The Alpha Men's Secret Club 4: Intrigue: A Shockingly Hot BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance (3 page)

5

Lan
ce Horner surveyed the CCTV footage of the cars coming in and out of the gates of the Mitchell homestead. The home CCTV was designed to catch the license plates of the cars, not the people in them. At least, not when it was so dark.

Anyone could clearly see that Teddy Mitchell’s Lamborghini left the premises
at 10.45 p.m. The shadows from the trees made it too difficult to see who was actually behind the wheel or any of the passenger seats. Then five minutes later, the black limo which had been rented by Rust O’Brien came out and swept down the same road the Lamborghini had disappeared.

The CCTV could not catch any other cars on the outer road.

Of course, it was just circumstantial. According to Rust O’Brien, he never left the premises until morning. According to his girlfriend, Kate, Rust was with her in the limo.

Geraldine Brickford, his
rookie, came in. She was a pretty redhead in a dark charcoal suit.

She said, “I’ve got the CCTV footage from the Four Seasons.”

She inserted the thumb drive into his laptop and played it.

They both watched. At
11.52 p.m., Kate Penney walked into the grand lobby. No one else was with her. She headed for the elevator bank, pressed a button, and went up when the doors slid open. She didn’t wait for anyone else.

“Rust O’Brien never walked through the Four Seasons lobby,” Geraldine Brickford said. “I checked the rest of the footage.”

“Is there any other entrance he could enter from?”

“
He would still go to the elevator bank. Unless he took the stairwell. Which is not likely.”

Lance leaned back. “So Kate Penney was not telling the truth.”

But he already knew that. He was an experienced interrogator, and he could sense that neither Rust nor Kate was telling him the whole truth.

“She was protecting Rust O’Brien, very likely. Or thought she was protecting him. He’s lucky to have someone who loves him that much.” There was a wistful tone in Geraldine’s
voice.

Lance was chagrined. Women and their love trysts.
There was no end to the amount of homicides those sort of trysts caused.

His cellphone rang. He picked it up. It was the coroner’s department.

“Yes?” he said.

“The results of the autopsy are in,” said the voice on the other side. “
And we found something else you’re going to be very interested in.”

6

Rita Cunningham
was at a quandary. The news of Teddy Mitchell’s murder was all over the place. And she was at the crux of it.

On that fateful night,
she was busy stalking Rust’s limo. But when she found that he wasn’t in it, she doubled back. She figured that either Rust or Kate had a fight with each other and Kate left in a huff. Whatever it was, Rust hadn’t left the party.

Now how was she to find him?

She had a sense that she was very close to the truth.

She got back to the party and the closed forbidding gates.
Surely there had to be a better way to access the party.

She drove around the entire perimeter of the Mitchell estate.
The six-foot high walls soon gave way to wooded forest. Forest covered the gently sloping hills behind the Mitchell grounds and blended into government reserve land. It was going to be very difficult to navigate these woods towards the house.

Difficult, but not impossible.

She parked the car at the side of the road. She had a GPS and she had gotten very good at finding her way throughout her years as an investigative reporter. She was dressed in suitable clothes and she had on her hiking boots. She had a flashlight and she was very fit from a daily routine of gym training. Besides, she had learned tracking from her father, an Appalachian redneck. She had learned everything she could from him before he killed himself in an alcoholic haze.

If anyone could find Rust O’Brien, she could.

*

But still, it was dark, and the woods were immense.
Rita made a beeline for the Mitchell mansion, using her GPS as a guide. The woods here were not dangerous, in general. There were no grizzly bears, although people have claimed that they had heard the howl of an occasional wolf.

Rita was more than prepared for wolf encounters.
She had her father’s gun with her. And she was a great shot.

It was 3.34 a.m., according to her watch.
The moon was full in the almost cloudless sky, and the wind carried with it the scent of fresh water from the creek which wounded through the woods. It was then she heard the crashing through the woods – the rustle of low-hanging boughs and dry leaves as an animal ran through.

She froze.

It was really dark, and the moon was obscured by the tops of the trees. She glimpsed the sight of something furry crashing through the undergrowth, but she couldn’t determine what sort of animal it was. It wasn’t wise to shine her flashlight in its eyes either. Although she had a gun, she didn’t want to use it on a wild animal.

The wolf (?) vanished, but was soon followed by another animal.
Once again, Rita froze and hid behind a tree. How many wolves were there in these woods? She didn’t think someone like Aaron Mitchell would stand for having predators around his home. Or maybe he encouraged it. Billionaires were eccentric that way.

Was the other animal a wolf? It seemed heavier. More agile. More feline than canine. Her heart thrummed against her ribcage, and she was suddenly aware of her own mortality. She was not afraid of wild animals, but her father had taught her to respect them and be wary of them. A wild animal, when cornered, could be very dangerous.

Rita waited until she could hear no more disturbances.

Then she moved again.

It was another twenty minutes when she came upon something else. A patch of moonlight shone on something which slept beneath a tree.

Rita held her breath.

It was a tiger.

This was certainly one wild animal she didn’t want to cross. Her mind ran with all sorts of possibilities. How did a tiger – a very Asian animal –
get into the woods of New York State? Of course, it was on Aaron Mitchell’s grounds, and she wouldn’t put it past someone like Aaron Mitchell to actually have a menagerie of wild animals on his land. A tiger could possibly be prowling around on a routine basis. Which was highly dangerous, because the woods connected to the outer roads and to the suburbs beyond.

This could be another story right here!

She didn’t have her camera, but she had a cellphone. She could take the tiger’s photo. If he didn’t eat her first.

She fished out her cellphone from her pocket and pressed ‘Record’.

The tiger’s chest rose up and down in its sleep. It was magnificent. She had never seen anything so beautiful before out of a zoo. And it was large. Larger than she thought possible.

She had to get closer. Even with ‘zoom’, she couldn’t frame as much of it in as she desired.

Then the tiger stirred.

Rita froze.

She had gone three paces away from the cover of the tree bark she had been standing behind. If the tiger opened its eyes now, she would be a dead woman. Assuming it wasn’t a tame tiger, of course.

Was it too late for her to back away?

The tiger lifted a mighty paw and swiped its nose with it.

Rita found herself taking three q
uick paces back to hide behind the tree again. She fumbled in her jacket for her gun. She might have to defend herself if things got rough.

The tiger shuddered, sighed, and then went back to sleep again.
Rita heaved a sigh of relief. She really, really didn’t want to have to use that gun on anyone or anything tonight.

Then something weird happened.

That was the only way Rita could describe it.
Weird
.

The tiger began to transform, like in all the legends of old.
Its fur withdrew and melted into pale flesh. Its limbs lengthened and became human-like. Its ears retracted. What he became in a span of seconds totally floored Rita, and her hand shook as she trained the aperture of the cellphone camera on the whole scene.

She was so glad she was recording this, because she sensed no one would believe her otherwise.
And even then, they were bound to question the validity of the video footage.

The sleeping human form which appeared
at the end of the metamorphosis was a strikingly handsome man. Rita held her breath as she studied the smooth planes of his beautiful face, the mild flutter of his closed eyes as his eyeballs moved in REM phase sleep and his long, naked body. His body was marvelously sculptured in all the right places, and his front was turned towards her – offering her a sumptuous view of his impressive genitals.

She recognized him as Rust O’Brien, whom she had never met in the flesh.

Until now.

And what a first meeting it was! Only she didn’t want to let out to him that she knew his secret. Just yet.

So this was the secret her anonymous informer was hinting at! Was the fact that Rust was a shapeshifter connected to the murders in Bellevue and the suspiciously clean coroner’s reports? Was his father, Connor, a shapeshifter too? What about those wolves she had glimpsed earlier running in the woods? What were they really?

Suddenly, a whole vista of possibilities opened up to her. Her mind and imagination soared. This was a secret world which had probably existed for eons, and she was the first modern human to record this! This was the discovery of the century, as promised.

She would be famous!

And when she exposed the shapeshifter world for what it was – in all its beauty and majesty and
its tapestry of good and evil and nature claiming its course – her life would never be the same again.

Nor would theirs.

*

Rita crept away from the sleeping Rust O’Brien. She had her evidence.

Should she seek more?

The entire party
thrown by Aaron Mitchell was suspect now. The guests could all be shifters. Aaron Mitchell and the entire Mitchell family could be shifters too. She wanted more video footage for posterity.

But along with it came danger as well. If any of the shifters sensed her, she could be in serious trouble. She doubted many humans knew of their existence in the course of time. Kate Penney had to be one of them, as well as her anonymous informer.

Those who would expose them could be silenced. Permanently.

She had to tread very carefully here.

Rita was nothing if not bold. She hadn’t won all those awards by being a shrinking violet. So she set out towards the mansion. She was getting quite close now. Close enough to see the halo cast by the lights in the gardens. The music had died down. It was after all very early in the morning and most of the guests had probably gone home or into the woods to sleep their revelry off.

It was then she stumbl
ed onto a scene that would play vividly in her head.

Over and over.

It was one that would have far-reaching repercussions for
Teddy Mitchell and Rust O’Brien.

7

Lance and Geraldine
hightailed it to the coroner’s as fast as they could.

The coroner was
a black man named Desmond Wells. He was tall and bald, and would have been handsome were it not for an extremely pockmarked complexion which he attributed to chicken pox as a child.

“Lay it on us, Des,” Lance said as he waltzed into the pathology lab.

“The autopsy shows that Teddy Mitchell was killed by massive chest wounds made by the claws of an animal. No fragment of any claw was left inside the chest cavity.”

“So it’s not murder?”

“Are there any wild animals running around in the woods behind Aaron Mitchell’s house?” the coroner said.

“There are bound to be wild animals running around in most woodlands,
I reckon,” Lance said. “Especially one as extensive as the one backing Aaron Mitchell’s grounds. I wouldn’t rule it out, no.”

Animal attack. He had to mull this over.
This was a new twist he hadn’t seen coming.

“What sort of animal was it?” Geraldine asked.

“Definitely something with long claws. Bigger than a dog. Difficult to judge by wound marks alone, but I would say – from their diameter – something akin to a wildcat.”

“What about wolves?” Geraldine said.
“I’ve heard reports of wolf howls recorded in that area.”

“It’s possible. But I would say it’s definitely bigger than your average wolf.”
The coroner smiled. “But there was something else.”

“Your clue,” Lance said. “The one you were teasing over the phone.”

“Yes. We found some hairs in Teddy Mitchell’s chest cavity. Hairs which did not belong to him. Hairs which were implanted by the claws.”

“Fur?”

“Not fur.
Human
hairs.”

Geraldine frowned. “A human with claws?”

“Possibly circumstantial, but in a case like this, we have to investigate everything.” Desmond held up a glass slide containing a specimen. “This is one of the hairs.”

Lance was quite well-versed in the texture and structure of human hairs.

“It’s thicker,” he observed. “And more wiry than a hair on a human hair. But it’s still human hair.”

The hair in question – mounted on the slide – was
dark. And short.

“Exactly.
What do you conclude?” Desmond said.

Lance turned to Geraldine.

“What do you conclude?” he asked his rookie.

Geraldine hesitated. Lance knew she was afraid to venture a wrong answer. But she was the best and brightest of his rookies.
She
knew
the answers.

Geraldine replied, “It’s a pubic hair. It’s a human pubic hair.”