Stanford walked over and sat down at the table, with his bodyguards hovering protectively nearby. He stared with fascination at Regina, who sat naked next to Vaughn, trying to cover her breasts and crotch with her arms.
“Doesn’t she bite?” he asked Vaughn.
“Not unless she wants to die, in slow, screaming agony,” Vaughn smiled, baring his capped white teeth. He yanked on her nipple chain again, and she shrieked.
“Try it,” Vaughn said to Stanford.
Tentatively, Stanford reached out and give the chain a light tug. She whimpered.
“That all you got?” Vaughn jeered.
Stanford yanked again, hard. This time she screamed in pain, and Stanford smiled with delight, like a child who’d just been handed a delicious box of chocolates.
“Oh, my,” he said. His breathing quickened, and the crotch of his pants tented.
“Soon, they’ll all be like that, crawling and begging,” Vaughn said. “Every god damned shifter in the world. Locked up in reservations. Under our thumb. Where they belong.”
“Have you found the man you’re looking for yet? I don’t feel like I’m getting full cooperation from the police,” Stanford said. “However, I do know they’re watching one of the employees who works at Caged Heat. Not a shifter. Some human whore named Aurora.”
“I know. It had occurred to me that the Chemist could be a woman, but it’s definitely not Aurora or her room-mate Ashley, or her boyfriend. I know the dates that the Chemist worked for me, and approximately where he or she was at the time, and these three were all in different parts of the country during that time period. They don’t match up, and there’s nothing in their background that would indicate they had the kind of skills that he did. What’s more likely is Aurora is selling drugs for him. My men will be making a move on her very soon. Trust me, she will tell us everything we want to know.”
Stanford nodded. “We need those drugs,” he said, staring at the naked shifter as if hypnotized.
“We’ll get them. This is what I do,” Vaughn said confidently.
Once they figured out how to reproduce the bad batch, it would be child’s play to dump the batch in the water supply of several major cities. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of shifters would go rabid. The streets would run red with blood, the air would be rent with screams. Chaos and panic would sweep the country, martial law would be declared.
And from the ashes, a new order would rise. Stanford would be recognized as a hero, a visionary who’d tried to warn everyone that this day would come. If only they’d listened to him…how many lives might have been saved? His opponents would topple like dominoes.
Every shifter in the country would be rounded up, forced to wear copper collars for life, and forcibly relocated to reservations where they belonged.
Stanford would ensure that Vaughn was protected in all of his operations, and would even allow him to peddle drugs on the reservations. With the shifters in despair, trapped on reservations forever, they’d turn to drugs more than ever before.
Stanford was still staring at Regina, his eyes round as pennies.
“Get on the floor, on your knees,” Vaughn ordered her. “Kneel in front of him.”
“Really?” Stanford’s eyes lit up. She quickly sank to her knees in front of him, letting out a low moan. Vaughn knew she was desperate to free her nipples from the cruel bite of the clamps; he also knew she wouldn’t dare.
“Of course. Nothing but the best for my friends.”
Stanford’s hands scrabbled at his zipper, yanking it open, and he smiled blissfully as she took him in her mouth.
“Now that’s where a shifter belongs,” he breathed. “Just like that. Oh, yes…”
His security guards stood behind him, pretending not to look but sneaking peeks out of the corners of their eyes.
Vaughn leaned back in his chair to watch, with a satisfied smile. He wondered if Regina had enough brain cells left to understand what it meant to her future, that he was allowing her to see him meeting with the state representative, and to overhear them making their plans together.
It meant she wouldn’t survive to see the sun set.
Chapter Fourteen
“I’m fine. Quit being such a mother hen,” Bobbi said. She was standing outside of an apartment building on one of San Francisco’s rolling hills, talking to Jax on her cell phone. The October air was cool and foggy, a chilly contrast to Playa Linda’s bright, sunny weather. Shreds of mist drifted by like ghosts.
“How long will you be there?”
“I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“I should have come with you.”
“You should calm down. Chillax, bro, as Pixie would say. I have to go now.”
After talking to Tyler that morning, she’d tried to reach Oliver’s ex-boyfriend by phone, but was told he wasn’t working at the bar that day. Tyler had managed to track down his address, so she’d hopped a commuter plane to San Francisco and taken a taxi to his apartment.
She jabbed her finger against the tiny round button that would buzz Brad’s apartment. A minute later, a man answered.
“Who is it?”
“Brad? My name is Bobbi Jo Simpson. I’m with the National Shifter’s Council, Enforcer Division. I have some questions for you about Oliver Ferguson.”
There was a long pause, and then a tremulous voice spoke. “I’ll be right down,” he said.
A couple of minutes passed, and then the front door opened, and a handsome young man with spiky blond hair and tight black jeans stood there. His brown eyes were haunted.
“Is Oliver all right?” he asked.
Bobbi hesitated. “I honestly don’t know,” she said, although she suspected that she knew the answer.
“Did something happen to him?”
“Let me show you a picture and see if you can identify the person in the picture.” His eyes widened, and she added quickly “It’s not a morgue picture.”
She pulled out the picture that Tyler had printed for her. He’d gotten it from the USB stick she’d given him; Cedric had a picture of every employee who worked for him.
“This man claims that he’s Oliver Michael Ferguson, date of birth 2/25/1980,” she said. “But when we looked at his driver’s license picture from Utah, they don’t appear to be the same person. Very similar, but not the same.”
He looked at the picture, eyes widening, shaking his head. “That’s not Oliver. Oh, God. What happened to Oliver?” He looked up, eyes filling with tears. “Did he…did he kill Oliver and steal his identity?”
Her heart quickened. She was getting close now, so close. After so many years. Five long years. “I think that’s a distinct possibility,” she said. “Do you recognize him?”
He stared at the picture again, hot tears coursing down his cheeks. “I knew Oliver would never have sent me that hateful text. I could never believe it, but when I went to his apartment it was empty and the landlord told me that he’d dropped a final rent check through the mail slot and gave no forwarding address.”
“Dropped it through the mail slot…because it wasn’t Oliver, so he didn’t want the landlord to see him,” she said. “It was the man who stole his identity. Think, Bradley. This is really important.”
“That looks like…oh, my God. Okay, I remember this. There was a man with brown eyes, and no facial hair, and not as tan, but the shape of his face…he kind of looked like Oliver. This could be the same man. He came by the bar a few times. He said his name was Roger, but one day somebody came up to him and called him Tony, and he answered without thinking, and then he got really angry and left the bar. The man who called him Tony – the man had prison tattooes, like he knew this guy Tony from prison and Tony didn’t want to be recognized. That was right before Oliver disappeared.”
He blinked, hard. “Where is Oliver’s body? What did this man do to him?”
She ached for Bradley. To have his lover disappear like that, and then to find out that his lover had most lik
ely been murdered…“I don’t know, Brad, but you’ve been incredibly helpful. Do you remember anything more about this Tony-slash-Roger guy? Or the person who recognized him?”
“I’ve never seen either of them since.” He wiped the back of his face with his hand. “Where is this man who’s pretending to be Oliver?”
“We’ve got a pretty good idea. Listen, I promise you this. When we apprehend him I’ll let you know. Give me your phone number.” She dug out a pad of paper from her purse, and he wrote it down with a shaky hand, his eyes huge and dewy with tears.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Bradley. I’ve got to get home now. We’ll catch this man, I promise you that, and he will pay for everything that he’s done.”
Oh, yes he will, she thought. Somewhere out there, a man named Tony had an invisible expiration date stamped on his forehead.
* * *“Something feels off. I don’t like it,” Bobbi muttered. Pixie, Jax and Bobbi were standing across the street from Aurora’s apartment building. The plainclothes cops in the building across the street had been watching all night long, and hadn’t seen Aurora coming or going, they’d reported. They also hadn’t seen Tony, or Roger, or Oliver, or whatever his real name was, either. They had Oliver’s cell phone number, also from Cedric’s records; the police and Tyler were both tracking it, and Oliver’s cell phone had last pinged about five miles away from Aurora’s house, a day ago, and then had gone dead.
Tyler hadn’t yet had any luck in finding Oliver’s real identity the day before. Neither had the police. Captain Thorne told Bobbi that they were going to pick Aurora up for questioning at the end of the day if they didn’t find Tony’s identity by then, but Bobbi wanted to get a head start on the investigation. It was partly because she didn’t trust the police with Stanford watching over their shoulders, and partly for reasons of her own.
“Ashley said to come by and check, to see if she was going to have a room available. The cops have been watching all night. Nothing could be wrong in there, right? I’m just going to ring the buzzer and see what’s up.”
“If you’re not back out in ten minutes…five minutes. If you’re not back out in five minutes, I’m coming after you,” Bobbi said.
“I’ve got mace, I’ve got a switchblade, I’ve got my mad ninja fighting street skills, and they’re all human, not shifter, so if anything goes wrong I can take them. Chillax, dude,” Pixie rolled her eyes and strolled off across the street. She didn’t have to ring the doorbell; she followed an old man into the building.
“Yeah, Chillax,” Jax grinned. Bobbi tried to smack him, good-naturedly, but he dodged her.
“Too slow.”
“You were saying that last night, too…when you were begging me to let you come.” Her voice came out in a seductive purr, and then she blushed and looked away. What was coming over her? Since when was she a seductive minx?
Jax trailed his fingers down her arm. “Oh, keep up with the sassy talk. You know the great thing about payback, beautiful? You never know when it’s coming.”
“I can run pretty fast.” She flashed a self satisfied smile, but then worry quickly puckered her face again. She glanced at her watch. “I’m going in.”
“It’s been sixty seconds!”
“I really don’t like using an untrained civilian in these situations.”
“The police were okay with it when we ran it by them.”
“They don’t care about her welfare.” Bobbi began walking across the street, with Jax right beside her. They climbed the steps. When they got to the front door to the apartment building, Bobbi paused; she was fine with jimmying the lock, but she didn’t have to. Pixie came flying down the hall towards them, yanked open the door, and fell into Bobbi’s arms, babbling hysterically.
“What? Slow down!”
Jax pushed past them and ran into the building.
“She’s dead! Her head’s all like – Oh God – I think I’m gonna barf!”
“Aurora’s dead?”
Pixie leaned over the steps, and threw up. Apparently she’d had oatmeal and apples for breakfast.
Then she straightened up, blinking watery eyes. “No. Her room-mate Ashley’s dead. In the livingroom, and everything’s, like, totally trashed. Aurora might be dead, I don’t know, I didn’t search the apartment.”
Bobbi quickly dialed the police department. How the hell had this happened? Vaughn must have an inside man on the police department, damn it.
“You should leave. I’ll call you later.”
Pixie nodded, scrambled down the steps, and walked west, clutching her stomach.
Bobbi rushed into the building. She’d already been given the layout of the building, with the location of Aurora’s apartment, emailed to her by her contact at the Enforcer’s department.
She wouldn’t have needed it, though; all she had to do was follow the scent of drying blood. The door to Aurora’s apartment gaped open, and Jax was standing in the living room.
The apartment had been decorated in bright primary colors, with a red couch with yellow and blue cushions, red lacquer coffee table, and a yellow rug with big red and blue polka dots wrinkled up on the floor.
A woman lay curled up on her side, crumpled up by the couch. Her head had been bashed in so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell what color her hair had been, and Bobbi’s stomach lurched when she saw that every one of the woman’s fingers had been broken. The floor was pale bleached wood, and the spreading pool of blood around her head looked so dark against it, it was almost black. Her dress had been ripped open down the front and there was a constellation of cigarette burns clustered on her breasts.
“She’s been tortured. Somebody was trying to make her talk, probably looking for Tony,” Jax said, his voice shaking with anger. “There’s no sign of Aurora here. Apparently the police were only watching the front of the building, not the back.”
“That sounds…really incompetent.”
Jax shrugged angrily. “They see it as a shifter problem. They’re claiming it’s top priority, but obviously it isn’t.”
The room had been searched with savage thoroughness. Sofa cushions slashed, curtains yanked down, cupboards emptied and cups and plates shattered, refrigerator door hanging off its hinges, bathroom door gaping open to reveal a shattered medicine cabinet lying on the floor…
“I bet they were hoping to find Tony’s stash,” Bobbi said.
She heard footsteps pounding down the hallway, and the two police officers who’d been assigned to watch the apartment burst in.
“Nice damned job watching the apartment,” Jax snarled.
“Hey! They only had enough manpower to watch the front of the building last night. Budget cuts,” one of the officers muttered, not meeting Jax’s eyes.
Bobbi felt the hair on the back of her arms lift. One of Vaughn’s men, she’d bet money on it. She just had a feeling…and her feelings were never wrong.
How had Vaughn turned somebody so fast? Was the man like her, somebody who’s loved one needed protecting, somebody desperate? Somehow, she doubted it. Another underpaid civil servant with dollar signs in their eyes.
She wanted to hurt Vaughn so badly.
She closed her eyes and thought of Heath. Heath surrounded by a prison gang, Heath being stabbed to death with the sharpened handle of a toothbrush or strangled with a sheet made into a noose…
This case couldn’t finish fast enough for her. Tony had to be found.
Jax continued to rage at the cops. “I know that you don’t care less about what happens to shifters, but that dead girl on the floor? She’s human. And whoever did this to her took their sweet time making her final minutes of life pure agony and terror, right under your noses, while you sat across the street with your thumbs up your asses.”
“Listen up, you mangy-“ one of the cops stepped forward belligerently, thrusting his jaw out, then quickly moved back when Jax’s eyes glowed amber and his jaw thrust forward.
“Let’s go downtown and fill out the repo
rt.” Bobbi grabbed him by the arm and dragged him towards the door, calling back over her shoulder “Try not to screw up the crime scene as badly as you did your protection detail.”
She knew it didn’t matter what she said. If at least one of them was working for Vaughn, then no evidence would be found at the scene.
“So now Aurora and Tony are both in the wind,” Jax said as they climbed into the car. “I don’t get the impression they ran off together, though. It seems like Tony took off, and then Aurora.”
“Well, the police can put out an APB for Aurora too,” Bobbi said, trying to banish the sight of Ashley’s poor, tortured body from her mind. Every time she closed her eyes, the bloody scene flashed across her lowered lids like a still from a horror movie.
I will gut you someday, Vaughn, she promised herself.
Was she somehow responsible for this? Vaughn was like an octopus, his tentacles reaching into everything. Could she have stopped him without endangering Heath’s life?
She leaned her head back against the seat cushion and tried to blink away Ashley’s tortured final moments.
When would this ever end?
“It’s not your fault,” Jax said, his hand on her knee.
You have no idea, Bobbi thought. You’ll be changing your mind about me, about us, sooner than you know it.
Chapter Fifteen
“I think we have a winner,” Captain Thorne said to Bobbi and Jax. They were in his office, still shaken and angered by what they’d seen earlier.
The police had gone through the apartment, lifted fingerprints, and run them through the national database. “Lorenzo Antonio LaRosa, known as Tony. He was a former college chemistry major, kicked out because he was using the school laboratory to manufacture drugs. Then he went on to have several drug manufacturing and distribution arrests. Went to prison for four years, finally. He got out about eight months ago. Skipped parole, disappeared.”
Bobbi’s heart sped up so fast, she thought it would leap from her chest. The time period that he was in jail…that fit perfectly. That would explain why there hadn’t been any other drug-related Shifter Rage incidents in the last five years. Everything fit. This was it. She had a name now. After all these years…
The Alpha Meets His Match Page 15
