Wolf, at which point it loses the option of looking like Joe, but gains the ability to look like Jack. Can these things kill each other?"
"Probably," Baker said. "They don't seem to hunt each other down much, though. There never were many of them, thank the King."
I nodded. "Okay, then we've got several possible investigative avenues for us. First, where'd the thing come from? Your people seem to keep fair contact with each other, at least for big important stuff, and I'd guess you'd have known if there were statues turning up before now. Besides that, I've been doing a search through police files across the country and even in other countries I've gotten access to, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern of a bunch of people being found dead without marks on them. So as a first guess, this thing just recently became active. How and why, and from where?
"Second, we follow the movements, as best we can, of the victims, see if we can come up with anything in common that might lead us to the killer's home. It's a damn shame about the statue trick; it doesn't give us much info on time of death, and that means that since the killer can take on the appearance of its last Wolf victim, sightings of the victim at any time during the day preceding the statue's discovery could actually have been the Maelkodan using the victim's shape.
"Third, we remember that the creature has to be living here somewhere. Probably as a human being. If that's so, it must be using its default form. So you want to look for people who have arrived here only recently and have been here since the first killing. Aside from myself and Sylvie, of course. "
"You I'll grant," Baker said. "But just out of sheer cussedness, why can't she be the one?"
I stared at him, speechless for a moment.
"Y'all gotta admit, the timing fits. And I hear tell she can sense us coming. That's impossible for