Page 11 of The Bones in the Yard

And she’d been… really rotten.

It had been a long time since poor Ward had actually lost his lunch at a crime scene, but that streak had just been ruined. To be fair, he wasn’t even remotely the only one. I have a stomach of steel and kept my partially-digested food where it was supposed to be, but I definitely didn’t feel like eating dinner, I can tell you that.

So not only was I still exhausted when I woke up, but my blood sugar was low from having skipped dinner rather than yarf it up on a boat or in the car on the way home. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a lot of groceries, so that was first on my list of shit to get done today.

Also on my list was to try to get Mays to ID the bone and give an estimate about how old it was. I also needed confirmation that the body was in fact Rosemary Carlisle and that she’d died about a year ago from some kind of stab wound from the Hampton Police, which, given last night’s only barely concealed hostility, probably meant I’d have to call Dan Maza to gethimto call for me.

That was one of the many things that irritated me about not being a cop anymore.

To be fair, thegoodthings about not being a cop anymore were a wee bit more important. My coworkers not trying to kill me was pretty high up there. I also got to work with people I genuinely liked—and I don’t like the vast majority of people—and when a case made me stay up until almost five-thirty in the morning, I could sleep the fuck in and not go in to work until noon. Especially since I had dropped off my sleepy and extremely cranky boss at five am, which is when he’d mumbled that I didn’t have to bother coming in at all.

But leaving me alone in my apartment all day before my now-rescheduled date with Taavi was asking for a lot of anxiety and overthinking, so after I woke up at eleven feeling vaguely like a sentient being, I was going to start trying to chase down some of the many dangling threads of this case.

Beginning with IDing an animal bone and confirming the identity of the body they’d pulled out of the swamp at a quarter to two in the morning.

Right after coffee and a shower. Coffee first.

I almost tripped over Pet on the way to the kitchen.

Pet is my cat.

No, I’m not enough of a heartless bastard to call my cat Pet just because she’s a literal pet. That’s just a bonus.

I called her Pet because she’s a cow-cat—black and white splotches like a Holstein, with white down the middle of her face. And Pet the Cow is a world-famous Holstein. You know—Pet Milk.

Yeah, yeah, my Wisconsin is showing.

And yes, before you ask, I got Pet exactly two weeks after Taavi moved into his own apartment. And yes, she sleeps on my bed, with her furry little ass up against my legs.

She’s not even remotely as big as Taavi in dog form. She’s a cat, for fuck’s sake. She weighs like ten pounds.

But she is warm, soft, purrs like a mad thing, and kneads my thighs while I watch the Food Network.

And I spoil her rotten by feeding her tuna every Sunday while I make myself brunch. It wasn’t Sunday, but Pet’s a cat. She’s not smart enough to have counted days of the week, so every time I stagger to the kitchen in the mornings she’s hopeful that there’s a can of tuna in it for her.

The coffee finished brewing, and I poured myself a cup liberally dosed with cinnamon creamer while my cat rubbed herself around and between my feet, meowing.

“Sorry, fuzzbutt,” I told her, taking a sip of my blessed, blessed coffee. “Sunday’s not for a couple more days.”

Pet let out another meow, rubbing her black-and-white head against my shin.

“I know, cat-brain. But not today.”

4

Taaviand I were supposed to go to one of those trendy places downtown, one of the ones where everybody always posts social media pictures of themselves with froofy drinks and ‘small plates’ of food where half the time I couldn’t even identify the food. Because that’s what you were supposed to do on a date. Right?

Fuck if I knew.

That’s how goddamn long it had been since I’d gone on an honest-to-God date.

Up until six months ago, my job had been my life. And then I quit because I’d had it up to here with the bullshit politics, threats against my life and safety, and sideways glances and mutters every other day.

So when I had the time to actually have a life, I had… just not had one. I told myself it was because I was adjusting to not being a cop anymore, or because I was too old for the dating scene, or because I didn’t need a life.

It definitely wasn’t because I couldn’t think about anyone besides a certain Xoloitzcuintli shifter who, it turns out, is also an alarmingly attractive man.

Not at all.

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