Rogue Wolf by Paige Tyler
Chapter 5
“You going to fill us in on how the date went last night, or did you think we’d let you slide without telling us anything?” Connor asked from the far side of the tables they’d shoved together in the training room.
Trey looked up from the STAT file he’d been reading for the past few minutes to see Connor, Trevor, and Hale sitting in front of file folders of their own, scribble-filled notepads near at hand. Tuffie, the team’s resident pit-bull-mix mascot, sat off to one side, while Kat perched on the table beside Connor, looking over his arm like she was actually reading the documents Alyssa had left them. Which, considering this particular cat, was a distinct possibility.
The four of them had come to the SWAT compound early that morning to go through Alyssa’s files on the three dead victims, hoping to find some kind of connection between them. Trey didn’t know about the others, but so far, nothing obvious was jumping out at him.
“The date was amazing,” Trey said, unable to keep the smile off his face.
“What’d you guys do?” Trevor asked.
“We went out for burgers and then ice cream.”
His buddies regarded him expectantly, clearly waiting for more details. But there was no way he was going to tell them about the kiss on the bench in front of the ice cream shop. No, that memory—of the most perfect kiss he’d ever had in his life—was for him alone. He still had a hard time believing it had been real, even if it had left him lying awake all night reliving it. Even now, all he could think about were Samantha’s pillow-soft lips and the way her skin had smelled like cherry blossoms and spring air after a light rain.
Of course, he had no idea how to explain the fact that, in all the time he and Samantha had been around each other over the past two years, the moment on that metal bench had been the first time he’d picked up that scent. Considering the way everyone else in the Pack who’d found their soul mate had made such a big deal about picking up their unique scents right away, he didn’t quite know what to make of his experience.
“Sounds like the perfect date,” Hale observed.
“It was perfect,” Trey said, what he knew was a dopey smile slipping across his face again. “Oh, who am I kidding? It was better than that. I haven’t been able to think about much of anything but her since dropping her off at her place last night.”
Connor exchanged looks with the other guys before leaning forward. “Do you think Samantha is The One for you?”
“Dude, they’ve been on a grand total of one date,” Trevor pointed out. “How is he supposed to know if she’s his soul mate yet?”
“Because he’s been crushing on her since the first day he saw her,” Connor said, as if that should explain everything. Then he looked over at Trey again. “So is she?”
Trey almost laughed at the eager expressions on his pack mates’ faces. He should have known the question was coming. Over the past two years, more than half of the Pack had found their soul mates—aka that one person who could love a werewolf in spite of what they were. Every time he or any of the other single guys went out with someone, everyone automatically assumed they’d found The One. That was the way it seemed to work lately. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been wondering the same thing when he’d knocked on Samantha’s door last night.
There was just one problem.
“I wish I could tell you definitively that she is,” he said, shocked at how true that statement really was. He hadn’t realized until then exactly how much he wanted what most of the other members of his Pack had already found: a future of more than merely searching and hoping.
“But?” Hale prompted.
“But I think Samantha might be playing me.”
Trey sighed, his gut twisting at the notion of thinking something like that, much less saying it out loud. He hadn’t gone to bed with these doubts floating around in his head, but they’d relentlessly started popping up as the morning dragged on and he began to overanalyze every single minute of last night’s date.
“I can’t shake the horrible feeling that the only reason Samantha wanted to go out with me is because she’s looking for dirt on the Pack,” he continued. “You know she’s been sniffing around our crime scenes for years. And after all the crap that got swept under the rug with that delirium case, I have no doubt she knows we’re hiding something.”
His pack mates looked at him dubiously.
“You think she knows we’re werewolves?” Trevor asked.
Trey shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not, but you have to admit, the timing of all this is strange. The two of us have been flirting with each other forever, and then out of the blue she asks me out? You don’t find that at least a little curious?”
“Not really, no,” Hale said. “Is it so shocking that Samantha got tired of waiting for you to ask her and decided to take things into her own hands? This is the twenty-first century, you know. Women are completely comfortable going after what they want.”
“Maybe,” Trey admitted. “But you weren’t the one sitting across from her as she asked me question after question.”
Trevor laughed. “I may not be the greatest at the whole social thing, but isn’t asking each other personal questions what people normally do on a date?”
“Yeah, personal questions I get,” Trey answered. “But almost all Samantha’s questions were about how I got into SWAT, what kind of work we do, how tight I am with you guys, and how well I know all of you. And every time I tried to steer the conversation in her direction, she turned it right back around on me. After a while, it was like she was grilling me for information.”
His friends were quiet for a while, considering that.
“So what are you going to do?” Connor asked.
“What can I do?” Trey ran his hand through his hair exasperated. “If I’m right, and the only reason Samantha is going out with me is to dig up dirt, then every minute I spend with her puts the Pack at risk. If I walk away now, and it turns out I was wrong about her, then I’d be giving up my chance at a soul mate.”
“You can’t do that,” Hale said firmly. “Walking away from a shot at finding The One would be insane. Nobody in the Pack would expect you to do that.”
“I know,” Trey murmured. “That’s why we’re going out again tonight. It feels like I’m playing with fire, but the thought of walking away makes me sick to my stomach.”
As they sat around, the files in front of them untouched, they talked about how much Samantha might already know, in between his buddies giving him suggestions on where he should take her on their second date. Connor was of the opinion that if things went well enough, maybe Samantha would give up her snooping and realize she was his soul mate. Trey thought that might be a little optimistic, but he couldn’t stop himself from hoping his pack mate was right.
It was Trevor who finally pointed out they’d been talking about Trey’s love life for the past hour, instead of finding clues on who was murdering men and leaving mummified remains at the city dumps.
“Never let it be said that I’m the adult in the room,” he added. “But maybe we should actually get back to looking at these files, especially if STAT is right about the MO and there’s a good chance the killer is going to strike again this weekend.”
Trey couldn’t argue with that logic. Pulling his pad full of notes a little closer, he flipped through the pages of scribbles he’d written. “I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t found anything earth-shattering yet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something STAT missed.”
“STAT has an army of intelligence analysts on this, not to mention criminal profilers, data-mining and predictive analytic software tools, and loads of experts with experience dealing with supernatural killers,” Hale pointed out. “You honestly think we’re going to find something they missed?”
“We don’t need a miracle here,” Trey said. “Just something that will give us a place to start looking.”
With that, Trey and his teammates spread out the papers from the three folders. Well, actually, two of the folders. Trevor was still sitting there holding one in his hand, his expression thoughtful.
“There’s not much on the body found in the McCommas Bluff landfill. We know from his bone structure that the guy was approximately thirty years old. STAT says he was likely killed last Saturday or Sunday,” Trevor said, holding up a piece of paper. “But they haven’t ID’d the body yet.”
“All right,” Trey said. “With so little on that one, let’s set him aside for the time being and focus on the other two.”
Grabbing photos of the other two victims, Trey stood and walked over to the whiteboard at the front of the room. After hanging them up with some magnets, he picked up a marker and turned back to look at his pack mates.
“Let’s start laying out everything we know about these two guys,” he said, motioning at the “before” pictures. “Give me everything you got. No detail is too small.”
“The first body, found in the truck at the Fair Oaks Transfer Station, was a man named Demario Harris,” Connor said, skimming through the file. “He was twenty-seven years old and worked as a commercial plumber.”
“Alden Cox was the one found at the DFW Landfill. He was a supervisor at a UPS distribution warehouse,” Hale added. “Twenty-nine years old.”
His teammates kept going like that, calling out information on first Demario and then Alden, helping Trey by focusing on equivalent data points. Trey didn’t pay much attention to what he wrote, instead listing everything the files had on the two victims—home addresses, education, work history, bank accounts and credit cards balances, police records, nearby relatives and close friends, how often they went out at night, where they went when they did, sexual preferences, even the type of women they hung out with.
As they quickly filled the whiteboard, Trey decided it was more than a little creepy how much personal information STAT had been able to dig up about the two men, most of it probably coming straight from social media and other open sources.
After he finished writing, Trey stepped back to regard the whiteboard. While there were still no obvious slam-dunk connections, seeing everything laid out this way allowed him to realize the two men were surprisingly similar in many ways.
“We might only have these two victims, but I think we’re already seeing a pattern,” Hale said. “Both of these guys were physically fit, around the same age, attractive, and, if their social media accounts are any indication, extremely active in the club and party scene, which means our killer has a type.”
Looking at what he’d written about Demario and Alden, Trey had to agree with Hale’s assessment. According to the date and time stamps on their social media posts, both had gone out to a club almost every night in the weeks prior to their deaths, including the weekends when they’d been killed. But as he continued to compare the two men, he realized they had more in common than their social lives.
“These two were perfect victims,” Trey said. “Neither seemed to be close with their families or have any good friends. Their interactions seem limited to casual acquaintances and a series of one-night stands.”
“Yeah, and I’m willing to bet the killer picked them specifically because no one would notice them leaving a club or bar with a complete stranger,” Trevor said.
“So we’re all leaning toward the killer being a woman, right?” Connor asked.
“Or a man and a woman,” Hale said. “The woman might be the bait. Her partner could be someone waiting for her to lure their victims outside.”
“The guy we found yesterday did have his pants down around his knees,” Trevor remarked. “That definitely supports the theory a woman enticed them to leave the clubs with the offer of sex, then whoever she’s working with took them down while they were distracted. It’s cold-blooded but effective.”
Trey sighed. “While we’re probably right about all of this, it doesn’t help us much. STAT had their analysts go through both men’s social media accounts. There were no women—or men—in common between them. There also weren’t any bars, clubs, or restaurants in common, either. Whoever the killer or killers are, they’re smart enough to stay away from any cameras. That’s going to make it damn hard to find them.”
“We could ask STAT to use their fancy computers to create a list of all the places the two victims spent time in the weeks before their deaths, then start hitting all of them with photos of Demario and Alden,” Connor said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will remember seeing something suspicious.”
Trevor groaned at that idea.
Trey didn’t blame him. “With only the four of us and the number of places those two guys frequented, that might take a while,” he pointed out.
He left out the part about there being a good chance someone out there could get murdered this weekend, if they hadn’t already. Unfortunately, they had nothing really to go on when it came to stopping it from happening.
“You’re right,” Hale said. “We need a way to cut down the list of potential locations. If not, we could be canvassing clubs and bars for the next month and still never find anything.”
They studied the board again, running through every detail they’d listed, wondering if there was something they’d missed. It wasn’t until Trey went through the files again that he caught sight of a picture of the garbage truck where Demario’s body had been found.
“Maybe we can use the fact that the killer appears to use dumpsters to dispose of the victims to our advantage.” He dug through the photos until he found some from the DFW and McCommas Bluff sites. “I doubt the killer would have lugged those bodies very far after the murders. If we’re right and the men were killed close to the bar, restaurant, or club where the killer picked them up, maybe it’s as simple as looking for dumpsters positioned close to those kinds of places.”
Trey could practically see the lightbulbs going on as his pack mates picked up on his reasoning.
“We could have STAT dig into the landfill records,” Connor suggested. “See if they can figure out where the trash came from that the bodies had been found in. It should be easy for the truck that unloaded at Fair Oaks Transfer Station. Probably a little harder for the body at the DFW site. Once they have an ID on the body from yesterday, they could do the same for him. If they can figure out where the trash came from, they could compare that to the list of places the men went. That should give us a list of clubs, bars, and restaurants that have dumpsters nearby. It should cut way down on the number of places we have to check out.”
“That theory depends on the killer being too lazy to haul the bodies anywhere before dumping them in the garbage,” Trevor said. “That’s one hell of an assumption, but at least it gives us a place to start. It might even lead us to the actual places the men were killed.”
They spent a few more minutes talking before Trey called the number Alyssa had left for him.
“We’ll have your requested info within twenty-four hours, if not before that,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “I’ll send the spreadsheets to each of your phones.”
Trey frowned. “I’m not sure I can read spreadsheets on my phone.”
The woman laughed. “You can now. I’ve updated your phones with the app. It’s already been installed and authenticated. All you have to do is tap the document attachment when you get the email. Call if you need anything else.”
As Trey hung up, he wondered if he should be worried that STAT could apparently get into his phone and do anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. Then he decided it wasn’t worth his time to care. He had other stuff to worry about now that he and his pack mates had a plan to find the killer. Like figure out where he was going to take Samantha tonight.
Maybe he should have asked STAT if they could have helped with that.