Jersey Shore, but up north, close to New York. They have a postage-stamp lot backed up to another postage-stamp lot, with neighbors all around them. You could spit and hit two different highways. And guess what they have in their backyard every night.”
“A lot of noise?”
“Smart-ass,” she said but didn’t seem angry. If anything, he’d made her smile. She shook her head. “Deer. They eat my grandma’s garden and make her crazy. It’s not a place where you’d think you’d see deer, but there they are, and why? Because they’ve been driven there. They don’t have another place to go.”
“You’re saying whatever’s attacking the menagerie has been driven here?”
“Could be. Land development, taking away territory. Chemicals in the water, changing the food supply. Something we don’t even know about, like down in Florida, where those people are dropping off their ball pythons and anacondas that got too big to be pets, and now they’re breeding and fighting with the alligators for dominance on the food chain.”
“That’s not happening here,” Jordan said.
Monica gave him a solemn look. “Could be something else, then. Too many gators being taken, maybe this thing normally eats them, and now it’s hungry. Whatever it is, it’s discovered the menagerie, and it’s not going to stop coming back unless we stop it.” She paused. “Why is it so hard for you to believe?”
“I don’t believe in monsters,” he said flatly.
Monica laughed. “You’re lucky, then. Because trust me, they exist. Or they did and have gone extinct. Or, like in this case, haven’t been discovered.”
“Maybe it’s zombies,” he said, deadpan. Scoffing.
She narrowed her eyes. “You mean like voodoo?”
“I mean like ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara,’” Jordan said. “Voodoo is a religion.”
She frowned again. “I wasn’t trying to be offensive. Zombies like in Night of the Living Dead definitely are not real, I can tell you that much.”
“No? But Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are, huh?”
She turned on him, finally, with a scowl. “I’m a cryptozoologist, Jordan. That means I search for the existence of animals whose existence has not been proven. Or things outside their natural realm. Do you know that just last year a half-sized cougar was discovered rummaging in the Dumpsters of restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen? A cougar in New York City.”
“That’s not surprising, I bet there are lots of cougars in the city,” Jordan said.
Monica laughed, and he discovered how much he liked the sound of it. “Not that kind of cougar. My point is, it might’ve been someone’s pet that got too big or some kind of inbred cougar that managed to thrive in the urban environment. People had been reporting sightings of it for months before the Crew came in and was able to trap it. But first we had to prove it existed.”
“A cougar is still a real animal.”
“Yes. But there are things in the world we don’t know or understand, whether you want to believe it or not. And they’re animals, too. People can’t turn into something else. No vampires, no zombies, no werewolves. There are monsters, but they’re not human.”
Not human.
Monica drew herself up and visibly shook herself. “Look, I’m here to do a job, so let me get on with it, okay? What’s on the other side of this wall?”
“Bayou.”
“I guess that goes without saying,” she said. “Dumb question, sorry.”
“DiNero put a lot of money into draining his land. Lots of money into landscaping. You wouldn’t know there’s anything out there besides more grass, I guess.” Jordan tried to shrug off her words, but they clung to him, making his skin itch.
“I’ve never been to Louisiana before, if you can believe it.” She gave him a small smile and another of those neutral but somehow assessing looks. She turned back to the wall, then glanced at him over her shoulder. “Can you take me over the wall? I want to see the other side.”
Jordan paused. “Yeah. I guess so.”
They spent the rest of the day that way. He took her outside the gates and showed her the places that had been compromised. She collected scrapings of the bricks. The soil. The water. She didn’t tell him what she was looking for, and Jordan didn’t ask. When finally she was satisfied, he brought her back inside. They’d shared scarcely more than a few words, which normally would’ve been perfect, except that the longer she went without paying attention to him, the more disconcerting he found it. They’d been driving in one of the estate’s golf carts, so he pulled up into the small space between their bungalows and waited for her to get out.
What the hell kind of woman seduced a man and then proceeded to ignore him as if they’d never been naked and sweating and...
“Thanks,” Monica said.
Jordan shrugged, stone-faced. “It’s my job.”
“Not everything you did was part of your job,” she said. When he didn’t answer her, she gave him another enigmatic smile and got out of the golf cart. “See you later.”
He watched her go, waiting to see if she’d turn back. She didn’t. But he was suddenly so damned hard it hurt to move. It made his hands shake, so he clenched them into fists on his thighs, but the hunger didn’t abate. It rose within him, something fierce and unyielding, until all he could think about, all he could do, was get out of the golf cart and force himself to put on a pair of running shorts and go for a run.
Run. And run. And run.
By the time he got back, night had fallen. Golden light welcomed him from the windows of her bungalow, while his were cold and dark. Breathing hard, the coiled snake of hunger still hissing in his belly but low and quieter, Jordan paused to bend over and spit into the grass.
Her door opened. Her silhouette made him groan. She took a step onto the patio and was followed by the waft of something warm and delicious. His stomach growled.
Not human, he thought.
“I made dinner,” Monica said. “Come inside.”
She’d begged supplies from the main house, despite the cook’s assurances she didn’t need to make her own dinner. But Monica liked to cook. It helped her think. While chopping and slicing and sautéing, she could let her mind wander over all the possibilities.
Too bad most of the possibilities had involved going another round with the taciturn and delicious Jordan Leone instead of figuring out what exactly was attacking the menagerie.
There was a science to what she did, though you couldn’t get most people to believe it. Tracking prints in the dirt or analyzing blood samples or simply calculating what sort of musculature would be needed for something to be able to jump over a wall. What sort of claws could dig through brick, what kind of hide was thick enough to fend off the bite of barbed wire. The Crew kept files. Made reports. She and her peers compared notes. But still, so much of what they did had to be based on speculation. When you couldn’t prove something, that was all you could go on.
Vadim had sent her down here thinking she might be looking for a chupacabra. Never mind it wasn’t killing goats and it was out of the normal territory associated with that beast—there weren’t many things that could do whatever this thing was doing. Yet after looking over the pictures of the slaughter and having Jordan take her around the estate, Monica wasn’t convinced. She’d been on a couple cases hunting chupacabras before, and while they could certainly cause a lot of damage, there’d never been one she’d seen or heard of that could drag away a full-grown tiger or even a half-sized mountain