Chapter 8
8
Elliot Crane
Good luck.
Seth Mays
Thanks
I was sitting in the parking lot of the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office, about to go in for an honest-to-God interview. I was terrified. And excited. But mostly terrified.
Thank God I had finally started working on shifting—I could feel the buzzing that told me I was on edge, fur and fangs prepared and at the ready, but I no longer felt like it was out of control. If nothing else, I would owe Elliot for the rest of my life for that. My control wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better now that’d I’d actually shifted on my own terms a couple of times.
We’d finished the shower stall yesterday—and then promptly inaugurated it by going out for another shifted ramble through the forest. I’d actually come back a lot cleaner, but Elliot had been absolutely filthy. Of course, badgers like to dig and tunnel. Wolves, not nearly as much. Sure, I found digging at the surface level of the dirt to be absurdly fun—and no, I didn’t really understand why—but that was a matter of a couple muddy paws, not full-body dirt submersion.
Elliot had nodded his head at it to indicate I should go first, which I did—only for a naked human Elliot to follow closely behind me.
Let’s just say the shower was inaugurated a bit more thoroughly than just having been showered in.
But thinking too much about that right now was probably not a good idea, given that I was about to go inside to conduct an interview. You really shouldn’t show up to formal interviews with a hard-on.
I was early by about ten minutes, but nervous energy wasn’t going to let me keep sitting in my Cruiser any longer, so I slid out of the driver’s seat slowly, trying not to jar my knee—which was more upset today because of all the shifting I’d been doing, although I wasn’t going to mention that to Elliot—so that I wouldn’t be limping when I went inside.
I only partly succeeded, but I managed to walk off the worst of it by the time I made it across the parking lot. Enough that I wasn’t limping, anyway. I put on a plain mask—grey, like the only now-ill-fitting suit I owned—so that I could at least pretend to be human so that I didn’t freak people out at the interview stage. I’d debated whether or not I wanted to be upfront about it… and decided not to. I wasn’t going to lie about it—if someone asked me, I’d tell them, or if they looked me up in the right databases in Virginia, it would be listed—but I also didn’t feel like advertising it, especially not at the interview stage. If they offered me a job I’d have to think about it again.
I walked up to the grey building with its glass front doors—eerily reminiscent of the entrance to the Virginia crime lab—and walked inside, coming up to the white-topped counter that served as the reception desk. The floor—like the floors of every such building I’d ever been in—were linoleum tile. In this office, everything I could see was grey. Grey floors, two-tone grey walls, grey counters with white tops. Completely monochrome. Heartless and soulless.
It helps people like me, like Hart, to do our jobs. I know that sounds horrible, but it’s true. If you have to be able to shut off your emotions—or at least put them on pause for a while—because what you do exposes you to the worst sort of monstrosity that humanity has to offer, you need the place you work to feel empty. It needs to match the way you feel, or it creates a cognitive dissonance that drives you mad, day by day. Sometimes the job does that anyway, but it would be so much worse if we worked somewhere with soft pastels and lush carpets and plants and flowers.
There was one uniformed officer—a white man with buzzed brown hair—and a white woman with short brown curls and a round face in plain clothes sitting behind the counter. Both wore masks—the cop’s was standard department issue, and the woman’s was covered in embroidered flowers. Not wanting to assume anything, I walked up and smiled at both of them, trusting the expression to be visible over my mask.
“Hi, I’m here to talk to Lacy Krinke.”
The uniform barely looked at me, but the woman smiled, showing off dimples near the outside corners of her mask and smile lines around her grey-blue eyes. “Well, hi there. Let’s see… you’re Mr. Mays?” Her eyes skimmed over the screen of her computer.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked over and smiled at me. “Not from around here, are you?” she asked, although her tone was friendly.
I still felt a little heat on the back of my neck. “No, ma’am. Virginia.”
“You don’t sound like a local,” she replied, showing me her dimples again. “You’ve got a lovely accent.”
The heat spread a little. “Oh. Thank you, ma’am.” I didn’t think of myself as having an accent, but I definitely did if you compared how I sounded to hers. Or even Elliot’s, although his wasn’t nearly as pronounced.
She smiled at me again. “Have you been up here long?” she asked conversationally.
“Um. Not really. A couple weeks.”
“You have family here?”
“No. I, uh, know Elliot Crane. He and Hart, um, Val Hart”—It was really weird to use Hart’s first name—“are friends of mine.”
“Oh!” She beamed. “Judy Hart is one of my mother’s best friends! That’s right—Val is in Virginia now. He’s a cop, right?”
“He was,” I replied. “He’s in the FBI now.”
“Oh, good for him!” She beamed. “My younger sister was in school with them—Val and Elliot. Not close or anything, but Shawano’s a small town. But you’re from the big city, so it must feel strange to you.”
It was a question, even though she didn’t lilt her voice upwards at the end. I smiled back. “I was born in a town even smaller than Shawano,” I told her. “So it’s familiar.” Not in the bad ways, at least not yet. That might come with more time spent here. Elliot had warned me as much—it wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, I just didn’t think Shawano could actually be as bad as the town I’d grown up in. Well. The weird religious community outside of a tiny town that didn’t offer much in the way of escapism.
I wasn’t going to go into that part of my life story with this woman, though.
“Like coming back home, then?” she said, smiling widely enough that her eyes crinkled nearly shut.
I smiled back, but was saved from having to decide between actually lying to her and making the conversation incredibly awkward by an interruption from a familiar voice.
“Mr, Mays?”
I turned, finding that the voice I recognized from our phone conversation a few days ago belonged to a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a tight, dark-brown ponytail and sharp grey eyes over a light blue mask and a lab coat worn over wrinkled black slacks and a blue button-down. “Ms. Krinke?”
“Call me Lacy,” she said, holding out a hand.
I shook it, impressed by both her grip and the size of her hand. Smaller than mine, but I have big hands. “Seth, please.” Most people didn’t call me that, but if she was going to lead with a first name, I’d play along.
She smiled back. “Come on back, Seth.”
I followed as she led me through more grey-and-grey walls and grey linoleum, until we reached a set of offices that had—surprise!—grey walls and brown carpeting. The offices—there were several in a row that we passed before we got to hers—all had those odd interior windows with miniblinds. Very 1990s-police-department chic.
The office she led me into didn’t look appreciably different than the others we’d passed, although this door said Shawano County Crime Lab . “Have a seat,” Lacy said, gesturing to a slightly-above-bargain-basement chair, one of two, on the receiving side of the desk as she walked around to the other side where she sat in a standard issue office chair.
I sat. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Oh, please, don’t ma’am me. Lacy. Or just Krinke if you must.”
“Sorry—Southern habit.” The word had come out of me without me thinking about it.
Lacy smiled. “Better than some things you could call people, I guess,” she remarked with a little bit of sarcasm, although she also immediately looked as though she regretted saying it.
I grinned, liking her better for it. “In the South,” I told her, “we’ve made a habit of using niceties as insults. ‘Bless your heart,’ for instance, when said the right way, actually means something much, much ruder.”
She laughed, a sharp sound that seemed a little surprised at itself. “Oh, we’re going to get along fine, Seth,” she said, relaxing a little.
Which obviously relaxed me a little, because it meant I didn’t have to worry quite so much about putting one of my overly large and/or furry feet in my mouth.
“Now,” she continued. “Tell me about this business last year with Detective Smith.”
I’d gotten about halfway through explaining what I’d had Hart do with the snot on the window when her phone rang. She looked at it sharply, looked at me apologetically, and then picked it up.
“I told you I—Oh. Shit.” She looked guilty for a second. “But Roger’s already at the crash scene—” She looked back up at me, a little alarmed.
I felt my eyebrows rise.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to do a, ah, working interview?”
It was definitely the first crime scene I had attended in a suit. I can’t say that I recommend it. For one thing, Shawano County did not use bunny suits. And dress shoes are slippery as hell inside booties. I now had blisters on my feet, and my suit was almost certainly ruined.
Lacy drove, loading me into the passenger side of a hard-top pickup that had definitely seen better days. I didn’t bother asking how you kept a covered pickup bed organized. The van we’d used in Richmond you could walk into, find everything that was hung on the walls or folded on shelves or in storage bins. You just couldn’t do that in a pickup bed.
On the way, Lacy had run through a bunch of very practical information mixed with questions about how I would handle particular things, usually following up with explanations about how we had to cut corners in Shawano because of budget or equipment or tradition or all of the above.
I had the feeling there was going to be a period of adjustment, assuming I didn’t accidentally flub this whole thing by being, in my opinion, anyway, too professional and competent.
Lacy pulled into a gravel driveway that led to a small house that had clearly seen better days. It had also clearly seen love. The siding might have been weathered, paint chipping off the trim, shingles covered with more moss than was good for them, but the flowerbeds were carefully tended, the bushes trimmed, and chalk drawings covered the sidewalk and driveway.
I didn’t want to be at this scene. Not one with kids.
But that was—or would be, hopefully—my job.
I got out of the truck, accepting the gloves and booties that Lacy brought to me, grimacing as my feet skidded a little in their new cloth coverings. Normally, I’d have worn shoes with treads that still gave me some amount of traction inside the booties. But that’s not what was happening today, so I had to go with what I had.
I stripped off the jacket before pulling on the gloves. Even if other parts of this suit were going to get ruined, I could at least save the jacket. Jackets were expensive.
Lacy led the way, and I followed after her, shuffling as I moved up the walkway and into the house, carrying one of the two kit bags Lacy had pulled out of the back of the truck. The bag was heavy, and four months ago it would have pulled at my shoulder joints and made my elbow ache. Now I could tell that it was heavy, but it didn’t pull on me the way it used to.
I’d finally discovered something about being a shifter that was less painful than being human.
Lacy moved through the doorway, shifting to the side so that I could see down the hallway. It was narrow and fairly dark, although some light came in through a few open doorways. The carpet was worn, but clean, with the exception of a clear bloody trail down the center, leading from just inside the doorway to a room at the far end of the hallway.
There was a uniform at the end, standing in a clean corner, looking uncomfortable and a little bored. He frowned when he saw me, the corners of his maskless mouth pulling down.
“Who’s he?” he asked Lacy.
“New tech,” she said back, her voice tight and not at all friendly. Apparently she didn’t think much of Bored Uniform.
He looked me over. “What happened to Marcks?” he demanded.
“Not your concern,” Lacy snapped back.
Bored Uniform grunted, his small, dark eyes squinting with malice. I couldn’t help the small surge of satisfaction at the clear evidence of the beginning of male-pattern baldness, even though I knew it was both petty and unfair.
He didn’t ask me what my name was, where I was from, nothing. Just that grunt and his unfriendly stare. I wondered what problem he had with me—or whether his problem was all Lacy.
Usually the boys in blue were happy enough with my presence at crime scenes. From the outside, I look like a good old southern boy, especially now that I had the beard. Maybe people in Wisconsin don’t go for that look? I had no idea.
I didn’t need him to like me, though, so I just kept following Lacy around the corner—careful not to step on the streaked blood trail—despite the slight itching between my shoulder blades as his stare followed our progress.
I wanted to ask her what that was all about, but I didn’t know her. She seemed like a good person, but I’d only talked to her once before and hadn’t been in her presence for even an hour yet. And asking questions about office gossip or politics before I’d even been hired might not do me any favors. So I didn’t ask. I just followed her into the next room.
When we crossed the threshold, I was surprised to find no body—not disappointed, but the amount of blood that had been smeared down the hallway had suggested there would be. There was more blood—quite a bit more, in fact—but the body it had come from was conspicuously absent.
There were more drag marks and footprints that tracked that blood out a back door. There were bloody finger-smudges on the sides of the door frame and the walls, some looked like they were from gloved fingers, although there was at least one clear bloody print that I could see right away. My guess was that that one belonged to the victim.
There was a tall, gangly man crouched by the back door, his eyes focused out at the tracks in the mud, red-brown unkempt hair being ruffled by the hot wind blowing in through the open door. He wore a department-issued mask, but I could see the furrows in his brow.
He had looked over as Lacy led us into the room, and his frown shifted from one of consideration to confusion.
“Lacy,” he said, and I immediately recognized the harsh gravel of his voice. We’d spoken on the phone—with Hart—last winter when he and Hart had needed guidance on collecting dried snot off a window.
“Gale,” Lacy greeted him, and she sounded much more pleasant than she had when speaking with Bored Uniform. “This is our… new potential tech, Seth Mays. Seth?—”
Smith’s brows had gone up, his frown easing, and he broke in. “Oh, we’ve spoken,” he said, standing and coming over to join us. “I didn’t realize you were planning a move to Shawano, Mr. Mays,” he said to me, his tone about as pleasant as his voice could actually manage.
“Just Mays is fine,” I reminded him with a nod that I hoped he took as friendly.
He nodded back.
“And I wasn’t when we last spoke,” I replied in answer to his remark about moving to Shawano. “But life is funny sometimes.” I didn’t really want to get into either the whole Arcanavirus thing, the fact that I’d been essentially fired because of the whole Arcanavirus thing, or my not-romance with Elliot Crane.
“It is that,” Smith agreed. Then he turned to Lacy. “Mrs. Greyfox said that her husband had dropped the kids off this morning at day camp, and then was planning on spending the rest of the day doing yard work.” He lifted a tablet, then scrolled down a little. “Mr. Greyfox has been unemployed for the last three months after an accident led to him needing to take time off work.”
I suddenly had a lot of sympathy for Mr. Greyfox, who was probably dead, if I were being completely honest with myself. But I knew exactly what it was like to be in his position.
Smith let out a sigh. “Mrs. Greyfox reports that her husband is, in fact, a silver fox shifter.”
I looked up, dread starting to pool in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to work another shifter murder.
Smith looked right at me. “You want to give me your read on this?” he asked.
I blinked. “You want to know what I think?” I probably shouldn’t have blurted that out at my own job interview, but I was shocked at the idea that any detective would want to hear my opinion on a case. Speculation wasn’t my job.
But Smith was nodding. “You read crime scenes for a living, right?”
I shrugged. “I collect evidence,” I replied. “I analyze it. I figure out where it came from and what it’s made of and whether or not it was or could be used to kill someone.”
“Sounds like a yes to me,” came Smith’s response. “So tell me what you’re reading.”
I wondered if this was a test or just how the man worked.
So I started reading. He wasn’t wrong—this was part of what I did for a living. It was how I identified evidence, how I figured out what was important and what wasn’t likely to be, how I sorted through the information to decide what to test and what tests to run. “He fought his attackers,” I said, keenly aware of the eyes of the two uniforms and Lacy as well as Smith on me as I looked around. “If I had to guess, they rendered him unconscious, but it was temporary, and he woke up after they dragged him in here, and he struggled as they pulled him out of the house.” The bloodstain on the carpet was irregular and smudged, but the streaks leading into the room weren’t crooked or broken. When you added in the pattern of footprints—that looked vaguely like someone had done a foxtrot in the blood on the way out the door—and the mix of gloved and ungloved bloody fingerprints, and it was pretty obvious to me that the victim had regained consciousness and fought his attackers, even if only instinctively, as they dragged him out of the house.
Smith’s bright blue eyes were shining with something that in any other context might have been glee.
I shot a look at Lacy, whose expression was impressed.
“Why do you say ‘they’?” Smith asked me.
I pointed at the foxtrot pattern on the carpet. “There are at least two different sizes of shoes, plus smudges that probably belong to Mr. Greyfox.” I paused. “That, and if he’s a shifter, there would have to be at least two of them, if not three.”
Smith was nodding. “What else you got for me?” he asked.
“He didn’t shift,” I said.
Smith’s eyebrows rose. “Okay?”
I shrugged. “They must have surprised him. Otherwise his survival instincts probably would have pushed him to shift.”
Smith’s expression was now thoughtful again, but in a different way. Then it cleared. “Right, you’re friends with Elliot Crane.”
I nodded back, feeling weirdly guilty about not sharing the fact that I knew this for much more personal reasons than being friends—or whatever—with Elliot. A few months ago, I would have told him that my twin was a shifter, too. But now it felt even worse to say that and not include the fact that I was, too. But fear kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even have this job, so I couldn’t get fired from it for being a shifter, but I wanted to actually have the job before that happened.
Apparently my life was now going to be one existential crisis after another. Most of which I’d be utterly humiliated to admit to Noah.
And that made me wonder if maybe I needed to reconsider some of my choices. Maybe I should be more like Noah—more open about being a shifter. About being queer. It wasn’t like I’d deny it if anyone asked directly, but it still felt like not saying something was lying.
But I really wanted this job, so I said nothing.
Smith asked a few more questions, then left Lacy and I to do the actual work of documenting the scene. Shawano County didn’t have a dedicated photographer, so I pulled out my phone and started doing it myself.
“We don’t have the budget for more than one,” Lacy said, her tone both apologetic and embarrassed. “And Roger has it.”
“Has what?” I asked her.
“The camera.”
“Ah.” I went back to taking pictures. They weren’t the best—they were actually probably pretty awful, if you were a crime scene photographer, but I did my best, drawing on what Quincy had talked about from her training and what I’d seen her do at scenes. And then made a mental note to call her and interrogate her later because I had the feeling that if I got the job, this wouldn’t be the last time I’d be taking photos at a crime scene—because Lacy had said Roger had the camera , not the photographer.
I’d taken casts of footprints in the mud, found and collected drops of blood, took fingerprints, and tracked the struggle all the way out to where the footprints gave way to the distinctive treads of three ATVs, where I took casts of the tire-tracks.
Smith was in and out of the scene constantly, moving between talking to Mrs. Greyfox and her kids, trying to get search parties going, and coming back to ask Lacy and me questions—he was constantly asking us what we thought. It was weird.
I liked it.
I wanted to be part of a team that worked together. That knew and trusted each other the way that Smith and Lacy clearly did. The way that Quincy and I had—and here, there were only three people and one—for now—homicide detective. And the idea that everyone would be working together… I wanted this.
I helped Lacy unload the truck back at the Sheriff’s Office, internally lamenting the fact that my pants were probably doomed. I’d try to get the mud and blood out of them, but while I was pretty good at getting both substances out of most materials, grey suit pants were not generally made of the most wash-friendly of fabrics.
Maybe I’d get lucky.
And then I’d have to stitch up the tear on the left leg of the pants from where it had gotten caught on a thorny branch while I was making plaster casts of the ATV tire impressions. Assuming I actually managed to get the stains out. My shirt was definitely a goner—white cotton was the least friendly thing to get stains of any kind out of, much less blood and ground-in dirt.
“Thank you, Seth,” Lacy said, sounding relieved as we put the last of the equipment back in the rather sad room that passed for the Shawano County Crime Lab. According to Lacy, anything that actually required serious testing got sent to either the Northern Regional Crime Lab in Wausau or the State Crime Lab in Madison. They could do a few things here—blood alcohol, breathalysers, a few basic tox and substance tests—but anything complex or unusual would have to be done in one of the state labs.
I wasn’t a fan of that idea, but I suppose it made sense—I’d just previously been working in a state crime lab, so I’d been the one doing the more complex testing on behalf of the small towns in Virginia. I could live with those limitations if I had to.
We’d been assisted by a thin, shorter man with fair skin, freckles, strawberry-blond hair, and eyes that were an interesting mix of grey and brown—hazel, I suppose, but without any of the green that made Elliot’s eyes sparkle. This was Roger Marcks, the other member of the CSI team who had been at the scene of a car accident—the vehicle had struck a motorcycle and driven it off the road, leaving the scene, and the rider, for someone else to find. Someone else driving down the highway had seen the skid marks and the downed motorcycle and slowed down enough to see the crumpled form in the ditch—possibly saving the rider’s life. He was currently in critical condition. Only time would tell whether or not he managed to survive.
Roger was a little twitchy, but friendly enough, and shook my hand with a grip that told me his seeming nervousness was more of a personality quirk than any actual discomfort with people.
All three of us were sweaty by the time we got the truck unloaded and the evidence put in all of the appropriate places, to which Roger or Lacy helpfully directed me.
“Thanks, Rog,” Lacy said to him.
He bobbed his head. “’Course,” he replied.
Then she turned to me. “Well, will you take it? Or are we too small-town for you?” The question was asked with a nervous smile.
I blinked. “You’re—offering me the position?” I’d expected a handshake and a we’ll-call-you-later.
“Are you kidding?” She snorted. “You’ve got more experience in homicide than either of us, and your mastery of CSI procedure and techniques is clearly better than mine. And Gale Smith likes you.”
I felt the flush creeping up my neck, and not just because I was hot and slightly sunburned. “Thanks. I—I accept.”
Lacy’s eyes turned up at the corners as she grinned, then grabbed my hand and pumped it. “Great! I know—I know you probably can’t start right away…”
“I can, actually.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager, but she had offered me the job, so I felt like I wasn’t going to jeopardize anything by doing so.
“See you in the morning, then?”
I felt myself grinning back. “Absolutely.”