Alex cursed. “Don’t you have anything we can work with now?” Frustration made the words come out louder than he intended. The guys didn’t seem to care. They were used to dealing with alpha werewolves who frequently lost their cool.
Becker grabbed up a notepad covered in his neat writing and started flipping pages. “Not much. Brooks went back to the bar. He’s going to wait until they close, then shift and try to track Kelsey’s scent when no one’s around. Since Lacey’s name is on the wireless bill and she gave us permission, we were able to pull Kelsey’s cell phone records without a warrant—or hacking—which was nice.”
Becker paused as he read his notes. “Like a lot of college kids Kelsey’s age, there are way more texts than phone calls, with the exception of calls to and from Lacey. Bottom line—there’s nothing there. A lot of chatting with her girlfriends about school, professors, hot guys, getting together to go out—stuff like that. Nothing to indicate she was seeing anyone regularly or that she was having trouble with anyone.”
“What about last night?” Remy asked.
Becker shook his head. “There were only two texts after she got to the bar, both about how sucky the music was. Nothing since.”
Alex cut loose a growl. He didn’t have a good feeling about any of this. “Any reason to think someone was using the bar as a hunting ground or that Kelsey was being stalked?”
“I checked out the bar,” Remy said. “Reports of fights, assaults, suspicious people hanging around—the usual stuff. Nothing to raise any red flags.”
“I sniffed around the neighborhood near the club,” Max added. “I talked to at least fifty people, asking if they’d heard about any girls getting messed with in the area, but no one heard a thing. They didn’t see anything unusual last night, either.”
“When I dug into Kelsey’s social network accounts, I came up empty,” Becker continued. “No enemies, no drunk pictures, no stalker boyfriends. Hell, no boyfriends at all. She’s slept with some guys, but she seems to be smart about selecting men who aren’t dirtbags. As a last resort, I even checked out her Find My Phone app. Nothing came up on that, either.”
“What’s a Find My Phone app?” Alex asked. God, he hated all this tech crap.
“It’s an account you can set up with your phone,” Jayna said, coming back into the living room. “If you lose your phone, you can log into the account, and it will use the phone’s GPS to track its current location.”
Alex frowned. “Okay, that’s seems creepy.”
“It’s the twenty-first century.” Becker chuckled. “You might want to hop on board the train, bro, because it left the station more than a decade ago. Regardless, it didn’t give us anything. The app requires the phone to be turned on and in an area with cell phone, Wi-Fi, or Internet connection. Kelsey’s phone isn’t showing up anywhere. Either it’s in an area with no wireless signal of any type, it’s off—or worse, destroyed.”
Alex rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. Damn, he hadn’t been this tense in a really long time. Not since he’d gone through his change and moved to Dallas.
“So what do we think we’re looking at here?” he asked. “A date-rape abduction, a random kidnapping, a serial killer?”
Max shrugged. “Since we’ve ruled out the obvious stuff—family, boyfriend, coworker, jealous girlfriend—then yeah, I think we could be looking at any of those worst-case scenarios you mentioned.”
Alex’s gut clenched. If this was one of those worst-case scenarios, the chance of Kelsey being found alive was slim. If Kelsey died, he wasn’t sure Lacey would hold it together. Her sister was her whole life.
“You know, there is another way to look at this,” Remy murmured almost to himself as he leaned back on the other couch. “Instead of focusing on Kelsey so much, we need to pull back a minute and consider the fact that Kelsey is the third girl from RTC to go missing, along with her friend Sara Collins and Abigail Elliott.”
Becker frowned. “Alex already told us that Sara sent an email to the registrar’s office saying she went to Mexico with some guy. Then Kelsey got a text from Sara a couple of days ago, saying she was having a wonderful time.”
“Yeah, the registrar got an email from Sara just like they got from Kelsey, but we know for a fact that one’s bullshit,” Alex said. “If we believe someone faked Kelsey’s email, it’s not that big of a stretch to assume they did the same with Sara. And that supposed text from Mexico wouldn’t be hard to pull off if whoever kidnapped Sara had her phone.”
“Okay, assuming you’re right,” Becker said, “why would the person who grabbed the girls send something to the school to cover their tracks with Sara and Kelsey but not the first girl, Abigail Elliott?”
“I don’t know,” Remy admitted. “But there’s another question I’m much more interested in getting an answer to.”
“What’s that?” Max asked.
“If there are three girls missing from RTC that we know of already, how many more are missing that we haven’t heard about yet?” Remy said.
Alex glanced at Becker. “Any chance you can hack into the RTC computers and figure out if there are any other missing girls who meet our profile?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Becker said. “It might take a while, though. Colleges have really good firewalls, since students are always trying to break in to change grades. It would mean putting the video footage on the back burner, though.”
Alex didn’t have to think about it very long. “Do it.”
Becker glanced at Remy, then at Jayna, who was still leaning against the kitchen counter, watching them.
“What?” Alex said impatiently.
“Nothing,” Becker said. “It’s just that… Isn’t there something else you could be doing than hanging around here?”
