Dreaming of the Wolf (28 page)

She gave a little nonchalant shrug, never taking her eyes off the detective, not wanting to see how Darien and the others were reacting or what the other detective was doing. Watching her? Watching them? She knew that if she saw their expressions, she’d fall apart more than she felt she was doing now.

“I assumed it was him from his build and the way he walked. When he was at the restaurant, he reminded me of a big disgruntled bear. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t really know for sure who he was until I felt his pulse after I shot him. Once I’d seen him up close, I realized it was him. He must have followed me to Crestview.” She frowned in feigned annoyance. “I forgot where I left off.”

She wondered if that had been a ploy on the detective’s part to disconcert her. Or if he was used to asking questions when they popped into his mind. He was right in asking her the question. She just wished she hadn’t made the slip. Then again, she supposed that made her appear more human.

The detective flipped back a page in his notebook and said, “You said you heard him jerk the shower curtain aside in the bathroom.”

“Oh. Yes. When he realized I wasn’t in the bathroom, he returned to the bedroom. That’s when he saw me in the corner of the room. He raised his gun and fired. I responded by firing three times in return. Because he was holding the flashlight, I was able to pinpoint him better. He dropped his gun and sank to the floor. I worried others might be with him because the men usually travel in pairs, so I ran to lock the door, then checked his pulse to see if he was still alive. He wasn’t.

“I dressed.” She’d been naked. She couldn’t tell the detective that. Wouldn’t he wonder why? She faltered. “I mean, I changed out of my nightgown and into jeans and a sweatshirt.”

Now she sounded damned suspicious. He could have assumed she’d been dressed in her nightgown already. She was getting rattled. Calm down, she told herself. She swallowed hard, her throat dry as a drought in summer. Now she wished she’d had some water to drink. But if she asked for any, she’d sound like she was getting nervous because she
was
guilty of a crime.

Tom slipped out of the room, catching her eye and everyone else’s. She wished she was free to go also.

“Go on, Miss Greiston,” the detective prompted.

“I went to call the police, but when I punched in the number and held the receiver to my ear, I discovered the phone line was dead. My cell phone battery had run down so I was charging it and hoped it would work. I was able to use it to call 9-1-1. But then another man tried to get in. He tried the doorknob, found it locked, and then began kicking the door in.”

This was the hard part. How had she gotten past two armed men without getting herself killed? The one had undoubtedly left more shell casings behind from shooting wildly into the sky. But she hadn’t had her gun with her. Not when she’d been tearing out of there as a wolf. And she’d left the gun behind, along with her cell phone and purse and everything. How could she have managed to escape them as a woman without any weapons?

“So only one other man was there?” the detective asked, pen and brows raised.

If there was only one other, the detective might have figured she had slipped past him and then he fired at her but missed. But how could she have avoided two gun-toting men? But what if there had been eyewitnesses? Oh, my God, what if someone had seen a wolf run across the parking lot?

“Miss Greiston?”

She jerked her head up to look at him. “Two of them. I was hiding in the dark. The one went to check on the guy I’d… killed, while the other hurried into the bathroom, looking for me. At least I presume. I dashed outside. Someone fired three shots, but I kept running and never looked back.”

Tom returned to the great room with a glass of water and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her eyes meeting his, his expression telling her she was doing fine. “Thank you,” she said again and took a swallow of the cold water.

“Did you have a dog with you in the room?” the detective asked in a consoling manner, his blue eyes fixed on her gaze.

She knew his ploy. Pretend to understand the perp’s situation, then throw the book at him or her. Just as she’d often done. Only in the case of the men and women she arrested, they were the bad guys.

“A dog?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

“Yes. Well, in truth,
a
wolf
.”

Jake’s hand tightened fractionally on Alicia’s. Her teeth were clenched together, and she didn’t know what to say. She was innocent, but if these men pushed her too hard, Jake and his family would be forced to turn them. She didn’t think the pack could kill them. That scenario would be too difficult to explain. But if they turned them, they’d have to take them into the pack, and Darien had already said he didn’t want two more newly turned pack members—male types, who probably had families of their own. And that would cause an even greater ripple effect of trouble.

The detective flipped through his notebook as if he needed to refresh his memory on the details of his investigation. She was certain this time it was a ploy to make her squirm. She didn’t squirm, although she felt light-headed and was afraid her face had drained of all color. She was barely breathing, and Jake looked anxiously at her. She scolded herself for not hiding her feelings better, but she couldn’t help it. They knew something. About the wolf.

And she was feeling damn guilty. How could she not? She’d bitten one of the two men. She
was
guilty! Nothing in her bounty hunter training said she could bite a perp into submission. Not that she had been after these guys, but still…

The detective tapped his pen at the open page. “Says here two men in the room next to yours saw a dog run out of your room. A big dog. Like a German shepherd. They never saw any sign of a woman leaving. One of the men had fired into the air, scared by the size of the wolf.”

Wolf.
Twice he’d referred to it as a wolf. But if the eyewitnesses thought it was a dog, why did the detective think it was a wolf?

The detective flipped through some more pages of his notebook, while the other one continued to watch her expression. Her blood ran cold. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and force Darien’s hand. But she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t cause trouble for their kind.

“Blood was found on the rug near the door. A man’s blood. But not the same as the blood from the one who died. Wolf saliva was mixed in with the second man’s blood.” The detective looked up from his notes. “So what about the wolf?”

Her stomach bunched tightly into a knot, Alicia licked her suddenly very dry lips. Yet, she thought the detective was feeding her a story. No one would look to see if saliva was a wolf’s or a dog’s, would they?

“Wolf saliva?” she asked. “You mean, canine saliva, right? Is there a difference between a dog’s and a wolf’s?”

“Believe me,” the detective said with a smug expression, “The saliva sampled from the bite marks was wolf DNA. They can determine that to rule out that it wasn’t some other animal’s bites.”

She took a shallow breath and said, “I—”

“It’s not illegal to own a wolf,” Jake interjected, his voice quietly firm, as if he was a lawyer who knew her rights when it came to pet wolf ownership.

She supposed that to protect themselves, Jake and the rest of the pack would know about such a thing for self-preservation.

The detective switched his attention to Jake. She thought Detective Simpson was fighting a smile. Jake to the rescue. But it was more than that. It was as if the detective had caught them in a falsehood. But she wasn’t rolling over and playing dead yet.

“
No
, you’re right, Mr. Silver,” the detective said with emphasis, “not unless the wolf owner takes the wolf within the city limits of some cities, which
is
illegal. Crestview is not one of those cities. But the wolves have to be fenced in with at least eight-foot-tall fencing. Every access has to be locked to prevent the wolves from escaping.

“Taking a wolf into a motel room
isn’t
legal, nor a safe thing to do. If Miss Greiston was afraid for her life and was using the wolf for protection, it wasn’t really a smart idea. Nor was it legal. The wolf could have injured anyone. Since it has bitten someone now, we’ll have to hunt it down and make sure it wasn’t rabid.” He sat taller and turned to Alicia. “So what about this wolf, Miss Greiston?”

“He wasn’t mine,” she said stubbornly, head held high, voice confident.

The detective raised his brows.

She shrugged. “I don’t own any pets. Never have. I don’t know where the animal came from or where he went. You can check with my apartment manager. I’ve never had any pets at the place. They’re not allowed.”

At least the part about not owning any pets was true. But what if they checked out the hotel rooms where she’d stayed over the past month? What if they found wolf hairs on the carpet where she’d restlessly paced, trying to shift back into her human body?

“The wolf ran off into the woods, the eyewitnesses said.” The detective studied her for a moment more, then asked, “But where did
you
go? Why did you run away?”

“Jake came for me.”

“You’d left your phone charging on the dresser. Only one phone call had been made. To 9-1-1. The sound of the men breaking into the room was captured on tape. They heard the one man cursing up a blue streak as he said, ‘Come on, Cicero, damn it. We’ve gotta get out of here before the police arrive. She’s run off. Holy crap.’ Then there was a lot of grunting and groaning and moaning. We assume that was when he helped the injured man outside. After several minutes, doors were opened and slammed shut. Then a car engine roared to life, and the vehicle tore off down the road. Detective Tandy and I arrived shortly after that.”

“They had guns, Detective. I wasn’t about to hang around to get shot at again. If they could have, they would have come after me, I’m sure.”

“So how did Mr. Silver know to meet you?”

“We had prearranged a meeting.” She patted Jake’s hand with her free hand. “We’ve been seeing each other. We planned to get together last night. Only instead of finding me at the motel, he found me on the road heading for Silver Town.”

The detective’s brows arched heavenward. “Long hike.”

“I didn’t know where else to go, and I was sure Jake was already headed to Crestview. I couldn’t hang around to get shot at again,” she repeated. Then she had to explain her connection to Danny Massaro, who had also murdered her mother, and the other, Cicero, who she hadn’t seen before.

After two long, exhausting hours, the detectives finally left and Alicia felt drained. “They didn’t believe me about the wolf,” she said to the family as Darien walked back into the great room after seeing the detectives out.

“You did fine,” Darien said, his tone reassuring, and she believed he really meant it. “They won’t find a wolf, and Peter has learned that the man you bit never went to any hospital or clinic in the area to get the wound taken care of.”

“It had to have been awful,” Alicia whispered, still feeling bad about what she’d done. “I didn’t mean to bite so hard, but I… I think I crushed the bone. I didn’t know my own strength.”

“I believe he died,” Darien said, matter-of-factly. “Peter had already talked to the eyewitnesses, and they said the one man was practically carrying the other out to the car. The injured man slumped in the seat, his face ice white. If Danny Massaro had to take him someplace any distance from the motel, the man probably died. We know for sure he didn’t take him to any area medical facilities. Peter’s already checked. We still want to confirm the man died, but it appears that way.”

She narrowed her eyes at Darien. “If you already knew that the men had seen a dog,
why
didn’t you tell me before the detectives arrived?”

“The witnesses hadn’t mentioned a dog,” Peter said, speaking up in Darien’s defense. “I had asked them about the men who had broken into your room, trying to get a description so we could locate them before the police did. The witnesses said the parking lot was dark. And so was the walk in front of the motel because the men had knocked out the lights.

“But when the car’s interior lights came on, the injured man looked pale as death, and the other man was shaking him and hollering at him. The wounded man was unresponsive. The other was cursing as he backed out of the parking lot and roared off. I assumed you’d shot the other man, too. I didn’t realize you had bitten him.” Peter looked contrite. “It was my fault that I didn’t think to ask the witnesses if they’d seen anything else near your room.”

“I have a question for you though, Alicia,” Darien said, his look stern. “Why did Danny Massaro and Mario Constantino kill your mother?”

Alicia was already upset by all of the police detective questioning she’d had to endure, so Jake wondered why in the hell Darien had to bring up the motive for her mother’s murder on top of all that. Jake knew Darien had good reasons for anything he did, but the timing seemed piss-poor.

But Alicia didn’t seem upset by the query. Instead, her lips parted, and she seemed surprised.