Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

The two of them had watched the other sheriff’s officers come. Had witnessed the coroner arriving in her boxy van. And when it had come time for the black body bag to be removed from the house on a gurney, she and Daniel had gotten to their feet.

It had been incomprehensible that Rick Marsh had been alive just that morning, in the veil. At that fence line. With a bomb in a duffel bag.

But some things shouldn’t be easy to make sense of.

Sheriff Eastwind was the only other one who had stayed the whole time. And during one of the lulls, he had taken their statements. Around noontime, she and Daniel had finally left, with him dropping her off at her house before he’d gone into the WSP for a shower.

They hadn’t said much. He seemed to understand that she needed space.

Not like it had helped. At all.

Back at her house, she had eaten some cereal and discovered she was ravenously hungry. An old box of Near East’s rice pilaf had solved that problem in a calorically dense, nutritionally deficient kind of way. And as she’d sat down to eat, she’d thought of Daniel and his health kick …

Coming back to the present, she looked around at the deep green of the conifers and the gray of the road and the bright yellow dotted line that cleaved the pavement in two. Overhead, the mostly cloudless sky was a resplendent blue, and the glinting yellow sunshine was proof that no matter how long and hard the winter, the spring always came.

As her eyes started to tear up again, she wiped at them.

The good news was that she was coming up to the WSP’s driveway, and she could focus on opening the mailbox and taking out whatever was inside. Pulling the black door down, she reached in for the bundle of letters and pouches—and the normalcy of picking up the daily delivery felt all wrong.

She cradled the modest load to her chest as she walked down to the main building.

In the parking area, Candy’s car and Daniel’s Harley were side by side.

Rick’s Jeep would never be under that tree again.

Lydia didn’t go to the front of the building. She took the mail to the clinic entrance. It was locked, so she used her key, and she opened the door slowly. Motion-activated ceiling lights came on, flickering to life and illuminating the otherwise dark area. Everything was so neat, so clean, the stainless steel counters gleaming, the cupboards closed up, the glass fronts of the cabinets showing rows of medications, trackers, equipment, supplies. Randomly, she pulled open a few drawers and doors. There was nothing that she didn’t expect, just all sorts of sterile syringes in unopened boxes, bandages in their packaging, and plastic-covered surgical instruments in trays.

With a sense of dread, she put the mail down and turned to Rick’s office.

Walking over to the open door, she flipped the wall switch on. His desk and chair were mismatched and worn, but everything was spotless and organized, his old computer monitor and keyboard off to one side, his landline phone beside them, the office lamp over in the corner. There were no papers out. No folders. And when she opened one of the drawers …

“What the hell?” she muttered as she went to the next one down.

They were all empty. Not even a stray pen, a pad of paper, or a document clip.

As she straightened from the desk, she looked around. There were no personal effects anymore: The pictures of him on various hikes around the country and bike rides were gone. His extra jacket. His WSP branded fleece. His dog calendar. His Hydro Flask and his nylon insulated lunch sack.

Just as with his house, he’d intended to never come back here. He’d cleared the space for the next person to hold the position.

Rick had been on a suicidal mission with that bomb.

Putting her head in her hands, she took a shuddering breath. Then she cleared her throat and went to the exam room the wolf had been in.

The crate was empty, the monitoring equipment put away, the space disinfected and ready for its next use.

With her heart in her throat, she went to a door that was mostly Plexiglas. On the far side of the foggy insert, she could see the transitional pen that was used for recovering wolves about to be re-released into the preserve.

Lydia’s wolf was across the way, up on his feet and looking directly at her. By the doorjamb, a clipboard with a log listed notes in Rick’s handwriting: When the last feeding had occurred and what had been offered and eaten; how much water had been taken; observations on how alert the animal was.

She ran her fingertips over the printing. Then she touched the Bic pen that was on a string.