Chapter 23
23
Elliot Crane
It happened again.
Seth Mays
On my way.
I didn’t even bother to ask if he’d called Smith, dialing the somewhat gruff detective on speaker as I started up the CSI truck. I wanted the gear, and it was early enough in the morning that I wasn’t going to get away with not going back to work. If Elliot wanted me to stay, I’d come back.
“You on your way to Crane’s place?” he asked me immediately, not even bothering to say hello.
“Yeah,” I answered, half-distracted as I turned out onto Main Street.
“Good,” came the response. “You have your kit?”
“Yeah. I’m in the truck.” I’d been assuming that whatever they’d left him wasn’t so large that I’d need the van—just in case Lacy and Roger needed it for a human. Or a cow. Or a deer. That had happened last week.
“Good,” Smith said. “See you in a few.” He hung up.
I kept driving.
I pulled over on the side of the road next to Elliot’s driveway because the driveway itself was blocked by two black and whites and Smith’s unmarked sedan.
I slid out of the truck, feeling the familiar pain in my knee, although it wasn’t quite as sharp as it had been. Thanks to Elliot and Henry. Maybe . The scientist in me wanted to cling to my skepticism. It wasn’t like Henry’s cream had healed me, but even taking the edge off was an improvement, and I wasn’t going to be above asking Henry for more of the stuff if it kept working.
I made my way from the grassy ditch over to the gravel at the bottom of Elliot’s driveway, the stones and slight frost crunching under my hiking boots.
I’d stopped wearing dress shoes after Lacy told me that I should stop torturing my poor feet—the dead didn’t care what kind of shoes I wore, and I was going to break an ankle or end up with trench foot if I kept wearing dress shoes to crime scenes. Since she and Roger both wore similar hiking boots, I figured I was safe doing the same.
They were also warmer and definitely better for my ankles.
I walked up to the skinned body of what looked like a medium-sized dog, pushing down the flashbacks to the case that had led the FBI to take all shifter cases away from the Richmond local PD. The idea of revising the cult murders of canid shifters now that I was a canid shifter was even more disturbing than it had been when I was worried about Noah. I really hoped we weren’t going to do that again.
I crouched down beside it, drawing in a breath through my nose. If it was fresh enough, I could still tell whether or not an animal’s corpse was shifter or animal. This one was… iffy.
“Anything I should know?” Smith asked, crouching down beside me, his knees not creaking or cracking the way mine did.
“Nothing definitive,” I replied. “It’s hard to tell breed without the skin and fur.” I glanced over at him. “I don’t suppose we’ve found that?”
Smith sighed. “Not yet.”
“DNA will tell us regardless,” I said, trying to be optimistic, even though I didn’t feel it.
Smith grunted. I couldn’t say I disagreed with the sentiment.
“Was it skinned here?”
I scanned the area. “Doesn’t look like it, unless it was done in the back of a truck or SUV,” I replied. “Not nearly enough blood.”
“Why skin a dog and not leave the skin if you’ve already skinned a badger and displayed the skin?” Smith mused. I could tell from his tone that he was actually asking the question.
“Do you want a guess?” I asked him.
“Sure, if you have one.”
“He doesn’t want the dog IDed based on its coat.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s somebody’s pet.” I looked down at the dog’s mangled body. “And, honestly, it seems like the dog was dead when it was skinned. And this hind leg—” I pointed at it. “—looks to me like it’s badly broken and mangled, which suggests that he hit the dog, probably with a car. So if he’s hiding it, the dog probably belongs to a neighbor.”
“Huh.” Smith studied the unfortunate animal’s corpse, his expression thoughtful. “You might be right, Mays.”
“Did you call out Borde?” I asked him.
“He wouldn’t come out for the badger, you think he’d bother to come out for a dead dog?”
I could tell he was annoyed. “He does know that it’s his job, right?”
Smith smirked. “He informed us last time that he does dead people , not dead animals .”
I felt a funny little churning in my stomach. “And what happens when our victim is a shifter?” I asked him.
“He shows up or we do every case after that without him,” Smith replied darkly. “Not that we aren’t basically doing that anyway.”
I snorted, but I didn’t disagree—at the crime scenes, anyway. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we lost the ability to do our own autopsies. As much as the acting ME irritated me, I wasn’t sure if it would be worse not having a medical examiner at all and had to wait multiple extra days for a postmortem.
But what it meant for now was that I didn’t have to wait for him to get started on my own job.
It was several hours later, the sun sinking low behind the trees, by the time I managed to get everything wrapped up, tagged, bagged, and loaded into the truck. At least it was a good handful of degrees warmer than it had been a week ago when they’d left the badger. My hands were cold, but they weren’t cramping and raw.
Smith was talking to the patrol team who were going to park at the bottom of Elliot’s driveway—since just doing drive-bys hadn’t let them catch whoever had dumped the dog’s carcass. I deliberately left the truck where it was and walked up the driveway, gritting my teeth a little against the sharp ache in my knee with every step. I’d known it would hurt walking up the hill and chose to do it anyway.
Elliot had been watching out the window, or maybe he’d set up a camera or other alert system, because he opened the door before I got to the path from the driveway to the front door, past the flowerbeds with their drowsy denizens. Most of the leaves had turned brown or yellow or red, and many were collected in the dirt and mulch below each of the shrubs and no-longer-blooming flowers.
“Where’s your car?” he asked me.
“At the bottom of the hill,” I replied. “I need to take evidence and equipment back, but I wanted to… see if you needed anything.” I’d changed my mind, switching from see if you were okay. Because that felt too personal. Too much like what a boyfriend would say.
His hazel eyes searched my face, but it felt like he was looking into my heart and soul. And I knew he wouldn’t like what he found there.
He swallowed. “Thanks for coming,” he said, his rough voice low. Vulnerable.
“I—” Now I felt like an asshole for spending hours working at the bottom of the driveway and not checking on him right away.
“You were working,” he said, his voice still strangely soft. “I walked partway down. You were… doing something to it.”
I nodded and opened my mouth to say something, anything, although I didn’t know what, but then Elliot held up a hand.
“I don’t want to know,” he said. “Whatever it was.”
I nodded again. “Okay.” I hadn’t been going to tell him that anyway. I didn’t know what I’d been going to say, but I knew better than to talk about a skinned dog corpse. “Do you need anything?” I asked, then. “I have to drive the… evidence back to work, but I can come back. If you want me to.”
I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to ask me to stay. I knew he wasn’t going to do either, and that even if he had, it would have been a terrible idea for the state of my heart.
“I’m okay,” is what he said.
So I just nodded. “Okay,” I repeated. “Then I guess—let me know if you do need anything. Or whatever.”
It was Elliot’s turn to nod. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Okay,” I repeated. “Well, be careful. Okay?”
I am so very awkward.
“Okay,” he agreed, and then I turned around and walked back down the hill to the truck, wishing I’d offered to order Chinese food or something. Come up with a reason to stay, because I thought that maybe, just maybe , if I’d offered specifically, he might have said yes.