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“But no one was here when you showed up,” Alvarez clarified. Santana shook his head slowly, then explained about noticing things were off, how he’d stopped at the main house, spied the open door and the unusual sets of footprints before he’d walked inside.
“. . . I found Long, right there in his chair,” he finished, motioning toward the victim. “He wasn’t dead when I got here, but he was bleeding out. I called nine-one-one, tried to save him, and then heard someone in the house. I thought it was the killer. Turned out it was Ivor.”
“Hicks was in the house?” Grayson’s brows slammed together.
“Came in after me, I think. The same way I did,”
Santana explained.
Grayson thought that over, then turned to Johnson. “Someone’s checking the tracks outside?”
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She nodded. “Slatkin’s taking measurements, too.” Mikhail Slatkin was another crime scene tech. Still disgruntled, Spitzer narrowed her eyes at Santana. “We’ve got dogs on the way. They’ll be all over you.”
He half-smiled and said nothing.
Alvarez had a mental “ping” and looked Santana over even more closely. “That’s right. You’re some kind of animal whisperer, aren’t you?”
“I work with dogs, yeah, and I’ve got mine in the truck. He could track your guy. Get a head start.”
“The dogs will be here in five minutes.” She wasn’t giving Santana an inch and Alvarez noticed the blood on his hands again.
“Anyone take samples?”
“Done,” Johnson said.
Santana added, “The blood belongs to Long.”
“From when you were trying to save him,” Alvarez clarified. His eyes glittered. “That’s right, Detective.”
As the tech took the sample of his blood away, Santana gave a concise rendition of how he’d spent the last hour and a half, first at the sheriff’s office, then driving here to find Brady Long dying just before Ivor Hicks walked in.
“That gibes with what Hicks is saying,” Spitzer admitted, though she was still angry that Santana had shown her up to her boss.
“Except I didn’t see any Yeti or Reptilian general or anything out of the ordinary. Just the tracks and open door,” Nate said calmly.
At that moment Bellasario, the deputy coroner, arrived. She was tall, nearly five-ten, with brown hair scraped away from her face and pulled into a thick,
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short ponytail. She dropped a body bag in the hallway, then worked efficiently, examining Brady Long carefully and scowling at the size of the wound.
“Someone wasn’t taking any chances that he would pull through.”
“Then why not shoot him in the head?” Grayson said. “Or a second time?”
“Because the killer wanted him to suffer.” Santana offered up his opinion flatly, as if it were a fact.
Grayson’s eyes narrowed on Santana, studying him. “You have any idea about next of kin? Brady wasn’t married, was he? Kids?”
“No kids that I know of. Married a couple of times but divorced the last I heard. Engaged to some model, but I didn’t hear they ever tied the knot. But then,” he said, his lips twisting a bit,
“Long and I weren’t exactly tight.”
