Chapter 37
37
Elliot Crane
Val and Taavi are here!
Seth Mays
Since when?
They got in last night, but I wasn’t looking at my phone.
Val called a little after you left.
Is it okay if they stay a while?
Of course!
Your brother won’t mind?
Noah’s friends with Taavi.
:)
I was sitting on a bench in the crowded—relatively speaking, anyway—Green Bay airport, waiting for Noah and Lulu to deplane and come out through security. There were quite a few people, and the harried expressions of the TSA agents and coffee shop workers told me this was insanely busy for them—even though there were far fewer people than I’d expect in even Richmond’s not-terribly-large airport.
I yawned, my body and brain still tired after a night of not-enough sleep and a morning of scrubbing the living shit out of the carpet by the door. I’d mostly gotten the blood out.
Mostly.
If you knew where to look, you could see the discoloration. It didn’t scream blood anymore, but I was pretty sure Taavi would be able to smell it. God knew I still could.
Which meant Noah would, too. And probably Elliot, although his sense of smell wasn’t quite as strong as mine.
Merry Christmas, smell the blood .
And then I felt like a horrible person, because here I was, bitching internally about the fact that my brother and Lulu were coming to a house that had a plywood-covered door and bloodstains on the floor, and I’d completely forgotten that this had happened to Elliot last year, too, when he’d been attacked and dragged out of the house and almost murdered.
I love you.
I love you, too.
What spurred that?
Just thinking about you.
I wasn’t going to remind him what had happened last year.
I think I’m going to redo the whole patio door thing.
Maybe build a porch.
That door and I do not have good history.
I wasn’t going to be the one to suggest it.
Maybe next year we do Richmond for Christmas.
Unless your brother has a patio door.
No.
But he’s gonna move in with Lulu.
Who has a back deck.
As long as no one uses it to break in.
It’s up a floor.
Great. Next year, Christmas in Virginia.
I didn’t actually know anything more about Lulu’s deck. I knew Noah had talked about the deck—Lulu had one of those houses that was ground floor on the front but second floor with an exposed lower level on the back. There was also a hot tub, although I wasn’t clear if that was on the deck or down on the ground.
But I did like the fact that Elliot was talking about next year . That meant that he was thinking about being with me for at least that long. It made me feel as though I wasn’t just the guy he was with now—I was the guy he wanted to stay with.
I supposed I had plenty of evidence that was true—the fact that he wanted me to live with him, that he trusted me to help him clear out his dad’s office, that he let me see past the stoicism, and, if Hart was to be believed, that he let me use his tools.
But he’d also tried not to date me for so long that I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t just given in because it was easier than arguing about it.
Okay, I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. But there was that niggling little voice in the back of my head that I was starting to recognize might have been my father’s. The one telling me I was unworthy. That I was a failure. A weakling and a coward. Not enough of a man.
Usually, I deal with my past—the one Noah and I share—pretty well. I don’t wallow in self-recrimination and I don’t consider myself a corrupt sinner. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the whole concept of sin , at least as my father defined it, was just a means of control and manipulation.
But when it came to things like relationships, those thoughts and words and feelings of inadequacy always seemed to creep up on me.
“Sethy!”
I looked up, happy and relieved to be distracted from my thoughts by my brother’s arrival as he half-skipped through the security doors and over to throw himself at me in what tried—and failed—to be a bear-hug. I hugged him back, and I was surprised at the emotion that choked up the back of my throat.
“I missed you,” I told the top of his head, really meaning it.
Noah squeezed harder, and I realized that he was actually squeezing , really gripping me hard—something he’d not been able to do as a shifter when I was still human. I squeezed back, and, damn, it felt good. “I missed you, too,” Noah replied, his voice a little strained from the strength of my hug.
I let him go and grinned. “Welcome to the frozen north,” I said.
Noah’s bright blue eyes lit up. “We saw snow, Seth!” he said. “Like, lots of snow! When we landed I was afraid you wouldn’t get here. There’s so much! Is it safe to drive? Will we have to stay here?”
I couldn’t help laughing, even though I’d said something similar to Elliot the first time we’d gotten more than a dusting and I’d been expected to go to work. “They actually know how to clear roads up here, Nono,” I told him. “It’s perfectly safe to drive back to Shawano.”
Noah and Lulu were updating me on what felt like literally every single detail of their lives—and Taavi’s, although I had the feeling I’d hear that part again—when my phone started ringing. A glance at it told me it was Smith, and I thumbed the answer button followed by the speaker.
“Mays,” I answered, trying to sound cheerful and mostly just managing not to sound pissed off.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Smith said. “That Buettner sang like a canary.” He sounded like the proverbial cat that had eaten said canary, appropriately enough.
“Oh?” is what I said out loud, glancing over to see Noah’s eyes wide. Lulu was in the back, and a quick check of the rearview mirror told me they looked just as curious.
“Rolled not only on our runner, Joel Vintner, but two more of his little friends, which brings our total to the four you identified as having been present on scene at the house.”
I felt a surge of relief. Even though I’d known Buettner and his buddy were in jail, I’d also known—well, strongly suspected—that there had been four people present for the staging of the dead badger. “You got IDs?”
“IDs and a nice fat warrant,” Smith replied, and he was sounding almost gleeful now. “Which we served earlier this morning. And Vintner’s ATV tested positive for human blood, so they’re definitely going to be spending Christmas in a little cement room, especially after last night.”
“Thank God,” I said.
“The other two buddies got freaked out after the badger incident, and refused to come out and help again—the dog was Buettner alone, and he and Vintner were both responsible for the possum. And last night, obviously.”
A glance at my passenger seat told me that Noah wanted very much to know what had happened last night and why it involved animals and people being arrested.
“But the judge I dragged out of bed this morning was very unamused by their arguments, thank heck, and isn’t going to have any nonsense about bail. Not after what they did.” He paused a moment, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “I thought that might help,” Smith said.
“Yeah, thanks, detective.”
“Gale, Seth. You should call me Gale.”
I smiled a little, even though he couldn’t see me. “Gale,” I repeated.
“You have a minute?”
I wasn’t terribly keen on having Smith divulge a bunch of details to Noah and Lulu. “I’m driving my brother and his partner back from Green Bay,” I told him.
“Ah. Call me back when you get a chance?”
“Will do.”
I poked the end call button.
“What the fuck happened yesterday?” Noah wanted to know.
I took a deep breath and told them.
It took the rest of the drive home.
Once everyone else had gone to bed, I texted Smith to see if he was still awake.
My phone buzzed, and I answered it. “You should really try sleeping,” I told him.
“Yeah, so should you,” came the blithe response. “And yet, here we are.”
I snorted, then settled onto the couch, grimacing a little at the hideous plywood door-replacement. At least Noah and Lulu hadn’t had to ask why, which meant that Elliot didn’t have to talk about it. If I was honest, I didn’t know if he even cared—I knew he didn’t much like talking about his dad’s death, though, and this might be close enough that it also bothered him. Or maybe not. But I hadn’t had the chance to ask him this morning on my way out the door, so I’d avoided it, just in case.
“What else did you want to tell me?” I asked him.
“You remember me talking about the Northmen?” he asked in return.
“Yeah. White supremacist group?”
“White human supremacist group,” he corrected. “Well, it seems that our friend Vintner was part of it.”
“And Buettner?”
“Not yet—he was apparently making a bid to join.”
“Is that what this was?” I asked. “Not some revenge thing?”
“According to Buettner, the first shifter—the timber wolf, a guy named John Runningdeer from the local Ho Chunk tribe—was entirely accidental, and that he and Vintner kept the body, afraid somebody would call the DNR.” The Department of Natural Resources.
“Accidental,” I repeated, and my disbelief had to have been clear in my voice.
“Not sure if Vintner would agree, but Buettner said the guy just jumped out of the woods.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Because a wolf shifter can’t hear an ATV coming.” I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable, and laid the sarcasm on pretty thick.
“I’m equally skeptical,” he replied. “But I don’t need to nail him on intentional homicide. I have him on unintentional, plus everything else.”
“You found the body?” I asked.
“When they went to skin it for the pelt, they found pierced ears, and realized the body belonged to a shifter, and then they really panicked and burned it,” Smith continued. “We didn’t have a DNA match in the database for him, but Roger was able to get a swab from Runningdeer’s daughter that matched the bone from your bonfire.”
I couldn’t decide if I was happy to have those threads connected, or if that was more disturbing, since it suggested a local cabal of human supremacists who thought they could get away with literal murder—and who almost had, since we hadn’t gotten an ID on the burned shifter bones before this.
“Fast forward a few months,” Smith went on. “And that’s what gave them the idea to start threatening Elliot with dead animals.”
“But why go after him to begin with?”
Smith sighed. “Buettner was trying to show off for his fiancée, if you can believe that. Her brother was?—”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know who he is.”
“Well, he was also a member of the Northmen,” Smith said.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “How many of them are there?”
“Too many,” Smith answered. “And they go back at least one generation. Possibly two. Vintner’s father, Hasenfuss’s father, and several other older men were also a part of it—so, by the way, was the suicide-killer who set that fire up in Aniwa.”
“Wait—what?” That was way too many things all connected to each other. It sent a chill down my spine.
“The ID came back on an Arnold and Henrietta Van Himmel, old friends of the Hasenfusses and the Vintners. I’ve asked the Sheriff’s Department to run their prints against those found in the barn, because one of the other listed members was the barn’s original owner.”
“Jesus,” I repeated. “So they do have a membership list?” When we’d first talked about the Northmen, Smith had suggested they weren’t organized enough for such a thing.
“Apparently they do,” he replied. “Vintner Senior was a ranking member and had a book we found in the search of the family home.”
“You got a warrant for that ?”
“Junior was living there, and the warrant covered searching his place of residence.” Smith almost sounded smug, but that wasn’t an emotion I’d ever seen on him, so I wasn’t sure. The man seemed too nice for smug.
“So you know who’s on the list, then.”
“We do—but being a Northman alone isn’t enough to warrant any sort of action. At least not yet.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning anybody can be a member of whatever they want, and just because they’re in the group doesn’t mean they’ve done anything illegal.”
“Other than be a bunch of species-ist shitheads,” I pointed out.
“Which, sadly, is not illegal.”
“They’re basically the Klan,” I grumbled.
“Which is also, sadly, not illegal,” Smith replied.
“It should be,” I grumbled.
Smith didn’t argue with me. “What I really want to know at this point is whether we can connect any of them to anything else in the area—or whether there are other chapters of Northmen out there. So I called the Feds. Roger drove a bunch of the samples and files out this morning.”
I was about to tell him I could have done that on my way to the airport, then realized that he and Roger—and probably Lacy—were all trying very hard to let me have time with my family.
It hit me, then, that these people cared about me—not like Elliot did, of course, or Noah, or even Marsh and Judy Hart, but they still cared. Even though they knew I was gay and knew I was a shifter (because that got out pretty quickly after I’d growled at Buettner last night—to the point where Roger was sending me pictures of doggy treats this morning), they still wanted to do things for me.
The very fact that Smith was giving me updates showed that he cared.
It made me suddenly feel like I actually had found somewhere I belonged, filling my belly with a warmth that was completely contradictory to what Smith and I were talking about.
“—hoping that will give us more to go on, to figure out if there are any other older Northmen still active or around. And hopefully the Feds will move on identifying them as a known hate group.”
“Will that do anything?” I asked, knowing I probably wasn’t going to like the answer.
“No idea,” came his reply, and I could see his awkward shrug in my mind. “But it will get them on a watch list, at least.”
“One can hope,” I remarked wryly.
“Darn right,” came his response. “I just wanted to give you a full update.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Merry Christmas!”
“Thanks, de—Gale. You, too.”