For a moment, no one spoke. Then the boss had to go and ruin my good mood. “Does anyone see any flaws in her logic?”

Glancing around boldly, I silently dared them each to speak. I’d ruined the curve in my col ege logic class with a perfect score on the final, and I was pretty confident in my deductions. So it came as a complete slap in the face when Ethan spoke up.

“Sure, no one called to report the body in New Orleans, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been reported. For al we know, the kil er was on his way to a pay phone when Parker and Holden found the body.”

“That’s certainly possible,” Daddy said as I stuck my tongue out at Ethan, well aware of how immature I was being. My brother reciprocated, as I’d known he would. “Anyone else?”

Vic cleared his throat. “Well, this isn’t a flaw in Faythe’s logic, since she mentioned it, but there’s always the possibility that one or both of them were kil ed somewhere else, then moved.”

“Yes, but without a forensics lab, we have no way of knowing, so I’m going to suggest we concentrate on what we do know. Or what we can smell.” My father’s eyes came to rest on me, then flicked to Marc, who now stood behind me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders.

Marc’s chin brushed the back of my head. “I’m guessing you want us to get up close and personal with Harper’s trace fragrances.”

The Alpha nodded.

“I can smell him fine from here, thanks,” I said, doing my best not to wrinkle my nose. While a human probably would have found the stench of rotten garbage offensive, for us it was virtually unbearable. At least in human form. As cats, we were more accustomed to nature’s less-pleasant scents, most of which were a normal part of life in the wild.

But things were different on two legs.

My father frowned, and his face hardened, but before I could make things any worse for myself, Marc gave me a little shove and fol owed me toward the body.

Kneeling by Harper’s shoulder, I turned to look up at my father, who was wearing his Alpha face. Again. “I assume you want to know if he has the same weird smel as the last one.”

Daddy nodded. “And anything else of interest that you notice.”

Following Marc’s lead, I leaned closer to the body, struggling to swallow the gorge rising in the back of my throat. I breathed in deeply through my nose, and felt my stomach churn. Trying to ignore the nausea, I clamped a hand over my mouth and took another deep breath.

Behind me, Ethan snickered, and I made a mental note to accidental y kick him somewhere sensitive next time we sparred.

Marc looked at me with his eyebrows raised, and I nodded to tell him I was okay. I leaned down one more time. This time I concentrated on classifying the smel s to distract myself from my urge to vomit. To my surprise, it worked. I detected several variations on the theme of rotting vegetables, and three or four kinds of moldy meat. Cooked meat. Harper hadn’t been dead long enough to start smel ing on his own, mostly because he’d spent the majority of the day in an air-conditioned van.

After the food, I identified several biological scents, probably from emptied bathroom trash cans. And under all that was the smell. The one I was looking for. It was faint, and I would never have noticed it beneath the other, stronger smells if I hadn’t already known what to look for. But it was definitely there.

I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised in question. He nodded. He smelled it, too. The murders were connected.

Turning back to the body, I closed my eyes in concentration. Bracing my hands on the floor to the left of the corpse—I was not going to end a perfectly good day by falling face-first onto a dead man—I followed my nose, moving to the right as the smell grew faintly stronger. When it began to fade again, I moved back to my left until my face hovered—eyes still closed—over the point at which the scent was most noticeable, though it was faint even then.

I opened my eyes. I was inches from Harper’s broken neck. The smel was strongest in the one place we were sure the killer had touched him, and that could only mean one thing: I was smelling the killer’s scent.

Standing, I turned to face my father. “It’s the same as the scent on Moore. It’s definitely a foreign cat, but it’s… more, somehow.” Ethan snickered at my unintentional pun, but I ignored him. “Different. And it’s strongest on his neck.”

“It’s on both his hands, too,” Marc said, rising to stand next to me.

Instead of replying, our Alpha knelt beside the body, heedless of the dirt floor, and closed his eyes as he inhaled deeply just above the corpse’s neck. He exhaled, then inhaled again. His forehead wrinkled and his eyes opened. He stood and pulled a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “I don’t smell it. I smell rot, and his personal scent, and cheap cologne, but nothing else.” He frowned deeply, cleaning his lenses out of habit, and his next words were softer than he usually spoke. “I guess this old nose isn’t quite what it used to be.”

Parker came forward then, and Owen followed him. They knelt side by side, inhaling with almost comic expressions of concentration. Several seconds later, they stood, shaking their heads in unison. The scent was too faint, and completely overwhelmed by the stench of garbage.

The others each took a turn, but none of them could detect the scent.

Still, it was almost funny to watch the parade of beefy men take their turns kneeling on the dusty barn floor to sniff the refuse-strewn corpse.

And by the time Vic stood, chestnut waves flopping as he shook his head in disappointment, I’d decided that they couldn’t smell the scent because, having never smelled it before, they didn’t real y know what they were looking for. Marc and I had probably only been able to pinpoint it because we’d gotten a good whiff of it earlier on Bradley Moore.