Chapter 15
At the light knock on her open office door, Samantha looked up from the autopsy records she was reading to see Trey standing there holding a paper bag from the deli down the street. Her pulse skipped a beat. She didn’t know why, but everything seemed a little bit lighter and brighter when he was around.
“Hey,” she said, pushing back her chair and walking around the desk to meet him. “You brought dinner? You didn’t have to do that.”
He flashed her a grin. “I wanted to. You didn’t eat already, did you?”
“No, and I’m starving,” she admitted.
She’d spent what was left of last night and much of the morning working the Cedar Ridge scene, then come straight to the institute to go over everything they’d collected. To say she was exhausted was an understatement, especially considering she hadn’t gotten a bit of sleep last night. Not that she was complaining. She’d gladly give up endless nights of sleep for sex that good.
“I ate a pack of cheese crackers and a Snickers from the vending machine around noon,” she added as they sat down on the couch along the wall. “Do I get any credit for that?”
Trey snorted as he pulled out a bottle of water and a small plastic clamshell filled with pickle spears, then two sandwiches wrapped in paper. “Absolutely none. I had no idea what kind of sandwich you liked, so I went with ham and swiss on rye. Hope that’s okay?”
“It’s perfect.”
Unwrapping the sandwich, she took a bite, then helped herself to a crunchy dill pickle spear. She resisted the urge to shove it in her mouth along with the ham and swiss. Dang, she really was hungry.
While they ate, Trey told her about the browbeating he’d gotten from Chief Leclair, admitting he wasn’t sure if she was more upset he’d gone into the woods after the Butcher by himself or that the killer had ended up getting away. Samantha glanced at him as she nibbled on the pickle, looking for any sign of the damage she knew he’d sustained last night in the fight with the bad guy.
After a few minutes of looking him over, she decided that if she hadn’t seen the bruises with her own eyes, she would never know that anything had happened at all. Which was absolutely insane. Yes, it had been dark when she’d pulled up his T-shirt and looked him over, and he’d done his best to keep her from getting a clear view, but she’d seen the unnatural dips and ridges along his chest. There was no doubt in her mind that he’d sustained at least three broken ribs and what she was guessing had been some pretty serious cartilage tears.
Trey should be in the hospital right now, with surgery as a distinct possibility, serious painkillers an absolute must, and breathing a chore to accomplish. The one thing he shouldn’t have been doing was sitting in her office, chatting and gesturing like it was just another beautiful day in the neighborhood.
She wanted to ask him about it, demand answers, but she refrained, choosing to focus on her sandwich and pickles instead. Her office wasn’t the place for that conversation. They needed privacy, and it was too easy here for someone to overhear. Besides, what did she expect him to say anyway? That yes, he had broken several ribs, but not to worry about it because he was fine now.
The scary part was that Trey truly was fine. He’d had his chest nearly caved in last night, and now, barely more than twelve hours, he was fully healed. It shouldn’t have been possible, but obviously it was. A part of her knew that somehow, it was the wolf DNA that had allowed him to heal so quickly, but for the life of her, she couldn’t explain how something like that could be possible.
The puzzle nagged at her, but in the end, she was simply glad he was whole and healthy. That was more important to her than having answers.
“Have you gotten anything from the blood samples I showed you at the crime scene?” Trey asked as she finished eating. “I know it’s too soon to have anything conclusive as far as DNA, but I was wondering if maybe you’d noticed anything strange about the blood?”
With all the bizarre stuff she’d seen the past two years, she should be immune to one more sudden left turn into the Twilight Zone. Apparently not. His odd question, and the fact that he was obviously hiding some important details concerning last night’s attack, still caught her off guard.
When Trey had led her to the stretch of forest where he and the larger member of the Butcher serial-killing duo had fought, she expected to see a few disturbed piles of pine needles, some broken tree branches, and maybe a drop or two of blood. What she’d gotten was a war zone of gouged earth, broken tree trunks, and what looked like two or three pints of blood spattered absolutely everywhere. It had helped some when Trey had assured her the blood wasn’t his, though he’d been seriously short on the details when it came to how that much blood had ended up spattered so far and wide.
If she had to guess—and she had to because his answers were vague BS—she’d say Trey had gone at the killer with a knife or even a machete. But Trey hadn’t been carrying a weapon like that when they’d left her place. Having essentially frisked him while getting naked with him, she knew that for a fact. And he definitely hadn’t taken anything from his truck because she would have seen him doing it.
Which meant that there was yet another secret Trey was keeping from her.
“The blood?” he prompted when she didn’t say anything.
Crap. How long had she been sitting there in a daze?
“Oh, sorry. I was lost in thought,” she said. “To answer the first part of your question, no, nothing on the DNA yet. Even with a priority rush, it will be a couple days before we can check to see if the samples match anyone already in the system. As far as the other part of your question, yes, there was something strange with the blood.”
Trey waited patiently, one brow lifted.
“This is going to sound insane,” she admitted. “But the blood I collected at the Cedar Ridge Preserve can’t be typed and doesn’t have a definitive rhesus factor.”
Trey considered that for a moment before nodding. “Okay, you’re right. That does sound insane. What exactly do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve tested multiple samples. The results either come back inconclusive or as a random mix of blood types. Same with the rhesus factor. It either comes back as positive, negative, or both. It’s like the samples were taken from a combination of a different people’s blood. You’re sure you saw the blood come straight from the big guy you fought, right?”
Trey nodded. “It was his blood for sure. Is it possible for a person to have mixed blood like that? Maybe if they’d gotten a transfusion?”
Samantha shook her head. “No way. For one thing, no doctor worth a crap would ever do a transfusion without typing and cross matching the blood for compatibility. And if something like that happened anyway, the person would have one hell of a nasty incompatibility reaction. He wouldn’t be running around the woods fighting. He’d be laid up in a hospital waiting for his kidneys to fail.”