1
Poor bastard. Nasty way to go.
Delilah Lovett shook her head, unable to keep out the thoughts. She tried to keep them out before, during, and after finishing her job, but sometimes it was just too much.
She had everything she needed for the Aquaterrestrial Task Force’s Scottish investigation and had pieced the victim back together. Whatever happened to him next was up to whichever funeral director the family hired to make him appear almost alive again, to give them a sense of closure.
Though Delilah knew it was going to be a hell of a challenge, with all the teeth marks, not to mention all the permanent discoloration from those suction cup spots.
This wasn’t the only body recovered in this state. A number of others had been found, with the unknown killer picking off tourists and locals alike. Men and women, but mostly shifters.
Since the non-shifters were fewer, the working theory was that the non-shifter victims had only been picked off accidentally. Like the young man on her table. He was no shifter. Just a teenager, less than a month away from his twentieth birthday, barely old enough to drink in this country.
His cause of death was logged to be accidental drowning with an overly high blood alcohol level. The story was that he’d become a little too drunk and had fallen into the water and drowned. The bad state of his body was explained away by saying that his body had encountered sea creatures after the fact.
It was all half true. He’d been drunk, but he hadn’t fallen in. He was dragged in. The marks on his hands and fingers indicated a struggle, a weak one, but they were all the same.
And there were plenty of actual animal marks that had occurred post-mortem. The octopus marks were real enough. But that was only because the killer apparently kept his trophies, where some animals could feast on them.
Originally, the FPU speculated that a kraken shifter might have been responsible for the killings, in light of the markings on the victims. Then, the undercover team was attacked by a bunyip. A creature with tentacles, and even suction cups on the ends of its limbs, so they believed the case was closed. The trio who took down the creature was off on well-deserved decompression leave, having thought they solved the case.
They were wrong.
Bodies started showing up again, and based on the setup of the bunyip attack, the FPU knew what they were really dealing with.
This was an inside job.
Someone within the FPU was the real killer. They’d sent the bunyip to try to kill the undercover team and throw the FPU off their scent.
Which was why the FPU flew Delilah all the way to Scotland for a second opinion.
Delilah carefully removed her lab coat and surgical gown, to prepare to give her report to the FPU team members who were less than patiently waiting for her just outside the viewing room.
They would have their questions, but Delilah was approaching them with caution, keeping a set number of steps back. As far as she was concerned, any one of them could be the killer, and if she got close to exposing them, she could become the next target.
She was out of her element, sent to assist the Aquaterrestrial Task Force, ATTF for short, because they could no longer trust the local agency’s coroner. Delilah would have preferred to have one of her Honey Badger Squad members there with her—no one had your back better than a badass badger—but she was the only one Chip wanted to send.
A few agents stood down the hall, waiting for updates but allowing Delilah to brief the director first. Jack Williams, in charge of the specialized water shifter unit, had only one other agent next to him.
The rest of the FPU’s Scotland counterparts would be at their desks or in the field, doing anything and everything they could to find the killer.
Jack looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. Even Delilah had been able to take a catnap on the flight over.
“What do you think?” Jack asked, rubbing his chin, his free hand resting on his hip.
“He was definitely murdered by the same person who got to the others. It’s not a random mugging gone wrong or an accident.”
Jack nodded. “Are you able to pinpoint anything new, anything the other corner may not have noticed?”
She had that answer ready. “He has defensive wounds on his fingers, what was left of them, anyway. The killer either kept him alive longer than the rest, maybe playing with him, or the victim managed to hold him off. Either way, the kill wasn’t quick.”
“How could you tell?”
Delilah had tried to ignore the blond male standing behind Jack. Her body was reacting to him in an overly large way. She registered his high level of hotness but tried to focus on the task at hand. She assumed he was a low-tier badge, like the other agents guarding the hall. The fact that Jack was allowing him to speak indicated that he was more important than she’d first guessed.
But all the same, Delilah didn’t appreciate being interrupted.
He’s our mate. Her badger tried to distract her, but she shoved it out of her mind.
“Because there is a difference in the appearance of injuries pre- and post-mortem. While most of the injuries on the other victims occurred post-mortem, this victim had more evidence of hemorrhage and clotting, which means they occurred before death.”
Even saying it out loud brought a shiver to her, but if it needed to be spelled out, then so be it. “There was nothing to swab from what he had left of his fingernails. The young man nearly shredded them all in what I have to assume was an attempt to cling to rocks and get away from the attacker.”
“But it also could be that he landed some blows, scratches, whatever, on the killer,” the blond man mused.
“Exactly.”
They all knew that meant that any agent with unusual injuries would rise up the suspect list. However, shifters healed quickly, so it was unlikely any of the damage done by the young man would stick around very long.
“Were there any issues you found otherwise?”
Delilah shrugged. “There are always issues with a second autopsy. Organs have already been examined. Certain fluids aren’t available anymore. It’s good you sent for me as soon as you did.”
“Yeah, the body might’ve been a little more tender if we’d waited any longer,” said blondy, glancing behind her toward the door, as though he expected the body to stand up and shuffle out that door like some sort of zombie.
That annoyed her. “You work as an agent, and the idea of a dead body makes you squeamish?”
The blond man kept on grimacing and looking a little green around the gills, as though he wanted to be anywhere else.
“No, not really. I’ve seen bodies, but this is different.”
“How so?” Not that she cared.
“Because...you know, you cut them up on purpose.”
“Yes?” Delilah was pretty sure she knew where this was going, but it was...kind of fun making a Surfer Dude Bro uncomfortable.
Deciding better against what he was about to say, he shook his head. “Never mind. Nothing.”
“Uh-huh.”
What a shame. He was cute, and her mate alarm was screaming, but even Delilah, who wasn’t very particular in getting itches scratched when she needed it done, had no interest in men who couldn’t keep their stomachs in a professional setting or who thought she was weird because of what she did.
Mate or not, she wouldn’t give him the time of day if he couldn’t handle all of her.