Free Stalking the Others by Jess Haines Page B

you can’t carry the weight of that knowledge, you’re not in the right place.”
    Well. Good to know. Though the serious words were a bit incongruous coming out of the mouth of a man wearing a Daffy Duck T-shirt, I wasn’t about to point out the inconsistencies.
    Bo nudged the vodka and juice closer to me and then got up, taking his glass with him. He clapped me lightly on the shoulder before heading back to bed, saying nothing more as I pondered the mysteries of the contents of my glass.
    Bo hadn’t used a bad analogy when he compared the burden of knowing what I’d done with a heavy weight. My shoulders were stooped with the burden of knowledge, and I felt as if I was carrying around about a thousand extra mental pounds. Nothing wanted to line up like it had in my formerly simple life. It might not have been perfect, but it all made sense before, and my worries, though they had seemed huge and occasionally insurmountable at the time, had become laughably minuscule in the face of the need to kill-or-be-killed.
    Though I was a private investigator, I had been reluctant to use old-fashioned, reliable methods to gather what I needed and end this as rapidly as possible. I was thinking too much like a law-abiding citizen. Early on, using my key to get into and search Chaz’s home and sending one of the White Hats to question some of the people at the gym where he worked hadn’t led to any clues, but I had done a very haphazard job in my haste.
    Now that I was thinking about it more rationally, I couldn’t imagine Chaz hadn’t called and said something about where he was going to the guys at work. At the very least, he must have contacted them to let them know he wouldn’t be in to teach his regular cardio and body-conditioning classes. I’d been expecting him to hide somewhere off the radar, and I was acting under the assumption that the only way to find him would be to use supernatural connections.
    Though I was still counting on those supernatural connections being my best bet, there had to be some other, more mundane means of finding him, too.
    The police were hindered by procedure. I doubted they had solid proof of Chaz’s connection to the murders of those people who had been suspected of being infected with lycanthropy outside of contracts, other than what Jim Pradiz had provided only a few weeks before. Since the cops might not yet have thought to use banking or credit card activity to track him down, or even bothered getting started on looking for him when he wasn’t necessarily implicated as a suspect, the wait to get a search warrant approved for credit card records could take a while. Not only that, but the credit card company had up to ten days once they were served to supply the records. Theoretically, that could drag out beyond the end of the month, if the cops even thought to go that route to find him.
    Chaz received his bank statements via e-mail. I’d seen him check one, once, using his computer at home. He’d set up his system to automatically download his e-mails without a password. If his computer was still there, there might be an e-mail trail or something in his bank statements that would lead me to him.
    I did some mental calculations, picking up the bottle of vodka as I rose and headed back to my room. From my recollection, he wouldn’t be getting that e-mail from his bank for another few days. Painful to wait, but I could manage. In the meantime, I’d return to Chaz’s gym and do a search for the next best thing.
    It was about time Kimberly and I had a reckoning.

Chapter 10
    (Days left to full moon: 17)
     
    There is nothing quite like going on a bender when your life is on the line.
    I woke up with a taste in my mouth like something had crawled in there to die, my joints still burning with the fire of a thousand suns, and a jackhammer pounding its way out of my skull. Not to mention a queasiness that rivaled the one time Sara and I had bought one of those big box taco deals from some