Rogue (17 page)

I’d made a lot of stupid mistakes in my life—hell, most of them in the past few months alone—but I’d never been responsible for an innocent person’s death before. Not even indirectly. And the guilt from knowing I might have saved
Robert Harper and Jamey Gardner was making me sick to my stomach. As in, seriously nauseated.

And unbelievably pissed off. When we found this tabby, she’d get much more than a piece of my mind. She’d get a piece of my fist—right through her pretty little neck.

In the office, Michael sat behind our father’s desk, clicking away at the computer with his right hand, and making notes with his left.
Ambidextrous freak.
He nodded at us when we came in, then went right back to work.

I made my way straight to the massive oak desk, while Marc settled onto the leather love seat. “Hey, Michael, where’s Holly?” he asked, twisting to face us both.

“Rome, for two more days,” Michael replied, without ever taking his eyes from the screen.

“Wasn’t she just there last month?”

“That was Venice, in July.”

“Oh.” Marc winked at me. While most of the other guys were predictably envious of Michael’s wife—an actual twig-thin, doe-eyed runway model—Marc let me know over and over again how unhappy he would be with a woman like Holly. She was away far more than she was home, and Michael’s career rarely gave him the freedom to travel with her.

Marc liked me exactly where I was—in Texas. With him. Away from the eager eyes of millions of men all over the world.

I tried to take such statements for the compliment he intended them to be, instead of focusing on the underlying hint that my place was at home, with him and our future—thus far purely theoretical—children.

Perching on the edge of my father’s desk, I pulled the stand-alone answering machine toward me, noting the blink
ing red light. Someone had called since we’d left for the barn, and my mother hadn’t answered the phone.
Why not?

Then the answer was there—obvious, in retrospect. She was in the woods. By herself. Again.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth as he read silently from the computer screen.

“Dad wants us to listen to the messages and make sure Painter’s the guy.” I swung one leg to thump against the side of the desk. “Have you heard them yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, get ready.” I pressed the play button on the machine, a digital model that didn’t actually take a tape, and was first surprised, then pleased to hear my cousin’s voice bubble from the tiny inset speaker.

“Hi, everybody, it’s Abby.” She paused, then sighed and continued. “My mom said that if I was serious about learning to fight, I should really commit to it, so I was calling to ask what kind of punching bag you guys use. The big heavy one. And I know the school year just started, but we’ll be out for fall break in a few weeks, and I’d really like to spend it with you guys, if you don’t mind. Maybe Faythe could teach me some more of those self-defense moves. I really want to learn how to disable a guy with one kick….”

I pressed the button to save Abby’s message, then began cycling backward through the old ones, glancing at the numbers to eliminate the calls one by one, without listening to them. There was a call from Vic’s cell phone, and another one from Ethan. Next was my own number; I’d called from the airport to tell my father I’d gotten his earlier message.

I pressed the button one more time, and a fourth number
appeared on the display. The time and date looked about right for the second message from the informant. So I pressed the play button.

“It’s me again. Your friendly neighborhood snitch…”

We listened in silence as Dan Painter—and it was definitely him—told us where to find the body of a werecat near the westernmost edge of the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. “And there’s more information where that came from, if you’re interested. But I want something in return, so next time, you’d better answer the damn phone.”

There was a soft click as the connection was cut, but right before that click there was a single, soft bang, like a gunshot in the distance. And the distinctive air-beating sound of a propeller.

I sucked in a silent breath as my blood seemed to freeze in my veins. I couldn’t swear that boom was actual gunfire, but I could swear I’d heard it before. That very afternoon, in the message Andrew had left on my phone.

Fuck.

I told myself it meant nothing. They were two different gunshots, or explosions, or whatever. Dan Painter and Andrew couldn’t possibly have called from the same town. It was just a coincidence.

Unfortunately, I didn’t believe in coincidence.

“W
ell, it’s official,” Marc said, his voice light with relief, because he had yet to notice my sudden panic attack. “Painter’s the guy. Our very own overworked, underappreciated anonymous informant. Now we just have to find him.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I mumbled, still staring at the answering machine.

“What’s wrong?” Marc eyed me carefully from the center of the love seat.

“Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly. I didn’t want to tell him about Andrew until I was sure of what I’d heard on Painter’s message. “I was just thinking that the best way to find him would be to start with the number he called from.”
Attagirl, Faythe. Stick to the truth. At least, as much of it as you can.

“Read me the area code,” Michael said, the disappointment on his face saying clearly that he wished he’d thought of it first.

Hopping down from the desk, I circled my brother to watch over his shoulder as he opened a new browser window and
typed “reverse phone directory” into the Google search bar. When the new screen loaded, I read him the number from the display on the answering machine. Michael added the digits to his search, and sat back while the computer did all the work.

“Did you come up with any other missing strippers?” I asked, watching as a progress bar began to fill on-screen.

“Yeah.” Michael extended both hands above his head, stretching like a cat asleep in the sun. “One from Arkansas, and two more from Louisiana.” He paused, tilting his head down to peer over his useless glasses at the information now available on the screen. “Here you go.” He nodded toward the flat-screen monitor. “Painter called from a pay phone in Leesville, Louisiana.”

And though it obviously meant nothing to Michael, according to the on-screen map, Leesville was less than ten miles north of Pickering, where the tabby had left Jamey’s body.

“The first call came from somewhere in Arkansas, didn’t it?” Marc asked, finally pushing himself off the sofa to join us at the computer.

“Yeah. Um…” Michael reached across the disturbingly neat desk and pulled the huge atlas toward him. It was already open to the Arkansas page, and my father had circled two towns in red ink. One of them was Dumas, the small town just southeast of Pine Bluff, where I’d first smelled, then spotted Dan Painter when we stopped for gas. The other was— “White Hall,” Michael said, finishing my own thought. “Isn’t that where you guys found Bradley Moore?”

“And where we buried him.” Marc ran one hand up my arm, and I struggled to return his smile. “That makes sense. Moore was murdered in White Hall, and Painter saw it happen, so of course he’d call from there.” I twisted in Marc’s
arms to face my brother. “You said you found a report of a missing stripper from Arkansas…?”

“Yeah.” Michael put down the atlas and picked up the yellow legal pad he’d been making notes on. “Amber Cleary. She disappeared on Wednesday night, after her shift at Club Moonlight.”

Wednesday night.
A full twenty-four hours before Kellie Tandy had gone missing from New Orleans. “Where’s Club Moonlight?” I asked, pulling open my father’s top desk drawer. Inside, I grabbed a mini legal pad from the top of a small stack and slid the drawer closed. Marc handed me a pen from the jar on the desktop, and I began scratching on the lined paper as Michael flipped through his own notes.

“Um…Pine Bluff, Arkansas.”

“Where’s that?” Clenching my pen and notepad together in one fist, I bent across the desk for the atlas.

“There.” Marc reached around my arm to tap a point on the map, before I’d even found the legend.

I brushed his hand out of the way and focused on the dot his finger had been covering. Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was forty-five miles south and slightly east of Little Rock. And less than ten miles from White Hall, where Bradley Moore was murdered.

I was starting to see a pattern, and it wasn’t pretty.

“Okay, this is what I have so far,” I said, glancing over the barely legible scribbling on my notepad. “On Wednesday, Amber Cleary disappeared from a strip club in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The next day—Thursday—the rogue tabby murdered Bradley Moore less than ten miles away, in White Hall. That same day, Kellie Tandy vanished in the middle of her shift at Forbidden Fruit, in New Orleans. Then, on Saturday, the tabby showed up at Forbidden Fruit, where she killed Robert Harper.”

I looked up to find both guys watching me. “Am I forgetting anything?”

“Yeah. The other missing strippers.” Marc leaned against my father’s glass display case as he looked to Michael for confirmation. “Didn’t you say there were two more in Louisiana?”

Michael nodded, flipping through his notes again. “Melissa Vassey never made it home after her shift at the Pegasus Lounge on Saturday night. Care to take a guess where the Pegasus Lounge is located?”

“Saturday…” I said, my brain scrambling to assemble a puzzle we didn’t yet have all the pieces for. “Leesville, Louisiana. Or somewhere nearby.”

Michael nodded. “Good guess.”

“How the hell did you know that?” Confused, Marc glanced back and forth between us.

I grinned in triumph. “It fits the pattern. A stripper goes missing, then, a day later, the tabby shows up and kills a tomcat. On Sunday she dropped off Jamey Gardner’s body in Leesville, which must mean that on Saturday, a stripper went missing from Leesville, or somewhere nearby.” I flipped my legal pad around for him to see. “But the tabby can’t be the one taking the strippers. She was busy killing Moore when Kellie Tandy went missing, and she was killing Jamey Gardner when Melissa Vassey disappeared from Leesville.”

“So, the tabby’s alibi for kidnapping is murder?” A sardonic smile played across Marc’s lips. “That’s one hell of a defense.”

“Not exactly exoneration, is it?” I shrugged. “But it holds up.”

“What about Friday?” Marc asked, taking the notebook from my hand.

“What do you mean?”

He aimed one finger at a blank line on the legal pad. “Friday’s blank. See? No dead toms, and no missing strippers.”

“Damn,” I plopped down on my father’s desk and took my notebook back for closer study. “You poked a hole in my theory.”

“Only a small hole,” Michael said. “The third Louisiana stripper went missing Friday night, from a topless bar in Lafayette.”

I stared at my brother for a moment, trying to process the new information and fit it into the timeline forming in my head. Then I twisted around and snatched the atlas from the far corner of the desk. “Lafayette.” I traced the I-10 to I-49, then north with my finger. “If you stick to the major interstates, Lafayette is on the way to Leesville from New Orleans.”

Marc looked from me, to the map, to my hastily scribbled notes, to Michael. “So we have a stripper missing from Lafayette on Friday, but no dead tom. Why?”

Michael shrugged. “We’re assuming the tabby’s following whoever’s taking the strippers, right?”

Unfortunately, we were indeed.

“I’m betting there’s no corpse for Friday because she didn’t find a tom in Lafayette. There aren’t that many of us, and she can’t possibly run into a werecat at every gas stop.”

Though I’d come across Dan Painter’s scent in that very manner.

“Besides, we don’t have anyone living near Lafayette, do we?” I asked, glancing to Marc for an answer, because Michael had been out of the loop—for the most part—for the better part of the last decade.

“No. No one with permission, anyway.”

In the foyer, a soft click and the squeal of dry hinges signaled the front door opening.

My father stepped into the office doorway and paused when he noticed us huddled around his computer. “Wait just a minute, guys, and let’s see what Michael found out.”

Michael nudged my hip with the capped tip of his pen, and I slid off the desk and onto my feet just as Vic, Owen, and Parker followed my father into the room.

“Well?” He marched forward to take the position of power: his desk chair.

Michael stood and gave me a shove, and I followed Marc toward the love seat, pausing to grab my notes on the way past the desk.

“I’ve found three more missing strippers so far.”

The Alpha sank into his chair, and Michael finished going over the details, then set his notepad on the center of the desk, where it wouldn’t be missed. “We’ve identified a pattern connecting the murders with the missing strippers.”

We’ve
identified a pattern?
I thought, glaring at my know-it-all older brother.

Marc pulled me onto the love seat next to him, squeezing my hand in sympathy, as if he knew what I was thinking. Hell, he probably did.

Dad scanned the notepad, then stood, motioning for Michael to take his seat. “I want to know why these girls in particular are disappearing. What do they have in common, other than their occupation? Are there pictures? Are they all students, or was Kellie Tandy an exception? Do they all work completely in the nude, or are some of them simply topless waitresses?”

My father turned to Vic, Owen, and Parker as he settled into his armchair. “If you go now, you can catch the eleven o’clock
news. I wouldn’t be surprised if the missing strippers have made it into the national broadcast.”

Vic nodded and led Owen and Parker out the door and down the hall, presumably toward the guesthouse, where three different televisions and two computers were at their disposal, ready to be used for the greater good of mankind. Or feline-kind, in this case.

“Okay…” My father turned back to face the rest of us. “So, we’ve traced the tabby and whoever she’s following, but we don’t know who that is, or where either of them are now. Right?”

“Right,” Michael said, his fingers clacking away on the keyboard without pause.

Dad closed his eyes, obviously thinking. “So the last known location for the tabby is Pickering, Louisiana, where she left Jamey’s body. What about whoever she’s tailing?”

“Leesville, which is less than ten miles north of Pickering,” I said, glancing down at my notes. Marc shifted closer to me to see them better. “It’s where the last stripper disappeared from, and where Painter made his last anonymous call.”

“And you’re sure it’s him?” My father’s eyes opened to take us both in from his armchair. “Did you listen to both messages?”

“We only heard the last one, but it’s definitely him,” I said, annoyed when Dad looked to Marc for confirmation of what I’d said. As if my word alone wasn’t good enough.

“So we know who the informant is, and we have a description of the tabby. The only one we know nothing about is whoever she’s following.”

“Well, we do know
something,
” Marc said, glancing at the notebook balanced on my knee. “He’s taken a stripper in a different town for each of the past four nights. If he sticks to his
pattern, he could be taking another one right now. But we have no idea where he is.”

“Okay, so trace his path.” Dad templed his hands beneath his chin, his most familiar I’m-thinking gesture. “Maybe we can make an educated guess based on that.”

Maybe we can at that.
I dropped the legal pad in Marc’s lap—in case he needed the cheat sheet again—and stood. My father’s gaze followed me as I passed his chair, and I heard the springs creak as he turned to watch me. Stopping in front of the huge oak desk, I spun the atlas around and pulled it close.

“Okay. He drove south from Arkansas, all the way to New Orleans.” I traced the interstate down through the state line and into Louisiana. But then I had to stop and flip through the atlas pages to find Louisiana. “From New Orleans, he probably followed I-10 to Lafayette, then went north—not sure how—to Leesville.”

My finger hovered over Leesville. “From there, he could go east on Highway 28, or turn either north or south on 171.”

“I don’t think he’ll go back east,” Marc said, closing his eyes as he leaned his head back against the sofa cushion. “He seems to be working his way west.”

To Texas.
I was unwilling to vocalize such a thought, at least until I’d either confirmed or dismissed my suspicion involving Andrew.

“Maybe so.” I exhaled deeply to slow my racing heart, then propped one hip on the edge of my father’s desk—hoping to look completely relaxed—and pulled the atlas onto my lap. Michael scowled, but went back to information-gathering when I stuck my tongue out at him.

“South of Leesville, there’s nothing but more small towns and large patches of forest, until you hit I-10. From there, he
could go back east toward New Orleans—which we all agree he probably didn’t do—or west, in which case he’ll wind up in Beaumont, then Houston.”

Marc ran one hand through his dark curls, then leaned his head on the back of the couch and closed his eyes again. He looked exhausted. I knew exactly how he felt. “Well, the closer he gets, the easier he’ll be to find,” he said.

Oh, shit.
I didn’t know where the stripper-kidnapper was going, but I was starting to seriously suspect he was somehow connected to Andrew. And I knew exactly where Andrew was headed.

Here.

“Anything new on those dancers yet, Michael?” my father asked.

My brother nodded without looking up. “Yeah. Just a second.”

Hopping down from my father’s desk, I dropped the atlas on the blotter and headed for the door. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” my father asked, and I heard springs creak as he stood behind me.

“To the guesthouse for a soda.” My sneakers squeaked on the tiles in a fast, irritating rhythm.

“You need some help?” Marc called. I didn’t answer.

At the end of the hall, I pulled open the back door and shoved the screen out of my way. It slammed shut behind me as I dashed down the steps, wondering where to go next. The guesthouse was out of the question; Vic, Parker, and Owen were in there scrounging up news reports. The barn was a definite no, too; it seemed very wrong to interrupt Jamey’s eternal rest with my own problem, no matter how serious it was.

At a loss for where to go, I settled for a patch of grass to
the left of the back porch, against the rear wall of the house. An owl hooted his greeting as I flipped open my phone, my heart thudding in my ears. I scrolled through the missed calls, thankful for the well-lit LCD screen. It didn’t take long to find the voice mail from Andrew. The one I hadn’t entirely listened to in the airport.