Never mind.
Hope you’re doing okay.
The sun hadn’t come up yetwhen I got the phone call dragging me out of sleep.
“Crime scene,” came Gale Smith’s gravelly voice. “They found our kidnapped shifter. Alive. Barely, but alive.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed, half climbing, half-falling out of bed.
It was then that I noticed the messages. The first one had come in around two a.m. The next about twenty minutes later, and the third one only a minute or two after that.
I stared at my phone for at least two or three minutes, trying to decide whether or not I was going to reply to them. Whether or not that would be a terrible idea. Or maybe Elliot was in trouble.
“Shit,” I muttered out loud, then went about quickly pulling on clothes and running a wet brush through my hair after splashing water on my face and patting my beard dry.
One very nice bonus of having a beard is that when people wake you up at five in the morning you won’t really look terribly unkempt if you don’t shave. Most people don’t notice if you trim your beard or not, whereas if you’re normally clean-shaven—like Smith—and you show up with a fairly epic five-o-clock shadow—also like Smith—it’s painfully obvious that you dragged your ass out of bed.
We all looked like crap—me, Lacy, Smith, and the sparse collection of uniforms still hanging around the scene. But Smith’s auburn stubble definitely made him look a bit more haggard than the rest of us, although there were plenty of eye-bags to go around.
It definitely made me miss Quincy, because one of us would have done the early morning coffee run. But Quincy wasn’t here, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to do it without her.
So we were exhausted and under-caffeinated, but there was a kind of manic edge to it—because this was a crime scene where there was no body to examine because they’d taken him, still alive, to the hospital. The helicopter, with its distinctive red cross on the belly, had flown over the highway, going the opposite direction as it headed toward the major trauma hospital in Green Bay.
The scene where he’d been found was an old barn, supposedly abandoned. The man who’d found the victim had been the grandson of the property owner—he’d finally gotten around to coming out to check out the property a good half-a-dozen years after his father’s death, and had found a bloody, dying man in the barn. He’d immediately called 9-1-1, leading to the airlift and us.
There was a lot of fresh blood—coupled with the amount left in the victim’s house, I was shocked he’d still been alive. But there was also a lot of old blood—years old.
The wooden floor-boards were stained dark with it.
I called over Smith.
“There’s a lot of old blood here,” I told him.
He squatted down next to me, and I was slightly envious of the fact that his knees didn’t make a horrific crunching noise as he did so. “How old?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I can’t really tell, just that it’s not fresh anymore. Months? Years?” I studied one of the dark stains. “I’d guess years, but you’d need a colorimetric analysis or degradation test to get more specific.”
He looked at me. “Can we do those here?”
I sighed. “Probably not.”
“Do you know how to do them?”
“With the right equipment, sure.”
“Can you tell what kind of blood?”
“With—”
“Some sort of tests,” he finished.
I nodded.
“Can we dothosehere?”
I shook my head.
“For the love of Pete,” he muttered.
