Zane pulled back and stared at his mobile. If he didn’t know Becker’s voice so well, he’d think he was talking to someone else. Becker was one of the easiest-going members of the Pack. He rarely lost his cool or snapped at anyone. Even less so now that he’d met his soul mate, Jayna. Zane couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his friend growl at someone, much less a fellow pack member.
“You okay?” Zane asked after the silence had stretched out for several long seconds. “Did something happen?”
More silence, then a sigh. “Those betas I mentioned used to have an alpha until a group of hunters cornered them in a warehouse outside Wichita, killing the guy right in front of them.”
Zane closed his eyes and cursed silently. To the best of their knowledge, hunters had been tracking down and killing random werewolves for decades, maybe even generations, but it had become so prevalent in the past year that werewolves had showed up in Dallas hoping they’d be safe there. Word had somehow gotten around that the Dallas SWAT pack was strong enough to keep the hunters at bay. For the most part, that was true. There had been the two attacks in Dallas, but those had resulted in heavy losses for the hunters. There’d been nothing since.
Unfortunately, the hunters had found a way around the issue by hanging out around the northern part of Texas and ambushing werewolves heading to Dallas.
“Are the betas okay?” Zane asked.
Beta werewolves were smaller than alphas and not quite as strong. To make up for that, they formed much tighter bonds with their pack mates, so much so that sometimes it seemed like betas could read one another’s minds. They never strayed too far from the group, either. Their bond with their alphas was equally strong.
“Not really,” Becker said. “The girls had the alpha’s blood all over their clothes, and the boy with them is barely keeping it together. Jayna tried to comfort them for hours, hoping they’d calm down, but it didn’t help. I don’t think any of them are ever going to be all right.”
“Damn.”
Zane leaned his head back against the wall. He knew Becker hadn’t told him any of that to make him feel like shit, but that was the end result regardless. The whole reason Zane, Rachel, and Diego were in LA was to find Curtis and figure out who’d hired the hunters to come after them. What they were going to do after that was a little vague, but one way or the other, Zane was damn sure going to find a way to stop the assholes.
But they’d been out here for weeks and hadn’t learned anything that got them closer to stopping the hunters. While they had been wasting time, innocent werewolves had been dying.
“What do you have on Alyssa?” he finally asked. “Anything interesting?”
“Yeah, I dug up some stuff on her. Not sure if it’s anything you want to hear, though.”
Zane tensed. Becker knew he was attracted to Alyssa because he’d all but come out and admitted it to him last night. If his pack mate was hesitant to get into the information he had on her, it couldn’t be good.
“Did she lie about being in the FBI?” he asked warily.
“No, she’s definitely in the bureau,” Becker said. “I was able to confirm that through her Quantico training records, W-2s and other tax records, pictures from various crime scenes, and about a half dozen other documents and databases that’d be damn near impossible to fake. But she doesn’t work at the LA field office. That’s the problem. As far as I can tell, Alyssa Carson isn’t assigned to any FBI field office anywhere in the United States.”
“What do you mean?” Zane frowned. “She has to be assigned somewhere. Where does she work cases out of? Who’s her boss?”
“That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” Becker admitted. “Up until about a year and a half ago, Alyssa Carson’s life was an open book. She got a bachelor’s in criminology in 2009, a master’s in criminal psychology in 2010, graduated Quantico in 2013, and got assigned to the Sacramento field office that same year. She got some serious commendations over a four-year period and looked to be on a fast track for advancement within the bureau.”
When Becker slowed to take a breath, Zane almost growled in frustration. “And then?”
“And then she left the Sacramento field office and simply fell off the official FBI radar,” Becker said. “She’s definitely still working for them. Like I said, I confirmed that. But there’s no record of where she’s currently assigned or who she works for. I can’t find anything related to cases she’s worked on or trials she’s testified at during that time. Hell, I couldn’t even find anything to indicate she’s gotten an award or commendation in all that time. Which doesn’t fit the pattern for her.”
“So she’s completely fallen off the grid?”
“Not really. I found her name on an apartment lease in DC, but I’m thinking it’s some kind of fake address because the rent and all the utilities are paid automatically. Plus, I could only find her on one or two DC traffic cams, which means she probably hasn’t been there more than a few times since leaving Sacramento.”
Zane’s gut clenched, though he couldn’t say why. All he could say for sure was that something felt seriously off. “Where has she been?”
“She’s been traveling almost nonstop all over the world for the past year or so,” Becker said. “I have airline and rental car records putting her in about forty different cities around the globe in that time. It appears she travels alone, and the longest she’s ever spent in any one place is about three weeks.”
“What was she doing in all those places?” Zane asked, trying to understand where all of this was leading. “Were they related to missing persons cases? That’s what she’s doing here in LA.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Becker said slowly, like there was something he wasn’t sure if he wanted to say out loud. “Especially since the FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction in the overseas locations she’s visited.”
“What is it then?” Zane demanded, fighting to keep another growl from slipping out.
“I don’t want to make too much out of it because it could all be a big coincidence,” Becker started, still choosing his words carefully. “But more than a few of those places on her travel itinerary just so happen to be places where hunters tracked down and killed werewolves.”
Zane knew Becker was still talking because he could hear his pack mate’s voice buzzing in his ear, but he stopped listening as the implications of what his friend had said filtered in. A fed showing up at the murder scene of one werewolf could be coincidence, but an agent traveling all over the country to multiple scenes went way beyond coincidence. Throw in the fact that Alyssa had started running around the globe at the same time the hunters’ activity had started to increase, and it all became impossible to ignore.
Was Alyssa a hunter? Or a fed working with the hunters?
