Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (5 page)

             
“She was on her way to a doctor’s appointment, but she never arrived.  I went to her house that evening because she hadn’t answered any of my calls.   My dad owns the house, and I have a key.  The suitcase was missing from her closet, along with some clothes, and there was a typewritten letter lying out on the kitchen table, saying she was leaving town and wanted to make a fresh start. It wasn’t signed. She left behind a bunch of stuff that I know that she would have taken with her if she left. Sentimental stuff, like jewelry her parents had given her, pictures of them, that kind of thing.”

             
She checked through her binoculars again. One of the men was handing the chief an envelope.

             
“I think they’re giving Chief Fennell an envelope full of cash,” she said. “There’s no insignia on their uniforms. I can’t figure out where they’re from.”

             
She scowled, shaking her head.  “When I went to the police station to report that she’d never arrived at the doctor’s office, he made a big deal about how she was an adult and he couldn’t go looking for her until she’d been missing for 48 hours.  He also asked me if she’d left any kind of note – when I hadn’t even mentioned that I’d been in her house. It was like he knew that I’d been there, and he knew about the note. So I looked him in the eye and told him no. I’d actually taken the note from the house, because I knew that she hadn’t written it. She would never just up and run off like that; I’ve known her my whole life.”

             
She checked again. Now the soldiers were heading back into the woods, and the chief was walking towards the four wheeler he’d driven out there.

             
“They’re leaving,” she said.

             
He nodded.  “I know.”

             
Ok, not weird at all, she thought.

             
“So anyway, I told my father, because I thought maybe she could have gotten in a car accident somewhere, and he organized a bunch of people to go looking for her. We were driving around town, checking all the roads. The police chief heard about it, and he got really angry and yelled at my father about wasting everyone’s time and getting them all worked up about nothing. The thing is, he’s a pretty new chief, and of course my family’s been here for generations, and most people sided with my father. Then that evening, I got an email that was supposedly from Roxanne, saying please don’t look for her, and she wouldn’t be coming back. In the email she said that she’d left behind a note explaining everything, but she wanted to make sure that I had gotten the message.  It was like someone knew that we were looking for her, and wanted to make sure that we stopped. Then the next day the chief called me up and asked if I’d heard from Roxanne. Like he knew.”

             
“So what did you tell him?” Dag asked.

             
“I had to say yes; I was sure that he knew about the email, and if I lied, he’d have gotten a subpoena to go through my email account. When I mentioned the email, he sounded really smug, and insisted that I send him the email. Then when I did, he quizzed me about the note that she’d mentioned in the email, and accused me of tampering with evidence. He claimed that I’d been seen entering her house the night she disappeared, and said I must have taken it from the scene.  Then he went on about how it wouldn’t help my father’s re-election chances if he had to arrest me for stealing evidence. I called my father, and my father yelled at him, but there’s nothing else happening right now.  Everything about this is ridiculous. I know how Roxanne talks, and the email sounded nothing like her, but how would I prove that?”

             
“So what are you going to do?” Edvin said.

             
Katherine shook her head in frustration. “There’s nothing that I can do. I could call the state police, I guess, but then they’d talk to the police chief and he’d make them think that I’m crazy. Even my own father is questioning me right now. He’s sympathetic, and he’s mad at the police chief for the way he treated me, but he also thinks that Roxanne just wanted a change and headed out of town.”

             
Katherine considered telling him what else she knew, but she couldn’t. She was holding on to that piece of information for now. It might come in handy one day. She didn’t know how, but it might.  She also didn’t know Edvin well enough to know if she could trust him.

             
“You should head back,” Edvin said. “I’m going to walk with you until you get to your car. You shouldn’t do this again, Katherine, it’s very dangerous. If those men spotted you, you would disappear and nobody would ever find you.”

             
She knew that was true, and that was very disconcerting.  That was the police chief he was talking about, and she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw a bull moose.

             
“You came out here alone,” she pointed out.

             
He smiled cryptically. “Did I?” He cupped his hand to his mouth and made a series of cawing sounds that perfectly mimicked a crow. 

             
A moment later, she heard an answering series of caws.

             
“Wow. That’s amazing,” she marveled, as he walked with her to the edge of the woods.

             
“It comes in handy,” he said.

             
They walked through the woods in silence until they came to the roadside where she’d parked her car.  She thought he might ask for her phone number, but instead he just waved at her, and watched her walk to her car.

             
It’s just as well, she told herself firmly.  The Gund family had that reputation. She wouldn’t even have been interested in him if he’d asked her. Would she have? Anyway, she had more important things to worry about – like whether she’d ever see Roxanne again, and why the police chief was having creepy secret meetings in the woods.

             
September 2014, Saturday afternoon
,
Timber Valley, Colorado…

             
“Why, Isadora?” Steele shook his head reproachfully.  

             
They were standing in front of a coffee shop in the town center of Timber Valley. The town center consisted of a big circle of shops and restaurants on a road called Green Street.  The sheriff’s office, a small brick building, was on the circle as well.  In the middle of the circle was a park with a gazebo and fountains and play structures and picnic tables.

             
He scowled at the slim, pretty lynx shifter standing in front of him. Tattoos, streaming black hair, blue eyes.  She’d grown up in Crystal Falls, about an hour and a half away, or an hour if Isadora was driving. She was a poor little rich brat with social climber parents who were mortified by her existence. They preferred her sister Diana, and showered Isadora with money to ensure she kept out of their fur.  She seemed to live her entire life in a deliberate attempt to shock and offend them. She was very good at it, too.

             
“Why what?” she asked innocently.

             
“Why have you decided to move to Timber Valley and serve as the bane of my existence? And more specifically, why did you break into the Elegant Apparel boutique a couple of nights ago, steal a bunch of their jewelry, and put it back last night?”

             
She smiled sweetly and took a swig of her coffee.  “What makes you think that I did that?”

             
He let out a snort of derision. “Nobody has a better sense of smell than I do, Isadora. I know where you’ve been.”

             
“I didn’t say I’d never been in that snobby store or looked at their jewelry.  Since I have been in there, I would expect that my scent would be on the jewelry.  So?” Her tone was challenging.

             
A slender blonde wolf shifter from the Pine Hills pack sauntered by.  Her pack was a small pack with a fairly weak Alpha. They were under the protection of Steele’s uncle, Vince Battle, who was the Alpha of Timber Valley, and they paid dues for the privilege.  Her name was Tiffany; she tried to catch Steele’s eye as she walked by, like she always did, and he ignored her, like he always did.

             
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stride off.

He turned back to Isadora as she finished her last gulp of coffee.  “I can also get a pretty good idea of how fresh a scent is,” he said.  “I can tell a scent that was left there last night versus a scent that was left there a couple of days ago.”

She tossed her coffee cup in to the trash. “Then arrest me,” she suggested. “Karen hasn’t had to bail me out in a while. I think she’s getting bored.”

Karen, a lynx shifter, was Isadora’s close friend and also a lawyer. She’d moved out of the state when she’d married one of Steele’s cousins, but from what Steele had heard, they still talked almost daily.

Steele felt a stab of envy thinking of Max and Karen, the way he frequently did when he saw a happily married couple. They had what he could never have, although it was entirely his own choice, he knew.

He forced himself back to the present.
“You sure you want me to arrest you? Dash isn’t working at the station today,” he said.  The spark of anger in her eyes gave him a flash of satisfaction.  Her indifferent, above-it-all façade could be wearing at times.

             
“So? What would I care where he is?” she snapped, and turned and walked away.  Sergeant Dashiel Battle was Steele’s cousin and one of his patrol officers. He and Isadora had some kind of weird thing going where Isadora could not stop herself from provoking him on purpose. Dash had arrested her for speeding, and chased her through the woods in wolf form on suspicion of vandalism, but she’d turned into lynx form and escaped by climbing high up in the trees.

  He couldn’t tell if they had a thing for each other or if they hated each other. T
hey were as different from each other as could be. Dash was the ultimate rules-following straight arrow. He lived and died by pack law and by the Covenant, the ancient book of rules that governed the lives of wolf shifters.

             
“Isadora!” Steele called after her.

             
She turned back with a look of annoyance on her pretty, pouty face.

             
“I know you have fun trying to prove that you’re smarter than everyone else, but I seriously don’t have time for this kind of garbage right now. You know what we’re up against. When you pull these pranks, it takes me away from our investigation into the disappearances.”

             
She paused, and her expression turned serious. “I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, to his surprise. “Has there been any progress? Or any more disappearances?”

             
He shook his head. “Not that we know of. Just watch yourself, all right? I know you like to be Ms. Lone Wolf, or rather Ms. Lone Cat, but these days, I think there’s more safety in numbers.”

             
She gave him a wry smile. “I’m pretty sure they’re only looking for shifters with special talents. My sole talent is for creating mayhem, or sometimes just minor chaos. But thanks for the warning.” She walked away. Steele shook his head and headed for his office. He had a meeting to attend.

             
Over the last couple of years, around the country, a number of shifters had disappeared, and there had been several foiled kidnapping attempts as well.

At first, because
shifters didn’t have a national centralized crime reporting agency like humans did, nobody had made the connections. The kidnappings had also taken place across different species – bears, lions, lynxes, wolves, and bobcats.

             
Then whoever was doing the kidnapping had stepped up their efforts, and tried to kidnap a group of shifter children from a summer camp on the Timber Valley Property. The attempt had been thwarted, and the men who’d attempted the kidnapping had been interrogated.  The shifters hadn’t been able to find out much, because the men were just hired mercenaries, but before they died they did reveal that they had been hired by a paramilitary group that called themselves STAB – for Shifter Tracking and Apprehension Bureau.

Now the Council of Elders, and the
Council Pride, who oversaw feline shifters, and the Bear Nation, were all coordinating intelligence and reporting everything that they knew on a daily basis.

             
What they knew so far was that there were at least a dozen shifters missing, and most of them had one thing in common:  they were mutations.  Most of them were healers, although there were a few shamans as well.  Every pack had at least one healer, and one shaman.  Timber Valley had a particularly high number of them.

             
Now shifters all across the country were on high alert.

             
Loren Redthorne was waiting for him in his conference room, drinking coffee and talking on his cell phone. He was the Chief of the Wardens, the law enforcement group that dealt with matters that affected all shifters, rather than individual packs.   Loren was solidly built, in his fifties, with thick crewcut black hair that was shot through with gray. He was a match for Dash in traditionalism; a good man, but a man who took the rules of the Covenant as gospel.