Furred Lines

by Renee George

  Furred Lines

  Peculiar Mysteries Book 7

  Renee George

  Barkside of the Moon Mysteries

  FURRED LINES

  Peculiar Mysteries Book 7

  Copyright © Renee George 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holder.

  Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement from the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and storylines in this book are inspired only by the author’s imagination. The characters are based solely in fiction and are in no relation inspired by anyone bearing the same name or names. Any similarities to real persons, situations, or incidents are purely coincidental.

  Cover Art: Renee George

  Print February 4, 2018

  ISBN-10: 194717715X

  ISBN-13: 978-1947177154

  Acknowledgments

  Dear Readers,

  I have to thank you for wanting to hear Nicole’s story. I adored getting know Sid Taylor and his wife Jean while exploring the unexplored parts of Peculiar. So I have to thank you for the kick in the pants.

  For Robbin, thank you for always being there for me, even when you are too busy to breathe, you still make space for me. I should be kissing your ass every day. For Michele Bardsley for all her great edits, suggestions, and revisions. Also, for all her crazy good knowledge about psychopaths and serial killer. I am so glad you love me because I’m afraid of what might happen if you didn’t.

  Lastly, I have to thank my Rebel Readers. I ADORE you guys! Thank you for being loyal fans ((((hugs))). I also want to thank the Peculiar Fans for making this mystery romance series one of my best sellers! I will keep writing them as long as you want to keep reading them.

  .

  Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  My Wolfy Wedding

  Paranormal Mysteries & Romances

  About the Author

  Welcome to Peculiar, Missouri!

  Wereraccoon Nicole Taylor, a recent Quantico graduate, is eager to prove herself. She's been assigned to work with oh-so-yummy field agent and werebear Dominic Tartan to catch a therianthrope serial.

  Dom doesn't know what to make of the sexy recruit he's been tasked to train. Half the time he wants to ditch her, the other half of the time he wants to kiss her. Nicole struggles with the urge to sock him one or jump his bones.

  Doomsday preppers, a dead body, and a crate full of stolen guns make the case even more Peculiar. Can Nicole and Dom find the killer in the chaos? Or will someone close to Nicole be the psycho's next target?

  For my husband,

  the Smokey to my Bandit.

  I adore you.

  Chapter One

  I took a deep breath and straightened my collar. “I am an FBI agent,” I said to myself in affirmation. “Special Agent Nicole Taylor and I’ve earned the right to be here. Nothing can take this away from me but me.”

  As I continued to mutter my new mantra, I assessed my outfit for the umpteenth time. I’m a therianthrope, a person who can turn into an animal. In my case, the animal is the Procyon lotor—you know, a raccoon. Fun fact about raccoons, their paws are extremely sensitive. Even in my human form, my hands and feet were crazy responsive. Thus... my choice of the black, riveted boots.

  The stylish boots were formal enough for my black slacks, black faux-fur lined bomber jacket, and a dark blue button-down shirt, but had just enough rock-n-roll toughness to help me get away with my silver aviators. My black hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail. I wore little makeup other than some concealer under my eyes, which were naturally dark because, hel-lo, raccoon here, and a tiny bit of lip color. I checked out myself in the black sedan’s side mirror and was satisfied I had successfully straddled the line of professionalism and vanity.

  I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and straightened to watch the man cross the parking lot at the Kansas City Field Office. I’d been told I would be assigned to a senior agent who had spent the past several years working undercover. I don’t know what I’d expected, maybe a beard, rough hair, tattoos, and the edge of a thug. Instead, I got a man with a chiseled jawline, a perfectly aquiline nose, sharp cheekbones, firm sensuous lips, and the palest green eyes I’ve ever seen. I reached out to brace myself against the hood of the car, missed and tripped forward. My cute boots that had seemed like a good idea minutes before acted as a wedge when I tried to catch myself, and they sent me careening forward.

  Right into Mr. Green Eyes’s arms. I congratulated myself for not lingering over his bulging biceps as he assisted me into an upright position.

  “Doctor Nicole Taylor?” he asked, his mouth tugged up at the corners in a wry smile. “You are Doctor Taylor, right?”

  “Yes,” I said when I’d swallowed enough spit to wet my dry throat. Jesus, this man was the eighty candles on my grandmother’s last birthday cake. Hot, hot, hot. It was a fire I definitely needed to blow out, and no, that isn’t a euphemism. This man was going to be my partner and mentor on my first big case. The bureau frowned on fraternization in the ranks, and I had no plans to jeopardize my career before it got started. “You must be Special Agent Tartan.”

  He looked me over, and while he seemed amused, he didn’t look all that impressed. “I read your file, Doctor Taylor. You have a Ph. D. in behavioral psychology.” He shook his head. “And still, you chose to go to Quantico and join the FBI instead of private practice.”

  I crossed my arms so I wouldn’t fidget. “That’s right.” I made direct eye contact and didn’t allow my voice to waver. “And you have a bachelor’s in criminology and twelve years of field experience. And, by your half-flirting half-condescending tone, I can tell you are attracted to me, but you don’t think I’m cut out for the work, so you can’t decide if you want to drop me straight away or sleep with me first and then get rid of me.” I smirked as he stopped smiling. “I’m here to tell you, neither will happen. I’m not a horny teenager who can’t keep it in her pants, and I’m a damn good agent.”

  “There is more to field work than test scores,” Tartan said.

  “And there’s more to me than what you see,” I countered. I’d always been on the shorter side, so he towered over me by at least nine inches. I didn’t flinch under his heated gaze.

  After a few seconds, he nodded. “We’ll see.”

  “Yep.” I nodded back.

  We faced off for another few seconds until Tartan pulled his coat collar up and said, “Do you have the keys? Or are we going to stand in this cold parking lot all day?”

  “Oh.” The heat of a blush warmed my cheeks. It was February in Missouri, and the temperature, which had been in the sixties yesterday, were in the thirties today. I dug the car keys from my pants’ pocket and unlocked the door with the fob. “Where we off to?”

  “Springfield,” he said. “A man went missing two nights ago. We believe he is another vic
tim of the guy the news is calling the Little Piggy killer.”

  Information about the serial killer taking the victim’s pinky toes had been leaked to the press, and one reporter had used the nickname as clickbait to get people to read her article. It had worked, and unfortunately, the name caught on.

  “No body?” I blinked in surprise. “The last three bodies have been placed near their homes within a week of going missing, right?” His M.O. had been all over the news the past six months since the third victim was found. “Do you think this guy is still alive?”

  He opened the passenger side of the car. “Our job is to find out.”

  I frowned as he got inside and buckled up. Springfield was about two hours south of Kansas City. I got behind the wheel. “I’ll take forty-nine highway to thirteen all the way down unless you want me to take a different route.”

  “You’re driving,” Tartan said. He pulled his phone wrapped with earbuds from his jacket and put the speakers in his ears. He gave me a sideways glance as he put his seat back. “Wake me when we get there.”

  “I’d hoped we could talk about the case on the way down.”

  My partner turned on some music, sort of a grungy-blues tune I’d never heard. He cranked the volume then closed his eyes.

  “I guess we aren’t talking about the case,” I muttered.

  “Good guess,” he muttered back.

  My eyes widened. How in the world had he heard me over all that loud music? In an even quieter voice, I said, “Looks like Clark Kent. Hears like Superman.”

  He took the earbuds from his ears and stared at me. “You think I look like Clark Kent?”

  I actually thought he looked more like Superman, the latest Henry Cavill version, but I had been trying to provoke him. “There’s no way you could have heard me. And you weren’t facing me so you couldn’t have read my lips. Who are you? And even more to the point, what are you?”

  He put his buds back in and leaned back. “I’m your partner, for now. Dominic Tartan. A black bear therianthrope. And you’re Nicole Taylor, daughter of Sid and Jean Taylor, raccoon therianthropes.” He opened one eye and smirked at my expression. “I guess you don’t know everything about me, do you?” He gestured with his chin. “By the way, your dad told me to tell you hi, and that you should call your mom. She worries.”

  I started the car, my hands shaking as I pulled out of the parking space and got on the road. Dominic Tartan, the FBI agent assigned as my partner was a shifter? And how in the hell did he know my dad? I fought the urge to scream as I headed down Summit Street and away from our field office. This. Was. Not. Happening. My dad, the sheriff of Peculiar, had somehow managed to set me up.

  As if on cue, my phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. A picture of my mom displayed on my screen with the option of red to decline or green to answer.

  “You going to ignore that?” Dominic asked.

  I tapped the red circle. “Yep.”

  It rang again. Ugh.

  “Mommy issues?”

  “You have a psychology degree?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, I do. So how about you let me worry about me, and you worry about you.” I tapped the green button and put the phone to my ear. “Hi, mom.” I plastered a fake smile on my face because my mother would hear the irritation in my voice otherwise. She might not be a psychologist either, but she could read people like no one I’d ever met before, and her intuition was off the charts. “Sorry I dropped your call. I was in the middle of something.”

  Dominic raised his brows at me.

  “It’s all right, puddin’. I’m just calling to see how your first day is going?”

  “Oh, fine.” I tried not to sound like I swallowed a bug. “Everything is A-okay.”

  “Well, that great. I’m glad to hear it.”

  I adjusted the phone between my shoulder and ear. “Did you need anything else, Mom?”

  “Your dad says hi.”

  I glanced at Dominic. “That’s what I hear.”

  The silence on Mom’s end was deafening.

  “I’ve got to go. Love you.”

  “Love you right back,” she said and hung up.

  I dropped my phone into the carrier in the car’s console.

  “You shouldn’t drive while on the phone,” Dominic said.

  “Thank you for that public service announcement, Agent Tartan. My eyes have been opened, and you have changed my world. You’re a hero.”

  A sound emitted from him that was a combination of grunt and snort. “You’re welcome, puddin’.”

  One of the things I didn’t miss about living in a town of therianthropes was the lack of privacy. In our human forms, we were a little stronger than humans, and our senses were more in tune with our surroundings. In other words, Dominic, as a werebear, who could hear my whispers over his loud music, had also listened to every word my mom had said to me. “Why was I assigned to you, Agent Tartan?”

  “Call me, Dom.” He scrolled through some files on his tablet.

  I gripped the steering wheel tight enough to my knuckles white. “That’s not an answer.”

  He shrugged. “Take the next exit. 71 South to 54 east to 13 south. That’ll be the quickest route to Springfield.”

  I bit back a groan. “You know I grew up in the Ozarks. I’ve done some pretty extensive traveling between here and Springfield, so if you don’t mind, I’ll do my own navigating.”

  Dom chuckled. “Fair enough.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Did you get a chance to look through the files yet?”

  “I was only given this assignment last night, but I did read through the first three murders.” I wiggled my fingers while controlling the steering with my thumbs. They creaked with crepitus. I gave Dominic a cursory glance before turning on my left blinker and passing the eighteen-wheeler going sixty in a sixty-five. “He grabs his victims as they arrive home from work. He leaves no trace of himself behind, no DNA, fingerprints, hair, foreign fibers. There are no tire tracks leading to or from the abduction site. He’s basically a ghost. He has spaced out his kills long enough that it took a while for the police to connect the cases. The first two victims were six months apart, and the third one eight months after that, then four months on this one. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to his killing. Within a week after the abduction, he places the body somewhere the family can find it. They always have a pinky toe missing, which the media has picked up on, and they are tortured with some kind of sharp implement. Oh, and he cuts off their pinky toes for some reason.” I could have recited the files word for word since I had an eidetic memory, but I found it creeped most people out when I put that ability on display. “Did I leave anything out?”

  “This fourth case is the one you should have read.”

  I passed two more vehicles and settled back into the right lane of traffic. “Why’s that?” I hadn’t been given the fourth case to review.

  Tartan held his phone screen up at an angle to show me a picture he’d pulled up on the screen. I was confused as I looked at a punch card with six paw prints punched out of twenty-eight tiny squares, and in the middle of the card was a bear logo with the words Blonde Bear Cafe Loyalty Card.

  A wave of nausea washed over me.

  “You know what this is, right?” Dom asked.

  “Sure, it’s a card from Blondina Messers’ restaurant. I probably have one of those in my wallet. Once you buy twenty-eight meals, you get a free lunch or dinner. Are you telling me that was taken from the crime scene?”

  “Don’t have a heart attack, Agent Taylor. Your dad confirmed that the latest victim doesn’t live in Peculiar. And appears to never have visited, either.”

  “The killer is a therianthrope?” Even though I was an FBI agent, I worked on the human side of the law. Suddenly it was perfectly clear why I’d been assigned to Dominic Tartan. This serial killer wasn’t a human psychopath. Shit. We were looking for a shifter. “All the victims were shifters?”

 
“Yes.” He looked at the tablet. “And this card proves the killer is familiar with your hometown.”

  I shook my head. “The killer can’t be anyone from Peculiar. It’s just not...” I shook my head again. “No.”

  “That card was found near the victim’s front porch. It’s got a gloss surface, so prints have been pulled, and they are running them through forensics,” Dom said. “You wanted to know how we were partnered up? Well, Agent Taylor, I requested you.”

  “Because I’m from Peculiar?”

  “Yes, that and it’s an in. You know what these therianthrope towns are like. They are pretty closed up with integrators like me, and no human is going to be allowed to get in there to investigate. Your dad said we can work out of his office. We’re going to check in with the locals in Springfield, get up to speed on the current victim, and then we are going to take our investigation to your hometown.”

  My knuckles were white again as I turned on to the 54-highway exit. “Great. Fun, fun.” I guess I was going home.

  Chapter Two

  We arrived in Springfield after a lot of silent car driving. I pulled into the parking lot of the FBI office on Chesterfield and parked near the front doors.

  “We’ll coordinate with an Agent Dale Resnik,” Dominic said. “He’s a good guy. I’ve worked with him once before a couple years back.”

  “So, he’s a therianthrope?”

  “Nope.” Dom shook his head. “He’s human. Completely unaware, and that’s the way we have to keep him and every other human we run into on this case. That’s part of our job.”