Ripper

by Lexi Blake

  “What do you want?” she asked through her black-tinged lips.

  I elbowed Liv because she was trying hard not to laugh. Apparently she’d forgotten what it was like to be young and hyper-pretentious. I would have to pull out the pictures of her in her surplus army coat. It was a phase that came right after her skater year.

  “Hello, I’m Kelsey Atwood. I’m investigating the disappearance of your roommate.” I would have handed her a business card, but she would just stare at me like I was an idiot.

  She did it anyway. “Okay.”

  I held my temper. “We need to come in and ask you a few questions and maybe look around at Joanne’s belongings. It can tell us a lot sometimes.”

  She shrugged, her black bob shaking. She was a tall, lanky girl, and she opened the door, not bothering to wait for us to walk in before she tossed herself on her bed and started thumbing through a magazine.

  I wasn’t buying it. I could see Liv getting pissed, but she was missing some important signs. The minute I mentioned Joanne’s name, Cassie swallowed not once, but twice. Her jaw had firmed into a hard line. It was the kind of thing you did when you were trying to control yourself.

  “When was the last time you saw, Joanne?” I kept my voice quiet and sympathetic. I didn’t need to give her anything to rebel against.

  She didn’t look up from her magazine, but I noted that she wasn’t reading. Her eyes stared straight forward. “I don’t know. Couple of days ago.”

  “Do you even care that your roommate is missing?” Liv asked, outrage in her voice.

  Cassie tensed, but didn’t look up. I widened my eyes at my friend. It let her know she wasn’t helping. She sighed and her hands went up in submission. I needed to give her something else to do.

  “Why don’t you look through her clothes?” Liv loved clothes. She knew they said a lot about a person. “Tell me what you see.”

  “All right,” she said, apology blatant in her tone as she walked to the small closet and started to look through it.

  I turned back to my problem. Cassie had gathered her armor tightly around her, and I was going to have to push through it. I sat down on the edge of Joanne’s bed and regarded the girl, deciding on the best tactic. “Did Joanne ever have any trouble with the girl at the front desk?”

  Cassie glanced over the magazine with startled eyes. “Sharon? She’s annoying, but I don’t think she had a problem with Jo. Did she say something bad about Jo?”

  I managed to suppress the self-congratulatory grin that wanted to come out. Now I knew she liked her roommate. Her default position was to never show she cared about anyone. “Oh, she didn’t say anything. I got a feeling that she was one of those chicks who gets weirded out by anyone even slightly different from what she considers normal.” I wasn’t lying. Sharon had said the words herself.

  Cassie’s black lips turned up a little. We were making progress. “She’s not that bad, actually. There are way worse than Sharon, but Jo gets along with everyone.”

  “She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who ups and walks away.” I took in the small room. The differences were well delineated. Cassie’s side of the room was messy and cluttered with clothes and makeup and CDs. Joanne’s side of the room was pin neat. Her bookshelf held her textbooks, a couple of notebooks, and a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines.

  Cassie set the magazine down. “She’s not. I tried to tell her mom that she’d been acting weird but…”

  But Helen didn’t think Cassie should be saying anyone acted weird, I could guess. I leaned forward. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of not taking her seriously. “How was she acting weird?”

  She bit her bottom lip as though wondering exactly how much to tell me. I had to put a stop to that.

  “Cassie, I’m not here to judge her. The crap I’ve done in this lifetime makes me unfit to judge anyone. I’m here to find her. The only thing I care about is figuring out what happened to her. I ain’t the cops. You can tell me whatever and trust me, I’ve probably been there and done that.”

  Cassie groaned in frustration. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on. I just know she’s been acting weird for Jo. She’s been going out late at night and staying out all night sometimes.”

  “Clubbing?” I heard Liv ask.

  “Maybe,” the girl said, still a little wary.

  Liv walked out of the closet carrying a handful of dresses on hangers. “Look at the labels.”

  I obediently read the labels on the beautiful dresses. They were awfully sexy for a sophomore good girl. “I don’t know who Versace is.”

  Liv groaned and I guessed I hadn’t pronounced it even close to right.

  “Holy shit, that’s a Versace?” Cassie asked and it was obvious she didn’t borrow the other girl’s clothes.

  “They were in the back.” Liv went through the dresses one by one. “Gucci, Zac Posen and Monique Lhuillier. I found two pairs of to-die-for Jimmy Choos.”

  “I take it those are expensive.” I’m not a fashionista. I wear jeans and T-shirts. I have exactly one little black dress and one pair of good heels. It’s all I need. But the fact that Joanne had clothes she shouldn’t have been able to afford made me curious. “Check her underwear.”

  Liv was game. She opened the top drawer of the dresser. “Plain white cotton. Panties and bras.”

  “She tends to sleep in a T-shirt,” Cassie offered.

  I wasn’t buying it. “Check the back of the drawer.”

  Liv’s hand disappeared and her eyes widened when she came back with a handful of silk. “Wow. La Perla. This is freaking gorgeous.”

  I wasn’t an idiot. Not even close. This particular leap I was taking had nothing to do with my so-called instincts and everything to do with connecting the dots. “Do you know when Jo lost her scholarship?”

  If she’d ever had it in the first place.

  Cassie’s mouth dropped open and she stared at me for a moment. “How did you know that?”

  I wasn’t about to tell her I knew because most nice girls didn’t prostitute themselves if they weren’t seriously hurting for cash. She wouldn’t be doing it if she still had a free ride. She might not be hooking in a traditional sense. I doubted that given the designer clothes and fancy undies, but she was making cash off some man, somewhere. “It was an educated guess.”

  Cassie shook her head and sat up straight. “I transferred in last semester in the middle of the year. Jo’s roomie had dropped out so she got paired up with me. We got along okay. She was always studying or doing things at home. I was surprised she requested to room with me again this year, but I was up for it. She’s a nice girl and she doesn’t freak about the weird stuff. But I knew something was different this semester. She was out a lot and her grades weren’t that great. I know it’s only October, but she missed a test because she slept in. It wasn’t like her. I asked about it and she said the foundation that administered her scholarship went broke this summer. There was some sort of scandal. She lied to her mom so she wouldn’t worry. She said she was working at some club, but I don’t know where.”

  “Were there any particular men who would come by wanting to see her?”

  “Well, there’s Darren. Jo’s known him since they were kids. Obviously he has a thing for her, but she doesn’t see him as anything more than a friend.” Cassie thought for a second or two. “She spent some time with a professor. She had him last year for freshman English, but she’s taking a special class with him this year on mythology and folklore. I think his name is Hamilton. She called him Peter, which I thought was a little weird. The profs around here tend to be conservative. She was doing some sort of project for him.”

  I stood up and glanced around. If Joanne was on the game then it made sense that she probably kept an appointment book. “Where is her laptop?”

  “She took it with her the night she went missing. For the last month or so, she took it everywhere because she’d gotten so behind she had to work whenever she got a few minutes.”r />
  I made a mental note to get her e-mail address from her mother and check to see if there was any activity. Hopefully Helen knew her daughter’s provider. “Do you know if she had an address book or a day planner?”

  “Not that I’ve seen,” Cassie said. “Wait. Now that I think about it…she’d been getting calls, but not on her usual cell. When she came back to school this year, she had two phones. She would get a call and then she would write stuff down in a spiral notebook. I thought it was school stuff and she was making notes about a class.”

  Liv was already pulling out spiral notebooks. There was a thick stack of them on the shelf above her dresser. On notebook five, we hit pay dirt. There were three different addresses. One was in the suburbs. One was downtown, and the last one was in North Dallas, not far from campus. There were a series of numbers that looked like times and dates after the addresses and a couple of names. The name Alexander came after the North Dallas address with the last date listed and a time of one a.m.

  The notebook in my hand felt like hitting the mother lode. This was what I needed. I stood and faced Cassie. “Thank you. This is exactly what I need.” There was a brisk knock on the door and Cassie got off her bed to answer it. I gave her my business card and this time she took it. “If you think of anything else that might help, please call me.”

  Cassie started to open the door, but whoever was on the other side wasn’t waiting. A young man shoved the door open, obviously not caring that he pushed Cassie aside. I was at her back, quickly propping her up so she didn’t fall on her ass.

  “Fuck me, you’ve got some nerve. I couldn’t believe it when Sharon told me who was here. I had to see it for myself.” He stormed in to the room.

  At first I assumed he was talking to Cassie and I thought I was going to have to defuse a situation with a bad ex. After his next words, I had no doubt as to whom his target was.

  “How dare you come here asking questions about Jo? I know who you are, hunter.”

  I pushed Cassie away because I wasn’t hiding behind some little college kid. The young man in front of me was stocky, but nowhere close to filled out the way he would be in a few years. His eyes were dark, probably brown, but filled with rage, they appeared black. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and worn jeans. His brown hair was overgrown and he could have used a shave. He was everything one would expect from a werewolf, and a young alpha at that, I would bet.

  “Let’s get out of here, Kels,” Liv said, her tone reflecting the thick tension in the air.

  “Darren, what are doing here?” Cassie looked around, her eyes wide because she obviously had no idea why everyone was on edge.

  Darren ignored her, but then I was betting he usually did. “I tried to convince Mrs. Taylor that this was a mistake. You think I haven’t searched for Jo? You think I haven’t tried to track her? What are you going to do when you find her? Are you gonna shoot her down like you did her father?”

  His eyes were rapidly flickering back and forth between his forms. He might be an alpha, but he wasn’t a terribly strong one. He still didn’t have good control of himself. I needed to keep the situation as calm as possible, though what I really wanted to do was throw up that turkey sandwich I’d eaten. It sat heavily in my gut.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that and Mrs. Taylor knows it.” My voice held a calm I didn’t feel. I didn’t even think about going after my gun. It was in my bag, right there in reaching distance. I could have had it in my hand and pointed at the angry wolf in a second, but I wasn’t even tempted. If he’d attacked in that moment, I likely wouldn’t have defended myself.

  He got right up in my face and I tried not to flinch. “Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but you were there in spirit. You’re always there. I know you call each other and tally up your kills. You hang out in your bars and talk about the carcasses you bagged. Tell me something, do you stuff your prey like some hunters do? I hear you have to get the head to the taxidermist real quick or we’re rude enough to disintegrate before you get your trophy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Darren?” Cassie stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

  “Shut up, bitch,” he growled. “This is between me and the hunter, here. You want to try to take me out? You want to test me, or do you just go after prey animals and children?”

  I stayed on my feet, but inside I was swaying and telling myself that there was no way he could know. No one knew except me and Liv and Jamie. And my father, but I didn’t count him. Darren couldn’t know what had happened that night.

  “Back off.” Liv got between us. Her voice was low, but it was full of menace. “You stay away from her, wolf. Jo’s roomie might be a dabbler, but I promise you, I’m the real thing and you won’t like what I do to you if you so much as lay a hand on her.”

  “Traitor,” he hissed at Liv. He glared at me and his eyes made a promise. “This is not the end. Maybe we should start turning the tables on you. See how you like being hunted.”

  He backed out the door, careful to not let me out of his sights.

  “Holy crap.” Liv let out a relieved breath. “Let’s get out of here. I think you have everything you need.”

  I swallowed and was sure my face was perfectly composed. I should be upset that I’d been saved by Liv. Sweet, gentle Liv had to get between me and an angry werewolf. I wasn’t pissed at myself. I was a little pissed at Liv because there was a big piece of me that wanted everything Darren’s twitchy hands had been promising.

  “Yes, we’re done here,” I heard myself saying. I turned to Cassie, whose eyes were wide. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call. You can also call me if he gives you any trouble.”

  I doubted he would. He’d barely noticed she was there, but I wanted her to feel like she had someone to call.

  I felt numb as I followed Liv back to the car. I felt like I had missed something essential in the confrontation with Darren, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was using my every brain cell to block out the images his words brought back. I drove back to Liv’s school on autopilot, responding to her questions, but not really hearing her at all.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Liv hesitated, getting out of the car. “You could come home with me. I’ll make some dinner and we can crack open a bottle of wine.”

  I could listen to Scott bitch about the things Liv did wrong and hear him mutter under his breath about how pathetic I was. No. I had other plans.

  “I’m fine.” I decided a little truth was necessary to really sell this particular lie. “Well, I’m not fine exactly. He brought back some shitty memories, but I have to move on.”

  “You do,” she encouraged. “You aren’t that person. You never were. You can’t blame yourself for something that happened when you were sixteen years old.”

  I nodded because it was what she wanted me to do. She didn’t blame me for what happened ten years ago, but she was wrong if she thought I couldn’t blame myself. I wasn’t the only one. There were ghosts that damn sure blamed me, too. But I already had a plan for exorcising those demons, at least for a little while.

  “I’m fine,” I assured her. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  She reached out and gave me a quick hug. “Okay, Kels. I’m sorry if I got you into something you aren’t ready for. I was trying to help Helen. I really thought it would be good for you to work a case that meant something.”

  I shrugged off the concern. The goal now was to get Liv out of the car. “Everything is fine. I need to get home and get some sleep. I’ll be ready to go in the morning.”

  She stared at me, her hand on the door. “You’re going straight home?”

  “Yes, Liv,” I said in my best “don’t mother me” voice.

  She got out with a sympathetic smile.

  Idiot believed me.

  Chapter Three

  “Wow,” I managed to slur once I pushed my head off the bar and downed my shot. “This is really good tequila. It’
s so sweet and smooth.”

  Gil looked at me over the bar and he frowned, but I didn’t really process it as disapproval. I was way too far gone.

  “That’s because it’s apple juice,” he said with a shake of his bearded head. “I cut you off thirty minutes ago, sweetheart.”

  “Seriously? Are you sure because I think this stuff is awesome.”

  “I’m glad you like it, darling.” Gil hadn’t been thrilled when I walked in several hours before, but he’d done his job and gotten me nice and toasted.

  I wasn’t even thinking about that asshole Darren or how guilty he’d made me feel. I was happy and really horny. I looked around the bar to see if there was anyone worth going home with. The River Bottom Pub was an out-of-the-way tavern in the bottoms along the Trinity River. It was a ludicrously crappy prefab building with a “backyard” filled with plastic tables and a place for horseshoe games. There were several subdivisions that had developed in the area and all the locals came here to forget their troubles. Unfortunately, most of their troubles had to do with wives and kids. I didn’t play around with wives and kids.

  “I called your brother about ten minutes ago,” Gil said.

  “Damn it, Gil. Why would you go and do that? I’m perfectly fine. I don’t need my brother to come and get me. I can find my own damn ride home.”

  “With whom?” Gil asked, looking around because it was a Thursday night and it was after midnight. All but the most hardcore of drunks had gone home. It was a testament to how fucked up I was that I was still here.

  I glanced around the bar. At this hour there were exactly four men still in the bar, and none of them would be potential partners on a sober night. Then again, I tended to not get laid when I was sober so I figured sobriety was way overrated. I pointed to the least hygienically challenged of the four. “How about him?”

  “Sweetie, he’s gay,” Gil said.

  “Seriously?” The truth was my gaydar didn’t work after fourteen tequila shots.