AlphaMountie (2 page)

Apparently he felt the same way, because she felt his fingers
at the button of her jeans. She murmured into his mouth, “Someone could come up
here any minute—”

He chuckled against her lips. “Well, then, we’ll have to keep
it subtle. And fast.”

Noire had never been so turned on by the word
fast
before.
But that’s what she wanted.
Fast.

His fingers popped open the button to her jeans and he spun her
around as he pulled at the zipper, so that she faced the ferry railing. For a moment
she was dizzy, looking down at the cold water below. The wind whipped through her
hair and she shivered. Then his warm body was pressed firmly against her back, his
cock grinding into her ass. He gripped her breasts through the cable-knit sweater
and skimmed his fingers across her nipples. She could hear the wind howling, his
breathing fast and excited in her ear, and the chatting of dozens of people on the
decks below who had no idea what was going on less than fifteen feet above them.

When he removed his hands from her breasts, she opened her mouth
to object—but then he moved them lower. One arm grasping around her waist, his other
hand slid into her jeans, over her panties. As he teased her clit through the cotton
fabric with his fingers, Noire wished she’d worn something a little sexier.

And then his finger moved lower, pressing the panties inside
her, rubbing against the slick wetness of her cunt, and she forgot how to think,
let alone worry about her lingerie. A second finger joined the first and he
filled her up completely, stretching the fabric deep inside. Her jeans hung
precariously on her hips. Her hands gripped the ferry railing, the cold metal
contrasting starkly against the heat of his hips still pressed firmly against
her ass. As he stroked her with his fingers, she leaned back into him,
centering herself against him. He murmured wordlessly in her ear, a heady
mixture of panting and something more wild, akin to a growl. She felt as if she
could fall or fly, tumbling over the railing to the deck below, or soaring out
into the deep, churning waters. She shivered, enjoying the combination of
pleasure and danger.

When his other hand joined in and slipped below her panties,
moving unerringly to her clit and flicking it with expert precision, Noire shuddered
to climax. Pressing her lips together as her body shook, she whimpered, keeping
her voice low, and his fingers rode with her to the finish. Pleasure fluttered
outward, from the depths between her legs down her thighs, up across her
stomach to the tips of her nipples. Warmth built in every part of her body, and
the stretch of her back that was pressed to his chest felt alive and trembling
with electricity even between the barriers of their clothing. He was so close
that she could swear she felt the buttons of his uniform pressing into her spine.

If she fell from the ferry railing right now, she could probably
float to safety on joy alone.

She was still gasping as he removed his hands, zipped up her
jeans and smoothed her hair back. He turned her around again and smiled. “So, I
never got your name.”

“That was amazing.” Noire blushed. “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t
have blurted that out.”

“It’s okay. I’m pleased to hear it.” His voice seemed oddly formal
now that it wasn’t growling in her ear.

“Just—I should probably repay the favor first.”

He shook his head with an exaggerated look of regret. “Wish you
could, but we’re about forty-five seconds from shore.”

“Oh!” She looked down and sure enough, the islanders and tourists
below were gathering their things. She held onto the Mountie as the ferryboat docked
with a sudden thump, nearly throwing her from her feet. She didn’t want to leave
the boat. She didn’t want to leave
him.

“I’m Noire Pelletier,” she said, answering his earlier question.
“Please call me Noire.”

“And Cam works for me.” His gaze ran from her toes to the top
of her head in a sudden possessive motion. “Black,” he translated her given name.
“Named for your hair or your eyes?”

“Neither. When I was born, my hair was blonde and my eyes were
blue. They stayed that way until I was four. Mom said my dad picked the name—it
was the color of the sky when he delivered me. The storm was so bad Mom had me out
in a watchtower in the middle of the forest.” Noire was babbling now. She had no
idea how to introduce herself to a man who’d just had his fingers buried deliciously
in her pussy.

It seemed Constable Dawson—or Cam, rather—was equally flustered.
“Which forest?” he asked.

“Uh, Algonquin Provincial Park. Born and raised, and now it pays
my rent.”

The Mountie’s eyes narrowed in thought. “You’re the park warden,
aren’t you? The one who identified bites on the last body. I read your report. Black
bear, if I remember?”

“Yes,” Noire said. Her personal shields were up again and though
her instincts urged her to trust him, human training told her to be careful. There
was no reason to tell him—yet—that “the last body” had been her sister. As soon
as anyone found out Noire was personally involved in the investigation, she knew
her credibility plummeted. As if letting an officer of the law finger her before
he knew her name really bolstered her reputation.
Can I fuck up any worse?

She turned the line of inquisition around. “I didn’t see you
at the last crime scene?”

“No,” he said. “Just got in from Prince George about an hour
ago.”

Prince George was a small city in northern British Columbia,
on the opposite side of Canada. They must really be pulling in the big guns for
this case.
At least he isn’t from Toronto—perhaps my little indiscretion
won’t get back to the rest of the team.

She could hope.

When they reached the tiny beach on Ward’s Island, the place
was already swarming with detectives and crime scene technicians.

Noire hung back and let Cam greet them. She noticed that despite
his relative youth (he couldn’t have been much older than thirty-five), many of
the others deferred to him immediately. One detective with mocha-colored skin and
a matching bun introduced him to the group. “Everyone, this is Constable Campbell
Dawson of the RCMP. Dawson’s been tracking our perp through Vancouver, Calgary and
Montreal.”

The others murmured in surprise. A steel-eyed man spoke up. “You’re
saying this is a serial killer?”

“I believe so, yes,” Cam said, his voice deep and firm. “We’ve
seen this MO in several different cities now. Young woman, skinned alive. In some
cases just her back was degloved, in some cases her full body. The faces are never
touched, but the bodies are marred by animal bites.”

“How do you know it’s not just a coincidence? Or a copycat?”

“There’s rarely coincidence in murder. While I may not have proof
I can testify that the brutality involved in these crimes is genuine and not easy
to replicate.”

The female detective who’d first introduced him spoke again to
admonish the tech. “Constable Dawson was on the team responsible for bringing in
Picton.”

Noire gasped when she heard this—so did many of the others. Pig
farmer Robert Picton was one of Canada’s most recent, most notorious serial killers.
He’d been implicated in anywhere from six to forty-nine murders, and who knew how
many more bodies were out there, still buried on his farm. The case had made international
news.

“Is that why you’re here?” one of the others piped up. “You think
this guy is another Picton?”

The female detective spoke again. “God, I hope not. Enough speculation,
folks. Get back to work.”

Noire was glad to have Cam at her side; this was all new territory
for her. By the time Noire had arrived to identify Fawn’s body, her sister had already
been moved to the morgue. It had been awful, but the room was sterile, metallic
and somewhat removed from reality.

Fawn had been covered with a sheet and Noire had only seen her
face, plus the bite wounds around her neck and shoulders. She remembered the blood
still caked in her sister’s dull brown hair, and how pale Fawn was—Noire had never
seen her that pale before. There’d been nothing left in the body that held even
a spark of her baby sister.

When she’d noticed the marks on her sister’s face and chin, which
the medical examiner had tried to hide with makeup for the identification, Noire
had recognized them immediately. Black bear. It was what made this case so strange.
Fawn’s body had been skinned, she found out later, which was obviously the work
of a human. But the teeth that had savaged her neck were clearly animal.

Noire held it together long enough to explain to the medical
examiner that she was a park warden with a background in animal biology, and thus
qualified to deal with and identify animal attacks. They had taken her contact information
for follow-up, which was how she’d received the second call today.

It wasn’t until she’d gotten back to her hostel that Noire had
let herself break down in tears. In the morgue, Fawn wasn’t Fawn anymore—she was
evidence
, cared for by the police, a sort of puzzle to be solved.

Seeing another woman’s body, naked and discarded on the beach,
was something different entirely.

She’d taken a swim off the Ward’s Island beach before. She remembered
it as a small but lovely little spot out of the knowledge base of tourists. In autumn
there had been a scattering of island residents with their dogs, and backpackers
with canoes. The locals were always friendly and the water was surprisingly warm—well,
for Canada, anyway. Noire and Fawn spent many a day there in university, taking
the ferry out to the islands for a little peace and quiet, wading along the beach
or jumping in for a quick dip after class. For the afternoon, you could almost forget
you were in one of the biggest cities in Canada. For Noire, it was the only thing
that had kept her sane.

Now it was nearing ten p.m. and in November that meant full darkness,
aside from the permanent glow of lights that reached the islands from downtown Toronto.
The islanders remained indoors, she supposed, not eager to play crime scene tourist
when the crime happened just outside their quiet homes.

The detectives were decked in street clothes, likely called in
after regular duty; the crime scene techs wore latex gloves and carried instruments
Noire didn’t recognize. The high-tech nature of crime scene investigation didn’t
interest her and actually completely confused her. She was there for one official
reason only—as an outside consultant to determine whether this attack was animal
or human.

Of course, her personal reasons went much deeper. Noire wanted
to find Fawn’s murderer. And she wanted to kill him herself. If offering her expertise
as wild animal expert helped her get close to the investigation, great. She wouldn’t
turn down the opportunity.

But that didn’t mean she was comfortable with it. The woman’s
body was splayed on the sand, right at the break between dry sand and rising tide.
She was completely naked. Her blonde hair fanned out around her like a halo. Her
face was buried in the sand and beyond the hair, Noire could see nothing of her
humanity.

The body was stripped entirely of skin. What was left of the
poor woman looked like raw hamburger meat.

Was this what Fawn had looked like, under the sheet?

She supposed so. The cops wouldn’t be crying “serial killer”
if the
modus operandi
wasn’t the same. Constable Campbell Dawson certainly
wouldn’t be here if this were a run-of-the-mill opportunistic killing.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

Noire looked up and into the warm eyes of a detective.

“I’m Detective Jim McFall of the Ontario Provincial Police. Constable
Dawson says you’re the park warden we’ve been waiting for.” He was smiling beneath
wrinkles and white hair. Noire liked the man immediately.

“Yes sir. Noire Pelletier, park warden in Algonquin. There are
some bites you wanted me to look at?” She kept her voice steady.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

His concern was touching. At the same time she wondered if her
inexperience was really that obvious. Part of her wanted to run straight to Cam,
ask him for help, but he was deep in discussion with a crime scene tech.
Keep
it under control, Noire,
she told herself. “Oh yes. Sorry. I’m good.”

She let Detective McFall lead her to the body. Up close she could
see sand stuck to the woman’s raw flesh. She swallowed back bile. Noire would
not
puke in front of a bunch of cops. She would extra not puke in front of a Mountie
who had recently fingered her to orgasm. Certainly she’d shown enough unprofessional
behavior for the evening.

“Looks like she was definitely killed by a human monster rather
than the animal kind, but check out these,” Jim pointed.

An Asian detective nearby spoke up, “She’s got bites all over
her neck and shoulders. Never seen anything like it. Can you tell us what the fuck
is going on here?”

“I’ll take a look,” Noire said, and she crouched down, sinking
into the cool sand. She balanced on feet and knees and felt the knees of her jeans
grow damp. She prayed this was water from the lake and not the woman’s blood, but
she didn’t look down to check. Her eyes were focused on the woman’s left shoulder.
Shallow gouges marred the flesh that remained, ripping upward toward her neck and
face.

“Anyone have a measuring tape?” Noire asked. One of the techs
handed it to her. She pulled the tape out and lined it up against the dead woman’s
neck. “Five centimeters, just about,” she murmured. Realizing the implications,
she pressed a hand to her mouth. She didn’t want to scream.

Cam left his own discussion farther down the beach and moved
back to her. “What is it you’ve got, Noire?” he asked. She noticed a few looks exchanged
between the detectives. Cam cleared his throat. “Warden Pelletier and I met on the
ferry out here and had, uh, some time to discuss the case.”

As she stared at the bites, Noire felt Cam’s warm hand on the
back of her neck. He effortlessly moved into a crouch next to her. “What is it?”
he asked. “You okay?”

“The bite marks. The last body, they were bear—a predator, not
unusual, I see them on animals all the time, and sometimes humans.”

“Yeah,” Cam said. “These ones don’t look the same, though, do
they?”

“You noticed?”

“I may not be as brilliant as you at the animal stuff, but it’s
kinda my job to notice things.” He flashed her white teeth and a warm smile. She
flushed a little and let her eyes move to the sand behind the dead woman’s hair.
Right now she didn’t want to look at the body
or
the sexy Mountie behind
her.

“Yes…” she said. “Obviously this isn’t a perfect science, but
they didn’t come from a bear.”

“Right,” Cam said. He didn’t sound surprised. Noire wished they
were back on the boat, far away from this insanity. Who was she to investigate a
serial killer? She was completely out of her league here.

“Some of the other victims had different bites,” he said. “At
first, because they’d clearly happened post mortem, we figured they were unrelated.
Animals sometimes will find a body before we do.”

“They didn’t take any flesh off this body, which they would have
if they were feeding.”
Or Fawn’s body,
she wanted to add, but Cam didn’t
know the extent of her involvement in the case and she didn’t think it was prudent
to bring that up now.

“Exactly.” He seemed pleased that she was following. His hand
was still on her neck and it was soothing. He rubbed a thumb back and forth in a
small massage. She closed her eyes briefly. But instead of a fantasy of Cam stretched
out on her bed, Noire’s imagination provided a glimpse of her sister’s body. She
opened her eyes quickly.

“They’re deer bites,” Noire blurted it out. Maybe if she said
it fast enough, she wouldn’t have to think through the implications. How could she
explain to Cam how important that fact was?

She couldn’t. It was that simple. Werewolves were pretty common
in pop culture these days, but no one believed they were real. And no one would
ever believe that Noire’s mousy, quiet, murdered sister had been a were-deer. A
shapechanger who took on deer form once a month under the full moon, her human body
screaming as her bones broke and muscles tore, reshaping themselves into a light
brown deer with a white tail, skittish as the human she’d once been.

“See this?” She pointed to the torn flesh. “It’s ripped, not
cut. See the jagged edges? They’re not clean, which makes me think deer. They don’t
have front teeth. If you’ve ever seen a tree with the bark stripped bare by deer
you’ll know what I mean. They grab the bark and rip it—they don’t actually chew
it the way a carnivore might.”

“Excuse me, did you say
deer
bites?” The dark-haired female
detective was standing over them now.

“Looks like it,” Noire confirmed.

“This is a fucking island. How did the deer even get here?”

“I don’t know.” Noire knew it couldn’t have been her sister—these
were fresh bites.

“Surely one of you must have a theory?” the woman asked. “Deer
bites? Really?”

Cam spoke up now, pressing his hand into Noire’s back in comfort.
“Detective Wahid, could I talk to you for a minute?” He rose and pulled the woman
aside.

Their voices continued in low murmurs. Noire heard her name and
she thought Cam might be defending her, but she forced herself to block it out.
She knew how she came across to cops—a woman who lived in the woods and knew more
about animals than people. A hick. She’d encountered resistance before, even when
investigating accidents.

She ran her eyes down the body, searching for more bites. She
felt herself growing faint at the rawness of what was left of the woman’s skin.
She had to stop thinking of Fawn. Stop thinking, stop feeling, stop reacting before
she embarrassed herself or her tears dripped all over the body and fucked up any
forensic testing.

Her eyes stopped at the woman’s wrist.

“Guys?” she called, her voice too loud amid the stilling November
breeze. “Uh, detectives? Constable?”

Cam turned his head, eyes concerned, and she focused on him.
“What is it, Noire?” he asked.

“Did one of the techs put this elastic band on her?”

“Elastic band?” Cam asked.

Detective Wahid waved a dismissive hand. “No, she was wearing
that when the patrol officers found her. We thought it might be useful but it’s
just regular elastic, nothing special about it.”

It was blue. And yes, just an ordinary elastic band. It might
be meaningless.

Noire pulled down the sleeve of her charcoal sweater to cover
the blue elastic band she wore on her own wrist. She shook her head. “I’m sure it’s
nothing.”

Detective Wahid’s eyes burned into hers. “There’s nothing else
you have to tell us other than deer bites?” Her voice was scornful.

“No,” Noire said. “I’m sorry.” She heard one of the techs mutter
something about “so-called experts”.

She felt Cam’s hand on her back and he leaned down, breath warm
on her ear. “Ignore them,” he said. “Do you have another hour or two?”

“Uh—yes?”

“Excellent. Stay silent for a minute and trust me.”

“Okay.” Noire was surprised to realize she did trust him. Though
he was only a few years older than her, he’d commanded the respect of the crime
scene team almost immediately—a far cry from the way Noire had embarrassed herself
with the deer bites.

She had to trust him. She had no one else left.

Noire waited out of the way as the crime scene technicians packed
up their equipment and prepared the body for transportation to the autopsy site
back on the mainland. Her mind kept twisting over and over about the deer bites.
It couldn’t be a coincidence for them to show up on the body directly after Fawn’s
death. But surely Fawn wasn’t involved in these killings, other than as a victim.
And was the blue elastic band simply a coincidence?