“Sounds like a good place to start. I need to run this by my boss first. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
He went out, walked down the hall, knocked on Dom’s door, and pushed it open without waiting. Dom looked up from his desk.
“Stella Keenan’s in the conference room,” Blaze said. Dom’s mouth dropped and his eyes narrowed, but Blaze cut him off before he could speak. “Her friend has been missing for ten days. She’s a twenty-year-old winter wren shifter. Local PD has it as an open case, but they’re not working very hard. Stella came to me. We’ve already worked out that her most likely last location is a trail behind her apartment building.”
Dom set his pen down. “Take Keenan with you to the trail. Log the girl’s details and I’ll have Axel pull whatever digital we can get on her tonight.”
Stella was waiting for him in the conference room when he got back.
“We’re good to go,” he said.
Chapter
Ten
Stella rodewith Blaze in one of the firm’s Suburbans. The cab smelled like leather and gun oil and the lemongrass scent of his skin. She had given him Nell’s address as soon as they got in the car, and now he was following the GPS directions in silence.
The sun had dropped behind the ridge. Late October light spilled blue and thin across the dashboard, the last warmth of the day already gone. Stella watched the sky from the passenger window and tried to keep her breathing even. Her bear paced at the back of her mind, anxious and demanding. Her purse was gripped in her lap.
The cab felt claustrophobic. She could feel the heat of him in the driver’s seat, three feet away, his right hand resting loose on the wheel. The sleeve of his black T-shirt cut across his biceps, and the tattoos on his arm ran unbroken down to his hand. His scarred knuckles flexed when he braked at the stop sign. She made herself look at the windshield.
Her bear was whining about being three feet from her mate, but Stella was not going to let her say it. A young woman she caredabout was missing. Going to Blaze had been her last option. The bond could wait.
It was not waiting.
Pine Street was four minutes from Steel Protection. Blaze pulled into the small lot behind the converted Victorian and parked. He killed the engine and sat for a second with both hands on the wheel before he looked over at her.
“Path down to the trail is where?”
“Back of the lot. There’s a connector path through the landscaping that comes out on the regional trail. I came down it once, the day I helped Nell move in last summer. She wanted to show me she could run from her own back door.”
They got out and walked across the lot. The asphalt was patchy, with weeds growing through the cracks. The connector path was a narrow strip of gravel, lined with low rhododendrons, that wound down about twenty feet to the regional trail.
The six-foot-wide trail was lined with alder and Douglas fir on either side. The alders had gone gold and were shedding into the leaf litter. The firs held their needles dark against the failing light. To the right, the trail climbed gently toward Fate Village Park. To the left, it dropped toward the creek that fed Lake Fate. The air smelled like wet leaves and creek water and the faint resin of the firs.
They started down the trail. Blaze sniffed the air and scanned the trees on both sides as they walked. About a mile in, he stopped, and she stopped beside him.
“What is it?”
“Picking up a chemical scent.”
She breathed in. Wet leaves. Creek water. Fir resin. Underneath all of it, something else. Sweet. Sharp.
He started off the trail into the forest, and she followed him. A narrow break ran through the underbrush, ten feet off the main trail. It twisted between two firs and opened into a small, flat clearing near a moss-covered log.
The chemical scent was stronger here. Blaze crouched at the base of the log and examined the leaf litter. He then pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his jacket and put them on. When he moved the leaf litter aside, he found a white cotton handkerchief. He picked it up and lifted it close to his face and breathed in.
“Chloroform.”
The word landed in Stella’s chest. Her knees went unsteady, and she put a hand against the trunk of the nearest fir to keep herself upright.
Blaze pulled a Ziplock out of his jacket and sealed the handkerchief inside. He marked the bag with a black Sharpie and a date. The chemical scent dropped a notch the moment the bag was closed, and the other scents around her came forward.
Lavender soap. Old paper. Nell.
“I can smell her.”
“Show me.”
