Alejandro laughed. "Sadly, I agree with you, but it's too late now. She's mine."
"We'll talk soon, okay? And give Rose our love. But right now, we need to get going," I said reluctantly.
"I understand. We'll be in touch and, of course, let me know if anything comes up Icanhelp with."
Jack gave me a hug after we said our goodbyes. "We'll figure this out, Tess. Don't worry. We're going to get Rooster out of that cell."
"I know," I said, trying to sound confident. "You go ahead. I'll talk to Rooster for a few and then meet you at the truck."
I watched him go and then walked back to the cells to find Rooster. He was sitting slumped on the bed, his head in his hands.
"Hey, Rooster. We're going to sort this out. Don't you worry. We know you didn't do it."
"I know I didn't do it, too, and that's the problem, Tess." He looked up at me with eyes filled with sorrow. "Because that means the actual killer is still out there."
"Not only that," I said slowly, realization slamming into me. "But the killer is somebody who knows us all well enough to decide exactly who to frame."
Rooster nodded glumly but said nothing, so I said it for him.
"It's one of us. The killer is a Dead Ender."
19
Jack
The coroner told us her initial conclusion was that Darryl died from a blow to the back of the head, but she still had to run a tox screen and do all the other official stuff.
Since we could see the amount of blood on the floor, it was pretty clear the murderer had caught Darryl in the shop and killed him there, but maybe the tox screen and the rest of it would tell us something new. Even in today's world, where so much magic was part of normal life, I never questioned the value of science.
The crime scene people scurried around doing their thing, but one of them looked at me and Andy and gave us a helpless shrug.
"This is a store, guys. It's clean enough, but it's a store. There are maybe a million fingerprints and hairs and bits of fabric all over the murder scene."
"What about the hammer?" I saw Andy had transferred the probable murder weapon from his car to the CSI folks now that the nosy crowd had dispersed.
"We processed it and took Francis McKee's prints for comparison. The kid's prints are the only ones on it. It's pretty clear someone had wiped it before the boy picked it up."
"Another point in Rooster's favor," I pointed out to Andy. "No way he's smart enough to wipe his prints off the bloody murder weapon, but then dumb enough to throw it in the back of his truck for anybody walking by to find."
I walked around the outside of the clearly marked crime scene area and gave it a try, but—as I'd said again and again—I wasn't a wolf. A werewolf could probably tell you exactly who'd been in the shop for the past month and what they'd had for dinner before they came, but I just caught scents from the Peterson brothers, Darryl, and a bunch of random people.
"Hey, Andy, I'm going to head out and leave you to this," I said after a second pass with the same results. "I got nothing."
He nodded. "Thanks anyway, Jack. I'll talk to you later."
The new deputy gave me a hard stare as I walked out, but then I could almost see the realization dawn. "Shepherd? And you're a tiger?"
"Jack Shepherd."
If the situation hadn't been so serious, I might have grinned at the frozen expression on her face.
Yeah. She'd heard of me.
I headed down to my truck, answering the few who called out to me with a quick nod. I knew, Dead End being Dead End, that everybody was desperate for news or even gossip, but I had nothing to say.
Tess was sitting in the truck texting furiously. She looked up when I opened the door, and I could read the question on her face.
I shook my head. "Nothing. But I didn't expect anything."
