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It also meant I was menacing a police officer.
Taking a step back, I lifted my hands and mimed a cat scratching. “But no claws today, Detective.”
“What are you saying, exactly?”
“I’m saying if Mason and Emmett were the ones who killed this guy, you would have needed a power washer to clean out this alley. Instead I can barely get the smallest hint of blood unless I’m facedown in the trash.”
“You think it’s totally out of the question they did this?”
I needed to show him, evidently. To make him understand what I meant. “The guy died from blunt force trauma, right? That’s what I heard someone at the station say.” It also explained why there’d been no obvious breaks or bruises on his body when I’d seen him yesterday.
Perry nodded.
“So he most likely hit his head on something or got hit on the head, yeah?”
Again, he quietly agreed with my assessment.
I scanned the area around me, trying to find something that would work by means of demonstration. A watermelon would have been awesome, really splashy and pink. I probably would have given the poor detective nightmares for a week if I had that for a prop.
Instead I took a broken cinder block from a pile next to the dumpster. The thing was heavy, in the same weight class as Santiago’s book of demons, but I was able to hold it in one hand. I judged the heft of it and said, “This weighs about thirty pounds, give or take.” I held it out to him so he could test it, assuring him it wasn’t Styrofoam or anything like that. “And if I learned anything from Jerry Maguire, it’s that the human head weighs roughly eight pounds.”
“Sure.”
I held the cinder block between my palms and squeezed. Without flinching, exerting myself, or so much as breaking a sweat, the hefty brick groaned in my hands, then crumbled, shattering apart into a dozen smaller pieces and clattering onto the pavement.
“That was without effort, Bryce. Without anger, or motivation, or adrenaline. My wolf didn’t even wake up.”
He was staring at me now, and I think if he’d had room, he might have backed up farther. But he was also nodding in a slow way that made me think I possibly could have gotten my point across.
“You’re saying if it had been your…wolves, and it had been a real brawl, Liam Casey’s head would have been…” He glanced down at the pile of concrete rubble at my feet.
This is where the watermelon would have made my point vividly.
Too vividly, considering Perry already looked shaky.
“I’m saying a wolf in a blind rage wouldn’t have given this guy a bump on the head.” He probably would have taken the guy’s head right off, but I decided it might be better to leave that part implied.
“What if it was just a tussle, guys being drunk idiots, you know?”
“I believe this guy could have been a drunk idiot.” I pointed to where the body had been. “And I absolutely will allow that Emmett and Mason could have been behaving like dumbasses. They’re loud, they’re young.”
Perry gave me an amused look at this last part, and it took me a second to realize why.
Mason and Emmett were each two years older than me.
They also had zero responsibility and hadn’t been at the epicenter of a near apocalypse. I think it was safe to say I was a lot wiser than my twenty-one years implied.
If not wiser, I at least had decidedly more life experience than two twenty-three-year-old werewolves who’d never left Louisiana.
Something else occurred to me then.
I’d been so busy looking at this from a werewolf perspective I hadn’t even considered the other option to determine what had really happened that night. There was a way, a difficult way, but one that could show Perry without a doubt who had killed the man in the alley.
“Were there witnesses?” I asked, unable to keep my excitement contained.
“Yeah. Two, aside from your guys.”
Good, because I doubted even with my brilliant new plan I’d be able to convince him I needed to let Mason and Emmett out for the night. “Do you think you could get them back here?”
