After a couple of minutes the guesthouse door slammed at our backs and we heard Jace walking behind us. He made no attempt to catch up, and we refrained from looking back out of common courtesy. Jace would be okay. He always was. And I would make a more concerted effort not to flaunt our relationship in front of him.
We caught up with everyone else as they stood gathered in front of the barn, waiting, their collective mood sobered by the task at hand. When my father saw us, he nodded and stepped toward the entrance.
Old, rusty hinges squealed as he pulled open the huge double barn doors centered beneath the gable of the steeply pitched roof. A waft of air rushed out to meet us, oppressively hot, though the temperature outside had already begun to drop from melt-you-where-you-stand to almost-tolerable.
The interior of our picturesque old barn was just as quaint as the exterior. Empty stalls stretched down the left and right sides, leaving a wide, empty space in the center, running the entire length of the building. The dirt floor was scattered with loose, fragrant hay, as was the loft overhead. On either side of the doors, wooden ladders led to the loft, where several bales still sat, left over from the year before. In a couple of months, both levels of the barn would be stacked full of hay bales, until my father sold them to the neighboring ranches, which, unlike ours, kept animals.
My father’s van sat in the center aisle, looking out of place in a barn built nearly a century earlier. Dented, with peeling blue paint and spots of rust sprinkled like a scattering of red freckles, the van had seen lots of action in its fourteen years, and had carried more than its fair share of bodies.
Our Alpha herded everyone inside, then closed the doors, shutting us in with the heat. And with the dead stray. “Okay, Parker, let’s take a look.”
I glanced at my father as he spoke, and blinked in wry amusement. There he stood, sweating into a three-piece suit, his dress shoes dusty from the dirty floor, asking to see a cadaver Parker had brought home from New Orleans. Life couldn’t get much weirder. Surely.
Parker opened the van’s rear doors and Vic came forward without being asked to help remove the black-wrapped bundle from the floor of the cargo area. The stench was strong and immediate, but it wasn’t the smell of rotting flesh. It was the smell of rotting food, from the garbage the body had been buried under.
Together, Vic and Parker lowered the bundle to the straw-strewn floor, then pulled strips of duct tape from the plastic, unwrapping the giant burrito and exposing the body beneath a smattering of putrefied lettuce, tomatoes, olives, and noodles.
Inhaling deeply through my mouth, I forced all traces of disgust from my expression and made myself look at the victim.
He was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, with freckles and nearly black eyes, which I could see because no one had bothered to close them. Or maybe the eyelids had simply refused to cooperate.
At a glance, I couldn’t tell that his neck was broken, but I was more than willing to take Parker’s word for it.
My father wasn’t. He knelt next to the man’s left shoulder and grabbed a handful of soiled brown hair, then gave the head a tug to the right. It moved with no visible resistance, and chills crept up my spine at the faint scraping of bones grinding together. His neck hadn’t just been broken. It had been broken in two. As in a completely severed spinal cord. He’d never stood a chance.
Our Alpha stood, brushing straw and dirt from his knee. “Ethan, check his ID.”
Ethan dug in the man’s back right pocket and came out with a thin black leather wallet, folded into thirds, which he handed over without opening.
My father took the wallet and rifled through the contents. He didn’t pass it around, nor did he remove anything. “Robert Harper. Twenty-three. From Picayune.”
Mississippi. He’d lived in the free territory, which was no surprise.
“So what was he doing in New Orleans?” Owen asked. I’d been wondering the same thing.
“He could have been doing anything,” Parker said. “Or anyone. But whatever he was doing, it must have been pretty important for him to risk trespassing on south-central territory.”
“Not necessarily.” All eyes turned to Marc, who stood leaning against the van, his arms crossed over his chest and one foot propped on a rear tire. “Picayune’s less than an hour from New Orleans, and we only have, what, two Pride cats living there other than Holden? What are the chances that either of them would get close enough to sniff him out? He’s probably made countless trips without us ever knowing. It wouldn’t be much of a risk for him.”
My father nodded in agreement. “Unfortunately, we can’t be everywhere all the time, and Harper obviously knew that.”
“Well, someone sure as hell sniffed him out this time,” Jace said.
“Evidently.” My father turned to me, and I held my breath. I dreaded catching his attention the way a child who hasn’t done her homework fears being called out by the teacher. “How does Parker’s body compare with yours?”
Great. A pop quiz, I thought, recognizing his transition into lecture mode.
“How does Parker’s body compare with mine? Hmm.” I gave Parker a quick, theatrical once-over, and he smiled, clearly catching on to my line of thought. “Nice legs and killer biceps. But I have better boobs. No question.”
My father frowned, but not before a flicker of amusement flashed across his face. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have seen it. “Faythe…”
“Oh, fine.” I barely resisted the urge to roll my eyes, gathering my thoughts for the test he’d just presented. “There don’t seem to be many differences at a glance.”
Our esteemed Alpha nodded, and I continued, walking slowly around the body as I spoke. “The only difference I see at the moment is their respective ages. Harper was twenty-three, and Moore was about a decade older. Each apparently died of a broken neck. Both men are Caucasian, and both are strays. Both are sturdy in build, which makes me wonder how an attacker could get close enough to either of them to break his neck without suffering so much as a scratch.” Okay, technically Marc had pointed that out first, but if he could borrow my shower, I could borrow his wisdom. Right?
Squatting on the ground next to the corpse, I made myself examine the fingers. “And based on the lack of blood and tissue beneath their nails, I’m going to assume I’m right about that.”
I glanced up at my father, and he nodded for me to go on, his face carefully devoid of any expression. Behind him, Marc beamed at me, obviously pleased. I smiled at him and stood, rubbing my hands on the front of my shorts out of habit, though I hadn’t actually touched the corpse.
“Both bodies were found on our territory, but near the Mississippi border, each less than an hour from his own home.” I paused, closing my eyes in thought as the gears in my brain whirred fast enough to make me dizzy. “Oh, wait. I just thought of another difference.” A second pause. “No, two.”
“Go on.” Though my father’s face remained unreadable, I thought I detected a hint of encouragement in his tone.
“Assuming they died where they were found, Robert Harper was killed in the middle of New Orleans, but Bradley Moore died in an empty field in Arkansas, miles from anything but empty fields and a small patch of woods.”
“And the other difference?” Marc prompted.
“Moore’s murder was reported, albeit anonymously, but Harper’s was not. In fact, it’s a miracle Parker and Holden found him before anyone else did.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then the boss had to go and ruin my good mood. “Does anyone see any flaws in her logic?”
Glancing around boldly, I silently dared them each to speak. I’d ruined the curve in my college logic class with a perfect score on the final, and I was pretty confident in my deductions. So it came as a complete slap in the face when Ethan spoke up.
“Sure, no one called to report the body in New Orleans, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been reported. For all we know, the killer was on his way to a pay
phone when Parker and Holden found the body.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Daddy said as I stuck my tongue out at Ethan, well aware of how immature I was being. My brother reciprocated, as I’d known he would. “Anyone else?”
Vic cleared his throat. “Well, this isn’t a flaw in Faythe’s logic, since she mentioned it, but there’s always the possibility that one or both of them were killed somewhere else, then moved.”
“Yes, but without a forensics lab, we have no way of knowing, so I’m going to suggest we concentrate on what we do know. Or what we can smell.” My father’s eyes came to rest on me, then flicked to Marc, who now stood behind me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders.
Marc’s chin brushed the back of my head. “I’m guessing you want us to get up close and personal with Harper’s trace fragrances.”
The Alpha nodded.
“I can smell him fine from here, thanks,” I said, doing my best not to wrinkle my nose. While a human probably would have found the stench of rotten garbage offensive, for us it was virtually unbearable. At least in human form. As cats, we were more accustomed to nature’s less-pleasant scents, most of which were a normal part of life in the wild. But things were different on two legs.
My father frowned, and his face hardened, but before I could make things any worse for myself, Marc gave me a little shove and followed me toward the body.
Kneeling by Harper’s shoulder, I turned to look up at my father, who was wearing his Alpha face. Again. “I assume you want to know if he has the same weird smell as the last one.”
Daddy nodded. “And anything else of interest that you notice.”
Following Marc’s lead, I leaned closer to the body, struggling to swallow the gorge rising in the back of my throat. I breathed in deeply through my nose, and felt my stomach churn. Trying to ignore the nausea, I clamped a hand over my mouth and took another deep breath. Behind me, Ethan snickered, and I made a mental note to accidentally kick him somewhere sensitive next time we sparred.
Marc looked at me with his eyebrows raised, and I nodded to tell him I was okay. I leaned down one more time. This time I concentrated on classifying the smells to distract myself from my urge to vomit. To my surprise, it worked. I detected several variations on the theme of rotting vegetables, and three or four kinds of moldy meat. Cooked meat. Harper hadn’t been dead long enough to start smelling on his own, mostly because he’d spent the majority of the day in an air-conditioned van.
After the food, I identified several biological scents, probably from emptied bathroom trash cans. And under all that was the smell. The one I was looking for. It was faint, and I would never have noticed it beneath the other, stronger smells if I hadn’t already known what to look for. But it was definitely there.
I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised in question. He nodded. He smelled it, too. The murders were connected.
Turning back to the body, I closed my eyes in concentration. Bracing my hands on the floor to the left of the corpse—I was not going to end a perfectly good day by falling face-first onto a dead man—I followed my nose, moving to the right as the smell grew faintly stronger. When it began to fade again, I moved back to my left until my face hovered—eyes still closed—over the point at which the scent was most noticeable, though it was faint even then.
I opened my eyes. I was inches from Harper’s broken neck. The smell was strongest in the one place we were sure the killer had touched him, and that could only mean one thing: I was smelling the killer’s scent.
Standing, I turned to face my father. “It’s the same as the scent on Moore. It’s definitely a foreign cat, but it’s…more, somehow.” Ethan snickered at my unintentional pun, but I ignored him. “Different. And it’s strongest on his neck.”
“It’s on both his hands, too,” Marc said, rising to stand next to me.
Instead of replying, our Alpha knelt beside the body, heedless of the dirt floor, and closed his eyes as he inhaled deeply just above the corpse’s neck. He exhaled, then inhaled again. His forehead wrinkled and his eyes opened. He stood and pulled a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “I don’t smell it. I smell rot, and his personal scent, and cheap cologne, but nothing else.” He frowned deeply, cleaning his lenses out of habit, and his next words were softer than he usually spoke. “I guess this old nose isn’t quite what it used to be.”
Parker came forward then, and Owen followed him. They knelt side by side, inhaling with almost comic expressions of concentration. Several seconds later, they stood, shaking their heads in unison. The scent was too faint, and completely overwhelmed by the stench of garbage.
The others each took a turn, but none of them could detect the scent. Still, it was almost funny to watch the parade of beefy men take their turns kneeling on the dusty barn floor to sniff the refuse-strewn corpse. And by the time Vic stood, chestnut waves flopping as he shook his head in disappointment, I’d decided that they couldn’t smell the scent because, having never smelled it before, they didn’t really know what they were looking for. Marc and I had probably only been able to pinpoint it because we’d gotten a good whiff of it earlier on Bradley Moore.
Marc shrugged. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to take our word for it.”
My father shook his head, frowning down at Harper, as if the victim were to blame for the faintness of the mystery scent he carried. “That’s not good enough. This same cat is responsible for murdering both strays. On our territory. We can’t let that continue, nor can we let it go unpunished, and if we’re going to stop him, we have to know who he is. Or what he is. I have to smell his scent.”
Resolute now, his jawline firm, my father turned sharply and marched away from us. I watched him go, noting the determination in his stride and the final-sounding thump each time his heels hit the ground. But I didn’t understand what he had in mind until he turned into the last empty horse stall on the right and dropped out of sight.
He was going to Shift.
In cat form, all of his senses would be heightened, even above the elevated sensitivity he had on two legs. My father wanted to give his feline nose a chance to succeed where the human version had failed.
As we stood around looking at one another, waiting for our Alpha to finish Shifting, my gaze returned to the body, and my thoughts to the scent in question. The smell was strongest on Harper’s neck, where he would have been gripped by his murderer. That made sense. What didn’t make sense was the fact that the smell was also noticeable—at least to me and Marc—on Harper’s hands, yet we’d found no defensive injuries.
“Hey, guys?” Six heads turned my way. “Harper has the killer’s scent on his hands, so he must have touched the bastard. But he has no blood or obvious tissue beneath his nails, and no defensive injuries.” I paused to give them a moment to digest what I’d said. “Why would Harper touch his killer, yet make no attempt to protect himself?”
In the back of my mind, I noted the whisper of claws scraping hard-packed dirt as my father neared the end of his Shift on the other side of the barn.
“The most obvious answer is that he trusted his murderer,” Owen drawled, shifting his cowboy hat back and forth on his head with one rough, tanned hand. “Knew him personally.”
I nodded. Marc had drawn the same conclusion about Moore in Arkansas. “Yeah, that makes sense—for a Pride cat.” My brothers and fellow enforcers were very close. They’d been friends and housemates for years, and in a Pride, a connection that strong came with a lot of physical contact. “But both Harper and Moore are strays. Loners,” I continued. “They were born human, and human men don’t touch one another much. They may shake hands, but that would only put the scent on Harper’s right hand. Right?”
Jace nodded, clearly following my train of thought. “So why would Harper touch his killer with both hands, if not to fight him off?”
“Exactly.”
A huffing sound drew our attention toward the rear of the barn and I turned to see my father padding toward us, his pa
ws silent on the packed-dirt floor.
Even in his midfifties, my father was impressive and physically intimidating as a cat. He wasn’t as long as Owen or Marc, but he was bulky and solid, and obviously powerful. Like all werecats, Daddy’s fur was sleek and solid black, with no spots or rosettes. But unlike the rest of us, he was easy to identify from a distance, even with the wind blowing his scent the wrong way. As he’d aged, my father had developed a streak of silver fur behind each ear, the exact shade and placement of the two most prominent streaks of silver in his hair.
As he slunk toward us, moving gracefully across the floor, I thought about the difference between the life of a Pride Alpha like my father and that of a stray like Harper. My father had everything: respect, responsibility, power, and more friends and family than he knew what to do with. By contrast most strays were socially isolated and constantly at risk of losing everything to a faster, stronger stray. Which raised a very important question: Who the hell would a wary loner trust?
Someone he has no reason to fear, I thought, surprised by how obvious the answer seemed in hindsight. But who was that? Who didn’t a stray fear?
My father paused at the edge of the ring we’d formed around the corpse on the floor. He took us all in with a single, sweeping glance, then padded directly to the body, bending to place his nose less than an inch from Harper’s neck. His long tail swished slowly behind him, and his nostrils twitched as he inhaled, sniffing to isolate the scent none of the rest of us could identify.
And still the gears in my brain spun furiously. I was on to something, and I couldn’t let it go, even when my father raised his head from the body, huffing in triumph.
Who’s strong enough to break a stray’s neck, yet seems harmless enough to put him at ease? Who can get close enough to touch a stray tomcat without setting off his inner alarm? And just like that, I knew the answer: I could.
The killer wasn’t a tomcat at all. She was a tabby.
Ten