A Study In Shifters

by Majanka Verstraete

  I felt myself dropping into “Sherlock Holmes” mode. At least, that’s what I called it. Whenever I worked on a case, I felt my emotions shutting off until a clinical, detached version of myself remained, a person who could look at the several aspects of a case and tie them together, connect them with invisible wires until they formed a logical conclusion. This was the side of me that solved cases, a detective in the purest sense of the word, who lived for uncovering clues and connecting the dots.

  My inner jaguar wasn’t too fond of Sherlock Mode, though, since that didn’t just mean shutting off my emotions, but shutting down my jaguar side, too. She hated it when I shut her out.

  My back stiffened, and I sat up straighter, lifting my chin. “All right, seems like we should talk to this Wyatt guy then. If he’s the last person who saw Elise alive, then that makes him as suspect as Reyna Felton. How about her roommate? She never came back to her room?” I fully embraced the “Sherlock Holmes” part of my brain now, letting it do what it could do best, the wheels spinning as it progressed this information and gave every piece an appropriate place in my own mind palace.

  “Her roommate was out to visit her family, so nobody has any idea if she went back to her room or not,” Indra said. “Elise’s body was discovered by a girl named Keira Sampson the following morning. Keira went running every morning at 6 a.m. around the same route and discovered the body along that route. She does have an alibi for the night before – her roommate confirmed she was in her room all night, but we should still talk to her, figure out what she knows.”

  “What kind of shifter is she?” I asked. Just as I spoke the words, the train conductor arrived in our compartment to check our tickets. Indra and I waited awkwardly until he left before we continued our conversation. The Conclave had booked us a compartment in first class, for once. I was used to travelling second class in cramped compartments with more people than seats, but they’d gone to great lengths to keep our mission a secret this time around.

  Not as if they were putting any pressure on my shoulders or anything.

  “Keira Sampson is a horse shifter,” Indra said. “Oh, and the guy I mentioned earlier, Wyatt Johnson? He’s an otter shifter. Not exactly the kind of shifter that could’ve done this.”

  I knew several otters, and they were usually good-natured, kind-hearted, and prone to using their minds over their muscles, a tactic that resonated with my own. Even if Wyatt wanted Elise dead, he could’ve never committed the carnage I’d seen on the coroner’s pictures.

  Thinking about the pictures made my stomach protest the McDonald’s food I’d had last night.

  My jaguar chuckled at that—she didn’t really chuckle, but projected a chuckle in my mind. Sometimes, she didn’t behave much like an animal at all, but more like a weird mash-up of animal and human.

  “What exactly does the coroner’s report say?” Already feeling sick, so I might as well hear all about the gruesome details surrounding Elise’s murder now that I felt under the weather. No matter how many coroners’ reports I’d stared at, they still made me feel nauseous.

  “She died from four deep lacerations across her torso. The cuts are diagonal from the top right to the bottom left, and based on the report, claw marks. The report is clear that this couldn’t have been done by any weapon.”

  “So, it’s definitely not a knife or a harpoon or anything?”

  “Here.” Indra handed me Morant’s report. “She’s quite formal on the matter.”

  I scanned through the report, forcing myself to look at each of the pictures showcasing the long, deep cuts destroying Elise Felton’s torso. Four cuts, four claws. It fit a jaguar’s mark perfectly.

  “Any defensive wounds?” I couldn’t find mention of that in the report, but since Indra had read it in more detail, I figured she’d know.

  “No.” Indra shook her head. “Not mentioned anywhere in the report, and Morant even specifically states there were none.”

  “That’s weird.” I handed the report back to her. “When you see a jaguar or a leopard or any kind of similar animal ready to pounce on you, then you’re going to hold up your hands and protect yourself.”

  “Unless you don’t see it coming?” Indra offered.

  “But that’s not possible. Show me that picture again, the first autopsy picture.”

  I whispered the last words, afraid someone would overhear. Our compartment was relatively empty, save for an old woman who was snoring a little in one of the corner seats and a twenty-something guy with spiked hair whose headphones were blaring so loud I could hear the music. Still, I didn’t want anyone to overhear our conversation.

  Indra handed me the picture. She, too, looked a little pale when she glanced at it. I showed her the picture and traced over the cuts. “These are cuts from the front. Full frontal attack. This could only have happened if the animal was standing in front of her and pounced on her from the front. Instinct tells us to hold up our arms to protect ourselves. She would’ve done so the moment the animal attacked her. But there’s no ulnar border injury…”

  “A what now?” Indra furrowed her brow.

  A blush crept up my cheeks. My obsession for solving crime had apparently made me such an outsider that even Conclave field agents didn’t understand half of what I was talking about. “A forearm defense injury. It’s when you hold up your arms to protect your torso or face. There should be lacerations on her arms, too, or at least some other minor injury. This doesn’t make sense. You don’t just stand there and wait for an animal to pounce on you. That goes against instinct.”

  My supervisor shrugged. She didn’t seem all that convinced by my theory. “What if she was occupied? Maybe on her cell phone?”

  I shook my head, tapping into Sherlock Mode as I conjured up the scene of what could’ve happened. The entire scene appeared in my mind’s eye. A blank figure, more of a shadow than a person, played the role of Elise Felton. Another similar figure without any facial features whatsoever played her attacker. Elise Felton was typing away on her cell phone. Her murderer approached and attacked her, tried to slap away the phone but Elise, having lightning-fast leopard reflexes, held up her hands before the attacker could reach her.

  Images like this, movies with shadow puppets as I often called them, always haunted me while I was solving cases. Every scene, I played out in my mind, determining all possible outcomes and then classifying them in my mind from most probable to least likely. I was in full-on Sherlock Mode now, a creature of thought and logic, ignoring my inner animal, which was clawing at the door I’d locked her behind in my mind.

  “If you’re on your cell phone, your hands are in front of you. They’d need to be bruised then, too,” I said. “Someone would’ve had to slap them away before they could reach her torso, and that’s extremely improbable. Was she killed at the spot where Keira Thompson found her the next day?”

  “The police think so. The scene had no signs of a struggle, though, but there were also no drag marks or anything else to suggest she wasn’t killed right there.”

  “We need to investigate that scene. Was there a lot of blood on the ground on the crime scene? The autopsy report doesn’t show a lot of blood. What was the cause of death?”

  “Cardiac arrest from the cuts and trauma.”

  “So, not blood loss?” I sat up straighter and leaned forward to take another look at the coroner’s report. “Peculiar,” I mused. “Very peculiar.”

  Indra clenched her jaw, obviously annoyed. “Why? Why is it peculiar?”

  “Well, when one is attacked this viciously, you don’t expect their heart to be the first thing to give out. You’d expect the sudden and extreme loss of blood would be the cause of death.” I gulped. The copious amounts of blood reminded me of the last time I’d seen such blood loss. Amaranth.

  My jaguar hurled itself at the door in my mind, urging me to let it out. “Can you show me a picture of the crime scene?” I asked. “Or a picture of her body prior to the autopsy?”

 
Indra scanned through the folder and handed me two pictures—one showing Elise Felton’s corpse lying in some sort of meadow surrounded by trees, grass, and flowers, a scene too tranquil for the monstrous act that had been inflicted upon her. The second was a picture of her body on the mortuary slab prior to Morant beginning the autopsy. “Do you have more mortuary pictures?”

  Indra handed me a few more, showing the body from different angles.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It’s odd. Very odd. There’s barely any blood, even on her body. It looks too…” I paused, searching for the right word. “It looks too clean for the carnage that happened.”

  “Maybe she was killed somewhere else?” Indra offered, jumping to the first conclusion I’d realized several minutes ago and that anyone with expertise in the field would deduce as well.

  “There almost certainly has to be another crime scene,” I said. “And then her body must’ve been brought to the spot where Keira Sampson found her. You can’t suffer this minimal blood loss when you have cuts that deep. However…it still baffles me.”

  “What does?” Indra sighed, and I saw she had to resist the urge to roll her eyes at me. People did that a lot when I went into Sherlock Mode out loud. They grew impatient or annoyed that they couldn’t keep up with my thought processes.

  I didn’t like Indra, didn’t trust her, and didn’t want her supervising me, but I had no choice… And the best way to get through this was to work together. Although I often acted as an arrogant jerk, a fact of which I was vastly aware considering my impressive number of friends (close to zero) and how my mentors had practically hammered that fact into my skull during my classes, I knew Elise Felton deserved better than this. She deserved an investigator willing to put personal issues aside to solve her case.

  “It doesn’t make sense that the cause of death isn’t blood loss,” I told Indra. “It doesn’t make sense that someone went through all the trouble to bring her to a different location, and nobody in the entire school noticed anything or heard anything. No screams, no struggle, nothing.” I held up the picture of the crime scene and waved it in front of her. “This is too clean. It almost looks staged. None of this makes any sense, least of all that she didn’t defend herself.”

  “She could’ve been frozen in shock,” Indra offered. She seemed less convinced than I was that something about this case was off, but at least she didn’t dismiss it right away.

  “But she’s a leopard. She’s been trained to fight.” I shook my head. “Her first instinct, if not to protect herself, would be to fight. Why didn’t she shift? As a leopard, she’d have a decent chance against whatever was coming for her. As a human, she didn’t stand a chance at all.”

  Indra stayed quiet for a moment. She leaned back in her seat and looked me straight in the eye. “So, what do you think?”

  I pulled my gaze away from her and back to Elise Felton’s picture—the one with just her face, where she was still alive and breathing, a beautiful young girl who had been murdered before she could even fully become an adult.

  “I think there’s something fishy about this case,” I said while I stared into Elise Felton’s eyes, “and I intend to figure out what.”

  Chapter Six

  After a while, the train exited the underground tunnel and passed through English countryside. Blurs of green hills and grass sped by our windows. We spent the rest of the ride mostly in silence. I had to admit Indra wasn’t too bad—for a snake. She had handed me half of the folder and was browsing through the other half, rereading materials in hopes of uncovering anything new. I did the same to my half, and then we switched.

  My jaguar was still sulking that I had locked her up and pushed her away to get into Sherlock Mode, so she remained quiet, ignoring me for the rest of the train ride.

  Reading the files, I didn’t learn much more than Indra had told me already, but it pleased me to see she was rereading the file, too. I’d once had a mentor who insisted on only reading about every case once… And then he promptly forgot about ninety percent of interesting details.

  The Eurostar rolled into the station, and we got off the train. Around us, the capital was bristling with noises and people.

  “Have you been to London before?” Indra asked while we waited for a cab.

  “A few times. During the Gatherings and on a few family trips.” I didn’t want to elaborate—France was my mother’s country, Paris her city. But London had been my father’s territory, and everything about the city reminded me about him. We’d gone to London often when I was a child, but I only really remembered the last summer we’d spent there when I was six years old. The weather had been dreary, in typical English fashion, but we’d visited Hampton Court, which seemed to come straight out of a history novel. There had only been four visitors besides us, one other small group, and Dad and I dressed up as a medieval knight and lady. It had been magical that afternoon.

  Even my sulky inner jaguar couldn’t help but react at that. She pushed feelings of fondness and sadness toward me, and in my mind, I nodded back at her—I felt the same.

  “Marisol.” Indra saying my name pulled me out of the memory. A cab had pulled up in front of us. “Let’s go.”

  I nodded, put my suitcase in the trunk, and joined her in the back seat. Indra told the driver directions and closed the darkened window between us and him. Then, off we went, into the busy traffic of the metropolis.

  “So, have you?” I asked about five minutes in the cab drive.

  “Have I what?”

  “Have you been to London before?”

  “Oh, yes.” A small smile played on Indra’s lips – probably the first time I’d seen her smile. “I used to live here. I was born here, in fact. My family owns a townhouse on the outskirts of town, a grand Victorian affair. We also have a penthouse in the city, but my mother doesn’t like it. Too modern for her tastes.”

  I nodded politely. “How far away is Waynard Academy from London?”

  “Only half an hour drive once we’re out of the city, give or take a few minutes.”

  Her mention of the townhouse her family owned pushed me straight back into Sherlock Mode. What if the Feltons had a home here too? And although my mind hadn’t made out yet why that could be important, I still had to ask—it was a missing piece in my mind palace, and I wouldn’t be able to solve this puzzle with any pieces missing. “How about the Feltons? Do they have property in London?”

  “They have a flat here, that I know of. Maybe more. I can look into it, if you want, but I don’t see how it could be connected to the case.”

  “I just like to cover all tracks,” I told her. “Make sure we don’t miss any leads.”

  “Did you find something else interesting in the coroner’s report?” she asked.

  I glanced at the darkened window, hoping the cab driver didn’t have a way to listen to our conversation. He didn’t stir when we mentioned the coroner’s report, so either he didn’t, or he was a good actor. Either way, if my supposed supervisor thought it safe enough to mention the case here, then I saw no reason not to go along with it.

  Maybe I was growing a bit paranoid in my old age. The last case I solved and the giant fiasco that had followed, aka The Big Betrayal, was the reason for that. Taxi drivers didn’t usually listen in to the conversations of their passengers, and those windows were supposed to be soundproof.

  “The report didn’t show much. Only one blood type found, A-positive, which is Elise Felton’s blood type. No weapon found, but that’s not surprising, considering the weapons used are most likely claws. No DNA traces that could lead us to our killer. Dead end, mostly. Nevertheless, I would like to talk to Morant and confirm this for myself. Maybe even do my own autopsy, if she’s still set on the idea a jaguar shifter is the culprit, without considering other options.”

  “What?” Indra blinked at me. “Your own autopsy? You do that kind of thing?”

  “Well…” I took a deep breath. “I’ve done a few. Usually I just pok
e around after the coroner has finished up, see if I can see anything they missed. I don’t really take out organs or anything. I just…smell them.”

  Indra scratched her head, staying silent for a minute before she looked at me. “You smell dead organs?” She sounded on the verge of bursting out laughing. “How?”

  “It’s gross, I know, but sometimes smelling organs can give you an insight on the person’s habits. Or help you smell poison. I think most people don’t use all their senses enough, and I want to remedy that in my own work.”

  “Yeah.” Indra twisted her mouth. “People told me you were weird, but I guess I didn’t really understand how weird until now.”

  My jaguar’s ears went down and she lifted her lip, revealing long sharp teeth as she growled at the snake shifter.

  I, too, wasn’t quite sure if I ought to take that as a compliment or not. “I once found something the coroner had missed inside a dead body. She couldn’t really be blamed; it was extremely small. A broken-off little butterfly wing that matched a butterfly on a ring belonging to the deceased’s sister. It was the breaking piece of evidence. The butterfly must’ve broken off while she was stabbing her sister with a knife. A lucky break, really.”

  “Thanks for the disgusting image.”

  I shrugged. “You have to be willing to do whatever it takes for the cases you’re working on.”

  “Whatever it takes?” Indra glanced at me sideways. “Like in your last case?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then closed it again. What words existed in the English language to defend myself? Even Shakespeare couldn’t invent words good enough or a sonnet convincing enough to explain why I’d done what I’d done.

  Why I’d trusted Mannix and walked into his trap blindly. And why, when all was said and done and I knew how horrible I was, I still let him go.

  The memory came back, the one that hurt me the most, the image that would forever be burned into my mind.

  Mannix standing over Amaranth, towering over her. The lips he’d once kissed me with were pulled back in a snarl, the eyes that had once shone like a million galaxies now looked mad and deranged.