“It’s not her fault she decided to date a werewolf with a possessive cat for a pet.” Trey would have said more, but a familiar scent caught his attention. He stopped and looked left, out across the slow-moving stream.
Trevor and Connor must have smelled it, too, because they both paused and sniffed the air.
“What is it?” Hale asked.
“Blood,” Trevor murmured.
Hale didn’t bother to try to trace the scent, but simply followed them as they ran along the bank of the stream.
“How are we going to explain ending up on the other side of the stream and well outside our search grid?” Connor asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Trey told him. “I’ll come up with something believable if anyone asks. Right now, just focus on finding the source of that scent.”
They followed the trail for another thousand yards or so before the stream narrowed enough for them to leap across. Not that a normal human would have been able to do it, but that was simply one more lie Trey would have to come up with once the questions started.
The scent led them to a low-lying area blanketed with thickets and brush, the kind of place Trey recognized as perfect for hiding a body—even if getting it here would have been a major pain in the ass for whoever dumped it.
He and his pack mates stopped the moment they saw the body, staying far enough away to hopefully not trample any forensic evidence that might have been left behind. It helped that there was no reason for them to move closer to check for a pulse. Even from fifteen feet away, Trey’s hearing told him the victim didn’t have a heartbeat.
It was another one of the Butcher’s victims. The man lying in the shallow grave had been partially dug up. Probably by the wandering dog. The head and hands were gone, along with another leg. It also looked like the stomach cavity had been ripped open, but that might have been the dog’s doing, too. As a cop, and before that a soldier who’d seen more than his fair share of combat, Trey had seen a lot of dead bodies, but this was as bad as anything he’d ever experienced. This killer was sadistic as hell.
“What am I smelling?” Trevor asked, sniffing the air.
Trey took a whiff and realized there were two separate scents competing—and neither of them were blood. The first one was sharp, similar to a cleanser or disinfectant, but with floral notes, like perfume. The other smelled almost human, but something wasn’t quite right about it. He was still trying to figure out what it was when he picked up a burnt electrical odor. While the first two scents lingered on the body, the third hovered around it. As if it belonged to whoever had carried the body and dumped it here.
Trevor must have concluded the same thing because he gave Trey a worried look. “You think we’re dealing with some kind of supernatural killer?”
Trey almost groaned. That was all they needed. Serial killers were bad enough. But if this one was indeed supernatural, there might be more to the Butcher than they’d thought.
***
“How exactly did you end up finding the body on this side of the stream when you and your teammates were assigned to a grid nearly a quarter mile away from here?”
Dark hair pulled back in a neat bun, Chief Leclair regarded Trey curiously where they stood several yards away from the organized chaos that was the crime scene.
“Pure luck,” he said. “We finished clearing our assigned grid when we saw some buzzards circling this area, so we decided to check it out.”
Leclair continued to study him as if she somehow knew he was lying through his teeth. Trey hoped not.
“I see,” she finally said in a soft, noncommittal tone before glancing down at the bottom of his tactical uniform pants. “And how did you get across the stream without getting wet?”
Trey did a double take, completely caught off guard by the question. Which is probably why she’d asked it. Damn, he and his pack mates were going to have to be careful around the chief. She was a cop through and through.
“The stream narrows quite a bit if you wander down that way,” he said as casually as he could, jerking his thumb in the stream’s direction. “We were able to jump across it.”
Leclair didn’t look like she believed that for a damn second, but at least she didn’t continue grilling him about it. “I suppose we should be thankful you followed your instincts and searched this area. I doubt anyone else would have bothered to fight their way through so many thickets on a whim. Then again, it’s starting to become the norm for me to find my SWAT team in places where they’re not supposed to be. Fortunately, things always seem to go right when you and your teammates go off script.”
With that, the chief walked away, heading toward the taped-off crime scene to talk to one of the detectives from the serial killer task force. Given that no one had approached the body yet, it was likely they were waiting for a medical examiner to arrive. Hopefully, they’d get here soon and Leclair would be too focused on that to worry about him and the other members of his pack. Because she definitely seemed suspicious right now.
“Everything okay?” Connor asked as he came up beside him. “You and the chief seemed to be having an intense conversation.”
“I think we’re good,” Trey answered. “Though I’m pretty sure she knows I’m lying about how we found the body.”
Connor blew out a breath. “I figured as much. We need to be careful around her. She’s sharp.”
Trey opened his mouth to agree, but the words got stuck in his throat as a blond-haired woman carrying a heavy-looking bag with the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office emblem on the side approached the crime scene tape and walked directly over to the chief. Between the bag that she had to lug half a mile through the woods in the mid-August heat and the navy blue coveralls she was wearing over her regular clothes, complete with high rubber boots, Dr. Samantha Mills was glistening with sweat, some of the long, blond hair escaping from her messy bun.
Damn, she was the most attractive woman he’d ever seen in his life.
“You ask her out yet?” Connor asked casually.
Trey glanced at his buddy to see him wearing a knowing grin. It wasn’t a secret that Trey had a thing for the assistant ME. He’d done nothing to hide it from the moment he’d first seen her at the site of the SWAT team’s raid two years ago when half the Pack had fully shifted into wolves. After that, Samantha seemed to show up at every crime scene to collect forensic evidence all while looking at them sideways. Hell, just this past June, while helping them with a case, she’d openly admitted to knowing the team was playing fast and loose with the truth when it came to how they did their jobs. He and the rest of the Pack had been worried she might be onto their secret—that the DPD SWAT team was composed entirely of werewolves—but when she hadn’t exposed them, they’d relaxed a little.