by Terry Spear
“I’m still at the clinic and the doc is keeping them overnight. They’re going to be just fine. Thanks to you.”
“And you. Hell, you saw the vehicle first.”
He mentioned that only because she’d commented on his keen vision too many times to count, and he didn’t want her to find that odd. “I’m sorry about lunch. I’ll make it up to you later.”
“No problem at all, Allan, but I’ll certainly take you up on it. Is everything all right?”
He couldn’t lie to her and say everything was fine. Everything wouldn’t be all right until they caught this maniac. “It’s a small family crisis.” Which was the truth. Anything that affected lupus garous in their territory affected them. So it was a family crisis. “I’ll be back tomorrow to help investigate the Van Lake accident scene.” It was located fifty-three miles from where Allan lived, so not too far.
“Can I help in any way?”
“No, thanks. I’ll…I’ll call you later tonight.” He hated this part of their relationship, where he couldn’t be completely honest with her. He could imagine just how well telling her the truth would go over. That he even considered such a notion bothered him. Normally, he never gave it any thought when he was around strictly humans. He and his kind were what they were and it was their own business.
“All right. I’ll fill out the accident report on the mother and baby. I’ll…talk to you later.”
He knew she wasn’t happy with the way he always shut down about his family when there were issues. She’d told him about her alcoholic father, and he suspected it bothered her that he wouldn’t come clean with his family “issues.”
“Talk to you later, Debbie.” He hung up as he reached the area where the killing had taken place.
He hated that tens of thousands of leghold traps and snares were legally set up on Montana’s public lands and along waterways. Reportedly, fifty thousand wild animals were trapped a year, but trappers weren’t required to check traps regularly or report numbers. People and pets could be the victims, as well as any other animal the hunter wasn’t interested in capturing. One of the former vice presidents of the Montana Trappers Association had agreed that trappers cause pain and suffering to animals, but would apologize to no one. Really a sad state of affairs.
Allan found the victim’s blood splattered all over the fresh snow. Tracks were everywhere, from the wolves who found the victim and humans who had come to retrieve her body. He looked around at the thick pine forest and where the trap had been set near a tree, buried by the snow. He tried to sense if the murderer was in the area. The trappers were a danger to them all. But this guy, even more so.
So many people had been in the area, it was hard to say who might have done this. Allan followed boot tracks in the snow for over a mile, then went back and followed another set of tracks. None of them led him to anything suspicious. Tons of tire tracks were on an old logging trail nearby too—the ambulance and police vehicles for sure. So again, nothing that could help him there.
Once he climbed back into his vehicle and shut the door, he called Paul. “I didn’t find anything that stood out to me.”
“I just got the preliminary report on the autopsy. She was shot five times and all the rounds were silver.”
“He has to be a werewolf hunter then.”
“You know, we’ve been thinking it’s a he, but it might have been a she. Some of her wolf fur was stuck to the blood on the jaws of the trap, though the coroner believes that a wolf had been caught earlier. Rose and Lori smelled it was the woman’s fur. So the victim couldn’t have been a new wolf or she couldn’t have been in her wolf form.”
“We need to put this guy down.”
“I’d like to also, but as long as the killer might be human and the police are involved, we have to let the homicide detectives working the case deal with it. We’ve got to catch the guy before they do to determine if he’s one of our kind now. If we catch him and he’s still human, we turn him over to the police. I’ve let everyone know to be extra vigilant if they think they’re being followed. I don’t want anyone to see our families except for you and me. I don’t want him to identify anyone else as a pack member so no one else will be put in harm’s way.”
“Agreed.” Allan couldn’t believe what a nightmare this could be for all of them.
“We have another situation that arose. Lori went in to see Franny and she wants to speak with you about her car crash. Lori thought maybe she had been confused, but Franny was adamant it wasn’t an accident.”
“That’s what she told me and she talked to Debbie about.”
“Franny knows you’re the only one in the pack available to investigate it right now, but I think there’s something else she’s hiding.”
“From Lori?”
“Yeah. If you’re going to investigate this, she’ll have to tell you what she knows.”
“All right. I’ll drop by the clinic next.” What else could go wrong?
* * *
“Hey, Debbie,” Rowdy said, meeting up with her as she headed to the clinic lobby. She was ready to get takeout somewhere close by and then work on the accident report back at the sheriff’s office. She was relieved Franny and baby Stacy were doing well.
She was surprised to see Rowdy here, since he was a homicide detective.
“Hey,” she said, disliking the speculative gleam in his eyes.
He glanced around the lobby and seeing it was empty, said to her, “I heard you were here by yourself and wondered where your partner had gone.”
She shrugged it off. “Yeah, he had a minor family crisis.”
Rowdy raised his brows.
She suspected then that he knew something she didn’t and it wasn’t good news. Especially when he was a homicide detective. But if someone in Allan’s family had been murdered, she was certain Allan would have told her. “Well, spill.”
“Allan’s twin sister and Paul’s wife were hiking in the woods when they came across a body—near Paul’s cabin. Didn’t he tell you?”
Order Terry Spear's next book
in the SEAL Wolf series
SEAL Wolf In Too Deep
On sale February 2016
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Acknowledgments
Thanks so much to my beta readers who do so much to help me keep on track! Donna Fournier, Dottie Jones, Loretta Melvin, Bonnie Gill, and Maria McIntyre! Thanks for all the time and effort you put into it to make this book so much better. And to Deb Werksman who helps to polish the manuscript to the nth degree. To the cover artists who make it a treat to share the next cover. And to my publicist, Morgan Doremus, who makes promoting the books fun.
About the Author
USA Today bestselling and award-winning author Terry Spear has written more than fifty paranormal romance novels and four medieval Highland historical romances. Her first werewolf romance, Heart of the Wolf, was named a 2008 Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, and her subsequent titles have garnered high praise and hit the USA Today bestseller list. A retired officer of the U.S. Army Reserves, Terry lives in Crawford, Texas, where she is working on her next werewolf romance, continuing her new series about shapeshifting jaguars, loving to share her hot Highlanders, and having fun with her young adult novels. For more information, please visit www.terryspear.com, or follow her on Twitter, @TerrySpear. She is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics, and her Terry Spear’s Shifter blog on Wordpress at www.terryspear.wordpress.com.
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