Free The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) by Michael Angel

them to walk, let alone run when danger presented itself. What you saw there was a distal fracture or a full-on dislocation. That’s a very serious and ultimately fatal injury for that kind of animal. Sure as heck it wasn’t a peaceful death.”
    “There’s more.”
    “Go on, then. This is getting interesting.” She sat back in her chair, listening attentively.
    “I’m not one-hundred percent sure of the time of death,” I confessed, “but the corpse was extremely fresh. This stag’s nose and lips were an abnormal shade of blue-black, and oil-slick shiny. As a matter of fact, I’d call it a shoe-polish kind of color.”
    “Sure doesn’t sound natural to me.” Shelly steepled her fingers in thought for a moment. “We did see deer in the clinic from time to time…but a broken leg, with no sign of gunshot or fall-related trauma? That could mean a seizure. Brain dysfunction caused by parasites or the rabies virus, most likely. However, whenever we saw changes in the eye, lip, or nose tissues of a deer, it always meant that something was way out of balance in the animal’s body chemistry just prior to death.”
    I all but pounced on that answer. “Could that mean poison?”
    “It’s possible.” Shelly held up a hand before I went on. “It’s only one of many possibilities. To be sure, you’d have to get a tissue sample, maybe a blood sample to run through the mass spectrometer. Still, the whole idea of poison is just out-and-out ridiculous.”
    “Why?”
    “Because people who want to get rid of deer don’t go around slipping arsenic into their lettuce. Depending on the state, you could be looking at a hefty fine from the Fish and Game Department if you tried to poison a sport animal. ‘Sides, if you want deer out of your garden, at least back in Texas, you just get the boys to shoot them and be done with it.”
    “That does make sense,” I admitted.
    Shelly took one last swig from the soup container, and then tossed the empty into the trash next to mine. “But you got me tarred with more than a speck of curiosity now, Dayna. What makes this particular stag so important?”
    “Because it’s starting to make me wonder about something.”
    “That being?”
    I gave her a hard look.
    “It’s making me question whether a good friend of mine is being railroaded into doing something that’s going to kill him.”
     

Chapter Nine

     
    My car’s tires let out a screech as I took the exit off of Los Feliz Boulevard and up towards my house. Mind no longer awhirl, but more convinced than ever than I had not one, but two appointments that I wasn’t looking forward to. I drove up the driveway next to the sad, brown excuse of a lawn that surrounded my place and pulled into the garage.
    I forced myself to take a deep breath as I watched the automatic door roll down into place. Had to remind myself that I was a damned crime scene analyst . I was supposed to make judgments based on hard evidence and nothing else.
    And yet…
    I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with how everything was turning out in Andeluvia since the Protector of the Forest had died. I got out and headed to my room so I could swap out the business attire for some comfortable dress slacks, a new top, and some flatter shoes. If I had to speak to King Fitzwilliam, I wasn’t going to fool him into thinking that I was a well-heeled noblewoman. As a matter of fact, I got away with breaking a lot of the dress codes in the kingdom, simply because my clothes screamed ‘woman from another world’. And yes, the flats rocked no one’s world. But I wasn’t about to go for a spin in my pumps, not when a lot of Andeluvia paved things in uneven cobblestone.
    It took just a couple of minutes for me to get ready. I took hold of Galen’s medallion and made ready to use the second of its four charges. Then thought about the long, drafty room where I’d first met Duke Kajari and the assorted nobility of what had been Benedict’s