“Who’s he?” he asked Lacy.
“New tech,” she said back, her voice tight and not at all friendly. Apparently she didn’t think much of Bored Uniform.
He looked me over. “What happened to Marcks?” he demanded.
“Not your concern,” Lacy snapped back.
Bored Uniform grunted, his small, dark eyes squinting with malice. I couldn’t help the small surge of satisfaction at the clear evidence of the beginning of male-pattern baldness, even though I knew it was both petty and unfair.
He didn’t ask me what my name was, where I was from, nothing. Just that grunt and his unfriendly stare. I wonderedwhat problem he had with me—or whether his problem was all Lacy.
Usually the boys in blue were happy enough with my presence at crime scenes. From the outside, I look like a good old southern boy, especially now that I had the beard. Maybe people in Wisconsin don’t go for that look? I had no idea.
I didn’t need him to like me, though, so I just kept following Lacy around the corner—careful not to step on the streaked blood trail—despite the slight itching between my shoulder blades as his stare followed our progress.
I wanted to ask her what that was all about, but I didn’t know her. She seemed like a good person, but I’d only talked to her once before and hadn’t been in her presence for even an hour yet. And asking questions about office gossip or politics before I’d even been hired might not do me any favors. So I didn’t ask. I just followed her into the next room.
When we crossed the threshold, I was surprised to find no body—not disappointed, but the amount of blood that had been smeared down the hallway had suggested there would be. There was more blood—quite a bit more, in fact—but the body it had come from was conspicuously absent.
There were more drag marks and footprints that tracked that blood out a back door. There were bloody finger-smudges on the sides of the door frame and the walls, some looked like they were from gloved fingers, although there was at least one clear bloody print that I could see right away. My guess was thatthatone belonged to the victim.
There was a tall, gangly man crouched by the back door, his eyes focused out at the tracks in the mud, red-brown unkempt hair being ruffled by the hot wind blowing in through the open door. He wore a department-issued mask, but I could see the furrows in his brow.
He had looked over as Lacy led us into the room, and his frown shifted from one of consideration to confusion.
“Lacy,” he said, and I immediately recognized the harsh gravel of his voice. We’d spoken on the phone—with Hart—last winter when he and Hart had needed guidance on collecting dried snot off a window.
“Gale,” Lacy greeted him, and she sounded much more pleasant than she had when speaking with Bored Uniform. “This is our… new potential tech, Seth Mays. Seth?—”
Smith’s brows had gone up, his frown easing, and he broke in. “Oh, we’ve spoken,” he said, standing and coming over to join us. “I didn’t realize you were planning a move to Shawano, Mr. Mays,” he said to me, his tone about as pleasant as his voice could actually manage.
“Just Mays is fine,” I reminded him with a nod that I hoped he took as friendly.
He nodded back.
“And I wasn’t when we last spoke,” I replied in answer to his remark about moving to Shawano. “But life is funny sometimes.” I didn’t really want to get into either the whole Arcanavirus thing, the fact that I’d been essentially fired because of the whole Arcanavirus thing, or my not-romance with Elliot Crane.
“It is that,” Smith agreed. Then he turned to Lacy. “Mrs. Greyfox said that her husband had dropped the kids off this morning at day camp, and then was planning on spending the rest of the day doing yard work.” He lifted a tablet, then scrolled down a little. “Mr. Greyfox has been unemployed for the last three months after an accident led to him needing to take time off work.”
I suddenly had a lot of sympathy for Mr. Greyfox, who was probably dead, if I were being completely honest with myself. But I knew exactly what it was like to be in his position.
Smith let out a sigh. “Mrs. Greyfox reports that her husband is, in fact, a silver fox shifter.”
I looked up, dread starting to pool in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to work another shifter murder.
Smith looked right at me. “You want to give me your read on this?” he asked.
I blinked. “You want to know what I think?” I probably shouldn’t have blurted that out at my own job interview, but I was shocked at the idea that any detective would want to hear my opinion on a case. Speculation wasn’t my job.
But Smith was nodding. “You read crime scenes for a living, right?”
I shrugged. “I collect evidence,” I replied. “I analyze it. I figure out where it came from and what it’s made of and whether or not it was or could be used to kill someone.”
“Sounds like a yes to me,” came Smith’s response. “So tell me what you’re reading.”
I wondered if this was a test or just how the man worked.
So I started reading. He wasn’t wrong—this was part of what I did for a living. It was how I identified evidence, how I figured out what was important and what wasn’t likely to be, how I sorted through the information to decide what to test and what tests to run. “He fought his attackers,” I said, keenly aware of the eyes of the two uniforms and Lacy as well as Smith on me as I looked around. “If I had to guess, they rendered him unconscious, but it was temporary, and he woke up after they dragged him in here, and he struggled as they pulled him out of the house.” The bloodstain on the carpet was irregular and smudged, but the streaks leading into the room weren’t crooked or broken. When you added in the pattern of footprints—that looked vaguely like someone had done a foxtrot in the blood on the way out the door—and the mix of gloved and ungloved bloody fingerprints, and it was pretty obvious to me that thevictim had regained consciousness and fought his attackers, even if only instinctively, as they dragged him out of the house.
