1. Lila
1
LILA
I t was still dark out, yet Max stood next to the bed, his nose close to my face as his hot breath blew across my cheek, demanding attention. He gave a huff, his wet nose spraying on me. It was the same routine every morning. I reached up to wipe my face with the blanket, letting out a sigh.
That was all the confirmation my furry friend needed that I was finally getting up. After a bark of excitement and a twirl, my German shepherd partner stared at me with a tilted head.
“Yes, Max, I’m up,” I mumbled, pulling the covers up higher in an attempt to snuggle back down into warmth.
Not that it worked. Max grabbed the corner of the comforter and began tugging. I didn’t bother putting up a fight. I never won when it came to him. I sat up on the edge of the bed to get my bearings while Max retrieved my slippers and dropped them off next to my feet, taking a few steps back and sitting down. I probably abused his police dog abilities a bit, using his smarts for my own personal gain, but this wasn’t a trick I’d taught him. He just knew getting my slippers on was one step closer to going outside.
“You know there’s a doggy door, right? That it’s always open for you to go in and out whenever you want…right?”
Max gave a little huff and sneezed, obviously letting me know that he needed a morning walk with me and was not going out there alone.
“Okay, tough guy, let’s go.” I stretched and yawned before slipping my feet into the soft, fluffy slippers. Walking out of the small master of my two-bedroom bungalow, I went right for the coffeepot.
My house wasn’t the most extravagant. The decor was from my late adoptive mother, and I hadn’t gotten around to changing it because, well, it was home. The two bedrooms were on opposite sides of the one hall, the tiny, practically half-bath, bathroom at the end. A single linen closet was situated in the middle of the hall, and then the house opened into the kitchen and living room.
I remembered there being a wall dividing the kitchen and living room at one point, but my adoptive father had taken it down when Mom was going through her “we need more space” phase. I was young at the time and thought the place was practically a gymnasium, with all the open room. Now it was just Max and me, and the four paces it took to get from the microwave to the couch remained perfect for me.
My coffee mug was already in place from the night before, so I stuck a pod in the single-cup-dispensing machine and pressed the button. The aroma of caffeine filled me with such joy. Max waited patiently, understanding it took me some time to fully wake.
As the coffee poured, I reached for the hook next to the back door and pulled my pink, fluffy housecoat around me. It wasn’t long before I was sipping on the hot liquid gold and walking through my backyard.
The air was cool enough outside that my breath came out in white puffs. A heavy fog fell around the forest that surrounded my property. Leaves were just turning color now, gracefully falling to the ground and crunching beneath my slippers with each step. What my house lacked in square footage, it made up for with property size and lack of surrounding neighbors.
I lived on the outskirts of a little town named Port Renderson. It was only a twenty-minute drive to the next city in either direction, though those twenty minutes were peacefully spent driving through acres and acres of protected forest land. Land that I had been guarding since I was a young pup.
Max came jogging back to me, standing a few feet away and tilting his head to the side as if to ask, are you ready yet?
I took a final sip of my coffee, emptying my mug before setting it down on a rock. Slipping off my housecoat, I hung it on a tree as I began stripping out of my pajama shorts and shirt. I stood in my slippers, naked as the day I was born, my clothing neatly hung on the tree. The cold didn’t bother me, but I hated my feet touching the frozen morning ground.
With the first snap of my bones, Max’s tail began to wag, his excitement growing. My shifting phase had sped up over the years, but it still took me a minute as bones and organs broke, pulled, and rearranged, making room and morphing into shapes not humanly possible. White hair grew at an impossible rate, thick and heavy, covering my entire body.
I could feel a part of me relax. My ears twitched on the top of my head, picking up sounds I wouldn’t have been able to hear in my human form. My eyes could focus more deeply, taking in details I hadn’t seen before, while also negating certain color hues that my human eyes were able to detect.
It was always my sense of smell that astounded me, though. Right away, I threw my nose up into the air and took a few deep breaths. A herd of deer had been here last night, no…they were here early this morning. Maybe two hours before Max and I had come outside. One, two, three… I could pick up six different scent signatures.
My wolf was excited, wanting to go after the deer and chase them down, but Max had other things on his mind. Besides, it was rare I chased the local wildlife. I had no desire to frighten them, no matter how much adrenaline coursed through my wolfy veins.
Max waited patiently for me, allowing me time to get accustomed to my senses. Once my eyes focused on my pup, we both froze, each one waiting for the signal, before he jumped and I sprang forward.
I couldn’t run at full speed with him, but we were going fast enough that someone might mistake me for a white husky. As long as I didn’t pause long enough for them to see the size difference between Max and me. Only once did we end up on the community bulletin board, during hunting season. Poor old Dan Huely had gone on and on about the ghost wolf that haunted the forests. He would never live that down; I’d heard them teasing him last Friday at the pub.
We didn’t have enough time during the work week to run the whole perimeter of the town, but we ate up a good distance. Besides giving Max a run before he had to put his vest on, this gave me a chance to spread my scent. To mark my territory.
Despite being a wolf shifter—or werewolf or whatever proper terminology I was supposed to use—I didn’t know much of the shifter world. I’d been a newborn when I was left on the doorstep of my adoptive parents, but my exact age was unknown. My birthday became the day I was found, swaddled in a thick white blanket with two sprigs from a lilac tree resting on top. Lila was the name my mother, Hannah Evans, had given me.
All I knew about my kind were from fiction novels, movies, and shows. I picked and chose what sounded like it could be legit and what was too far out of this world, except was there really such a thing as too far-fetched? My human bones literally snapped and molded into place to form a massive wolf.
The first time I had shifted in front of my parents, I was four years old. Hannah screamed in horror at the cracking of bones, but once the shift was complete, she had surprisingly calmed down, even when in shock.
She played with me as a wolf pup, keeping me occupied until Jacob, my father, returned home from work. He never would’ve believed her, stating he was sure she had traded me for a puppy, if I hadn’t shifted back in front of him. That day was the one and only time Hannah and Jacob told me to keep a secret. It was a heavy secret I kept to myself to this day, even after their passing.
No one could know the truth about me, ever. The consequences could be dire.
The sun continued to slowly rise higher, the fog settling as warmth returned to the forest. Max and I made our way back home, stopping at my robe and slippers, so I could shift back into human form.
Changing from human to wolf was like cracking my knuckles or my back. It felt good, a release of tension, but changing back from wolf to human hurt. As my limbs rearranged, the bones fusing back into position, it was unnatural; my skin didn’t sit right on my body. It always took me at least an hour to get used to human form.
In my youth, there’d been times when I’d spent the whole weekend as a wolf. My parents weren’t particularly fond of it, mainly because they worried someone would find me and harm me. After I had explained to them it was the only time I felt close to my biological family, they let it go, as long as I took precautions and never got caught. Like any teen, I’d often wondered about my bio family, but as years passed and no one came forward, I let it go. They knew where they left me.
I had only ever run into three individual wolves in the past. They’d carried on after sniffing out my territory. I was pretty proud of the marking and claiming I had done over the years.
So, yeah…my family knew where I was. They just never cared enough to come back.
I pulled out a container of food for Max from the fridge, some raw food that I had previously frozen, then set it down in front of him, giving him time to eat while I showered and got ready for work.
When I’d first started at the academy, working towards becoming a police officer, I’d thought it was exactly what I wanted to do. All my life, I’d been told to hold back, not to show my abilities. I’d watched kids get picked on by bullies, I’d seen people get hurt, and I could’ve stopped it. I could’ve given those bullies a taste of their own medicine, but I didn’t. I played it safe.
To me, becoming a police officer was a way to atone for my lack of honor in my youth. I hadn’t been able to fight my own moral compass any longer.
I’d just started K9 training when my parents died. Mom succumbed to a stroke in her sleep, and it was a painful shock for both Dad and me. She’d been the love of his life, his first and only true love. He died exactly two weeks later, due to a heart attack. I knew he wouldn’t have lived long without her.
I carried on with my training, even with the loss of the only two people in my pack. They may have not been wolves, but they’d been my pack. That’s when I met Max. Seven years later, we were still inseparable. Max retired from the K9 unit last year when I took a promotion to detective and the department had offered me full ownership of him. Maybe, on paper, I was his owner, but he was my pack in more ways that anyone could imagine.
Stepping out of my room fully dressed and freshly showered, I headed right for the coffee machine and brewed myself another pod before taking a few waffles from the freezer and popping them into the toaster.
I didn’t even have the cup to my lips before my phone went off. I set it down with a frown and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Lila.” Jenny, the dispatcher, seemed out of breath. “I was told to call you in. There’s been another body found at Cartway Park.”
I closed my eyes. When I’d decided to become a detective, I had envisioned scenes from Sherlock Holmes—unlocking secrets, finding missing people, discovering a piece of thread and knowing all the answers.
While some of that was true, my detective role should be called homicide investigator . I wasn’t one to boast, but I was a good homicide investigator, even asked to travel now and then. No one knew it was my wolf that made me as successful as I was.
This, though… This would make the third body found in my small town in less than a month, and I was still no closer to a lead. All dropped in Cartway Park.
My heart sank and I nodded to the phone. “I’ll be right there.”
Before leaving, I gave Max a little pat on the head, where he was curled up on his bed, ready to sleep off his morning run. I kept the doggy door open for him, so he was able to go in and out as he pleased. He never left the property when I was gone, intent to guard our home.
Though Jenny sent me the directions to where exactly in the park I was being called out to, it wasn’t hard to find. The fact that five police cruisers and a mile-long caution tape lined the side of the road, where the forest met the ditch, hadn’t caused a large crowd of concerned neighbors was shocking. However, it was still early.
My chief was the first to greet me. Chief Rodney Nix was the least intimidating head of staff I had ever met. He was new to the job here, however, the guy seemed like he was better suited to a position where he handed out balloon animals and farted rainbows. The townspeople loved him, but it always boggled my mind how someone so happy-go-lucky ended up in such a position.
“Morning, Evans,” he greeted with a smile.
“Morning. What's going on?” I asked, getting right to it.
“Gosh, Lila. It's the darndest thing. Becky was out jogging—well, you know, she's training for that there marathon next summer. Anyhoo, she was coming down from South Gate Trail and nearly tripped over the body of a young male. Still unidentified.”
I frowned. “Is the body still here?”
“Oh, yeah, it is. I remember what ya said last time, ’bout keeping the scene as is. I only went in there to check for a pulse, but there's no darn use, as you know his heart is—”
“Missing.” I cut him off, turning to the forest and examining the scene that was taped off. This one followed the same pattern as the last two bodies found. All young men, all with their hearts ripped from their chest in a savage, animalistic way. “Is forensics on the way?”
“Yes, they will be a while yet.”
“Do we have an ID on the body?”
“Nope, John Doe.”
Figured.
“Okay, I want the area cleared until forensics shows up, crowd control and all. Ensure the park entrances are blocked off. We don’t need anyone wandering down the trails. The entire park is now a crime scene. I’m going to take a little walk. I want no officer in or around that perimeter.”
“Alrighty, then. You’re the boss.”
But I wasn’t—he was. I shook my head and walked around the perimeter I had set up for everyone else. I kept markers in my pocket and grabbed a camera from the car. For the next two hours, I combed.
I walked through each trail I knew, taking note of prints or anything that stood out, but it was more than that. I took note of the things others would miss.
This body, like the others, had been dumped here. But there were no drag marks to note, there were no broken branches or limbs you would get from another human pulling a body to a dump site. This body had been carried and dropped. No tire tracks, nothing left behind. Just like the previous victims.
Actually, there was one thing left behind. A faint scent that was so complex it continued to confuse me at each crime scene. A damp musk with an undertone with which I could only describe as natural gas. It was earthy, but not from this area. The scent had to have been carried here by the killer.
Once the forensics team arrived, we fell into our routine while the PD did crowd control. It was bliss. We worked together documenting everything before the body was then respectfully taken off site and to the morgue.
Even after removal, we stayed and combed the area twice, three times, four times, and by the sixth time, it was getting late. All samples were labeled properly and ready for the lab in the morning.
The team came from the city, so they would be delivering the samples themselves while I finished the paperwork on my end.
Before heading into the office for another late night of writing up reports, I stopped by the house and gave Max some love and his dinner. I picked up takeout from Sunshine Palace on my way in, then made myself comfortable as I spent another two hours writing up all findings and entering information into the case file.
I wasn’t the only one. A few other stragglers were sitting at their desks in the shared room of the precinct, writing up their events of the day.
By the end of my shift—or my double shift—I was more annoyed than exhausted. We’d collected everything we’d seen. Everything that forensics found, plus everything my wolf nose and eyes were able to pick up, and still, nothing.
The third body with a missing heart, and I was completely empty-handed. All evidence bagged and tagged, John Doe was now over in the cold cellar of the hospital, and that’s it. With absolutely nothing to go on, would we ever find this killer?
“Report from the morgue will take a few days,” Rodney said as he walked up to my desk.
“Yeah, I figured.” I closed down my laptop and began packing up for the night. “Third body, Chief, I think we should be calling this in.”
Rodney frowned. “We haven't any more to go on. Not much the higher-ups will be able to do.”
“Yeah, but there's a protocol in place. Third body in one month. Do you want to make the call, or do you want me to?”
“No, no, I will. You’re right, perhaps more manpower will be useful.”
“Never know. Maybe the database will take a hit if this guy has done the same thing somewhere else. They could even have more evidence on him.”
“So, you think it’s a male?”
“There are aspects that have me looking in either direction at this time. It could be a team.”
“Well, then, girlie, tell me your thoughts.”
Though I suppressed a sigh and a roll of my eyes, the pursed lips were immutable. Rodney had a lot of experience on the force; he should know better than to use pet names. It had my hackles standing on end whenever he did.
I leaned back in my chair and folded my hands on my lap. “Well, Roddy.” I pointedly stared at him while emphasizing his name, even though I knew he didn’t care if we used his nickname. “It’s easy to presume male, with the lack of drag marks and tracks. Someone strong enough to carry at least a hundred and sixty to two hundred pounds, given how large the victims were. However, we found no footprints or markings, and given how soft the soil is, we are also looking for someone light enough on their feet. That aside, this could be female. The crime itself is a crime of almost passion. Middle aged males, chests torn open, hearts removed.”
Now I was mumbling to myself, mulling over how anything in this case made sense.
“It had to have been a multiple person job.”
It had to have been a shifter. I wasn’t stupid. I knew there were more like me. I’d just never ran into a case where a shifter was a suspect. How would I even bring this up to a team? How would I investigate this without giving away who I was?
“Seems like a lot of uncertainty.” Roddy said.
His voice brought me out of my mind. “It is. It’s all presumptions. Like I said, we need to make a call to the city crime scene forensics. We need to build a team to properly investigate this.” I stood up, grabbing my bag. “See you tomorrow.” I gave Rodney an attempt at a smile.
“Evans,” he said as I passed by him. I turned to face him, and for the first time since I had worked at this precinct, Rodney wasn’t smiling. “Don’t be surprised if this case runs cold. The lack of evidence alone, with no suspects. I mean, this is Port Renderson—the chances of there being a serial killer in our town are one in a million.”
One in a million. That phrase played in my mind over and over. One. In. A. Million. This case was going to get solved. Even if I had to keep it going myself. There was a killer among us, and I would find them. The chances might be one in a million, but I doubted they expected having someone like me after them.