“There are more than one?” She envisioned a mass grave of thousands of bodies.

  He cast her a small smile. “Only one in the field. For now. Get your feet wet. See how it goes. But I’m telling you right now, I have every faith that you can give us a good idea of what the man looked like, a hell of a lot better than what we have now, or I wouldn’t have asked you to do this. I want to see what you come up with after you have a chance to do it,” her boss said by way of dismissal.

  “All right. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  She left her boss’s office and saw Adam coming into the bureau. He solved cases involving anything from robberies to kidnappings to carjackings, and he was always needing her to do a witness sketch for him. “I hear you need me to see a dead body.”

  “Yeah, sorry about this, Sierra. I know how you feel about it.” Adam was dressed in a dark suit and was already wearing a raincoat.

  “It’s not your fault that Willy decided to retire.” On the way out, she grabbed her raincoat and the camera bag containing the bureau’s camera Willy had used. “What is this case about?”

  “This one involved a carjacking. The driver crashed into a tree and flew out the front windshield, and his face was shredded badly. Sorry, Sierra. Truly. I wish Willy had handled this one before he left. We don’t have any video on the carjacker and no way to identify him, so we really need your help with this.”

  “Okay, I’ll do my best. The boss said you told him last night that I returned home from my vacation early.”

  Adam smiled down at Sierra. “He did, did he? He told me last night that he heard you had returned. You know him. He seems to know everything about everyone on the force before we even do.”

  “True.”

  Adam glanced down at her high heels and raised his brows. “You might want to wear some more sensible shoes from now on if you’re going to be doing this kind of work.”

  “I was wearing sensible shoes when I came into work this morning. How was I to know my job description was going to change so drastically? The boss called me in to do a sketch for a witness of yours. Besides, not all sketch artists go to the crime scene. I could do this from photos.”

  He shook his head. “I know you. You’re too particular. I’m sure you would want to see the body after you saw the photos because they didn’t capture the remains the way you wanted them to. Thanks for helping us with this. We’re doing DNA testing and checking into dental records, but all that takes time. He might not have either on file anywhere. If you can make a sketch of his facial features, maybe we can find someone out there who recognizes him, and we’ll catch a break.” He unlocked his SUV’s doors and Sierra climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I might not be able to do this. I’ve never done a real, live postmortem sketch before.”

  “You’ll be able to do it. I know you will. You’ve taken the training. You can do it.” He glanced at her as he pulled out of the parking lot. “By the way, have you ever seen a dead body?”

  “Only on TV.”

  He cleared his throat. “Okay. If you get sick, move away from the crime scene.”

  “Thank you. Good to know.”

  He pointed to the glove box. She opened it and found a baggie.

  “Use that to barf in if you need to.”

  Oh, just great. She really didn’t want to do this now. But if she didn’t actually see the person and get the pictures that she thought she needed, she might not be able to capture the actual person’s features well enough to make the sketch recognizable to family, coworkers, and friends.

  She pulled the baggie out and set it on the console, then closed the glove box.

  “Are you free this weekend?”

  She glanced at him. “I am. We’re boating on Sunday, right?” Was he interested in a date? She wasn’t really planning on dating anyone for a while. Sure, dating someone new could be an ego booster and make her feel that someone really cared for her after what she’d gone through. It could be fun. But she wasn’t sure she was ready for that emotionally. “I’m just staying home and chilling otherwise.”

  “Yeah, we are boating on Sunday. The rest of the time, we could have more work for you then.”

  She frowned at Adam. “The boss said there was only one body.”

  “Today. At the crime scene. That’s not including the three in the morgue already.”

  She’d had an idea this day wasn’t going to go well as soon as the chief called her into the office so early this morning.

  Instinctively, she knew to bring some humor to the table when she was helping a witness recall everything she or he could about an assailant. A little levity could go a long way in helping the witness relax and recount details of his experience—or vent, whatever was necessary to help in the cognitive process. Often a witness would blank out the assailant’s face in their mind, terrified of the ordeal they’d gone through. They often wouldn’t remember seeing anything that would help. She’d just ask things like Was he smiling? And suddenly the witness had a description of his mouth. Was he frowning, eyes narrowed? Then she had the color of the eyes, the size of the eyes, the expression.

  Sierra wasn’t sure she could manage when the victim was dead.

  * * *

  Adam knew Sierra was a terrific artist, but he wasn’t sure she would have the stomach to view dead bodies to do her work. Maybe she could work just from photos if being at the scene didn’t work out for her.

  Sketches didn’t always mean a victim was identified or that a criminal was either. It could be hit or miss. That didn’t mean the sketch didn’t look like the person. Other factors came into account, like no one who knew the person seeing the bulletins or news or the person not being local. Or someone knew and wasn’t saying.

  Sierra had a higher success rate than Willy at getting a better picture of the assailant while doing witness sketches, and Adam thought it was because she was so good at putting the witness at ease. He’d really enjoyed watching her work while he took notes about the description the witness gave.

  She was easy to get along with and he liked working with her, so he didn’t want to see her fail and quit the job. He didn’t want to see anyone else take her place either.

  Today, Sierra was wearing a black raincoat over a navy-blue jacket and skirt meant more for office work. He glanced at her shapely legs, her high heels way too spiked for the kind of terrain she would have to manage. He agreed it didn’t matter what she wore when she was doing witness sketches. She was often sitting down at a desk, drawing the sketch. Most of the time, they brought in the witness or had the witness come to see her. Sometimes she would go to the scene of the crime to speak to the witness, but it normally wasn’t in a muddy setting.

  With all the traipsing through the grass in the rain where the body of the carjacker had landed when he went through the windshield, the area would be muddy. Adam hoped she didn’t slip and fall, but he would be right beside her every step of the way to catch her if she did.

  He drove her out to the site, and she glanced down at her sandals in his Hummer that she’d left there when he’d picked her up during the storm last night. “Sorry about leaving my sandals in your car.”

  He smiled. “Tori gave me a hard time about them when we went to a crime scene earlier this morning. She said here she’d considered asking me out, but if she was going to find a she-wolf’s clothes in my car, that was the end of that.”

  Sierra laughed. “She didn’t.”

  “Yeah, she has a great sense of humor.”

  “What if she wasn’t kidding?”

  “I told her why they were in the SUV. She said she suspected as much.”

  “Oh, I bet. Hmm, as long as she doesn’t think there’s something going on between the two of us.”

  “Only police business.”

  “So is she dating anyone in the pack yet?”

  “She went out with the coroner. Just once though. She told Leidolf to spread the word to the bachelor males that she wants to get settled first and meet everyone. It’s a lot to get used to—working with me, working a new job, working with a new boss. She took the job and started right away, but she has to move her household goods into her house this weekend.”

  “Does she need some help with any of it?” Sierra asked.

  “She has professional movers helping.”

  Sierra let out her breath. “Right, but does she need some help? When I moved to Portland, even with professional movers, I had so many boxes to unpack it would have taken me forever. The movers just set the boxes and furniture in the rooms where I wanted things. After that, it was up to me to do what I needed to with the contents. It was really nice when my brother and others of the pack helped me to empty boxes and sort through things and break down boxes, then haul them away.”

  “Uh, yeah, Josh and I were busy on a case that weekend. I remember that.” He’d regretted he hadn’t been able to help her back then and get to know her a little better. Then about a week later, he learned she had an out-of-state boyfriend, so that had put her off-limits with him and the other bachelor males of the pack.

  “I can help her if we don’t have bodies to sketch all weekend. Oh shoot, if I’m going to be full-time, I won’t have as much free time to do things I like to do. I won’t be able to teach art to the kids in the pack on Tuesday and Thursday starting next week either. I was still supposed to be gone all this week, so I wasn’t scheduled.”

  “You could do some classes on the weekend though, if you don’t have to work.” He’d forgotten that she was teaching art to the kids in the pack. Though next Monday, he was looking forward to her adult art class he was taking. “As to Tori, we can ask her when we get back to the office if she would like our help, if she’s there.”

  “Sure. We could do it on Saturday. It would be a nice way to visit with her and get to know her while helping her out.”

  Adam agreed.

  When they arrived at the scene of the crash site, several police vehicles were there and some of the police officers glanced in their direction and waved. They looked a little surprised to see Sierra out there. Especially when she got out of the vehicle in her high heels.

  She hadn’t grabbed the barf bag, so Adam did, just in case.

  Being the wolf that he was, Adam wanted to carry Sierra through the muddy grass to where the man’s body rested. But he figured Sierra would want to sock him if he did that to her in front of all the police officers there. Instead, he stayed close to her in the event she fell. He hadn’t expected her to get stuck in the mud after they had barely left the roadway.

  She grabbed his arm to steady herself and pull her heel out of the mud. The rain was coming down hard, but she had her hood up over her head and didn’t seem fazed by it at all. Four more steps and her heel was stuck in the mud again. This time, she grabbed his arm and yanked off one heel, then the other.

  He smiled down at her. She released him, handed her heels to him, and squished through the mud in her bare feet. The police officers were all smiling at him and at her. This was a side of her none of them had seen before.

  The rain let up and was now just a light sprinkle.

  When she reached the man’s body, Sierra turned suddenly, and he knew from the way her eyes were round and she was trying to keep it together that she was about to vomit. He quickly pulled the barf bag out of his raincoat pocket, handed it to her, and then seized her arm and moved her away from the site.

  “Sorry, Sierra. I probably should have given you pictures of him instead. You could have tried to reconstruct his features that way for the first time.”

  Sierra threw up in the bag, then handed him the used barf bag, pulled a tissue out of her pocket, and wiped her eyes and mouth. “No, no, I need to do this. You know me. I’m thorough, if nothing else.”

  He glanced down at her muddy heels clutched in one of his hands and the barf bag in the other.

  She held out the used tissue, and he offered the bag so she could stuff it in. Then she took hold of his arm and made her way back through the mud to the man’s body.

  “Who found him?” she asked, releasing Adam and pulling out the camera from the camera bag.

  He hadn’t expected to bring her to the site and end up carrying her muddy high heels and barfed-in barf bag. He cleared his throat. “The police were following him in a high-speed chase, and then he lost control of the stolen car.”

  “So it was an accident.”

  “Right.”

  “And he did it alone.” She took several pictures from different angles, her feet squishing in the mud. Her toenails had been painted a pretty red, but now every time she lifted her small feet, her toes were coated in the slick mud.

  “He did.”

  “Was the owner of the vehicle hurt?” She snapped another couple of shots.

  “Yeah, the carjacker pistol-whipped the owner, who is in the hospital now with a concussion. He’ll survive but he was injured badly.”

  “Then he’ll be glad to know this guy won’t be hurting anyone else like that.”

  “I know we are.”

  “Did you or anyone else know Willy planned to retire?” Sierra eyed Adam, watching his reaction.

  That was the thing about wolves. They were good at recognizing if another was telling the truth, but he was surprised she would question him about that now.

  Adam didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking about the conversation he’d had with their boss last night. “Willy had talked to me about it a number of times. But no one thought he would really do it. I mean, he has been saying this for a couple of years. I think it was the combination of working the last case—”

  Her brows rose.

  “He was tired of it. And his new grandson was just born in New Jersey and he wanted to be there. Another daughter is having a child in two months, and he wanted to help out and get to know his grandchildren. That’s all.”

  “The last case?” She finished taking the pictures she wanted, then tucked the camera away in the bag, slung the strap over her shoulder, and seized his arm to make her way back to his vehicle.

  “It wasn’t a bad case, but he was ready to do something else with his life. He’s sixty-five. He’s been doing this for nearly forty years. He was past wanting to retire. And then here you are, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and doing a great job.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And throwing up my breakfast after seeing the remains.”

  “Everyone does it the first time they see a dead body. That isn’t just on TV.”

  She smiled and looked up at him. “Did you do that the first time you saw one?”

  “Uh, no. Maybe not everyone. But a lot do.” He handed the barf bag to a police officer.

  “Evidence, sir?” the officer asked, frowning.

  “No. Just dispose of it when you have a chance, will you?” Adam didn’t want to take it with them in the SUV, not with their heightened sense of smell. “About Willy, I didn’t know he was going to leave like that. But the boss did call me last night and told me to tell you, to convince you that you should take his place in the full-time position.”

  She narrowed her eyes at Adam. “You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

  Adam let out his breath. “You’d just broken up with Richard. I was afraid you would be worrying about taking the job on top of that last night, and you didn’t need the extra concern. I told the boss how you felt comfortable with the prior arrangement you’d had with Willy. After the night you’d had, I didn’t feel calling you with this was appropriate.”

  “You were worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep last night?”

  “Something like that.” He unlocked his vehicle’s doors and glanced at her.

  She was still eyeing him, but he couldn’t read her expression. “Thanks, I guess.”

  He waited for her to climb into the passenger seat, then handed her heels to her. He shut her door for her and climbed into the driver’s side.

  “What do you think about drawing a sketch of the guy’s face?” He started the Hummer.

  “I can do it.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t know if it will be as accurate as the sketches that I do from eyewitness reports,” she warned him.

  He glanced down at her muddy heels in her hand. “You’ll do your best. That’s all we can ever do. Do you want me to drop by your place so you can get cleaned up? And grab a different pair of shoes?”

  Her feet were caked with mud, and she had mud splatters all the way up her legs.

  She hesitated, then said, “Sure, thanks. I could try and clean up in the ladies’ room, but I would make such a mess.” She glanced down at his muddy shoes. “You can clean up there too. I’m afraid I’ve made a mess in your car.”

  “It’s inevitable when we’re doing work like this. Think nothing of it.” He was just glad to be working with her no matter what the circumstances were.

  Chapter 9

  Twenty minutes later, Sierra and Adam were at her home and she was hoping her place was halfway straightened up after last night’s wild adventure. If she’d known she was going to have company again, she would have done more. He would think she never cleaned up the place.

  With the sandals she’d left in his SUV overnight in hand, she wiped some of the mud on her bare feet off on the grass before she entered the house. Adam did the same with his shoes on the grass, and then he did it again on her doormat. But then he just pulled off his shoes and walked into her house in his stocking feet.

  At least the mud left on her feet was dry. She hung her raincoat on a coat tree, and he pulled off his raincoat and did the same.