Muscle and Bone - Mary Calmes Page 0,50

all wolves, they had a heightened sense of smell, but in lupines, they were specifically trained to scent certain biological markers as they broke down. I could tell if someone was dead from their scent, but our ME could scent, during the autopsy, each postmortem interval like algor, rigor, and livor mortis. Each carried its own smell specific to lupines, and our ME could gauge, with a fair amount of accuracy, the decomposition rate, to then trace it back to a narrower time window.

Wade sighed deeply and turned to look at Peck. “What’re you thinking?”

He shrugged. “Maybe things got rough between her and Trent Highmore. He ends up losing it, wolfing out––”

“That hardly ever happens,” I said defensively.

“I know,” Ness snapped at me. “I got a brother-in-law who’s a wolf, Rhine, so don’t bust my balls.”

Betas, gammas, and even omegas could marry humans, and some of them did. Alphas could not. Many alphas were far too powerful to have sex with humans. Some of them with absolutely rigid discipline could, but having sex when you had to be careful wasn’t something alphas were known for.

“But it does happen,” Peck jumped in. “Alphas especially can get overstimulated and freak the fuck out.”

“Young alphas,” I corrected him. “But still, you’re reaching.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “But maybe since she’s brand new to bein’ an omega, she doesn’t get how she’s drawin’ in these guys fast and hard, and you know what they say about omegas: that other wolves lose their shit around them.”

I grunted my agreement.

“Turns out Remy Talmadge was putting omegas into a kind of fake heat,” Wade told our fellow detectives. “And then blackmailing them over it down the road.”

“No shit. You see?” Peck almost shouted. “That’s the answer right fuckin’ there.”

“It follows,” Ness affirmed with a shrug. “Think about it. Talmadge gets her all going, kissing on her, fingering her––”

“Could you not,” Wade groused at him.

He scoffed. “Whatever, Massey, sack up.”

“Anyway,” I pressed him.

“Yeah, okay,” Ness groused, turning from Wade in disgust to meet my gaze. “So Talmadge has got the girl all wet and ready, her pheromones are off the fuckin’ charts, and Highmore’s there for who knows what, and he loses it, he attacks her, knocks her out, and now he’s shittin’ bricks, ’cause just like that, suddenly there’s someone who will for sure say what he did, ’cause she’s rich, and he can’t do nothin’ to her.”

“That plays,” Wade agreed.

“Oh good, thank you” came the sarcastic reply.

“Don’t be a dick,” Wade ordered, slipping his arm around the back of the couch, pressing into my side. “Fuck, she’s lying in a pool of blood. That can’t all be hers.”

“It is.” Seeing Imogen bathed in blood shook me more than it probably should have by now. The aftermath of violence, both human and lupine, was an unavoidable part of the job, but she was so young and vulnerable, and I was sad thinking about how fragile life was and how relentlessly cruel fate had been to her. “Lupines have double a human’s supply to allow for the shift. It’s all hers.”

“Poor kid,” Ness commented.

“Your story makes pretty good sense,” I assented, glancing at Ness, “but what’ve you got as her time of death?”

He gave me the estimation that the ME gave him, between nine and nine thirty.

“Yeah, see, that’s the same window we’re getting on Highmore’s death. So maybe he knocked her out, I can buy that, but he couldn’t be dead and in a car driving from Highland Park to Englewood.”

“Okay then, next suspect,” Peck offered. “Where was Talmadge?”

“Locked in a panic room.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, it’s a coded lock system. We have the log from the monitoring company showing when he went in, and the door didn’t open again until he came out to get to me.”

“And Talmadge’s car was there, at his house,” Wade told them. “CSI took it to the garage, so we’ll know if her DNA can be linked to it pretty quickly, but do we think Talmadge drove from his house to Englewood, ripped out her throat in an alley there, and then drove home and locked himself in the panic room? Does that work?”

“Not with the time lock on the panic room,” Ness replied. “Unless Talmadge found a way to hack the system and close the door to make it look like he was locked in when he wasn’t.”

“But if he’s out driving his car, that means he has to park it in his garage without any of the first responders spotting him, and then