by Paige Tyler
Clayne heard a thud behind him, quickly followed by a whole lot of cussing. Apparently, Tony wasn’t having such an easy time with that fence. Clayne felt bad for the fed, but not bad enough to slow down. He wasn’t about to let the shifter get away. Besides, it was better if Tony was otherwise occupied for the moment. Having to explain to the fed why he could clock speeds of twenty-five miles an hour over rough ground might be a little difficult.
He tried to use both his sense of smell and hearing to predict which way the cat shifter would go, then take the shortest path to intercept him, but the asshole didn’t make it easy. The cat shifter was fast. Maybe faster than Clayne. And he obviously knew these hills a whole hell of a lot better. While Clayne stayed with him, he wasn’t catching up. In fact, if it wasn’t for the scent the shifter left, Clayne would have lost him more than once already.
Clayne growled and shifted completely, allowing the claws on his hands and his fangs to slide out. It was a risky move in such a heavily populated area, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to let out his inner wolf and everything that went with it if he hoped to catch this son of a bitch.
A heightened sense of smell, better night vision, and an extra burst of speed weren’t the only things he felt when he shifted this time, though. As bizarre as it sounded, he swore he could sense Danica. She was somewhere on the hill directly above him, moving fast in a line that would cut right across the killer’s escape route. He didn’t get how he knew she was there. Maybe it was his senses going a little nuts from spending so much time with her the last few days. But what the hell? Maybe they’d all get lucky and Danica would run the murderous piece of shit over. Save everyone a lot of trouble. Not to mention get him back home faster.
Then he heard tires squeal, followed by a crash.
He stopped cold, his boots sliding across the rough ground. Something clenched deep inside his chest.
Danica.
He took off running again, faster than before. When he reached the top of the hill, he saw a car smashed into a tree and his heart stopped beating. Then he realized it wasn’t Danica’s sedan and his heart started up again.
Thank God.
But if it wasn’t her car, where was she?
Clayne looked around wildly and spotted her sedan a few hundred feet away from the other vehicle. He immediately headed toward it only to stop when he caught sight of her kneeling down beside the other car. She was checking on the driver and talking on her cell phone at the same time.
A part of Clayne wanted to go after the shifter, but he knew it was too late. The killer would have had a getaway vehicle parked somewhere nearby to transport his prey. This little distraction was all it’d take to give the shifter enough time to get to his car and drive off. Chasing him would also mean leaving Danica, and he didn’t know for sure she hadn’t been injured.
He glanced over his shoulder, searching for Tony. But the fed was still way back there somewhere. He wasn’t going to be any help.
Swearing under his breath, he ran over to Danica, retracting his claws and teeth as he went. Inside the car, a young woman leaned back in her seat, blood running down her face. The airbag had inflated, but the impact with the tree must have bounced her head off the side window.
Danica finished calling in their location, then glanced at him. “The suspect ran into the middle of the road and darted right in front of her. She went into the tree and I had to choose between helping her or going after him. I’m sorry.”
“You did the right thing.” Clayne searched her face. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Did you get a good look at him?”
Clayne shook his head. “You?”
“No. I didn’t see crap. He was lightning fast, though.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Something to keep in mind the next time we catch up to this bastard. Don’t let him get close to you.”
Danica opened her mouth to say something, but Tony came stumbling over the crest of the hill, gasping like he’d run a marathon. He took one look at the woman behind the wheel of the car and mumbled something that sounded like a curse before collapsing on the ground. He leaned back against the car and eyed Clayne in amazement.
“How the hell can someone as big as you run so freaking fast?” he demanded.
“Good shoes,” Clayne told him.
The fed looked down at his feet. “You’re wearing boots.”
Clayne looked, too. “Yeah. But they’re the right boots.”
Tony just shook his head and put his head between his legs, gasping for more air.
* * *
Even though he knew the trail was cold, Clayne had followed the shifter’s scent anyway. He’d been right. The trail had disappeared in a subdivision one street over from the apartment complex.
Clayne would rather have kept the whole event quiet and not let the rest of the task force—especially that prick Carhart—know how close he and Danica had been to the killer, but that turned out to be impossible. Within the hour, the crash site turned into a three-ring circus. As soon as the press found out the FBI was on the scene, they put two and two together and came up with Hunting the Hunter: Drama in the El Dorado Hills.
The man the killer had tried to kidnap—an up-and-coming MMA fighter—was talking a mile a minute by the time Clayne, Danica, and Tony got back to the apartment complex. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen much more of the killer than Clayne had. It had been dark in the shadows where the rogue shifter had made his move, and he’d attacked from behind, so the target never saw his face. The would-be victim had no problem using his imagination to fill in the gaps in his fifteen minutes of fame, though. He went to great lengths to describe how he’d fought the killer, saying his attacker was muscular, freakishly strong, and growled like an animal. Clayne wished he’d left off that last part, especially since the media clearly ate it up.
He glanced over to where Danica stood talking with Carhart. He probably shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but that had never stopped him before.
“How the hell did Buchanan stumble across the Hunter? You were supposed to be keeping him away from the investigation, Agent Beckett.”
Danica gave him a contrite look that Clayne couldn’t have managed in a hundred years. “I’m doing my best, sir. But Agent Buchanan is tough to control.”
Clayne snorted. If only Carhart knew. She’d never had any problem wrapping him around her finger when they’d been together, that was for sure.
The task force leader didn’t look quite as amused. Actually, he looked as if he might just blow a gasket.
Clayne swore. If he listened to any more of this, he was going to jump to Danica’s defense and punch Carhart in his smug face. Turning his back on them, he took out his cell phone and called John so he could get him up to speed. He didn’t have a lot of info to pass along, but he wanted the DCO to have everything there was. You could never tell what might be important.
“The witness said he was a white guy,” he told John. “And based on what I saw, he’s about six three or so, at least two hundred and twenty pounds. Probably somewhere between twenty and forty years old.”
That wasn’t much to go on, but the DCO had spent more than a decade finding shifters within the general population, so Clayne hoped they might already have someone matching that description in the database.
“We’ll add what you’ve given us to the search criteria and keep looking,” John said. “But right now, we don’t have very much. Zarina was able to look at the wound patterns and confirm you’re looking for some kind of cat shifter, though.”
That was a big help. “Yeah, I’ve already figured that part out,” Clayne said dryly. “Any chance you can get Ivy and Landon out here to help? It might be good to have another cat on this. Maybe she can figure out what this psycho is going to do next.”
John sighed. “I’d like to. But I’ve still got Ivy and Landon trying to find something on Klaus and Renard. If I send them out to help, I’m only going to have to yank them again the second something po
ps.”
Clayne understood. He knew how important it was for Ivy to find those doctors—and the DNA samples they’d taken from her.
“Regardless,” John added, “we’ll search our database for a cat shifter that meets your description, one with serial-killer tendencies. Since we don’t already have something on this guy, we’ll extend the parameters outside the U.S. border. We might be dealing with a foreign national who slipped into the States recently. I’ll be in touch as soon as we find anything.”
“One more thing,” Clayne growled. “You could have told me I’d be working with Danica.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the phone. “I thought I did.”
Clayne just grunted and hung up. He turned back around to see if Danica was still getting chewed out by her boss only to find Carhart giving a quick field briefing.
“Based on the information our profilers have gotten from the witness—most especially the abnormal strength and animal-like growling—we’re most likely dealing with a drug user, probably someone who abuses steroids. Which makes perfect sense since the previous victims spent a lot of time in the gym.”
Tony leaned over to Danica. “Now we’re not only looking for a survivalist who’s a hunter and a gangbanger, but one who works out at the gym and takes steroids?”
“And who growls,” she whispered back.
Their words were too low for Carhart or anyone else to pick up, but Clayne chuckled. What wasn’t so funny, however, was that Carhart hated the idea of giving the “guy from DHS” any credit. He’d completely dismissed the fact that Clayne had been right with the prey angle and that they’d almost caught the killer. Or saved the next victim. How the hell Carhart had ever been put in charge was beyond Clayne. Then again, Dick got ahead in the DCO by being so stupid that people thought he was brilliant. Maybe that was this guy’s MO, too. Hell, maybe they taught the technique in the academy or something.
“So, do we go back to the list of possible victims?” Tony asked when they got in the car.
Clayne leaned against the backseat as Tony pulled out of the parking lot. “That’s all we have to go on right now.”
“Let’s hope the killer doesn’t change his tactics now that we know his preferred target demographic,” Danica said from the passenger seat.
She reached up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Some of her hair had come loose from her bun to hang down her back, and Clayne had to resist the urge to lean forward to gently sweep it aside so he could massage the tension from her shoulders. Damn, she looked beat. None of them had slept in thirty-six hours, so they probably all looked like crap.
But she was right about the killer possibly changing up his script. If he did, it wouldn’t be because he knew the feds were onto his favorite target group. It’d be because the killer knew there was another shifter after him. If the guy was smart, he’d blow town. That’d solve the city of Sacramento’s problem, but it’d make life hard on Clayne, because he’d have to figure out where the asshole had disappeared to. That’d be a pain in the ass.
On the upside, he wouldn’t have to work with Danica anymore.
That should have had him doing freaking cartwheels, but for some stupid reason, it didn’t. And that irritated him just about as much as not catching the serial killer did.
Chapter 5
Thanks to the media buzzing with news about “The Sacramento Hunter,” it was damn near impossible to get anything useful out of anyone. Everyone freaked the moment someone with a badge showed up at their door. For all Clayne knew, they’d spooked the killer off last night and he was now prowling another part of the state—or continent—looking for some poor, unsuspecting husband-slash-boyfriend-slash-father to sink his claws into. On the other hand, the cat shifter might already have grabbed someone who wasn’t on the list and was hunting him while Clayne wasted his time driving around town with Danica and Tony.
Clayne ground his jaw. If it were up to him, he’d have surveillance on the most likely targets, but unfortunately it was up to that asswipe Carhart. Instead, he had every member of the task force out on the street, rounding up every drugged-out, steroid-using gym rat and hunting freak who had a police record. And while they did that, the rest of the FBI field office was spending their time trying to determine if there was some new drug that could account for the animal-like behavior and exceptional strength. The media had put that in their story, too, saying the FBI was searching for a serial killer who was high on bath salts or some other hallucinogenic drug. Like they needed to freak people out even more than they already were.
Danica and Tony had attempted to convince Carhart the FBI should put agents on the other possible victims on their list of AB blood types—the fact that they’d almost caught the Hunter proved they were on the right track. But Carhart didn’t want to waste agents on what he thought had been dumb luck. He’d rather drag in every juicer and drug addict in the city than do anything useful. Maybe the idea that they were facing a drugged-out wacko was less terrifying than the truth—that they were after a seriously deranged, but smart, serial killer.
“How the hell are we supposed to find the killer if we’re doing this stupid shit all day?” Clayne growled to Danica as they dropped off another suspect for interrogation. This guy was the owner of a local gym who was known for selling steroids to the local high school football players. He was scum, but being scum was a long way from being a serial killer.
Clayne clenched his hands into fists to keep his claws from coming out. God, he felt like punching someone—preferably Carhart. But truthfully, right then, anyone would work. Which was unfortunate for the uniformed officer who appeared with another rap sheet of yet another suspect to bring in for questioning. Clayne’s claws pushed out from beneath his nails. Screw this. He was done playing these silly-ass games. He ignored the folder the young cop held out to him and instead reached for the front of the man’s uniform. He wasn’t that idiot Carhart, but he’d do.
But Danica’s hand intercepted his, her fingers closing over the folder just in time. “Thanks, Officer,” she said smoothly as she stepped between Clayne and the cop. “I’ll take that.”
The man blinked like he’d just been pushed out of the way of a moving truck and nodded his head nervously as he stepped back and darted for an opening in the crowd filling the room.
Danica turned and gave Clayne a pointed look. “O-kay. Time to get you something to eat.”
Huh? She wasn’t going to lecture him about keeping his cool and playing nice with others, or some other stupid crap that wasn’t any of her damn business?
“Eat?” he repeated stupidly.
Way to go, genius. But she was standing so close to him that he couldn’t think, much less speak.
“Yes, eat. Before we pick up this next suspect,” she said. “It’s a little early for dinner, but you tend to get hangry when you don’t eat.”
He glanced at his watch. Three o’clock. It was early to eat, but he was hungry. He fell into step beside her as she walked toward the exit. “Hangry? What the hell is that?”
She led the way to the four-door sedan that he was starting to think of as his home away from home. He spent more time in it than he did in the bed at the hotel. “You know, when you get angry because you’re hungry. Hangry.”
He couldn’t help chuckling. “Cute. Did you come up with that?”
Danica laughed. “No, but I wish I had. I saw it on some website.” She jerked her head toward the backseat. “Get in. We’ll grab something to eat, then pick up this next guy.”
Tony was leaning against the side of the car waiting for them, and he got in the driver’s side as Danica went around to ride shotgun.
“Where to?” Tony asked as he put the car in gear.
When Danica named a fast-food place known for their monster burgers, Clayne almost laughed. Danica knew him pretty damn well—maybe better than he knew himself. She knew when he was frustrated, when he was pissed off, when he was hungry, and apparently wha
t he liked to eat. And as the past few days had reminded him, she knew how to keep him calm and focused on the task ahead of them, and she knew what to say to keep him from losing it. She brought out the best in him—like any good partner would.
Only Danica wasn’t his partner anymore. And working with her again reminded him of how good they’d been together.
She’d been the first woman—the first person—to really get him. It made no sense, especially since she was a norm, but she understood him like no one he’d ever met before. Within weeks of teaming up with her, he’d felt this connection between them, almost a bond. It should have scared the hell out of him, but it hadn’t. Instead of pushing her away with baleful glares and subtle growls like he had everyone else, he’d allowed her to get inside his defenses and get close to him. It had been so easy to trust her, and even easier to fall in love with her.
Clayne looked out the window, not seeing half of what went by as he replayed the memory of that first time they’d both decided to let their partnership slip beyond the bounds of a professional relationship into something more. And though the memory was rather bittersweet now, it still made him smile.
* * *
Upstate New York, July 2010
They’d been watching the Chinese diplomat’s house for a week. According to their intel, the guy was supposed to be buying information from a high-tech computer company in the United States and sending it back to China. He and Danica weren’t sure what technology was trading hands, but their orders had been simple. Don’t touch the Chinese diplomat. Wait until he made the transfer, then apprehend the person who picked up the package. Problem was, no one had shown up for the drop, which was supposed to have happened a week ago. Clayne’s gut told him they’d missed it, but John insisted they sit tight, that their source might have been wrong about the date.