“Do you want a guess?” I asked him.
“Sure, if you have one.”
“He doesn’t want the dog IDed based on its coat.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s somebody’s pet.” I looked down at the dog’s mangled body. “And, honestly, it seems like the dog was dead when it was skinned. And this hind leg—” I pointed at it. “—looks to me like it’s badly broken and mangled, which suggests that he hit the dog, probably with a car. So if he’s hiding it, the dog probably belongs to a neighbor.”
“Huh.” Smith studied the unfortunate animal’s corpse, his expression thoughtful. “You might be right, Mays.”
“Did you call out Borde?” I asked him.
“He wouldn’t come out for the badger, you think he’d bother to come out for a dead dog?”
I could tell he was annoyed. “He does know that it’s his job, right?”
Smith smirked. “He informed us last time that he does deadpeople, not deadanimals.”
I felt a funny little churning in my stomach. “And what happens when our victim is a shifter?” I asked him.
“He shows up or we do every case after that without him,” Smith replied darkly. “Not that we aren’t basically doing that anyway.”
I snorted, but I didn’t disagree—at the crime scenes, anyway. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we lost the ability to do our own autopsies. As much as the acting ME irritated me, I wasn’t sure if it would be worse not having a medical examiner at all and had to wait multiple extra days for a postmortem.
But what it meant for now was that I didn’t have to wait for him to get started on my own job.
It was several hours later,the sun sinking low behind the trees, by the time I managed to get everything wrapped up, tagged, bagged, and loaded into the truck. At least it was a good handful of degrees warmer than it had been a week ago when they’d left the badger. My hands were cold, but they weren’t cramping and raw.
Smith was talking to the patrol team who were going to park at the bottom of Elliot’s driveway—since just doing drive-bys hadn’t let them catch whoever had dumped the dog’s carcass. I deliberately left the truck where it was and walked up the driveway, gritting my teeth a little against the sharp ache in my knee with every step. I’d known it would hurt walking up the hill and chose to do it anyway.
Elliot had been watching out the window, or maybe he’d set up a camera or other alert system, because he opened the door before I got to the path from the driveway to the front door, past the flowerbeds with their drowsy denizens. Most of the leaveshad turned brown or yellow or red, and many were collected in the dirt and mulch below each of the shrubs and no-longer-blooming flowers.
“Where’s your car?” he asked me.
“At the bottom of the hill,” I replied. “I need to take evidence and equipment back, but I wanted to… see if you needed anything.” I’d changed my mind, switching fromsee if you were okay.Because that felt too personal. Too much like what a boyfriend would say.
His hazel eyes searched my face, but it felt like he was looking into my heart and soul. And I knew he wouldn’t like what he found there.
He swallowed. “Thanks for coming,” he said, his rough voice low. Vulnerable.
“I—” Now I felt like an asshole for spending hours working at the bottom of the driveway andnotchecking on him right away.
“You were working,” he said, his voice still strangely soft. “I walked partway down. You were… doing something to it.”
I nodded and opened my mouth to say something, anything, although I didn’t know what, but then Elliot held up a hand.
“I don’t want to know,” he said. “Whatever it was.”
I nodded again. “Okay.” I hadn’t been going to tell him that anyway. I didn’t knowwhatI’d been going to say, but I knew better than to talk about a skinned dog corpse. “Do you need anything?” I asked, then. “I have to drive the… evidence back to work, but I can come back. If you want me to.”
I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to ask me to stay. I knew he wasn’t going to do either, and that even if he had, it would have been a terrible idea for the state of my heart.
“I’m okay,” is what he said.
So I just nodded. “Okay,” I repeated. “Then I guess—let me know if you do need anything. Or whatever.”
It was Elliot’s turn to nod. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
