I drew in a long breath, then let it out again. “He spent most of the morning on the phone trying to convince Raj Parikh to claim jurisdiction. He managed to get him to agree to make the case to their boss, but he wasn’t sure whether or not it would work.”
Elliot grunted, unhappy with that news. “What does it fucking take?”
“Adeadshifter,” I replied grimly. “Which I’m personally quite happy that wedon’thave.”
He grimaced. “Attempted murder isn’t good enough?”
“Sadly, no.”
“He’s harassing the Sheriff’s Department anyway, though, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes.” I snorted. “And theyhatehim.”
Elliot groaned. “So he’s gonna get fucking stabbedagain.”
I wasn’t happy about it, but I had to say it: “He’s more likely to get shot, given the circumstances.”
“Fuck. Thank you for that observation.” He shot me a look.
“Sorry.”
Hart drove back upto the house with a giant bag of vegetarian Thai food, which we ate in my parents’ kitchen off the same plates that we’d used when Noah and I were kids. White, with a pattern of little brown leaves around the edges. It was weird. Not the Thai food—that was good. But being in the kitchen and eating again. Especially eating something as indulgent as Thai—since I’d never once eatenrestaurantfood growing up, and since we were supposed to eat only for sustenance, my mother’s cooking had been pretty basic.
The closest thing to indulgence we’d gotten in our house was having snacks for two growing kids who spent most of their free time outside in the mountains—a basic trail mix of nuts and raisins, crackers with either peanut butter or cheese, raw fruit. And even that my father had often disapproved of, calling it gluttony if he saw us eat what he deemed too much.
If he was dead—which I doubted—he’d be rolling over in his grave. But I was pretty sure I didn’t have that kind of luck.
“Val, what the fuck were youdoingall day?”
The elf snorted. “Being given the most fucking epic runaround about Mays’s car.” He put a bite of curry noodles in his mouth and spoke around them as he chewed. “They’ve impounded it, and were refusing to let me actually see the damn thing. Refusing to even state whether they were running chemical tests.” He gestured at Elliot with his bamboo fork. “Claiming the body is too damaged for an ID through DNA as though I don’t know they’re so full of shit it’s coming out their nostrils.”
“Are they saying anything about Seth’s mother?” Elliot asked.
“Supposedly unrelated,” came Hart’s bitter reply.
Which meant that even if the FBI got interested in the attempted murder of a shifter, they weren’t going to be able to intercede in the murder of a human woman, even if it had been perpetrated by a shifter.
“Shit,” is what I said out loud, poking at the cubes of tofu in the pad thai on my plate.
“Bullshit,” Hart said. “A load of stinking, fucking bullshit.” He grabbed a spring roll out of the little brown paper box and bitthe end of it. “They’re fucking covering for a murderer. The only thing I can’t fucking figure iswhy?”
“Why does it matter?” Elliot asked.
“Means, motive, opportunity,” I said. “You have to have all three to make a case.”
“We know why they pushed you off the road, but their argument is that they happened upon the scene after the car was on fire,” Hart explained. “Could have been a freak accident.”
“The scene itself says otherwise, though,” I pointed out.
“The scene they almost certainly didn’t document and definitely didn’t fucking investigate,” the elf countered.
“You did, though,” I reminded him. “Youhave documentary and physical evidence that Elliot was driven off the road.”
“You do?” Elliot looked up. “That’s something, then?”
“Yeah, but without being able to inspect the department car that did it—and you can bet your sweet ass they’ve already repaired it—all I have is evidence thatsomeoneran El off the road. Not who. Not why.”
“But we know why,” Elliot objected.
