“Which means what?”
I sighed. “I’ll need to see if there’s enough left of it for DNA, but you’re most likely looking at shifter bones. Wolf or coyote.”
“How sure are you?” Colfax asked me.
“Eighty percent,” I replied, swiftly. Larger normal animals were a possibility. Maybe someone’s St. Bernard or Great Dane. But your average coyote femur topped out around 200 mm, and a wolf was only marginally larger, at 275 mm or so. A shifter’s canid femur would be closer to 320 or 330mm.
Mine, if I were killed in wolf form, would be about that.
That was a disconcerting thought.
Even though I’d been around a good deal more than my fair share of death over the course of my career in CSI, I’d somehow managed to mostly keep myself from thinkingwhat if this were me?It probably helped that I’d never seen anyone who looked particularly like me or reminded me of myself in any other way.
I’d had bodies that made me think about Quincy or Noah or Hart or someone else I knew and liked, but never myself.
This one was different.
Iwas different.
Colfax hadme take the femur and a collection of other bone fragments pulled from the ashes of the fire back to the Sheriff’s Department so that we could attempt to run DNA and whatever else might help us definitively determine species and, hopefully, identify our victim. I’d also started a homicide report that I’d turned in to a very surly-faced Sheriff Mallet who had explained that it wasn’tmehe was upset about, just what I was handing him.
I couldn’t say that I blamed him for that. I didn’t much like the idea that I was once again working a shifter death. Murder. You didn’t burn a shifter who died of natural causes in a goddamn campfire.
I hoped they’d be able to get DNA. To figure out who this was. To tell their family they were dead so that they could put away the false hope and try to find cold comfort in knowledge. Every family I had ever met, every story Ward had told, always—the not knowing was worse than even the worst news. If I could, I would try to spare this shifter’s family that.
I was doing my best to get enough material for our new DNA sequencer—thanks to copious amounts of begging fromboth Smith and McKinley, as well as Roger and Lacy, at least according to Lacy—when my phone buzzed, face down, on the table that passed for my desk.
I ignored it, finishing what I was doing first, then prepping the machine and putting what I hoped would be a viable sample into it, then hitting the button to let it work.
I picked up my phone and flipped it over, noting that the missed call had been from Judy Hart. There was a tiny voicemail icon, so I called it to see what Hart’s mom had wanted.
“Hi Seth, sweetie!” Judy Hart was in incredibly cheerful and kindly woman. I wondered what on earth had happened to her son. Not that Hart wasn’t kind, because he was, he just wasn’tniceabout it. “Marsh and I are barbecuing chicken tonight. There was a sale on chicken, so we bought way too much, and it’ll go bad if we don’t cook it all up. So you should come out and help us eat it all.”
I felt emotion rise in the back of my throat. They had so very obviously done this on purpose. Just for me.
Because by all rights, if they were going to call someone to feed them lots of chicken, it probably should have been the man who called them ‘Ma’ and ‘Pop’—but they hadn’t called Elliot, they called me. Now they probably had Elliot over yesterday or something, but I was still touched by the fact that Judy had called me.
I checked the timer on the sequencer, figuring I could make it out to the Harts’ place by around seven, and called her back.
The grilled barbecue chicken, for the record, was fantastic. But it was made a little blander by the fact that the DNA on the femur came back shifter.
Colfax had thanked me and let me know they’d be in touch if they needed anything else.
I knew what that meant. It meant thank-you-very-much-if-you’re-lucky-you’ll-find-out-if-we-caught-the-guy. I was usedto that—handing over evidence and hoping that it was helpful. Maybe finding out in a few months or a few years whether or not it had made a difference. If the case had been solved, the perpetrator caught, justice served.
Just because I was used to it didn’t mean Ilikedit. But it was what it was. I worked the evidence, found all the pieces, and gave them to somebody else to put together.
Now if only somebody could help me put the pieces of my life together, I’d be all set.
19
Elliot Crane
Happy Halloween!
Seth Mays
What the fuck is wrong with your state?
