for a moment. I knew him well enough to know there was something off in his behavior. He was too quiet. Will wasn’t the sort of man to sit at a table fiddling with his napkin when his wife was missing and quite possibly in danger. He was terrified, frightened to such a degree that it was nearly paralytic. I recognized the look.
I’d seen it in the mirror often enough.
“What aren’t you telling me, Will?” I asked quietly.
He closed his eyes and shivered as a tear tracked down each cheek.
“Georgia’s pregnant,” he whispered. “Seven months.”
I nodded. Then I pushed the rest of my coffee away and got up. “Let me get my coat.”
“It’s supposed to be nice today,” Will said.
“With the coat, I can carry more guns,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
WILL’S APARTMENT WAS a wreck. The lock had been smashed, though the door was still in one piece. The furniture was askew. A few things were broken. Paperback books had been knocked off a shelf. A laptop computer lay on its side, a blue screen of death glaring from its monitor. A mug of cocoa had been spilled and lay in a drying puddle on the hardwood floor.
I looked back and forth for a moment, frowning. The spill lay near the laptop, and both were to the right side of a comfortable-looking recliner, which had been bowled over backward. There was a therapeutic contoured pillow lying a few feet beyond that.
“So,” I said, “maybe it went like this. The attacker kicks in the door. There’s a partial impression of a shoe’s tread on it. Georgia’s sitting in her chair, there, working on her computer.” I frowned some more. “She drink a lot of cocoa?”
“No,” Will said. “Only when she’s really upset. She jokes about it being self-medication.”
So she’d been upset already, even before the attack. She was sitting in the chair with her laptop and her cocoa and . . . I walked over to the fallen chair and found a simple household wireless phone lying behind it.
“Something besides the prospect of an attack had upset her,” I said. “She took the time to make a cup of cocoa, and you don’t do that when there’s a maniac at the door. She made herself a comfort drink and huddled up in her chair to call you. Do you have any idea what could have upset her like that?”
Will shook his head. “Normally, no. But she’s been on a hormone crazy train the past few months. She’s overreacted to a lot of things.”
I nodded and stood there, just trying to absorb it all, to get an image of how things might have fit together. I pictured Georgia, a long, lean, willowy woman, curled up in the recliner, her face blotchy, her eyes red, almost curling up around her baby and the sound of her husband’s voice.
Someone broke the door in with a single kick and rushed her. Georgia was a fighter, accustomed to combat, even if it was mostly when she was in the form of another creature. She used the first defense she could bring to bear—her legs. As her attacker rushed her, she kicked out with both legs, trying to shove him away. But he had too much momentum, and instead Georgia’s kick had flung her chair over backward.
A pregnant woman nowhere near as lithe or graceful as she usually was, she turned and tried to get away.
“There’s no blood,” I said.
The attacker had dragged her out by main force. Either he’d beaten her with his fists and feet—easy, on a pregnant woman, who would instinctively curl her body around her unborn child, so that blows landed mostly on the back, ribs, and buttocks—or else he’d choked her unconscious. Either way, he’d subdued her without, apparently, drawing blood.
Then they left.
I shook my head.
“What do you think?” Will asked.
“I think you don’t want to know.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I need to.”
I nodded. I repeated my theory and its supporting evidence. It made Will go pale and silent.
“How was her hand-to-hand?” I asked him.
“Fair. She used to teach women’s self-defense seminars on campus. I don’t think she’s ever had to use it in earnest. . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the fallen chair.
“What did you find out that I couldn’t?” I asked. “I mean, with the whole werewolf thing.”
He shook his head. “The human brain isn’t wired for serious scent-processing,” he said. “Not like a wolf’s, anyway. Shifting . . . sort of