Once everyoneelse 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?”
“Whitehumansupremacist 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 theotherlisted 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.”
