The deputy paused, maybe to gauge whether Tate was buying any of this shit. Tate didn’t bother to point out that you couldn’t see the house from the road in the daylight. How Bell had supposedly seen it in the dark was beyond him.
“Any idea why the man would have been driving around here so late at night?” he asked. “He lived in Scarborough near the medical center, right?”
Chase shook his head. “No idea why he was up here. We’ve checked with the people at the hospital and his service. It wasn’t like he was making a house call or anything.” He wandered over to the next cabinet and opened it. “The handyman swears he always locks the door behind him, but since Bell got in without breaking any windows or locks, the assumption is that the handyman made a mistake and left the front door unlocked. Unfortunately, the bobcat, or whatever it was, followed him in before he could close the door. The animal chased Bell into the kitchen and attacked him, and the wind blew the door closed at some point after the animal left.”
Tate didn’t say anything, instead waiting to see if Chase was going to add anything else to the fantasy, but apparently, the man was done. With everything except digging through the cabinets.
“What the hell are you looking for in there?” Tate finally asked, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.
Chase held open a cabinet door and pointed inside. “There’s food in at least half of these cabinets, yet the animal never bothered trying to get into them. I mean, there’s not even a scratch on them. A hungry bobcat might chase a person into a house and attack them, but if it did, it would sure as hell take a few nibbles. If it didn’t, it would at least dig around the house looking for something else to eat. This one didn’t. There are also no animal prints anywhere in the house. I saw Bell’s body after the attack. No way any animal tears into a man like that without leaving a single fucking paw print.”
Tate crossed his arms over his chest. “What are you trying to say? If an animal didn’t kill Bell, what do you think happened to him?”
Chase rested his hands on his gear belt and met his gaze. “I was hoping you’d tell me. And don’t bother trying to sell me that lame-ass pet mountain lion story, because we both know that was a load of shit.”
“You sure of that?” Tate asked.
“I don’t know what the hell to think or what I’m sure of. But I know there’s some strange crap going on with this case, and you know way more than you’re saying.”
Tate regarded the deputy for a moment. Chase was obviously sharp as hell. The kind of cop who saw things most officers made sure they didn’t and asked the questions other officers wouldn’t. Right now, he had that glint in his eyes that a man gets when he knows he’s involved with something big and wants to know exactly what it is.
Tate recognized that look and the insane urge that came with it. The one where you wanted to throw yourself into the far end of the pool just to see how deep the water really was. He’d felt that urge himself nearly a decade ago when he’d stumbled onto the existence of shifters and made a decision that changed his life. He’d never looked back, but every once in a while, he couldn’t help but wonder how his life would have been different if he hadn’t opened the door all those years ago. Or if someone had pushed it closed before he saw too much. Would he still be in the marshals? Would he be married with two-point-three kids, a house with a white picket fence, and a dog? He supposed he’d never know.
But this moment wasn’t about him. It was about a small-town cop from Oxford County, Maine, and whether Tate was going to open the door for him or push it closed.
“Maybe I’m not saying anything because you’re not ready to hear what I have to say,” he murmured.
“Why don’t you let me decide what I’m ready to hear?” Chase asked. “I think I can handle anything you throw at me.”
Tate almost laughed. Damn, this guy was so much like him when he was younger. So sure he had all the answers and could deal with anything.
He turned and looked around the kitchen again, doubting there was anything else to see here. Yeah, he could search the rest of the house, maybe even check out the yard. It would be nice to find some footprints or tire tracks that might tell him something about the person who’d killed McKinley Bell. But his gut told him he was wasting his time.
So instead, he focused on where to dig next for clues and how to deal with Deputy York. The first part was easy. The second, not so much. He knew for sure he wasn’t ready to tell Chase how Bell had died or that shifters existed. The guy wasn’t ready for that.
“You want to know what’s going on. I get that,” he told Chase. “But what we’re dealing with here is complicated and kind of tough to deal with all at once.”
Chase opened his mouth to say something, but Tate stopped him. “The one thing I can tell you is that Bell wasn’t chased in here by an animal. He was brought to this place to be tortured. I have no idea if he talked, but when the person who tortured him was done, he or she sliced open the man’s femoral artery and let him bleed out.”
“Why?” York asked.
Tate shook his head. “I don’t know yet. Which is why I’m going to dig a little deeper into the doctor’s
