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you as it does to me?”
    “Like a dead fish down the back of the radiator,” she said with a nod. “You’re right—I’d bet any money somebody extracted him. Either his own people, or those government wankers who kept trying to take over the case.” The Counter Terror Action Team, a group she’d never heard of before or since. “They were obviously pretty eager to get control of the one skinbinder with the know-how to make pelts from human skin.” Pierce hesitated, wondering if she could trust him with her wilder conspiracy theories. “And that’s not all that stinks. My old superintendent—Howard Palmer. You heard that he retired?”
    Leo cocked his head. “You think they forced him out?”
    “Worse than that.” She pressed her lips together, assembling an argument that still felt almost too paranoid even to her. “He came to see me in the hospital after I’d had my op—or at least, somebody claiming to be Palmer did. Looked and sounded like him, but the way he was acting was all wrong. Nervous, police uniform in a mess... I’d have been willing to call it stress if he hadn’t been missing his silver watch.”
    With the details of their last shared case probably still even fresher in Leo’s mind than in hers, it took him barely a moment to twig to the implications. “You think he was replaced by a shapeshifter.”
    Pierce let out a huff and shook her head slightly, aware how mad it sounded. “Maybe I’m nuts,” she admitted. “But he’s completely disappeared. Supposedly moved to France, and didn’t leave contact details behind him.” And there was no way to know if the new superintendent who’d taken his place was an innocent patsy or part of the conspiracy.
    She was relieved when Leo nodded thoughtfully rather than dismissing it out of hand. “It’s possible,” he said. “The people involved in this clearly have a long reach.” He straightened in his seat. “Any leads?”
    “Maybe,” she hedged. “I had a run-in with a group calling themselves Red Key back in December: organised, well-funded, and they had a whole bunch of shapeshifters working for them. Only managed to arrest one of them, but he was wearing a pelt with Sebastian’s maker’s mark. I had our Enchanted Artefacts man analyse the pelt’s age—the results wouldn’t stand up in court, but he swears it was made after Sebastian supposedly died.”
    Leo drew in a long breath and nodded slowly. “So that’s the start of the trail,” he said. “If Sebastian’s alive, we need to find him.” His gaze sharpened as he focused on her. “You said you apprehended the shapeshifter. Still alive?” he asked.
    She nodded. He was last time she’d checked—and she checked pretty frequently. “Had a suicide rune on the roof of his mouth, but we knew to look for it this time.” Unlike the decidedly unpleasant outcome the last time they’d arrested one of Sebastian’s crew. “Didn’t manage to get a word out of him in questioning, though.”
    “Well, he’ll have had time to stew by now,” Leo said. “You confront him about the age of the pelt?”
    She shook her head. “Not yet. Cliff only came back to me with the results today.”
    “Then we’ve got time to press before anyone finds out you’ve got something,” Leo said, standing up. “We should head over there right now.”
    Pierce could have pointed out there was little reason to bring Leo along for that, but she didn’t have the heart.
    “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

 

     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    P IERCE HAD CAUSE to doubt the wisdom of bringing Leo along with her as she watched the painstakingly slow, stiff way he bent to lace his shoes, and again as she accompanied him to her car; he hadn’t brought the cane, and his limp seemed to worsen even over the short walk to where she’d parked. She wondered if the reason he’d opted to leave his wife a note was less to avoid questions about where they were going, and more to avoid ones about