"One of the others," the prisoner replied, his voice robot-like.
"He's under compulsion to tell the truth," Radomir said. "I placed it myself. But save your questions for when we reach Mr. DeLuca's home. That way we will not be repeating ourselves."
"All right," Randy sighed. "How's Ashe doing?"
"He's fine, breathing evenly and his heart rate is good," Aedan replied. Ashe's father held the sleeping boy in his lap on the passenger side of Winkler's van while Nathan Anderson climbed into the driver's seat and started the vehicle. He didn't even use the lights to navigate his way through Cloud Chief.
* * *
"Dad, it's Winkler's van!" Marco shouted, looking out the kitchen window.
"Come on," Marcus led the way outside, followed by Marco, Sali and Micah Rocklin. They all stood in shocked surprise as Winkler and all three missing vampires piled out, followed by Randy Smith, Ashe Evans and Paul Harris, Cloud Chief's English teacher. Mr. Harris was held firmly between Radomir and Winkler.
"Here's your culprit, and there are two dead collaborators in the back of the van," Winkler said.
"What the hell?" Marcus stared in dismay at Paul Harris.
"Come along, he has a story to tell and I don't want you to miss a single word," Aedan said, carrying Ashe, who was now awake.
"Hey, dude," Ashe gave Sali a weak smile. Sali was whooping and punching the sky immediately.
* * *
"This is what Ashe used to solve what we couldn't," Aedan handed over the photograph and the receipt. The photograph showed Paul Harris, standing next to Dawn Smith, his hands on the shoulders of two small boys. Twins, actually.
"Dawn and Paul were married?" Denise was shocked by what she saw.
"Long ago," Aedan nodded. "You only knew Dawn after she left Paul Harris behind. Ashe filched that photograph from your father's album," he added. "It's yours, when Marcus is done with it, that is."
"But how?" Denise still didn't understand.
"My boys are dead, and she went off and married that human," spittle flew from Mr. Harris' mouth as he hissed the word human. "I wanted both of them to die. The boy and his father. My boys died in a fire and she went off and married him."
"How did you hook up with those others?" Marcus growled at Mr. Harris. He'd seen both bodies in the back of Winkler's van. One looked human, except for the pointed ear tips. The other was something out of myth. It carried a jackal's head atop an eight-foot human body, except for the claws it bore on hands and feet. One of the two that had come to help Winkler said he was misshapen—an aberration from the normal. Not knowing exactly what normal was for that particular race, Winkler had refrained from asking questions.
"I went looking for someone who could help me," Paul Harris replied, his eyes unfocused. "I caught them spying on the New Mexico community one night, and when I learned they were looking for a boy who appeared human and whose mother had gone to a certain clinic in St. Louis, I'd found the perfect collaborators." Paul Harris blinked at Marcus—his words were forced. He wanted to fight Radomir's compulsion, but it was much too strong. He couldn't deny it.
"Randy fit the description; they just needed to get him away from Dawn and Terry," Mr. Harris went on. "They don't have any desire to start a race war with the vampires and the werewolves; they've had a war going with some of their own kind for thousands of years. But the numbers are dwindling on both sides. When the Bright side came up with the idea of farming out the births by donating eggs, it was an ideal situation. Their half-children are nearly as capable as the full-blood ones, and make good soldiers in the army. When the Dark side got a whiff of what the Bright side was doing, they sent out some of their own to kill the children."
"This is worse than I ever imagined it could be," Radomir sighed. "In my experience with the Elemaiya, even though they call themselves Dark and Bright, in my opinion there's not much difference between the two. They only see an enemy and will stop at nothing to kill one another. Put them side by side and they look exactly the same."
"I've never heard of them before," Marcus said. "Paul, how did you manage to get Randy to say what he did, to get him expelled from the community?"
"Not hard. Those things have their own version of compulsion. They told him what to say and when to say it. Convenient, don't you think, that Ben happened to be in the same restaurant when Randy let that slip?"
"You arranged it," Marcus said flatly.
"I certainly did. I fooled every one of you. Didn't I?" he grinned widely, leering at Marcus. "It would have been easy to kill Randy afterward, except my collaborators discovered he wasn't the one they were after. Ashe was."
"But what about James? Why was he killed?" Denise asked. The Johnsons would want to know.
"He saw the Elemaiya that night. Was going straight to you, Marcus, with the information. We had to stop him, you see. One of the others dumped his body behind the Evans' house. We thought it would implicate Aedan. We didn't know he wasn't at home."
"And you wrote the letter that Randy was supposed to have written," Marcus was now beginning to see how it was all done.
"I did. I have plenty of papers from all the students over the years. Wasn't hard to reproduce Randy's handwriting, now was it? I drove to Santa Fe the weekend before the letter was delivered here and mailed it from there."
"Hence the receipt," Radomir tapped the receipt for fuel that bore the Santa Fe address. "He then attempted to place the blame on Harold for James's death, beheaded Harold and killed Pat Roberts, only Pat's body wasn't supposed to be found so we'd think Pat killed Harold and fled afterward. And then had his cronies place more compulsion on the Daniels woman to kill herself and attempt to kill Ashe at the same time, to account for the human deaths. When he was standing in your yard, Mr. DeLuca, pretending to help guard the children, one of his partners tried to kill Ashe with another stolen gun."
"But what about Megan?" Marco had listened silently while Paul Harris confessed, but no mention had been made of Megan.
"We don't need humans infiltrating Cloud Chief," Mr. Harris focused on Marco. "You would have brought her in; don't try to deny it. So I had her killed. It was convenient, too, after we killed Terry Smith, to make it look like a human serial killer was on the loose. The Daniels woman was a perfect choice for my plan." Marco cursed at Paul Harris' words.