Shifters: A Samantha Reece Mystery Book 1 by Jaime Johnesee (libby ebook reader txt) 📕

the shower. Enjoy that, too. Next time, I damn well hope you’ll have some respect for others on the job."

"Dang, Grace, way to lay down the law!" one of her two suited employees said.

"I sure as hell hope neither of you ever treated anyone like that,” Grace said sternly.

"No way, you'd kill us." The other fellow nodded his head and pulled off his respirator.

They were away from the body and there was no need to wear a breather out here, aside from the horrible stench of death and decay.

"Damn straight. Nobody should be talked to like that, unless they aren't showing the proper respect to the deceased or other victims. Then, have at them." Grace was angrier than I had ever seen her.

Well, almost. There was this time a woman ran over Grace's cat and had the gall to blame Grace for allowing her cat outside. Grace came in to work red-faced and ready to shoot someone.

Gerry took her down to the firing range and requalified her to carry. He said it would be a great time to do that. She agreed. Three hours later she came up from the range in the basement with her hands coated in gunpowder residue and a faint smile on her face.

"So, Grisly is losing it. There is no evidence he drugged her to make the cutting easier. But how did he keep her quiet? There is a very big difference between happy sex yells and the screams of someone being torn into pieces." I couldn't figure out how Grisly kept the neighbors from complaining.

"We found a small bit of duct tape. It's possible he had her mouth taped shut," one of the two lab guys offered.

"If he did, then he has really gone off book. These killings started because he felt like he was saving the world from the evil shifters. What if he has begun to enjoy the killing?" I was worried.

If he started to relish murder then things were going to get a whole lot messier. He'd probably stop leaving clues because he would decide he didn't want to be caught. My heart sank. We needed to find this guy before he killed someone else.

"I hope we find the answers you need, Sam. Speaking of which, back to the grid, boys. I know you've walked it three times already, but you never know what you might find on the fourth go around. See you later, Sam." They raised the respirators onto their heads and continued sweeping the room for evidence.

The problem was they'd get a ton of it. Grace and her crew would spend weeks narrowing down what they pulled from that place. So many cheating spouses and prostitutes would be pulled down to the station and interviewed, and somewhere in that list, marked as an unknown, would be Grisly. He will have left something else behind aside from the bloody handprint, he always did.

This murder had been even more frenzied than the last. There was blood spatter on the ceiling on one side of the bed. I was guessing he had hit the victim, knocked her unconscious, and dragged her to the tub where he proceeded to tear her into bits.

I took a deep breath to track his scent around the room while staying out of the way of Grace's team and the coroner's. He'd been in human form in the bedroom area and shifted once he had her in the tub. The scent of shifter was strong in there. Almost as strong as the smell of blood and viscera. The spicy tang wafted through the sour smells of death and violence and painted a picture for me I could have lived without.

Based on the smells, I would say he knocked her silly, dragged her to the tub, and then started in on her. There was a second scent of shifter, but it was faint. I think she’d tried to shift, so she could fight him. It probably only fueled his rage. I looked at the pile of ground meat, bone fragments, and hair that had once been a person and shuddered.

That could be me. I'm a shifter, and I'm a woman, and he could come after me that way. The only thing I had going for me that his other vics didn't was simply that I wasn't a whore. This case was hitting home and making me feel very uncomfortable.

I also found it bizarre that Ben had just shown up out of the blue while all this was going on. The scent I attributed as Grisly's wasn't like Ben's or even the vics Grisly had offed. It was Grisly's alone and I'd know him the second I smelled him. It wasn't much, but it was something.

I decided to speak with the motel manager to see if there was anything he could tell me about the guy who had rented the room. I figured that James and Josh had probably already questioned him, but decided it was now my turn to give it a go. Maybe I could come up with something they hadn't. Maybe I could shake a memory loose that would help us.

I had to.

We were losing ground and now that he'd killed two in a week there'd be no going back for him. He was officially escalating. This was bad news. Horrible news for shifter prostitutes and the shifter community, at large. At any time he could decide that hookers weren’t enough and start going after high risk victims like soccer moms and little kids.

I'm not trying to insinuate that a soccer mom's life is worth more than a prostitute's, I'm just saying that hookers are living life in a danger zone, professionally speaking, while most soccer moms don't. It's just a sad fact. I was angry that Grisly had chosen these women to shred; they’d had a hard enough life.

Most of them had been handed a bum rap from the get go. Add in a drug or alcohol addiction (or worse, a child they couldn't afford)