Chapter 15
15
Elliot Crane
I don’t suppose you’re awake?
Never mind.
Hope you’re doing okay.
The sun hadn’t come up yet when I got the phone call dragging me out of sleep.
“Crime scene,” came Gale Smith’s gravelly voice. “They found our kidnapped shifter. Alive. Barely, but alive.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed, half climbing, half-falling out of bed.
It was then that I noticed the messages. The first one had come in around two a.m. The next about twenty minutes later, and the third one only a minute or two after that.
I stared at my phone for at least two or three minutes, trying to decide whether or not I was going to reply to them. Whether or not that would be a terrible idea. Or maybe Elliot was in trouble.
“Shit,” I muttered out loud, then went about quickly pulling on clothes and running a wet brush through my hair after splashing water on my face and patting my beard dry.
One very nice bonus of having a beard is that when people wake you up at five in the morning you won’t really look terribly unkempt if you don’t shave. Most people don’t notice if you trim your beard or not, whereas if you’re normally clean-shaven—like Smith—and you show up with a fairly epic five-o-clock shadow—also like Smith—it’s painfully obvious that you dragged your ass out of bed.
We all looked like crap—me, Lacy, Smith, and the sparse collection of uniforms still hanging around the scene. But Smith’s auburn stubble definitely made him look a bit more haggard than the rest of us, although there were plenty of eye-bags to go around.
It definitely made me miss Quincy, because one of us would have done the early morning coffee run. But Quincy wasn’t here, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to do it without her.
So we were exhausted and under-caffeinated, but there was a kind of manic edge to it—because this was a crime scene where there was no body to examine because they’d taken him, still alive, to the hospital. The helicopter, with its distinctive red cross on the belly, had flown over the highway, going the opposite direction as it headed toward the major trauma hospital in Green Bay.
The scene where he’d been found was an old barn, supposedly abandoned. The man who’d found the victim had been the grandson of the property owner—he’d finally gotten around to coming out to check out the property a good half-a-dozen years after his father’s death, and had found a bloody, dying man in the barn. He’d immediately called 9-1-1, leading to the airlift and us.
There was a lot of fresh blood—coupled with the amount left in the victim’s house, I was shocked he’d still been alive. But there was also a lot of old blood—years old.
The wooden floor-boards were stained dark with it.
I called over Smith.
“There’s a lot of old blood here,” I told him.
He squatted down next to me, and I was slightly envious of the fact that his knees didn’t make a horrific crunching noise as he did so. “How old?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I can’t really tell, just that it’s not fresh anymore. Months? Years?” I studied one of the dark stains. “I’d guess years, but you’d need a colorimetric analysis or degradation test to get more specific.”
He looked at me. “Can we do those here?”
I sighed. “Probably not.”
“Do you know how to do them?”
“With the right equipment, sure.”
“Can you tell what kind of blood?”
“With—”
“Some sort of tests,” he finished.
I nodded.
“Can we do those here?”
I shook my head.
“For the love of Pete,” he muttered.
I felt my lips twitch, thinking about the stark difference between Smith’s clean language and Hart’s completely degenerate sailor’s vocabulary. I could only imagine what Hart would have had to say in the same circumstances. Jesus fucking Christ, Mays. What the fuck can we do, then?
“We could, ” I put in. “If we had a hand-held Raman spectrometer.”
“A what now?”
“Raman spectrometer. It uses laser technology to determine whether blood is animal, human, or Arcanid in about thirty to forty-five seconds.”
“ Seconds ?” he repeated, incredulous.
“Seconds,” I confirmed. “Really useful little devices.”
“Lacy!” Smith called out.
“Yeah?” She came over.
“I want one of those Ramen things.”
“Ramen—?”
“Raman spectrometer,” I supplied, suppressing a smirk.
Lacy rolled her eyes. “Me, too,” she replied. “But I don’t make the budget. You wanna fight with the sheriff to get us new equipment, maybe he’ll listen to you .” There was a certain bitterness to her tone that made me wonder if the sheriff was as old-fashioned about women (and undoubtedly Nids) as the police chief Smith had mentioned.
Smith pressed his lips together, the motion making the skin around them even paler. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
My guess was that probably meant yes .
It didn’t bode well for my future employment—because I wasn’t unrealistic about the fact that, sooner or later, people were going to find out I’m a shifter. If I didn’t tell them, someone in my fire investigation class or someone who saw me somewhere else or heard me say something would know—and then it would all be over.
Part of why I wanted to do fire investigation was because that gave me an out—one I could do even as a shifter. Because I’m a shifter. It was a safety net of sorts, but it was also something that would let me be me. Something that was mine, and only mine. Not Noah’s or Elliot’s or Hart’s or Ward’s— mine .
I wanted that to extend to my crime scene work, too, but I was starting to think that this job—or, at least, this part of it—came with an expiration date. It was disappointing, but not really unexpected. I’d had the feeling that would be the case when Smith told me that the chief wasn’t a big fan of Nids.
I busied myself taking samples—the new blood that almost certainly belonged to our victim, the old blood soaked into the wood beneath, which I gathered by pulling up pieces of the floorboards. And then I started nosing around the rest of the barn.
Which is how I found three more bloodstained areas.
Two of them were huge. Too big to have been the site of a chicken’s demise, for instance. So either it was a lot of chickens, or something larger had been killed or seriously injured. My money was that it wasn’t a pig or a cow, either.
Smith called to tell me that the doctors had determined that the shifter victim needed to be put into a medically-induced coma in order to have a fighting chance, so we weren’t going to get any useful information out of him until he woke up. Then Smith asked me to tell him all the tests I would run if money weren’t an issue and I had all the equipment I wanted.
So I did.
“I am starting to think you are way beyond our league,” Smith told me.
“I’m not dating y’all,” I told him, amused. I knew what he meant, though. My training, my expertise, the things I knew were the best choices to process the evidence, were far beyond what Shawano County or city homicide had access to.
Yeah, we could send it out to the regional or state crime lab, but that took time, and, even though I didn’t know him all that well, I could tell that Smith was worried about what might happen—who might go missing or turn up dead—while we waited for Wausau or Madison or Green Bay to get around to doing our work for us.
“How do you solve anything?” I asked him. “You have no local DNA analysis, no even moderately complex blood tests, no rapid blood tests, and a very basic-level tox screen that essentially only gives blood-alcohol and the most common three poisons. Anything else has to go through Wausau or Madison.”
“Or the FBI,” he’d put in.
“You really want to call in the feds?”
Smith shrugged. “They have resources we don’t, and as long as I play nice, I get what I want, too.”
This was completely contrary to the way Richmond homicide felt about the involvement of the FBI. “But they’re your cases,” I said, feeling slightly stupid.
“And I’m the only homicide detective and overworked to heck.”
I smirked because he was on the phone and couldn’t see my expression. Heck . And it wasn’t because he was from the upper Midwest, either—because so was Hart.
Smith didn’t seem to care that other people—the uniforms, Roger, and even occasionally Lacy and me—swore. But he didn’t. He’d laugh or grimace along with everyone else—he just didn’t do it himself.
I liked Smith. And Lacy and Roger, although a lot of the uniforms I either didn’t know or could have done without. Most of them gave me small-town-cop vibes, and not in the Andy Griffith kind of way. Some seemed nice enough, I just only had the opportunity to nod hello or watch as they stood guard over a body or a length of crime scene tape, neither of which is a particularly good way to get to know somebody.
I mostly took my cues from Lacy, Roger, and Smith—if they were pleasant to someone, I figured they couldn’t be that bad. I tried to be nice and cheerful around everybody, because everything is already shit enough, and I shouldn’t be contributing to it by being irritable, but there were people I gave a wide perimeter to or deliberately didn’t engage with based on Roger’s locked jaw or Lacy’s pursed lips or the totally flat expression on Smith’s angular features.
“Are they going to hire anybody else?” I asked him. The last other homicide detective—they had one person for special victims, one for just homicide, and one homicide-plus, including cold cases, vice, and cyber crime, interestingly enough. I’d expressed surprise that Shawano had enough cyber crime to warrant being assigned to a detective, and Smith had explained that the population tended to be on the older side and were fairly frequent targets of scams, some of them incredibly elaborate and locally based. Smith was ostensibly homicide, but tended to pick up missing persons who were likely dead or dying, from the special victims detective, Christopher McKinley, a dark-haired, light brown-skinned, burly dude who made my beard look scanty, which it is definitely not. He was around my height, but built broader, hairier, and more muscled. He seemed like a decent enough guy the few times I’d had reason to interact with him. Mostly, he asked for Lacy, and they had a rapport going.
“No clue,” came Smith’s response with shrug of one slender shoulder. “I’d have thought they’d have gotten to it by now if they were going to, but we have to have an ME, and they haven’t managed to get us a permanent one of those, either.”
That had been an annoyance, because it meant that a lot of the tests that an ME would run hadn’t been run, which meant I had nothing to compare some of the other test results to . The more information you had, the better you could narrow things down—and yeah, a lot of that was Smith’s job, not mine, but it could help me know what other tests to run or ask for, what to look for, where to check for soil or pollen samples, that sort of thing.
As it stood, I didn’t have much beyond the barn itself—and all the pollen and dust and animal shit that had accompanied the blood in the barn itself.
There was a lot of it. Pollen—wheat, corn, soybeans, goldenrod, and at least half a dozen other particulates that were easily linked to the things that one might find in a barn in the upper Midwestern United States—dust, fecal matter from an undetermined origin, dirt, bits of straw, dried corn, grasses, dead bugs… Pretty much what you’d expect to find in a barn. Plus blood.
I really wished I had better equipment. The ability to just run the tests we needed instead of shipping off samples with requests and then just waiting until somebody else got around to providing us the answers to our problems.
Despite the fact that my job was solving problems—and the fact that having to wait for the Wausau crime lab to get around to my cases was driving me up the proverbial wall—I had actually spent most of my life letting other people solve my problems for me. My life-related problems, anyway. I’d fallen into jobs, taken offers from Noah and the people who worked to support new shifters, let other people push me this way and that, make choices about where I would go to school, who I was going to date, even down to what I was going to wear.
That was Enrique, who always tried to dress me, as though I were some sort of doll. A prop that he took with him to show off until he got bored or I failed to meet some standard I hadn’t been aware of or maybe I just wasn’t capable of meeting.
Don’t get me wrong. I hadn’t objected. I’d not only given him permission, but I’d wanted him to make those choices for me. It was easier that way. Simpler. And I’d trusted him more than I’d trusted myself.
The same way I’d trusted Clay and Devin.
And Noah, although Noah at least had wanted to be supportive and helpful, instead of controlling and self-serving.
To be fair to myself, it wasn’t my inability to solve problems that was making me have to rely on another lab to send back the test results. I could do them all myself, if I’d had the equipment I needed. But I still didn’t like it.