Danny winced, transposing the image: Marty Goines, HIM, the creature he was watching. “I need to look at your records. All the wolverines you’ve lent out to movies and animal shows.”

Cormier said, “Officer, you can’t lend Gulos out, much as I’d like to make the money. They’re my private passion, I love them and I keep them around because they shore up my reputation as a mustelidologist. You lend Gulos out, they’ll attack anything human or animal within biting range. I had one stolen out of its pen five or six years ago, and my only consolation was that the stealer sure as hell got himself mangled.”

Danny looked up. “Tell me about that. What happened?”

Cormier took out his cigar butt and fingered it. “In the summer of ‘42 I worked nights at the Griffith Park Zoo, resident zoologist doing research on nocturnal mustelid habits. I had an earlier bunch of wolverines that were getting real fat. I knew somebody must have been feeding them, and I started finding extra mouse and hamster carcasses in the pens. Somebody was lifting the food latches and feeding my Gulos, and I figured it for a neighborhood kid who’d heard about my reputation and thought he’d see for himself. Truth be told, it didn’t bother me, and it kind of gave me a cozy feeling, here’s this fellow Gulo lover and all. Then, late in July, it stopped. I knew it stopped because there were no more extra carcasses in the cages and my Gulos went back to their normal weights. About a year and a half or so went by, and one night my Gulo Otto was stolen. I laughed like hell. I figured the feeder had to have a Gulo for himself and stole Otto. Otto was a pistol. If the stealer got away with keeping him, I’m sure Otto bit him real good. I called hospitals around here to see if they stitched a bite victim, but it was no go, no Otto.”

Bit him real good.

Danny thought of sedation—a wolverine Mickey Finned and stolen—HIM with his own evil mascot—the story might just play. He looked back in the pen; the wolverine noticed something and lashed the wire, making screechy blood W noises. Cormier laughed and said, “Juno, you’re a pistol.” Danny put his face up to the mesh, tasting the animal’s breath. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Cormier,” pulled himself away and drove to the Joredco Dental Lab.

He was almost expecting a neon sign facade, an animal mouth open wide, the address numbers done up as teeth. He was wrong: the lab was just a tan stucco building, a subtly lettered sign above the door its only advertisement.

Danny parked in front and walked into a tiny receiving area: a secretary behind a desk, a switchboard and calendar art on the walls—1950 repeated a dozen times over, handsome wild animals representing January for local taxidermist’s shops. The girl smiled at him and said, “Yes?”

Danny showed his badge. “Sheriff’s. I’d like to speak to the man in charge.”

“Regarding?”

“Regarding animal teeth.”

The girl tapped an intercom switch and said, “Policeman to see you, Mr. Carmichael.” Danny looked at pictures of moose, bears, wolves and buffalos; he noticed a sleek mountain cat and thought of a wolverine stalking it, killing it off with sheer ugly persistence.

A connecting door swung open; a man in a bloody white smock came in. Danny said, “Mr. Carmichael?”

“Yes, mister?”

“It’s Deputy Upshaw.”

“And this regards, Deputy?”

“It regards wolverine teeth.”

No reaction except impatience—the man obviously anxious to get back to work. “Then I can’t help you. Joredco is the only lab in Los Angeles that fashions animal dentures, and we’ve never done them for a wolverine.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because taxidermists do not stuff wolverines—they are not an item that people want mounted in their home or lodge. I’ve worked here for thirteen years and I’ve never filled an order for wolverine teeth.”

Danny thought it over. “Could someone who learned the rudiments of animal-denture making here do it himself?”

“Yes, but it would be bloody and very slapdash without the proper tools.”

“Good. Because I’m looking for a man who likes blood.”

Carmichael wiped his hands on his smock. “Deputy, what is this in regard to?”

“Quadruple homicide. How far back do your employment records go?”

The “quadruple homicide” got to Carmichael—he looked shaken under his brusqueness. “My God. Our records go back to ‘40, but Joredco employs mostly women. You don’t think—”

Danny was thinking Reynolds Loftis wouldn’t sully his hands in a place like this. “I think maybe. Tell me about the men you’ve had working here.”

“There haven’t been many. Frankly, women work for a lower wage. Our current staff has been here for years, and when we get rush orders, we hire bums out of day labor and kids from Lincoln and Belmont High School to do the scut work. During the war, we hired lots of temporaries that way.”

The Joredco connection felt—strangely—like it was clicking in, with Loftis clicking out. “Mr. Carmichael, do you have a medical plan for your regular employees?”

“Yes.”

“May I see your records?”

Carmichael turned to the receptionist. “Sally, let Deputy whatever here see the files.”

Danny let the remark slide; Carmichael went back through the connecting door. Sally pointed to a filing cabinet. “Nasty prick, if you’ll pardon my French. Medicals are in the bottom drawer, men in with the women. You don’t think a real killer worked here, do you?”

Danny laughed. “No, but maybe a real live monster did.”

It took him an hour to go through the medical charts.

Since November ‘39, sixteen men had been hired on as dental techs. Three were Japanese, hired immediately after the Jap internment ended in ‘44; four were Caucasian and now in their thirties; three were white and now middle-aged; six were Mexican. All sixteen men had, at one time or another, given blood to the annual Red Cross Drive. Five of the sixteen possessed O+ blood, the most common human blood type. Three of the men were Mexican, two were Japanese—but Joredco still felt right.

Danny went back to the shop and spent another hour chatting up the techs, talking to them while they pried teeth out of gum sections removed from the heads of elk, deer and Catalina Island boar. He asked questions about tall, gray-haired men who acted strange; jazz; heroin; guys with wolverine fixations. He breathed blood and animal tooth infection and stressed strange behavior among the temporary workers who came and went; he threw out teasers on a handsome Hollywood actor who just might have made the scene. The techs deadpanned him, no’d him and worked around him; his only lead was elimination stuff: most of the temps were Mex, wetbacks going to Belmont and Lincoln High sans green cards, veterans of the Vernon slaughterhouses, where the work was twice as gory and the money was even worse than the coolie wages Mr. Carmichael paid. Danny left thinking Reynolds Loftis would faint the second he hit the Joredco line; thinking the actor might be circumstantial linkage only. But Joredco/Cormier still felt right; the blood and decay smelled like something HE would love.

The day was warming up; heat that felt all the worse for coming after heavy rain. Danny sat in the car and sweated out last night’s drunk; he thought elimination, thought that the day labor joints kept no records in order to dodge taxes, that the high school employment offices were long shots he had to try anyway. He drove to Belmont High, talked to the employment counselor, learned that her records only went back to ‘45 and checked the Joredco referrals—twenty-seven of them—all Mexes and Japs. Even though he knew the age range was wrong, he repeated the process at Lincoln: Mexes, Japs and a mentally deficient white boy hired because he was strong enough to haul two deer carcasses at a time. Gooser. But the rightness kept nagging him.