AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’s the only one of us that can outscore you at the range, Duke,” Frankie said.
“You’re nipping at our heels, Frankie. I’ll take you out for practice when this is all over.”
“Thanks, Duke,” she said, smiling. She looked pleased in that dad-noticed-me-and-was-proud-of-me way. It wasn’t the look you gave someone who was just your boss. Maybe that was why Duke and his officers all called one another by their first names? It was more family than business. I’d seen it before on small forces, but never to this degree.
“Who asked you to turn into your leopard?” Olaf asked. It surprised me that he was taking lead on the questioning when there were no threats involved. He didn’t usually enjoy interrogation without them.
Bobby shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.”
“Bobby, just confess, and it’ll be all over,” Duke said.
“We’re trying to get to the truth here, Sheriff, or don’t you care about who really killed Ray Marchand?” I asked.
“We found him covered in blood at the scene of the crime, Blake. The only ones complicating this case are you and Win.”
“If it was so open-and-shut, why didn’t you pull the trigger while Bobby was unconscious, Duke? If you were so certain that he killed his uncle, then you’d have been justified in shooting him at the scene. No one would have questioned it. You could have written the report up almost any way you wanted it to read. This is your town. Your deputies think of you as a father figure. If it was so simpl
e, why didn’t you just take the simplest solution, Duke?”
He tried to meet my gaze with his bored-cop face, but he had to look away. Whatever he was thinking or feeling at that moment, he wasn’t sure he could hide it from me. That meant it was a strong emotion. The question was, which one?
“Unconscious seems a lot more unsporting than shooting into a cell,” he said at last.
“You couldn’t do it,” I said.
“Not like that, no.” Duke raised his eyes and let me see the anger and confusion in them. It wasn’t just the two younger men who had history with their “coach.” It was Leduc’s history with them. God, it was like family. No matter how this ended, damage had been done to the relationships, if nothing else.
Duke turned those angry eyes to the prisoner he’d known since he was in elementary school. “But if Bobby would man up and be the monster that tore Ray apart and spread his blood and guts all over that room, that I could shoot.”
“I swear that all I remember was the deer,” Bobby said.
“Your control should be better at the dark of the moon,” Olaf said.
“It is.”
“Then why change form?” Olaf had moved closer to the bars and was giving Bobby some of the most serious attention I’d seen him give anyone when they weren’t a target or a victim.
“I . . . wanted to.”
“Why?”
“I . . . can’t say.” Bobby’s eyes flicked toward the sheriff.
“Duke, I think we need less of an audience for this,” I said.
“I already told Forrester that you don’t get to kick me out of my own jail, especially not when you’re questioning my prisoner.”
There was movement in the doorway. Then Newman poked his head in and said, “But he’s not your prisoner, Duke. He’s mine. You’ve made it clear that he’s my problem to solve.”
“He’s yours to execute, but he’s my prisoner as long as he’s in my jail.”
“You’ve got an interrogation room here.”
“Not one that will hold a shapeshifter.”
“You let us guard him in the bathroom,” I said.
“That was different. If you’re not going to kill him, then making him sit around covered in God knows what probably goes under cruel and unusual or something,” Duke said.
