family would be given the final say, as was only right, but it was near certain that the family would expect her to act on their behalf.
“Ready to rock and roll?” Kenji asked, that pretty hair of his sliding forward as he shifted his attention to the body.
“Yes.” The contact with a packmate she respected regardless of the painful history between them, the skin privileges given and accepted in friendship, without any expectation of deeper intimacy, steadied her wolf. “My forensics people are in Dallas, so we’re it.”
Opening the kit, they gloved up together, pulled on paper-thin and transparent plas coveralls, sealed their shoes in plas booties as fine, and tugged up transparent masks to reduce the risk of any further DNA contamination. Only then did they move into the room.
Kenji went to Russ’s fallen form, but Garnet walked around to the back of the door. One thing was clear at first glance. “This dead bolt is still in a locked position.” It had been torn violently away from the wooden frame around the doorway but remained in one piece on the door itself.
• • •
Kenji had crouched down by the handkerchief crumpled on the carpet, intending to examine it more closely, but Garnet’s words had him rising to join her. He caught her scent as she moved back a step, the steel and strength of it an unmissable song even through all the ugliness in this room. “Like it’s been forced.” Frowning, he said, “Eloise.” He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t have to, given the acute nature of changeling hearing.
The girl appeared in the doorway, her focus determinedly on Garnet and Kenji rather than the gruesome scene. “Yes, sir?”
“Did you force the door?”
Eloise’s face crumpled. “I had to.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Garnet said at once, her tone calm but demanding the younger wolf’s attention. “We just need to know the sequence of events.”
Swallowing, the junior soldier squared her shoulders and put her hands behind her back. “I smelled blood and when no one answered, I thought maybe Russ and Shane had hurt each other.” She bit down on her lower lip. “I could scent them around the door, like they’d both touched it not long ago. I swear I didn’t touch anything after I saw them inside.”
Realizing he was missing something, Kenji decided to wait to ask Garnet, but she filled him in then and there. “Russ was in a long-term relationship with Athena. We’re talking going on ten years. Five months ago, she broke it off with him. A month ago, she moved in with Shane.”
“Ah.” A love triangle could explain the entire thing.
Pack was family, and loyalty was branded into a SnowDancer’s bones, but they were also wolves. And wolves in love could be hot tempered, especially when in competition for a lover. Shit happened. Usually not this deadly, however. No question that things might escalate to a bloody fight now and then, but Kenji could think of no other incidence of the cold and apparently premeditated murder of a rival.
“You okay to keep standing guard?” Garnet held Eloise’s eyes. “No shame if you want some time out. I don’t like being around this kind of violence, either.”
The girl gave her lieutenant a grateful but steady look. “I’ll be all right. It was just the shock, you know?” Taking a deep breath, she turned to go back outside. “I won’t let anyone in without permission.”
Garnet shut the door behind Eloise, ensuring privacy. “This dead bolt can only be set from the inside.”
Kenji nodded; the dead bolt was an old-fashioned one where the thick metal bolt had to be manually slid across. “No mechanism on the other side.” A separate thumb-scan lock had been added to the door, likely during a denwide upgrade, and it was probably what Russ had used day to day.
“I don’t suppose you scent a Psy?” she asked. “A teleporter would make a convenient villain right now.”
Kenji wished he could answer yes to that bleak joke of a question. “No unexpected scents. Aside from me and you, Rev, Lorenzo, and Eloise, the only other scents in this room are of Russ and Shane.” He paused, took another deep breath to confirm his initial reading. “No hint of anyone else—unless I’m missing it? I don’t know Athena.” Even five months away couldn’t erase a scent imprint that had been laid down over years.
Garnet rubbed the back of her forearm across her forehead, her gloved hand curled into a fist. “Russ hired a chemical steam