Page 2 of Her Dragon Outlaw

"What do you have?" I ask, already knowing the answer from the fruity smell of decay hanging in the air.

"Body number five. Just like the rest. A friend called it in when they hadn't heard..." Vince trails off as he checks his notes. "...when they hadn't heard from Alexander Marinov. They had plans, and Mr. Marinov didn't show up. The friend, one Susan Eyers, tried to call it in that night, but the cops said she needed to wait 24 hours to report him missing."

"Don't those mother fuckers know we have a rash of missing persons right now?"

"Would be nice if they got off their asses, but I'm guessing since it's been a bunch of poor folks with no connections, they aren't getting a lot of pressure to move on this yet."

"You'd think five dead bodies would wake people up," I grumble.

"Do you want to see the body?" he asks.

"Want is a very strong word."

Vince snorts and then makes a face filled with regret when he breathes in through his nose. "I hear that."

"Lead the way," I say.

Vince leads me toward the back of the cramped apartment and the smell gets worse. While there are other shifters with more acute senses of smell, being a dragon shifter means my sense of smell is much stronger than that of a regular human, like Vince.

"Even if the cops had moved to enter the missing person's case into the system as soon as Ms. Eyers tried to report it, I still think it'd've been too late for this dude. He's been in there two days minimum," Vince says, wrinkling his nose.

I draw in a shallow breath through my nose.

"Yeah. I'd say two days based on the smell alone. Let's get the coroner in here to do their thing and get this body to forensics so they can confirm the pattern," I say.

I'm not one to jump to conclusions too quickly, but I'm sure they'll find the same thing on this body as they did on the others. The black spider web of necrotic veins spread out from the inside of the arms, the neck, the ankles are the same as the last four. In each of the four bodies, foreign DNA was found. Shifter DNA in regular human bodies.

Something is very wrong here. As a way to kill someone, injecting them with shifter DNA is an odd choice of execution method. But there's no signs of struggle. It’s as if each victim just sat there while they were injected, like it was voluntary.

"Any other evidence?" I ask, stepping out of the bathroom.

"Not sure if any of it is relevant, but here's the vic's wallet," Vince says, handing me a plastic bag with a worn faux leather wallet inside, the black surface cracked with age and use. "I'll be sending the phone to tech. We're still fighting with the phone companies to pull the call logs on the previous victims. I appreciate everyone being security conscious, but now that everyone and their brother has their phone password protected, it sure makes our jobs much harder."

"Do you have a password for your phone?" I ask.

"Hell yes, I do. Can't have my wife finding my girlfriend's number." With the way Vince grins, I can't tell if he's actually fucking around on his wife or not. I hope he's just joking. I like Vince, but I don't like cheaters.

I decide it's best not to examine it further. There are more important things at the moment than whether or not a coworker is screwing around on his wife.

I put on gloves and open up the bag. When I look inside the wallet, I groan. It’s packed with ticket stubs, receipts, and random bits of paper. It might help us establish a timeline, but the signal to noise ratio will equal a lot of fruitless running around. I put everything back in the bag.

After dropping the evidence off at headquarters and wrapping up my report, I head home and shower the aroma of corpse off me. I'll have to shower again after working out so I don't have to smell myself, but I simply can't stand the pungent scent anymore. After scrubbing away the last remnants of the job from my body, I dry off, put on a pair of loose shorts, and head to my basement to try to cleanse it from my mind.

I have a modest home gym, enough to do what I need to keep my body strong - the human version, at least. Working out my dragon form would require more than a set of free weights and a speed bag.

But as I start my reps, the muscles in my arms straining as I push myself, my dragon has other plans. The instincts are always there, but sometimes they're harder to control than others. I move to the speed bag, hoping something faster paced will help me get the scene of the crime out of my head for a few blissful moments.

Even though my fists are lightning quick on a good day, today isn't a good day. The pull of the dragon is too strong. He wants this case solved. Slamming my fist into the bag one last time, I give up. I'll hit the shower and then head back to the office. Given this makes body number five, I can't imagine they'll begrudge me the overtime.

3

LORI

“They’ll be right with you.” I nod in response to the girl behind the desk.

My leg bounces as I sit in the waiting room at Miller Labs. This place is all sleek edges and glass walls, though some are frosted for privacy. But it's very clean and modern. Expensive art hangs on the walls.

When I first saw the flier, I was expecting something a little more...back alley. People with this kind of money shouldn't have to resort to recruiting in low-rent neighborhoods.

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