The newest bedroom had belonged to my parents and had been put in around what had been the old back door, which now had a tiny hallway out to the yard and the door of their bedroom. I assumed, anyway. That’s the way it had been when I was fifteen.
As a kid, I’d always thought of our house as looming, its porch imposing and its dark windows—sometimes lit like a demon’s eyes, sometimes not—hollow.
Now, it just looked like a house. Weathered, but not uncared-for, the wood having aged to a greyish color and starting to splinter, but not to the point where it needed replacing. The shingles looked newer, maybe a handful of years old, and the steps leading up to the porch still had some of their blond-wood tone to them.
Except for where there were dark stains that my crime-scene-experienced brain knew immediately was blood.
“Are you—” Elliot began.
“She died on the porch,” I said, my words sounding oddly flat even to my own ears.
“Yes,” Humbolt confirmed, walking over and looking in the direction I was facing.
“How do you know that?” Elliot asked.
“Blood on the stairs,” I replied, then forced my feet to walk in the direction of those same stairs.
“Seth—” Elliot hurried to catch up to me.
“What?” I asked him
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” I replied. “But what else am I going to do?”
“I mean the…” He trailed off.
“Blood?”
“Yeah.”
“It might tell me more about what happened,” I replied.
He didn’t respond, but a glance over told me that his silence was one of agreement and resignation, not annoyance.
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better look at the spatter pattern. In Richmond, we’d had a woman whose whole job was blood spatter and trajectories. Not in Shawano, so I’d done quite a bit of research into it because it bothered me that we’d only been guessing most of the time. Educated guessing, but still guessing.
Between spatter patterns and arson investigation and fire fighting, I’d learned a lot in the last year.
The stains on the stairs were the result of arterial spray mixed with spatter, most likely from her struggling against her attacker, and then smearing as the result of someone walking through or moving something through the blood and not being particularly careful about it.
I got close, very close. And then I saw one possible reason why they were so stuck on Noah—because I could see the outline of a wolf’s print in one of the smears of blood. If their CSI team was observant, they’d know that it was a wolf who had killed Momma. And, thanks to the Virginia shifter registry, they knew Noah was a wolf. They knew I was, too, but I had an alibi they couldn’t question, and Noah didn’t.
Shifter types ran in families.
So it was likely that if my theory about my father being a shifter was correct, he was also a wolf. Which meant that this print also fit with my theory that my father was a murderer.
“What did you find?” Elliot asked.
I pointed to it. “Wolf,” I replied.
“What’s a wolf?” Humbolt asked.
“Whatever walked through this blood,” I replied.
The lawyer bent down, his lips—visible because wasn’t wearing a mask outside—pursed as he studied the blood. “Where?”
I sketched the lines with my finger hovering over the dried blood smears.
