“Did you recognize him?” the detective asked.
“Yes, he was the man who tried to force me to leave Victoriana’s Restaurant in Breckenridge. I assumed he worked for Mario Constantino, the man I was tailing. I had information that Mario was meeting Danny Massaro, the man I intended to serve a warrant on.”
Alicia took a deep breath. So far, so good. Everything she’d said was the absolute truth.
Detective Simpson scribbled some notes, then looked up at her. “How could you see him so clearly? The room was dark. He couldn’t see you. He only had a flashlight. How did you know him?”
She’d seen him because she was a wolf. She would have sworn, if she didn’t know any better, that her heart had stopped beating. But with her silence, her trying to come up with an explanation, the way her body heated with panicked concern, she worried she was signing these men’s death warrants or fates as werewolves if she didn’t come up with something fast that sounded plausible.
She gave a little nonchalant shrug, never taking her eyes off the detective, not wanting to see how Darien and the others were reacting or what the other detective was doing. Watching her? Watching them? She knew that if she saw their expressions, she’d fall apart more than she felt she was doing now.
“I assumed it was him from his build and the way he walked. When he was at the restaurant, he reminded me of a big disgruntled bear. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t really know for sure who he was until I felt his pulse after I shot him. Once I’d seen him up close, I realized it was him. He must have followed me to Crestview.” She frowned in feigned annoyance. “I forgot where I left off.”
She wondered if that had been a ploy on the detective’s part to disconcert her. Or if he was used to asking questions when they popped into his mind. He was right in asking her the question. She just wished she hadn’t made the slip. Then again, she supposed that made her appear more human.
The detective flipped back a page in his notebook and said, “You said you heard him jerk the shower curtain aside in the bathroom.”
“Oh. Yes. When he realized I wasn’t in the bathroom, he returned to the bedroom. That’s when he saw me in the corner of the room. He raised his gun and fired. I responded by firing three times in return. Because he was holding the flashlight, I was able to pinpoint him better. He dropped his gun and sank to the floor. I worried others might be with him because the men usually travel in pairs, so I ran to lock the door, then checked his pulse to see if he was still alive. He wasn’t.
“I dressed.” She’d been naked. She couldn’t tell the detective that. Wouldn’t he wonder why? She faltered. “I mean, I changed out of my nightgown and into jeans and a sweatshirt.”
Now she sounded damned suspicious. He could have assumed she’d been dressed in her nightgown already. She was getting rattled. Calm down, she told herself. She swallowed hard, her throat dry as a drought in summer. Now she wished she’d had some water to drink. But if she asked for any, she’d sound like she was getting nervous because she was guilty of a crime.
Tom slipped out of the room, catching her eye and everyone else’s. She wished she was free to go also.
“Go on, Miss Greiston,” the detective prompted.
“I went to call the police, but when I punched in the number and held the receiver to my ear, I discovered the phone line was dead. My cell phone battery had run down so I was charging it and hoped it would work. I was able to use it to call 9-1-1. But then another man tried to get in. He tried the doorknob, found it locked, and then began kicking the door in.”
This was the hard part. How had she gotten past two armed men without getting herself killed? The one had undoubtedly left more shell casings behind from shooting wildly into the sky. But she hadn’t had her gun with her. Not when she’d been tearing out of there as a wolf. And she’d left the gun behind, along with her cell phone and purse and everything. How could she have managed to escape them as a woman without any weapons?
“So only one other man was there?” the detective asked, pen and brows raised.
If there was only one other, the detective might have figured she had slipped past him and then he fired at her but missed. But how could she have avoided two gun-toting men? But what if there had been eyewitnesses? Oh, my God, what if someone had seen a wolf run across the parking lot?
“Miss Greiston?”
She jerked her head up to look at him. “Two of them. I was hiding in the dark. The one went to check on the guy I’d… killed, while the other hurried into the bathroom, looking for me. At least I presume. I dashed outside. Someone fired three shots, but I kept running and never looked back.”
Tom returned to the great room with a glass of water and handed it to her.
“Thank you,” she murmured, her eyes meeting his, his expression telling her she was doing fine. “Thank you,” she said again and took a swallow of the cold water.
“Did you have a dog with you in the room?” the detective asked in a consoling manner, his blue eyes fixed on her gaze.
She knew his ploy. Pretend to understand the perp’s situation, then throw the book at him or her. Just as she’d often done. Only in the case of the men and women she arrested, they were the bad guys.
“A dog?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
“Yes. Well, in truth, a wolf.”
Jake’s hand tightened fractionally on Alicia’s. Her teeth were clenched together, and she didn’t know what to say. She was innocent, but if these men pushed her too hard, Jake and his family would be forced to turn them. She didn’t think the pack could kill them. That scenario would be too difficult to explain. But if they turned them, they’d have to take them into the pack, and Darien had already said he didn’t want two more newly turned pack members—male types, who probably had families of their own. And that would cause an even greater ripple effect of trouble.
The detective flipped through his notebook as if he needed to refresh his memory on the details of his investigation. She was certain this time it was a ploy to make her squirm. She didn’t squirm, although she felt light-headed and was afraid her face had drained of all color. She was barely breathing, and Jake looked anxiously at her. She scolded herself for not hiding her feelings better, but she couldn’t help it. They knew something. About the wolf.
And she was feeling damn guilty. How could she not? She’d bitten one of the two men. She was guilty! Nothing in her bounty hunter training said she could bite a perp into submission. Not that she had been after these guys, but still…
The detective tapped his pen at the open page. “Says here two men in the room next to yours saw a dog run out of your room. A big dog. Like a German shepherd. They never saw any sign of a woman leaving. One of the men had fired into the air, scared by the size of the wolf.”
Wolf. Twice he’d referred to it as a wolf. But if the eyewitnesses thought it was a dog, why did the detective think it was a wolf?
The detective flipped through some more pages of his notebook, while the other one continued to watch her expression. Her blood ran cold. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and force Darien’s hand. But she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t cause trouble for their kind.
“Blood was found on the rug near the door. A man’s blood. But not the same as the blood from the one who died. Wolf saliva was mixed in with the second man’s blood.” The detective looked up from his notes. “So what about the wolf?”
Her stomach bunched tightly into a knot, Alicia licked her suddenly very dry lips. Yet, she thought the detective was feeding her a story. No one would look to see if saliva was a wolf’s or a dog’s, would they?
“Wolf saliva?” she asked. “You mean, canine saliva, right? Is there a difference between a dog’s and a wolf’s?”
“Believe me,” the detective said with a smug expression, “The saliva sampled from the bite marks was wolf DNA. They can determine that to rule out that it wasn’t some other animal’s bites.”
She took a shallow breath and said, “I—”
“It’s not illegal to own a wolf,” Jake interjected, his voice quietly firm, as if he was a lawyer who knew her rights when it came to pet wolf ownership.
She supposed that to protect themselves, Jake and the rest of the pack would know about such a thing for self-preservation.
The detective switched his attention to Jake. She thought Detective Simpson was fighting a smile. Jake to the rescue. But it was more than that. It was as if the detective had caught them in a falsehood. But she wasn’t rolling over and playing dead yet.
“No, you’re right, Mr. Silver,” the detective said with emphasis, “not unless the wolf owner takes the wolf within the city limits of some cities, which is illegal. Crestview is not one of those cities. But the wolves have to be fenced in with at least eight-foot-tall fencing. Every access has to be locked to prevent the wolves from escaping.
“Taking a wolf into a motel room isn’t legal, nor a safe thing to do. If Miss Greiston was afraid for her life and was using the wolf for protection, it wasn’t really a smart idea. Nor was it legal. The wolf could have injured anyone. Since it has bitten someone now, we’ll have to hunt it down and make sure it wasn’t rabid.” He sat taller and turned to Alicia. “So what about this wolf, Miss Greiston?”
“He wasn’t mine,” she said stubbornly, head held high, voice confident.
The detective raised his brows.
She shrugged. “I don’t own any pets. Never have. I don’t know where the animal came from or where he went. You can check with my apartment manager. I’ve never had any pets at the place. They’re not allowed.”
At least the part about not owning any pets was true. But what if they checked out the hotel rooms where she’d stayed over the past month? What if they found wolf hairs on the carpet where she’d restlessly paced, trying to shift back into her human body?