at the same time I said, "Edward."

Jessie picked up the phone.
Chapter 15
Before she could dial, the door crashed open. Jessie and I pointed our weapons toward the sound.

Will stopped dead. "I have to go."

Jessie waved her .44 toward the sign that read: rest-room. "Go."

He shook his head. His earring waggled, catching the light and throwing speckles of gold across his jaw.

"I found something."

In the act of putting away our guns, Jessie and I tensed.

"What?" she asked.

"I'm not sure."

"There's a lot of that going around," I muttered.

"Huh?" Cadotte's eyes were unfocused behind his glasses. He stared at me as if he couldn't remember who I was. Then understanding dawned. "Oh, hi, Leigh. What are you doing here?"

"Never mind her, Slick. What did you find?"

"I did an Internet search on Weendigo, and I came up with the Legend of the Power Eater."

Jessie and I exchanged glances. "What's that?" she asked.

"I've never heard of it. But there's a book - "

Jessie groaned. "Not another book. Haven't we been through this?"

Confused, I looked back and forth between them. Jessie explained. "Will had a book on raising the wolf god. Sadly, a page was missing. A very important page."

"I ordered another one," he said.

"Which the werewolves