“Crime site,” he said. “We haven’t processed this. We didn’t know about this one.” He looked around. “This isn’t a make-out site, and there’s no reason for people to be walking around here. Probably wouldn’t have seen it until the guy who called us about the first body in his field came upon this by accident, too.”

“How did she know it was here?” asked the angry man who knew who I was.

“I could smell them,” I told him simply. “I’ve got a good nose—being the mate of a werewolf can bring unexpected benefits.” Both were true, just not the way I implied.

“Clay Willis, this is Mercy Hauptman. Mercy, Clay Willis,” said Tony. “Clay’s the investigator in charge. We had one body I wanted you to take a look at because it looked like it’s been eaten by something. Our guy said maybe werewolves. That kill is older than this one”—he paused and took a breath—“than these are by more than a day.”

“Could have been a werewolf,” I acknowledged reluctantly. If a werewolf had done this, he needed to be stopped yesterday. But, I thought with some relief, if it had been one of our werewolves who had taken this much prey, he’d been in the grips of some kind of frenzy, and that would have translated itself to the pack bonds. We all knew, on moon hunts, when one of us took down prey. It wasn’t one of our pack.

“I can’t tell for sure if it was werewolves from here. Maybe if I got closer.” If a werewolf had been around here, he’d taken a different route to the killing field because I couldn’t smell werewolf.

“Just tell us what you see,” Tony suggested, and raised a peremptory hand to keep the other people spread out behind us quiet.

I looked at the pile of bodies, trying to analyze what I saw rather than worry about it.

“Someone,” I began slowly, “maybe several someones—” I stopped and changed my mind. “No, it was just one killer. He had dinner, then … a play day, maybe? Opportunistic kills? Some predators, like leopards, will bring all of their prey to one place, where they can feed later.” But it didn’t really feel like that.

“Why not several someones?” Tony asked.

I tried to work that out, but my instincts said one killer, and I couldn’t tell them that. When I made a frustrated sound, Tony said, “Just from the top of your head, Mercy.”

“No sign of competition,” I said, finally, distilling what my instincts had told me. “When a pack hunts—” Someone behind me sucked in a breath.