Chapter 11
11
Elliot Crane
Where are you?
Seth Mays
work
Are you at least not sleeping at work?
Are you there?
Canttalk
You can still stay here.
I didn’t respond.
I wasn’t trying to be mean or petty, although I was questioning the wisdom of continuing to text Elliot because continuing to text Elliot after he’d left Richmond was how I ended up in the current mess I was in—both the emotional mess and the physical mess in which I was currently stuck.
I was wedged extremely awkwardly in a half-crumpled, mostly burnt, and absolutely rank vehicle trying to get close enough to the weeks-old corpse in the front in the hope of determining literally anything at all. The medical examiner—a man named Douglas Borde who was apparently the third one they’d gone through since January after Hart had brought down the last permanent one, according to Detective Smith—had stuck his dirty-blond head in the door, pronounced the guy dead, and left.
I’d been taking pictures on my phone because we still didn’t have more than one crime scene camera, but then Smith had looked at me and asked if I could possibly be any more helpful than, and I quote, “That lazy jerkface.”
So I was trying to get my too-tall self through the trunk because the driver and passenger side doors were both fused shut, and my phone’s constant buzzing was the only reason I’d actually bothered to try to take it out. I’d missed two calls from Elliot, then his texts. After his last message, I put it on mute and shoved it back in my pocket.
Dead guy now. Living guy later.
I squirmed a little more, trying very hard to at least not hit the dead man as I squeezed through the narrow gap between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, wincing as multiple joints objected strongly to the positions I was forcing them into. At least I managed to preserve the integrity of the body, if not the seats or myself. And at least I had a bunny suit this time.
Regretting my current life choices on multiple fronts, I got myself close enough to the extremely deceased driver that I could try to get a swab for chemical or DNA analysis (although the latter seemed unlikely), and I wrinkled my nose at the stench of… something chemical. I pulled down my mask and took a deep sniff, grimacing. In the midst of roasted and rotting flesh, I could smell a thread of it, clear as day. Lighter fluid.
What I’d been told by Smith and the admittedly un-thorough ME was that this was supposed to be a freak accident. A car that had ruptured its gas tank when it hit the guardrail and exploded. Well, gas tanks do not smell like lighter fluid. Same family, yes, but trust my now-canid nose, they are not the same.
Both lighter fluid and gasoline had been on the very long list of chemical substances that I’d had to sniff from the crime scene at which Detective Maginot of Richmond Homicide had realized that my nose could be a useful forensic tool. I hadn’t planned on reenacting that particular—and particularly painful—escapade, but it had at least provided me with the clear knowledge that gasoline and lighter fluid didn’t smell even remotely the same to my shifter nose.
Given that it was deeply important that people know that this was now almost certainly a murder, I had to convey that information to someone outside the car while being stuck inside the car. The thought of extricating myself only to have to un-extricate myself again was unpleasant enough that I was going to be borderline rude. That maybe wasn’t the best way to behave on my first solo case—Roger and Lacy had taken the first call of the day, assuming it would also be the last so that I could settle in. But no. So it was my sixth day of gainful employment, and here I was, origami-ing myself into a burned-out car and being rude.
“Detective!” I’m a big guy. I can be loud when I need to.
The sound of approaching feet told me I’d been loud enough. Shortly after, Smith’s head poked through the open hatchback. “What do you need?” he asked me, seeming entirely unconcerned about my rudeness or the fact that I was doing an admirable impression of a human pretzel.
“Our friend here was set on fire,” I told him.
“How do we know this?” he asked me, sounding tired.
“Lighter fluid.”
“There’s a can up there?”
I looked around. “Not that I can see, but I can smell it.”
“Can you get the door open from in there?” he asked me.
I did not particularly want to cuddle up to the dead man as close as that was going to require me to do, but I squirmed through into the otherwise empty passenger seat and managed—with several kicks, lots of swearing, and a good, hard shove—to get the door open. Smith poked his head inside.
“I can’t smell anything.”
Of course not. Because my nose was better than his and every other human’s on the force.
I sighed. I was going to win the award for shortest-employed CSI tech in Shawano County. Six whole days.
Smith’s blue gaze was sharp. “I suppose there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?” he asked.
“Probably,” I answered, resigned to the inevitable.
“And a reason your primary reference was an ex-cop and not a current one.” It really was too bad that he was quite smart.
“My second reference is still a homicide detective,” I pointed out, despite the fact that it wasn’t really relevant.
“Who recently caught the Arcanid Killer, whose victims were deliberately staged to spread Arcanavirus.”
I nodded, my chest tight and a pit in my stomach.
“You know,” Smith said, examining his gloved hand. “I personally think it would be a good idea to have a shifter or faun or orc on every CSI team.”
I looked up at him, startled—and in a good way, for once. “What?”
“I mean, case in point here,” he said, the tone of his voice completely unchanged, so I didn’t think he was kidding or being sarcastic. “You can smell evidence that the rest of us sad, pathetic normie humans can’t.”
I knew my mouth was hanging open behind my mask, which was probably pretty obvious, but I couldn’t help it.
“Let’s just… not tell the chief, yeah? He’s… from a different era.”
Don’t tell the big boss that I have fur and fangs. Got it.
It felt good to know that somebody had my back, though.
Then Smith stood and moved away from the car. “Hey, Hilgers! Call in the FD, would you? We need to make sure this wasn’t staged.”
“Yah, a-right,” came the call of one of the uniforms, whose northern Wisconsin accent was so thick it sounded fake. I was pretty sure it wasn’t, but I was having to recalibrate my ears a little, given that the guy sounded like he’d stepped out of Fargo . I’d spent the first ten minutes at the scene trying desperately not to snicker every time he talked. After that, I got control of myself. Mostly.
Smith returned and looked through the now-open door at me. “Can I—help you?”
“Hand me the kit bag?” I asked.
He went and got it, then crouched in the doorway, holding it in one hand. “Did you want me to try to stuff the whole thing in there, or is there something specific I can hand you?”
Smith suggested that I probably didn’t want to be inside the car when the fire department showed up to start the official is-this-arson investigation, so I had to decide whether going out one of the front doors was going to be easier than figuring out how to get myself back out of the back.
Before that happened, though, I swabbed the dash, seats, and floor, as well as the clothes of the victim, hoping that I’d be able to get some sort of chemical evidence from one or all of those samples. I wanted to try to get anything from under the victim’s nails, but I wasn’t confident about my ability to do so without breaking them—or his very burnt fingers—off.
I wanted other things, too. I wanted to pull a tooth to use its root to test for DNA. I wanted to see if there was any sort of fluid left in his veins to run a tox screen on. But I couldn’t actually do those things—teeth and blood came from the ME’s office, for one thing, and Shawano didn’t have the equipment to run anything particularly sophisticated, for another. We’d have to send things over to Wausau, or maybe down to Madison, depending on what we needed and who had the bigger backlog.
Instead, it was my job to preserve as much of the integrity of the body as possible, since any damage would interfere with the autopsy results. Not that I had a lot of confidence in the current acting ME. While there was no question that the victim was dead, I felt like the approximately ten seconds he’d spent actually looking at the body probably wasn’t enough to make any sort of definitive pronouncement about cause of death, time of death, or pretty much anything potentially useful.
I’d passed my swabs and a couple smudgy fingerprints back out to Smith, and then squirmed my way out the back hatch again, just managing to clamber out as the fire marshal’s red SUV pulled off the highway onto the shoulder, gravel and grass being crushed by its all-terrain tires.
The man who swung his way out of the driver’s side was short, squat, and built like a barrel, with brown hair shot through with grey and weathered fair skin. He also wasn’t human.
Dark brown eyes met mine with a knowing flash, and I ducked my head, feeling compelled to show deference to this man, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was wearing a shirt with a ‘Fire Chief’ patch on it.
He was stronger than me. Not physically. Physically, I probably could have picked him up and thrown him, despite his muscular bulk. But I could feel the power in him. Whatever he was, whatever kind of shifter, he was more powerful than I was.
I wondered if that meant he was bigger as an animal. If he were a bear or some large apex predator.
And he knew—just as I did—that I wasn’t human, either. And that if it came down to it, he would win in a fight. I wondered if this was how animals felt when they encountered one another—they just sort of knew which of them was dominant, and which submissive.
Smith appeared oblivious to the fact that a whole series of communication happened between the chief and me.
“Chief Ziemer,” Smith greeted him as they shook hands. “I’d say it’s good to see you again, but given the circumstances…” He trailed off.
“Polite as ever, Smith,” Ziemer replied dryly before turning dark eyes on me. “And who do we have here?”
“This is our newest CSI tech, Seth Mays. Seth, this is Fire Chief Craig Ziemer.”
Ziemer held out his rough palm. I quickly pulled off my gloves so that I could take it. “Nice to meet you, Mays,” he said, his voice warm and his grip strong as he smiled up at me.
“And you, sir,” I replied, feeling oddly nervous. Something told me that it was important for him to like me—at least to think of me as competent and capable. Maybe it was my shifter instincts, but it felt right to be deferential. Respectful.
He let go of my hand with a smile, then turned to Smith. “ME been here yet?”
“And gone,” came the response. “Took all of thirty seconds to pronounce the victim dead.”
Ziemer’s eyebrows—bushy and dark—went up. “Still Borde?” Douglas Borde, the current acting ME, who, in my admittedly very limited experience, did seem rather lazy. Or like he had another thousand things to do on any given day that he thought were far more important than working a crime scene.
“Yep,” Smith answered, and I could tell that there was a whole wealth of emotion behind the single word, even though I couldn’t quite tell what it meant.
Ziemer cocked his head, looking at me. “You a medical doctor?” he asked.
“No, sir. Biochemist.”
“Pity,” Ziemer remarked mildly. “We could use an ME with work ethic.”
I wanted to ask him what made him think I had a work ethic—or, at least, a stronger work ethic than Dr. Borde, but I didn’t.
Smith nodded. “I’d just like someone to settle here. But everybody wants to work in the big city. Not enough murders out here.”
I felt my eyebrows rise.
“Speaking of which,” Smith pushed on. “Seth thinks there might be something more than just an engine fire or spark and leaky gas tank to this one.”
“So I hear,” Ziemer replied, but he was looking at me. “What makes you think so?”
He was going to smell it the minute he got into the car, and it wasn’t like he didn’t already know what I was. And Smith had guessed, so there was no reason for me to be coy about it. “I smelled lighter fluid.”
“Through that?” Ziemer asked, gesturing toward my face.
“Faintly,” I replied. “I took it off and confirmed.”
He was studying me with the same expression Elliot had used the one time we’d gone grocery shopping together. Everybody in Shawano already knew he was a shifter, so he didn’t bother with a mask. I didn’t want to deal with the stares—people who either thought you were a virus-denier or people who (correctly) figured you were a shifter who didn’t need to wear one. In a depressing number of cases, it was a tossup which would get you the more hateful looks. I just wanted to be able to buy my chicken and pasta in peace.
I wasn’t sure if Elliot thought I was trying to pretend to be something I wasn’t (which I kind of was, but only kind of) or if he thought I was just a coward for not wanting to face reality, I didn’t know. But he didn’t approve.
I didn’t care.
Well, okay, I did care what he thought. Just not enough to not wear a mask. I wore one at work for other reasons—people have all sorts of icky communicable diseases, and dead people also stink on top of that, so masking at a crime scene was a good idea whether you were a Nid or a normie. It was more important for those of us handling the body and any bodily fluids—the CSI teams and the MEs—than for detectives or uniforms.
But despite the look, Ziemer didn’t actually say anything to me about it, and I didn’t offer any sort of explanation.
“Lead the way,” he said, instead. “Let’s see what you’ve got, Mays.”
I looked at Smith, and he gestured for me to go ahead—so I did. Smith and Ziemer chatted as they followed me back to the car, talking about how they thought next year’s football season was going to go for the Packers. I liked football well enough, although I had the feeling I was going to have to get to know the rules and players—at least the Packer players—a lot better now that I lived in Wisconsin.
It was weird to think that I lived here now.
Sort of.
I had a job here, and I was working on the whole apartment thing. I had a couple options that would let me move in immediately and pay partial rent for August, and I’d set up appointments to see them and fill out applications. Assuming I didn’t have to work for the next three straight days, which was never a guarantee in our business.
Once I was able to save up the money, I was going to have to get Hart’s mom a really nice thank-you gift. I’d have to ask him what she’d like once I could afford it.
We arrived back at the car, and I gestured for Ziemer to do as he wished—search, sniff, whatever else. As many crime scenes as I had been at, in Richmond, we’d left anything involving fire to the arson investigators. We didn’t touch it.
In Shawano, apparently, we touched it—arson was the purview of the Sheriff’s Department, according to Smith, with some help from a regional office in charge of the entire upper quadrant of the state of Wisconsin. Whether Ziemer had anything to do with that or not, I didn’t know.
But he bent a little so that he could stick his head in the still-open driver’s side door and inhaled deeply. And then he coughed. “Hoo boy.” He coughed again, then turned and grinned at me, showing bright teeth that seemed to me to be a little too sharp in some places. “Yep, that’s absolutely lighter fluid. Possibly Royal Oak. Definitely not Kingsford.”
I couldn’t help myself. “You can tell what brand it is?”
He chuckled. “You could, too, pup,” he replied. “If you did the training.”
I stared at him, uncertain about several things. First, if I was okay with him calling me ‘pup.’ Second, if that meant he knew what kind of shifter I was, and if so, how he could possibly know that . And third, if that was some sort of hint at an offer.
I offered him a smile that was a half-grimace. “I did something along those lines once,” I told him, aware of Smith listening. “In order to ID a chemical that had rubbed off on a murder victim.”
“Did you?” Ziemer asked.
I nodded. “I also burned out the inside of my sinus cavity,” I muttered.
That made Ziemer laugh. “You need to learn how to smell without inhaling,” he said.
My eyebrows went up again. “That’s physiologically impossible.”
“In the most literal sense, yes,” he agreed. “But there’s no need to spend a day unable to smell anything in order to ID chemicals.”
I shrugged. “Next time someone asks, I’ll give you a call.”
He grinned at me, showing those too-sharp teeth. “I like you, pup,” he said, then turned back to Smith. “You’ve got yourself a bona fide arson here,” he pronounced. “So let’s get the paperwork done and get a team out to do all the right tests.” Then he looked over at me. “You want to stick around a learn a thing or two about arson investigation?”
I shrugged. “As long as nobody needs me anywhere else,” I replied. I was curious. And if I wasn’t going to get to play with things like DNA sequencing and complex toxicology, maybe I could learn something about the chemistry of fire.
Ziemer and his team were there for another three hours before they gave us the go-ahead to remove the body and do the rest of the evidence collection—like dusting for prints and taking fabric samples, etc. And by the time Smith, Hilgers, and I managed to maneuver the body out of the car—which was an exercise in physics that I had not anticipated ever having to do—I was sweaty, smeared with grease and soot and God-only-knew what else, and ravenously hungry. It was also getting dark.
At least I’d been kept so busy learning about arson investigation and then trying to un-pretzel both myself and the body that I hadn’t really had time to think about Elliot.
Until now.
But first I had to drive back to the Sheriff’s Office to log all the evidence I’d spent the afternoon and evening collecting. Then I could get dinner. Something extremely calorie-dense, since I hadn’t had lunch. I’d managed to eat a protein bar while Ziemer’s arson team got set up, so I wasn’t actually starving, but I knew I needed a lot more than I’d had.
Judy Hart would probably feed me if I asked, but I didn’t want to make her have to do that again. She’d left me a vegan muffin and a key to the house this morning, which had made a lump collect in the back of my throat, so I’d had to wait until I got to work to actually eat the muffin so I wouldn’t choke on it.
I also had no idea how Hart had gotten to be the foul-mouthed, somewhat surly creature that he is—his mom was about as far from that as you could get. I did understand his extremely wide generosity streak, although I’m pretty sure he’d have denied having it if you ever accused him of such a thing.
It was late—after ten—by the time I managed to get everything logged and unloaded. I went out of my way to stop at a KFC—it was the best place for me to get a lot of food that was dairy-free. McDonald’s fries have dairy, Hardees everything has dairy or beef, and Culver’s puts butter everywhere. I could get Extra Crispy Chicken (not the regular recipe), coleslaw, and fries. No biscuits, sadly. I love buttermilk biscuits, but I had to make my own, since most of them have, well, buttermilk .
But at KFC I could buy a bucket of chicken, a ton of fries, and some actual vegetables, so it was better than a lot of my options.
I munched on a few fries on my way back to the Harts’ house, then let myself in, being as quiet as I could. Judy and Marsh had left the exterior light and the light over the stove on, presumably so I wouldn’t break my neck coming back, and I shut both off before heading down the stairs toward my futon. One benefit to being a shifter was that I had much better night vision than I used to, and I didn’t have to turn on my phone flashlight to safely navigate the stairs.
I settled myself on my futon, opening up my laptop and finding the tab I had with the one streaming service I allowed myself to pay for. I needed to watch something familiar and comforting to keep my mind from going to places—and people—I didn’t want to think about. I wanted to rewatch A New Hope and eat my chicken and try to avoid falling into a pit of self-loathing.
I didn’t succeed.