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It meant I didn’t even dare say goodbye.
CHAPTER48
Stone
The clinic wasquiet and deserted at this late hour, and the corpse made it eerie.
Doc examined Louisa’s body carefully. She shook her head. “This is a damn shame. Who would do something like this?”
Someone who was sick of me being alpha.
Louisa was dead because of how useful she was to me.
“That’s what you’re here to tell me, Doc,” I said. “There’s got to be something that leads us in the right direction.”
Doc examined Louisa’s body carefully, rolling Louisa over and peering at the wounds.
She was an experienced doctor who had cared for our people under my grandfather and my father's time as alphas. Doc didn't do politics or care who led the pack. She just patched us up and kept going.
She took out a magnifying glass and began to look for clues. After several minutes of intense searching, she made a soft, satisfied huff under her breath. She went hunting with her tweezers, and I watched her closely as she drew out a small shard of metal.
"Someone broke the tip of their knife off in her side," she said. "If you find the rest of this knife, you might just have yourself a killer."
She dropped it into a bag, and I held my hand out for it.
"I'll get justice for her," I promised.
"I know you will," she answered.
When I lingered at the door, she glanced up at me. "If I find anything else, I do know where to find you, Stone."
"I know," I said. "But I’ll stay until Lawrence arrives.”
"I'm fine.” She sounded exasperated, but fond. "Louis was just a witch. I'm a wolf. I can take care of myself."
I still waited until Teresa and Lawrence arrived, no matter how much Doc grumbled that I was distracting her. As we left the shelter of the clinic behind and stepped into the rain, I showed the bag to Teresa.
An hour later, we'd collected a wide assortment of knives--not a hard thing to turn up between the two of us--and we were comparing them carefully.
"It's not a knife from her knife block," Teresa told me. "I already eliminated those."
"It could be one of these." I held the tip in the baggie up to the training knife that we gave young cubs when they were old enough to carry a knife into the forest.
"Great," she said. "Everyone's got one of those."
"But not everyone has a broken one."
"How do you want to eliminate suspects?"
"I have some ideas where to start," I said. "We both know who's been fantasizing about rebellion."
She cut me a look. "So you're going to pretend you don't sleep in a house full of suspects?"
"Yeah," I said. "They wouldn't have done this."
She looked as doubtful as I felt deep inside. "People do weird things when they get desperate."
As we were hunting for Louisa’s killer, Teresa and I broke into one pack home after another, rifling through the belongings of those who we knew might be disloyal and covering our tracks so they wouldn’t know we were there.
