asked, through stiff lips.
“I told her she could go fuck herself, excuse my language.”
“And how do you feel now?”
“Numb. Isn’t that stupid? I’m pulling her out of me by the roots, though. I told you I would. I had to do it. It’s like being addicted to crack. She’s awful.”
I thought of Lorena. “Sometimes,” I said, and even to my own ears I sounded sad, “the bitch wins.” Lorena was far from dead between Bill and me. Speaking of Debbie raised yet another unpleasant memory. “Hey, you told her we had been to bed together, when you two were fighting!”
He looked profoundly embarrassed, his olive skin flushing. “I’m ashamed of that. I knew she’d been having a good time with her fiancé she bragged about it. I sort of used your name in vain when I was really mad. I apologize.”
I could understand that, even though I didn’t like it. I raised my eyebrows to indicate that wasn’t quite enough.
“Okay, that was really low. A double apology and a promise to never do it again.”
I nodded. I would accept that.
“I hated to hustle you all out of the apartment like that, but I didn’t want her to see the three of you, in view of conclusions she might have drawn. Debbie can get really mad, and I thought if she saw you in conjunction with the vampires, she might hear a rumor that Russell was missing a prisoner and put two and two together. She might even be mad enough to call Russell.”
“So much for loyalty among Weres.”
“She’s a shifter, not a Were,” Alcide said instantly, and a suspicion of mine was confirmed. I was beginning to believe that Alcide, despite his stated conviction that he was determined to kept the Were gene to himself, would never be happy with anyone but another Were. I sighed: I tried to keep it a nice, quiet sigh. I might be wrong, after all.
“Debbie aside,” I said, waving my hand to show how completely Debbie was out of our conversational picture, “someonekilled Jerry Falcon and put him in your closet. That’s caused me—and you—a lot more trouble that the original mission, which was searching for Bill. Who would do something like that? It would have to be someone really malicious.”
“Or someone really stupid,” Alcide said fairly.
“I know Bill didn’t do it, because he was a prisoner. And I’d swear Eric was telling the truth when he said he didn’t do it.” I hesitated, hating to bring a name back up. “But what about Debbie? She’s . . .” I stopped myself from saying “a real bitch,” because only Alcide should call her that. “She was angry with you for having a date,” I said mildly. “Maybe she would put Jerry Falcon in your closet to cause you trouble?”
“Debbie’s mean and she can cause trouble, but she’s never killed anyone,” Alcide said. “She doesn’t have the, the . . . grit for it, the sand. The will to kill.”
Okay. Just call me Sandy.
Alcide must have read my dismay on my face. “Hey, I’m a Were,” he said, shrugging. “I’d do it if I had to. Especially at the right time of the moon.”
“So maybe a fellow pack member did him in, for reasons we don’t know, and decided to lay the blame on you?” Another possible scenario.
“That doesn’t feel right. Another Were would have—well, the body would’ve looked different.” Alcide said, trying to spare my finer feelings. He meant the body would have been ripped to shreds. “And I think I would’ve smelled another Were on him. Not that I got that close.”
We just didn’t have any other ideas, though if I’d tape-recorded that conversation and played it back, I would have thought of another possible culprit easily enough.
Alcide said he had to get back to Shreveport, and I lifted my legs for him to rise. He got up, but went down on one knee by the head of the couch to tell me good-bye. I said the polite things, how nice it had been of him to give me a place to stay, how much I’d enjoyed meeting his sister, how much fun it had been to hide a body with him. No, I didn’t really say that, but it crossed my mind, as I was being Gran’s courteous product.
“I’m glad I met you,” he said. He was closer to me than I’d thought, and he gave me a peck on the lips in farewell. But after the peck, which was okay, he