“Thanks,” he said.
O’Malley wrinkled her nose dismissively as she pulled the sealed envelope out from the rack under the table. She handed it over, and Marlow hooked his finger under the flap to rip it open. It contained his badge, personal weapon loaded with non-silver bullets, and his wallet.
Wolves weren’t men during the full moon, but they weren’t just beasts either. No one on Night Shift wanted to tangle with a wolf and then find out it used their ID to beat them home. There were tragedies written about that.
Not that Marlow had anyoneathome to put at risk. The worst he had to fear was wolf scat on his sheets.
“See you tomorrow night,” O’Malley chirped cheerfully.
Marlow grimaced as he clipped his gun to his belt and pulled his T-shirt down over it. He supposed he would with the current manpower shortage, no matter how much sleep he ended up getting.
“Maybe I’m going to get a pie for all my hard work?” he said. “And the night off?”
O’Malley wrinkled her nose. “I think Jay would have gotten a pie first,” she said. Her eyes went big and dreamy. “She’s amazing. It wouldn’t be fair to give one to you andnother.”
It took Marlow a second to realize who she meant. Bennett. He rarely used her first name or even thought about it.
“There’s no pie,” he said as he stepped back. “There’s never pie, O’Malley. Or a night off.”
It turned out he was right. There was no pie.
There was a corpse.
Chapter Two
THE DEAD GIRLlay on the slab in the SDPD’s chill, sterile morgue. She looked dead—her skin slack and sticky-sallow and the faint whiff of decomposition ripe in the air—but at first glance, there was no obvious cause. The sheet had been folded down to her chest, an inked wolf winked from the curve of her upper breast, and there were no visible injuries.
Cade didn’t recognize her, but he’d always had a bad memory for faces. If Captain O’Hara had gone to the bother of an early-morning, post-moon callout, he assumed he had crossed paths with her.
“Tragic,” Cade said as he pushed the sleeves of his borrowed sweats up his forearms. “But I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
Dr. Sun, the chief pathologist, half turned to grab a small plastic bag from a tray. She handed it to Cade—inside it was a single black card etched with three wavy silver lines broken by a stylized tree.
“That’s a keycard provided by Cold Winds Security, isn’t it?” O’Hara said. He already knew the answer, but the dance was—Cade supposed—traditional. “As part of your company’s contract with the board up at the Reserve.”
Cade turned the card over to check the back. He didn’t know the serial number of every card they issued, but he knew what the grouping structure of the number meant.
“She was a guest,” Cade said as he gave the card back to Sun. “Not a resident. Based on the card.”
“Whose guest?”
It was Marlow who asked the question. Cade glanced around at the slender Night Shift officer who was slouched back against the wall of the morgue and tried not to look like someone who’d just been shot down in an elevator.
The morning after a full moon always made Cade feel larger than life. His muscles were tight, his nerves too close to the surface of his skin, and any self-control he had was replaced with far too much confidence. And it wasn’t as if anyone had ever accused him of lacking that the rest of the month.
It usually faded.
Usually, he didn’t run into anyone who his subconscious apparently found more attractive than he ever had. That revelation would have been enough to put him in a bad mood on its own; the fact it wasn’t reciprocated meant he took a certain amount of pleasure in his answer.
“Even if I knew that off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “Client confidentiality, I’m afraid. Get a warrant if you’re that interested.”
Marlow stared at him for a second through those pretentious tinted glasses of his and then shrugged the refusal off. Literally. With one hitch of a shoulder, Cade was denied a frustrated rant about the right thing as Marlow just accepted it and moved on. Cade felt more cock-blocked than he had earlier.
“Where was her body picked up?” Marlow asked O’Hara.
O’Hara exchanged a look with Sun. The pathologist picked up a clipboard and ran her finger down the crumpled piece of paper attached.
“According to her intake paperwork,” she said, “from the Reserve—”
