A Wolf At Her Door

Detective Amanda Barnes thought she’d seen everything that the small town of Prowers Bluffs, Colorado, had to offer, and it wasn’t much. A townie for life, she’d grown up in the tiny, mountain-hugged pocket of Prowers Bluffs and had been one of its detectives for a year. One of its five detectives, and one of only twenty individuals on the entire police force. Because Prowers Bluffs was that kind of town. In olden times, they would’ve called it a one-horse town. Presently, it was a one-main-street town, and there wasn’t even a Walmart for twenty miles. Serene, picturesque, with a tight-knit community of people whose families had lived in that exact spot for generations, Prowers Bluffs was not a high-crime area. Some theft, the rare vagrant meth-head from a neighboring county come through on the railroad, defacement of property upon occasion, and in the last year, a few wolf sightings but never any attacks. Public drunkenness on a Saturday night and assault when tempers ran too hot in the high altitude. A few cases of domestic abuse and one very confusing incident with a stolen dog. But generally Prowers Bluffs was not a hotbed of criminal activity and certainly not of murder.

But this was some Silence of the Lambs shit, and Amanda was not prepared for it.

She’d barely finished her morning cup of coffee, getting through the tedious paperwork of a teenage car accident the day before, nobody hurt, when the call came in. Officer Andy Rottler had sounded so panicked over dispatch that Elaine, who worked the desk, had just handed him over to Amanda. Apparently, Andy had stopped into the QuickMart to fill up the tank of his cruiser and grab a bag of Funyuns, and that’s when he’d found poor Mr. Stanley in the same state that Amanda was observing now.

Mr. Stanley, an odd old bird in his late fifties, had owned the town’s only gas station and QuickMart for some twenty years. He kept to himself, had a cabin up on the mountain off the town grid, and was a generally pleasant if unsocial person. Always had a 'have a nice day' when Amanda stopped in or a wave if she was just driving past, and now here Mr. Stanley was in the back office of the QuickMart, splayed out on the floor and skinned like a jackrabbit for supper.

Amanda had never seen anything like it outside of a horror movie. None of them had ever seen anything like it, and basically the entire PBDP had gathered at the QuickMart when they heard. All ten cop cars were crowding its parking lot, along with a few personal rides, including Amanda’s motorcycle, which once she’d made detective, she preferred to drive instead of one of the sedans. Rules were lax in Prowers Bluffs in the way of small towns everywhere, and Captain Martin had just shrugged and muttered something about how she’d break her neck one day and it wouldn’t be his fault when she did. And no, he’d said firmly, she could not have lights for the bike.

Now even gruff Captain Martin was standing beside her, staring down at ruined Mr. Stanley with a look of horrified bewilderment on his face. He even reached over and got an arm around Amanda, hugging her close for a second like a protective father.

“This is the damnedest thing I ever seen,” he murmured, looking a bit sick, as he let her go.

“Nobody local could’ve done this,” Amanda said, stepping back. But her eyes were glued to the corpse. “And where’s the...the…”

“Not on the scene.” Judd Peterson, the local ME, arrived on Captain Martin’s other side, staring grimly down at Mr. Stanley as well. He scratched thoughtfully at his long gray beard. “Whoever did this took the...the skin.”

Barry Sims, Peterson’s brand-new assistant, went scuttling over to the corpse to begin his examination.

Amanda grimaced and looked away from the corpse. “Well get him out of here so that we can go over the scene for anything the killer might have left behind. There has to be a fingerprint or something. You can’t just skin a man whole and get away clean.”

Peterson nodded and turned to wave his one assistant forward with the gurney. Amanda turned away as they set to gathering up what was left of Mr. Stanley, pacing over to the QuickMart’s front doors. She stared through the glass at the parking lot, at the mountains beyond it all that ringed the small town, clutching at Prowers Bluffs like a giant’s hand.

“I want you to take point on this,” Captain Martin said.

Amanda looked at him, frowning. “Me? Why me?”

“Amanda, if we don’t find who did this quickly, I’ll be forced to call in the feds,” the Captain sighed. “I don’t want to do that. Nobody in this town wants me to do that. You may be the youngest detective on the force, but Hanson and Felix can’t handle this kind of shit. They’re still sitting out in their squad car.”

Amanda frowned. “Fine, but—”

“And your new partner—”

Amanda’s frown turned into a surprised scowl. “Wait, my what?”

Captain Martin hauled in a deep breath, dark eyes meeting Amanda’s when she looked into his face, and smiled. Amanda did not like the shape of that smile. “You’re a detective, Barnes, you need a partner. We got a transfer in. He’ll be meeting you at the station.”

“Someone transferred here?”

The Captain nodded. “From Denver. Before that, Chicago. He’s got good references. His superiors all said he’d do better in a small town. He asked to come here, and with his experience, he could’a gone anywhere.”

“That sounds like bullshit to me,” Amanda muttered, looking away.

Captain Martin sighed out that deep breath. “Look, maybe he’s dealt with something like this before. We sure as shit haven’t. We’ll use all the help we can get.”

“Well I’m going up to Stanley’s cabin,” Amanda decided.

“You need to go to the station and get your partner.”

“I don’t want to go get him. You call him and tell him to meet me at Stanley’s cabin.”

“You think that’s a good way to start a partnership?”

Amanda shoved open the QuickMart door with a glance over her shoulder at the Captain and scoffed. “I don’t need or want a partner, Captain, and you can force me to have one, but you can’t force me to like it.”

The little bell above the QuickMart’s door chimed meaningfully as Amanda let it swing shut at her back. She pulled her aviators from where they were hooked onto the collar of her t-shirt and slid them over her eyes as she passed beneath the fill-up’s overhang to where she’d parked her bike. She took up her helmet and settled it snugly over her short, dark hair, climbing onto the bike as she flipped its visor down. With a honk at the squad car where Hanson and Felix were still huddling away from the crime scene, she drove her bike out of the parking lot and onto the wide highway that led up the mountain and deep into the woods that fleeced its peak.

It wasn’t having a partner that bothered Amanda. She’d known that it was only a matter of time. Protocol demanded that detectives work in pairs. But she’d been on her own since passing the detective’s exam and she’d gotten comfortable. Moreover, she hadn’t ever thought that her partner—the person she was supposed to trust with her life—would be a stranger from out of town. Like anyone who’d grown up in a small town and never left it, Amanda was not good with strangers. She liked to think of herself as more open-minded than your average townie, but the truth was that she didn’t like change or new people just like the rest of them. When she was younger, she’d had dreams of leaving Prowers Bluffs and going to college, making a life somewhere else, but then her parents had died in the worst flash flood the Bluffs had seen in decades, and Amanda never thought about leaving again. Instead, she got her BA in criminology online and joined the force, wanting to help people.

She wasn’t stupid or naive. She knew how narrow-minded other people could be in their view of small towns, and she did not look forward to having to defend Prowers Bluffs to this new hot-shot detective from wherever. He would call it backwards, a backwater, call the townspeople bumpkins and hicks. And maybe they were. In fact, most of them definitely were, but they were her home and Amanda felt like it was being invaded. And she was on the front line. As she drove her motorcycle up into the mountains, her ears popping as the air thinned further, she thought about these things and her new partner instead of thinking about poor Mr. Stanley and who might have killed him. The idea that there was a violent killer in her small town was even more frightening than the idea of her annoying new partner.

Mr. Stanley’s house was tucked off the main highway, half a mile into the deep woods. These roads were old and unpaved, hard to navigate if you weren’t familiar with the area. They were mostly old trapper trails leftover from the turn of the 20th century, used primarily by hunters in modern days. But hunting season was past, and as they did every year, the paths were beginning to overgrow with foliage, clogging the way up the mountain. Amanda had to park her bike only a little ways off the highway and leave it, continuing into the forest on foot.

Morning sunlight dappled the gnarled roots and crunching leaves that blanketed the trail into the forest, and Amanda followed the well-worn path. She was no stranger to the forest, even if she had never been up this far or to Mr. Stanley’s house before. The quiet of the sentinel trees overhead did not bother her, nor did the occasional chirp or cry of the wilderness teeming with life all around her. Her feet were sure despite the unpaved ground underfoot, and as she got deeper into the forest and the sunlight began to thin between the tree branches and leaves above, she pulled her aviators from her eyes and hooked them into the collar of her shirt again, hiking her way up the trail in the cooler mountain shade.

Mr. Stanley’s house blended so well into its surroundings that she almost missed it. Most of the cabins this far up were self-sufficient homes, their residents going out of their way to make them modern, but Mr. Stanley’s house was basically just a shack. It was tucked up against a gigantic oak tree, its roof slanted beneath a jut of mountain rock. It looked like it was easily a hundred years old, if not more, and there was a wooden gate around a small front yard that doubled as a garden, though the gate itself was dilapidated and falling apart. The garden thrived in spite of that, though, and Amanda couldn’t help but wonder how Mr. Stanley had kept the woodland animals from eating all of his fresh vegetables. She nudged open the gate’s door, which made a loud groaning noise on its hinges, tilting a little more towards the ground, and walked up the cobblestone path to the little cabin’s front door. When she tried the knob, she found that it was locked, so with a sigh she pulled her lock-picking kit from the pocket of her leather jacket and sank into a crouch in front of the door.

Lock-picking had not been part of her criminology coursework, but before she was a cop she’d been a rambunctious teenager with a penchant for troublemaking. Though those days were behind her, some of the skills remained. And came in handy on occasion. It only took her a few minutes to pop the crude lock on Mr. Stanley’s front door. She swung it wide and slipped inside, closing it at her back, and found herself plunged into sharp-smelling darkness. There weren’t any windows at all. She fumbled a hand along the wall beside the door for a light switch, but found none. After bumping into at least one table, she pulled the small utility flashlight from her belt and clicked it on, sweeping its pale light all around the cabin’s interior. Then she knew what was causing that smell.

Half a dozen animal carcasses were hanging from the ceiling in various states of preservation. Amanda didn’t balk as some might have; she knew what the inside of a hunter’s cabin could look like. A few rabbits and a buck had been skinned and left to cure, and huddled around them were bunches of herbs and dangling branches. Though it looked, Amanda thought, not unlike the inside of an evil witch’s home, it was more likely that Mr. Stanley grew and hunted his own food, skipping the convenience of even his own QuickMart. In a corner of the room, Amanda found a gas lamp and went over to it, setting down her flashlight in favor of the box of matches beside it. Once lit, the warm light of the lamp cast the cabin’s interior in gentler tones, and Amanda saw a wood stove at the other end of the room, along with a small cot, a comfortable armchair, and a transistor radio. Mr. Stanley had been, it seemed, a very simple man. Amanda couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would want to murder him, let alone so violently.

She paused by the armchair, looking around at the hardwood floors. They were very clean, save that there seemed to be an abundance of animal fur. Amanda saw no food bowls, no indication of a cat or dog, and the carcasses strung up for meat were naked of skin and fur. She bent down, pulling a latex glove from her jacket pocket with every intention of taking some of the hair back to the lab for identification, but before she swept any of it up, she heard the exterior gate groan again outside. She turned on her heels towards the door, tucking the glove back into her pocket, hand instinctively landing on the sidearm holstered on her belt. The front door swung open, and she straightened back to her full height as a broad-shouldered silhouette filled the entryway.

He had to duck a little to get through the cabin door, he was so tall. And as the light from the gasp lamp swept over him, Amanda felt a breath hitch in her chest. He was gorgeous. Long lines and roping muscles bound by a brown bomber jacket, thick black hair swept back from his face. His jaw was so chiseled Amanda was pretty sure she could’ve cut diamonds on it, shadowed by a few days of beard, and when his dark brown eyes landed on her, she shivered a little in spite of herself.

“Detective Barnes?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Yes.” She let go of her sidearm and unclipped her badge from her belt, holding it up for him to see.

He sniffed at the air and prowled deeper into the cabin. It felt suddenly very, very small with him inside, and much, much hotter than it had been when Amanda arrived.

“Who are you?”

“Jake Hunter.” He lifted a badge as well, the shield catching the lamplight with a flicker. “Your new partner.”

Amanda’s heart did a little flip-flop. How was she supposed to hate someone this freaking good looking?

“Nice to meet you,” she stammered, blushing as she caught herself giving him a once-over.

Apparently, he’d caught her as well, because a beautiful smirk lit across his mouth and he propped his hands on his hips, easing the wings of his jacket back to give her a better view of how his black t-shirt hugged the ripples of his abdomen.

Her blush brightened, and she looked away.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t fuck locals.”

Her eyes snapped back to him at that, eyebrows rocking upward. “Excuse me?”

“You’re cute and all but not my type.”

She was gaping at him then. “Well you’re not my type.”

“You’d climb me like a tree,” he laughed.

“Ew, who talks like that to people?”

“Look, I’m here to solve a murder.” He shrugged. “Not my fault if you get wet just looking at me.”

Amanda felt a strong urge to shoot him, but she just shook her head and decided it was better to ignore him as best she could. What a dick. All of her worst expectations of this whole new partner thing were being not only confirmed, but proved too gentle. This fucking guy was going to be the worst thing that ever happened to her. She clipped her badge back onto her belt and pulled the glove from her pocket, dropping back down to swipe up some of the hair off the floor.

“What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

“Collecting evidence. You know, like detectives do.”

“I’ll take that.” He paced over to her, ducking around a hanging rabbit carcass, and held out his hand.

She glared at him. “I got it. Thanks.”

“Give it to me,” he insisted. “You backwater cops always fuck up evidence collection. I’ll make sure it gets to the lab intact.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said, pocketing the hair and the glove. She moved to go around him towards the front door, but he took one big step to the side and blocked her path.

“You don’t want to get on my bad side, sugar,” he growled.

She squared her shoulders. “I don’t really give a shit about your bad side. Or your good side. If you even have one. I’m doing my job and you’re getting in the way, just like I knew you would. Now move so I can go back to the station.”

She saw surprise flicker across his face. He probably wasn’t used to dealing with women who stood up for themselves, certainly not any who stood up to him. Then his sharp, dark eyebrows swept downward. She thought he was going to insist again, but there was a sudden noise from the garden outside. They both turned towards the door, and then Amanda could hear it more clearly. Growling. The unmistakable growl of a predator on the hunt. Her hand went to her sidearm, and she shoved past Jake to get to the front door. When she opened it, to her amazement, she found a pack of at least seven wolves milling about in Mr. Stanley’s garden. She slammed the door shut.

“Holy shit, it’s a pack of wolves,” she gasped, looking with wide eyes back to Jake.

He had crossed his arms over his chest and was looking not at all worried about this new turn of events. In fact, Amanda thought, he looked a little smug.

“Well if there are wolves, you shouldn’t go out there,” he pointed out.

Amanda frowned, pulling her sidearm from its holster. “Well I’m not just going to stay in here with you for god knows how long.”

Jake laughed, the sound dark and resonating. “I’m good with animals,” he told her, walking forward. He got close. Too close, Amanda might have said, except that she found herself particularly fond of the scent of him. Green things and dark shadows, smoke and clean soap. She inhaled and realized that he’d stopped only inches away. He looked down at her, dark eyes sparkling with amusement. “I’ll get rid of the wolves if you give me the evidence.”

She tried to scoff, but it got stuck in her throat. “How will you get rid of them?”

“I won’t hurt them,” he assured her.

Amanda thought that sounded ludicrous, that this guy was just good with animals and could get rid of a whole wolf pack on his own. It was also ludicrous that a wolf pack would be prowling around outside during the day like this, gathered together in an old man’s front yard. But something in her gut told her that Jake could handle the animals and that there was something else going on here. And Amanda always listened to her gut. She had, she would’ve said, very good guts. They never steered her wrong. She just didn’t think even her guts knew what to make of her new partner.

With a sigh, though, because she just wanted to get out of this house and away from him, she pulled the glove and the hair from her pocket and slammed them down into his palm. He made a fist, shoved it into the front pocket of his, she noticed, tight-fitting jeans, and flashed her some white, white teeth.

“Be right back,” he said, reaching past her to tug open the door again. She moved, and he slipped around her and outside, closing the door behind him.

She put her ear to the door, wanting to know what he would do but having no window through which to watch him work. At first, all she could hear was the sound of his boots on the cobblestone walkway, then she could hear the growling again. The sound swelled until it was a chorus of indecipherable animal sounds, all dangerous, until there was one apart from the others that sounded less animal. More human. Was Jake just standing out there growling back at them? Amanda could’ve kicked herself for being so stupid, for believing he could just handle a pack of wolves. What an idiot. He was going to get himself killed, like all attractive men used to getting their own way. The wilderness of the mountain didn’t care that he was confident and hot. It would eat him alive just like anyone else. Gritting her teeth, Amanda pulled her sidearm from its holster again and grabbed the door, yanking it open. She burst out of the house, firearm raised, but as soon as her eyes adjusted to the sunlight, she realized the wolf pack was gone.

“What the hell?”

Jake was standing with his hands in his pockets, surveying the garden. He half-turned to look at her and smirked. “Told you I’d handle it.”

“What did you do?” She holstered her sidearm and tromped down the walkway, brushing past him to exit the garden and head back down the path. “I’ll have crime scene go over the cabin, but there’s nothing in there that’ll tell us who killed Mr. Stanley.”

“I reasoned with them,” Jake quipped, shrugging his broad shoulders as he fell into step behind Amanda. “And it was probably just a freak thing. A drifter. I want to take a look at the body.”

“Why?” Amanda frowned some more. “He was skinned. That’s the cause of death.”

“Because I’m a fucking detective,” Jake snapped. His tone of voice got so sharp so suddenly that Amanda looked over at him, taken aback. He was scowling at her. “So I’m going to do my job and look at the damn body.”

“Fine,” she snapped back, “Jesus. Calm down.”

He seemed to take a moment, breathing in and then out, and looked away from her with a grunt. “I’m fine.”

She didn’t believe him. There was a vein standing out from his throat, and he was flushed with the effort of controlling himself. Amanda had never seen a man so close to losing his temper so quickly. And over what? Her mind started turning it all over again. How had he found Mr. Stanley’s house so easily and quickly without ever having been there before? Why was he so determined to be the one to handle the evidence? And who in their right mind would want to see the skinned corpse of a man; what further evidence did he think he’d find that the ME wouldn’t? Then a cold lance of dread sliced right through Amanda, straight to her guts. What if he wasn’t looking for evidence to use to find the killer? What if he was looking for evidence to cover up? Was it a coincidence that her new partner’s first day was the same day that the most grisly murder in twenty years occurred in Prowers Bluffs?

Amanda felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

“What is it?”

She looked up and realized that Jake was staring at her. His expression was hard, unreadable, his dark eyes nearly black in the bright sunlight spotting the forest floor through the trees.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You had a look on your face like you were scared.”

She shook her head and looked away. “Nope. Not scared. Totally fine.” Except for his looming figure beside her. She told herself not to get swept up in paranoid thinking. Maybe the Captain had given Jake really good directions to Mr. Stanley’s cabin. Not that Amanda thought the Captain did much hiking up here, but maybe he knew the area better than she thought. She knew he liked to hunt. Maybe that was it. Maybe Jake had a map in his car and he’d studied it really closely before heading up the mountain. It might actually all be coincidence. But...it might not. She needed to dig into his history, find out more about him. She didn’t think she’d get very far by asking. He was such a prick he’d probably just lie.

They walked the rest of the way back down to the highway in silence. Amanda couldn’t help but notice how sure-footed Jake was the entire way, never stumbling or pausing to think about which direction to go. He wasn’t even really following her, just matching her strides and her pace, confident in where he was even though he’d never been there before. It had taken her years, once she’d gotten brave enough to actually hike the mountain, to learn these woods. He walked like he’d been born in them. That didn’t sit right with Amanda, along with many other things about him. She wasn’t some doe-eyed teenager. Just because he was hot didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. In fact, it probably meant he was more dangerous.

Finally, Amanda could hear the quiet zoom of the highway beyond the trees. Shortly after that, she spotted her bike right where she’d left it. A navy-blue Buick, one of the station’s undercover cars, was parked beside her motorcycle. Jake fished the keys out of his jacket pocket.

“I like your bike,” he said.

She tried not to roll her eyes. “Yeah. I’ll see you back at the station.”

She didn’t look at him again, just went to her bike and pulled on her helmet, but it was like she could feel him staring at her the whole time. And it freaked her out as much as it turned her on, just thinking about him looking at her. She hated to admit it, even just to herself, but she was incredibly attracted to him. She couldn’t help but flush under her helmet just at the thought of his body, his hands, his eyes. She gunned the bike’s engine just to hear it roar, to listen to something other than her own stupid thoughts, and drove back up and onto the main road before Jake had even gotten into the sedan.

When he got back to the station, Detective Jake Hunter just wanted to the ME’s office. He’d get the go-ahead to head to the county morgue, attached to the town’s only hospital, which was almost as much a shack as Stanley’s cabin, in the scheme of hospitals. Fucking small towns. Jake hated small towns. Really, he hated all towns, but small ones were the worst because you didn’t have the peace and quiet of the middle of nowhere or the anonymity of a big city. The worst of all possible worlds, but here he was, Small Town USA. Population nobody except for one crazy murderer and one hot lady cop who was already more distracting than he could handle. He was here for a reason, and he hadn’t expected to get saddled with a partner, let alone a pretty one with brains who was going to get in his way, and his head. He had to focus. On something other than how cute her ass looked when she climbed onto that motorcycle, and what it might have been like to ride her instead.

Focus, Jake. Focus.

He dropped off the keys to the undercover car with Felix at the front desk, and got waylaid by Captain Martin, steered into the bullpen to meet everyone. He endured the protocol, the handshakes, the smiles and welcomes, knowing that he’d never remember any of these people. He wouldn’t even try. He caught a glimpse of Detective Barnes, though, at her desk, and then saw her leave again without even looking at him. Probably for the best.

She wasn’t even his type. Jake went for skinny blonds with no inhibitions or self-esteem, picked them up in local bars and fucked them in the bathroom between rounds of shots. He didn’t have time for women who had an opinion. He didn’t have time for women who wanted more. He also just didn’t have much to offer those women, so he didn’t bother. Amanda Barnes was a different story altogether. Petite and curvy, with full hips and a generous bust, and piercing blue eyes beneath the sexy fall of sleek, dark brown hair in a jagged bob that cut across her chin. All soft feminine looks and then that sharp intellect. She was going to be a problem if she got too nosy. Jake did not like problems. They pissed him off. And he had never been very good at controlling his temper.

He made the rounds and introduced himself to everyone, then managed to detach from Captain Martin and head downstairs to the basement, where the medical examiner’s office was located. Just his luck, the ME was out to lunch and so was his assistant. Jake moved deeper into the office, though, until he found a computer and some filing cabinets, and then he started rummaging until he found the forms he’d need signed to see the body at the morgue. Without the ME’s signature, they might not let him into the morgue but Jake was going to give it his best shot. Most of the time, people weren’t interested in getting in his way, proper paperwork or not. If the coroner was a man, he’d intimidate him out of the way. If it was a woman, he’d seduce her out of the way. Either way he was going to get a good look and a sniff at that body, because he was already mostly sure he knew why the clerk was dead, but he still didn’t know who, or how. He hadn’t come all this way for nothing, he told himself. He was going to solve this fucking case.

He drove his rental to the hospital instead of the undercover car. While both cars were a piece of shit, at least the rental had some clutch left to it. And it was a jeep, good for off-road in the mountains, just in case. Far more practical than the department’s navy-blue Buick, but not as practical and Barnes’ motorcycle. Which Jake saw was already parked at the damn hospital, outside the rear entryway to the morgue, as he pulled into the parking lot himself. Sonovabitch. She’d beat him here. After the look she’d given him for wanting to see the body, the last place he expected her to go was the morgue. And the little bitch had come without telling him, knowing he wanted to get in to see the corpse. He didn’t like that one bit. That wreaked of suspicion and the last thing he needed was a stupid bumpkin partner gumming up the works. He parked the Jeep right next her bike and strode up the walkway, pushing open the glass door that led into the hospital, running a hand back through his hair to sweep it out of his eyes.

Small hospitals had to have a morgue, of course, but they liked to keep it as far out of sight as possible. Even without the very quiet signage proclaiming where he was, Jake would’ve known he was in a morgue immediately. Both from the smell, which had very little smell at all, really, except for the sharp odor of clean things, and because it was so damn cold inside. He bypassed the front desk altogether and the receptionist let him, assuming he was supposed to be there just from his attitude. That happened a lot, and he took full advantage of it. People didn’t want to get in his way almost as much as he didn’t want them in his way. He tipped his head up and inhaled deeply, taking the smell of his place right into his nose. He managed to parse through the clean smells towards the sweet funk of death underneath, and then something fresh and unexpected interrupted it. Summer sunlight and crisp mountain evenings, wildflowers and the subtle glance of lavender soap. Amanda.

He turned a corner and followed the scent down a corridor, through a pair of swinging double doors and there was the cadaver bank, the coroner, and Amanda Barnes looking down at a corpse pulled out of its drawer.

Both the coroner, a mousey-faced man with a thin mustache, and Amanda, looked up from the body as Jake approached.

“Nice of you to offer me a ride,” he all but sneered at Amanda.

She frowned. “Figured you could find your way on your own easy enough.”

“So I did. What do we got, doc?”

The coroner flinched a little back from the body, holding up a small, pale hand. “Ah, subject was found DOA, cause of death was loss of blood. He, er, bled out while he was…”

“While the killer skinned him alive,” Amanda finished, folding her arms beneath the full curves of her breasts. “Which was what I told you already.”

Jake ignored her, going to the slab’s edge. He looked down at the exposed figure of Mr. Stanley, all muscle and bone and skinless. It was disgusting, but it didn’t bother him. The scent of flesh never did, even the rotten kind, because at least it was natural. The state of the body bothered him, got his dander right up, and he felt his temper start to simmer in the back of his mind like a waking beast. The other scents on the body were more difficult to navigate. Some animal, some man. He couldn’t pull one scent out of the rest to identify the killer. Just a lot of muscle and blood and bone and what was left of Mr. Stanley.

“Show me the incision mark on the back,” he told the coroner, who blinked widely and looked up at him in alarm, then looked sharply at Amanda. After she gave a little nod, the coroner reached up and grasped Stanley’s shoulder in gloved hands, rolling the corpse onto its side so that Jake could see the back. There, in the same place it always was, right at the base of the spine, was the first cut the killer used to get under the skin. Jake nodded and the coroner rolled the corpse back down.

“I’m sorry, detectives, but I have a lot of work to do,” he said. “Will that be all?”

Jake stepped back from the slab and tucked his hands, curled into tight fists, into the pockets of his bomber jacket. “I’m done.”

“Me too,” Amanda said, nodding.

The coroner slid Mr. Stanley back into his fridge, clamping and locking the compartment, and before he was even finished, Amanda was walking away. She didn’t say a thing, she just started walking away, and Jake frowned and went after her, long strides eating up the distance between them quickly, until he was at her side.

“How did you get the coroner to show you the body without paperwork from the ME?” he asked.

“I’ve known Bob since I was six.” She shrugged. “He knows I’m good for paperwork.”

“And you didn’t tell me you were coming here because…”

She let out a delicate little snort. “You seem to want to do things on your own, Hunter. I was just trying to oblige.”

Her tone pissed him off. He couldn’t tell if he wanted to smack her or shove her up against the wall and kiss her, but both were problematic.

“I want to catch this murderer as much as you do,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.

“Yeah I’m sure you do.”

He couldn’t read her tone, but he was pretty sure that meant he wouldn’t like it if he could. And her body language, well, he could read that easily enough. High shoulders and eyes straight ahead, arms still crossed. She was defensive. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so cavalier with his comments earlier in Stanley’s cabin. He’d expected her to be a stupid bimbo, the usual sort of women he dealt with. That had been a mistake and he regretted it now. But she had been checking him out, he was sure enough of that. Every woman he met checked him out.

But he didn’t usually have to work a case with them, and this was messing him up. Maybe he should’ve just fucked her right away and established that right off, taking dominance in the form of sexual conquest. Then maybe he wouldn’t feel so undermined by her. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered him so much that she could undermine him at all. Most people couldn’t. She seemed naturally predisposed to ignore his looks, and he had no real charm to lean on instead.

Oh fuck this, he thought. He had shit to do.

“I’m going to go take a look at the crime scene,” he said. “I haven’t been over there yet.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Paperwork. Back at the station. Some research into this kinda thing elsewhere in the country.”

“Well then I’ll see you there.”

“Probably not.” She shouldered open the glass door and walked out, into the parking lot, heading for her bike. “I’ll only be there an hour or two, then I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off.”

“You can just do that?”

“I can, sure. You can get my cell number from dispatch if you need me.”

This woman was infuriating. Jake couldn’t tell what was pissing him off more. The idea that he’d been stuck with her as a partner and he didn’t want a damn partner, or the idea that she, his partner, wasn’t even going to help him. What kind of a cop was she? A shitty one. He thought she must have just been a shitty little girl playing at cop, and not a detective at all. Maybe she was fucking the Captain and that’s how she’d gotten her shield so young. That sort of shit never happened in big cities, or even in the really rural areas where cops had more ground to cover. That was some real small-town bullshit.

“Fine,” he said to her back, even as she was climbing onto her motorcycle. He got to his truck, slamming the door shut once he was in the driver’s seat. The sound of her motorcycle roaring and then zipping off into the distance set his teeth on edge.

Focus, Jake.

The sooner he got to the bottom of this, the sooner he could get the hell out of Prowers Bluffs, Colorado.