Red Sole Clues by Liliana Hart

Author:Liliana Hart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Anthology, Fiction
Publisher: NLA Digital LLC
Published: 2016-03-10T19:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

SEEING VANESSA’S ANGUISHED expression, Jack tried to explain. “I’ll do what I can, but I’m no wolf,” he said, but he should have saved his breath, because he could tell by her expression that she’d heard “Yes, I’ll find your dad right away.” It was Hope Springs, after all.

He bent down toward the chair and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply, but mostly got the candy-cane-scented evidence of the hordes of little kids who’d been there to whisper secret wishes into Santa’s ear. When he knelt down next to the blood pooled on the floor, though, he caught a pungent scent that he followed to an artificial Christmas tree propped up in the corner of the room next to a table with a menorah on it.

Someone had been standing behind the tree—recently.

“Wolf,” he told the sheriff, who’d followed him over. “Stood here for a while, too. Behind this tree, in the corner, where he wouldn’t be seen by people in the room.”

“He?” Vanessa said. “It was a male wolf?”

Jack nodded. “Male wolf shifter.”

He headed back to Santa’s chair and followed the scent of the wounded man to a side door, but the sheriff clearly could have done that, since the blood trail led there, too.

“The blood stops in the alley, but there’s plenty of tire tracks in the snow. People cut through that alley all the time. Either Ray got in a car on his own—”

“Or somebody put him in a car,” Jack completed the thought.

“Can you follow his scent even if he’s in a car?” Vanessa asked, her dark eyes huge in her pale face.

He shook his head. “No, but I’ll go outside anyway, just in case.”

But there was nothing. The faint scent of blood vanished a couple of feet outside the door, where tire tracks from many different kinds of cars were stamped into the snow. Vanessa, who’d come out with him, read the answer in his face, and she caught her breath in a hitching gasp. “Nothing at all?”

“I’m sorry. He got in a car, whether voluntarily or forced, and I have no way to know which one. If the sheriff finds a witness who saw something, that’s probably your best bet.”

She nodded sharply and then turned around and went back inside. Jack followed her, although there was nothing else he could do.

She made a beeline for the sheriff, who was talking into his radio. “What do we do now, Chuck?”

The sheriff ended his communication and rubbed his forehead. “I need to go talk to some people. My deputies are canvassing the area to see if we have any witnesses.”

“Do you have wolves around here, Sheriff… uh, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your last name?” Jack asked the sheriff, who clearly understood that he didn’t mean the four-legged kind of wolves.

He figured he didn’t know the man well enough to call him Chuck.

“McConnell. And we have one pack not too far away, near the Idaho border. The Bear Lake pack. Rogues wander in and out of the area, though, according to our Division of Wildlife guy,” the sheriff said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.