Beside her, Alex bit back a growl. Lacey knew this was a sore subject with him. Nothing was quite working out the way they’d expected, considering how many people had died as a result of this whole nightmare, and it pissed him off.
“DeYoung flipped immediately,” Alex said. “The charges related to Nicole Arend’s death, as well as the drug-related deaths due to fireball, were dropped in return for an agreement to testify for the prosecution. That piece of crap will probably see less than ten years for various drug charges, maybe as little as five.”
Lacey reached under the table and squeezed his leg to calm him down. She’d quickly learned that it didn’t take much more than a touch from her to back him down from a partial shift.
“What about McDonald and Bensen?” Brooks prompted.
Alex shrugged. “McDonald is still in a coma at some cushy private hospital, and the doctors aren’t sure when he’s coming out. The DA has prepared the charge sheet against him, naming him as the person responsible for Nicole Arend’s death, along with Pettine. There have to be about a hundred other charges related to the black-market transplant ring—kidnapping, assault, false imprisonment, even violations for using the information in the girls’ medical records at the clinic to screen them for organ matches. Right now, the DA is waiting to file those charges until he sees whether McDonald wakes up.”
“That sucks,” Remy said. “But Bensen’s going to jail, right?”
“Yeah, he’s in a jail hospital ward, but he probably won’t live long enough to go to trial for everything he did. His kidneys are totally shot, and he won’t be around long enough for the DA to bother pushing for an early trial.”
“So, DeYoung gets off almost scot-free, McDonald is sleeping it off in a cushy private hospital, and Bensen is getting free medical on the state.” Cooper frowned. “Did anybody get any time out of all this?”
“You mean beyond Pettine and the other doctors and nurses involved in the transplant surgeries going to jail?” Gage answered from across the table. “Not really. And if you think that’s hard to swallow, you want to know who really came out of this smelling like a rose? Chief Curtis.”
Cooper did a double take. “Seriously?”
Gage snorted. “Thanks to Deputy Chief Mason, Curtis has everyone thinking he created this elaborate suspension ruse so he could send a team of SWAT guys after McDonald, even though everyone knew the two men were tight. The press is eating it up, and now there’s talk of Curtis being a viable candidate for mayor.”
Alex looked ill at that, and Lacey didn’t blame him. Curtis had showed up at the hospital only hours after she and Kelsey had been admitted, dragging a TV crew with him as he checked “to make sure they were being taken care of.”
At the other end of the table beside Xander, Khaki looked up from her gumbo. “There’s one thing I never understood in all this. Where did the dogfighting stuff fit in? It never made any sense that Bensen would involve himself in a high-risk activity like that at the same time he was trying to sell drugs.”
“That’s how he was raising the money to fund DeYoung’s drug lab,” Alex explained. “He knew the cops were watching all his legitimate accounts, so he needed outside funds to allow DeYoung to buy the raw material to make fireball. Apparently, Pendergraff was a big player in the dogfighting community, so it wasn’t difficult for him to get started.”
Lacey couldn’t help but think of all the dogs the SWAT team had saved by raiding that place out on I-45. There had been a lot of dogs there, and most of them had been in bad shape. Every vet clinic in the city had taken a hand in caring for the animals and getting them new homes.
“I suppose in the end, while things didn’t exactly work out as well as we could have hoped, at least we stopped McDonald’s black-market transplant ring, Bensen and DeYoung’s drug lab, and Pendergraff’s dogfighting operation,” Alex said. “I guess we can count it as a win of sorts.”
“Except for one thing,” Gage said softly. “There’s still the issue of a half dozen YouTube videos we have to worry about.”
Alex frowned. “You don’t really think anyone is buying those blurry videos, do you? I mean, the media is already calling it a hoax.”
Gage scowled, those steely eyes of his making Lacey squirm—and she didn’t even work for the guy. To say that the Pack alpha had been unhappy with Alex running down the middle of a busy highway in full wolf form was an understatement. While the media had put dozens of witnesses on camera, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for Alex and his teammates. Hearing some guy rant about seeing a wolf as big as a bull, only to have a passenger in the same car insist that the animal hadn’t been a wolf at all but had instead been a chupacabra, pretty much convinced most people that Texas needed to work harder on tightening up their open container laws.
“I don’t care what the average Joe looking at YouTube thinks,” Gage said. “I’m more concerned with attracting the attention of the hunters, who will buy those blurry videos.”
A little shiver ran up Lacey’s spine. She had thought that werewolves were indestructible, but then Alex told her there were people out in the world who hunted down and killed werewolves for a living. The thought scared the hell out of her.
“What are we going to do about them, boss?” Xander asked.
Gage swung his dark gaze on his senior squad leader. “Not much we can do. We collect information from the newcomers to the area, like those new betas that Alex met, we watch out for each other, and we make sure we see them before they see us.”
Silence reigned for a while after that until Alex cleared his throat. “And what are we going to do about Samantha Mills?”
This subject had stumped Lacey when Alex first mentioned it a few days ago. Before leaving the crime scene at McDonald’s surgical center, Alex had slipped back into the operating room to clean up a little hard-to-explain werewolf evidence, namely the bullet fragments and the scalpel Pettine had used to stab him. But Alex hadn’t found either of those things. Instead, the medical examiner was in the room, taking blood samples from every corner of the place and looking mighty uneasy when Alex had asked her about the bullet and scalpel. She’d claimed she hadn’t found anything like that in the room, but Alex was sure she’d been lying.
“You think we need to check her out, Gage?” Xander asked softly.
“I can do a little sniffing around and see what she knows,” Trey offered from beside Lacey.
Tall and good-looking with brown hair and blue eyes, Trey was kind of quiet, and beyond the fact that he was the team’s other medic, she didn’t know much about him.
“I know what you’re trying to do, dude,” Remy said with a laugh. “But you can forget it, because it’s not going to work out.”
Trey frowned. “Why not?”
