by Amy Green
She looked at the map again, at the tough terrain that Devon had spent weeks in—sleeping rough, getting rained on—and then up at Devon, who took one look at her expression and said, “What? What did I do?”
“Tell me honestly,” Nadine said. “Do you think my deputies are useless?”
“Against the Silverman, yes,” he replied. “To take the Silverman, you need shifters.” He nodded past her shoulder. “Here come some now.”
She didn’t have time to turn before two big bodies slid into the booth, one next to her and one next to Devon. The one next to her was none other than Brody Donovan, wearing his usual flannel shirt and baseball cap. The shifter that sat across from her, next to Devon, was a tall, handsome Native American with dark hair, wearing a uniform shirt not much different from hers. This was Quinn Tucker, Shifter Falls’ chief of police. Nadine had met him before; he was a bear shifter, put into the job of chief of police by Brody after the previous chief of police, who had been corrupt and loyal to Charlie Donovan, had left town.
“Nice to see you, Sheriff,” Quinn said in a voice smooth as whiskey. “You’re always welcome here in the Falls.”
Nadine met his dark gaze head on. She had no issues with Quinn Tucker, but he was a shifter first and a cop second, which meant he put shifter laws before the human ones. She wasn’t sure how welcoming he really was. “You learned I was here awfully quick,” she pointed out.
Brody’s gaze darted to the waitress, a pretty red-haired woman who was wiping a counter and staring at him, and Nadine figured out who had given Brody the heads up that she and Devon were in town.
“News travels fast,” Quinn said. He turned to Devon. “What news on the Silverman, Devon? Is he dead yet?”
See, this was why you couldn’t trust a shifter cop. “You’re supposed to arrest him, not kill him,” Nadine couldn’t resist pointing out.
“I’m not going to kill anyone,” Quinn said, motioning to the redhead waitress for coffee. “Devon here is going to do it for me.”
“With pleasure,” Devon growled.
“You’re not helping,” she snapped at Devon’s handsome face. “I told you I need an arrest, not a dead body.”
“Wait,” Brody said, the first words he’d bothered to contribute. “You two are working together now?”
Nadine met Devon’s gaze quickly before looking over at Brody. “I know you’d like some bloodshed, Brody, but the two murders the Silverman committed were over the county line. In Grant County. That makes them my jurisdiction. And I want an arrest.”
“And two Donovans were shot by that piece of shit,” Brody pointed out in his easy drawl. “With silver bullets, no less. That gives me a blood right.”
“Dammit, Brody.” Nadine put her forehead in her hands. “Can I arrest him before you kill him? Can we at least agree on that?”
“It isn’t Brody’s call,” Devon said, surprising her. By the looks on Brody’s and Quinn’s faces, it had surprised them too. “It’s mine.” His eyes met his half-brother’s across the table. “It’s my bullet and my leg, brother. The blood right is mine, not yours.”
Brody glared back at Devon, and then conceded grimly, “Yours and Heath’s.”
“Heath already tried to track the Silverman while I was sick, and got nowhere. Now he’s home with his mate, where he should be, and not out roaming on the hunt,” Devon replied. “I’m unmated, which means I take to the mountains until the Silverman is dead.” He nodded to Nadine, acknowledging her. “If she wants her arrest first, it’s my choice to give it to her.”
The air crackled. Brody and Devon stared each other down. Nadine had never seen two Donovans face off before; it was unsettling, to say the least. She wasn’t exactly afraid either of them would be violent, but she was suddenly glad that the four Donovans had decided to get along instead of fight all the time. She glanced at Quinn, but he just shrugged. Of course he wasn’t intimidated; the man was a goddamned bear.
“All right,” Brody said at last, some kind of calculation moving swiftly and silently behind his eyes as he looked at his brother. “I accept that. Besides, maybe law enforcement can help us bring this man down quicker. Let’s put our heads together and see what we can do.”
With that, the tension defused and they all turned back to the map. Devon went over it again, pointing out where he’d been and what he’d found, and where Heath had gone before him. Quinn used the salt and pepper shakers to pinpoint where the bodies had been found.
“It’s incredible how untraceable he is, even to a wolf,” Quinn said when they had run through everything. “He must have special skills.”
“That’s where I come in,” Nadine said. “We’ve been doing some background research. The Martell pack, where the Silverman was based for years, is centered in Northern California. I’ve had Tate and Ben looking into the military bases there, anyone invalided out or AWOL. Prison records, even psychiatric hospitals. Narrowed it down to men aged fifty or over. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we’ve been sifting through it as fast as we can.”
Devon was watching her intently. “Not bad,” Brody said.
“There’s more,” Nadine continued. She looked at Devon. “You’re sure you and Heath were shot with pure silver bullets, right? One hundred per cent silver, no alloy?”
Devon nodded. “It’s the only thing that would produce an injury like we have. One that won’t heal. If anything had been mixed with the silver, we would have healed by now.”
“Right,” Nadine said. “So I may not be an ammo expert, but that has to be pretty damn rare. I don’t think any of the big ammo companies have pure silver bullets rolling off their factory line.”
“No,” Quinn agreed.
“So.” She was on a roll now, and they were all watching her so intently that she forgot to feel intimidated. “That leaves two options. A small plant that will make custom bullets, or the Silverman somehow made them himself. Not to mention that he has to have gotten his hands on pure silver from somewhere—and paid for it. With what money?”
“Not the Martells’ money,” Devon said, taking his turn to surprise her. “I already asked. Christian Martell, the Martell alpha, had the Silverman on the payroll, but he didn’t pay him much. The Silverman never asked for much. Martell thinks he was mostly living off the land.”
“A wilderness type,” Quinn said. “We get humans like that from time to time. Tourists, challenging themselves to see how close they can live to the land. To see how much hardship they can take.”
“It fits with the Silverman’s skill set,” Devon said, “but it doesn’t answer the question of where he got the money for even a little bit of pure, unalloyed silver.”
“Maybe he stole it,” Brody said.
“Already checked,” Nadine answered him. “No break-ins or thefts reported in the past ten years that list pure silver as taken. At least, not in the database.”
The other three were quiet for a second. “Hell,” Quinn Tucker said finally. “I guess a human cop can be pretty useful from time to time.”
“You could learn this stuff too,” Nadine told him. “It’s called the police academy.”
Quinn looked at her levelly from his dark eyes. “Unfortunately, I don’t qualify,” he said.
Nadine drew back. Was that true? The academy wouldn’t accept shifters? That didn’t seem right. Then again, it would be hard to accommodate a shifter, who investigated using his wolf senses, in a regular academy class. If they weren’t allowed to become cops like humans could, Nadine was starting to see why shifters did things their own way.
And damn it, she was just supposed to be working with them, not starting to understand them. This was just a job. But something niggled at her, something that made her feel uncomfortable, like she was wearing a girdle or the wrong size of shoes. This, right here—sitting around a table, putting aside her differences with shifters and sharing ideas—this was not what she’d been taught. About law work, about life, about anything. And suddenly
she wondered just how much about everything she’d been taught was wrong—wrong enough to let crimes go unsolved for too long, or not get solved at all.
As her daddy liked to say, the truth hurt sometimes.
Nadine dropped her gaze and turned back to the map again.
7
Nadine was late getting back to the sheriff’s office in Pierce Point. It was a small building, made to look like a rustic wood cabin from the outside to fit in with the spectacular Colorado scenery around it. Inside it was just like any other office—fluorescent lights, stale art on the walls, a brown and overused coffee pot, a few desks with those big computer monitors no one even made anymore, and a nineties-era fax machine stacked in the corner, giving everyone the stink eye.
Tate and Ben, her deputies, were both there. Tate, young and tall and raw-boned, was pointing at something on his computer monitor. Ben, middle-aged and slightly paunchy, was standing behind him, a puzzled frown on his face.
“No, you’re not listening,” Tate was saying. “You see that? That picture? If you like it, you just click Like. This little thumbs-up here.”
“It’s a picture of a kitten,” Ben pointed out.
“And you like that, right?” Tate said.
“Well, everyone likes kittens, I guess.”
“Then you click here.” Tate demonstrated. “There. Now you’ve liked it.”
“Then what?” Ben looked no more enlightened. “Do I win something?”
“No, you just—” They both saw Nadine come in, and Tate jumped. “Afternoon, Sheriff.”
“Tate,” Nadine said, shaking her head as Ben backed away guiltily to his desk. She’d lost count of the number of times her younger deputy had tried to explain Facebook to her older one. “Have you finished going through the results the psychiatric hospital sent us from California?”
“Sure, boss, sure.” Tate pulled a package from his desk drawer. “Vanilla cookie?”
Now that she saw the package, she recognized them as a type she’d once mentioned she liked. Was he paying attention to her every word? “No thanks,” she said to his hopeful face. “Ben, do you have the files on the Bryant and Kraemer murders? I want to go through them again.”
“Sure, yeah, sure.” Ben rifled through one pile of papers on his desk, and then another. “They’re here somewhere.”
“They should be. They’re the two murders that are the top of our case load right now. Remember?”
Ben shrugged. “Got it. Here you go.”
Nadine grabbed the two thick file folders from him. “How are you two doing on the military records search?”
Ben and Tate looked at each other. “Um,” Tate said. “We’ve been…” He trailed off.
“You’ve been what?” Nadine asked him. “I’ve been gone for hours. We have records to look through. What have you been doing?”
“Look, Sheriff.” Ben took over. “It isn’t that we doubt you. It’s just that it seems like these records searches, looking for some rogue human, are a waste of time when there are werewolves we should be questioning.”
Nadine bit back a retort. She’d already questioned the werewolves—at least, the Donovan alphas. Alone. But she didn’t mention that. “This is a line of enquiry we’re pursuing,” she said to Ben. “So we pursue it.”
“But there’s a killer shifter!” Tate broke in. “We’re getting calls about it all day. One woman’s dog disappeared, and another man heard something in his shed last night.”
“There’s no evidence of a killer shifter,” Nadine said. “No one should panic.”
“No one knows what those things are capable of,” Ben said. “An animal like that, decides human meat is tasty? People aren’t going to let their kids walk to school.”
“That’s enough,” Nadine said. Jesus, shifters were a little rough around the edges, but the idea that the men she’d just sat and planned with would abduct children from the street and eat them—she couldn’t listen anymore. “Get back on the military records, both of you. Okay?”
They looked unhappy about it, but Tate shrugged, and Ben sat down.
Nadine retreated to her office, the only place in the small sheriff’s office that had a door. She shut the door and sank into the chair behind her desk, rubbing her forehead slowly.
She didn’t like being the bad guy all the time. Tate was young and inexperienced, so she had to herd him like a sheepdog every minute of the day. Ben, on the other hand, was near retirement, so nothing she said or did penetrated. She knew for a fact that he had a calendar in his desk that counted down to his last day, and every morning he crossed off another day with silent glee.
She liked both of them. They were good men, fine deputies. But this wasn’t an everyday situation. If they didn’t step up and bring some results, they could all lose their jobs. It hung by a thread, and the responsibility was all hers.
She sighed and looked down at the files. She wondered what a shifter would do in a situation like this. What Devon would do. Most likely he’d challenge Mayor Archer to a fight, and they’d both turn into wolves and attack each other until there was a clear winner and a clear loser. She summoned half a smile at the image of Mayor Archer, who was tall and distinguished and gray-haired, pulling off his clothes and turning into a wolf to prove his alpha-ness. But at least everything would be settled once and for all.
She opened the two murder files and went over them for the thousandth time. Kyle Bryant, a hiker from Denver, had been killed at his camping site, his body torn open and left. Then Scott Kraemer, who it turned out was Tessa’s ex-boyfriend and hired by the Martells to abduct her, was found in the woods a mile away, ripped open like Kyle Bryant had been. Scott Kraemer, it seemed, had been killed because he’d failed in his mission to abduct Tessa. Kyle Bryant had been killed—if the shifters of Shifter Falls could be believed—as a decoy, made to look like a wolf killer so the cops would accuse one of the Donovans and weaken them. So she would accuse one of the Donovans and weaken them. Which she’d nearly done.
Her superiors didn’t believe the decoy theory, nor did they believe that Scott Kraemer had been killed as punishment. They simply believed that a werewolf—a rogue, a killer, a natural predator—had killed both men, and that said werewolf needed to be stopped. Her two deputies, apparently, believed the same thing.
Nadine didn’t know what to think. But she knew that she’d spent the past few hours in the presence of the Donovans, plus Quinn Tucker, and she’d never gotten the feeling that they were killers. In fact, she’d been welcomed, her ideas listened to and appreciated.
Maybe they were fooling you. Maybe they just wanted to know the details of your investigation so they can keep one step ahead of you.
She let that little voice niggle at her for a minute, trying it out. If it was true, then what she’d just done—giving away everything she and her deputies were working on—was stupid. But damn, she really didn’t think she was stupid. She was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
She just didn’t think one of the wolves was her killer. And it wasn’t just because Devon Donovan was hot.
She dropped her head into her hands, blushing hard even though she was sitting here alone with the door closed. She could admit it, now that she didn’t have him sitting there in front of her, his eyes never leaving her face. She, Nadine Walker, unmarried spinster at age thirty-one, had a thing for a werewolf. A younger, hotter, sexy, muscled, bearded werewolf who probably thought of her as nothing but a nuisance, a means to an end. She’d been single for too long. He barely noticed her, she was sure. And even if he did, it would never cross his mind to do anything about it, because five years ago she’d arrested him.
So no, he wouldn’t want to kiss her. Or pick her up and throw her down on his bed and pull off all his clothes and have his way with her like—
Oh, God, she hadn’t had sex in so long.
Her job didn’t allow for it. She had boyfriends from time to time, but they had to be guys she’d carefully vetted and ch
osen so there would be no bad publicity. And jumping into the sack with a big, hot werewolf to scratch an itch was a recipe for publicity of the very worst kind.
Her cell phone rang, and the display said it was her father. Right when she was thinking about sex and Devon Donovan. Talk about awkward.
She made herself answer it. “Hey, Daddy.”
“My girl,” he said. “How are things? You have any leads on those murders yet?”
Her daddy had been a sheriff until he’d retired five years ago—two counties over. Nadine came by her blue blood honestly. “Working on it,” she said, looking down at the files again.
“Last we talked, you were looking at how the victims were connected,” her dad said. This was usually how their conversations went—straight to cop business, instead of the usual small talk about her mother or the weather. She always found bouncing ideas off her dad useful, his insights unexpected.
She opened both files and set them side by side now, looking at the crime scene photos. She was a cop, and she’d seen her share of crime scenes and crime scene photos, but these were a little hard to look at, even for her. “I don’t think the victims are connected,” she said. “They have different backgrounds, lived in different cities. What connects these murders is the method.” Both men had been ripped open, their bellies unzipped like jackets. It wasn’t something she had a particular desire ever to look at again.
“Wolf kills,” Daddy said.
The words were out of her mouth before she thought them. “Rogue wolf kills.”
“Sorry, what?”
Shit. She wasn’t supposed to know about rogue wolves, because that would mean she’d been talking to shifters. “Well, it makes sense, right?” she said, covering. “If a wolf did this, he was probably crazy. A rogue of some kind. Not your usual wolf.”
“A usual wolf is already a killer,” Daddy said, casual as you please. “It’s how those things think.”
“They aren’t things,” she argued. “They’re people.”
“Only half human,” he replied. “You know that. Are you a shifter advocate all of a sudden? I didn’t know.”