“I’m glad you’re a wolf and can take care of this guy.” Roxie narrowed her eyes. “I expect you will find the MP and charge him with attempted armed robbery.”
“If I can prove he tried to rob you, yes.” Nicole couldn’t promise more than that. She knew that without any real proof, she couldn’t do anything. “If you would, tell me everything that happened that you can recall.”
“He was wearing a black ski mask and ski jacket, army boots, and camo pants. If I hadn’t been able to smell his scent, I wouldn’t have recognized him as the MP who had pulled me over on post for an expired safety-inspection sticker earlier in the day. He must have seen my coin books sitting on the seat beside me. I had just had them appraised and had a buyer for them. I’ve had them for years, and I was tired of trying to safeguard them. Neither of my brothers nor my sister was interested in having them. Collecting coins was something my dad and I used to do when I was a kid.”
Nicole understood how Roxie felt about that. Moving with the service made it difficult to safeguard valuables and everything else a service member needed to “hand-carry” with them to each new assignment.
“Do you think the MP learned where you lived after seeing your driver’s license?”
“That’s what I assume. He could also have looked it up from my license tag. He was professional, very pleasant, and obviously clean-cut, being in the military. He gave me a warning to have the inspection done within the week and told me to have a nice day. I didn’t have any negative feelings about him when we talked.”
“Then he came to your apartment and…?”
“No longer in uniform and wearing a ski mask, he told me to hand over the coin collection. He had intense blue eyes that reminded me of the MP I’d met earlier in the day, but his scent was what really confirmed it. I was horrified to think one of our own military personnel, who is supposed to uphold the law, was breaking it. I couldn’t recall his name. I never can remember names when I hear them, so that wasn’t surprising. He might not have even given it to me. I was kind of rattled when I learned I had an expired safety-inspection sticker and thought I was going to be fined. Not to mention, any trouble with the military police could end with a call to the commander’s office and a stern lecture from my commander.”
“That’s so true.”
“He had dark-brown hair, military cut, and was clean shaven.”
Nicole wrote everything down.
“He needs to be stopped. If he can get away with trying to rob me, what will he do next?”
“But he didn’t get the coins from you?” That concerned Nicole, because the sergeant might try to break into Roxie’s apartment or accost her at some other time.
“No. I slammed the door in his face and locked it.”
Nicole’s lips parted. The lieutenant had spunk, which Nicole admired.
“Don’t tell me I should have just handed the coins over. They were in the apartment, and if I’d let him inside, it could have been far worse for me. When I slammed the door in his face, it automatically locked and he didn’t have time to react. I think I really surprised him with my reaction. They’re my damn coins, and I’ve safeguarded them since I was a kid. He couldn’t very well have kicked in the door or shot at it, or he would have caused a scene and left evidence behind. I think he had assumed it would be a quick grab-and-run scenario.
“Actually, I don’t think he thought it out all that well. He didn’t go to any of the cars parked where I could see them from my windows though. He must have parked out of sight of the apartment. I called the local civilian police, but they said they couldn’t do anything about it because nothing had been stolen and there were no witnesses who had seen the alleged crime. They had nothing to go on. I knew he was the MP I’d seen, but I didn’t want to tell the people at his workplace, or he’d learn I knew he’d been the one who tried to rob me. Without proof, it would be my word against an MP. I couldn’t do anything. I called your office instead, hoping someone there could help.”
“I see your dilemma but also the civilian police’s problem with the case. Are the coins in a safe place?”
“I had a buyer for them, and he came and picked them up right after the MP pulled his attempted burglary. The coins are gone, but the MP won’t know that. What are you going to do about him?”
“You don’t know his name?”
“No. Um, come inside. He had ahold of my driver’s license when he was checking me out. You can smell his scent from that. I did capture a picture of him on my cell phone, but it’s just a bit of a blur because he was moving so fast, and it only shows his profile.”
“Okay, thanks.” Unfortunately, learning the guy’s scent wouldn’t help Nicole bring him to justice. Roxie was right though. He needed to be held accountable for his actions.
What if this was just the beginning of his life of crime? Or what if it wasn’t the first time he’d committed an offense? He knew military police procedures, which would give him an edge. Nicole looked at the photo, and other than the clothes he was wearing—the same as the description Roxie had given her—she couldn’t tell anything about him except that he appeared to be tall like the lieutenant had said. He was still wearing the hoodie with the hood up so Nicole couldn’t see his face.
“Did you notice if he took off the ski mask when he was headed away from your apartment?”
“I think he must have, or he would have looked suspicious. I thought his right pocket was bulging a bit when I didn’t think it had been before. Since he still had his hoodie up, I couldn’t see for sure.” Roxie pointed to the hood. “But I didn’t actually see him remove the ski mask. I ran for my phone to capture a shot of him, but when I returned to the window, he was nearly out of sight.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to your neighbors and check the security cameras monitoring the apartment complex.” Nicole took a whiff of the driver’s license and had Roxie send her the photo she’d taken of the man. After that, Nicole left and talked to as many of Roxie’s neighbors as she could. She also checked for video surveillance around the complex but found nothing that could corroborate Roxie’s story. Nicole believed every word the lieutenant had told her, but without any hard evidence, she couldn’t prove anything.
Nicole did go to the military police department to see if she could locate the police sergeant by scent. She was working on another case, an attempted rape, and she needed to see the officer who had been called to the scene first, which gave her a good excuse to drop by. That was when she got a good look at the blue-eyed cop, sitting back at his desk, drinking coffee and joking with another MP. She was careful not to be seen, and when he left the station, she noted the nameplate on the sergeant’s desk. Oscar Kovac. Human and bad news, if Roxie’s story was all true.
For an entire year, Nicole kept trying to prove Roxie’s story was true, but she had no concrete evidence, and the MP didn’t commit any other crime that she was aware of.
Roxie soon left the service, and Nicole was dismayed that her first case involving a wolf victim could never be put to rest.
Chapter 1
Silver Town, Colorado
Nicole paused to watch a man dressed in a gray ski jacket, hat, pants, and snow boots struggling to start a snowblower to clear a walkway to the parking lot from the Timberline Ski Lodge. She was conducting surveillance for her investigation into a fraudulent life insurance claim, but that was less interesting than the man before her.
What intrigued her was that he was the same hunky guy who’d been walking a Saint Bernard in the snow earlier this morning. The dog had taken chase after a rabbit and dragged the man off on a wild jaunt, with him hollering, “Rosco, heel!” Which hadn’t had any effect whatsoever. Rosco had been hell-bent on catching the rabbit, and nothing would keep him from his mission. That was the last she’d seen of the dog and the man, who had disappeared from sight through the snow-laden trees. She wondered if the guy had ever reined
the dog in or if the dog had finally given up on his own.
Now the lupus garou seemed to be having trouble with his snowblower. She could relate to both instances, having raised a yellow Labrador retriever who had a mind of her own when Nicole took her on walks or runs. The dog moved much faster than Nicole could manage. Unless, of course, she had been in her wolf form. But she hadn’t taken the dog for runs while she was. No telling where Dusty would have ended up.
As to machines, Nicole had a bark mulcher that she’d always had to ask her neighbor to start for her. She knew all about uncooperative outdoor equipment.
She shouldn’t watch the guy. But since he was also a hunky wolf, he really had her attention.
Nicole knew she should have continued on her way, but she was mesmerized by his antics. He poked at the push-button start with a gloved finger. Nothing happened. After three more pokes, he stared at the pull cord and finally pulled it out. Voilà, the snowblower started. He smiled.
She smiled. He must have been new on the job. Maybe a handyman at the lodge. She would have offered to help him, but she didn’t know a thing about snowblowers.
The snow blades were throwing the snow up into his face, and he was frantically attempting to adjust the blades by pushing buttons and levers on both the right and left sides of the snowblower. Nicole stifled the urge to chuckle. She glanced around to see if anyone else was watching him, but everyone was hurrying to the ski slopes, eager to ski, and taking a different stomped-on path that also needed to be cleared of fresh snow .
Finally, the guy was blowing the snow off the path, creating an even higher snowbank than had been there. Once he finished, it would be like walking down a narrow path with castle walls of snow on either side. Nicole was about to continue on her way, the show over, when the wind switched and the snow blew straight into his face, covering him from his hat to his boots. This time, she couldn’t help but chuckle. He was so busy fighting with the snowblower—and the equipment was so noisy—that he didn’t notice her. Thankfully.
He unzipped his parka and shook out the snow. Not once did he curse, and he kept going, despite all the trouble he was having. She admired him for it. He zipped his parka back up and began to move the snowblower again. His boots must have hit a patch of ice and he slipped on it, landing on his backside.
Nicole laughed. Scolding herself for not being nicer, she headed in his direction to help him up. Before she could get close, he was back on his feet and clearing the path without any trouble. She chuckled again, imagining herself in his boots, and headed down the other path of trampled snow.
She entered the warm, toasty lodge, where a fire was crackling in the double-sided gas fireplace in the lobby. The mischievous Saint Bernard she’d seen running off earlier was sound asleep next to it on a big, soft dog bed covered in brown velvet-like material, no doubt dreaming of chasing rabbits. Her thoughts again shifted to Larry Thornton, the human working as her partner on this case. Larry was suffering from high-altitude sickness, and Nicole thought he needed to go to the medical clinic in Silver Town to get checked out.
When she reached their room, she set his bag aside and pulled her ski boots out of the closet. She planned to wear them to make it look like she was skiing while she observed her suspects. Larry made his way out of the bathroom wearing gray pajamas. Nicole studied her sick partner. Even his skin looked gray as he stumbled back to bed. He insisted he was fine, though he had a major headache, was short of breath, and had thrown up in the bathroom twice already this morning. He said he would be up and out of bed in no time. According to him, he just needed to rest a little more while adjusting to the lower oxygen pressure at the higher altitude.
“Larry, you really need to go to the clinic.” Nicole sat down on her made-up bed, the patchwork quilt featuring a block each of moose, bears, and wolves, surrounded by green and black plaid squares. She loved the lodge. It made her feel as though she was in a cabin in the woods. She pulled off her snow boots and slipped into her ski boots.
Photographic prints on the wall featured wolves running in a pack on the snowy slopes. She wondered if they were lupus garous or real wolves. The slopes looked like the ones the ski lodge was connected to. She noticed the signature of the photographer was Jake Silver and thought of the name of the town: Silver Town. Was he related to its founders? She’d initially thought it was called Silver Town because of the nearby silver mine that was now closed.
“Every time I go skiing at a higher elevation, I have this condition,” Larry finally said. “This is all I do. Just rest. It’s always worked for me before when I went skiing.”
Nicole finished buckling her boots. “So you’ve said.” But she wondered if he’d felt this bad before.
Larry worked for another private investigator firm, while Nicole had her own agency. They had been hired by the same insurance company to learn if a policyholder had faked his own death so that his beneficiary would receive the five-million-dollar payout. What she couldn’t fathom was how people could get such high-dollar life insurance policies when they didn’t earn that much normally on the job. And wouldn’t you know, Oscar Kovac was the policyholder—the former army MP who had tried to steal from Lieutenant Roxie Wolff. Nicole had jumped on the case, wanting to prove he was alive and a fraud in the worst way since she hadn’t been able to prove he’d tried to commit armed robbery against Roxie.
He had left the service two years after Roxie did. Through Nicole’s sleuthing, she discovered he was now going by the name Rhys, a Welsh variant of the name Reese, pronounced the same way.
She tucked her ski goggles into her jacket pocket so she could wear them while she was outside watching for Rhys and his partner in crime, his cousin, William Kovac.
“What had you been working on before you were assigned to this case?” her partner asked.
“I’d been working on a case involving a burned-down steak restaurant that appeared highly suspicious. I found accelerant on the kitchen floor, the place was closed for business, and the wife had just received it in a divorce settlement. The whole situation screamed arson. I was eager to finish the case and prove the wife guilty. It appeared she had wanted some quick cash and didn’t want the headache of running the business or trying to sell it in that small town, which could have been impossible.” Nicole shrugged. “I had all the evidence that supported arson, but then the insurance company asked me to take this new case right away because of my military and investigative background. Somebody else took over my findings on the arson case.”
“Bummer. I don’t think I would have given up the other job.”
“The insurance company did pay me for most of the work. This one pays even more because if Rhys and his cousin got away with this, it would mean even more of a payout to the cousin.”
“Thankfully, I was between jobs. You be careful. They wouldn’t have hired us to work together if the last PI the insurance company hired to search for Rhys hadn’t vanished without a trace.”
“That’s what I was told.” Nicole was glad that the company hadn’t tried to hide the truth from them. Because the police couldn’t find any sign of foul play in the private investigator’s disappearance and he was known to go off the grid on cases, the police hadn’t delved into his disappearance any further.
Even the guy’s girlfriend was unconcerned about him disappearing, saying he did it all the time. Nicole would have worried the guy was seeing some other woman!
But this time, the company had hired Nicole and a male PI she didn’t know so they could pretend to be a couple while keeping the suspects under surveillance. Safety in numbers. Except now her “marriage partner” wasn’t going to be any help at all. Not in his condition. She felt bad for him and worried too. As much as she wanted to prove that Rhys was the policyholder and very much alive, she couldn’t risk Larry’s life if he insisted on doing the job but was too sick to do it.
“I can run you down to the clini
c in Silver Town. It won’t take any time at all, and they’ll make sure you’re fine.” Nicole’s wolf genetics meant she could heal faster, and she never had high-altitude sickness. Though she was from Denver, and Larry was from Kansas City, so the elevation, and the fact he was human, worked against him.
“I’ll be okay. Really. Go look for Rhys and his cousin, and I’ll join you after I get a bit of rest. Just…don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
Since the insurance company had been concerned about the missing insurance investigator, they had hired PIs who both had a military background: Larry, a former sniper in the army, and Nicole, who was trained in combat and police techniques. As an agent with the CID, she had supervised or conducted investigations into felony-level crimes against army personnel and property, drug sales and use, rape, robberies, and all kinds of other crime. She’d even had to look into a case of treason, the selling of classified documents to the highest bidder.
She hadn’t ever had a case of terrorism, but it had always been a possibility. She’d had one case of a faked death, a soldier not wanting to be in the army any longer, which was another reason she had been asked to work on this case. She’d found him hanging out with his girlfriend in another state. And she’d solved three civilian cases where the dead person turned out to be very much alive but involved in life insurance payout schemes.
“All right. I’ll check on you in a bit. Call me if you start feeling worse. I mean it.”
He smiled a little at her. “I will.”
She didn’t trust that he would. She knew he didn’t want her to have to go after Rhys and William on her own. And he really did want to work with her on the case. “Okay, I’ll check on you after a while.” Then she texted her mom. Her mom and dad had a stationery store and gift shop in Denver. She always let them know where she was on a mission so they wouldn’t worry.
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