“Not the kind of place you expected?” Chase asked as he opened his door and stepped out.
“Not really.”
As Tate headed for the front door of the cabin alongside the deputy, he glanced over his shoulder at the highway, confirming that somebody passing by would never even know the place was here.
“How did anybody realize there was something going on out here?” he asked. “There doesn’t seem to be a person close enough to hear anything.”
“The owners are an older couple who spend their winters down in Florida, so they pay a handyman to come out here every week and keep the place up,” Chase said. “When the guy came by the other day, he saw a couple of black bears pawing at the door and figured there was something in there attracting their attention. He chased them off, took one look inside, then called me.”
Tate did a double take. “He called you, not 911?”
Chase shrugged as he stepped onto the porch. “The Oxford County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have a lot of deputies, so the people on our beats know each of us by name. The handyman has called me before when there’s been trouble, so it made sense for him to reach out to me when he peeked in the window and saw the body.”
Tate shook his head. He had a hard time imagining working in a place so small that people not only knew the deputies by name but had them on speed dial. Heck, he had a hard time remembering the names of half the people he worked with at the DCO. He probably only had phone numbers for a dozen of them.
Chase used a pocketknife to cut the crime scene tape on the door, then pushed it open. “We were planning to turn the house over to the cleaning crew this morning, but when Homeland contacted us, we put them on hold. Nothing has been touched since the coroner took the body out.”
Tate had barely stepped foot in the cabin when the acrid metallic scent of blood slapped him in the face. Thank God the weather was cool. He didn’t want to think about how bad the odor would be if it had been the middle of summer.
Breathing through his mouth so he wouldn’t yak, he moved through the small entryway, then across the living room with its wood-burning fireplace and leather couches, following the bloody footprints into the kitchen. One look at the knocked-over chairs, broken table, and big puddle of sticky, nearly dried blood was enough to tell him that this was definitely where all the action had occurred.
Besides the blood on the linoleum floor, there were some spatters decorating the far wall. Arterial spray from Bell’s slashed femoral, he guessed. At least a half dozen different shoe impressions had traipsed through the reddish-brown mess on the floor. Probably from the first responders who’d come in hoping there was a chance Bell was still alive. Some of the tracks likely belonged to the coroner’s team, too. Since Bell’s death had been declared an animal attack from the start, no one had seen the need to preserve the scene. It would have been nice to know if one of the shoe imprints belonged to the killer, but it was too late to do anything about it. Besides, his gut told him the person who did this was too good to leave behind any obvious evidence.
While there were undeniably a lot of footprints around the crime scene, the one thing he didn’t see were animal tracks. How the hell had the local cops explained that little detail?
Tate wandered around the room, carefully avoiding the blood that was still wet as he looked for anything that might give him an idea of how McKinley Bell had ended up in the middle of nowhere getting sliced up by a shifter or hybrid. But other than one of the kitchen chairs having some scuffs on the arms from the restraints used to hold Bell down, there was nothing.
He wished Declan was there. Having the bear shifter’s sensitive nose would have told him a lot, namely whether he was dealing with a shifter or hybrid, if the attacker had been working alone, maybe even if Bell had been drugged. Without Declan, Tate was swimming blind, hoping to stumble over a clue the police had missed. It made him wonder how he’d ever gotten anything done before having a shifter partner.
He crossed the room to check the dead bolt on the back door that led out of the kitchen and onto a walkway toward the pond. The bolt and doorframe were intact with no sign they’d been kicked in or even tampered with. When they’d first come in, Tate had glanced at the front door and noted that was in good shape, too.
“What’s the theory on how this all went down?” Tate asked, turning back to the deputy.
Chase was casually looking in the cabinets, like he was searching for a snack, which was crazy, considering how many donuts the guy had eaten. At Tate’s question, the deputy glanced his way, his face serious. “You want the narrative that’s in the final report?”
Tate frowned. Did Chase know the whole animal attack angle was BS regardless of what he’d said about the bobcat in front of his boss? “Yeah, the official party line would be good. Unless there’s another one you’d like to tell me about?”
Chase shrugged and closed the door of the cabinet. “Bell’s car was found out on the main highway about a half mile from here with the left front tire blown out. The official police report says he must have pulled over due to the flat and started walking along the road looking for help. Time of death was around two a.m., so there weren’t many people out there to see him. At some point, Bell realized he was being followed by an animal, and
