Julie swallowed. “You were in town when Peter was killed.”
“So I was.” Luke leaned against the doorway again, his pose all feigned relaxation. “But I had no motive.”
“Someone did.”
“Let me explain something to you, Julie. I have as much stake in learning the truth of this as anyone else. More. Because what happened here was something that never should have happened. I didn’t come to Merritt expecting to find a murder, but now that I’ve found it, it involves me as much as anyone.”
“Because of what you are?”
He didn’t respond directly, but she knew. “There are responsibilities. Laws. Rules. Murder is a universal crime. It can’t be allowed to go unpunished.”
Julie leaned over her desk. She’d wanted Cheryl’s murder solved, her murderer caught. And now, it seemed, this stranger wanted the same for reasons he wouldn’t give.
She looked up. “Why should I trust anything you say?”
“I have no answers for you. All you have is your own judgment. But I think your judgment is sufficient. Look at me. Do you sense a lie, Julie? Do you think I’m something to fear?”
Julie closed her eyes, calling on the spirits for guidance. Nowhere within herself could she find either untruths or fear. Only a sense of rightness.
She opened her eyes again. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Alex is with Kieran. This place you want him to go—is it a place she can go, too?”
He understood, and his expression was very serious. “It would be best if she came back and let him go on alone.”
She was beginning to form a reply when she caught sight of a commotion outside the grimy window. A bunch of men were clumping down the street, huddled together and uncharacteristically silent. Howie, Julie recognized, and his band of wolf haters.
“I heard their hunt was unsuccessful,” Luke commented. He watched the men recede, baring his teeth in a smile.
Julie joined him. “And what else did you hear?”
He looked at her, a glint of mischief in his eyes. “That they ran into a large gray wolf instead of the one they wanted to find. I hear they lost something of their dignity when the gray led them on a wild goose chase all the way out to the county line.”
“I see. Amazing how quickly word spreads, considering they just got back.”
“Yes. Amazing.”
They exchanged a long look. “Lots of amazing things have been happening these days,” she said. “Seems all a person can do is go with her gut.” She extended her hand. “I hope my gut doesn’t let me down, Luke Gévaudan.”
* * *
Julie’s gut was still on full alert when she went to the pay phone at Merritt’s gas station.
She dialed the number Alex had left at Mom’s house and waited while it rang. Luke Gévaudan was gone, but the hair continued to prickle along the nape of her neck, and only Alex’s voice pulled her out of the feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
“We’re about fifty miles west of the Saskatchewan border,” Alex’s voice said over the line. “At a gas station on the edge of a town called Falkirk. Kieran was insistent about stopping here, said he remembered something, but so far nothing has turned up.”
Julie pulled the map from her pocket and began to unfold it one-handed. Something’s sure as hell happened here, she thought.
“We made good time last night after we left the motel in Manitoba.” Alex continued. “We’ve been staying off the road for most of the daylight hours, but now that it’s late afternoon we’re getting ready to head out again.”
Julie glanced at her watch—four P.M.—and at the map she held spread against the grimy Plexiglass of the phone booth. “You’re still heading west on the expressway, right toward Kamloops? Does Kieran have any better idea of where he wants to go?”
“Not so far. He… hasn’t really talked about it.”
“Well, I’ve got a new suggestion. There’s a town in the mountains northeast of Kamloops called Lovell. I think Kieran should make for that area.”
She heard Alex’s question in her mind before it came out in words. “Why, Julie? Have you learned something?”