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I was starting to realize that naming things might actually mean more trouble than good.
Chapter Eighteen
What my day needed was a crime scene.
Thankfully, Detective Bryce Perry must have foreseen the need to interrupt a relatively awkward conversation, because he showed up at my door shortly after I hung up the phone with Santiago.
Wilder, who apparently decided being with the police would keep me safe enough for the time being, went with Magnolia to collect my car and his motorcycle from the French Quarter where we’d left them the previous evening.
I had to wonder what would change now that we’d gone from flirtation to physical intimacy. Could he still be my bodyguard? Should he? While it might make him extra motivated to protect me, I also recognized it would make situations like those with Santiago a lot more difficult for me to navigate. I couldn’t negotiate the weird little arrangements that kept my life functioning properly and also worry about hurting Wilder’s feelings.
I still wanted him around and as part of my pack, but maybe it was time to start thinking of making him my Second instead of my guard. It would give him more power and autonomy, and was a role better suited to someone like him anyway.
Ben would shit a brick.
Luckily, Ben didn’t get to make these decisions.
Detective Perry drove a nondescript navy sedan, and I had to assume he had a hidden siren light somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. His car was boring and said nothing about him except that he was kind of a slob. There was a half-full Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup in the drink tray and an assortment of fast-food wrappers littered across the passenger-side floor.
“Do you live here?” I asked. “I mean, don’t be too ashamed to tell me.”
He smiled at this and leaned over to grab a McDonald’s fry container near my feet so he could chuck it in the backseat. It didn’t make a lick of difference to the grease-stained strata around my ankles.
I didn’t dare look behind me.
“My guys cleared the scene late last night. There’s not a lot left, but I thought maybe you might want to poke around, see if anything stands out. I know you didn’t get to see much yesterday.”
“I’m still surprised you let me see anything.”
“The times, they are a changing.” He turned a corner onto an almost deserted block with a dozen or so storefronts boarded up, the paint on all the buildings peeled and fading. Another block and we reached the area I’d been to the previous morning, a strip club on one side of the street advertising Live Nude Girls! Out front a woman in her early thirties was sitting on the hood of an orange Chevelle, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was in curlers, and she was wearing a baggy sweater over ripped jeans. When she saw Perry get out of the car, she gave him a polite nod. She didn’t acknowledge me.
The bar looked different today than yesterday. The police tape was still hanging in front of the alley, but without all the cars and uniformed officers there wasn’t any life here. The place felt cold and gray, scrubbed bare of anything remotely human. It was nothing more than bricks and broken glass and a faded red closed sign in the window.
Someone had removed all the yellow plastic tent markers that had been used to flag potential evidence, and there was nothing on the concrete to indicate where the body had been. Guess they didn’t use chalk for that, like the movies had taught me. I still remembered the location though.
I ducked under the police tape, and the smell of the alley mingled with the fresh scent of smoke from the woman’s cigarette. The breeze was blowing just right to give me the worst of both worlds. Stale beer and old piss, combined with burnt tobacco. Pretty much par for the course in a place like this. But the copper tang of blood was here too, fresh compared to some of the other odors.
I paced the area where Liam’s body had been lying a day ago, scanning the street and walls, hoping something might speak to me. All the real evidence was gone, but there might be something here they hadn’t seen. Something a human would miss.
That’s why he’d brought me, after all.
I noticed a few drops of blood and crouched down, touching them with my fingers. Wolf. Emmett, specifically. I remembered how bloody his shirt had been when I saw him the previous morning. Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to find he’d left some behind. It had been a fight after all.
But I didn’t need to know what happened to Emmett; I needed to know what had happened to Liam Casey.
If I was here to do freaky wolf shit, I might as well do freaky wolf shit.
Crouching low to the ground, I balanced myself with one hand on the concrete and leaned as close to the area where the body had been as I could without lying down. I shut my eyes and breathed deep, parsing through layers of useless stink, trying to get to anything that might tell me I hadn’t wasted my time coming back here.
I focused on the sweet smell of blood.
The hair on the back of my neck went up, the way a dog’s might in a stressful situation, but I kept my eyelids shut tight and breathed through my nostrils. Sight would never be a werewolf’s strongest sense. I had twenty-twenty vision, fine, but with just my nose doing the work, a whole new world opened up to me.
I dropped to my knees and lowered my face closer to the street, my palms near my head to support me.
There were so many other distractions to push away. My shampoo was too apparent with my hair hanging by my face, and the scent of my morning coffee on my breath was chasing off what I was trying to find. I tucked my hair back, and got so close to the pavement my nose brushed the rough asphalt.
Somewhere behind me Perry shifted, his pants rustling softly, one leg against the other, a faint squeak in the sole of one of his shoes.
