Hierarchy (8 page)

* * * *

Caleb Westmoreland wasn’t pleased when the police came to call. He sent a chilling look at his butler as the man escorted them into his office. White faced, the butler babbled an introduction of the two detectives and hastily withdrew. After studying the two detectives for several moments while they studied his office and, no doubt, tabulated the price of everything in it, he finally curled his lips into the semblance of a welcoming smile. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked sardonically.

The one the butler had introduced as Detective Reilly, looked at him sharply. “I believe you have a man by the name of Bill Duncan in your employ?”

Caleb lifted his brows. “I do?”

Reilly frowned, glanced at his partner, Detective Brown, and then looked Caleb over suspiciously. “I understood that you did,” he responded coolly.

Irritation flickered through Caleb. “Well, if you understood that he did, then
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you’re probably right.”

“That name doesn’t ring a bell?”

Caleb smiled at him thinly. “No bells ringing. You must know I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand employees.”

“We clocked it at closer to two thousand.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is a fact. And it’s also a fact that Bill Duncan worked for you, was an officer of the company, in point of fact!”

“Hmm,” Caleb purred curiously. “Which company?”

“We didn’t come here to play at cat and mouse with you!” Brown snapped. “Do you know the man or not?”

Caleb’s lips curled in genuine amusement. “And here I thought playing cat and mouse was your forte!” he drawled. His smile vanished. “I believe I already informed you that the name wasn’t familiar, but then again, you must realize that I don’t personally handle the hiring and firing. It would be impossible to micro-manage my holdings—

which I’m sure you’re aware are fairly extensive—and still turn a profit. Would you like to take a seat? Or do you prefer to stand?”

The two men exchanged a look. “We won’t take up any more of your time.”

Caleb nodded. “Good day, gentlemen.”

Reilly paused at the door, as Caleb had known he would. “You might be interested to know that he was murdered last night. We found his headless corpse on a sidewalk downtown.”

Caleb lifted his brows. “The evil that walk our streets,” he murmured commiseratingly, then added on a sardonic note, “Thank the gods we have the police to protect us.”

* * * *

“What do you think?” Brown asked his partner as they climbed in their car again. “You think he knows something about the murder he ain’t tellin’?”

“I think he’s a fucking weirdo and I think he gives me the creeps. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man that was colder or less sympathetic to his fellow man.” He considered his partner’s question as he started the car. “I think he knows a lot more about it that we’ll ever pry out of him, but I doubt he was personally involved. Did you see that place? See him? Not a hair out of place, not a speck of lint on that thousand dollar suit he was wearing and the whole fucking place just as pristine. If he’d had anything to do with the murder, even to ordering it for some reason, there ain’t no way we’d’ve found the body … especially not lying on the damned sidewalk for anybody to trip over. Messy, that. I don’t know which murder was more gruesome, but I almost lost my breakfast!”

Brown nodded. “I was thinkin’ the same thing. You think the coroner’s managed to figure out what was used to take his head off yet? Maybe it’ll give us a lead? This is obviously a dead end.”

“What I’d like to know is who that other stiff is! Poor kid!” He turned to back down the drive. “Let’s head over to Westmoreland Media and interview some of that poor slob, Duncan’s, co-workers. We can talk to the coroner before we head back to the station.”

* * * *

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Curiosity slithered through Caleb as he stood at the window listening. Satisfy it?

Or let it go? He turned from the window as the detectives disappeared down the drive and pinned his butler with a cool look. “Tell Moore to bring a car around—the sedan, I think,” he said coolly.

“My lord,” Yancy said meekly after a moment. “Are you certain that’s wise?”

He paled visibly when Caleb turned to him again.

“What I mean to say is, don’t you think it’ll make the cops suspicious if you leave directly after they’ve been here?”

Caleb considered it and shrugged. “I hadn’t thought of that. This could be …

interesting. You’re right. Tell Moore to bring the red sporty one.”

There was yellow crime tape all over everywhere. The crime scene was hard to miss even if he hadn’t already had a general idea of the location from the piece in the newspaper. Parking his sports car, he ignored the two detectives who’d been tailing him since he’d whipped around them and strode casually down the sidewalk, stopping to examine the first cordoned section of sidewalk. “Head,” he murmured to himself, studying the brown, dried blood for a moment before he stepped into the street and strolled down to the main site of the crime scene. “Body.” He sniffed. “Ah. Wolf.

Nasty, low class creatures.” He waved a hand to bring the fading scent to his nose.

“Lycan—not wolf,” he corrected himself. “True bloods—most of them, anyway.”

Now why in the world would that fool, Duncan, decide to tangle with a pack of Lycans, he wondered?

He almost missed the scent that answered the question. He excused himself on the grounds that the overpowering scent of beast and piss—Duncan’s—were enough to taint such a lovely, delicate scent.

His mate, if he didn’t miss his guess.

The flavor of magic and the paranormal were a surprise. He lingered for a few moments, trying to decide if they mingled with her scent because they belonged to her or if there’d been a magic user in the midst of the wild battle that had evidently been waged in the street the night before.

Finally, he dismissed it as unanswerable at the moment.

Following the scents, he made his way to the cemetery and to the site of the final crime scene. The scent of Lycan was much stronger here—no doubt most if not all of the pack. The taint of vampire hung about the area, though.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured.

Realizing once he’d surveyed the area that neither the churned up earth, the overturned grave stones, or the mingling of scents was going to take him any closer to unraveling the mystery, he left the cemetery, lifted his head to catch the multitude of scents and sort them, and finally crossed the street. The scents of more Lycan—different scents and some of the same from the cemetery—lingered there. He paced back and forth in front of the building for a few moments and finally caught a single scent leading up to the melee—hers.

She’d either walked into a trap set for her—poor darling—or inadvertently stumbled into the midst of a turf war between the two groups of Lycan he’d detected. He followed her delightful scent to the corner and rounded it, discovering that the vamp had been trailing her. Frowning, he made his way to the next corner and stood for a few moments studying the Club Rouge—Constantine’s lair.

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He would sleeping now, Caleb thought, lifting his head to study the sun. The question was, did he know? Or care? It certainly wasn’t Constantine who’d followed her, but that didn’t rule out the possibility that the vamp who had had been under orders to keep an eye on her.

On the hunt again after a few moments, he picked up her scent once more and followed it until he found himself standing in front of a run down apartment building. He followed her scent from there—much fainter—to a ‘greasy spoon’ and then back again.

She lived here. She worked there.

She went for a walk, picked up a vampire along the way and then landed in the middle of a turf war. Alternatively, she’d already caught the interest of the vamp, or his master, and possibly the Lycans, as well.

He considered and finally decided to wait to explore her apartment. He’d had his fun with the city’s finest. He didn’t want them pawing her things.

“Where are you, my little
papillion
?” he murmured musingly once he’d gotten in his car again. Butterfly, he mused and then felt a touch of amusement. “How appropriate. Chaos. Is that your true role in this, I wonder? To spread chaos where ever you roam, my butterfly? I suppose we shall see.”

Ignoring the speed limit signs, he headed for his estate once more. He was mildly annoyed that Duncan had proven to be so inexcusably useless when he’d shown such promise to begin with by finding the woman, but then it occurred to him that Duncan hadn’t been completely incompetent. He’d had the grace to die nearby. If not for that he wouldn’t even have her scent—wouldn’t have anything more than the admittedly lovely view of her bottom in a pair of snug jeans, the color of her beautiful hair, and the sight of the mark on her arm to tease him.

He was less pleased that someone had snatched her, but he had her scent now.

One way or another, he would find her.

* * * *

“We oughta arrest the bastard!” Brown growled as the two detectives watched Westmoreland fly past them for the second time that day. The bastard even had the audacity to wave at them as he went by—
ten
miles above the speed limit and climbing! “For what?” Reilly grunted.

Brown sent him a wide-eyed look of disbelief. “You kidding me? We just talked to the guy about the murder. Here he’s claiming he don’t have a clue and heads right to the crime scene!”

Reilly rolled his eyes. “He had today’s newspaper right there on his desk—
with
directions to the crime scene. Anybody could’ve put that together.”

“Yeah? But he ain’t just anybody. He’s the guy the dead guy worked for.”

“Maybe so, but we ain’t got nothin’ to touch him. That ain’t what bothers me about this whole thing anyway.”

“Well, it pisses me off! What part bothers you?”

Reilly sent him a wry look. “I got the feelin’ that, by the time he’d walked the crime scene and took that stroll down the block, he knew exactly what happened here last night. And we don’t know dick, yet. That’s the part that really pisses me off!”

* * * *

“I don’t know, Pater. It looked like the mark to me, but don’t it seem weird to you that the
promised one
would be a white woman?”

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Luke grunted absently. “There’s nothing in the prophesy that says she’ll hail from any of the tribes.”

“I’d fuck in her a heartbeat.”

Luke narrowed his eyes at the speaker. “You so much as look at her crossways, Ronin, and I’ll cut your pecker off and feed it to you,” he growled.

Ronin gaped at him. “But … If she belongs to the pack ….”

“She don’t belong to the pack!” Luke said pointedly. “There ain’t nuthin’ in the prophesy about that neither.”

“I say we need to call the elders together and see what they have to say about it.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really remember the damned prophesy—not word for word anyway. D’you?”

Luke shook his head. “There’s been talk about that prophesy for two or three hundred years—maybe more. I never expected to run across her. I wasn’t really paying attention when they were passing it down. I think you’re right. I think we’re going to have to consult with the elders—but it’ll have to wait. She’s in trouble. We need to find out why the vamps are after her and who else was keeping tabs on her and why. And while we’re at it, we’re going to have to make sure they don’t manage to snatch her.”

Not that he particularly cared about the prophesy one way or the other in so far as the pups went. He’d be happy enough with whatever he had. The problem, as far as he could see, was the damned crone’s protection spell. He hadn’t adequately considered that, he thought wryly.

But that gods damned spell meant he wasn’t going to be able to mark her and if he couldn’t then he also couldn’t bind her. He might be able to get her into his bed without his powers—but even
he
doubted that. The only thing Lycans had over the men of her kind was their pheromones and if she was immune to those because of the fucking talisman, he was in trouble.

He might be able to work out his lust on her—maybe. But he wanted
her
and he might not get her, no matter how hard he worked at it, if he couldn’t mark her and bind her to him.

And it got worse from there. Assuming he could get her in his bed and he did manage to drop a pup on her, he wasn’t going to have any way to hold her to him. She might just decide to light out with his pup in her belly and where would he then? His first born in the wind and him with no way to track him down!

It pissed him off all over again every time he remembered the old hag’s warning—or whatever she called it.
Love!
How was he supposed to win the love of a woman like that—especially now that she knew what he was? If things had gone down differently, if he’d had the chance catch her interest and maybe win her affection
before
she’d discovered he was a monster as far as her kind was concerned ….

Who was he kidding? He was about as rough around the edges as they came even in human form. Beyond that, she was a white woman. It wasn’t easy overcoming the racial barrier at the best of times and in the best circumstances.

Not that that was anything he should be worrying about when he suspected the whole thing was some sort of scam cooked up by the witch. Bronwyn didn’t seem to know, but that didn’t mean she didn’t or even that she was the genuine article. A witch powerful enough to plant a spell that was still so potent with her in the grave was damned sure powerful enough to put that mark on Bronwyn and make it look as natural as
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everything else about her.

The object of his thoughts peered into the room where he and his highest ranking officers were having their powwow. His cock sprang to attention.

He was getting better at controlling himself, he thought wryly. He’d only been semi-erect until she came to the door.

He smiled at her wide-eyed look as she glanced around the room and her gaze finally settled on him. “How’re you doin’, darlin’? Better?”

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