Rogue (11 page)

“Well, someone sure as hell sniffed him out
this
time,” Jace said.

“Evidently.” My father turned to me, and I held my breath. I dreaded catching his attention the way a child who hasn’t done her homework fears being called out by the teacher. “How does Parker’s body compare with yours?”

Great. A pop quiz,
I thought, recognizing his transition into lecture mode.

“How does Parker’s body compare with mine? Hmm.” I
gave Parker a quick, theatrical once-over, and he smiled, clearly catching on to my line of thought. “Nice legs and killer biceps. But I have better boobs. No question.”

My father frowned, but not before a flicker of amusement flashed across his face. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have seen it. “Faythe…”

“Oh, fine.” I barely resisted the urge to roll my eyes, gathering my thoughts for the test he’d just presented. “There don’t seem to be many differences at a glance.”

Our esteemed Alpha nodded, and I continued, walking slowly around the body as I spoke. “The only difference I see at the moment is their respective ages. Harper was twenty-three, and Moore was about a decade older. Each apparently died of a broken neck. Both men are Caucasian, and both are strays. Both are sturdy in build, which makes me wonder how an attacker could get close enough to either of them to break his neck without suffering so much as a scratch.” Okay, technically Marc had pointed that out first, but if he could borrow my shower, I could borrow his wisdom. Right?

Squatting on the ground next to the corpse, I made myself examine the fingers. “And based on the lack of blood and tissue beneath their nails, I’m going to assume I’m right about that.”

I glanced up at my father, and he nodded for me to go on, his face carefully devoid of any expression. Behind him, Marc beamed at me, obviously pleased. I smiled at him and stood, rubbing my hands on the front of my shorts out of habit, though I hadn’t actually touched the corpse.

“Both bodies were found on our territory, but near the Mississippi border, each less than an hour from his own home.” I paused, closing my eyes in thought as the gears in my brain
whirred fast enough to make me dizzy. “Oh, wait. I just thought of another difference.” A second pause. “No, two.”

“Go on.” Though my father’s face remained unreadable, I thought I detected a hint of encouragement in his tone.

“Assuming they died where they were found, Robert Harper was killed in the middle of New Orleans, but Bradley Moore died in an empty field in Arkansas, miles from anything but empty fields and a small patch of woods.”

“And the other difference?” Marc prompted.

“Moore’s murder was reported, albeit anonymously, but Harper’s was not. In fact, it’s a miracle Parker and Holden found him before anyone else did.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then the boss had to go and ruin my good mood. “Does anyone see any flaws in her logic?”

Glancing around boldly, I silently dared them each to speak. I’d ruined the curve in my college logic class with a perfect score on the final, and I was pretty confident in my deductions. So it came as a complete slap in the face when Ethan spoke up.

“Sure, no one called to report the body in New Orleans, but that doesn’t mean it
wouldn’t
have been reported. For all we know, the killer was on his way to a pay phone when Parker and Holden found the body.”

“That’s certainly possible,” Daddy said as I stuck my tongue out at Ethan, well aware of how immature I was being. My brother reciprocated, as I’d known he would. “Anyone else?”

Vic cleared his throat. “Well, this isn’t a flaw in Faythe’s logic, since she mentioned it, but there’s always the possibility that one or both of them were killed somewhere else, then moved.”

“Yes, but without a forensics lab, we have no way of
knowing, so I’m going to suggest we concentrate on what we
do
know. Or what we can smell.” My father’s eyes came to rest on me, then flicked to Marc, who now stood behind me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders.

Marc’s chin brushed the back of my head. “I’m guessing you want us to get up close and personal with Harper’s trace fragrances.”

The Alpha nodded.

“I can smell him fine from here, thanks,” I said, doing my best not to wrinkle my nose. While a human probably would have found the stench of rotten garbage offensive, for us it was virtually unbearable. At least in human form. As cats, we were more accustomed to nature’s less-pleasant scents, most of which were a normal part of life in the wild. But things were different on two legs.

My father frowned, and his face hardened, but before I could make things any worse for myself, Marc gave me a little shove and followed me toward the body.

Kneeling by Harper’s shoulder, I turned to look up at my father, who was wearing his Alpha face. Again. “I assume you want to know if he has the same weird smell as the last one.”

Daddy nodded. “And anything else of interest that you notice.”

Following Marc’s lead, I leaned closer to the body, struggling to swallow the gorge rising in the back of my throat. I breathed in deeply through my nose, and felt my stomach churn. Trying to ignore the nausea, I clamped a hand over my mouth and took another deep breath. Behind me, Ethan snickered, and I made a mental note to accidentally kick him somewhere sensitive next time we sparred.

Marc looked at me with his eyebrows raised, and I nodded
to tell him I was okay. I leaned down one more time. This time I concentrated on classifying the smells to distract myself from my urge to vomit. To my surprise, it worked. I detected several variations on the theme of rotting vegetables, and three or four kinds of moldy meat.
Cooked
meat. Harper hadn’t been dead long enough to start smelling on his own, mostly because he’d spent the majority of the day in an air-conditioned van.

After the food, I identified several biological scents, probably from emptied bathroom trash cans. And under all that was
the
smell. The one I was looking for. It was faint, and I would never have noticed it beneath the other, stronger smells if I hadn’t already known what to look for. But it was definitely there.

I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised in question. He nodded. He smelled it, too. The murders were connected.

Turning back to the body, I closed my eyes in concentration. Bracing my hands on the floor to the left of the corpse—I was
not
going to end a perfectly good day by falling face-first onto a dead man—I followed my nose, moving to the right as the smell grew faintly stronger. When it began to fade again, I moved back to my left until my face hovered—eyes still closed—over the point at which the scent was most noticeable, though it was faint even then.

I opened my eyes. I was inches from Harper’s broken neck. The smell was strongest in the one place we were sure the killer had touched him, and that could only mean one thing: I was smelling the killer’s scent.

Standing, I turned to face my father. “It’s the same as the scent on Moore. It’s definitely a foreign cat, but it’s…
more,
somehow.” Ethan snickered at my unintentional pun, but I ignored him. “Different. And it’s strongest on his neck.”

“It’s on both his hands, too,” Marc said, rising to stand next to me.

Instead of replying, our Alpha knelt beside the body, heedless of the dirt floor, and closed his eyes as he inhaled deeply just above the corpse’s neck. He exhaled, then inhaled again. His forehead wrinkled and his eyes opened. He stood and pulled a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “I don’t smell it. I smell rot, and his personal scent, and cheap cologne, but nothing else.” He frowned deeply, cleaning his lenses out of habit, and his next words were softer than he usually spoke. “I guess this old nose isn’t quite what it used to be.”

Parker came forward then, and Owen followed him. They knelt side by side, inhaling with almost comic expressions of concentration. Several seconds later, they stood, shaking their heads in unison. The scent was too faint, and completely overwhelmed by the stench of garbage.

The others each took a turn, but none of them could detect the scent. Still, it was almost funny to watch the parade of beefy men take their turns kneeling on the dusty barn floor to sniff the refuse-strewn corpse. And by the time Vic stood, chestnut waves flopping as he shook his head in disappointment, I’d decided that they couldn’t smell the scent because, having never smelled it before, they didn’t really know what they were looking for. Marc and I had probably only been able to pinpoint it because we’d gotten a good whiff of it earlier on Bradley Moore.

Marc shrugged. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to take our word for it.”

My father shook his head, frowning down at Harper, as if the victim were to blame for the faintness of the mystery scent he carried. “That’s not good enough. This same cat is
responsible for murdering both strays. On
our
territory. We can’t let that continue, nor can we let it go unpunished, and if we’re going to stop him, we have to know who he is. Or
what
he is. I have to smell his scent.”

Resolute now, his jawline firm, my father turned sharply and marched away from us. I watched him go, noting the determination in his stride and the final-sounding thump each time his heels hit the ground. But I didn’t understand what he had in mind until he turned into the last empty horse stall on the right and dropped out of sight.

He was going to Shift.

In cat form, all of his senses would be heightened, even above the elevated sensitivity he had on two legs. My father wanted to give his feline nose a chance to succeed where the human version had failed.

As we stood around looking at one another, waiting for our Alpha to finish Shifting, my gaze returned to the body, and my thoughts to the scent in question. The smell was strongest on Harper’s neck, where he would have been gripped by his murderer. That made sense. What
didn’t
make sense was the fact that the smell was also noticeable—at least to me and Marc—on Harper’s hands, yet we’d found no defensive injuries.

“Hey, guys?” Six heads turned my way. “Harper has the killer’s scent on his hands, so he must have touched the bastard. But he has no blood or obvious tissue beneath his nails, and no defensive injuries.” I paused to give them a moment to digest what I’d said. “Why would Harper touch his killer, yet make no attempt to protect himself?”

In the back of my mind, I noted the whisper of claws scraping hard-packed dirt as my father neared the end of his Shift on the other side of the barn.

“The most obvious answer is that he trusted his murderer,” Owen drawled, shifting his cowboy hat back and forth on his head with one rough, tanned hand. “Knew him personally.”

I nodded. Marc had drawn the same conclusion about Moore in Arkansas. “Yeah, that makes sense—for a Pride cat.” My brothers and fellow enforcers were very close. They’d been friends and housemates for years, and in a Pride, a connection that strong came with a lot of physical contact. “But both Harper and Moore are strays. Loners,” I continued. “They were born human, and human men don’t touch one another much. They may shake hands, but that would only put the scent on Harper’s
right
hand. Right?”

Jace nodded, clearly following my train of thought. “So why would Harper touch his killer with both hands, if not to fight him off?”

“Exactly.”

A huffing sound drew our attention toward the rear of the barn and I turned to see my father padding toward us, his paws silent on the packed-dirt floor.

Even in his midfifties, my father was impressive and physically intimidating as a cat. He wasn’t as long as Owen or Marc, but he was bulky and solid, and obviously powerful. Like all werecats, Daddy’s fur was sleek and solid black, with no spots or rosettes. But unlike the rest of us, he was easy to identify from a distance, even with the wind blowing his scent the wrong way. As he’d aged, my father had developed a streak of silver fur behind each ear, the exact shade and placement of the two most prominent streaks of silver in his hair.

As he slunk toward us, moving gracefully across the floor, I thought about the difference between the life of a Pride Alpha like my father and that of a stray like Harper. My father had
everything: respect, responsibility, power, and more friends and family than he knew what to do with. By contrast most strays were socially isolated and constantly at risk of losing everything to a faster, stronger stray. Which raised a very important question: Who the hell would a wary loner trust?

Someone he has no reason to fear,
I thought, surprised by how obvious the answer seemed in hindsight. But who was that? Who didn’t a stray fear?

My father paused at the edge of the ring we’d formed around the corpse on the floor. He took us all in with a single, sweeping glance, then padded directly to the body, bending to place his nose less than an inch from Harper’s neck. His long tail swished slowly behind him, and his nostrils twitched as he inhaled, sniffing to isolate the scent none of the rest of us could identify.

And still the gears in my brain spun furiously. I was on to something, and I couldn’t let it go, even when my father raised his head from the body, huffing in triumph.

Who’s strong enough to break a stray’s neck, yet seems harmless enough to put him at ease? Who can get close enough to touch a stray tomcat without setting off his inner alarm?
And just like that, I knew the answer:
I
could.

The killer wasn’t a tomcat at all.
She
was a tabby.

M
y father reemerged from the empty horse stall on two legs, wearing a satisfied, cat-who-ate-the-canary look—and little else. He’d taken the time to pull on his pants, but the remaining parts of his suit—including socks and tie—lay draped across his left arm, his shoes hanging from the fingers of his right hand. We were getting a rare glimpse of our Alpha at his informal best, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“The scent was definitely there,” he said, walking toward us from the other end of the barn in long, confident strides. “It was faint, but unmistakable once I caught it. We’re not looking for a stray after all.” He paused dramatically, and I was amused to realize my father was dragging the moment out to prolong the tension. It was working. All eyes were on him, and Ethan actually leaned forward in anticipation.

The Alpha opened his mouth to make his grand revelation, but I beat him to the punch. I just couldn’t resist.

“We’re looking for a tabby.”

I’d whispered, but they all heard me clearly in the eager
silence created by our Alpha’s theatrical pause. At the edge of my vision, Marc gaped at me, but my eyes were on my father, whose face registered first surprise, then annoyance. Then pride. He was
proud
of me for figuring it out on my own.

I grinned, relishing what felt like a rare moment of competence. But my father kept watching me, as if waiting for more. My smile faded as I wondered what I was missing. Was he irritated at me for one-upping him on purpose? Instead of answering my unspoken question, he smiled and glanced from me to the rest of the guys. Whatever was on his mind, he didn’t want to talk about it in front of everyone else. At least, not yet.

“How did you know?” he asked at last, moving on as if he’d never paused.

“Deductive reasoning.” Beaming openly now, I glanced from face to astonished face, unbothered by the knowledge that they were reacting to my news, not my skill in deducing it. “There’s no way the average stray would let someone else get close enough to hurt him without going on the defensive. Unless that someone was a girl. Specifically, a tabby—the tomcat’s Achilles’ heel.”

Ethan frowned, skepticism etched into every line on his face at the thought that a
girl
could ever be his downfall. I was more than happy to burst his sexist bubble.

“Tell him, Dad. Harper and Moore got their tickets punched by a
girl.
And it could just as easily have happened to
you,
Ethan.” Self-defense would have been the last thing on my youngest brother’s mind if he’d met a strange tabby on the street. He’d have been more concerned with getting his hands on her than with keeping hers off him.

“No way.” He shook his head, short black hair falling across his forehead.

I sighed. Tomcats aren’t threatened by tabbies. I’m proud to consider myself the exception to that rule, but generally speaking, male werecats see nothing to fear in the female of the species. Even as a member of the not-so-gentler sex, I’d made the same mistake. The truth was that we’d all been trained from birth to underestimate women. Some of us, to underestimate ourselves.

While human society had made wonderful progress in the struggle for gender equality, the werecat community was still decades behind the times. Irritating though that fact was, I understood the reason. Tabbies are very rare, averaging only one out of every six or seven Pride births. Once you add in the strays, who are all male, the ratio of tabbies to toms becomes even smaller.

Since technology has yet to eliminate the necessity of a womb in the process of procreation, female werecats are not only rare, but very valuable.

How do people treat rare and valuable treasures? With great care and respect. And with a single-minded determination to eliminate all possible dangers. For that reason, most tabbies grow up to be full-time moms, like my mother. As such, they can remain under the watchful eyes and protective arms of their husbands and teams of enforcers, who would gladly give their own lives to protect the woman who will someday bear the next generation of werecats.

Frustrating, and frighteningly archaic, but true.

And when I thought about it that way, it wasn’t really much of a surprise that none of us had considered that the killer could be a woman. Or that Harper and Moore had let her slip through their personal defenses. Fear for his life was probably the last thing on either man’s mind when he saw the
mystery tabby. The first was no doubt lust. On second thought, that might have been the
only
thing on either of their minds.

“Think about it,” I said, enjoying my moment in the limelight. “You guys have been falling for that one since the beginning of time. Remember Adam and Eve? Samson and Delilah? Need I go on?”

Apparently not, judging by the less-than-friendly looks on their faces. And I had serious doubts they’d recognize references to Calypso, Circe, or Scheherazade. Maybe Lorena Bobbitt…

“Whatever.” Ethan glanced from me to Marc, then back to me. “If you’re so sure it’s a tabby now, why didn’t either of you recognize the scent in the first place?”

Shrugging, I crossed my arms over my chest. “The smell is very faint, and just like the rest of you, we went into this
expecting
to find a tom’s scent. So that’s exactly what we found. Or what we
thought
we found. Besides, I can’t speak for Marc, but I was blindsided by the foreign aspect of the scent. That surprised me—” and
scared
me “—so much that I didn’t think to analyze any further.”

Marc nodded in agreement, threading his warm fingers through mine. I squeezed his hand in response, thanking him silently for backing me up. If we’d
both
missed the cat’s gender, I didn’t come off looking like such an idiot.

“Well, she’s not a jungle cat.” My father’s voice rang into a silence broken only by the crickets chirruping outside, and I felt a small measure of tension ease from the cramped muscles in my neck. “She lacks that distinctive Amazonian scent. But she’s definitely from somewhere south of the equator.”

“Holy…crap.” Vic glanced at our Alpha as he altered what he’d been about to say. “A South American tabby? We’re
looking for a serial-killing
foreign tabby cat?
In our territory? How is that even possible?”

In spite of the frustrated feminist in me who insisted that women were capable of anything men were—including murder—I had to admit to having similar questions. To my knowledge, I was the only other tabby who’d ever killed anyone, and I’d done it in self-defense. Mostly. But there were no signs that either Harper or Moore had tried to hurt the tabby in question.

And beyond all of that, there was an even bigger question…

“Who the hell
is
she?” I asked, my attention on my father even when someone grumbled softly over my language. No one else ever cussed around our Alpha; it was considered disrespectful. I didn’t do it to be rude; I did it to remind him that even though he had me where he wanted me—for the moment—I wasn’t completely malleable. And, honestly, sometimes it just slipped out. My mother was right: bad habits die hard.

“I don’t know,” my father said, surprising me with the honest bewilderment in his voice. Of
course
he didn’t know. There was no reason he
should
know. But I was kind of accustomed to his having all the answers…

“How on earth did she get here?” Parker wondered aloud. “And where are her enforcers? Why would her family let her come here alone? She has to be alone, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.” Marc nodded firmly. “We’d know it if there were an entire contingent of foreign cats in our territory. It’s one thing for a single cat to evade detection for a little while. But a whole party?” His tone went up in question on the end. “No way.”

Jace brushed a strand of short brown hair back from his face, and his cobalt eyes sparkled with sudden excitement. “Maybe she doesn’t have any family or enforcers. Maybe she’s a stray.”

Vic snickered, and even Parker smiled at the thought of a female stray. There weren’t any, and to my knowledge, there never had been. Not even in legend.

The theory generally accepted by the council was that human women were too weak to survive either the initial infection, or the transition period itself. To my surprise, that theory had survived Dr. Carver’s recent revelation about the recessive werecat genes, by virtue of the fact that we’d never once found a female stray. But with no proof of the impossibility, I was no longer willing to accept the old theory as fact. Women really
could
do anything men could do, and our mysterious tabby was proof of that.

Still, while the possibility of a female stray
did
exist, at least in my mind, our murderer didn’t fit the bill.

“No.” Marc and I spoke in unison, and I gestured for him to continue. The spotlight was starting to make me sweat, and he was more than welcome to it. “She’s not a stray,” he said, and I nodded in agreement. This second whiff of her scent had verified that she was a natural-born cat. A natural-born
South American
cat, apparently.

“Then that brings us back to my questions,” Parker said. “If she belongs to one of the
South American
Prides, where are her fellow Pride members? Why on earth would they let her off on her own?”

“Maybe she killed them all,” Vic suggested, morbid humor shadowed behind his eyes.

Ethan crossed his arms. “Then they probably won’t mind if we keep her.” His cocky smile clearly showed his confidence that he could tame any tabby.

I frowned, un-amused. “Ethan, she’s a murderer, not a stray puppy. You can’t be serious.” But he only smiled, and
most of the others suddenly found the straw at their feet fascinating. I looked to my father for help, but he simply gestured at my fellow enforcers, telling me to take my complaint to the general assembly. Frustration rumbled up my throat in the form of a mild growl. “Guys, come on!” I couldn’t believe them! We were talking about a cold-blooded killer, and they acted like she was a lost kitten they wanted to adopt.

“What would you suggest, Faythe?” Owen asked gently, peering at me from beneath the brim of a stained and faded cowboy hat. “You want to execute a tabby?”

Did I? My uncertainty stung like salt rubbed into the open wound that was my own indignation. Whoever the tabby was, she was a murderer. But she was also a tabby-cat. The species needed her just as badly as it needed me. Did that mean she should literally get away with murder?

Based on the expressions around me, the guys had come to an unspoken, unanimous conclusion: yes. She should get a walk—at least from the death penalty—because of her gender. They thought they could reform this murderess, whoever she was. Or they at least thought it was worth a try. Even Marc, who met my eyes unflinchingly.

My father cleared his throat, effectively cutting off the retort I hadn’t even thought of yet. All eyes turned toward him, and I noticed idly that no one was looking at poor Harper anymore. Our interest had shifted from the dead guy to the girl who’d introduced him to his current state of rigor mortis.

Our Alpha eyed each of us in turn. “We’ll cross that bridge when it crumbles beneath our feet. For now, I believe the most important question is,
Who is she?
While I seriously doubt she killed her entire family, the fact remains that she’s running around the southern U.S. killing strays, so I’d say
there’s a very good possibility she’s no longer on good terms with her Pride. But without more information, or a stronger scent, I couldn’t begin to guess which Pride that is.”

My father dropped his shoes on the ground in front of his feet and glanced around the barn. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had enough excitement for tonight, and we need some time to think about all this. I’m going to bed, and I suggest the rest of you do the same. Except for Jace and Ethan, of course.”

Ethan nodded, and he and Jace came forward to wrap the body for its date with the industrial incinerator.

I turned to Marc, intending to ask if
I’d
get away with murder just because I had ovaries, but before I could even open my mouth, my father popped his knuckles. Several at once.

My eyes closed in dread. Knuckle-cracking was never a good sign.

Marc elbowed me and I opened my eyes to find the Alpha watching us both. As I’d expected.

“You two pack your bags before you go to bed.” My father leaned against the van and pulled on one black dress sock, then stepped into his shoe. “I want you both on the first flight out in the morning from Houston International.”

“Where to?” Marc asked, pulling me toward him. I let myself melt into his chest, pulling his arms around me as my head fell back to rest against his shoulder. I didn’t want to go anywhere. We’d only been home for two days, and I’d rather spar with Ethan twice a day for the next month than go out on another assignment.

“New Orleans. If memory serves, Kevin Mitchell still lives there. I want you to meet up with him and find out what you can about Harper. Check out the restaurant and the alley, and
see if you can figure out what he was doing there. Then drive out to Picayune and look around his apartment. I’ll get you the address.”

My father paused to put on his other sock and shoe, then stood and gathered the rest of his clothes. “Talk to his neighbors. Be discreet, of course, but find out if any of them saw him with a woman who could be the tabby. Get a good description. While you’re doing that, I’ll work on her identity from another angle. I have a contact in Venezuela who should be able to tell us who’s missing a daughter, and why.”

My mouth dropped open, and I clamped it shut before anyone noticed. “You have a contact in Venezuela?” How could I not have known that?

“Faythe, I’d been to six different continents before you took your first step. When will you stop sounding surprised that I bring a bit of worldly experience to my position?”

“I’m not surprised, Daddy. I’m just ready to accumulate a little of my own.”

He raised one brow. “Fine. Start with New Orleans. And, Faythe?”