“And I’m the only homicide detective and overworked to heck.”
I smirked because he was on the phone and couldn’t see my expression.Heck. And it wasn’t because he was from the upper Midwest, either—because so was Hart.
Smith didn’t seem to care that other people—the uniforms, Roger, and even occasionally Lacy and me—swore. But he didn’t. He’d laugh or grimace along with everyone else—he just didn’t do it himself.
I liked Smith. And Lacy and Roger, although a lot of the uniforms I either didn’t know or could have done without. Most of them gave me small-town-cop vibes, and not in the Andy Griffith kind of way. Some seemed nice enough, I just only had the opportunity to nod hello or watch as they stood guard over a body or a length of crime scene tape, neither of which is a particularly good way to get to know somebody.
I mostly took my cues from Lacy, Roger, and Smith—if they were pleasant to someone, I figured they couldn’t be that bad. I tried to be nice and cheerful around everybody, because everything is already shit enough, and I shouldn’t be contributing to it by being irritable, but there were people I gave a wide perimeter to or deliberately didn’t engage with based on Roger’s locked jaw or Lacy’s pursed lips or the totally flat expression on Smith’s angular features.
“Are they going to hire anybody else?” I asked him. The last other homicide detective—they had one person for special victims, one for just homicide, and one homicide-plus, including cold cases, vice, and cyber crime, interestingly enough. I’d expressed surprise that Shawano had enough cyber crime to warrant being assigned to a detective, and Smith had explained that the population tended to be on the older side and were fairly frequent targets of scams, some of them incredibly elaborate and locally based. Smith was ostensibly homicide, but tended to pick up missing persons who were likely dead or dying, from the special victims detective, Christopher McKinley, a dark-haired, light brown-skinned, burly dude who made my beard look scanty, which it is definitely not. He was around my height, but built broader, hairier, and more muscled. He seemed like a decent enough guy the few times I’d had reason to interact with him. Mostly, he asked for Lacy, and they had a rapport going.
“No clue,” came Smith’s response with shrug of one slender shoulder. “I’d have thought they’d have gotten to it by now if they were going to, but wehaveto have an ME, and they haven’t managed to get us a permanent one of those, either.”
That had been an annoyance, because it meant that a lot of the tests that an ME would run hadn’t been run, which meant I had nothing to compare some of the other test resultsto. The more information you had, the better you could narrow things down—and yeah, a lot of that was Smith’s job, not mine, but it could help me know what other tests to run or ask for, what to look for, where to check for soil or pollen samples, that sort of thing.
As it stood, I didn’t have much beyond the barn itself—and all the pollen and dust and animal shit that had accompanied the blood in the barn itself.
There was a lot of it. Pollen—wheat, corn, soybeans, goldenrod, and at least half a dozen other particulates that wereeasily linked to the things that one might find in a barn in the upper Midwestern United States—dust, fecal matter from an undetermined origin, dirt, bits of straw, dried corn, grasses, dead bugs… Pretty much what you’d expect to find in a barn. Plus blood.
I really wished I had better equipment. The ability to just run the tests we needed instead of shipping off samples with requests and then justwaitinguntil somebody else got around to providing us the answers to our problems.
Despite the fact that my job was solving problems—and the fact that having to wait for the Wausau crime lab to get around to my cases was driving me up the proverbial wall—I had actually spent most of my life letting other people solve my problems for me. My life-related problems, anyway. I’d fallen into jobs, taken offers from Noah and the people who worked to support new shifters, let other people push me this way and that, make choices about where I would go to school, who I was going to date, even down to what I was going to wear.
That was Enrique, who always tried to dress me, as though I were some sort of doll. A prop that he took with him to show off until he got bored or I failed to meet some standard I hadn’t been aware of or maybe I just wasn’t capable of meeting.
Don’t get me wrong. I hadn’t objected. I’d not only given him permission, but I’dwantedhim to make those choices for me. It was easier that way. Simpler. And I’d trusted him more than I’d trusted myself.
The same way I’d trusted Clay and Devin.
And Noah, although Noah at least had wanted to be supportive and helpful, instead of controlling and self-serving.
To be fair to myself, it wasn’t my inability to solve problems that was making me have to rely on another lab to send back the test results. Icoulddo them all myself, if I’d had the equipment I needed. But I still didn’t like it.
16
Elliot Crane
im sorry
will you talkto me?
I rubbedsleep out of my eyes, then stared at the messages again. Getting texts from Elliot while I was asleep was becoming… I didn’t want to call it a habit, exactly, since I wasn’t the one doing it. I guess it washishabit.
I hadn’t responded to the messages he’d sent me two days ago, and I had no intention of replying to these, either, although they were a little more worrying. All of Elliot’s texts had always been written in complete sentences with correct punctuation, but these weren’t.
What if he was really upset? Or sick?
If he was either of those things, why would he be texting me?
I sighed, tapped my way to my text history with Hart, and sent him a message:Is Elliot okay? He sent me some weird texts.
He didn’t respond and there were no little dots suggesting that he was typing.
Of course, it was also like six in the morning, and Hart was not the morning type if he could help it. And it was a Saturday, so he was probably still asleep.
I was a morning person, though, Saturday or not. I got up and padded into my tiny kitchen from my tiny closet of a bedroom to make coffee and investigate breakfast options, although I wasn’t entirely certain I had any.
Turns out, I didn’t have any coffee, either. Or, rather, I had just enough grounds to faintly dust the bottom of my french press, but not enough to make anything stronger than brown water.
