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“Is, or was?”
“Haven’t gotten any other visits,” came the reply.
“Fair enough. Anything else?”
“Nope.”
I was trying to be a better person. “Thanks,” I told him. “Try to get a nap.”
He let out a half laugh. “Yeah, right. Bye, Hart.”
I hung up.
If my not-so-furry friend was one of the two dog shifters, this wolf was likely the other. My last was apparently a male lion shifter—which meant he was almost certainly Black or Arabic.
Shifters take the form of an animal native to wherever they’ve got ancestry—original ancestry, not this colonizer bullshit. If you’re a white guy from Kentucky, even if your family goes back several generations, you’re going to be some European predatory mammal, not an Appalachian bobcat. This meant we had a lot of wolves and European brown bear shifters. Some foxes and lynxes, and a handful of wolverines and the occasional badger. Give me one of the European ones over the mean bastards we got in the states any day. Trust me. My best friend is the other kind, and he can take your fucking hand off in half a second when he’s pissed and furry.
The point is, when somebody tells me I’ve got a lion shifter, that meant that the person on the other side of the fur was going to have African or Arabic ancestry in there somewhere. Probably sub-Saharan. Sure, it was possible this was an Asiatic lion, but they were really rare, so the odds were good we were looking at someone of African descent.
It helped.
I put “probable Black male” in the BOLO.
Then I went into the missing shifter database.
I got nothing on Tatiana Zhirov, but she’d supposedly just moved to Richmond, so maybe she wasn’t in the system yet. I made a note to do a national search on her and moved on.
Mark Roberts, wolf shifter, popped up immediately. He was from Midlothian, reported missing five days ago. I added his info to the warrant request, then sent it off.
While I waited for a response on that, I pulled up the national search and put in Tatiana’s name. Still nothing.
Which meant she might have come in to the country without documentation. It was common enough for Eastern European women—many of whom were from extremely poor communities and left their homes to work and send money back to parents and siblings.
Either way, we didn’t have any record of her in the US that I could access.
I sighed, then made a note to have Ward ask her about family.
Next came my dead shifter—I had fingerprints and a description, and it didn’t take long to find her: Daria Chester, lynx. I looked down at the dog on the floor, wondering if he’d be able to ID the lion from a driver’s license photo. If I found one.
I began going through the lion options—and was deeply disturbed at how many of them came up for the DMV area. A bit over a year ago, I’d gotten Ward to clear out a lot of our missing cases—those who were dead, anyway. There were still a lot of missing left—and we’d of course added to that total since.
He’d done as I suggested and charged the RPD through the nose, so they hadn’t been terribly keen to repeat the experience, despite the fact that any number of people on the floor were more than willing to put up with Ward in order to clear out a solid handful of cases.
But the brass didn’t like the price tag.
That, and I was pretty sure they didn’t like the fact that a skinny guy in a wheelchair could make the whole RPD look bloody fucking incompetent.
Believe me, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
I had seventeen missing lions. Eight of them were women, and Ward had said “guy.”
“Hey, doggo.”
He looked up at me.
“Think you can ID the lion shifter that was with you in that truck?”
He studied me, his expression as serious as a mostly-bald-with-a-weird-crest-on-his-head dog’s expression possibly could be. Then he let out a soft chuff.
