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“She’s giving me a… full narrative,” he explained, his words a little halting as he tried to both explain what he was seeing and hearing and also pay attention to the dead woman. “It was… different? And dark. We’re definitely looking for another shifter, though.”
That was news. “I thought she said it wasn’t Theodore?”
“Not a wolf,” Ward clarified, his words a little clipped. “Something else. She doesn’t know what?”
“But a shifter?”
“Yeah.” He listened some more, one hand held up. “Maybe… a little bit more toward the middle of where the bushes were?”
“Maybe?” I repeated.
“Sorry.” Ward shrugged. I suppressed my irritation. It wasn’t his fault the ghost was a flake and a half. Or that she’d had imprecise visions.
I just wished this were easier.
We got back to digging.
Another twenty minutes, and I hit another whelk shell, also split, like the two before. This time, I didn’t ignore the shell as random refuse, getting down and working with a smaller trowel and brush to minimize any damage to the shell.
Raj came over, crouching beside the hole, his white tank streaked with dirt and damp with sweat—my t-shirt wasn’t any better. “I take it our ghost was correct?”
“Probably,” I answered. “Found another fucking shell, which I’m pretty sure means there’s another body under it.”
“Our shifter?”
“Maybe,” I answered. “Or maybe another dog.”
Another twenty, and I’d found more bones.
Raj was working outward in another direction, and at some point I’d heard him swear—we had another body of some sort where he was, as well.
Kurtz had fully exposed the wolf-shifter’s skeleton, documenting it with pictures every step of the way. When the FBI’s crime scene van showed up, Kurtz hopped out of the hole to go yell at them about being slow.
* * *
Raj had a regular dog,but I had, in fact, unearthed Mariah Stebbens, a fox shifter who was also not the victim whose murder Rosemary had witnessed.
Upon receivingthatnews, I’d said several very inappropriate, mean, and unsavory things that Kurtz had found hysterically funny and which appeared to have scandalized both the FBI crime scene people and the head of the museum, who had the unfortunate timing to walk outside with Madeeha in the middle of it.
“Can she tell us what kind of shifter we’re looking for?” Raj asked, passing me a bottle of water, which I took and drank down, since I was probably dehydrated and because putting something in my mouth would keep me from saying something else unprofessional.
“Something furry with teeth,” was all Ward could give us, although further probing from Kurtz yielded that we were probably not looking for a fox, but something larger, although not a wolf. So anything from a coyote to a lynx to a wolverine to a badger. But I’d have put money on it being some sort of canid—we had a wolf and a fox so far, and the presence of dead dogs make me pretty confident that all our victims were going to be either canid or canine.
Then Raj issued the order that we were just going to dig up the whole fucking yard, much to the delight of me, Kurtz, and the crime scene feebies. And when I say ‘delight,’ I do not in any way mean actual delight. I mean ‘resigned exhaustion and bitterness.’
At least the FBI sprang for dinner, ordering enough pizzas to feed three Arcanids and two crime scene teams, since Raj had also called in a second team.
We found Rosemary’s victim around sundown—Saul Bates, who was a hyena shifter. We also found three more: a coyote, another wolf, and an African wild dog. All canids. Every single one had a cracked whelk shell.
We’d also found another half-dozen actual dog skeletons.
Madeeha and a couple other museum people—including Helen MacGinley, the head of the organization—had stayed with us into the night, supplying water and much-appreciated cookies.
At about eleven, Madeeha came outside with a sheaf of papers in her hand, looking uncertain. She went over to Ward, and I took the opportunity to take a short break from digging and clearing away dirt.
“What’ve we got?” I asked, walking up to them.
Ward had put on a pair of gloves—as had Madeeha—and was looking at a couple of the papers. He held one out for me to see, and I recognized a fragment of the complex circular pattern that looked a lot like the exposed portion of Taavi’s tattoo I had seen on his neck.
