Page 150

She did. There were potatoes and onions and peppers to chop for a frittata, sausages to fry up, and a cranberry-and-pear cheesecake tartlet that needed to get baked and cool.

I told you my mom goes all-out for holiday meals. Or family meals. Or any excuse she can find, really.

Elliot wandered in another hour or so later, his voice scratchy as he greeted Mom and gave her a hug. And then gave one to Taavi, who successfully managed not to stab him with the chopping knife. And then he came over to me, carefully hugging only my left side.

“Thank you for being my brother,” he murmured in my ear.

I hugged him back, leaving flour on his shirt. “Thanks for letting me.”

27

Smith had managedto get the CSI team this time, all two of them, although they clearly had their work cut out for them between the barn and Elliot’s house. They had DNA from the house where Elliot had mangled one guy’s leg, and DNA from Taavi’s mouth—andthathad found an immediate match.

Wess Dopfer, a former Green Bay police officer who’d been removed due to excessive force—and that takes some doing, let me tell you—and had moved to Shawano to be closer to an old high school buddy by the name of Leon Reynolds. Yep, same Leon Reynolds. Dopfer’s DNA was in the system because he’d been a cop, and once they had him, Olsen and Smith had been able to start doing some hunting.

And that had led them to some of Dopfer and Reynolds’s other friends, one of whom—the same Keith Baker who happened to be married to Reynold’s wife’s sister—had a gnarly dog bite he hadn’t reported, at least according to his wife’s social media post complaining about unleashed dogs. Olsen and Smith were still trying to positively ID the last killer, although Smith had some suspicions he wasn’t yet sharing with me.

He’d told me to keep all of that to myself, though, because they wanted to move on all of them at once. He had confirmed that the DNA on the window was also Baker’s, and that they’d also matched it to an unknown sample from Janice Butcher’s house, so they had at least those two for Butcher’s murder, as well.

“We’ve got this, Hart,” he said, after going through all that.

“Are you telling me to back off?” I asked, a little offended.

“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the heck out of everything you did. But we need everything as by-the-book as we can keep it.”

“And some rando elf ex-cop isn’t exactly by the book.” It stung a little—although not nearly as much as my side—but he had a point.

“You see my problem.”

“Yeah, I do. And… Gale?” I made myself use his first name.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. For letting me in. And also for saving my ass.”

He rumbled his gravelly laugh. “You’re welcome. For both. And stop by next time you visit your folks.”

I smiled at the phone, even though he couldn’t see me. “I will,” I promised.

* * *

“Val, relax. I’ll be fine.”Elliot stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched against the cold. He was wearing a scarf around his neck, hiding the nasty bruising and rope burn. “Besides, I’ll see you again in a couple months, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. This time, Elliot was coming to Richmond. I was excited to show him the city—and introduce him a bit more officially to my boss, who had been in the middle of all of this, although mediated by cellular towers, from the beginning.

“Are you slowing down on me, old man?”

“No,” I grumped. My side was much better, and the slight aches I had from cracked ribs and being beaten and battered a couple too many times over the last year really weren’t all that bad. I also refused to admit that I was getting used to not having ten-below winters or that I was a little nervous about where we were going.

“You develop a fear of needles?”

“Of course not.” It was true. What had me nervous was that I didn’t know what Taavi was going to think about the result of this particular outing.

Elliot and I were headed back to the tattoo artist who had done our set over a decade ago—the stylized badger paw print on my right arm, Elliot’s moon-and-star. I was going to get a matching print on the left—except not quite matching. Elliot, who was good not only with wood, but with art in general, and who had designed our tattoos, had sketched out a design of a dog paw print surrounding a Maya glyph of a dog’s head—anook.

Elliot thought this was great fun.

I just hoped Taavi wasn’t going to be mad at me about it. Or insulted. Or disappointed.