At this point, he would have cheerfully talked all day to a telemarketer just to rescue himself from boredom.
Luckily for him, he didn’t have to. The caller was Detective Wilson Wynette, a buddy of Colby’s and a local cop who sometimes fed them cases down the pipeline. Wilson liked to play dumb, but he was sharp enough to have realized a long time ago that there was something different about Colby’s office. He didn’t know the truth about shifters. But he knew that his local Marshals dealt with what he called “weird shit.”
“And this,” Wilson said, “is weird shit.”
“What kind of weird shit?”
“We have a woman named Aria Clarke who was picnicking out at the nature preserve.”
Colby felt like there were two puzzle pieces in his head that were trying to fit themselves together. “That name sounds familiar.”
“She’s local. Maybe you met her.”
“Maybe,” Colby said. But for
some reason he didn’t think so. “Sorry, keep going.”
“Ms. Clarke brought her parents and her eight-year-old daughter along, but they stayed in the clearing while she went off into the woods to take some pictures.”
The puzzle pieces came together with an almost audible snap.
“Aria Clarke the nature photographer?”
There was the sound of rustling papers. “Um, yeah, I guess that’s what she does for a living. Acton, how do you know the names of nature photographers? If you’re that much of a nerd, why are we even friends?”
“I like nature,” Colby said stubbornly. “She’s an incredible photographer. Keep going.”
“Okay, incredible photographer Aria Clarke goes off to take some incredible pictures, and when she’s on her way back to meet up with her family again, she runs into a naked man who tries to smash her camera.”
Yeah, Colby guessed that qualified as weird shit.
“Why?”
“No clue. Maybe he thought she’d snapped a full-frontal pic of him, and he doesn’t have a lot to be proud of in that department. Anyway, he threatened her, she clocked him on the head with her camera—”
“I knew I liked her.”
“—and ran. We showed Ms. Clarke some possible matches based on her description, and she IDed the dude as trouble with a capital T. Eli Hebbert, a federal fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. This guy crashes into towns and takes what he wants from them, and he leaves a lot of bodies behind him.”
“Does he kill just as part of the robbery, or does he do it on its own?”
“Mostly the former. He’s straightforward, I’ll give him that: come in, bang-bang, grab, out the door again. But he tends to get a girlfriend—he likes them sweet, blonde, and a little silly. One of them died.”
Colby had been on the job a long time, and he’d heard about a lot of ugly things, but guys hurting the people who had trusted them always struck him hard.
He managed to unclench his jaw. “How?”
“Believe it or not, apparently the medical examiner there couldn’t tell. Podunk little town—the M.E. is probably the part-time barber too. Anyway, we’re lucky Ms. Clarke ran into him before he could do any of that here. He’s all yours. Enjoy tracking down the bare-assed backwoods wonder. I hope the numbnuts gets a splinter in his dick.”
Colby winced. “Ouch. But agreed. Can you ask the Clarkes to hang out at the station for another hour or so? I can come over and do an in-person interview before I head out to chase Hebbert.”
“Sure. They’re pretty rattled. I think they’d be happy to have an excuse to stay anywhere they already know Hebbert isn’t. I’ll tell them you’re on the way.”
Colby thanked him and hung up.
“Fugitive hunt, boss,” he said to Martin. “This one’s mine, right?”
They’d been joking about the basketball, but there really were certain genetic advantages to different shifter types. They all recognized that and gave way when necessary.