By Hook or by Wolf

“No. I just went back outside, reported it, and came to see you.”

“Fair enough. Listen, I want to thank you for your time, officer,” I say. I peer over his shoulder and see my brothers pulling into the parking lot out front. Cody hops out of his car and strides up. Like me, he’s dedicated and focused. Trevor, ever the artist, follows closely behind. He arrives on a motorcycle and hops off before jolting up the front steps. “My brothers and I will have a look and let you know if we find anything out of place.”

After a few gentle and careful words, the officer seems to understand that we don’t really want to talk anymore. He takes the hint, gives us each a copy of his card, and turns to leave.

“Wait!” I call out suddenly. He turns, confused. “Did you turn off the security system when you came in today?” I ask. The officer blushes and nods.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he says. “I forgot to reset the alarm when I came to see you.”

“How did you get the code to turn it off?” I ask. The man seems surprised at the question, but I feel like it’s a legitimate one. Our security system is a pretty good one.

“The security company shut it off remotely for me,” he says. Then he turns once more and heads to his car. He climbs in, takes a breath, and then leaves. Apparently, investigating gallery break-ins isn’t this guy’s idea of a good time. That makes two of us. It’s a bit curious that there was only one police officer today, but at the end of the day, it’s a closed building. Nobody comes to the gallery anymore. Nobody’s been here in years. It’s not exactly top priority for the police to spend a lot of time here. Besides, I doubt they have any idea how much the remaining art inside is actually worth. If they knew, the place would be crawling with cops. My mother made quite the show of selling off many of the items after Dad passed away. Most people probably assume the building is completely empty and devoid of anything valuable. If they didn’t, it would have been robbed a long time ago. Once the officer is out of sight, Trevor turns to me.

“What happened?” He asks. His eyes narrow and he, too, sniffs the air. As wolf shifters, scent is one of our biggest assets. We use it constantly and in ways we probably shouldn’t. Smell lets us determine where someone is located, where they came from, what they’re feeling, and what their emotional state is like. Just last week I had a client who was in the building next to mine. I could smell him from my office because I knew his scent.

More importantly, I could scent how agitated he was.

When I arrived for our meeting, I could tell that he’d recently come from the bakery and was feeling pissed off. That enabled me to figure out how to speak to him a way that would help him calm down and relax. In the end, we managed to have a wonderful talk and he shared more of his feelings with me than he’s probably even shared with his therapist. Using my scenting abilities in this way, I was able to connect with this client in a manner that was mutually beneficial.

Now, I’m using my scenting abilities to figure out what the hell happened here.

“A police officer came to my office,” I tell my brothers. “They had a report of a break-in.”

“That’s really weird,” Trevor points out. “This place has been closed for, what? Three years now?”

“Two years and ten months,” I say.

Since the day our father died.

None of us had planned to close the gallery when he passed away. It had just sort of worked out that way. The art gallery had been his passion project. It had been something he loved more than anything else in the world. Then he died and none of us knew what to do with the gallery. None of us was in a place where we could emotionally handle running the gallery. Isn’t that just the littlest bit sad? If my dad could see the gallery now, he’d be devastated, but I can’t do much about that.

“So why now?” Cody asks. He shakes his head, looking around. “Why rob us now? And it doesn’t look like they took anything. Is there even anything missing?”

“Time to find out,” I say. We walk toward the ballroom and follow the scent of vanilla through the room. We can tell exactly where our mystery-thief stopped, what she looked at, and what made her pause.

“Seems like she likes art,” Trevor murmurs. “She stopped enough.”

Her scent really is all over the room. It makes it very difficult to determine exactly where she moved and what she was looking for.

“She must have been searching for something,” I say. “If she was just an ordinary thief, she could have taken any of this stuff. It would have fetched a pretty price.”

“And there are a lot of small things,” Cody adds. “So even without an accomplice, she could have gotten out of the room easily.”

“Are we sure it’s a woman?” Trevor says, looking around. “You know, it could have been a man.”

Cody and I both look at our brother like he’s an idiot. We’re triplets, but there’s still a definitely order of bossiness that falls into our family. Me? I’m your typical, run-of-the-mill, oldest child. I’m only two minutes older than Cody, but I’m a full twenty minutes older than Trevor. That kid did not want to be born.

“It smells like a woman,” I say.

I can’t quite pinpoint how I can tell. It’s just that women have a very distinct scent. They’re feminine, yeah, but it’s more than that. They’re soft. Sweet. Their smell is a little bit gentler than their male counterparts.

“Plus,” Cody squats down and considers the footprints in the dust. “Look at these. They’re tiny. Narrow. No man has feet that small.”

He’s right, but it didn’t doesn’t explain what our little thief was after.

“Come on,” I say to my brothers. We follow her footsteps up the ballroom stairs. Along with the cop’s footprints, there are two distinct sets of feminine prints: one coming, one going. If I had to guess, we’ll find the point of entry for our little thief if we follow them. She entered through the back of the building somewhere before moving to the front. What she did in the lobby, though, I have no idea. We’ll start from the beginning.

We locate the room where she entered. The window still flutters open.