“Or if whoever did this found what they were looking for,” Cooper added as he skimmed through the book. It was all very animal-specific, of course, and not at all relevant to werewolves. A sort of general coverall directed toward laypeople: the origins of their dogs’ quirks, some basic biology, the decimation of the wolf population by their only real predator—humans—and their loss of habitat. It was all told along the loose thread of Hirano’s thirteen months living in isolation in the Yukon while attempting to follow one particular pack who, she explained in the foreword, first avoided her, then seemed to tolerate her distant observation, but ultimately rejected her, disappearing from the territory after a “particularly antagonistic encounter.”

And yet Cooper couldn’t put it down. He wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. In a way, it seemed like too weird a coincidence that she had written an entire book on wolves. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t weird at all. She’d already mentioned more than once that they were one of the species she tracked as a documentarian, and wolves were a popular figure in public imagination. He doubted there was much market for the Ecology, Behavior and Mythology of Fisher Cats. And it’s not like she was writing about werewolves.

Cooper was about to put the book back down when one sentence caught his eye:

If we dismiss the myth of a single dominating alpha, the question we must ask ourselves is what then binds a wolf pack together? The simplest answer I can offer is a common purpose. What does this—

“Find something interesting?”

Cooper gasped and almost dropped the book. Park was standing over him, clearly amused.

“I was just—Hirano wrote it,” he said, handing the book over to Park, who took it and skipped directly to the back, About the Author, which Cooper wished he’d done himself and avoided being caught entranced by a book on animal wolves like a dickhead.

“She wrote this ten years ago. It says she had plans to return, to try to relocate the pack she followed.”

“I wonder if she ever did,” Cooper said. Park flipped back a couple of pages and stilled suddenly. “What? What is it?”

Park handed him the book. It was open to the acknowledgments page, and Cooper skimmed it, looking for what had caught Park’s eye.

...and special thanks to my friend Emily Freeman, without whom I would never have understood that we uncover the answers we go looking for, but must wait for the truth to come find us.

“What the hell is Freeman doing in Hirano’s book?” Cooper asked quietly.