Ripper(10)

I made a mental note to get her e-mail address from her mother and check to see if there was any activity. Hopefully Helen knew her daughter’s provider. “Do you know if she had an address book or a day planner?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Cassie said. “Wait. Now that I think about it…she’d been getting calls, but not on her usual cell. When she came back to school this year, she had two phones. She would get a call and then she would write stuff down in a spiral notebook. I thought it was school stuff and she was making notes about a class.”

Liv was already pulling out spiral notebooks. There was a thick stack of them on the shelf above her dresser. On notebook five, we hit pay dirt. There were three different addresses. One was in the suburbs. One was downtown, and the last one was in North Dallas, not far from campus. There were a series of numbers that looked like times and dates after the addresses and a couple of names. The name Alexander came after the North Dallas address with the last date listed and a time of one a.m.

The notebook in my hand felt like hitting the mother lode. This was what I needed. I stood and faced Cassie. “Thank you. This is exactly what I need.” There was a brisk knock on the door and Cassie got off her bed to answer it. I gave her my business card and this time she took it. “If you think of anything else that might help, please call me.”

Cassie started to open the door, but whoever was on the other side wasn’t waiting. A young man shoved the door open, obviously not caring that he pushed Cassie aside. I was at her back, quickly propping her up so she didn’t fall on her ass.

“Fuck me, you’ve got some nerve. I couldn’t believe it when Sharon told me who was here. I had to see it for myself.” He stormed in to the room.

At first I assumed he was talking to Cassie and I thought I was going to have to defuse a situation with a bad ex. After his next words, I had no doubt as to whom his target was.

“How dare you come here asking questions about Jo? I know who you are, hunter.”

I pushed Cassie away because I wasn’t hiding behind some little college kid. The young man in front of me was stocky, but nowhere close to filled out the way he would be in a few years. His eyes were dark, probably brown, but filled with rage, they appeared black. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and worn jeans. His brown hair was overgrown and he could have used a shave. He was everything one would expect from a werewolf, and a young alpha at that, I would bet.

“Let’s get out of here, Kels,” Liv said, her tone reflecting the thick tension in the air.

“Darren, what are doing here?” Cassie looked around, her eyes wide because she obviously had no idea why everyone was on edge.

Darren ignored her, but then I was betting he usually did. “I tried to convince Mrs. Taylor that this was a mistake. You think I haven’t searched for Jo? You think I haven’t tried to track her? What are you going to do when you find her? Are you gonna shoot her down like you did her father?”

His eyes were rapidly flickering back and forth between his forms. He might be an alpha, but he wasn’t a terribly strong one. He still didn’t have good control of himself. I needed to keep the situation as calm as possible, though what I really wanted to do was throw up that turkey sandwich I’d eaten. It sat heavily in my gut.

“I didn’t have anything to do with that and Mrs. Taylor knows it.” My voice held a calm I didn’t feel. I didn’t even think about going after my gun. It was in my bag, right there in reaching distance. I could have had it in my hand and pointed at the angry wolf in a second, but I wasn’t even tempted. If he’d attacked in that moment, I likely wouldn’t have defended myself.

He got right up in my face and I tried not to flinch. “Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but you were there in spirit. You’re always there. I know you call each other and tally up your kills. You hang out in your bars and talk about the carcasses you bagged. Tell me something, do you stuff your prey like some hunters do? I hear you have to get the head to the taxidermist real quick or we’re rude enough to disintegrate before you get your trophy.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Darren?” Cassie stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

“Shut up, bitch,” he growled. “This is between me and the hunter, here. You want to try to take me out? You want to test me, or do you just go after prey animals and children?”

I stayed on my feet, but inside I was swaying and telling myself that there was no way he could know. No one knew except me and Liv and Jamie. And my father, but I didn’t count him. Darren couldn’t know what had happened that night.