“Probably,” I answered, resigned to the inevitable.
“And a reason your primary reference was an ex-cop and not a current one.” It really was too bad that he was quite smart.
“My second reference is still a homicide detective,” I pointed out, despite the fact that it wasn’t really relevant.
“Who recently caught the Arcanid Killer, whose victims were deliberately staged to spread Arcanavirus.”
I nodded, my chest tight and a pit in my stomach.
“You know,” Smith said, examining his gloved hand. “I personally think it would be a good idea to have a shifter or faun or orc on every CSI team.”
I looked up at him, startled—and in a good way, for once. “What?”
“I mean, case in point here,” he said, the tone of his voice completely unchanged, so I didn’t think he was kidding or being sarcastic. “You can smell evidence that the rest of us sad, pathetic normie humans can’t.”
I knew my mouth was hanging open behind my mask, which was probably pretty obvious, but I couldn’t help it.
“Let’s just… not tell the chief, yeah? He’s… from a different era.”
Don’t tell the big boss that I have fur and fangs. Got it.
It felt good to know that somebody had my back, though.
Then Smith stood and moved away from the car. “Hey, Hilgers! Call in the FD, would you? We need to make sure this wasn’t staged.”
“Yah, a-right,” came the call of one of the uniforms, whose northern Wisconsin accent was so thick it sounded fake. I was pretty sure it wasn’t, but I was having to recalibrate my ears a little, given that the guy sounded like he’d stepped out ofFargo. I’d spent the first ten minutes at the scene trying desperately not to snicker every time he talked. After that, I got control of myself. Mostly.
Smith returned and looked through the now-open door at me. “Can I—help you?”
“Hand me the kit bag?” I asked.
He went and got it, then crouched in the doorway, holding it in one hand. “Did you want me to try to stuff the whole thing in there, or is there something specific I can hand you?”
Smith suggestedthat I probably didn’t want to be inside the car when the fire department showed up to start the official is-this-arson investigation, so I had to decide whether going out one of the front doors was going to be easier than figuring out how to get myself back out of the back.
Before that happened, though, I swabbed the dash, seats, and floor, as well as the clothes of the victim, hoping that I’d be able to get some sort of chemical evidence from one or all of those samples. I wanted to try to get anything from under the victim’s nails, but I wasn’t confident about my ability to do so without breaking them—or his very burnt fingers—off.
I wanted other things, too. I wanted to pull a tooth to use its root to test for DNA. I wanted to see if there was any sort of fluid left in his veins to run a tox screen on. But I couldn’t actually do those things—teeth and blood came from the ME’s office, for one thing, and Shawano didn’t have the equipment to run anything particularly sophisticated, for another. We’d have to send things over to Wausau, or maybe down to Madison, depending on what we needed and who had the bigger backlog.
Instead, it was my job to preserve as much of the integrity of the body as possible, since any damage would interfere with the autopsy results. Not that I had a lot of confidence in the current acting ME. While there was no question that the victim was dead, I felt like the approximately ten seconds he’d spent actually looking at the body probably wasn’t enough to make any sort of definitive pronouncement about cause of death, time of death, or pretty much anything potentially useful.
I’d passed my swabs and a couple smudgy fingerprints back out to Smith, and then squirmed my way out the back hatch again, just managing to clamber out as the fire marshal’s red SUV pulled off the highway onto the shoulder, gravel and grass being crushed by its all-terrain tires.
The man who swung his way out of the driver’s side was short, squat, and built like a barrel, with brown hair shot through with grey and weathered fair skin. He also wasn’t human.
Dark brown eyes met mine with a knowing flash, and I ducked my head, feeling compelled to show deference to this man, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was wearing a shirt with a ‘Fire Chief’ patch on it.
He was stronger than me. Not physically. Physically, I probably could have picked him up and thrown him, despite his muscular bulk. But I couldfeelthe power in him. Whatever he was, whatever kind of shifter, he was more powerful than I was.
I wondered if that meant he was bigger as an animal. If he were a bear or some large apex predator.
And he knew—just as I did—that I wasn’t human, either. And that if it came down to it, he would win in a fight. I wondered if this was how animals felt when they encountered one another—they just sort ofknewwhich of them was dominant, and which submissive.
Smith appeared oblivious to the fact that a whole series of communication happened between the chief and me.
“Chief Ziemer,” Smith greeted him as they shook hands. “I’d say it’s good to see you again, but given the circumstances…” He trailed off.
“Polite as ever, Smith,” Ziemer replied dryly before turning dark eyes on me. “And who do we have here?”
