Rogue Wolf by Paige Tyler
Chapter 18
“Still no answer?” Connor asked from beside Trey as he ended yet another call to Samantha without attempting to leave a message. He’d left her a dozen already, each more urgent than the last. She simply wasn’t answering.
“No,” he murmured before getting out of his truck and heading across the parking lot to her apartment complex, forcing himself not to run even as the muscles of his legs twitched and spasmed with the desire to put on more speed. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. If she wasn’t home, he had no idea where she was.
The original plan had been for him and Connor to go to Nadia’s place with Hale and Trevor and confront her. Trey knew it was an overly simplistic plan, bordering on naive and stupid. But until they knew for sure the woman was actually a life-sucking vampire and found a way to tie her more directly to the deaths of those three men, there wasn’t much more they could do.
After trying over and over to reach Samantha most of the night without success, his pack mates had insisted they change the plan. While he and Connor were here checking on Samantha, Trevor and Hale were on their way to Nadia’s place.
“Samantha’s okay, Trey,” Connor said as they took the stairs to Samantha’s apartment. “She probably just put her phone on do not disturb so she could get some sleep. She’s been running herself ragged on the Butcher case.”
Trey wanted to believe his friend, and he appreciated what Connor was trying to do, but he knew for a fact that Samantha would never shut her phone off for the night in the middle of an investigation, and not when they’d made plans to get together this evening.
When they got to her apartment, Trey knocked hard enough to wake Samantha up, but not rouse every neighbor along this stretch of hallway. Before the sound faded, he knew it was a waste of time. There were a lot of heartbeats thumping gently within the limits of his hearing, but none of them were coming from her apartment.
At the sound of a door opening behind them, he turned to see Crystal standing there in a pair of pajamas with a bad case of bedhead.
“She hasn’t come home yet.” Crystal pushed her dark hair behind her ear, regarding them intently. “And since the two of you are here, I’m starting to think that means I should be worried.”
“Samantha and I were supposed to meet up tonight, but then she sent me a text saying she had something important to talk to me about,” Trey said. “She hasn’t replied to my calls or texts.”
“Hang on. I’ve got a key to her place,” Crystal said, disappearing into her apartment.
A moment later, she hurried across the hallway to where they stood. Unlocking the door, she opened it and immediately charged in, leaving him and Connor to follow. Samantha’s apartment was dark, and Crystal flicked the light switch before making a beeline for the bedrooms. Trey could have told her Samantha wasn’t in the either of them.
“She must still be at the institute,” Crystal said, coming out of the guest bedroom and carefully closing the door behind her. “She can sometimes get tunnel vision when she’s buried in evidence.”
Connor looked dubious. “If that’s all it is, why wouldn’t she answer her phone?”
Crystal was already heading back across the hall to her apartment. “She frequently leaves her phone in her office when she’s in the lab, so she won’t be disturbed. Or the battery might have died.” She glanced at them over her shoulder. “Give me a minute to get dressed and we’ll go find out one way or the other.”
“You don’t need to come with us,” Trey said to her, catching the door to her place before it closed, watching as she raced off through another door into what he assumed was her bedroom. “Connor and I can head over and check. If her car is in the parking lot, we’ll know she’s there.”
Crystal didn’t answer. Thirty seconds later, she came running out of the bedroom dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, jumping in place as she pulled on a pair of tennis shoes.
“And what would you do then?” she asked, grabbing up her purse from the counter in the kitchen. “Bang on all the windows until she lets you in or kick in the door?”
Not really having an argument to that logic, Trey exchanged looks with Connor, then they both followed her down the hall.
Crystal led the way to the institute in her bright green Kia. They were halfway there when Trey’s phone rang. He answered immediately with the pickup’s hands-free system, praying it was Samantha calling him.
It wasn’t.
“Nadia wasn’t home,” Trevor said without preamble. “A quick check of her place indicates she hasn’t been there for a few days at least. But we did pick up that sweet scent you described. She’s definitely the vita.”
At least they were right about that much.
“We haven’t found Samantha yet,” Trey said. “We stopped by her place and are on our way to the institute with her friend, Crystal.”
“Okay, let us know when you find her,” Trevor said “We’ve already contacted STAT about Nadia. They’re going to try to find her. In the meantime, Hale and I are heading back downtown. We figured Nadia might be looking for someone to replace the guy you stopped her from killing this past weekend.”
Samantha’s car was nowhere to be seen when they reached the institute, but he and Connor still went inside with Crystal anyway, hoping they’d find something that would tell them where she’d gone.
From how weak Samantha’s scent was in her office, Trey could tell that it had been a few hours since his soul mate had been there. He watched curiously as Crystal logged on to Samantha’s computer, flipping through what he guessed were autopsy records, if the photos of body parts were any indication.
“Samantha and I have each other’s passwords, so we can proofread each other’s reports,” Crystal said without looking up. “This is the institute’s forensic database. Everything entered into the files gets a time stamp put on it for evidence-tracking purposes. It will tell us exactly what Samantha was doing right up until the moment she left work. I’m hoping this gives us an idea of what she might have found and tell us where she might have gone.”
He and Connor stood there, leaning over Crystal’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the endless string of photographs and narrative pages. They all sort of blurred together for Trey, but something must have caught her attention because she kept going back and forth over the last three or four pictures of a tattooed arm and the forms that accompanied them that were mainly description.
“Did you find something?” he prompted as Crystal continued to look at the pictures.
“I don’t know if I found anything, but I think Samantha did,” Crystal murmured, still flipping through the gruesome shots of the amputated arm. “You might have noticed that the narrative pages after each of the photos were stuffed with descriptive details—weights, measurements, skin texture, bruising, etc. That’s Samantha for you—she’s a compulsive notetaker. But when you get to these last four photos, all photos of this arm with the tattoo, there are hardly any notes at all.”
“Maybe she didn’t notice anything worth writing about,” Connor suggested.
Crystal shook her head. “That isn’t Samantha’s style. If there was nothing to note, she’d actually write nothing to note. I’m thinking she saw something in these last few pictures that made her stop what she was doing and log out of the system.”
Trey was tempted to ask what Sam might have seen, but it was obvious it was something they were all missing. “So that’s it? She took these pictures and then left right after that?”
Crystal clicked around Samantha’s computer for a few seconds before shaking her head. “Actually, after logging off the computer in her lab, she came back here and logged into her desk PC to look through Tuesday’s staff meeting files. She must have left right afterward.”
That’s why she’d called and left him a message. She’d seen something on the computer—or in the lab. But what?
They went back to the lab to look around, hoping there would be a clue there that’d tell them something important. While he and Connor looked around, Crystal called Louis to ask if he knew what Samantha had found and where she’d gone after leaving the institute.
Across the room, Trey could hear the panic in the man’s voice when he heard Samantha was missing and possibly in danger. Crystal told her boss everything they’d discovered since getting to the institute, which admittedly wasn’t very much.
While Trey hadn’t expected the older man to know anything, his gut tightened when the chief medical examiner said he hadn’t heard from Samantha.
“Louis is coming in to help me search the lab reports and see if we can find anything,” Crystal said after she hung up.
That was good. They’d take any help they could get.
The search of Samantha’s lab didn’t turn up anything useful, and Trey was trying to figure out what to do next when Connor mentioned they’d passed Nadia’s lab earlier. “Do you think we should take a look around in there?”
Trey seriously doubted they’d find anything that would connect Nadia to her vita lamia identity or where she might be hiding, but he supposed there was no harm in searching the place.
Crystal frowned. “What would be in Nadia’s lab?”
Trey exchanged looks with Connor before turning his attention back to Crystal. “It’s complicated. That said, could you unlock the door?”
Crystal hesitated for a moment, but then nodded. Thankfully, one key unlocked all the labs in this part of the building.
When they walked into Nadia’s lab, Trey didn’t get even a hint of the sweet and dusty scent he’d come to associate with the vita. Then again, there wasn’t much of any scent, unless he counted blood and corpses. It was like Nadia didn’t have much of a smell in her human form, which was strange as hell. For a moment, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed that distinct lack of scent when he’d first met her.
Trey was still trying to figure that out when he smelled something all too familiar. The odor was like a chemical disinfectant, but with a flowery noted blended in. He froze for a moment before following his nose straight toward the sink on the far side of the room.
“You got something?” Connor asked.
Trey was too focused on the plastic pump bottle filled with pink foamy soap on the counter to answer. Picking it up, he gave it a big sniff and almost gagged. It was like someone had dumped a bottle of perfume into a container of bleach. This was definitely it.
He turned and held up the bottle, giving Crystal a questioning look. “What is this stuff?”
“It’s a disinfecting body wash. It’s normally used for cleaning patients prior to surgery, but Nadia uses it to wash her hands. She buys it directly from a vendor in France or someplace fancy like that. It’s ungodly expensive, but she claims it’s the only thing that gets the stench of dead bodies off her skin. She makes a big deal out of having a sensitive nose.”
Trey stood there wondering how it was possible he hadn’t smelled this scent on the woman in their previous encounters. It was damn strong. Again, all he could think was that it had something to do with her vita half. Maybe shifting back and forth from human to vita diminished her scent? That would certainly explain why Nadia barely had a scent as a human.
“What’s the big deal about the body wash?” Crystal asked, looking back and forth from him to Connor.
Trey exchanged another glance with Connor before answering. “The scent has shown up on a couple of the body parts related to the Butcher case and at least one of the crime scenes.”
Crystal gaped in disbelief.
Trey tensed, waiting for the avalanche of questions to start.
“I really want to ask how the hell you know something like that, but instead, I think I’m just going to file it under that it’s complicated category you mentioned earlier and leave it at that,” she said. “I’m going to wait for Louis in Samantha’s lab. I’ll call you if we find anything.”
Connor waited for Crystal to leave before looking at him. “Do you really think Nadia is working with the Butcher?”
Trey ran that possibility through his mind. He’d been sure that the second person he’d seen in the woods the other night was a man. Maybe he’d been wrong. “I don’t know. But what really has me scared right now is that if we figured out Nadia is involved with the Butcher, maybe Samantha did, too. What if that’s what she wanted to tell me, and when I didn’t answer, she went to confront Nadia herself?”
“Samantha wouldn’t do anything that crazy,” Connor said.
Trey could tell from the doubt in his pack mate’s eyes that Connor wasn’t as sure about that as he sounded. The truth was, they had no idea what was going on. Or even what to do next. All Trey knew for sure was that Samantha was out there somewhere completely on her own.