Chapter Two
“Okay, I’m calling it,” Genov said, staring into the alley as they rounded the corner of the shit-hole motel and stopped. “If that dude really was out here blowing himself, he had some serious self-hate issues. One of those blue plastic portable toilets would have been more appealing than this.”
Splattered with dried vomit, feces, and patches of who knew what else, the back wall of the brick building was a horror in itself. The row of windows was hidden beneath layers of rotting plywood – something Lamar noted to report to the code enforcement division – ensuring almost complete privacy from observation by the occupants inside. Add to that the heaps of garbage and excrement, the sour odor of urine, and the drug paraphernalia scattered in the dirt, and nasty was an understatement.
Tearing off a piece of residual crime scene tape that fluttered in the breeze, Lamar nodded. “You’re not wrong.” He pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket, noticing with approval that Genov followed suit. “Well, we might as well get this started.”
They worked quickly, scraping samples off the surfaces and taking photographs to add to those supplied by the crime scene investigators who’d processed the scene.
“Check this out,” Genov called suddenly, gesturing Lamar over to the area still marked with the location of the body. “Up there.”
Lamar followed his finger to a spot a few feet above their heads. “Are those scratches in the brick?”
“I think so.” Genov focused his camera on the spot and then flipped it over, enlarging the digital image on the screen. “Fuck. They look like pretty deep gouges.”
“They do,” Lamar agreed, looking from the screen back up to the wall.
“What could do something like that?”
“Not sure.” Lamar shrugged. Actually, he could think of at least one option, but what would a dragon have to do with the case? Making a mental note to put in a call to Trask, he moved back to the far side of the alley. “No reason to think its related, but it’s an interesting question.”
“Should I delete these?”
“No. I don’t remember seeing any mention of the gouges in the CSI report, so let’s get a few more, just in case.”
After all, better safe than sorry.
Lamar had learned that lesson the hard way back when he was a rookie detective and decided to wait and finishprocessinga drug house the day after a murder had taken place there. When the building went up in a suspicious fire an hour after he left, so had all of his evidence.
Back at the precinct that afternoon, Lamar tuned out the steady hum of the printer next to his desk as it spit out sheets of photo paper, focusing instead on comparing the narrative of the CSI report to the scene they had just left. Other than the obvious lack of a body and the addition of a few day's garbage accumulation, nothing jumped out at him.
“Is it possible that this really is what it looks like?”
“Seriously?” Genov raised a brow. When Lamar nodded, he shook his head. “No way. Even if everything else added up, explain to me how the poor bastard died with a mouthful of jizz?” When Lamar didn’t respond, he rolled his eyes. “C’mon, man. If someone came in his mouth before he died, he would have swallowed it, choked on it, or it would have leaked out when his jaw went slack, right? Someone put it there and then closed his mouth after he died but before rigor set in.”
“Shit. I’m an idiot,” Lamar groused. “Talk about fucking obvious.”
Genov smirked. “Well, it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us if you got all the beautyandthe brains.”
“Fuck off.” Lamar flipped him a good-natured bird and reached for the stack of pictures on the printer. Flipping through them, he came to a close-up of the strange marks in the brick. “Each of these gouges is in a set offive.”
Genov nodded and reach for the stack that Lamar set down, scattering them until he found the one he was looking for and laying it next to the first. “When you look at the regular one, you can see that there are four separate sets.” He uncapped a marker and circled them. “Four sets of five. It looks a lot like something with sharp fucking claws climbed that building.”
Lamar nodded slowly. “I’m still not sure it’s related, but it’s definitely worth looking into.”
He glanced up at the clock on the wall. “In the meantime, since we’re hitting the club tonight, we might as well call it a day.”
With a few hours to kill before he would meet Genov for the trip to the sex club, Lamar settled into the battered easy chair that faced out into the backyard garden with a glass of sweet tea in one hand and his cell phone in the other.
“Hey man,” Trask’s voice was low as he answered.
“Hey. Baby sleeping?” Lamar guessed at the reason for the mild greeting.
Trask chuckled. “Alexander and Christian are both sleeping,” he said. “I’d rather gargle with gasoline than wake either of them.”
Lamar snorted. As one of the few people who knew Trask was a dragon shifter, he could definitely appreciate the seriousness with which his partner was avoiding waking his family. “I hear you. Any chance I could drag you away for a bit once they’re awake? We tripped over something weird in a death investigation. I’d like to get your take.”
“Sure,” Trask agreed without hesitation. “Christian should be up in an hour or so. You want to come by the house? Christian was just saying the other day that we should get together.”
Lamar hesitated. “I’d love to see him and the sproutling, but I was hoping to get you to take a trip to the scene in person. Even enlarged, the pictures don’t help much.”
“That’s fine,” Trask assured him. “I’ll text you when I can get out, and then maybe we can all get together after?”
“That’d be perfect,” Lamar agreed, holding back a relieved sigh. “I do have to be back on the road by nine, though.”
Trask laughed. “Son, I haven’t seen nine o’clock since we brought little Alex home!”
