A figure appeared on the hilltop above and gave me a brief wave before disappearing again. The sharp glint of silvery hair told me it was Cole, and while I might not have missed coming to bloody crime scenes, I had missed Cole and his men.
I crested the hill and paused to survey the scene below. The body lay to the left of the trees, half ringed by scrubby-looking bushes that would have offered the killer little in the way of protection. Several yards beyond the trees was a lake in which ducks and toy boats floated. Kids ran around the edges of the water, oblivious to the cops stationed nearby.
I watched one little girl laugh as she chased a red ball that was rolling along the ground. With her blond pigtails and pale skin, she reminded me of Risa, Dia’s daughter and the little girl who’d saved my life. She’d begun calling me Aunt Riley, and in my worst nightmares, I sometimes thought that this was as close as I was ever going to get to having a child of my own.
Because of my own inability to carry children, and because my soul mate was dead. The picket fence dream was dead. At least, the version of it that had carried me through childhood was.
I blinked back the sting of tears and forced my gaze back to the body, trying to concentrate on the business of catching a killer. The victim was naked, his flesh sallow and sagging—the body of an old man, not a young one. There were no obvious wounds from what I could see, but Cole was kneeling beside him and obstructing my view of his upper body.
I drew in the air, tasting death and blood and something else I couldn’t quite name. I frowned as I moved down the hill. Strong emotions could stain the air, and hate was one of one of the strongest, but this didn’t quite taste like that. It was edgier, darker. Harsher.
If I had to guess, I’d say it tasted more like vengeance than hate. And the killer had to be feeling it in spades for it to linger in the air like this.
Cole glanced up as I approached, a smile crinkling the corners of his bright blue eyes. “Nice to see you back on the job, Riley.”
“I’d love to say it’s nice to be back,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets so he couldn’t see them shaking, “but that would be a lie.” I pointed with my chin to the body. “What have we got?”
My gaze went past him as I asked the question, and the method of our victim’s demise became starkly obvious. Someone had strangled him—with barbed wire. His neck was a raw and bloody mess, the wire so deeply embedded that in places it simply couldn’t be seen. That took strength—more than most humans had.
But why would a nonhuman want to strangle a human with wire? Hell, most nonhumans could achieve the same result one-handed.
Unless, of course, our killer didn’t only want death, but pain as well.
Which would certainly account for the bitter taste of vengeance in the air.
I knew about vengeance. Kye’s death had been an act of vengeance as much as it had been a requirement of my job. He’d been a killer—a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer. And yet he’d made my wolf soul sing, and she still ached for him.
Would probably always ache for him.
Cole offered me a box of gloves, forcing me to take a hand out of my pocket. If he noticed the shaking, he didn’t say anything.
“As you can see, he’s been strangled,” he said. “He’s probably been dead for about five hours, and there’s no sign of a struggle.”
“Meaning he was probably drugged beforehand.” I couldn’t imagine anyone not fighting such a death. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t conscious or feeling every brutal bit of it.“Or,” Cole said grimly, “that he was killed somewhere else and dumped here. There’s very little blood on the ground.”
I snapped on a pair of gloves then walked around to the opposite side of the body, squatting near the victim’s neck. The bits of wire that weren’t embedded or bloody shone brightly in the growing sunshine. “The wire looks new.”
“Yeah. And we’ve got very little chance of tracing it back to the source.”
Not when barbed wire was still a staple fencing material for most farms—and Melton, despite being a suburb of Melbourne, was surrounded by farms of one kind or another. I touched the victim’s chin lightly, turning his head away from me so that I could see the back of his neck. The wire appeared just as deeply embedded at the back as it was the front. I wouldn’t mind betting it had severed vertebrae.
“Who discovered the body?”
“Anonymous phone call.” I raised my eyebrows at that, and he grinned. “Line trace said the call came from 12 Valley View Road. That’s the white brick house above the lake.”
I twisted around and looked at the row of neatly kept houses that lined the park. The curtains twitched in 12 Valley View, indicating we were being watched.
“Have the police interviewed the owner?”
“The police weren’t called first. We were.”
I frowned. “That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”
He reached forward and plucked a bloody thread from one of the wires, putting it in a plastic bag before saying “Not when you’re reporting that the killer is a red-faced demon.”
That raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Seriously.” His gaze met mine. “My normal response would be to suggest the witness’s alcohol intake might have been a little high, but Dusty found cloven hoofprints. Which supports the whole demon thing.”
A laugh escaped, then I realized he was being serious. “But demons don’t have cloven hooves.”
“That we know of. But there’s no saying there isn’t a branch out there that has.”
“I guess that’s true.” I shifted, my gaze sweeping the park. Neither Dusty nor Dobbs was in sight, and the morning was filled with the sound of children’s laughter. It was a happy noise that seemed so out of place given the brutality that lay at our feet—although we’d certainly seen far worse over the years. And done worse. Like shooting a soul mate. I bit my lip for a moment, using one sort of pain to control another, then added, “Anything else worth knowing?”
“Nothing obvious at the moment. I’ll send you the report as soon as it’s done.”
“Thanks.” I rose and pulled off the gloves.
And that’s when I felt it—the rush of power, the chill of death. There was a soul here.
I scanned the park again, trying to pinpoint the soul’s location. There was nothing obvious—no wispy, insubstantial form, no obvious focal point for the energy that was washing across my skin.
“Have we got an ID on the victim yet?” I asked softly.
I felt rather than saw the sharpening of interest from Cole. “His name is Wayne Johnson. He was released from prison a week ago.”
“His crime?”
“Murder. I requested the trial records, but they haven’t been sent through yet. He served twenty-five years.”
Then it had to be a nasty crime, because the average sentence wasn’t usually that long—unless you were a nonhuman, and then the sentence was death.
“I’m betting he strangled his victim.” It would certainly explain the method of his demise as well as the bitter taste in the air.
“I agree,” Cole said, “and it would certainly be worth finding out who he killed, and where the victim’s relatives were during the early hours of the morning. You never know; it might turn out to be an easily solved case for a change.”
I snorted at the improbability of that and turned, my gaze moving to the strand of trees behind us. There in the softening shadows drifted a fragile wisp no bigger than a handkerchief.
The soul.
I walked toward it. My ability to communicate with the dead was still growing, and most souls could now gain shape and talk quite coherently. Of course, it was my strength they were drawing on to materialize, and it had reached the point where the mere act of talking to the spirit world could leave me weak both in body and mind. But it was a weakness I was willing to endure if it meant catching a break and solving a crime.
Not that this soul was drawing much energy at the moment. He might be here, but I had a feeling he was of two minds about speaking.
The closer I got to him, the colder it got, until it felt like fingers of ice were creeping into my bones. No one could really explain why these souls brought the chill of the underworld with them, but the general consensus was that it had something to do with them being in between—neither here nor in heaven or hell. Or wherever else it was that souls went to.
As I stepped into the ring of trees, his soul retreated, and fear swirled through the ice of the afterworld. I stopped.
“Why are you lingering here, Wayne Johnson, if not to speak?”
The wispiness that was the soul seemed to pause and then the energy flowing from me surged, the suddenness of it making me gasp.
Why? His voice was guttural, harsh, as it flowed through my mind. Why did this happen? I paid for my crime. They should have left me alone. It’s not fair that I should pay twice.
I couldn’t argue the validity of that without knowing who and how he’d killed. I’d learned over the years there were some crimes that deserved nothing less than death, but whether this man’s did wasn’t the point. “I’m here to find your killer, Mr. Johnson. But to do that, you need to talk to me.”
For a moment he didn’t answer, but the chill continued to grow until my fingers and nose ached with the fierceness of it. Energy continued to flow out of me, building in the air, giving him the strength to speak.