X-Ops Exposed

by Paige Tyler

  Tate considered how to answer that, thinking about all the scraps he’d been in with his old team, then decided honesty probably wasn’t the best policy here. It was too much to get into with somebody he was going to have to majorly lie to at some point. Easier to fib a little now.

  “Me?” He chuckled. “Nah, nothing like that. I spent a while in the U.S. Marshals chasing a few averagely mean bad guys, then moved over to Homeland, where I’ve pretty much hugged a desk ever since.”

  The deputy glanced at him as he stopped at the end of the gravel road, his expression doubtful. “Sure, whatever you say.”

  Tate stared out the windshield, stunned. After hearing where Bell had been found, he’d been expecting some kind of broken-down hovel with vines covering half of it. Instead, he got a neat, well-maintained, split-level log cabin with a wraparound deck and large windows overlooking a sloping yard and the picture-perfect pond just beyond it. The place looked like something on a postcard, for crying out loud. In fact, Tate could see himself burning up a few weeks of excess leave renting the place and catching up on all the reading he’d been putting off. Well, if a man hadn’t been murdered there.

  “Not the kind of place you expected?” Chase asked as he opened his door and stepped out.

  “Not really.”

  As Tate headed for the front door of the cabin alongside the deputy, he glanced over his shoulder at the highway, confirming that somebody passing by would never even know the place was here.

  “How did anybody realize there was something going on out here?” he asked. “There doesn’t seem to be a person close enough to hear anything.”

  “The owners are an older couple who spend their winters down in Florida, so they pay a handyman to come out here every week and keep the place up,” Chase said. “When the guy came by the other day, he saw a couple of black bears pawing at the door and figured there was something in there attracting their attention. He chased them off, took one look inside, then called me.”

  Tate did a double take. “He called you, not 911?”

  Chase shrugged as he stepped onto the porch. “The Oxford County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have a lot of deputies, so the people on our beats know each of us by name. The handyman has called me before when there’s been trouble, so it made sense for him to reach out to me when he peeked in the window and saw the body.”

  Tate shook his head. He had a hard time imagining working in a place so small that people not only knew the deputies by name but had them on speed dial. Heck, he had a hard time remembering the names of half the people he worked with at the DCO. He probably only had phone numbers for a dozen of them.

  Chase used a pocketknife to cut the crime scene tape on the door, then pushed it open. “We were planning to turn the house over to the cleaning crew this morning, but when Homeland contacted us, we put them on hold. Nothing has been touched since the coroner took the body out.”

  Tate had barely stepped foot in the cabin when the acrid metallic scent of blood slapped him in the face. Thank God the weather was cool. He didn’t want to think about how bad the odor would be if it had been the middle of summer.

  Breathing through his mouth so he wouldn’t yak, he moved through the small entryway, then across the living room with its wood-burning fireplace and leather couches, following the bloody footprints into the kitchen. One look at the knocked-over chairs, broken table, and big puddle of sticky, nearly dried blood was enough to tell him that this was definitely where all the action had occurred.

  Besides the blood on the linoleum floor, there were some spatters decorating the far wall. Arterial spray from Bell’s slashed femoral, he guessed. At least a half dozen different shoe impressions had traipsed through the reddish-brown mess on the floor. Probably from the first responders who’d come in hoping there was a chance Bell was still alive. Some of the tracks likely belonged to the coroner’s team, too. Since Bell’s death had been declared an animal attack from the start, no one had seen the need to preserve the scene. It would have been nice to know if one of the shoe imprints belonged to the killer, but it was too late to do anything about it. Besides, his gut told him the person who did this was too good to leave behind any obvious evidence.

  While there were undeniably a lot of footprints around the crime scene, the one thing he didn’t see were animal tracks. How the hell had the local cops explained that little detail?

  Tate wandered around the room, carefully avoiding the blood that was still wet as he looked for anything that might give him an idea of how McKinley Bell had ended up in the middle of nowhere getting sliced up by a shifter or hybrid. But other than one of the kitchen chairs having some scuffs on the arms from the restraints used to hold Bell down, there was nothing.

  He wished Declan was there. Having the bear shifter’s sensitive nose would have told him a lot, namely whether he was dealing with a shifter or hybrid, if the attacker had been working alone, maybe even if Bell had been drugged. Without Declan, Tate was swimming blind, hoping to stumble over a clue the police had missed. It made him wonder how he’d ever gotten anything done before having a shifter partner.

  He crossed the room to check the dead bolt on the back door that led out of the kitchen and onto a walkway toward the pond. The bolt and doorframe were intact with no sign they’d been kicked in or even tampered with. When they’d first come in, Tate had glanced at the front door and noted that was in good shape, too.

  “What’s the theory on how this all went down?” Tate asked, turning back to the deputy.

  Chase was casually looking in the cabinets, like he was searching for a snack, which was crazy, considering how many donuts the guy had eaten. At Tate’s question, the deputy glanced his way, his face serious. “You want the narrative that’s in the final report?”

  Tate frowned. Did Chase know the whole animal attack angle was BS regardless of what he’d said about the bobcat in front of his boss? “Yeah, the official party line would be good. Unless there’s another one you’d like to tell me about?”

  Chase shrugged and closed the door of the cabinet. “Bell’s car was found out on the main highway about a half mile from here with the left front tire blown out. The official police report says he must have pulled over due to the flat and started walking along the road looking for help. Time of death was around two a.m., so there weren’t many people out there to see him. At some point, Bell realized he was being followed by an animal, and when he saw the cabin, he headed this way, either looking for a phone or just a place to get away from the thing behind him.”

  The deputy paused, maybe to gauge whether Tate was buying any of this shit. Tate didn’t bother to point out that you couldn’t see the house from the road in the daylight. How Bell had supposedly seen it in the dark was beyond him.

  “Any idea why the man would have been driving around here so late at night?” he asked. “He lived in Scarborough near the medical center, right?”

  Chase shook his head. “No idea why he was up here. We’ve checked with the people at the hospital and his service. It wasn’t like he was making a house call or anything.” He wandered over to the next cabinet and opened it. “The handyman swears he always locks the door behind him, but since Bell got in without breaking any windows or locks, the assumption is that the handyman made a mistake and left the front door unlocked. Unfortunately, the bobcat, or whatever it was, followed him in before he could close the door. The animal chased Bell into the kitchen and attacked him, and the wind blew the door closed at some point after the animal left.”

  Tate didn’t say anything, instead waiting to see if Chase was going to add anything else to the fantasy, but apparently, the man was done. With everything except digging through the cabinets.

  “What the hell are you looking for in there?” Tate finally asked, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.

  Chase held open a cabinet door and pointed inside. “There’s food in at
least half of these cabinets, yet the animal never bothered trying to get into them. I mean, there’s not even a scratch on them. A hungry bobcat might chase a person into a house and attack them, but if it did, it would sure as hell take a few nibbles. If it didn’t, it would at least dig around the house looking for something else to eat. This one didn’t. There are also no animal prints anywhere in the house. I saw Bell’s body after the attack. No way any animal tears into a man like that without leaving a single fucking paw print.”

  Tate crossed his arms over his chest. “What are you trying to say? If an animal didn’t kill Bell, what do you think happened to him?”

  Chase rested his hands on his gear belt and met his gaze. “I was hoping you’d tell me. And don’t bother trying to sell me that lame-ass pet mountain lion story, because we both know that was a load of shit.”

  “You sure of that?” Tate asked.

  “I don’t know what the hell to think or what I’m sure of. But I know there’s some strange crap going on with this case, and you know way more than you’re saying.”

  Tate regarded the deputy for a moment. Chase was obviously sharp as hell. The kind of cop who saw things most officers made sure they didn’t and asked the questions other officers wouldn’t. Right now, he had that glint in his eyes that a man gets when he knows he’s involved with something big and wants to know exactly what it is.

  Tate recognized that look and the insane urge that came with it. The one where you wanted to throw yourself into the far end of the pool just to see how deep the water really was. He’d felt that urge himself nearly a decade ago when he’d stumbled onto the existence of shifters and made a decision that changed his life. He’d never looked back, but every once in a while, he couldn’t help but wonder how his life would have been different if he hadn’t opened the door all those years ago. Or if someone had pushed it closed before he saw too much. Would he still be in the marshals? Would he be married with two-point-three kids, a house with a white picket fence, and a dog? He supposed he’d never know.

  But this moment wasn’t about him. It was about a small-town cop from Oxford County, Maine, and whether Tate was going to open the door for him or push it closed.

  “Maybe I’m not saying anything because you’re not ready to hear what I have to say,” he murmured.

  “Why don’t you let me decide what I’m ready to hear?” Chase asked. “I think I can handle anything you throw at me.”

  Tate almost laughed. Damn, this guy was so much like him when he was younger. So sure he had all the answers and could deal with anything.

  He turned and looked around the kitchen again, doubting there was anything else to see here. Yeah, he could search the rest of the house, maybe even check out the yard. It would be nice to find some footprints or tire tracks that might tell him something about the person who’d killed McKinley Bell. But his gut told him he was wasting his time.

  So instead, he focused on where to dig next for clues and how to deal with Deputy York. The first part was easy. The second, not so much. He knew for sure he wasn’t ready to tell Chase how Bell had died or that shifters existed. The guy wasn’t ready for that.

  “You want to know what’s going on. I get that,” he told Chase. “But what we’re dealing with here is complicated and kind of tough to deal with all at once.”

  Chase opened his mouth to say something, but Tate stopped him. “The one thing I can tell you is that Bell wasn’t chased in here by an animal. He was brought to this place to be tortured. I have no idea if he talked, but when the person who tortured him was done, he or she sliced open the man’s femoral artery and let him bleed out.”

  “Why?” York asked.

  Tate shook his head. “I don’t know yet. Which is why I’m going to dig a little deeper into the doctor’s background, his life, and the people who knew him. I could use your help with that, but you’re going to have to accept that until I’m ready to tell you the rest of the story, you’ll just have to trust me. Think you can handle that?”

  Chase’s expression was half pissed, half amused. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure,” Tate said. “You could drop me off at the motel, then go back to your office in Paris and tell the sheriff I’ve left already. Then you can go back to your normal everyday routine.”

  Chase snorted. “Like that’s going to happen.”

  Chapter 6

  Zarina gazed at Tanner from where she sat in bed, her heart aching at how incredibly beautiful and peaceful he looked sleeping atop the cot on the far side of the small cabin. Early morning sunlight was just creeping through one of the small windows, enveloping Tanner in an almost heavenly glow. Which was fitting, since he was already an angel in her mind.

  It took all her willpower to keep from climbing out of bed and walking over to caress his scruff-covered jaw simply so she could feel the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers without him pulling away from her.

  But she didn’t move, afraid she’d wake him up and ruin the moment. Tanner needed his sleep. He’d pushed himself hard last night, spending almost two hours after they’d come back from town putting supplies away. Then he’d stayed out half the night with Spencer and the other hybrids, patrolling the woods around the prepper camp and making sure no additional trouble came their way.

  Even though he’d been quiet, Tanner had woken her when he finally slipped into the cabin a few hours ago. She’d thought he might want to talk, but instead, he’d tumbled onto his cot in an exhausted slumber. She hated seeing him that way. It was like he was carrying the weight of the entire camp’s safety on his shoulders.

  She sighed. At least he’d slept in the cabin with her. When Chad had told them Bryce’s house was the only place he had for the two of them to sleep, Tanner had resisted. Okay, that was an understatement. What he’d said was he preferred to sleep outside on the ground than share the small space with her. She’d known he wasn’t trying to be hurtful with his words, but they’d cut deep nonetheless.

  She’d solved the problem by announcing that if Tanner was going to sleep outside, then she would, too. It might have been juvenile, but if Tanner could be stupid, then so could she. Besides, it had worked. He’d agreed to stay in the cabin with her, even if he’d slid his cot as far away from the bed as he could. He was in the same room with her. That was a big improvement as far as she was concerned.

  Zarina swung her legs over the side of the bed and tiptoed over to Tanner, needing to be closer to him. She loved him so much, it made her heart ache. How could they ever be together if he kept working so hard to keep them apart? As much as she’d wanted to come here and make everything better for him, she didn’t know how that could ever be possible. She wasn’t sure where that left her. If he kept shoving her away, how much longer could she hang around and pretend she could make this work all on her own?

  Tears stung her eyes, and she stifled a sob. If she didn’t get out of there, she was going to start crying and wake him up.

  Grabbing her coat from where she’d tossed it on the chest at the foot of the bed, she slipped it on, glad she’d decided to sleep in her shirt and jeans last night instead of pajamas. Picking up her boots, she carefully opened the door of the cabin and left, closing it quietly behind her.

  She was a little surprised she hadn’t woken Tanner up. Perhaps he was even more exhausted than she’d thought. Or maybe he was faking sleep so he wouldn’t have to face her.

  Pushing that horrible thought from her mind, she put on her boots and stepped off the tiny porch, trying to remember where the main building was. In addition to serving as the camp’s meeting hall of sorts, it was also their communal kitchen and dining area. Hopefully, she’d be able to find something to eat there. She was famished. It was why she was awake at this ungodly hour in the first place.

  “You’re up early,” a voice said behind her, and Zarina turned to find Lillie standing there with a basket in her hands. “
I thought you and Tanner would sleep in this morning since you were out so late last night.”

  Zarina didn’t mention she and Tanner weren’t actually sleeping together. It was too complicated to get into.

  She smiled. “Tanner was up late last night, so I let him rest while I went looking for breakfast.”

  Lillie’s mouth curved. “I know what you mean. I like getting up early to grab something to eat before everyone else is up and about. In fact, I was just about to make some breakfast. Want to join me?”

  “I’d love to.” Zarina glanced at Lillie as they made their way across the camp. “Any word on Bryce and Josh?”

  The girl’s face fell. “Uh-uh. Dad was out all last night talking to people in the other nearby settlements. He’s hoping someone will turn up something soon.”

  Zarina hoped for the best, too, but limiting the search like Chad was doing seemed myopic to her.

  The building Lillie led her into was bigger than she expected. Based on the number of benches and tables set up along one side of the interior, it looked like it could easily seat thirty or forty people.

  Lillie set the basket on the counter in the kitchen, then stirred up the embers in the four wood-burning stoves at the back of the room and added some fresh wood to each. Zarina moved closer to the heat they gave off, groaning in appreciation as the big space immediately began to warm up. It seemed like she’d been cold since she’d gotten to Washington State. The aroma of fresh coffee brewing on the stove didn’t hurt, either.

  “You’re not used to spending so much time outdoors, are you?” Lillie asked with a laugh as she flipped open the basket she’d been carrying, revealing a large pile of eggs.

  Zarina blinked. They had chickens there? She hadn’t heard a peep from them since she’d arrived. The idea of eating eggs for breakfast made her mouth water. She’d love to help Lillie cook, but it had been a long time since she’d made anything over an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.