Barking at the Moon by Nene Adams

Author:Nene Adams [Adams, Nene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay & Lesbian
ISBN: 9781594933912
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2013-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

By the following afternoon, Dempsey was still a no-show at the church, but Annalee continued to pin her hopes on the surveillance teams. Leaving Noah in charge of the office, she took a patrol car out, intending to go over to the morgue and see about the deformed victim from the day before. Not in the mood for company, she drove alone.

As predicted, her sleep had been troubled by a nightmare, but not of birds or crows. Instead, she had seen a pale wolfskin nailed flat to her back door. The head was attached to the pelt. The wolf’s golden eyes glittered at her, awake and aware, filled with a loneliness and longing that clawed at her heart. Mine. She had woken up wiping tears from her cheeks, her chest aching, her throat raw, wishing Lunella Skinner was there…which in the light of day was seven kinds of crazy, no matter how miserable she’d felt at oh-hell-thirty in the morning.

After checking into the morgue, she made the long awful walk down the corridor. She found Betty Vernon in the main autopsy room, standing by a stainless steel sink and knocking back a shot of whiskey. A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels stood near her elbow.

The sight of the medical examiner drinking hard liquor during the day was so shocking, Annalee halted in her tracks to gape.

Betty lowered the glass and grimaced at her. “Join me?” she asked.

“The hell? When did you start drinking on the job?” Annalee demanded, wondering if this was the first time Betty had indulged on duty—if so, where had the bottle come from?—or just the first time she’d caught her with the evidence in hand.

“Since I got that in my morgue.” Betty pointed at the first autopsy table, where the dead wolf was strapped down on its back, its stiffened legs in the air. Flaps of hairy flesh and the rib cage were peeled back to expose the animal’s body cavity. The grotesquely deformed female victim lay on the second table, her naked body looking pitiful under the harsh fluorescent lights. She, too, had already been opened for a postmortem examination.

Annalee reached out and took the empty glass from Betty, hoping the woman wouldn’t start chug-a-lugging whiskey straight out of the bottle. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or do I have to stand here and guess?”

“That thing shouldn’t exist.” Betty indicated the dead wolf a second time. “Its organs are…the only way I can describe it is ‘wrong.’” She pronounced the last word faintly, on an exhalation of breath. She added more strongly, “You have no idea, Sheriff. No idea at all.”

“Just tell me.”

Betty sighed. “There are medical details you won’t understand, but the gastrointestinal tract, the muscles of the bladder neck…let’s say that if I didn’t know better, if I wasn’t certain I could detect any tampering with the corpse, I’d swear this was a prank.”

“How so?”

“Bottom line and without resorting to a lot of jargon, that thing may grossly resemble a wolf of the Canis lupus variety, but inside, it’s more Homo sapiens than canine.

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