Page 29 of Red Rooster

He led, in fact, which was probably a bad idea, but she was tired of arguing. Halfway up, she heard him growl.

“Lanny,” she warned.

“Yeah.”

When they reached his floor, even she was hit in the face with the stink. God knew what it smelled like to him.

Thompkins met them in the hall, pale-faced and sweating. His hand shook as he reached to resettle his patrol cap. “Guys,” he greeted. “It’s bad in there.”

“What happened?” Trina asked, because Lanny had brought his arm up over his nose and mouth to block out the smell.

“The three vics are Angela, Ben, and Rebecca Meyers.” He shook his head. “A mom and her two kids. The neighbor across the hall called it in; said it was the time when Angela normally gets the kids home from school, and she heard the screaming.” Another headshake, expression caught between grief-stricken and sickened.

Trina patted his arm as she passed. “We’ll just take a look. Harvey’s on the way.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, dazed.

Even holding his arm up over his face like Dracula – and no, the irony was not lost on her – Lanny led the way the last few steps to the threshold of the apartment next to his, and crossed it first.

Trina had seen some nasty scenes in her career in law enforcement, particularly the Satanist cult slayings, but none of them had prepared her for what awaited them in that apartment. This was no human mutilation, no carving of organs in a fit of Hannibal Lector lust. Lanny’s poor neighbors had been set upon by wild animals. The carnage was unimaginable. Trina found she couldn’t look directly at any of it.

A battle-hardened veteran of the force, Davis, walked them through the scene. Cause of death was safe to call, even without Harvey there yet: exsanguination due to evisceration. Trina breathed through her mouth, and they were in and out in under five minutes.

Ten minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, gulping down hot summer air and willing her stomach to quiet. “How you holding up?” she asked Lanny.

He leaned forward and braced his hands on his knees, breathing in loud gasps. “There were two of them,” he said, quiet enough that only she could hear. “Two wolves, and two humans. And the wolves smelled…dirty.”

She gathered her hair back and snapped an elastic off her wrist, tied it up off her hot neck, giving him a chance to elaborate.

And he did. “Like sweat, and BO. Like they hadn’t had showers in alongtime, you know?”

“What do you think that means?”

“Dunno. We need to get Nik and Sasha in there.”

In the midst of her shock and disgust, Trina managed to scrounge up a smile.

He tipped his head back. “What?”

“You called him Nik.”

He frowned. “That’s his fucking name. So?”

“So I’ll call them.” She wiped her smile away, grateful to have found it at all, given the situation.

~*~

Trina was incredibly grateful that she didn’t have to attend the press conference, and was already dreading her next interaction with Captain Abbot. Pair their lack of decent leads on the disappearing bodies – there was just no explaining the truth to the man – with the new massacre, and she didn’t envy the captain’s job of fending off questions in front of the press.

She couldn’t do anything about Chad Edwards and Jamie Anderson, but she could figure out who – or what – had killed the Meyers family.

Harvey came and went, grim-faced, pale. “Parts are missing,” she told them. “The bodies looked like they werechewed on.”

The neighbor across the hall, stuttering and whimpering, claimed to have heard snarling and barking; she’d seen two huge, shaggy dogs leave the apartment, but no one on the street had seen such a thing.

“They shifted,” Nikita said when he joined them after nightfall. All the CSIs and uniforms had gone home save the token duo left to guard the scene. Trina and Lanny stood propped against the building, tired and sore from being on their feet. Nikita had walked up with the unconscious swagger of a gangster from an old movie, Sasha at his side, Jamie and Alexei trailing behind. He wore all black, and his denim jacket with the Romanov patch sewn on the collar. He finished the last quarter inch of a cigarette, dropped the butt, and ground it out beneath his boot, smoke mingling with his words when he spoke. “They shifted on the stairs and left the building as humans. As human as they’re capable of being, anyway.”

“Can you scent them?” Lanny asked.