I shrugged. “So—”
Titus gave the doorknob a quick, firm twist, and the door swung open.
“Oh shit,” I whispered. Now we were breaking and entering.
He quickly pulled me into the room and closed the door behind us.
“We can’t—” The rest of my objection was swallowed by horror. “Oh no…” Leland Blum lay on the floor of his dorm room, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. A pool of blood had soaked into the rug beneath his head, and more dripped from the corner of his nightstand. Where he’d clearly split open his scalp. Very recently, as far as I could tell. The blood hadn’t yet begun to dry. “You think he fell?”
“I think that’s what we’re supposed to think.” Titus knelt next to the nightstand and sniffed the blood. “It’s all his.” He bent even farther to sniff Leland’s hands, careful not to touch the body. “Fresh hand sanitizer. Either he just came out of the bathroom, or someone tried to destroy a scent.”
“You think this was…”Justus?But I couldn’t say his name. I couldn’t theorize that Titus’s brother was now a killer. “…a shifter?”
“A human murderer would have no reason to try to destroy his scent,” Titus said. “They can’t smell personal scents like we can. Try the doorknob.” He waved one hand at the bedroom door, but I didn’t understand what he wanted until I saw him bend to sniff the bathroom doorknob.
I squatted in front of the front door, but found only the metallic scent of the knob itself and… “More hand sanitizer.” My gaze fell on Leland again as I stood. We’d dropped him off two hours before, alive and relatively well. A sick feeling twisted in my gut. “So we’re pretty sure this is a murder?” If we’d kept him with us, he would still be alive.
This is our fault.
“Looks like it. Let’s go.” Titus took my hand as he reached for the door, but I pulled free.
“Wait, we can’t leave him here.”
“It’s noon, Robyn.” The sense of urgency in his voice, along with whatever Alpha pheromones were leaking from his veins, made me suddenly itch to get moving, even though I was morally opposed to that action. “We can’t carry him out without being seen, and we can’t call the police because eventually, they might be able to match my voice from the 911 call. And even if they can’t, an anonymous 911 call will lead the authorities to investigate this as more than the accident it’ll look like if the body is found organically.”
“You don’t think they’ll know this was a murder?”
“Not unless they connect it with Ivy’s disappearance. And we can’t afford to be the ones who call this in, in case they do make that connection. Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, I followed him into the hall, then out of the building without making eye contact with the two people we passed on the way. Fortunately, they were both staring at their phones and couldn’t possibly identify either of us, if asked to.
By the time we got to the car, the unasked question was like a hot coal sitting on the end of my tongue. “Was it Justus?”
“I don’t know.” Titus slid into the driver’s seat, closed his door, and started the engine. “Accidentally infecting people, I can understand. He likely didn’t even know that was possible. But murder? In human form?” He shook his head as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “He wouldn’t do that. It’s not Justus.”
“So maybe itwasan accident.” I think I wanted to believe that as badly as Titus did. “Maybe he came to confront Leland about Ivy, and they fought. Maybe Leland hit his head, and Justus panicked.”
Titus’s gaze stayed glued to the road, but he didn’t seem to see the traffic. “That’s a lot of maybes.”
“And I stand by each one of them. But there are other possibilities. There have to be. If it wasn’t Justus, who else could it be? What are we missing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who else would want Leland dead? Not that Justus would want him dead,” I hurried to add. Which was when I realized I was making guesses about the motives and thoughts of a person I’d never even met. “My point is that we could be overlooking someone else’s motivation. If this wasn’t an accident, it was murder, and murder always has a motive, right?”
“I’m pretty sure that true psychotics murder people just for fun,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Okay, but if Leland Blum got infected by a shifter, lost his girlfriend, and was murdered by a true psychopath, all in the span of two days, he’s the unluckiest man on the face of the planet. Odds are that his murder and his infection are related. We just need to figure out how.”
Titus stared at the road in silence.
I put one hand on his shoulder, half afraid he would shrug it off. “That doesn’t mean Justus did it. That isn’t what I’m saying.”
“I know. But it’s what I’m thinking. Who else would have anything against Blum?”
“We may not know that until we know who killed him.”
“Or we may never know.” Titus pulled the SUV into the parking lot of his brother’s apartment building, then into Justus’s designated space. He shifted into park, then folded his arms on top of the steering wheel and laid his forehead against them. “I can handle a brother who lost control of himself after being infected. But I don’t know what to do with a brother who’s a murderer.”
