The Shifter's Conspiracy (Paranormal BBW Werewolf Romance Novella)

Copyright © 2013 by Cassie Laurent.

Kindle Edition

v1.0


The Shifter's Conspiracy
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. This book or portions thereof may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form whatsoever without direct permission from the author.

This book is intended
Only for Mature Audiences 18+
. It contains mature themes, substantial sexually explicit scenes, and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers.

UUID: 6de3f6c3-f753-4bf6-9353-d9437d2a873e

Thump
.

I heard the sound of about ten pounds of paper and manila folders hit my desk and looked up to see Lieutenant Jackson staring down at me, his face stern and impatient.

“If you’re done reading the paper, maybe you feel like scanning these,” he said sarcastically, turning his back and walking away before I even had a chance to respond.

I flipped through the files that had landed on my desk: just a bunch of cold cases, autopsy reports, even a few traffic citations thrown in the mix. Nothing in here was really very important and certainly not time-sensitive. I look a sip of my coffee and looked back down at the newspaper in my hands.

I was reading local news again, but who wasn’t these days? Three kidnappings in the last forty-eight hours; over twenty in the past month. Something was certainly going on and nobody had any clue what it was. Was it a serial killer? Organized crime? Mere coincidence?

All of the victims had been women ages eighteen to thirty-five. They were students, waitresses, a few legal assistants, even a stripper which the paper noted with a sense of intrigue. What did they all have in common? That’s what my department was trying to find out.

Notice that I said my
department
. While other detectives were out on the case, I was stuck inside scanning trivial documents as part of the Police Commissioner’s 2013 digitization effort. The goal was to have all previous records online and in a searchable database by January 1, 2014.

The Commissioner had promised city officials that this digitization project would make the department twice as efficient and save taxpayers millions of dollars each year. Because we’d spend less time doing paperwork and research, we’d have more time to actually be out fighting crime.

This sounded good, but it didn’t change the fact that I was bored out of my mind scanning and uploading documents all day long for months and months on end. No one else wanted to do the work and I was the youngest detective in the department, so I was the de facto leader of the initiative. Lucky me.

As I stood at the scanner, getting started on the day’s tedious task, I thought about the story in the paper and all those girls who had gone missing: Sara Nelson, Katie Harris, Eleanor Jaspers, Helen Jefferson… the list went on and on. Who were they? What were they like? I knew some details about them: occupation, what part of the city they lived in, where they had been spotted on the night they each disappeared, etc. That was stuff everyone knew; it was common knowledge readable in the daily paper. But what linked them together besides their sudden disappearances?

A few days ago I’d plotted out their locations, both residence and area where they were suspected of being kidnapped, on a map in the main conference room. They were scattered all throughout the city, mainly in Manhattan, but there had been at least two abductions in Queens and a few in both Harlem and Brooklyn. There was only one reported kidnapping in the Bronx. The locations didn’t yield any good leads; there appeared to be no pattern whatsoever.

I mulled this over as I scanned document after document, placing the hard copies back in their files to be sent to our permanent back-up storage center in upstate New York. When I was finished, I brought the files down to the basement where they would be kept before being loaded into the truck that was headed upstate the following week.

I caught the elevator upstairs. It stopped at the first floor lobby and in walked Frank Donnelly. He was a good guy, one of those old-school cops who was the last of a dying breed. He was smart and tough, but his methods seemed so outdated and anachronistic; he didn’t use a cellphone and rarely responded to e-mails. But he was smart as a whip and knew his way around the politics of the department. If there was ever anyone to ask for advice on how to get put on the abductions case, it was Frank. The problem was that I was just too shy to do it.

The elevator doors opened at my floor and I walked off quickly without saying a word.
Dammit
. Why hadn’t I spoken up? Not that it would have helped. Was I just going to ask to be put on the case? If I didn’t have any leads, I didn’t have any basis for convincing them I needed to be part of the team. You didn’t get put on cases just because you asked; you had to work for it.

I needed to prove to Lieutenant Jackson and the other detectives in the police department that I could be a valuable part of the team, more than just someone who ran out to pick up lunch orders and scan documents. So I went to the break room and poured myself a fresh cup of coffee and headed back to my desk. I’d have a few hours before the next files were dropped off; maybe I would do some of my own research and see what I could come up with.

I sat down at my computer and looked through the database, checking the name of each kidnapped woman against our records system. Most of them didn’t have a history; the only queries that came back with data were about traffic violations. None of these women appeared to be leading shady lives in the seedy underbelly of New York City. Even the stripper was what one might call a ‘good girl’; she was just stripping to put her way through law school at Fordham.

I wanted to talk to these girls’ families and friends. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they were having troubles that just didn’t show up in the official record. But I knew I couldn’t do this type of research without my Lieutenant’s permission. So I decided to do something a bit unorthodox.

I started searching the names of these women on the internet, compiling a file on each girl based on what I could find in publically available articles. Then I started to dive into social media, checking Facebook and Twitter, even a few Pinterest pages. I scrolled through photo after photo. It was a bit surreal, looking through these pictures. Here they were, laughing, smiling, joking around at a bar, celebrating holidays with family, a few graduation pictures here and there. And now they were gone. It was as if they disappeared into thin air.

Within a few hours I felt I was making some headway. It seemed that a lot of these girls tended to go out around the same places. I could cross reference their check-ins on Facebook and Yelp with the time of their disappearance and maybe learn some answers. Now that I had all the preliminary work of verifying these were the correct profiles, I could really get into some analysis and see if any patterns emerged.

Thump
.

Another pile of papers fell on my desk, this time dropped by Eric Carpenter, the second youngest detective in my department.

“Boss needs these scanned by end of day,” he said, with a slightly evil smirk on his face.

“Please, Eric, can you do it? I’m in the middle of something important,” I pleaded, hoping that for once he’d actually do me a favor.

“Really? What’s so important?”

“It’s related to the kidnappings. I think I might be onto a lead.”

“Yeah? What is it? I can let Lieutenant Jackson know.”

I mulled over the idea of telling him and then decided against it. He’d bring it to the Lieutenant and take all the credit for it. Besides, it’s not like I had anything really concrete yet, just a good avenue for proceeding that I was positive no one else in the department was pursuing. Who knew whether it would actually lead to anything?