Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

killed. Hopefully very soon.”
    â€œWho is ‘we’?” he asked.
    â€œSome acquaintances of mine.” I looked him square in the eye and prayed that he’d leave it there. The heavy emphasis I used was straight out of a gangster movie. He didn’t have to know how underpowered we were; the police would be even more helpless than Andre and I.
    â€œI promise I won’t lie to you about the preternatural community,” I told him. “I may leave things out, because I have to, but I won’t lie to you.”
    He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. He tapped his fingers unhappily on the top of the desk, but in the end, he didn’t ask more questions.
    He got off the desk and walked over to a cabinet mounted in the wall behind my chair. I moved when he opened it and pushed back the doors to reveal a white board in the center and corkboards on the inside of each door. On one of the corkboards someone had pinned up a map of the Tri-Cities and covered it with roundheaded colored pins. Most of the pins were green, some were blue, and a double handful were red.
    â€œThis isn’t all of them,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago a few of us wondered if there was a pattern to the violence, so we pulled all reports of violence since April. The green pins are usual stuff. Property damage, arguments that get a little hot and someone calls them in, someone bangs his girlfriend around. That kind of stuff. Blue is where someone ended up in the hospital. Red is where someone ended up dead. A few of them are suicides.” He put a finger on a cluster of red near the highway in Pasco. “This is the murder-suicide at the motel in Pasco last month.” He moved his hand to a green pin all by itself near the east edge of the map. “This is your trailer.”
    I looked at the map. I’d expected to get a list of addresses, but this was exactly what I needed—and not. Because there was no pattern I could see. The pins were scattered evenly around the Tri-Cities. Denser where the population was heavier, light in Finley, Burbank, and West Richland where there weren’t so many people. There was no neat ring of pins like you see in the movies.
    â€œWe can’t find a pattern either,” he said. “Not an overall pattern. But the incidences do tend to come in clusters. Yesterday it was East Kennewick. Two fistfights and a family disturbance that roused the neighborhood. The night before it was West Pasco.”
    â€œHe’s moving around,” I said. That wasn’t good. Where was he keeping Adam and Samuel if he was moving around? “Is there a time of day that the violence is the worst?” I asked.
    â€œAfter nightfall.”
    I looked at the pins again, silently counting the red ones. They were short of Uncle Mike’s count—and I don’t think either of them knew about the family who died during Daniel’s experience with Littleton.
    â€œDid you learn anything?” he asked.
    â€œHunting serial killers is easier on TV,” I said sourly.
    â€œIs that what we’re dealing with?”
    I shrugged, then remembered Littleton’s face when he killed the woman at the motel. “I think so. Of a sort. The incidental violence is really bad, Tony, but this monster likes to kill. If he decides he doesn’t need to hide anymore, it would be very bad. What can you tell me about serial killers?”
    â€œI haven’t seen one here,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we don’t have one we don’t know about—but there are things we watch for.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œMost of them start with easy victims for practice.”
    Easy like Daniel? I thought.
    â€œI have a friend in the Seattle PD who tells me his whole department is waiting for someone to get killed. For three years they’ve had neighborhood pets turn up dead. They’re patrolling extra heavily near their at risk populations: the homeless, runaways, and prostitutes.”
    I shivered. Had Littleton been a killer before he became a sorcerer and a vampire? Had he been a vampire first or a sorcerer? Had he been evil, or had he been made evil? Not that it mattered.
    Someone knocked on the door. Tony reached past me to open it.
    â€œCome on in, Sergeant,” he said. “We’re finished here. Sergeant, this is Mercedes Thompson. Mercy this is Sergeant Owens, our watch commander. This is his