Page 16 of Assisting the Alpha
“Marketing. People trust you. If they use you for wards while you’re part of my company? Then they’ll consider us trustworthy and use us for other things. Getting the BSG contract would make a huge difference to our reputation, but so would this, and neither would prevent us from taking on other private work that doesn’t fall under the remit of the task force.”
He nods thoughtfully, then holds out his hand. I take it, noting the softness of his palm against my rough skin and the way my wolf rumbles happily. “You’ve got yourself a deal, boss.”
“Want to tell us why the newbie smells like you?” Kit wiggles their eyebrows, so I reach over and cuff them around the back of the head. “Hey! Watch the hair!”
“None of your business.” It wouldn’t be fair to Ayo to talk about how he reacted at the pathology lab. “Now, are you prepared? Or have you been too busy gossiping?”
Kit sends me a scathing look. “Bitch, please. When have I ever not been prepared?”
Cal answers without turning away from his computer. “That time in Rio.”
Kit waves that off. “Those were extenuating circumstances.”
Skye turns around and grins. “Aye, hooking up with a hottie kind of circumstances.”
Kit flushes and stands, hands on hips. “Right, anyway, aren’t we starting this meeting? The boss has spoken, people. Chop chop.”
Raj and I exchange amused looks as the five of us head for the conference room and take our usual seats around the long table. Sometimes I just do the end-of-the-day meeting in the office where we can turn our chairs around and chat, but I want us to be able to pull up details on a single large screen today and use the whiteboard. While I’ve not needed to use the team much yet for the legwork on the investigation, allowing them to focus on our prior commitments, I do want their input on what we’ve got so far.
Jet and Ayo follow us in, mugs of tea and coffee in their hands. They pass them out as Kit sets up one of the laptops to cast to the screen on the wall, and then I pull up a map of the city with the supe territories overlaid and three red crosses. The whiteboard on the left hand wall already has the timeline of the disappearances and subsequent finding of the bodies marked on it, as well as bios of the victims next to headshots.
“Since I know where you’re all at on your current workloads, I’m going to dive straight into the murder investigation. We have three victims, all witch-level magic-users in the Muroyi coven, and all women between the ages of thirty and forty-five. The map indicates where they were found, although we know they all died elsewhere. They were killed a month apart, all in the same manner, and the forensic pathologist hasn’t been able to find any DNA evidence of the attacker whatsoever.”
Jet leans forward in his chair, uncharacteristically serious. “Nothing? That’s weird, right?”
I give a sharp nod. “Very. He was clear that our murderer is a shifter with claws, but beyond that he was able to give us very little to go on.”
Cal frowns. “Are we sure this pathologist told us everything? Could he be keeping information back and only telling it to the coven?”
Ayo shakes his head. “I don’t think Doc P would do that. I get that I’m not the best person to vouch for him in this scenario, but Doc P rarely interacts with the coven. We have our own healers, so Doc P is basically the doctor for every other supe in the city. Whether it’s routine kids’ stuff, births, emergencies when the wolves and cats get into it, vamps in trouble, or even the fae, he’s there for it. That’s why I was surprised he was the forensic pathologist on this. He normally does living people stuff.”
“What species is he?” I asked Kit to dig into the man’s background after we arrived back at the office around lunchtime, but they were unable to find anything.
Ayo shrugs. “No one knows.”
“He lives and works in the neutral zone,” Kit adds. “I couldn’t find any affiliations or preferences for any specific group.”
“All right, for now, we assume Doc P hasn’t held anything back. Kit, see if you can find any evidence of him accepting any kind of bribe, but otherwise let’s move on. As you can all see, the victims were all found in different areas of the neutral zone. Bessie in West Green, Zoe in Riverside, and Frida, the most recent, in the Southern Quarter. None were killed where they were found.”
“How sure are we of that?” Raj asks.
“For Frida, very.” Ayo is the one who answers. “You can’t alter the death residue.”
I jump in before someone asks him to explain death residue. This is likely difficult enough for him. “The bloodstains are also consistent with that conclusion in each case.”
“So they likely were killed elsewhere.” Raj studies the map carefully. “But where? And why leave them in different areas of the neutral zone?”
“There doesn’t appear to be any kind of geographical pattern,” Skye says.
I turn to the headshots of the three women on the whiteboard. “What I need right now are ideas on possible motives for the murders, as well as any significance to the locations. These women had very little in common beyond their gender, membership of the coven, and level of magic. So, why them?”
Chapter Five
AYO
Who would have killed Bessie, Zoe, and Frida? I keep coming back to that same question. Ethan is right that they had very little in common.
“Were they friends?” Jet asks.
