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The next morning,Rajfinallyfucking emailed me with the FBI’s file on Dr. Leon Reynolds and a short list of four supposed suicides who were Indigenous Arcanids from Shawano in the last five years. He’d included a note stating that all four had family members who had objected to their loved ones’ deaths being ruled suicides—and no history of mental illness or depression, no indication that they were going through a particularly rough time. Of course, they were Indigenous and shifters, so that meant they were dealing with more than their fair share of bullshit, but not red-flag level stuff.

Unlike Smith and I, Raj thought there might be a connection to the Janice Butcher case. An ‘escalation,’ he called it. What that meant, in lay terms, was that the dickbags who had killed the previous victims now felt confident enough that they could get away with it, convinced that their kill-pattern was fool-proof, that they could go after a higher-profile target.

Just fucking ducky.

Our potential victims were, in order of death, Mariah Bowan, Devon Swiftwater, Aaron Boushie, Tara Redsky, Gregory Crane, and now Janice Butcher. Butcher was half Mamaceqtaw, Bowan was half Ho Chunk, Swiftwater, Boushie, and Redsky were all full Mamaceqtaw, and Gregory was full Ho Chunk.

I immediately sent the names to Smith, who was slated to meet me at the Crane house after lunch. Elliot had gone back last night after dinner, and told me that Taavi and I should stay with my parents. He promised he’d call me if he needed anything.

So far, radio silence.

Mom had loaded me up with several more pans of food and a large Tupperware of Christmas cookies to take over to Elliot, as well as demanding that I make him promise he’d spend Christmas with us. While I figured he’d agree, I wasn’t sure—if I’d, God-fucking-forbid, been in that situation—whether or not I would do the same. Christmas on your own when you could call or text your parents was a whole different kettle of fish than the first time you had no choice in the matter. I didn’t know if I’d want to spend it with somebody else’s parents.

But I’m not Elliot. He’d seemed to actually find some amount of enjoyment in the Christmas tree outing, so maybe it’s exactly what he needed.

I’m an antisocial asshole, so my view on things like socializing with family probably weren’t a good metric for literally anyone else who had normal human emotions. Or shifter emotions. Or whatever.

Taavi had begged off coming with me, saying that he didn’t really want to scrub Elliot’s basement, but he also didn’t want to hang out with me and talk about murder. Instead, he was going to help my dad put lights up on the outside of the house because it was actually supposed to be sunny and slightly above freezing—and because my mother didn’t really want my dad up a ladder at his age.

So Taavi was hanging lights, Elliot was probably going to hide in the basement, and Smith and I were going to talk about how there was a group—hopefully only three, but who the fuck knew—running around Shawano killing shifters and making them look like suicides.

Between my mother and sending messages to Smith and Elliot, and thanking Doc yet again for feeding and petting my cat, I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to look through the Reynolds file, which I was hoping to do before Smith arrived.

I got out of Mom’s Taurus and hauled out the tote bag full of food from Mom, my laptop, and a bag full of groceries Elliot had asked me to pick up, leaving my just-in-case duffel bag of clothes in the car.

Elliot must have heard the car pull up, because he opened the door for me before I had a chance to either knock or try to juggle my keys to the right one.

“Thanks,” I said, sidling past him and awkwardly toeing off my shoes so I could take the food directly to the kitchen.

“Anything exciting?” Elliot asked as I unloaded Mom’s tote.

“Cookies, tuna noodle casserole, a chicken-and-mushroom thing, potatoes au gratin, and a broccoli-and-potato bake.”

“Can you eat those last two?” he asked, taking the pans from me and putting them into the fridge.

“Yep. You eat lunch?” I felt like I’d spent the last two weeks telling Elliot to eat or asking him if he had eaten.

“I made a sandwich all by myself,” he retorted.

“Just a sandwich?”

“I can open a bag of chips if it would make you feel better.”

I flashed him a smile, pleased he was bantering instead of glowering or actively growling at me. “Only if you open two so I can have one.”

“Didyoueat?”

“I did. Very exciting leftovers. But there’s always room for chips.” Especially since my dad wasn’t supposed to have a lot of sodium, so my mother was refusing to use salt in any of her cooking—nevermind that the high sodium was coming from the other shit, like mixed nuts and the canned soup in every goddamn casserole my mother made, not the addition of a pinch of salt.

Don’t get me wrong—I eat as much high-sodium processed trash as every other American, but I’d heard enough lectures from Doc on food that I understood that adding salt to one’s food from a shaker or grinder was not going to be where most people got their unnaturally high sodium levels.

Blame Campbell’s and Doritos and shit like that.

Tasty shit. But shit nonetheless.

Speaking of, Elliot pulled two bags of Doritos out of the cabinet—the traditional mix of Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch that had characterized most of junior high and high school snack time.