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“Legally?”
Anubis shot him a look that said he was slightly insulted. Chuff.
“DMV records?” I asked Raj.
The tiger shifter nodded, his fingers moving quickly over his laptop’s trackpad. Then he stopped.
His gold-brown eyes met mine over the top of the screen, then he turned it around.
Anubis barked, getting to his feet, his tail wagging furiously.
No, not Anubis.
Taavi Jacinto Camal. From Yuma, Arizona.
He was thirty-four years old and short as fuck. A full foot shorter than me at 5’4”.
And even in his goddamn driver’s license photo, he was gorgeous.
Fuck me.
8
I’d just barely gotten usedto thinking of him as ‘Anubis’ instead of ‘doggo,’ and now I had a new name to get in my head. At least I knew this was actually his fucking name, and there were no particularly weird letter combinations in it for me to fuck up as badly as Xoloitzcuintli.
So I just repeated “Taavi” to myself in the shower about a hundred times to make it stick.Tah-vee. Tah-vee.
Raj had left a few hours after we’d found Taavi’s DMV record. We’d finished all the pizza and the cookies, and Raj had helped me try to figure out how to deal with the fact that we had a key witness—with a name—who was still stuck as a dog and whom nobodyknewwas a shifter.
Raj had suggested that we should pretend it had all been his idea—to keep Taavi a secret for his own protection while the feds figured out how to get him un-dogged so that they could go after the assholes who had gotten him stuck like this in the first place.
Usually, I’m not a big fan of lying on legal paperwork, but in this case Raj was probably right. Also, I had the feeling that if Ihadcalled him the night we’d found Taavi, he might have suggested doing it this way anyway. Maybe.
That’s what we decided to tell ourselves, anyway.
And it’s now what Raj’s paperwork said.
So my ass was covered when the shit inevitably hit the fan if and when the RPD found out I’d been essentially smuggling a civilian in and out of the precinct for the better part of the last two weeks.
I still didn’t want to leave him alone in my apartment. Not because I thought he’d run off with my stuff, but because there was an actual risk of him getting grabbed if the people who’d taken him to begin with figured out that I had him.
So we agreed to keep quiet about his species to the RPD, and he kept coming to work with me.
I was working my way through some old missing shifter case files, looking for anything similar to Taavi’s case—shifters who had been drugged, who couldn’t shift, sightings of vans picking people up who seemed unwilling to get into them. I was cranky because I had thus far come up with jack shit, but then I noticed that the bullpen had gotten much louder than usual.
I lifted my head, pulling an ear bud out of one of my ears—I’m one of those people who can focus better with music, but playing music at your desk tends to get frowned upon when you share space with a dozen other people.
“Bowman!” I hissed at the figure who was standing only about six feet away from my desk.
Dani Bowman, precinct witch, jumped a little, then turned toward me, their bright green hair tipped with blue and clashing with a vibrant orange Hawaiian-style shirt and a pink and black checkered mask. “Oh! Detective Hart.”
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked, nodding my head at the noise as people milled around.
“Oh. Um. The MFM protest at the State House.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What about it?”
Bowman shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
