Chapter Two
Howling, Homicide, and Highly Unapproved Investigations
Nick
Like every day, exactly at eight, the car stops at the Starbucks drive-thru. I focus on the sound as the soft and sluggish voice orders a coffee that can replace engine oil. The same one he got yesterday. And the day before. And every day for the past six months, and I’d bet long before that.
Then the car takes off.
I keep my distance but follow it as I do almost every day.
It parks in the same spot, a street over from the Pawsitive Care Veterinary Clinic.
The name is so cute and so unlike Elliot, I need to know the story behind it.
I would ask him if it wouldn’t sound suspicious as fuck and if the guy would ever talk to me for more than a couple of minutes.
Elliot steps out, slamming the door behind him a little louder than necessary. But that’s routine too.
He's cranky in the morning. Like the sun has personally offended him by rising.
But you wouldn't know that just by looking at him.
His perfectly styled dark hair, which he must spend hours getting right, his spotless white Henley T-shirt, and crisp, tight black pants make him look the part of the respectable veterinarian.
His long lashes, pink pouty lips, and lack of facial hair give him an innocent, non-threatening look.
He definitely works hard to achieve that because Elliot isn’t sweet or nice, not even in the vicinity of that.
It must work well because he has a steady stream of loyal customers coming in and out of the clinic, mostly women with pets.
Elliot isn’t interested in women, though.
Oliver let it slip once, not that it’s a big secret.
He wouldn't have said it otherwise. But I saved that information like I save every other thing about Elliot in hopes I can finally figure out if he knows about werewolves.
The fact that I haven’t gotten even close to uncovering anything suspicious in the last six months is horrible for my ego as an LAPD detective and a Werewolf Regulation Bureau Agent. I know he’s hiding something.
My instincts are never wrong.
Elliot drags himself to the clinic, sipping his jet fuel slowly, and my eyes follow his every sluggish movement until the door closes behind him.
I park a little distance away so I have a good vantage point without being visible.
I met Elliot around six months ago at my brother's fake Christmas party that he organized to distract his neighbor, now fiancé, Oliver. Matt was on a Bureau mission to stop Oliver from discovering our existence.
It worked out perfectly, depending on who you ask.
Being a firm supporter of Matt's happiness, I'd say it was a great plan. But I’m sure our Bureau supervisor disagrees wholeheartedly. Because Matt didn’t have as much of a handle on Oliver’s curiosity as he believed, and it led to a crazed werewolf attacking Oliver.
He ended up learning about our existence in the process.
But I know I saw Elliot's eyes flicker to Matt as he shifted that day. His poker face was good, but not that good. We had an agent conduct a covert interview to see whether he knew about werewolves, but he acted completely oblivious.
I didn’t believe it for a second. Despite the distractions, I know what I saw.
My wolf was intrigued by Elliot the moment I saw him, but after that incident, I was too.
So, here I am, like every day, as if I don’t have a thousand open cases in my day job and two pending assignments and a hundred incomplete reports due in my other full-time gig.
Just to get an indication that Elliot knows about us.
Because people knowing about us without us being aware of it creates loose ends that can lead to disasters.
My phone rings, snapping me out of my staring match with Elliot’s clinic door.
“Do you have time before your shift to swing by the hospital?” Meena's voice fills my car. She is the LA Werewolf Regulation Bureau supervisor, single-handedly responsible for keeping the Bureau agents in line while stopping shit from going sideways.
The Bureau was created to deal with werewolf-related crimes on the down low and keep our existence a secret from humans so they don’t react the way humans react to anything they can't control.
We primarily do that by placing agents with emergency and medical services and tackling issues as they come.
I give the door another lingering gaze. I still had an hour until my shift started. “I think I can make it,” I say. “Why, what's up?”
“Another werewolf died by heart attack yesterday," she says, her voice grave.
My eyebrows shoot up. “So the killer didn’t leave after all.” I’ve been hearing about a serial killer targeting the werewolves of the city for a few years now. A team of off-field agents, who are not planted in human departments, has been working on the case for a while.
As far as I knew, they hadn’t found a single trace yet. And then a few months ago, the murders stopped abruptly. The Bureau was sure the killer had moved on. Clearly not.
This doesn’t bode well for my extracurricular project or my sleep. If Meena wants me to look at the body, she’s planning to make some big changes.
I tune in to Meena’s words. “We won’t know for sure until Marcus is done with the autopsy. But pretty much looks like the same MO right now,” she says.
“I’ll be there in twenty,” I tell her, already starting the engine.
“Perfect. I’ll join you and Camilla in half an hour,” she says and disconnects without so much as a goodbye.
From what I’d gathered over the years, the first suspicious werewolf body showed up at the hospital almost five years ago.
Coincidentally, it was during Dr. Camilla Reyes’ shift.
Cami, a fellow Bureau agent, didn’t make much of it at the time.
She reported it as a natural death with the Bureau, because everything werewolf-related is reported.
But when three other heart attacks were reported in werewolves in a year, Cami quickly flagged it.
We’ve kept an eye out for heart attack cases in werewolves since then.
Someone was killing these people in cold blood. Even though I wasn’t actively working the case, it hurt my ego that a serial killer was roaming my city. But I didn’t feel too bad for the victims because we found the pattern with these killers pretty quickly.
All the victims were under investigation for one crime or another by the Bureau. So, someone was cleaning the streets for us. But when the eighth body shows up in five years, you have to wonder how long before the cleaning turns into plain destruction for sport.
I find a spot in the hospital’s parking lot.
As soon as I step in, the air hits me with the layered smell of bleach and chemicals, and beneath it all, the faint scent of death that no disinfectant can fully hide.
The sharp lights, too bright, make my skin itch with the need to run the other way.
I make my way down to the morgue instead.
Cami meets me at the door. I draw her into a hug.
“Oh, look who has time to meet his friends again,” she comments.
You miss one Sunday brunch with the group, and they practically report you missing. Elliot was being particularly sketchy that day. He hadn’t left his house for the entire weekend.
“We met like two days ago.”
She lightly taps my head on our way in. “You came late, so it doesn’t count. Why weren’t you at brunch anyway? And don’t try to lie and say you had a shift. Sloan told me you didn’t,” she warns.
“Why is Sloan keeping tabs on me?”
“Sloan does what Sloan pleases,” Cami says absentmindedly as she scans her card and pushes the door open. “But I think Serena told her.”
“Why is Sloan talking to Serena?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“I don’t know?” She turns to look at me. “Maybe they’re friends?”
My LAPD partner, Serena, and Sloan, a crime scene photographer and fellow Bureau agent, are not friends. Serena wishes, though. “They aren’t,” I tell her.
“Is this you trying some weird distraction technique you use with criminals? Because it sucks. I’m frankly amazed you still have a job,” she says.
“It’s usually the criminals attempting the distraction and not the other way around,” I point out.
“Either way, it won’t work here,” she claims.
The smell is so much worse here. All the masks and menthols in the world can’t convince me to work here day after day. Cami is brave.
We stop in front of a bed with the body of the latest victim of my nemesis. Yep, I’m declaring the killer my nemesis because I’ll be the one to take him down. After Meena officially assigns me the case that I have absolutely no time for, that is.
“When did he come in?” I ask.
Cami instantly assumes her work mode, like the workaholic she is. “The paramedics brought him in around four am yesterday. There was no pulse when he came in. I’m sure he had been dead for a while,” she says as she uncovers the body.
“Are we sure it was murder?” I ask.
Cami nods. “You know werewolves aren’t prone to heart attacks with our active lifestyles and naturally good metabolism…” I tune out her lecture about the effects of constantly breaking and rearranging our bones and put on gloves to examine the body closely.
“…but we’ll know more once we have the reports. Oh my god, you’re not even listening to me?” she complains.
“I totally was,” I lie.
She rolls her eyes. “At least you didn’t threaten to dig the walls Shawshank Redemption style to escape learning about the basics of your own body like you did the last time.”
She’s exaggerating. It wasn’t a threat, more of a fantasy. “He tried to pop his claws out recently,” I point to the victim’s nails, successfully distracting her.
Cami comes beside me with a small clipper and pokes gently under the nails. “No blood.” She looks closely at the clipper. “Some thread?”