“Why does that surprise you?” His voice was dry. “Ultimately, we have a duty to our clan to mate with our own kind. It’s the only way our species can survive.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Caroline. Caroline Lambert.” Although Cody’s voice remained calm, his knuckles whitened on the steering wheel when he said her name. “We met at a gathering of the clans in Montreal the summer I was twenty-one.”

“Montreal?”

“It has an underground city and a functioning underworld.” That muscle in his jaw twitched again. “And a narrow but deep streak of conservative Catholicism that would like to see, like Mr. Huizenga, that very underworld razed and destroyed. The hunter happened to be of that persuasion.”

“You think he did it on purpose.”

“I’m sure of it,” he said grimly. “The Montreal clan weren’t discreet, and they had human enemies.”

“Did the police investigate?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Caroline was killed during the full moon. Nothing to investigate about a wolf carcass.”

“Yeah, but . . .” A sense of indignation swamped me. “Cody, she was a person, too! Couldn’t her clan have done something?”

“They tried,” he said briefly. “The police weren’t interested.”

I put two and two together. “That’s why you became a cop.” Mistress of the obvious, me.

Cody gave a curt nod. “We’ve always existed on the fringes, Daisy, walking the line between human and animal, between civilization and wilderness. It makes us vulnerable in ways that don’t affect others in the community. Hunters have always killed wolves. And contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take a silver bullet, just a bullet. As a police officer, I’m in a position to help protect my clan.”

I had a feeling there were some serious flaws in his logic, and it occurred to me that if he was serious about the whole mating-within-his-species thing, there was no way he was interested in a real relationship with Jen, but I also had a feeling this would be a good time to keep my mouth shut, so I went ahead and did that.

We drove along the bluff above the river, passing the road down to the mobile home community where my mom still lived. I saw Cody glance briefly in that direction before making a left turn, and I was glad he remembered.

Brent Timmons lived in a ramshackle old farmhouse in the country. He came shambling up to the door when we rang the doorbell, scratching his bulging belly beneath an impressive overhang of bushy black beard.

“Cody, man!” His eyes lit up, and he stuck out one big, hairy mitt of a hand. “Whassup? How’s life on the straight and narrow?”

Belatedly, I recognized his name and remembered that Cody and Brent had been in the same graduating class at Pemkowet High.