Page 33 of Bears Behaving Badly
The bathrooms each had a white washcloth on a towel rack and a single toothbrush beside the spotless sink, but no toothpaste. No floss. The toilets shone. The gleaming showers were dry.
The last room. She knew it was coming, but Annette still winced when she saw the blood she’d been smelling for five minutes. The contrast after the sterile rooms was shocking. It was set up exactly as the other bedroom, except with a large circular mirror over the dresser.
And the bloodstains, of course. “Did the techs have a cause of death?” Annette asked. “Or a best guess?”
“Shot,” David replied. “Probably in this room—no drag marks. Somebody walked him up here, or followed him up here, produced a gun from somewhere, emptied it into him. Then did whatever else they needed to do and left. Crime-scene guys figure he bled out in under two minutes. We’ll know more once we get the ME’s report. Assuming they haven’t kicked us off the case by then.”
“Shooting,” Nadia observed, “would preclude a teenage werewolf who likes to bite.”
“Likes to biteLund,” Annette corrected. “We don’t know a single thing about her life before Tuesday. Leaping to conclusions and tossing around assumptions—”
“You make it sound like an aerobic workout.”
“—lead to errors.”
David touched the bottom corners of the mirror and found out the thing slid sideways, revealing a small rectangle about eighteen inches by twelve. He took the mirror down and carefully set it aside, then lightly pressed the rectangle. There was a click, and the door swung open as though it were a medicine cabinet. “Ta-da!”
She and Nadia bumped shoulders when they leaned in for a look.
“Empty.”
“And shame on us for thinking it’d be that easy.” Nadia sighed.
“That little hidey-hole isn’t just empty,” Annette said, thinking aloud. “It’s been cleaned out very carefully. There’s absolutely no indication of what might have been in there.”
David felt around the immaculate hiding place. “Meaning you don’t think the techs emptied it and bagged the contents for evidence.”
“Correct. I do not think that.”
David straightened and slid the mirror back into place. “So the killer got Lund to show him his stash, shot him, grabbed his shit, and vamoosed?”
“Or Lund had enough time to move whatever-it-was from this hidey-hole before he let his killer in.”Please let it be the latter.
Annette went back to the washer-dryer combo and opened the front-loading door. Spotless, empty, and dry.
“Hunch?”
“You said it yourself, David, this isn’t a home, it’s a set. Everything’s a prop.” She tapped the washing machine. “This is newer than anything else in here—see? It’s still got the price tags. So he’s been using this place for almost a year—but not really—and then a few days ago he goes to the trouble of buying a big appliance he knows he won’t use?”
“Oh-ho.” From Nadia. “Tricky-tricky.”
Annette, who’d borrowed a pair of gloves from David—his jacket pocket bulged with them for some reason—pulled the machine toward her, out of the hidden recess that was barely noticeable until you were standing in front of it. And behind the machine
“Nice.”
was another little hidey-hole, and inside this one there were stacks of files and photos.
Christ, the photos.
“Lund,” David murmured, staring at a picture of a young, battered werewolf half snarling, half crouching at the camera, showing bloody flanks. “You piece of shit, I hope it hurt.”
Chapter 13
The other pictures were just as bad. Wolves, bear cubs, at least two foxes, and even a weretiger, a subspecies Annette had never seen before. All juveniles. All brutalized. And several had names scrawled across their pictures: Scout. Lambchop. Ruby. Baxter.
And then…
Jackpot.
