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“Then he isn’t going to like this,” Mays replied, his voice sounding a little choked.
“No, he really fucking isn’t,” I agreed. “Do we know that’s human?”
“It isn’t, actually,” Mays replied, then stuck a long metal tool into the goo and pulled up a skull with the most disgusting squelching sound I’ve ever fucking heard.
Everybody around me made strangled groaning or choking noises. Including me.
That was fuckinggross.
The skull looked canine to me.
“We need to know if we’re looking at a dog or a shifter,” Raj said, sounding just as nauseated as I felt.
And because we had no name or photograph, and the bodydefinitelywasn’t identifiable on sight, that meant I’d have to be taking some part of our victim over to my boss, whoreallyhated touching dead things.
“Can I not takethatover there?” I asked nodding at the still-dripping skull.
Ugh.
“Let’s see what else we can find,” Mays replied, his voice tight.
Quincy slid over a plastic tray, and Mays set the skull down.
“How did we find this?” I asked Kurtz, who was standing closest to me.
“The guy mowing the lawn noticed the smell,” the faun answered. “The rain from two days ago must have softened up the ground and…”
“I get the idea,” I interrupted. “But why did he call the cops? And why did they call you?”
“Oh, he started poking,” Dan told me, coming over to join us as Mays and Quincy scooped—
I stopped looking. The sounds were bad enough without the added visual of decomposing muscle-jelly-soup adding to the churning acid in my stomach.
“The groundskeeper?”
“Yeah,” Dan confirmed. “Mays already bagged the shovel he stuck in there and the first bone that came up. Leg or some shit. That’s when he called us. Mays IDed it as canine pretty quick—” Dan shot me a look over the top of his blue RPD mask. “—Probably because he’s been looking at a lot of dog bones recently.”
“Has he.” I knew I wasn’t fooling anybody, but I wasn’t going to throw Mays under the proverbial bus.
Dan grunted. “I called Parikh. And he wasgenerousenough to let us stick around.”
RPD was supposed to wash its hands of shifter cases, although I knew that was one of the many things making Dan irritable these days. “You didn’t want to?” I asked him.
“I want fewer headaches,” he replied. “But I would like to know what the fuck is going on in my city.”
I looked at Kurtz. “And the FBI is okay with you using LEO CSIs?” LEOs—law enforcement officers—were what the feds called cops.
“We aren’t asking,” Kurtz replied, still watching whatever the fuck revolting thing Mays was doing now.
“Trouble in federal paradise?”
Kurtz bared his too-big teeth. “Above my paygrade,” he replied. “And I’m staying the fuck out of it.”
“How many days left?” I asked him.
“Ninety-fucking-eight, and it can’t come soon enough.”
“Det—Hart?” Quincy walked over and offered me a small Tupperware-looking tray with a reddish-brown smeared small bone. Looked like a dog’s toe. Way to much like a toe, since all it did was remind me of Taavi’s dog-feet.
