Page 95

“No. I live in Madison. Or I did, anyway.”

Mom had asked him yesterday if he was going to move into his dad’s house, and—surprisingly—he’d said he was thinking about it. You could have fucking knocked me over with a goddamn feather, but I’d kept that thought to myself. Especially after Taavi kicked me in the ankle to get me to shut my gaping mouth.

“You moving back?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Elliot answered, spreading his palms on the counter. “But I’m thinking about it.”

Smith simply nodded, his expression bland and without judgment. Either he really didn’t care or he was doing one hell of a job acting disaffected. I knew that something like a house could have been seen as motive, but Elliot had been the better part of three hours away.

“Do you mind if we check your phone records for the past few months?” Smith asked, casually.

Elliot looked at me, and his expression was… concerned? I wasn’t quite sure. It wasn’t panic, certainly, or guilt. I knew what a guilty Elliot looked like. But like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that. I gave him a small nod.

“Okay,” he said to Smith, although I could tell he wasn’t exactly happy about it.

I couldn’t blame him—nobody likes people snooping around in their phone records. I knew why Smith had asked, though, and while I resented it a bit, I understood. Elliot might not physically have been able to kill his father, but he could have hired some goons to do it. Phone records would provide Smith with a list of Elliot’s contacts—regular and otherwise—in order to make sure none of them were hired thugs.

Of course Elliot hadn’t hired assassins to go after his dad.

But—as I reminded myself for probably the tenth time over the past few days—Smith not only didn’t know that for sure, but it was literally his job to examine all possible angles. I didn’t like it, but nobody said I had to.

Smith simply nodded again, as though he weren’t implying that Elliot was a greedy, murdering psychopath.

I made myself take a deep, slow breath through my nose, trying to be as unobtrusive about letting go of my tension as possible.

Elliot noticed anyway and shot me a curious look, to which I shook my head very slightly. Not only was bringing it up now not at all productive, but I had no intention of ever bringing that up. Telling Elliot that the cops were looking at him, however briefly, as a suspect might well get both my and Smith’s fingers chewed off.

I like my fingers right where they are, thanks.

Smith went through a whole list of routine questions, some more insulting than others, but none of them particularly surprising, at least to me. There were several that got me looks from Elliot. I had to remind myself more than once that Smith was doing his job, and doing it thoroughly. And, the more I thought about it, probably to protect Elliot more than because he thought Elliot was a likely suspect.

If there were people in the Shawano PD—and with a coroner in their pocket, that seemed likely, at least to me, although Smith hadn’t explicitly said so—who hated shifters, and, specifically, Indigenous shifters, then it was important that Elliot came out of the investigation as squeaky clean as we could make him. Polished, shined, and fluffed with a little bow on his stripey head. Because if these assholes had even a half-chance of getting him convicted…

Well, for one thing, I sure as shit didn’t trust a jury of Shawano’s peers not to be racist fucknuts as far as I could throw them, whether we were talking race or subspecies or both. For another, if they could even justify an arrest, there were a lot of accidents and suicides that took place in jail. If Elliot were arrested, he might not leave jail alive.

That went a long way to make me more charitably inclined toward Detective Gale Smith and his weird gravelly voice.

Finally, the man in question clipped the stylus back into the tablet case. “Thank you, Elliot. I appreciate your cooperation and candor.”

Elliot nodded once.

“Do I have your permission to examine the… office?” I could tell he’d been about to say ‘crime scene,’ but had thought better of it and stopped himself. I appreciated that, even if Elliot would never know.

“Of course. Do you—”

“I think Hart and I can handle it if you… have other things to do.”

And he was sensitive enough to the situation that he hadn’t blurted out something about Elliot being too distraught or some shit. I was really starting to like Smith, even if I hadn’t thought much of him the first time we’d talked on the phone.

Elliot nodded, and the relief in his expression was obvious, probably even to Smith. “Yes. Thank you. I’m sure Val can tell you anything you need to know.”

As I led the way to the office, Smith asked softly behind me, “Val?”

“We’ve been friends since kindergarten. He gets to.”

A soft snort told me Smith was amused by that.

I still had to take a breath before opening the office door.