Marc (3 page)

He realized something else about her
right then. She had no clue. Neither of what he was nor that she was supposed
to follow rules set up by other panthers. He stepped back from her, wondering
how to make her understand. She was still looking at him.

“You’re going to be fine. I thought…I
guess I thought you’d go out on assignments like Mia did before she got
pregnant.” He was babbling and shut up. He showed her how to access the phone
and asked her if she had any questions. She shook her head. He might have
promised he’d not talk to Caitlynne about her, but he needed to talk to Khan. He
called him when he left the offices.

“I need to talk to you. You know about
when I can come in?” He told him now would be good and asked him what it was
about. “I think it would be better in person. Besides, I need to think about
this. Okay?”

He was walking into the Towers a few
minutes later and in Khan’s office just after that. He sat down, then jumped
and started to pace. He hadn’t touched Joan but knew that Khan could smell her
on him. Reed sat again and looked at him.

“I was just at Marc’s office. Mia had me
set up a cell and computer access for her new employee. Her name is Joan Savior,
she’s a panther.” Khan leaned back and nodded as Reed continued. “I think that
there is something going on. At first I thought it was a set up but now—”

“Now what? You…is she your mate?” Reed
shook his head and Khan continued. “Okay then, what’s the problem? She didn’t
hurt Mia, did she?”

“No, nothing like that. She’s….” Reed
got up to pace again. “Mia seems to think she’s running from a boyfriend or
husband. Joan told her that she couldn’t work for her when she offered her the
job because she couldn’t take a job where she’d be found. I don’t think Joan is
her real name either. And I promised Mia that I’d not look into her either via
Caitlynne.”

“So you came to me so I could ask her to
look into it for you? I don’t think so. When you make a promise like that it’s
implied that you won’t go around the bush to get what you want. Not from Mia or
anyone.”

“No. Nothing like that. I don’t…what if
I told you that I don’t think she knew what I was? What if I said that I got
the feeling from her that she’s…terrified of what she is, for more reasons than
someone chasing her? She seemed to be…I know this sounds really stupid, but I
get the feeling that she thinks she’s the only one of her kind.”

“You think that’s why she’s being
chased, because she’s a cat?” Reed nodded and sat back down. “Why? I mean you’d
not be able to smell that on her. What makes you think that?”

He looked at his brother hard and
decided that he was right. “She didn’t know what I was talking about when I
asked her if she had registered with you. She didn’t know. And she wasn’t lying
either. She simply doesn’t know.”

“You want me to go and talk to her?” Reed
nodded and frowned when Khan shook his head. “Nah, we’ll leave it to Marc to
deal with. He owes me for siding with Monica about Mom and Dad on the cruise. You
and I will look around and I might just go by there to see Mia tomorrow and
check her out. If I see what you see, we’ll wait. If she’s faking it, we’ll
call in Dylan. He can find out sooner than most of us anyway.”

Reed liked that plan. But he thought
maybe he’d keep an eye on her as well. Marc was gone and he felt it his responsibility
to watch over his business while he was away. Besides, she was a beauty, and
maybe he’d ask her out if this turned out to be nothing more than a woman
running from someone.

Chapter 3

Marc walked the crime scene again. There
were so many imprints there that he was having a hard time figuring out who was
who. He thought maybe there had been at least three dozen people in this room
as recently as a week ago. He knelt down to the stained floor again.

He could smell her blood and knew that
she’d been terrified when she’d been laying there dying. He looked at the size
of the stain and thought maybe she’d bled quickly and had died within minutes.
But that didn’t ring true with the cuts on her. Marc looked up when he heard someone
enter the room. It was the chief of police in this town.

“You said that she didn’t have any other
marks on her but the ones that marred her, right?” Eric Campos nodded. “Yet
there doesn’t seem to be nearly enough blood for her to have bled to death, do
you think?”

“I thought the same thing. Even had one
of the coroner guys run tests to see if she was indeed all emptied out like
they said. She was.” He bounced on his heels for a few seconds. “Could it be a
blood sucker?”

Marc shook his head. He and Eric had
been friends for nearly all their lives, and he knew as much about Marc as Marc
did about him. Eric was simply a human, but he was a telepath as well.

“Then I’m at a loss. I was thinking of
that murder we had a few years ago, the one you came and helped me on. Remember
it?” Marc nodded and stood up. “She was beat up pretty bad, and we nearly
didn’t see the marks on her throat until we’d been about to send her to her
family. You saw them when none of us could.”

“But I smelled him on her first. I don’t
smell anything like that here.” Eric nodded. “What do you think happened here?”

“Her husband hired someone to kill her
and make it look like some animal did it. But he panicked for some reason and
killed her here and had to get rid of the blood.” Eric knelt down to the stain
as he handed Marc a picture. “See that? The heel print? It was here when I got
here, but after a while of her laying here and bleeding and waiting on the asses
at the morgue to show up, it covered it.”

It was there, a little of the heel. He
looked at it, then at the stain, and moved to where the heel would have been. Taking
out his pocketknife, he asked if he could cut below the carpet, and was told
that they were done with this room as far as evidence went.

Marc cut deep through the carpet and
lifted a large square of it up. There on the padding was a perfect outline of
the boot, also all the extra blood they’d missed. The padding was soaked with
it. Eric grinned up at him.

“Wouldn’t have thought of that. I guess
when he was standing here she’d already bled enough through the carpet to leave
the print.” Marc nodded and lifted it to his nose. “Whatcha got?”

“Male, human pissed.” He looked at the
closet, then back at Eric. “Maybe we should check the closet now. We have
probable cause.”

Eric had told him that the only place
they could look was the floor. The homeowner and the husband of the dead woman
had said that anything else was off limits. Eric pulled out his cell and made a
call.

“Hey, Judy, can I talk at your husband? Tell
him it’s important.” After talking for several minutes to the judge in the town,
he and Eric waited on the judge to sign off on a search warrant and have it
brought to them. They both knew that the room was being watched, and looked up
at the newly installed camera and smiled.

“You figure a pair of his boots is gonna
have blood on them?” Marc nodded. “You really sure or are you guessing you’re
sure?”

“I’ll smell them before you bag them,
but I’m sure that he wouldn’t have gotten rid of them.” He sat down on the chair
and looked at Eric when he sat in the other one. “When the maid came into the
house the night she was found, you said that he was in the kitchen and that
he’d sent the maid up to find his wife. She said that she’d commented on his
boots and that they were muddy.” Eric nodded.

“If that is the same pair, he wouldn’t
have been able to get rid of them then or since because we’ve been watching the
house. Anything going out would have been searched, and he’s even being watched
at work. We’re telling him that it’s as a precaution, but I think he knows that
we suspect him. He’s a bit cagey.”

They got the warrant twenty minutes
later and Eric went to the closet with one of his officers in tow. He lifted
one of the three pairs of boots from the rack and handed them to his officer,
nearly dropping them on Marc, who’d been kneeling close by. It was a trick they
had perfected over the years to get Marc a good whiff of whatever was being
handled. Marc shook his head.

The second pair of boots was it. Marc
stood up and backed away, signaling to Eric he’d hit pay dirt. They bagged up
the third pair because they had to, and Eric had the officer take them to the
lab. As soon as he was gone the door to the bedroom opened and three men came
in.

It was the man himself, Jeff Ansell the
widower, and his attorneys more than likely. “You have no right to look
anywhere but the bloodstains. Anything you find in this house is—”

Eric slapped the warrant against the
first attorney’s chest and smiled. “That says I can look anywhere I want, and I
did. As soon as the tests come back positive, I’m going to enjoy arresting
you.”

Jeff lashed out at Eric. Eric had him on
the floor in seconds.  The man was screaming about wild animals and such by the
time he was being cuffed. When Eric lifted him off the floor, Jeff looked wild,
insane, and pissed.

“I’ll sue you for this. I’ll own
everything you have by the end of the day.” Eric nodded as he escorted him from
the room and told him his rights. “I’ll even own your cat if you have one, and
all your pension.”

“I don’t have a cat because my friend
there says that they’d be pissy every time he came over. Even if it was a male
and a female wouldn’t be much better. I don’t have a pension thanks to my ex-wife’s
blood-sucking lawyer, and he is that, by the way. I do have a nice television,
but it’s not working so well right now. The football team I was watching the
other night made a stupid play and I sort of threw my shoe through it. But it’s
yours if you want it. Might get you a nice boyfriend while you’re in prison if
you got it fixed up and hung it in your cell.”

Marc spent another night in town after
hanging out at the bar until all hours of the night with Eric. The tests had
come back positive for blood, and Ansell was being put into an orange suit and
taken to the cells by the time Marc had his first drink. Now he was loading his
suitcase into the trunk of his car and getting ready to leave.

“You should just move down here. We
could get into trouble every weekend instead of once in a while.” Eric had on
sunglasses even though it was cloudy. Marc felt the same way, like his eyeballs
had been run through salt and put back in his head backwards.

“If I lived here I’d be dead within a
month and you know it.” He grinned at Eric. “I’m too old for this shit. Next
time let’s just go and get some pancakes with whipped cream and call it a
night.”

Eric laughed hard, then snapped his
mouth closed and grabbed his head. “Fucking bastard, you did that on purpose.”

Marc laughed as well and hugged his
friend goodbye. “I have to get going. I have a very pregnant secretary back
home that I have to find a replacement for before her and her husband murder
me. I wouldn’t mind it so much right now, but I might in a day or two when my
head doesn’t hurt so much.”

It took Marc nearly ten hours to drive
home, and by the time he showered and got into bed, it was well after four that
afternoon. Knowing that no one was expecting him until Monday and it was only
Saturday, he decided to sleep until he woke before he called anyone to let them
know he was home.

The pounding at the door made him snarl.
He looked at the clock by his bed and had to look again. It had been nearly
sixteen hours since he’d gotten to bed. He staggered down the stairs but nearly
went back up them when he saw Khan standing on the porch.

“You’ll let me in or so help me I’ll
break this fucking door down.” Marc opened the door and stepped back. “You get
back into town after being gone for over two weeks and don’t say a word to
anyone? You prick, you have any idea how worried I was when I called Eric and
asked him where you were and he said you’d left hours ago?”

“I was exhausted and didn’t think anyone
would mind if I slept it off. Want some tea?” He went to the kitchen, knowing
that Khan would either follow or go home. He hoped he’d go home but that was
just too much to hope for.

“Did you solve the murder?” Marc nodded
as he pulled down the tealeaves from his cabinet. “I suppose that’s good. Who
did it? Her husband?”

“Yes. He was having an affair with his
secretary and his wife found out. She told him she was kicking him out, as she
had all the money, and he took exception to that. If they would have divorced,
he wouldn’t have collected anything. Murder like this one would have given him
everything times two. So tell Monica she was right.”

“No thanks. She’s hard enough to live
with right now. She’s mad at me because I haven’t talked to Mom yet.” Marc
rolled his eyes. “Speaking of secretary, Mia hired you one while you were gone.
She’s a cat.”

Marc nearly dropped his tea maker and
turned to look at Khan. “What do you mean she hired a cat? Mia doesn’t know
what we are, nor does the rest of my team. Please tell me you didn’t tell
them?”

“No, I didn’t, though I think you
should. They seem like a great bunch.” Marc sat down, holding onto his pot. “I
went to see Joan.”

“And?” Marc got up to finish the tea and
then looked into his refrigerator, knowing that he was avoiding his brother. He
didn’t come here to tell him about Monica or the new secretary. There was more.

“She doesn’t seem to recognize that
we’re the same. Reed noticed it first when he went to set her up with a phone.
When I went to see her on the pretense that I needed to see Dewey about
something, she didn’t react at all. I thought she was either a good actress or
like Reed said.” Khan stretched out his legs as he continued. “I sent Monica
over a couple of days later to meet her. She really is clueless.”

Marc didn’t want to hear the rest, but
he knew that Khan was upset about something that Monica had found when she’d
read the other woman’s mind. He finished with the tea and sat with his brother
while it brewed.

“Just fucking tell me. Is she there to
kill me, one of the other family members now? And so you know, if it’s you, I
might help her.” Khan shook his head and smiled. “Tell me, Khan.”

“She’s being chased by a man named Roy
Dawson. Monica said that she has a block on her mind that’s pretty tight, so I
had Reed look this prick up. He deals in exotic animals. You think he wants to
sell her to one of those people he deals with?”

“Why would he do that knowing that she’s
going to shift at some point, and then where will he be?” The timer sounded and
he got up to pour them both a cup. “Did you ask her what was going on?”

“No. I was leaving that up to you to
find out. You’re the investigator. Also, something else. Joan isn’t her name
and Monica refused to look into Mia’s mind to find out if she knew. We’re
pretty sure she does, because she’s really protective of the girl. Also….”

Marc sat the two cups on the table and
thought that if he could, he’d find someone to murder his brother. All these bits
and pieces of information about his place of business were driving him nuts. Marc
slammed the cookie tin in from of Khan and snarled at him to fucking tell him
it all.

“She’s a virgin.” Marc looked at his
brother, wondering why the hell he thought that information was needed. “She
has to be protected by us now. We can’t let anything happen to her until she
finds her mate.” He waited for Khan to laugh or to say he was kidding, but he
just stared at him. For whatever reason, that pissed him off more. Of all the
old-fashioned idiotic things to say, this had to be the topper.

“Are you fucking kidding me? What do you
propose we do, Khan? Find a chastity belt and strap it on her? Maybe we can
follow her around from now on, and when another male comes near her we can
slash his throat and hope she doesn’t notice all the blood.”

“That’s not what I meant, you jack ass.
I meant that we can’t let this Dawson person find her in the event that he
wants her for himself. What if he rapes her thinking that he can get her
pregnant or something?”

Marc took his tea from him and dumped it
in the sink. Then he took the cookie Khan had in his hand and put it in the
trash before going to the door. He opened it and took several deep breaths
before he spoke to Khan.

“Get out. I mean it, Khan, get out.” Khan
started to speak but he cut him off. “I don’t care if she’s a virgin, but I’m reasonably
sure that she’s been one longer than you ever were. And she stayed that way
because she could fight men off or she simply doesn’t care for sex. Either way,
she’s a virgin by choice and I for one could care less. If she needs my help
with this person, I’ll help her, but I’m not going to stalk a woman because
you’re a Neanderthal who has yet to come to this century.”