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Both of us looked down at him.
“What’s the matter, buddy?” Mays asked him.
The dog looked back up at him, then swiveled his head. I had the feeling the dog’s problem was me and my asshole mouth.
“Can we get this over with, Mays?” I interrupted. I got the oddest feeling that Mays was studying Anubis far too closely. As though he suspected something wasn’t quite right, and I didn’t need to raise any red flags around him.
Mayes turned that critical blue gaze on me. “Yeah, sure, detective.” His voice was completely calm, mild.
I wasn’t buying it.
I also wasn’t about to call him out on it.
“You want him on the table?” I asked, ignoring thewhat the hell?look I was getting from the dog.
“Sure, if he won’t mind.” Mays slid the extra collection tubes to the side.
“How much do you need for this?” I asked, eyeing the tubes as I bent down and lifted a non-resistant Anubis.
“For this? Just one. But I figured if he’s okay with it, I’d pull a couple more in case we need to run something else. DNA or whatever.” Mays shrugged. “Or in case we can’t figure it out and need to send some off somewhere else.”
I couldn’t really argue against that logic, although I definitely wasn’t keen on the idea of Mays running DNA, since that would absolutely confirm that Anubis wasn’t a dog. Fortunately, the likelihood of RPD paying to run DNA was pretty low, since we’d only need to do that if there was a possible match to another part of the crime scene—or if and when we found wherever he’d been taken. Every now and then it was nice to have budgetary constraints as an excuse to not do something.
At this point I probably wasn’t going to find where he’d come from without getting him shiftedback, and if that happened, the cat—or dog, as the case may be—was going to be well out of the bag anyway.
I grunted a response, settling the dog’s head on my shoulder and wrapping my arms around him to “hold” him still. I didn’t need to, of course, but nobody’s had-him-a-week dog found in a dumpster would happily sit still for a blood draw.
Anubis obligingly let out a whine and did a little bit of front-paw scrabbling when Mays put the needle in, hopefully in support of our fiction and not because Mays had actually hurt him.
Goddamn, I hated this shit.
I don’t like lying to people, although I’m not particularly bad at it. It just makes me feel like an even bigger dick than usual, especially when they’re good people, like Mays.
At the same time, though, I also knew that whatever had happened to Anubis had left him terrified, drugged, injured, and rendered pretty helpless. And whoever had done this to him had murdered four other shifters rather than let them escape, so it was pretty clear to me that they’d do the same to Anubis if they saw the chance.
Lying about what he was might keep him safe.
Of course, on the other hand, it might also be keeping me from finding the answer to his shifting problem, drawing the whole thing out longer than necessary, which ran the risk of these assholes kidnapping and torturing some other shifters.
It was a lose-lose situation, and I fucking hated it.
After our little blood draw, we headed back toward the station. About a quarter of the way there, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out.
“Raj. What do you got for me?” I was hoping he had answers about Shelby.
“We need to talk, Hart.”
I blinked. He sounded serious. Possibly even worried. “Okay,” I replied. “When and where?”
“You busy?”
“Not especially. We’re on our way back from the lab.” A car with a noisy muffler drove past, and I grimaced, putting a finger in my ear. Anubis shook his head, glaring at the car as it continued down the street.
“You on foot?”
“Yeah. Why?”
There was a long pause on the other end. “Can you meet me by the playground at Abner Clay?”
