Rogue (Shifters #2)(19)

Daddy nodded. “And anything else of interest that you notice.”
Following Marc’s lead, I leaned closer to the body, struggling to swallow the gorge rising in the back of my throat. I breathed in deeply through my nose, and felt my stomach churn. Trying to ignore the nausea, I clamped a hand over my mouth and took another deep breath. Behind me, Ethan snickered, and I made a mental note to accidentally kick him somewhere sensitive next time we sparred.
Marc looked at me with his eyebrows raised, and I nodded to tell him I was okay. I leaned down one more time. This time I concentrated on classifying the smells to distract myself from my urge to vomit. To my surprise, it worked. I detected several variations on the theme of rotting vegetables, and three or four kinds of moldy meat. Cooked meat. Harper hadn’t been dead long enough to start smelling on his own, mostly because he’d spent the majority of the day in an air-conditioned van.
After the food, I identified several biological scents, probably from emptied bathroom trash cans. And under all that was the smell. The one I was looking for. It was faint, and I would never have noticed it beneath the other, stronger smells if I hadn’t already known what to look for. But it was definitely there.
I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised in question. He nodded. He smelled it, too. The murders were connected.
Turning back to the body, I closed my eyes in concentration. Bracing my hands on the floor to the left of the corpse—I was not going to end a perfectly good day by falling face-first onto a dead man—I followed my nose, moving to the right as the smell grew faintly stronger. When it began to fade again, I moved back to my left until my face hovered—eyes still closed—over the point at which the scent was most noticeable, though it was faint even then. 
I opened my eyes. I was inches from Harper’s broken neck. The smell was strongest in the one place we were sure the killer had touched him, and that could only mean one thing: I was smelling the killer’s scent.
Standing, I turned to face my father. “It’s the same as the scent on Moore. It’s definitely a foreign cat, but it’s…more, somehow.” Ethan snickered at my unintentional pun, but I ignored him. “Different. And it’s strongest on his neck.”
“It’s on both his hands, too,” Marc said, rising to stand next to me.
Instead of replying, our Alpha knelt beside the body, heedless of the dirt floor, and closed his eyes as he inhaled deeply just above the corpse’s neck. He exhaled, then inhaled again. His forehead wrinkled and his eyes opened. He stood and pulled a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “I don’t smell it. I smell rot, and his personal scent, and cheap cologne, but nothing else.” He frowned deeply, cleaning his lenses out of habit, and his next words were softer than he usually spoke. “I guess this old nose isn’t quite what it used to be.”
Parker came forward then, and Owen followed him. They knelt side by side, inhaling with almost comic expressions of concentration. Several seconds later, they stood, shaking their heads in unison. The scent was too faint, and completely overwhelmed by the stench of garbage.
The others each took a turn, but none of them could detect the scent. Still, it was almost funny to watch the parade of beefy men take their turns kneeling on the dusty barn floor to sniff the refuse-strewn corpse. And by the time Vic stood, chestnut waves flopping as he shook his head in disappointment, I’d decided that they couldn’t smell the scent because, having never smelled it before, they didn’t really know what they were looking for. Marc and I had probably only been able to pinpoint it because we’d gotten a good whiff of it earlier on Bradley Moore.
Marc shrugged. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to take our word for it.”
My father shook his head, frowning down at Harper, as if the victim were to blame for the faintness of the mystery scent he carried. “That’s not good enough. This same cat is responsible for murdering both strays. On our territory. We can’t let that continue, nor can we let it go unpunished, and if we’re going to stop him, we have to know who he is. Or what he is. I have to smell his scent.”
Resolute now, his jawline firm, my father turned sharply and marched away from us. I watched him go, noting the determination in his stride and the final-sounding thump each time his heels hit the ground. But I didn’t understand what he had in mind until he turned into the last empty horse stall on the right and dropped out of sight.
He was going to Shift.
In cat form, all of his senses would be heightened, even above the elevated sensitivity he had on two legs. My father wanted to give his feline nose a chance to succeed where the human version had failed.
As we stood around looking at one another, waiting for our Alpha to finish Shifting, my gaze returned to the body, and my thoughts to the scent in question. The smell was strongest on Harper’s neck, where he would have been gripped by his murderer. That made sense. What didn’t make sense was the fact that the smell was also noticeable—at least to me and Marc—on Harper’s hands, yet we’d found no defensive injuries.
“Hey, guys?” Six heads turned my way. “Harper has the killer’s scent on his hands, so he must have touched the bastard. But he has no blood or obvious tissue beneath his nails, and no defensive injuries.” I paused to give them a moment to digest what I’d said. “Why would Harper touch his killer, yet make no attempt to protect himself?”In the back of my mind, I noted the whisper of claws scraping hard-packed dirt as my father neared the end of his Shift on the other side of the barn.
“The most obvious answer is that he trusted his murderer,” Owen drawled, shifting his cowboy hat back and forth on his head with one rough, tanned hand. “Knew him personally.”
I nodded. Marc had drawn the same conclusion about Moore in Arkansas. “Yeah, that makes sense—for a Pride cat.” My brothers and fellow enforcers were very close. They’d been friends and housemates for years, and in a Pride, a connection that strong came with a lot of physical contact. “But both Harper and Moore are strays. Loners,” I continued. “They were born human, and human men don’t touch one another much. They may shake hands, but that would only put the scent on Harper’s right hand. Right?”
Jace nodded, clearly following my train of thought. “So why would Harper touch his killer with both hands, if not to fight him off?”
“Exactly.”
A huffing sound drew our attention toward the rear of the barn and I turned to see my father padding toward us, his paws silent on the packed-dirt floor.
Even in his midfifties, my father was impressive and physically intimidating as a cat. He wasn’t as long as Owen or Marc, but he was bulky and solid, and obviously powerful. Like all werecats, Daddy’s fur was sleek and solid black, with no spots or rosettes. But unlike the rest of us, he was easy to identify from a distance, even with the wind blowing his scent the wrong way. As he’d aged, my father had developed a streak of silver fur behind each ear, the exact shade and placement of the two most prominent streaks of silver in his hair.
As he slunk toward us, moving gracefully across the floor, I thought about the difference between the life of a Pride Alpha like my father and that of a stray like Harper. My father had everything: respect, responsibility, power, and more friends and family than he knew what to do with. By contrast most strays were socially isolated and constantly at risk of losing everything to a faster, stronger stray. Which raised a very important question: Who the hell would a wary loner trust?
Someone he has no reason to fear, I thought, surprised by how obvious the answer seemed in hindsight. But who was that? Who didn’t a stray fear?
My father paused at the edge of the ring we’d formed around the corpse on the floor. He took us all in with a single, sweeping glance, then padded directly to the body, bending to place his nose less than an inch from Harper’s neck. His long tail swished slowly behind him, and his nostrils twitched as he inhaled, sniffing to isolate the scent none of the rest of us could identify.
And still the gears in my brain spun furiously. I was on to something, and I couldn’t let it go, even when my father raised his head from the body, huffing in triumph. 
Who’s strong enough to break a stray’s neck, yet seems harmless enough to put him at ease? Who can get close enough to touch a stray tomcat without setting off his inner alarm? And just like that, I knew the answer: I could.
The killer wasn’t a tomcat at all. She was a tabby.
Chapter Ten
My father reemerged from the empty horse stall on two legs, wearing a satisfied, cat-who-ate-the-canary look—and little else. He’d taken the time to pull on his pants, but the remaining parts of his suit—including socks and tie—lay draped across his left arm, his shoes hanging from the fingers of his right hand. We were getting a rare glimpse of our Alpha at his informal best, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“The scent was definitely there,” he said, walking toward us from the other end of the barn in long, confident strides.
“It was faint, but unmistakable once I caught it. We’re not looking for a stray after all.” He paused dramatically, and I was amused to realize my father was dragging the moment out to prolong the tension. It was working. All eyes were on him, and Ethan actually leaned forward in anticipation.