WHEN I LEAVE GLORIA, I HEAD TO MY OFFICE. I realize as soon as I'm in the car that she never answered the question of why she went to Rory's yesterday in the first place. She pulled a neat little trick, distracting me with the coffee cup and the trembling hands. She recovered herself quickly enough, though, when the questions shifted to Mrs. O'Sullivan.

She's hiding something. I'm tempted to turn around and go right back to the hotel, force her to tell me what O'Sullivan said that sent her scampering to his home. Truthfully, though, there's another matter I'm more interested in. I want to find out why Frey objected so strongly to my meeting with Sandra. Frey and I have fought some pretty dangerous characters-human and otherwise. He knows I can take care of myself. The fact that he reacted so negatively means something.

Should I take his advice? Call Williams? And yet, when I saw Williams last night, did he offer any advice? Issue any warnings about meeting with Sandra? No. In fact, all he did was push the same buttons. Warn me that I was living a lie and that I'd crawl back into the fold soon enough.

I think Frey is overreacting.

I glance at my watch. I'm not due at Mom's until later. I may as well resume my reading on the deck of our office. Then when Gloria's lawyer faxes me the reports, I can look them over right away and decide what to do next.

David and I share an office on Pacific Coast Highway. Close to Seaport Village. Our business, fugitive apprehension, bounty hunting, has boomed in the last year or so. It's the perfect career choice for two adrenaline junkies. David is an ex-pro football player who couldn't face the prospect of opening a car dealership or becoming a sportscaster when he retired. I was a schoolteacher who couldn't face another year of teenage angst.

My parents still don't understand how I could have made such a radical career change. They never recognized the wild child who only went into education to please her mother. From the beginning, teaching was an ill fit. When I found myself hating the classroom even more than some of my students, I knew it was time to quit. Meeting David in a kickboxing class and listening to his stories about bounty hunting was like a door opening into another world. I only had to throw his six-foot-six frame on his butt a couple of times to convince him to take me on as a partner.

That was almost four years ago.

Before I became vampire.

I unlock the door and step into the empty office. I miss David. Though our relationship isn't what it was before a rogue vamp attacked and turned me, we still share-what? Love of the chase. Freedom. An appreciation of what making good money does for your lifestyle. Now, with Gloria soon to be but a bitter memory and that point of contention gone, maybe we can start having fun together again.

Yeah. Fun that does not involve eating or showing how strong and fast I've become or avoiding mirrored bars and backlit windows.

Not bloody likely.

The most I can hope for is that his next girlfriend doesn't make it her mission to get me out of his life. God knows, Gloria tried hard enough.

I trudge over to the slider and pull it open. The deck stretches the length of our office and is suspended over the bay. The sky above is deep blue and the water below white tipped and frothy.

We're in the corner office. The neighbor to our left, a real estate broker, has strung Christmas lights and installed a tree in the middle of his deck. His slider is open, too, and the not-so-soft strains of Christmas carols drift out. For once, it doesn't bother me. For once, I'm not dreading Christmas. For once I think maybe I won't fight with David about putting up our own tree.

That is assuming he comes back before Christmas.

I lean against the deck rail, relaxing for a minute. Since my body temperature is much, much cooler than the 98.6 degrees of a human, and the air feels slightly warm to my skin, I figure it must be in the sixties. A clear, perfect December day.

Frey's book calls to me. Not literally, although it wouldn't surprise me if it was capable of such a thing. I retrieve it from the desk, roll my chair out onto the deck and settle in.

Let's see-chapter two. I thumb to the page.

I skim the text, letting the salient points sink in and skipping the irrelevant.

When bitten by a werewolf, a person does not undergo a drastic change. Not at first. He or she is taken to the woods and left there by his "sire" with no weapon and no food. He is told he must obtain a belt of wolf fur. He must obtain that belt within fourteen days or before the full moon, whichever occurs first. If he does not kill a wolf in that time, he dies.

If he is successful, the pelt becomes his talisman. He is accepted into the werewolf community and is initiated into a pack. The pack is his family. He is free to choose a mate, but only from within the family. If there are not enough females in the pack, he must earn the right to bring another over. The subjugation of females is complete within a pack. Mating is for life. Werewolves only propagate by an exchange of blood. Once bitten and initiated, the werewolf must, within its lifetime, turn two others to complete the circle of life. The rule is strict-he may turn only two. Rogues who disobey this edict are dealt with severely. (No details are given, but since I've dealt with rogue vamps before I can imagine what it means-death.)

The chapter ends and I'm left fuzzy headed and confused, partly from the strain of interpreting the difficult text and partly because what I read contradicts everything I ever knew about werewolves.

As soon as that thought passes through my head, the absurdity of it makes me laugh. The same could be said about vampires. Until I became one, I had quite a different perspective on the subject. Hadn't almost everything I believed about vampires proven to be false? Why should the popular mythos about werewolves be any less false?

And yet, there is one glaring inconsistency. Sandra is the leader of a werewolf pack. She's female. Definitely, unquestionably female. From what I saw the other night, her pack is 90 percent female. There were maybe two or three males in Culebra's bar that night. Unremarkable males obviously because I can't remember what they looked like. I wonder their purpose? Sexual toys? Heavy lifters? Bike mechanics?

Hmmm.

Chapter three beckons so I prepare to continue reading when the chime of the fax machine distracts me from the book.

Gloria's lawyer?

I go inside to watch the machine spit out page after page of grainy, handwritten forms. The first page is a note on the lawyer's letterhead. It requests I call with anything I learn-either to Gloria's advantage or not. It also adds that I am to invoice the law office and not Gloria for my services.

No problem. I don't care who writes the checks as long as they're written and don't bounce.

I gather up the pages and take them back out to the desk. Frey's book gets put aside.

It doesn't take me long to go through the stack. There's the original police report made on the scene. Harris caught the case. It came in on a 911 call from Mrs. O'Sullivan at 9:10 p.m.

Harris' notes are precise, detailed and objective. No weapon was found at the scene. The ME put time of death somewhere between 2:00 and 6:00 p.m. O'Sullivan was killed by a small-caliber weapon, one shot to the back of the head. No sign of forced entry. No obvious sign of a struggle. The only thing disturbed was a stack of papers on the desk.

The interview with Mrs. O'Sullivan is more interesting. She named Gloria as a suspect right off. Talked about the affair and hinted that there were improprieties in their business dealings as well. She said she didn't know the details, but her husband indicated he had hired a forensic accountant to go over the restaurant's books. She assumed he'd found something because the last few days Rory had been furious with Gloria and tried several times to get in touch with her.

The next interview was with the son, Jason. Fourteen years old. Home from Loyola Prep School for the holiday break. He and his stepmom had spent the afternoon shopping and then went to dinner. He said he didn't know anyone who would want to hurt his father. He was with his stepmother when she found the body.

There was no one else in the home. The staff had the day off. The house is secluded behind a gated brick wall and is not visible from the street. To gain access, a key card is needed. As far as she knew, Mrs. O'Sullivan said, all the cards were accounted for, but she couldn't be sure if Gloria had one. She thought she probably did . . .

I have to smile at that. Mrs. O'Sullivan was doing a masterful job of steering the investigation toward Gloria.

The rest of the pages include pictures of the crime scene, O'Sullivan slumped across his desk, close-ups and wide range shots. The room. The outside of the house showing the windows and the ground beneath. The ground was not disturbed, and the notes indicated the area was muddy because the sprinklers had run that morning. If someone had broken in through the windows, there would have been footprints.

There are booking files. There's a mug shot, but damn if Gloria doesn't look beautiful. In a mug shot. She stares right into the camera, eyes wide, head up. An expression of shock and bewilderment casts a shadow on those perfect features, but not a hair is out of place.

The last page is the result of the warrant search of Gloria's suite at the Four Seasons and her vehicle. Nothing of interest found. No weapon. No key card for O'Sullivan's home. A request is to be filed to search her L.A. residence. The restaurant.

And David's condo.

That brings me straight up in the chair. Naturally they'd include David's condo. Not only because David and Gloria are a well-known local celebrity couple, but because of the way David acted with Harris. Now with the revelation that Gloria and O'Sullivan were lovers, this search may be a fishing expedition for an accomplice. Or worse. David may actually be a suspect.

Why didn't I think of that this morning?

I grab the phone and put a call into SDPD. When I ask to speak to Detective Harris, I get an officer in his unit that tells me he's not available.

I don't leave a message. I'm out of the office and into my car so fast, the detective on the other end of the line may not yet realize it's gone dead.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***