Undercover Wolf

by Paige Tyler

  “Blood,” Trevor murmured.

  Hale didn’t bother to try to trace the scent, but simply followed them as they ran along the bank of the stream.

  “How are we going to explain ending up on the other side of the stream and well outside our search grid?” Connor asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Trey told him. “I’ll come up with something believable if anyone asks. Right now, just focus on finding the source of that scent.”

  They followed the trail for another thousand yards or so before the stream narrowed enough for them to leap across. Not that a normal human would have been able to do it, but that was simply one more lie Trey would have to come up with once the questions started.

  The scent led them to a low-lying area blanketed with thickets and brush, the kind of place Trey recognized as perfect for hiding a body—even if getting it here would have been a major pain in the ass for whoever dumped it.

  He and his pack mates stopped the moment they saw the body, staying far enough away to hopefully not trample any forensic evidence that might have been left behind. It helped that there was no reason for them to move closer to check for a pulse. Even from fifteen feet away, Trey’s hearing told him the victim didn’t have one.

  It was another one of the Butcher’s victims. The man lying in the shallow grave had been partially dug up. Probably by the wandering dog. The head and hands were gone, along with another leg. It also looked like the stomach cavity had been ripped open, but that might have been the dog’s doing, too. As a cop, and before that a soldier who’d seen more than his fair share of combat, he’d seen a lot of dead bodies, but this was as bad as anything he’d ever experienced. This killer was sadistic as hell.

  “What am I smelling?” Trevor asked, sniffing the air.

  Trey took a whiff and realized there were two separate scents competing—and neither of them were blood. The first one was sharp, like a cleanser or disinfectant, but with floral notes, like perfume. The other smelled almost human, but something wasn’t quite right about it. He was still trying to figure out what it was when he picked up a burnt electrical odor. While the first two scents lingered on the body, the third hovered around it. As if it belonged to whoever had carried the body and dumped it here.

  Trevor must have concluded the same thing because he gave Trey a worried look. “You think we’re dealing with some kind of supernatural killer?”

  Trey almost groaned. That was all they needed. Serial killers were bad enough. But if this one was indeed supernatural, there might be more to the Butcher than they’d thought.

  * * *

  “How exactly did you end up finding the body on this side of the stream when you and your teammates were assigned to a grid nearly a quarter mile away from here?”

  Dark hair pulled back in a neat bun, Chief Leclair regarded Trey curiously where they stood several yards away from the organized chaos that was the crime scene.

  “Pure luck,” he said. “We finished clearing our assigned grid when we saw some buzzards circling this area, so we decided to check it out.”

  Leclair continued to study him as if she somehow knew he was lying through his teeth. Trey hoped not.

  “I see,” she finally said in a soft, noncommittal tone before glancing down at the bottom of his tactical uniform pants. “And how did you get across the stream without getting wet?”

  Trey did a double take, completely caught off guard by the question. Which is probably why she’d asked it. Damn, he and his pack mates were going to have to be careful around the chief. She was cop through and through.

  “The stream narrows quite a bit if you wander down that way,” he said as casually as he could, jerking his thumb in the stream’s direction. “We were able to jump across it.”

  Leclair didn’t look like she believed that for a damn second, but at least she didn’t continue grilling him about it. “I suppose we should be thankful you followed your instincts and searched this area. I doubt anyone else would have bothered to fight their way through so many thickets on a whim. Then again, it’s starting to become the norm for me to find my SWAT team in places where they’re not supposed to be. Fortunately, things always seem to go right when you and your teammates go off script.”

  With that, the chief walked away, heading toward the taped-off crime scene to talk to one of the detectives from the serial killer task force. Given that no one had approached the body yet, it was likely they were waiting for a medical examiner to arrive. Hopefully, they’d get here soon and Leclair would be too focused on that to worry about him and the other members of his pack. Because she definitely seemed suspicious right now.

  “Everything okay?” Connor asked as he came up beside him. “You and the chief seemed to be having an intense conversation.”

  “I think we’re good,” Trey answered. “Though I’m pretty sure she knows I’m lying about how we found the body.”

  Connor blew out a breath. “I figured as much. We need to be careful around her. She’s sharp.”

  Trey opened his mouth to agree, but the words got stuck in his throat as a woman carrying a heavy-looking bag with the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office emblem on the side approached the crime scene tape and walked directly over to the chief. Between the bag that she had to lug half a mile through the woods in the mid-August heat and the navy blue coveralls she was wearing over her regular clothes, complete with high rubber boots, Dr. Samantha Mills was glistening with sweat, some of her long, blond hair escaping from her messy bun.

  Damn, she was the most attractive woman he’d ever seen in his life.

  “You ask her out yet?” Connor said casually.

  Trey glanced at his buddy to see him wearing a knowing grin. It wasn’t a secret that Trey had a thing for the assistant ME. He’d done nothing to hide it from the moment he’d first seen her at the site of the SWAT team’s raid two years ago when half the Pack had fully shifted into wolves. After that, Samantha seemed to show up at every crime scene to collect forensic evidence all while looking at them sideways. Hell, just this past June, while helping them with a case, she’d openly admitted to knowing the team was playing fast and loose with the truth when it came to how they did their jobs. He and the rest of the Pack had been worried she might be onto their secret—that the DPD SWAT team was composed entirely of werewolves—but when she hadn’t exposed them, they’d relaxed a little.

  Now, if only Trey could figure out how to man up and ask her out when he couldn’t even seem to talk to her without getting tongue-tied.

  “I’ve been meaning to, but I haven’t found the right time to approach her about it,” he said.

  Connor shrugged. “How about right now?”

  Trey snorted. “Yeah right. She wants some guy to ask her out while she’s leaning over a dead body.”

  “Dude, she deals with dead bodies every day, so you’re going to need to come up with another excuse. You’re a werewolf, not a werechicken. Just ask her to go out to dinner. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Trey would have laughed at the werechicken comment if this thing he had for Samantha hadn’t gone on for so long it had somehow taken on a life of its own. The thought of asking her out only to be turned down was something he didn’t even want to think about. That was why he kept putting it off. He was waiting for some sign to light up and tell him to finally go for it.

  But that was stupid. There wasn’t going to be a sign, and if he kept waiting, the worst that could happen—would happen—was someone else would make a move on the beautiful, brilliant woman and he’d be left thinking about what could have been. The thought alone made Trey’s gut clench.

  Dammit. He was going to ask her out—today.

  But as he watched her drop to a knee beside the body and lean over to study the headless corpse, he decided he’d wait until she wasn’t leaning over a mutilated body.

  Chapter 2
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  Samantha unlocked her office and walked in, letting the quirkiness of the space soothe her aggravated mind and soul. With its light gray color scheme, the room was sleek and modern, like the rest of the Dallas Institute of Forensic Sciences. While the shelves filled with medical journals were fairly standard for a pathologist’s office, it was the other shelving units on the far wall that defined the space. The display cases showcased her collection of antique medical devices and various other medical curiosities, including a human skull saved from a sanitarium where they’d practiced medicine that could only be labeled as barbaric. She kept it as a reminder that psychos could be found wearing all kinds of disguises…including doctor’s garb.

  Standing in the middle of her safe zone, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, releasing the urge to throttle somebody.

  “Briefing go that badly?”

  Samantha turned to see her best friend, coworker, next-door neighbor, and all-around confidant Crystal Mullen in the doorway. Petite with brown eyes and her shoulder-length dark hair in its signature ponytail, Crystal was always there when Samantha needed to vent about something. These days, that was a lot.

  When her boss, Louis Russo, said he was assigning her to the serial killer task force, Samantha had been thrilled. Okay, that sounded bad. For a nerd like her who was used to working miles behind the lines, where she barely had a clue what case she was involved in, the chance to team up with the police as they chased down a murderer, uncovering clues and questioning suspects, sounded exciting. Then she’d started going to meetings, and the shine had quickly worn off that particular apple. Now, after only a little more than a week, she dreaded every briefing she was forced to attend and their ability to frustrate her beyond all rational explanation.

  “No worse than usual, which is to say horrible,” Samantha admitted, moving over to her mini fridge to pull out a bottle of water. She held another up to her friend, but Crystal shook her head. Crystal was a die-hard caffeine addict. Seriously, her friend would wheel around her coffee in an IV stand if Louis had let her.

  “Let me guess,” Crystal said as she perched in the chair in front of Samantha’s desk. Her friend never actually sat back in the comfortable club chair like a normal person. Probably because she had way too much caffeine in her system. “They’re upset you haven’t already solved the case for them.”

  Samantha sat down behind her desk with a sigh. “Pretty much. They didn’t want to hear that I barely had time to do more than an initial assessment of the body found this morning.” Opening the bottle, she took a long drink of water. “Never mind that I was able to establish an approximate time of death and confirm the amputations were accomplished with the same type of saw as the one used in the previous Butcher cases. Or that the cuts were made by the same person, based on the angle and technique involved. I even got samples collected and prepped for DNA profiling and checks against CODIS and NDIS, but that still wasn’t enough for them.”

  “Sounds like a lot to me,” Crystal said. “What else were they expecting?”

  Samantha shrugged, relaxing back in her chair and lazily swiveling from side to side. “I think they’re all waiting for the wow factor to kick in like all those CSI shows on TV. You know, where they collect and profile DNA, then a computer spits out a name before the first commercial break? They don’t want to hear this killer chooses his victims specifically because they aren’t in the system and that he’s too meticulous to leave behind any hair, fiber, or blood evidence. And because I know the killer is a man from the size and depth of his boot prints, they think I should be able to track those boots to a specific store and found out who bought them. But I can’t do that because it doesn’t work that way.” She sighed. “I know they’re just trying to catch this guy, but so am I. But when there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence.”

  “Maybe I can find something to make the task force happy,” Crystal said.

  “Let’s hope,” Samantha agreed.

  Crystal was a forensic technician at the lab, working on a little bit of everything, but concentrating mostly on latent prints and tool marks. Before coming to work at the institute, Samantha never would have thought there’d be a call for someone to do that full time, but Dallas was a busy city when it came to crime. Crystal could work overtime for the rest of her life and never catch up with the backlog of cases that needed her expertise.

  Samantha was about to ask Crystal if she wanted to start going over the body together when footsteps outside her office interrupted her.

  “Senior Corporal Duncan,” she said with a smile even as Crystal snapped her head around to see who was at the door. “Come in.”

  Trey and the other three officers with him from the SWAT team exchanged looks before stepping inside. Her office wasn’t small by any means, but with the four very large cops in there, it suddenly seemed much harder to breathe.

  Or maybe that was simply a side effect of being so close to Trey.

  Samantha would be the first to admit she and Trey had been bouncing around in each other’s orbits ever since she’d responded to a crime scene involving the SWAT team and found a handful of dead criminals who’d supposedly been mauled by wild coyotes in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Her experiences with the team had only gotten stranger from there. To say that they weren’t quite normal was an understatement.

  Okay, so maybe her intellectual curiosity wasn’t the only reason she’d spent most of the past year and a half stalking Trey. With that square jaw, intense blue eyes, and perfect amount of scruff, the man was extremely attractive. Not to mention the fact that he looked amazing in the dark-blue tactical uniform. But there was more to it than that. Simply put, there was something about him that mesmerized her every time she was around him. His presence at the Audubon center this morning had made it damn hard to focus on her work, that was for sure. Even with a headless corpse there to distract her.

  The funny thing was, she wasn’t surprised at all to see him and his teammates here in her office today. In fact, since hearing that it had been Trey and his fellow SWAT officers who’d actually found the body, she’d been pretty much expecting a visit from them. Just like back in mid-June, when they’d inserted themselves in the middle of that delirium drug thing…which really hadn’t been a drug thing at all. When things got weird in Dallas, SWAT was going to be there.

  Realizing she’d yet to make any introductions, Samantha quickly did so. Trey did the same, introducing Connor, Trevor, and Hale, though she could have easily introduced them herself since she had files on every member of the SWAT team. Crystal was well aware of Samantha’s fascination with all things SWAT—and Trey in particular—so it was no surprise when her friend came up with an excuse to leave, saying she needed to start working on the body Samantha had brought in earlier.

  “Normally, I’d ask what brought four of Dallas’s finest down to my office,” Samantha said as she moved around the side of the desk and sat on the edge to study the four men, “but since you showed up minutes after I got done briefing the task force—and you were also at the crime scene this morning—I’m assuming your visit is related to the Butcher.”

  Trey glanced at his teammates, who returned the look, as if saying your call.

  “You’re right. It is.” Trey gave her a smile, flashing the most perfect dimples. “We’re hoping you might be able to tell us a little about the case.”

  Samantha had to fight the urge to return his smile. Damn, when Trey put on the charm, it was scary how badly she wanted to walk over there, climb him like a sloth, and start coming up with names for their future children. But she fought off the desire. Besides, she didn’t need to think about names. She had all four of them picked out a few days after meeting the hunky cop. No, she needed to play this cool and use the situation to get what she wanted.

  “I really don’t think I should be talking to you four about the Butcher case since none of
you are on the task force,” she said.

  Trey smiled again, his eyes holding hers captive. “I know we’re not on the task force, but we’re asking anyway.”

  “And why is that?”

  He crossed his arms over his broad chest, treating her to a pair of biceps she couldn’t have gotten both hands around if she tried. And boy, would she like to try. “Do you remember what I said to you back in June to get you to help us with that delirium case?”

  That had been two months ago, so Samantha had to really think about it to come up with what part of the conversation he was talking about. Most of her memories were of the stunningly attractive Trey Duncan practically begging for her help on that case and her feeling badly about not being able to offer up anything.

  “I remember you said you needed my help because you and the rest of the SWAT team were the ones who had to deal with the people you thought were on some drug called delirium and that you needed to understand what you were up against.”

  Trey gave her another distracting smile. “Exactly.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Samantha thought back to the delirium case. Was there some kind of connection to the current serial killer terrorizing the city? She couldn’t see how that was possible. The two men responsible for those crimes had something in their DNA that allowed them to turn people into puppets and control their minds simply by wiping their blood on their victims. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to figure out exactly what was in their DNA, and while the Butcher might be scary as hell, she hadn’t found anything to make her think he wasn’t a regular human.

  Unless…

  “Wait a minute,” she said, her mind starting to spin at a hundred miles an hour. What had she just said to herself only a few minutes ago? When things got weird in Dallas, SWAT was going to be there. “Are you saying the Butcher isn’t a normal killer? That he’s different like the men responsible for making all those people do things against their will are different?”