Wicked Cowboy Wolf

by Kait Ballenger

  “So they hire a woman?” Blake couldn’t help how that sounded after he spoke the words. If a man couldn’t deal with these two men, how could a woman? In retrospect, he should have said it a little differently.

  Nicole cast him an annoyed look.

  Roxie and Landon were smiling as if they knew Blake had blown it. Kayla was frowning at him.

  “I’m highly trained, have a double black belt in jujitsu, was weapons-trained in the military, and keep up my training. I’m trained in hand-to-hand combat and more. Usually when we’re working an investigation, we have to do a lot of computer searches, following the trail the suspect left behind, looking for them on social media sites, and conducting surveillance. So it’s not all about trying to take the men down but about proving they’ve committed a crime. As a private investigator, I’ve proven three prior cases of pseudocide and saved the insurance companies some hefty payouts. I’m good at what I do.”

  “Uh, yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “Since there are two subjects involved in this, it’s better for us to work as a couple, in case the men split up. Though I’ve found that they’re sticking together. Once Larry and I got the case, we were shadowing the cousin first, since he’d received the payout, knowing if he suddenly was chumming it up with a male who fit Oscar’s description, it could be him. I really thought they wouldn’t see each other for a good long while after getting so much money. For the first two months, they didn’t have any contact. Then they must have thought they were out of the woods. Rhys and William seem to be really good friends, not just business partners. Maybe they assumed receiving the payout meant they were in the clear. Even after a payout, investigators will continue to search for the truth if no body is found. Or if foul play might have been involved.”

  “Wait, if they got rid of the other investigator, wouldn’t these men be worried another investigator would come after them?” Blake asked.

  “That’s why the cousin left Florida and they ended up here. They were trying to hide their tracks.”

  “And you knew this how?” Blake asked.

  “Facebook. I found the cousin’s name, to begin with. Not Oscar’s, because he had already changed his name. Rhys was a friend of William’s on his Facebook account. William had over a thousand followers, so I created a fake Facebook persona and friended several of his friends until it looked like we had a lot of mutual friends.”

  “Sneaky. I’ve got to see this fake Facebook page of yours,” Roxie said, sounding intrigued.

  Nicole showed it to her. “Don’t you go and do the same thing.”

  Blake smiled at his sister. Nicole seemed to have her pegged.

  Roxie rolled her eyes. “Your picture looks like you are fun-loving. Single. But it doesn’t look like you, exactly. Black hair? Bobbed?”

  “Wig.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been hit up a thousand times,” Roxie said, while Blake, Landon, and Kayla took a look at Nicole’s profile and Blake thought the same thing.

  “I have. Anyway, once we had lots of the same friends, I friended William and he accepted my friend request. Then it was a matter of going through all the friends on his list and checking out their profiles. I narrowed it down to a guy who had just started his account a couple of months earlier. No earlier posts than that.” Nicole showed them some of the comments Rhys and William had made.

  “Which means he just suddenly came into existence,” Blake said.

  “Right. Luckily, no one seemed to think anything of the fact that I had started my Facebook account even more recently than that. Rhys mentioned kayaking with William. And that raised a red flag, since that’s how Oscar supposedly died. The two of them made comments that appeared to be inside jokes about ways to die a dramatic death while kayaking or white-water rafting.

  “Then I began researching what I could on Rhys. He had a new driver’s license in Little Rock, Arkansas. It looked like he had moved there after the other PI disappeared in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Then Rhys’s posts were all about skiing and the places that he’d been. He didn’t mention anything about being an MP in the army. He didn’t share his birth date, but his driver’s license says he was born a month and two years later than his original birth date. A lot of times, these guys will be so arrogant, thinking they’ve pulled one over on the system, that they’ll post where they’re living or vacationing.”

  “‘Skiing at the ski resort in Silver Town, Colorado.’” Blake shook his head while reading more of the comments William and Rhys had made.

  “Yep. Since it’s winter, I figure that’s why he’s not kayaking, but come spring or summer?” Nicole said.

  “Hopefully, he’ll be in prison before that happens,” Roxie said.

  “I agree. If I get the evidence I need and have him arrested before he gets away again.”

  “His Facebook profile picture is of a guy skiing, ski goggles, ski mask, ski hat, so you can’t tell who he really is,” Blake said, looking at the masked figure wearing gray and black ski pants and jacket. “Some of William’s friends might know Oscar, a.k.a. Rhys.”

  “Right. But they might not know that Rhys is Oscar. Just that he’s a good friend of William. Some of the men listed as William’s friends were ones who had been at a party the night Oscar’s parents died in their home due to a fire. A lot of discussion about what had happened that night was posted on William’s page. Nothing incriminating though. Just lots of discussion how awful it was that they had died and William and Oscar sharing a bunch of wonderful childhood memories.”

  “You think Oscar had something to do with their deaths?” Blake asked.

  “Possibly.”

  “Do you think the discussion about how they were upset over his parents’ deaths was contrived?” Blake skimmed backward to see earlier messages.

  “Faked wonderful childhood memories? Could be to show anyone who might investigate William and his cousin’s social networking sites that Oscar was the adoring son and his cousin was their loving nephew.”

  Nicole was looking over Blake’s shoulder, and he loved the way her body was pressed against his. He was trying to concentrate solely on the business at hand, but she was definitely making that difficult. Not that he wanted to give that intimacy up.

  Roxie was looking over his other shoulder at the comments.

  Blake found the pictures of the kayaking trip where Oscar supposedly had drowned, the overturned red kayak wedged between rocks, the throw rope in the water, the men freeing the kayak, turning it over, and then realizing Oscar wasn’t pinned beneath it. “Someone was taking pictures.”

  Blake looked at pictures of Oscar’s funeral that a friend had taken. William was wiping away tears in a couple of them. “Man, these guys are con artists.”

  “Yeah, they are,” Nicole agreed.

  Blake looked much further back on William’s page and found pictures of him and Oscar kayaking at the same location. “Okay, so this was two weeks earlier.”

  “The staging operation, I figured,” Nicole said.

  “Sure looks like it to me.” Blake could really get into this sleuthing business.

  “You wouldn’t think they’d post all this stuff,” Roxie said. “It’s a dead giveaway.”

  “I think it’s all a cover-up for when they actually did the deed. If you look further back, William posted about Oscar’s younger brother Eli’s drowning—which was real. There are pictures of Eli’s funeral on William’s page, but if you read the conversation between William and his cousin, when he was still Oscar and shortly after Eli’s death, you’ll see a lot of anger concerning the parents being mad at Oscar for allowing his brother to die.”

  “Wait, the younger brother died in a drowning too?” Blake asked.

  “Yep.”

  Blake went back to see the comments on William’s page, referring to the brother drowning earlie
r on.

  Oscar: If my mom hadn’t forced me to take Eli to the damn lake, none of this would have happened.

  William: I agree, man. You shouldn’t have had to be your brother’s keeper. Hell, Tyson nearly broke my nose when he hit me with the ball. The ass. My eyes were swollen, and I could barely see! Let alone watch out for your brother. Besides, Eli was being a nuisance like usual and wanting to tag along. Then he sulked off when we wouldn’t include him in the game of toss.

  Oscar: Yeah. It wasn’t my fault.

  That made Blake want to see how many times before that they had written about Eli tagging along with them. There were no pictures of Oscar and his brother, just of Oscar and William. There was no indication that Blake could see of Oscar complaining to William about taking care of his younger brother. Blake mentioned that to Nicole.

  “Yeah, I had the same thought when I was looking at earlier comments on William’s Facebook page, figuring if the parents were also forcing him to take Eli with them, he would have said something about it.”

  “What about Eli’s Facebook account?”

  “There is none that I could find.”

  Blake handed Nicole’s phone back to her. “Great detective work.”

  “Thank you. You’re not bad yourself.”

  “A PI in the making.”

  Nicole smiled at him.

  “All right, so I’ve got video security monitoring duty.” Roxie sounded resigned to her assignment, though Blake knew she would do a good job of it. “Give me your phone number so I can contact you.”

  Nicole exchanged her phone number with everyone. “Roxie, you’ll need to wear a disguise whenever you’re roaming the lodge when Rhys is around.”

  Roxie smiled a little evilly, Blake thought. “Okay, what else can I do?” she asked.

  “I need his fingerprints or a sample of his DNA after he has eaten off a utensil or had something to drink. The military has been collecting DNA from soldiers since 1992, in addition to dental records and fingerprints, so if we can catch a break, we should be able to prove beyond a doubt that he is still very much alive. But he’s been really careful about not leaving any evidence lying around. And I haven’t wanted to go into his room and get caught.”

  “Housekeeping service? One of us could pose as a housekeeper,” Blake offered.

  “They’ve got a Do Not Disturb sign posted all the time on their doorknob. We don’t want to have someone slip in there and get caught. That might tip Rhys off so that I wouldn’t be able to find them again,” Nicole said.

  “It sounds to me like he is being somewhat cautious about anyone learning he’s here.” Blake couldn’t imagine going through such a farce and getting a big payout and then being really careless about it. Mentioning on Facebook where Rhys was going to be skiing was plain dumb. Then again, he thought no one had discovered his alias.

  “Right. People often go back to their old habits. Not only that, but again, there’s the arrogance factor. That helps us as investigators to catch them.”

  Because Nicole was in their territory and her partner was out of commission, Blake thought they needed to contact Darien and Lelandi, their pack leaders, and get the whole pack involved in watching Nicole and her partner’s backs. Even though the lupus garous usually didn’t eliminate human criminals in their territory, instead turning them over to other authorities in the location where the crime had been committed, they protected their own kind. Well, humans, too, if they needed protection from the bad guys.

  Kayla motioned to the office door. “Nice meeting you, Nicole. I’ve got to get to work on a marketing plan, and I hope you get this resolved soon. But I’ll help in any way that I can. I’m going to the house to unpack first though.”

  “Thanks, Kayla.”

  Kayla left the office and shut the door.

  Landon finally spoke up. “Okay, the problem is that Roxie could be in danger if Rhys eliminated the other investigator, since she’s already thwarted him once. If he sees her, he could feel compelled to murder her to keep her from revealing that he’d been here.”

  “What do we do about it?” Roxie asked. “Believe me, I’d rather do anything than hide out here. Or at the house.”

  “I say eliminate him. He’s already dead. The insurance money is paid out. Let him get his just deserts that way,” Landon said.

  Blake knew his brother was only half-serious. He wouldn’t mind doing it himself, since the sergeant had threatened their sister with a gun, but he knew they couldn’t. The guy was human, and the pack would have to be involved in any decisions of that magnitude.

  “I’d go along with that,” Roxie said, “but I’m sure we don’t have that option, unless it’s in self-defense.”

  “We could arrange that.” Landon smiled.

  “I’m going to help Nicole with this,” Blake said.

  “We’ll all help,” Landon said. “We need to end this guy’s need to commit crimes.”

  “Since you are in charge of this, what do we do next?” Blake asked Nicole. He and his siblings were lodge operators, not criminal investigators. She would have to guide them in what they could do to help her.

  “I need to go to my room to check on my partner’s condition. I’m sorry about not being able to charge Oscar the first time,” Nicole said to Roxie.

  “I understand,” Roxie said. “I don’t like it, but at least he never got the coins and he never bothered me again before I left the service.”

  “Okay, and thanks for helping with the case. Just let us know if you see him.” Nicole started to leave the office.

  “I’m going with you,” Blake said. “I’m her boyfriend,” he reminded his sister.

  Roxie scoffed. Landon just smiled. Smiling back at them, Blake hurried after Nicole.

  “After the comment you made about a woman not being able to handle this job?” Nicole said, arching a brow at Blake as they entered the lobby.

  “Uh, yeah, I apologize for that.” He figured he might have to work a bit on mending fences if they were going to pull off being a couple, but he was certainly willing. They took the stairs to the second floor.

  When they reached her room, she unlocked the door and Blake saw her partner in bed, a redhead, looking pale as he opened his blue eyes and stared at the two of them.

  “Okay, that’s it. You look awful, Larry. You’re going to see a doctor,” Nicole said to her partner.

  Larry was frowning at Blake. “Who’s he?”

  Blake thought the guy sounded more like a real boyfriend than just Nicole’s partner on a job. Not that he was surprised that the guy would be interested in more. If Blake had really been her partner, he definitely would have been intrigued enough to become a real boyfriend.

  “He’s my fiancé. You didn’t last long enough in the relationship, though I told Blake you were my brother, in case anyone overheard what was going on. It’s much more believable this way. He’ll help look after me. Don’t you worry about it. I’m truly sorry you’re feeling so poorly.”

  “You just picked the guy up?” Larry sounded as if he couldn’t believe how naive she could be.

  Blake didn’t blame her partner. Even though Blake was a wolf like her, that didn’t mean he was automatically a trustworthy individual or that he was someone who could really protect her. Her partner wouldn’t know Blake was a wolf either. If the guys Nicole was after had been wolves, that would have been a whole other story. The pack would have taken care of them themselves. Actually, he and his brother would have dealt with them with the pack leaders’ blessing.

  “Blake Wolff owns the lodge.” She changed out of her ski boots into furry snow boots.

  “Oh. Stepping up in the world.” Larry tried to sit up in bed, and Nicole hurried to help him. “Does he have any combat training? Weapons training?”

  Good questions. If Blake had been solely a business owner, maybe not.
But being a wolf meant he’d dealt with lots over the years.

  Nicole glanced at Blake, raising her brows.

  “All of the above.” Not that he’d been in the military or on the police force, except as deputy sheriff in the wolf pack, but over the years, he’d had his share of fighting with the bad guys, wolf and human. He even knew how to use a sword, but that was more for fun.

  Nicole sighed. “I’m sorry, Larry. It would never have worked out between you and me.” She smiled at Larry teasingly.

  “Women are fickle.” Larry finally got out of bed and began to dress. Slowly. The way he kept leaning to the side and losing his balance, he appeared to be dizzy.

  Nicole helped him as much as she could. Blake would have offered, but she seemed to want to take care of him.

  “You can drive him to the Silver Town Clinic. They’ll take good care of him. If he needs longer-term care, they’ll transport him to a hospital farther away.” Blake thought maybe she could use his help getting Larry there. “Do you need me to drive you?”

  “No thanks, we’re good.” She called the clinic. “I have a friend who needs to be seen for high-altitude sickness…right. I’ll bring him in right away. Thanks.” She pocketed her phone. “Dr. Weber can see him.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need my help?” Blake realized he was reaching for any excuse to stay with her longer. It wasn’t just the kiss they’d shared but the reason why they’d shared it. He wanted to make sure she stayed safe, if she really needed a partner on this mission. And he suspected she did.

  “I can manage. We’ll be fine.”

  “If you need my services any further, just come get me. I’ll be down in the lobby. My brother will probably go skiing, but you and I can talk. And now that my sisters are here, they’ll be helping us run the lodge so I can take off more time.” Well, he guessed Roxie shouldn’t until they turned Rhys over to the authorities.

  “You can buy me lunch when I return if you’re free.”

  “Room service?” Blake smiled a little.