Brooks was just pulling away from the Deep Ellum apartment building when Max’s phone rang. His heart did this seriously unmanly backflip thing when he thought it might be Lana calling. He’d left her lying naked and beautiful in his bed this morning, and if he was lucky, that was where he’d find her tonight after work.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Lana. It was Detective Peterson from Austin homicide, and though Max’s stomach was doing that backflip thing again, it was for a completely different reason.
“Lowry,” he said when he put the phone to his ear.
“Max, it’s Detective Peterson, Austin PD. I’m not sure what this means, but I thought you should know. We found another murder victim with an MO similar to Denise Sullivan’s. Signs of torture and the guy had a large-caliber bullet through his forehead.”
“Who is he?” Max asked, a sickening feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. Two people shot through the forehead? It couldn’t be a coincidence, not when hunters preferred putting down werewolves exactly that way.
“We’re still trying to ID him, but getting prints is tough because the guy’s fingertips are a mess,” Peterson said. “This guy was a big bruiser type, with a nose that had been broken a couple times, lots of scars like the ones you’d get fighting, and a collection of prison ink. Bottom line, he’s the kind of man more likely to do the torturing than to get tortured. The ME is saying he was probably killed at least two days before Denise, maybe three. We’re trying to ID him from his prison ink, but that’s probably going to take a while.”
No kidding.
“Any way to connect this guy to Denise?” Max asked.
A big guy with prison tats didn’t sound like someone Denise would hang out with, but maybe Lana hadn’t known her roomie as well as she’d thought. Max knew better than most that everyone kept secrets.
“Actually, there is,” the detective said. “But probably not the way you’re thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before you and Ms. Mason came down, we’d been digging through old police reports, parking citations, and traffic cam footage for the area around their apartment complex. It’s standard practice when we don’t have any other leads. Sometimes you get lucky, you know? So we ended up finding a complaint filed by one of Denise’s neighbors almost a week before the murders. He reported seeing a man lurking around Denise’s apartment building a couple times, watching the place. He thought the guy was casing the apartments for a robbery, but when dispatch sent a patrol out, they didn’t find anything. They talked to the other neighbors and increased patrols in the area, but no one saw the guy again, so the report was left open and pending.”
“You think this guy the neighbor saw is the one who killed Denise and your unnamed male victim?” Max asked, trying to figure out where this was all going. The hunter angle wasn’t lining up.
“No,” Peterson said. “This guy the neighbor saw is the unnamed vic. We showed a photo of him to the witness who had called in the report and he confirmed our John Doe is the one who’d been watching Denise’s apartment.”
Max tried to wrap his head around this nugget of information—and failed. Was this new victim a werewolf or a hunter taken out by his own people? None of this stuff was making any sense.
“Can you send me a picture of your John Doe and anything else you have on him? I’ll see if Lana recognizes him.”
Max wanted to get a look at the guy, too.
“I’m already working on it,” Peterson said. “The paperwork to release the file and photos to you is on my captain’s desk, but I don’t think he’s going to cause me any grief on this one. Let me know what Ms. Mason says.”
Max promised he would and was about to hang up when Peterson stopped him.
“One more thing. I’m not sure how to say this without freaking you out, so I’m just going to put it out there.”
That didn’t sound good. “Okay.”
“It goes without saying that I have no idea who killed Denise Sullivan and this John Doe or what their motives might be. All I can say for sure is that the person who did it is vicious, probably unhinged, and somehow connected to that apartment building your girlfriend used to live in. I probably don’t need to say it, but I’d keep a close eye on her, just in case.”
Max appreciated the warning, even if it wasn’t necessary. “I will.”
Peterson was about to hang up, but this time it was Max who stopped him. His gut was telling him it was time to trust the other cop. “This is going to sound really weird, but can you have your ME run a tox screen for animal tranquilizer in both Denise and the John Doe you found?”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Do you know something about this case you should be telling me?”
“Just call it a crazy hunch,” Max said. “But if I’m right, your case might be tied to a string of murders that have been happening all across the country. I ran into a similar case in New Orleans a while back. The gunshot to the head is similar.”
“And you’re just mentioning it now?” Peterson demanded, sounding a little pissed.
“Because nothing else seems to fit,” Max told him. “The extensive torture prior to the head shot isn’t anything like the previous MO, so I’m just grasping at straws here.”
Max could tell the other cop wanted to ask a lot more questions, but he refrained, saying he’d get the ME on the screening. “I’ll keep it quiet for now, but if this comes back positive for animal tranquilizer, I’m going to be asking a lot more questions.”
“I understand,” Max said. “But if this comes back positive, you won’t be the only one with questions.”
