“The door wasn’t damaged, so we thought Denise must have known her attacker and let him in,” Peterson said. “But earlier today, we had a locksmith take a look, and it’s his opinion that the lock was picked by someone who knew what they were doing.”
Lana transferred the photo to the other side of the folder, then looked at the next picture. Any relief she’d felt at the sight of the front door disappeared as she took in the living room. The couch and matching chairs looked like someone had taken a knife to them, the coffee table had been smashed, the TV had been completely destroyed, and the built-ins that made up the entertainment center had been demolished.
The rest of the photos were just as bad. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms looked like a tornado had hit them. Lana could only stare in disbelief. Who would do something like this?
Peterson asked her one question after another. Was there anything missing? Did Denise have a boyfriend? Did she sleep around? Was there anyone Denise had problems with lately, anyone who hated her enough to want to hurt her? Was Denise doing well in her classes? Did she take drugs? Did she hang out with anyone off campus?
Lana answered the questions the best she could, telling the detective Denise wasn’t like that. “Seriously. She was fanatically focused on her classes. If it wasn’t for the occasional times I’d drag her out to go see a movie after an exam or big project, she probably wouldn’t have left the apartment other than to go to school.”
She looked through the photos again, stopping when she got to the picture of one of their kitchen chairs. There were pieces of what looked like duct tape attached to the wooden arms and dark smears that could only be blood. Lana knew Peterson was talking because she could hear the sound of his voice in the background, but he was saying stuff that made no sense, using words like gagged, beaten, and tortured. Denise had been a beautiful person who’d never hurt a soul in her life, and never given anyone reason to hurt her in return.
Lana pushed the pictures away and got to her feet, then walked over to stand on the far side of the small conference room to look at the photos on the wall. They were of various Austin PD police functions, from chili cook-offs to commendation ceremonies. They weren’t all that interesting to her, but she needed something to get the images she’d just seen out of her head.
Max ended up becoming a translator for her, talking to Peterson, then gently prodding answers out of Lana a little at a time. The fact that someone had not only killed Denise, but had also tortured her was simply too much to deal with.
Detective Peterson was of the opinion that this hadn’t been random. It was too violent to be anything other than personal, but Lana refused to believe that. No one who’d ever met Denise could have hated her this much. This had to be some kind of horrible case of mistaken identity.
After Peterson was done with his questions, Lana forced herself to ask one of her own.
“Have you reached Denise’s parents yet?” she asked, sitting down beside Max again.
It might seem like an odd question, but Denise had grown up in the wilds of Alaska. When Denise sent packages to her parents, they took weeks to get there, and calling her parents had always been an adventure too.
Peterson nodded, his face bleak. “They’re on the way down from Alaska now. They’re arranging to take her home at the end of the week or early next week—after the ME’s office has done their job.”
Lana couldn’t imagine how hard this was for Denise’s parents. She’d been an only child. Lana’d need to call and find out what arrangements they were making, so she could pay her respects. Alaska…that was going to be complicated.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, Max asked Peterson to keep in touch in case anything turned up, and then they left. For her part, Lana hoped she never heard anything more about this case unless it was to say that they’d caught the person responsible and put them away forever.
She wasn’t aware of much of anything after leaving beyond Max helping her into his car. When he started his Camaro, she leaned back in the seat and lost herself in the soothing rumble of the muscle car’s engine. She probably would have stayed like that all the way back to Dallas, but halfway there, Max pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot of an all-night diner.
“What are we doing?” she asked in confusion.
He shut off the engine, then looked at her. “When’s the last time you ate anything?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Lunchtime, I guess. I’m not really hungry.”
“Lana, it’s almost midnight, which means lunch was probably twelve hours ago,” he said gently. “We still have two more hours on the road before we get back to Dallas, so I’m going to take you in there and get you something to eat. And while we’re eating, you’re going to tell me about all the funny stuff you and Denise did while you were roomies.”
That sounded like the most insane thing Lana had ever heard. She didn’t have any desire to eat or talk about Denise. But it wasn’t like Max was giving her an option. Getting out of the car, he came around and opened her door, then stood there, hand outstretched. She took it simply because she didn’t know what else to do.
When the server came to take their order, Max ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of tomato soup, then started prodding her with questions about Denise. At first it was hard talking about her friend, but after a while, she told him more and more, including all the funny stuff he wanted to know—the way they’d met, the way they’d borrowed each other’s clothes, the way they’d passed notes in organic chemistry class about the cute guy in the front row.
Lana cried some, but she laughed a lot, too. Before long, the soup and sandwich were gone and Lana could barely stop the stories that kept pouring out. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed in the diner, but the waitress kept refilling their coffee and bringing Lana more tissues, so she supposed it must have been a while. It was then that Lana realized that she’d truly stumbled across one hell of a man. There weren’t many guys in the world who’d sit with a woman half the night listening to her tell stories about a friend who’d just been murdered—not when they’d known each other for less than two days.
But Max was that kind of guy. She decided then and there that she was going to do anything she could to keep him around for as long as possible.
Chapter 5
Max sat in his car on Park Lane, gaze trained on the Wallace house as he strained his ears to hear even a peep of a noise that meant Terence and his sisters were in trouble. If he heard anything to suggest Wallace was hurting those kids or their mother, he’d go in and worry about the consequences later.
Ernest Miller, the crusty, old neighbor, had called Max a couple hours ago, saying Wallace was up to his old ways, shouting like a madman less than a day after the cops had been there. Ernest had called the police, but by the time the uniformed officers had shown up, everything had calmed down. Eileen Wallace claimed everything was fine and that the kids had been watching TV too loud or some crap like that.
Max had wanted to haul ass for the Wallace house the moment Ernest called, but unfortunately, he and a few of his pack mates had been stuck outside a convenience store in midtown, waiting while negotiators convinced a guy with a gun to come out with his hands empty, instead of clutched around a hostage. The city negotiators, with more than a little help from the team’s hostage negotiators, Zane and Diego, had gotten the guy to give himself up, but waiting around had been agonizing.
To make things worse, Max couldn’t simply take off the moment they’d gotten back to the SWAT compound. Since it was the middle of the afternoon and he was still on duty, he had to ask his squad leader, Xander, for a couple hours off so he could take care of some personal business, all the while praying his fellow werewolf didn’t question it—or worse, know he was lying. But Xander had told him to take off.
