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“I doubt it,” Connor said. “They’d have checked around the waterfall since that’s where the event was held, but not far beyond that.”
“Whoever left him here believed someone would find him.”
They both looked at me.
“What do you mean?” Connor asked.
“He wasn’t killed here,” I said. “He was left here for someone to find.”
“Psychic?” Alexei asked, just as Connor had.
“Observant,” Connor corrected, narrowing his gaze as he looked at me, considered. “What do you see?”
“He looks like he was attacked by a wild animal—somethingwith teeth and claws—not a knife or a gun or fists. He’d have bled a lot, but there was no blood where he was placed. No smears of it on the ground, on the plants. He’s tall and in good shape, and presumably would have put up a fight, but the grass around him wasn’t trampled down. He wasn’t killed here.”
Connor nodded. “Wild animals certainly cache food, but we’d have seen evidence if they’d dragged something this large through the brush. And you’re right—there isn’t any evidence here.”
“Which means this wasn’t an attack by a wild animal,” Alexei said grimly. “Humans or Sups did this.”
“Which ones?” Connor asked. “And why leave him here for the rest of us to find?”
“Someone who wanted to ruin the initiation?” Alexei asked. “Or make a statement?”
“Could be either or both,” Connor said. “That’s what we’ll have to find out.”
***
The sheriff was younger than I’d expected, a sturdy man with suntanned skin, short brown hair, and brown eyes set beneath dark and angular brows. His jaw was square, his chin equally so, but with a dimple in the middle, his bottom lip a little fuller than the top. Handsome in a rugged way, and probably in his late thirties. And he definitely wasn’t a shifter.
He wore a wide-brimmed taupe hat in the same shade as the perfectly creased uniform.
“I’m surprised his first thought was calling a human sheriff,” I whispered.
“Clan’s doing what humans would do in this situation,” Connor whispered back. “Call the authorities and let them come in and handle it. It’s the cost of pretending to be human.”
Along with the cost of turning over control to humans,I thought. Was that worth it? Given the looks of displeasure on some of the younger shifters, they didn’t seem to think so.
The sheriff examined the scene, hands resting on his loaded belt as he scanned what remained of Loren. After a minute of review, he looked over the crowd, pausing when he reached me and Connor, then turning back to Cash.
“What was happening here?” he asked.
“Baptism at the cataracts,” Cash said solemnly.
As cover stories went, a baptism wasn’t terribly far from the truth.
“Not a very auspicious one,” the sheriff said.
“No, it isn’t.”
“You hear anything? See anything?”
“Nothing,” Cash said. “One of the kids was playing, found him, came back and told us.”
“Looks like he’s been mauled,” the sheriff said. “A man was killed by a bear in Boyd a couple of weeks ago. Blew a tire while driving down a fire road, was attacked while putting on the spare. His dashboard screen caught the whole thing.”
He scratched his jaw, the stubble making ascritchsound. “Looked a lot like this. Maybe he was taking a walk on the property, was attacked, taken down. I don’t see a weapon wound.”
“I don’t, either,” Cash said. “Just these scratches, the bites.”
