CHAPTER FIVE

  WHILE COLLEEN AND HER crew finished up inside and moved the body to the van, we looked for more tracks but didn't have any luck. We found a couple sets of four-wheeler tracks, but they were generic. Nothing out of the ordinary, and half the county owned at least one, so that was a path to nowhere.

  They were loading the body up when Tommy got back, and I thought he was gonna break his neck trying to get a look at the body. Teenage boys. The only thing was if he'd actually seen it, he would have wished he hadn't. I sure did.

  Fred climbed behind the wheel of the Polaris and Tommy got in beside him. "We'll do some checkin' around. I haven't seen any bears around lately, least none I don't know, and it won't be hard to pick that track out if I see it again. I'm guessin' you're gonna talk to Sully?"

  I nodded. "He's my next stop."

  "Good," he said.

  Sam, who'd been helping the crew gather up equipment and load up, made his way over to us, wiping his brow on his sleeve. "When was the last time anybody besides you and your crew stayed here?" he asked.

  "Me and some of my friends stayed here weekend before last," Tommy said. "Before that, nobody's used it for the last couple months or so as far as we know, but hikers stop in that we don't know about."

  That may sound strange, but as shifters, we didn't hold quite the same views on land ownership as humans did. People think wolves and bears and the like are territorial, but when it came right down to it, no creature on earth was more itchy about sharing what they "owned" than regular old people. Unless folks had livestock, most of us just left the land open for all. After all, bears and wolves need room.

  The news was discouraging, because it meant all the prints that Colleen probably pulled were worthless unless we found a suspect. That's assuming she could even sort through them all. And one of the last things she'd told us as she left was that the knob had been wiped clean. That left us with the tracks.

  "So are we free to go back in?" Fred asked.

  I pulled in a deep breath, thinking, and glanced at Sam. He'd been the last to talk to Colleen.

  "If you wouldn't mind giving us a couple days just in case, that would be great," Sam said. "Besides, it's not gonna be pretty in there, especially with this heat. We'll send somebody out to clean it up for you. Is there a lock on the door?"

  “There's a place for a padlock," Fred said, "but I don't have a lock with me."

  Sam scratched his whiskers. "I think I have one in my toolbox."

  Fred motioned toward the cabin. "Be my guest, then. Unless I miss my guess, we'll have kids up here wantin' to get a look at the place, and it's probably just as well if they can't. The windows lock from the inside."

  Sam went to his truck and started rummaging through his toolbox, and something popped into my head. "I want to take another look inside before we go," I said, heading back to the cabin. Tommy and Fred followed, but I held up my hand. "Let me see how bad it is before y'all come in, okay?"

  I poked my head inside, doing my best to breathe through my mouth. It was surprisingly clean. The old loveseat would have to go, but aside from a few dark stains on the floor, there wasn't much sign of what had happened there.

  Giving them a nod, I said, "Just don't touch anything, all right?"

  They muttered in agreement and followed me in. Fred had been a wolf long enough to know to breathe through his mouth, but Tommy wasn't that experienced. He was only a step in before he turned green from the coppery smell and walked back to the porch.

  I motioned Fred forward and pointed at the tracks. "Those consistent with bear?"

  He bent down closer and examined them, furrowing his brow. "Maybe, but if so, they're not from the one who made those tracks out there. Space between them isn't wide enough.” He pointed to the front of the tracks, then followed them with his fingers as the led back. "You found the body on the loveseat, I assume?"

  I nodded.

  "These are almost like whatever animal made them was being pulled backward."

  "Is it possible the victim made them, then changed back to human once he was dead?" I hadn't thought to ask Colleen whether the guy had claw marks on his back as well as his front.

  Fred rubbed the back of his neck. "Maybe. They're wide for a wolf, though. All I can tell you for sure is that somethin' was drug backwards and was diggin' in to stay put. And that whoever it was, wasn't the same creature who made those tracks we found outside."

  Another scenario occurred to me. "What if our guy was pushing his attacker backward?"

  He shook his head. "I guess that could be it, but I doubt it. They wouldn't be that consistent."

  Sighing, I turned back toward the door, then at the last minute, pulled my phone out and took a picture of the claws as well as a few more of the surroundings. Colleen would have crime scene pics ready in a couple hours, but something wasn't sitting right with me. I wanted a chance to look the scene over without the smell—and preferably with a cold beer in front of me—to see if I could figure out what it was.

  Sam clomped up the steps and leaned against the doorframe, taking the room in again one last time himself. He held up a heavy padlock with two keys attached to it with a zip-tie. "Found it."

  Fred and I stepped out and Sam pulled the door shut behind us, then closed the latch over the hook and snapped the padlock into place. He turned to Fred. "You want one of these keys?"

  "I'm good," Fred replied. "Just let me know when it's open again. We ain't got any plans to use it in the near future."

  Tommy, who'd been sitting on the edge of the porch, wrinkled his nose. "Far as I'm concerned, we should just burn it down. We ain't gonna get all that blood outta those wood planks and it'd be creepy to be in there at night."

  Fred rolled his eyes at him. "You're a wolf, and scared of ghosts?"

  Tommy motioned toward the doorway as he pushed off the porch. "That guy was a wolf, and it don't look like it did him much good."

  He made a good point. Speaking of the guy being a wolf, I couldn't put off a call to my mom much longer, but first I was gonna go back to Sully's, have a sit-down with him to see if he knew any bears missing toes, and have a cheeseburger and a beer or three.

  Sam shook hands with Fred and Tommy, and the Hutchinson men were long gone before we even got the truck turned around.

  "What do you think?" Sam asked, turning to me.

  "I think shit's about to hit the fan," I said, not mincing words. And boy, was I right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO town, Sam and I reviewed the case, or at least what little we knew about it. After that, I decided I couldn't put off the call to my mom any longer. If she heard about it from somebody else, my goose would be cooked. When I dialed, part of me hoped I got her voicemail, but the realistic part of me realized that would just be putting off the inevitable.

  She answered on the second ring. "Hello, darling. How are you?"

  At least this time, I knew she wasn't going to grill me about Adam since he was up there.

  "Hi Mom," I said, "I—"

  "So I've had a little time to talk to Alex," she said, cutting me off. I pulled in a deep breath. I should have known. "He says you two are getting along like peas and carrots."

  I know it sounds weird, but I preferred to talk to my mother about the murder rather than my love life. "We are," I said. "But that's not why I called. I have some news that's not good any way you slice it. Pack news."

  "Oh?" Her voice became all business. When it came to the pack, she took her role as half of the alpha couple seriously. It came before idle chitchat and motherly nosiness, hands down. "What's wrong?"

  I closed my eyes, dreading delivering what could be a deathblow to the merger she'd put her all into for the past two years. "We've had a murder down here." I decided to just cut straight to the chase. "It's Darrell Beauchamp."

  A pregnant paused filled the airspace between us for the span of a couple heartbeats, then, in her typical fashion, she got down to brass tacks.

  "I don't have to tell you what this means for the pack," she said, her voice deadly serious. "I've been working on this coalition for the better part of two years. At least tell me you know who did it, and that it was a human."

  She was working on striking a similar deal with the vampires, and the witches were almost a given; they'd been all for standardizing the paranormal legal system for years. A human killer was the best possible outcome from a political standpoint.

  I fidgeted, even though she couldn't see me. I didn't want to be the one to tell her all her hard work was swirling the drain, but I didn't have a choice. "No, I haven't solved it, and from the looks of it, it was a bear shifter, and they may not have been working alone. Colleen says there were smaller bites on his arm that weren't consistent with the rest of them and I caught a whiff of wolf, though that could have just been because the owners are wolves."

  "No, no, no," she said, and I could see her wagging her fingers and pacing in my mind's eye. "You have to figure this out before the end of the week. If they end up backing out, there are several other clans and packs that will follow. They're twitchy about uniting, even though the new council will have elected representatives from each region."

  Personally, I didn't see what the big deal was. Regardless of species, most of our laws were the same, with the exception of the vampires. The disconnect came when one species created a crime against another because then two different legal entities were involved. This new system would bridge that gap, but little else would change in either theory or in function.

  "So do you want to handle the New Orleans alpha or do you want me to?" I asked, silently begging the universe for a break. I had enough on my plate.

  She sighed. "Not that I don't think you could handle it, but I want you to focus on finding whoever did it. I'll deal with the NOLA pack and pray the murder wasn't politically motivated."

  Never in my life had I wished for a "garden variety" murder, if there were such a thing, but I did then. Mom was right on this, and it would benefit all of us—especially those of us who were responsible for enforcing the law.

  "Okay, then. Sam and I are on it and I'll keep you posted."

  "Please do," she said. "And Cordelia?"

  "Yes, Mom?"

  "Do your thing. No matter what. I'm sending Alex back early to help. He's friends with Barnabe Dupre"—the New Orleans alpha—"so maybe he can buy us a little leeway."

  Lord, I hoped so. They were a hotheaded bunch, and the last thing I wanted was for them to descend us me like, well, a pack of wolves while I was trying to figure out who killed somebody in my county. I took my job seriously, and nobody was more pissed about it than I was.

  I'd had a nagging feeling since we'd found out who he was, and the reason for it popped into my head.

  "Find out what he was doing down here, please. He was a long way from home, and that cabin's out in the boondocks. I can't imagine he would have known about it on his own."

  By then, we'd reached Sully's and as Sam swung the truck in, I was glad Sully and I had the relationship we did. He wasn't just the den leader; he was well respected by his people, so it would make them feel better to have him central to the investigation.

  "Your mom's right, as bad as I hate to say it," Sam said as he pulled into a spot and shut the truck off. He and my mother went way back, but they didn't always see eye to eye. They liked each other just fine, but as two strong-willed people, they butted heads sometimes. My dad, on the other hand, was one of his best friends.

  "How so?" I asked.

  "Some of the folks around here aren't keen on this coalition. I was at the Hook the other night and overheard Rocks"—the vampire owner and bartender—"talkin' to Chuck McKnight about it. Apparently, the bobcats are runnin' lukewarm on the whole thing and some of the badgers are too. Most of them see it as a good thing, but there's a small but significant portion dead-set against it. This could be the fuse that sets off the keg, depending on how we handle it."

  The Rusty Hook was the local dive bar, and though I loved Rocks to pieces, he gossiped worse than little old church ladies at a Sunday social.

  "Then it's a good thing that's her problem for now and not mine," I said. "We have a murder to solve, and the rest will have to come out in the wash."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AS ALWAYS, SULLY'S was cool and dim, and the smells of frying meat and grilled onions filled my nose. I breathed it in and my stomach rumbled. The sandwich he'd packed for us had been great, but it had been hours ago.

  He greeted us with a smile that faded when he saw our expressions. This time he didn't ask—he just poured me a pint of my regular beer and popped the cap off a bottle of Miller Light for Sam.

  I climbed onto my stool and took a long pull from my glass, relishing the cold, hoppy brew as it hit my tongue and slid down my throat. Sam did the same, letting out a sigh of appreciation. Not only were we emotionally spent, we'd also been on our feet and out in the heat for the better part of five hours. It was good to sit down in the AC. Fall couldn't come fast enough as far as I was concerned.

  Sully examined us as he wiped down the bar. "Was it that bad? Ye look spent, the both of ya."

  "Worse," Sam said, grabbing a handful of Chex Mix off a bowl on the bar. I shuddered as always, picturing the plethora of germs he was popping into his mouth along with the salty snack. He noticed and, being the smart aleck he is, offered me some, then made a big deal of popping another handful into his mouth.

  "Thanks anyway," I said, scrunching my nose. "I'll just go straight to the source and lick the toilet handle."

  He grinned, then Sully brought us crashing back to reality.

  "So what happened?" he asked.

  I cleared my throat and set my beer down, focusing on centering it on the coaster. "Nothing good. We need to talk." There were several other people in the place, and some of them were shifters. "In private."

  "Sounds serious," he replied, glancing around. When he caught sight of his waitress, Kelly Ann, he called her over and asked her to cover for him for a minute.

  "Let's go to my office," he said, turning toward the kitchen and motioning for us to follow him.

  Al, his line cook, was flipping burgers and the smell about made my stomach turn inside out and eat itself. He smiled at me when I gazed longingly at the ginormous patties frying on the griddle. "I'll have y'all's specials ready when you come out. They're already on the grill."

  I smiled at him, grateful he knew me so well. Sully led us down a short hall and into a surprisingly neat office, decorated with pictures of his family and a lone dartboard, currently holding a picture of a politician. That made me grin. Though rule numero uno in a bar was no politics or religion, he wasn't shy about voicing his opinions any other time.

  He took a seat in a well-worn office chair behind his desk and Sam and I took the two facing him.

  "So what's all the fuss about?" he asked, an expectant look on his face. "Did you find out who he was? Any idea who did it?"

  "Yeah," I said. "It was Darrell Beauchamp." I could tell by the oh crap expression on his face that he knew who I was talking about.

  "That's not good, lass," he said. "This could blow the whole shebang."

  "I know." Boy, did I know. I took a deep breath before I told him the bad part. "And that's not all. I caught a whiff of bear inside, and there were a couple sets of huge bear tracks outside in the mud."

  I paused, waiting for him to absorb that.

  "That doesn't necessarily mean a bear killed him," he said, though the resigned look on his face made it clear he was at least entertaining the possibility.

  "You're right," Sam said. "The tracks were clear, and it rained night before last, so it was made after that. And the left rear paw was missing a toe."

  I watched Sully's face carefully for any flicker of recognition, but all he expressed was thoughtfulness.

  "I don't know anybody missing a toe," he said, "but I'll ask around. That's something somebody would know about, seein' as how most of us go barefoot when we meet up to change."

  "And he was huge," I reminded him.

  "Yeah," he said, "but that doesn't necessarily mean he's that large as a man. Usually, but not always. Still, I'll start investigating on my end. Hopefully, we can get this cleared up before the wolves from NOLA back out of the deal and drag those who aren't so keen with them."

  "You and me both," I said.

  Sam pushed up from the chair. "We'll keep you posted, and we'd appreciate it if you'd do the same."

  "Of course," Sully said, rising. "This isn't just a bear thing or a wolf thing. The consequences are way beyond that."

  "Good," I said. "Then about that cheeseburger ..."

  As promised, Al had our favorites ready when we made it back to our seats, and I dug in. The juicy goodness of it hit the spot after such a crappy day, and the beer went with it perfectly.

  I texted Colleen to see if she'd learned anything, but she was still trying to put the pieces back together, so to speak, and didn't have anything new for us. I was a little surprised I hadn't heard from the Beauchamp family, but Mom had said she'd take care of it. We didn't always see eye to eye, but she always came through when it mattered, and this definitely counted.

  Since there was nothing we could do for the time being, Sam and I decided to call it a day. I was supposed to have a magic lesson, but I just didn't have it in me to focus on moving rocks with my mind or building a defensive bubble to keep people out of my head, so I called and canceled.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHEN I PULLED INTO the driveway of the house I shared with my best friend, a centuries-old vampire name Katarina Bellarosi, I was tickled pink to see Alex's silver Beamer sitting there. Mom had said she was sending him back early, but I was surprised he'd gotten there in the time it took me to eat a cheeseburger.

  He was sitting on the porch swing smiling at me, those irresistible dimples that only appeared when he was genuinely smiling out in full force. "Hey, beautiful!" he said, pulling me into a hug. "I've missed you."

 

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