“I’d rather stand and stare at Delorme.”
“Be nice to the locals, Yellowrock.”
I laughed and disconnected. About two and a half minutes later a woman rounded the corner. “Dellie, this is the woman I was expecting.”
“You sure, Nadine?”
“I’m sure.”
I followed Nadine LaFleur to her utilitarian office, admiring the building but fighting off a case of the sneezes. The building was old enough to have a faint, nose-wrinkling stink of mold and dust and age. The sheriff’s perfume was strong enough to take the edge off, but was also an additional odor for my sinuses to fight.
I stepped into Nadine’s office and took my first good look at Rick’s first cousin. She was Frenchy—dark-eyed, black-haired—and stout, maybe five feet four inches of shrewd, narrow-eyed, political acumen. She looked meticulous, tough, and competent, giving off a far different impression from Rick’s pretty-boy, come-hither personality. Not that Rick wasn’t smart and tough, but he hid it well. Nadine didn’t try to hide it. Underneath her perfume were pheromones of aggression, anger, frustration, and territoriality.
Nadine was glad I was here but equally wanted me to be gone. She settled on a grudging but determined welcome. Closing the office door with a firm snap, she stuck out a hand and gave mine a firm shake before indicating one of the chairs in front of her no-nonsense desk. “Rick says you can help me with the dog attacks,” she said,
“Uh—”
“Except I don’t think it’s dogs. I think it’s werewolves.” She slapped a stack of files on the desk in front of me, opened the top one, and spread the photographs inside across the desktop. I had been right in my first estimation of what I would see here. It was gruesome. And Nadine was watching me like a hawk for any reaction that was squeamish or girlie. I hadn’t taken a seat yet, and so I inhaled slowly as I leaned over the desk, palm flat on the desktop, letting my weight fall onto my left arm and using my right hand to reposition the photos in order of interest: overall crime scene photos together, heads together, torsos together, limbs together.
My Beast pushed into the forefront of my brain and looked with me, though she still had some trouble accepting two-dimensional photographic representations of anything. No scent, she thought at me. No dead meat smell.
No scent, I agreed. Paper pictures.
Stupid paper pictures. Need scent.
I have a feeling we’ll get all the scent we want, I thought back. Sadly.
A quick scan of the first crime scene showed me body parts scattered over a small clearing, blood soaked into the ground, clothes bloodied and shredded, a backpack, contents spread to the side. The body had been dismembered and eaten. The age and gender of the victim was impossible to discern: no face, eyes, nose, or lips over the gory skull, no flesh or viscera over the chest and abdomen, hands too swollen by decomposition to guess at a gender. Long brown hair on a chewed scalp. And maggots. Lots of maggots. I hate maggots.
Oh yeah, Nadine was watching me like a hawk.
I lined the photos up the way I wanted and opened the file beneath. This one had sat in the sun for a while before it was discovered. Scavengers had been on the scene longer. There was less to see. The third crime scene, however, was fresher and had taken place after a rain. The black mud had dried, protecting the tracks and physical evidence better than the other scenes. I checked the time stamp. Yesterday. These pics were the ones I needed.
I had studied up on wolves, wild dogs, and other predators after I fought the werewolves, research that would have come in handy ahead of time, though that wasn’t something I could have planned on needing. But it was handy now, and I dredged up the facts from my memory.
“Measurements differ on how and who you ask, but researchers with digital bite meters have done testing and discovered that adult humans have a narrow range of bite force between one twenty to two hundred twenty pounds per square inch, or p.s.i., of bite force.” My voice sounded dispassionate, reasoned, and almost pedantic. Maybe even bored. And not at all nauseated. Go, me. Keeping my eyes on the photos, I continued. “Wild dogs, German shepherds, pit bulls, and Rottweilers can have a bite force from three-twenty to five hundred p.s.i. Hyenas, by contrast, have a p.s.i. of a thousand, and wild male crocodiles have been measured at around six thousand, by far the highest bite force on the planet. Wolves at play measured in at four hundred. Wolves eating have, rarely, measured in at fifteen hundred and can snap their way through an elk femur in less than eight bites.”
I turned the shot of the shattered femur to Nadine. “I’m guessing this wolf bite was upwards of twelve hundred p.s.i., maybe even higher than fifteen hundred p.s.i., because I’m not seeing but two bite marks, which means he snapped it like a twig.”
I pushed the skull pictures to her. “The orbital bones are cracked, the jaw was forcibly removed in what looks like a massive wrenching motion, and the skull itself was cracked open.” I turned to another shot. “Brain removed.” I pushed a photo of the torso toward her. “All internal organs eaten.” I pointed to two what looked like puncture marks. “Wolves and dogs share a similar canine tooth length and have the same number of teeth—forty-two—but this one bite mark”—I indicated a set of score marks on a meatless bone—“looks deeper than dog canines. What did the medical examiner say?”
Grudgingly, Nadine said, “He suggested the canines of the predator were longer and sharper than dogs. Maybe two and a quarter inches long.”
That was big even for a werewolf. “And?”
“He says there’s no animal in the state that has teeth that long except the Florida panther.”
She was testing me. Nadine smelled of challenge. Which meant she was holding back on something and was wondering if I’d catch it. I paged through the photos and realized what was missing. Inside me, Beast huffed with amusement. Alpha woman is playing cat-games. Hiding paw prints in mud. Inside me, she yawned to show her canines. Beast killing teeth are longer than small cousin called Flo-ree-da.
Still mostly toneless, I asked, “Where are the photos of the footprints?”
Nadine relaxed suddenly and blew out a breath. “Okay. You know your way around. I wasn’t sure Rick—never mind. Here.” She handed me another folder, this one much thinner.
I chuckled dryly and opened the file to expose prints in the mud, cracked and partially dried, several full of dried blood. Without looking up, I said, “You weren’t sure if he sent you some ditzy woman he was sleeping with or a real expert.”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone as dry as mine. “Women seem attracted to my cuz.”
I separated out and placed three different paw prints on the desk. “He is a pretty boy, not saying he isn’t.” I pointed from print to print. “All these photos have claws in the prints. Puma concolor coryi, like all pumas, have retractable claws and most prints display clawless, meaning claws retracted. Yours?”
“All with claws exposed. So. Not a lion.”
“And Florida panthers have been extinct in this state for a century or more,” I said. “It would be astounding to have three in one place.” I tapped the smallest print and spread my hand over it. According to the ruler beside the print, the paw pad was over four inches across. “This wolf or dog is the smallest of the three, and while the density and water content of the substrate makes a difference in the size of the paw prints, I’d estimate this one weighed in at one twenty. Big for a gray wolf.” I pointed to the larger print, which was more than five inches long and more than four inches across. “Maybe three hundred pounds. Gray wolves in this country are big, very big, at one fifty. That medical examiner?”