“Hello, this is Detective Oliver Vickers with Toronto PD. I was wondering if you could help me out?”
“Of course, Detective, what can we do for you?” The woman sounded happy to help, but also a bit confused. It probably wasn’t every day a detective called them.
“I’m working on a case,” I said. “And this is going to sound a little strange, but I wanted to see what kind of reports you all may have about wolves, big dogs, or maybe overly large foxes.” In the dark, to a human, those animals might all look similar. “It has to do with some of the witness statements.”
“Wolves?” the woman said. “I’m not sure about that. I’d have to dig through the records. How far back are you looking for?’
A quick scan of the dates I had gave me a bit of a time frame, but I decided to go even farther back in case the guy had been lurking in Toronto before his first attack.
“Two months?”
“All right, Detective Vickers,” the woman said. “I can look up all those reports, but it may take a while. Can I send them to you tomorrow sometime?”
“Sure, that works.”
I gave her Ollie’s official email and hung up. I’d let him know to forward the reports to me when they came in.
The map sat, almost chiding me over my lack of progress. This guy was becoming a pain in my ass. He wasn’t following any of the typical feral behaviors. It was ridiculous. He was desperate, but from what Ollie and I could find, he hadn’t stolen anything off the victims. At least then, we could have tracked usage on credit cards and triangulated from there.
No, the guy was surviving by stealing from stores, and… what? I supposed he could have been eating small animals in his wolf form. That would give him sustenance without attracting too much attention. Still, a feral should have been on the outskirts of the city. I kept going back to the rich areas of the city where men of his description had been spotted the most.
The guy was desperate enough to invade a pack’s territory he didn’t belong in, yet he was still sane enough to keep to certain areas more than others. In a fit of frustration, I finished my beer and tossed it across the room into the trash can, the bottle rattling into the bottom of the can.
My phone rang. It was an unlisted number. Hope and excitement surged through me as I answered.
“Is this who I think it is?” I asked.
“Hello again, Nathan. How are you?”
“I’m great, but now isn’t the time for pleasantries. Do you have an ID on the picture I sent you yet?”
The electronically warped voice chuckled on the other end of the phone. “My dear Nathan, you must learn that sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.”
I sank into my chair. “Nothing?” I asked, a depressed tone creeping into my voice.
“The CCTV picture you sent me became a bit clearer after I scrubbed it, but it’s still not great. Whatever store you were in needs to upgrade their security cameras. Facial recognition turned up nothing. This man is not on any national databases. That tells us he’s not a part of any formal organizations, past or present. After digitally cross-referencing it with mugshots, there was also no match. Meaning, he’s not been in the system, either.”
Most shifters who were born and raised in packs tended to strive toward something better—to become lawyers, businessmen, politicians, or even cops like Ollie. A shifter’s one goal was to make something of themselves to allow them to surreptitiously help their packs behind the scenes. Shifters who were exiled for crimes against their alpha or for other reasons lost that support, and as they slipped into becoming feral, they tended to make bad decisions and end up in the system somewhere somehow. Unlike me, most didn’t keep their sanity and humanity. Many of those exiled never even made it to a full feral. They tended to get killed by humans well before the full transformation took place.
The fact that this guy was this far gone but had managed to stay off the radar was really fucking weird.
“What about the general description? Anything there?” I asked.
The contact sighed heavily. “I did some digging on that end as well. Using the general age, body shape, race, and other things I could glean from the picture, I ran it through the missing persons database.”
“And?” I probed.
“Andthere were dozens of matches from jobs like laborers, food service, and lower-skill blue-collar workers. Of those, mostof the men had substance abuse issues or had run-ins with the police so would have been in the system somewhere, which our suspect is not.”
Ollie hadn’t been able to find any proof that high-ranking or significant pack members from local packs had gone missing. If the guy belonged to one of those packs, he would be of low standing and possibly unknown to the higher levels.
A nobody. Like me.
The fact that I had anything in common with the psycho I was chasing made my skin crawl.
“Anything else?” I asked, trying to get my mind off that train of thought.
“Not as of yet. I will update you should anything come from my research.”
