I felt my lips twitch, thinking about the stark difference between Smith’s clean language and Hart’s completely degenerate sailor’s vocabulary. I could only imagine what Hart would have had to say in the same circumstances.Jesus fucking Christ, Mays. What the fuckcanwe do, then?
“Wecould,” I put in. “If we had a hand-held Raman spectrometer.”
“A what now?”
“Raman spectrometer. It uses laser technology to determine whether blood is animal, human, or Arcanid in about thirty to forty-five seconds.”
“Seconds?” he repeated, incredulous.
“Seconds,” I confirmed. “Really useful little devices.”
“Lacy!” Smith called out.
“Yeah?” She came over.
“I want one of those Ramen things.”
“Ramen—?”
“Raman spectrometer,” I supplied, suppressing a smirk.
Lacy rolled her eyes. “Me, too,” she replied. “But I don’t make the budget. You wanna fight with the sheriff to get us new equipment, maybe he’ll listen toyou.” There was a certain bitterness to her tone that made me wonder if the sheriff was as old-fashioned about women (and undoubtedly Nids) as the police chief Smith had mentioned.
Smith pressed his lips together, the motion making the skin around them even paler. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
My guess was that probably meantyes.
It didn’t bode well for my future employment—because I wasn’t unrealistic about the fact that, sooner or later, people were going to find out I’m a shifter. If I didn’t tell them, someone in my fire investigation class or someone who saw me somewhere else or heard me say something would know—and then it would all be over.
Part of why I wanted to do fire investigation was because that gave me an out—one I could do even as a shifter. Because I’m a shifter. It was a safety net of sorts, but it was also something that would let mebeme. Something that was mine, and only mine. Not Noah’s or Elliot’s or Hart’s or Ward’s—mine.
I wanted that to extend to my crime scene work, too, but I was starting to think that this job—or, at least, this part of it—came with an expiration date. It was disappointing, but not really unexpected. I’d had the feeling that would be the case when Smith told me that the chief wasn’t a big fan of Nids.
I busied myself taking samples—the new blood that almost certainly belonged to our victim, the old blood soaked into the wood beneath, which I gathered by pulling up pieces of thefloorboards. And then I started nosing around the rest of the barn.
Which is how I found three more bloodstained areas.
Two of them were huge. Too big to have been the site of a chicken’s demise, for instance. So either it was a lot of chickens, or something larger had been killed or seriously injured. My money was that it wasn’t a pig or a cow, either.
Smith calledto tell me that the doctors had determined that the shifter victim needed to be put into a medically-induced coma in order to have a fighting chance, so we weren’t going to get any useful information out of him until he woke up. Then Smith asked me to tell him all the tests I would run if money weren’t an issue and I had all the equipment I wanted.
So I did.
“I am starting to think you are way beyond our league,” Smith told me.
“I’m not dating y’all,” I told him, amused. I knew what he meant, though. My training, my expertise, the things I knew were the best choices to process the evidence, were far beyond what Shawano County or city homicide had access to.
Yeah, we could send it out to the regional or state crime lab, but that took time, and, even though I didn’t know him all that well, I could tell that Smith was worried about what might happen—who might go missing or turn up dead—while we waited for Wausau or Madison or Green Bay to get around to doing our work for us.
“How do you solve anything?” I asked him. “You have no local DNA analysis, no even moderately complex blood tests, no rapid blood tests, and a very basic-level tox screen thatessentially only gives blood-alcohol and the most common three poisons. Anything else has to go through Wausau or Madison.”
“Or the FBI,” he’d put in.
“You really want to call in the feds?”
Smith shrugged. “They have resources we don’t, and as long as I play nice, I get what I want, too.”
This was completely contrary to the way Richmond homicide felt about the involvement of the FBI. “But they’reyourcases,” I said, feeling slightly stupid.
