Alex had agreed to meet Remy at the RTC dorms to check out Nicole’s room while Becker, Max, and Brooks would see what they could dig up over at Carla’s apartment.
Lacey had wanted to come with him, but he’d convinced her to stay home. He had no idea where the investigation was going to lead him after checking out Nicole’s dorm, and he couldn’t focus on Kelsey if he was worried about Lacey.
Thankfully, she seemed to understand, saying something about going into work for a while, then hanging out with Everly again. Alex was glad she had someone she could talk to, especially since she obviously couldn’t talk to him.
“Nicole left about three weeks ago, but since she didn’t have a roommate and we won’t have anyone showing up needing a room until the fall semester, I still haven’t packed up her stuff yet,” the RA said as she unlocked the door. “I was hoping she might come back at some point. She was a really quiet girl and didn’t have a lot of friends, but we got along well.” She smiled at Remy. “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything else.”
Alex followed Remy into Nicole’s room, taking in the motivational posters and school paraphernalia covering the walls.
“Would have been nice if Nicole had a roommate we could talk to,” Remy remarked. “We can check with the other students on the floor, I guess, but I get the feeling Nicole didn’t talk to many people.”
“Might be why she was targeted in the first place,” Alex murmured. “It doesn’t seem like anyone even noticed she was missing except for the RA.”
Remy went through the girl’s desk while Alex searched her nightstand. He was flipping through a dream journal she kept in there when he picked up a familiar scent. He closed his eyes, using the scent recovery tricks Khaki had taught him. There were a lot of them, but the one he found most useful was to imagine himself digging through a bunch of old boxes stored up in an attic, with each box holding a different scent he’d picked up at some point in the past. The idea was to stimulate his memory by going through the mental process of searching for a scent. He had no idea why it worked, but sometimes it did. Like now.
Shit. He tossed the journal back in the drawer and closed it.
“We can stop worrying about finding Nicole,” he said.
Remy looked up from the drawer he’d been searching. “Why’s that?”
“Because I recognize her scent. She’s the girl Lacey and I found dumped with the dogs.”
“You sure?” At Alex’s nod, the other werewolf swore. “Damn, that poor girl. Well, this is officially no longer just a kidnapping case, and it got real ugly fast. Lacey is going to freak out when she learns about this.”
All Alex could do was nod as he reached for his phone and called Gage. His pack alpha answered on the first ring. “What do you have?”
Alex quickly filled him in, telling him about Becker tracking down two more suspected kidnapping victims and their subsequent search of Nicole’s room. “She’s the dead woman I found when I was out with Lacey the other night.”
Gage muttered a curse. “Homicide’s going to need to know about this, but we have to come up with some other way to explain how you identified this girl. We can’t exactly tell people you ID’d her by scent.”
“Maybe Mac can say someone dropped her an anonymous tip,” Alex suggested.
“If we do that, homicide is going to hone in on the tipster, assuming that person knows something about the murders. We need another way. One that won’t lead to more questions.” Gage was silent for a moment. “Get down to the ME’s office with a picture of the girl. Tell them that you were digging into the missing girls from the college and thought you recognized one of them as the dead woman you saw. That should get the ME close enough to confirm the identification.”
“Roger that,” Alex said.
As Alex hung up, he realized he was going to have to do some serious tap dancing with the ME’s office to make this work. Nicole Arend’s face had been unrecognizable. If he didn’t handle this right, they were going to know he was full of crap.
* * *
Samantha Mills, one of the staff medical examiners at the county ME’s office, regarded Alex and Remy with curious blue eyes. Tall and slender, she had on a white lab coat over a silk blouse and a pair of dark slacks. “I know you found the body, Officer Trevino, but I’m not sure I understand your continued involvement in this case beyond that.”
Alex hesitated for a moment as he looked around the fancy crime lab. He’d never been to the place before, but the huge glass-and-brick facility known as the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences didn’t look anything like the dark, dank basement he’d envisioned as the home of the county’s medical chop shop.
He was also surprised to run into the extremely suspicious blond-haired doctor now regarding them with her arms crossed over her chest in a blatant I-think-you’re-full-of-crap stance. Remy had tried to use his patented Cajun charm on the doctor when they’d first walked in, but she ignored him as if he wasn’t even there. Remy fell silent after that, apparently deciding to let Alex try it his way while he attempted to repair his damaged ego.
This wasn’t their first run-in with Samantha Mills. She was the ME who’d been out at Gage’s in-laws’ ranch after it had been shot to hell by the Albanians and Jayna’s old pack alpha. She was also the woman whom Senior Corporal Trey Duncan—the team’s other medic—had a thing for. Alex had been worried the woman would find something conclusive concerning the existence of werewolves among all the dead bodies at the ranch, but the ME report had come back surprisingly generic.
Trey had sworn it was all because of him. The doctor hadn’t been able to focus on her work once she’d gotten a look at the hunky Trey Duncan. In some ways, Trey was nearly as delusional as Remy.
Fortunately, Alex had expected the ME to be suspicious, so he’d spent most of the ride over coming up with a believable story to explain why he thought the woman in their cooler was Nicole Arend. One close enough to the truth that Dr. Mills wouldn’t be able to catch him up in a lie when it turned out he was right.
“To be honest, we’re not officially involved in the case at all,” Alex admitted. “We were helping out a friend whose sister disappeared a couple of days ago. While we were looking into it, we stumbled on a picture of another student who’d dropped out of classes at RTC three weeks ago, named Nicole Arend. The moment I saw her picture, I recognized her as the dead girl I found over on Ridgecrest.”
Dr. Mills lifted a brow. “That’s hard to imagine, considering how badly damaged the girl’s face was.”
“Trust me, after finding her like that, I’m never going to forget her face. Ever.”
