Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(23)

It was still close enough to summer that the night air was pleasant - a good thing since I had to pick the damned lock stark naked and it took me too long. Samuel had taught me to pick locks when I was fourteen. I hadn't done it a lot since then - just a couple of times when I'd locked my keys in my car.

As soon as I had the door open, I replaced the picks inside my collar. Bless duct tape, it was still sticky enough to hold them.

A washer and dryer were just inside, with a dirty towel laid across the dryer. I picked it up and wiped the door, doorknob, lock, and anything else that might have picked up my fingerprints. I didn't know if they had something to check for bare footprints, but I wiped the floor where I had taken a step inside to reach the towel, then tossed it back on the dryer.

I left the door mostly shut but unlatched, then shifted back into coyote, hunching under the gaze of eyes that weren't there. I knew, knew that no one had seen me go inside. The gentle, gusty wind would have brought the scent of anyone skulking about. Even so, I could feel someone watching me, almost as if the house was aware of me. Creepy.

With my tail tucked uncomfortably close I turned my attention to the task at hand, the sooner to leave - but unlike the fae houses, this one had seen a lot of people in and out recently. Police, I thought, forensic team, but even before they had come there had been a lot of people in the back hallway.

I hadn't expected an obnoxious boor like O'Donnell to have a lot of friends.

I ducked through the first doorway and into the kitchen, and the heavy traffic of people mostly faded away. Three or four light scents, O'Donnell, and someone who wore a particularly bad male cologne had been in here.

The cupboard doors gaped and the drawers hung open and a little askew. Dish towels were scattered in hasty piles on the counter.

Maybe Cologne Man was a police officer who searched the kitchen - unless O'Donnell was the sort who randomly shoved all of his dishes to one side of a cupboard and stored his cleaning supplies in a pile on the floor instead of tucked neatly in the space under the sink behind the doors that hung open, revealing the empty dark space beneath.

The faint light of the half moon revealed a fine black powder all over the cupboard doors and counter tops that I recognized as the substance the police use to reveal fingerprints - the TV is a good educational tool and Samuel is addicted to those forensic, soap opera - mystery shows.

I glanced at the floor, but there was nothing on it. Maybe I'd been a little paranoid when I'd wiped the place where I'd stood on the linoleum with bare human feet.

The first bedroom, across the hall from the kitchen, was obviously O'Donnell's. Everyone from the kitchen had been in here, including Cologne Man.

Again, it looked like someone had gone through every cranny. It was a mess. Every drawer had been upended on the bed, then the whole dresser had been overturned. All of his pants' pockets had been turned inside out.

I wondered if the police would have left it that way.

I backed out of there and went into the next room. This was a smaller bedroom, and there was no bed. Instead there were three card tables that had been flung helter-skelter. The bedroom window was shattered and covered with police tape. Someone had been angry when they'd come in here, and I was betting it wasn't the police.

Avoiding the glass on the floor as much as I could, I got a closer look at the window frame. It had been one of those newer vinyl ones, and the bottom half had been designed to slide up. Whatever had been thrown through the window had pulled most of the framing out of the wall as well.

But I'd known the killer was strong. He had, after all, ripped off a man's head.

I left the window to explore the rest of the room more closely. Despite the apparent mess, there wasn't much to look at: three card tables and eleven folding chairs - I glanced at the window and thought that a folding chair, thrown very hard, might break through a window like that.

A metal machine that looked oddly familiar had left a dent in the wall before landing on the ground. I pawed it over and realized it was an old-fashioned mail meter. Someone had been sending out bulk mail from here.

I put my nose down and started to pay attention to what it had been trying to tell me. First, this room was more public than the kitchen or first bedroom, more like the back door and hallway had been.

Most houses have a base scent, mostly a combination of preferred cleaning supplies (or lack thereof) and the body scents of the family who live in it. This room smelled different from the rest of the house. There had been - I looked again at the scattering of chairs - maybe as many as ten or twelve people who came to this room often enough to leave more than a surface scent.

This was good, I thought. Given the way O'Donnell had rubbed me wrong - anyone who knew him was likely to have murdered him. However - I took another look at the window - there hadn't been a fae or any other magical critter in the bunch that I could tell. No human had taken out the window that way - or torn off O'Donnell's head either.

I memorized their scents anyway.

I'd done what I could with this room - which left me with only one more. I'd left the living room for last for two reasons. First, if someone were to see me, it would be where the big picture window looked out onto the street in front of the house. Second, even a human's nose could have told them that the living room was where O'Donnell had been killed and I was growing tired of blood and gore.

I think it was dread of what I'd find in the living room that made me look back into the bedroom, rather than any instinct that I might have missed something.