Feeling like someone is watching me.How to tell if you’re being followed.Best self-defense for short people.Pepper spray legal Oregon.Can you call the police if you’re not sure something is wrong?
Nell could feel she was being watched, but she didn’t tell anyone.
Hunter then started his report. “I scouted the area around her last known location. There’s a fire trail about twenty yards through the woods from where you found the phone.” He set an evidence bag on the table with a hair tie in it. “I found this in theleaves at the edge of the road. The scent matches the scent on the cardigan from the diner break room.”
A beat.
“I’m guessing the fire road is where they loaded her and drove her out.”
Dom looked around the table. “The investigation just changed. We’re not looking for one person who grabbed one woman. We’re looking for an organized operation that hunts non-predator shifter women across the Pacific Northwest. They have a method. They have a system. Nell is one of at least eight. There’ll be a ninth if we don’t find them.”
He waited.
“Axel. Keep working the digital. Pull the socials of all Siren’s leads. Look for common scout accounts, common followers, a pattern in who liked or commented on the videos before the women disappeared. Cross-reference the geotags.”
Axel nodded.
“Siren. Your pattern is the spine of this. Keep building it. I want to know who else fits the demographic.”
Siren wrote on a yellow legal pad.
“I’ll have Valeria share everything we have with Fate Mountain PD.”
Then Dom looked at Blaze.
“Blaze. You work your contacts in the underground. An operation moving women across state lines for two years without getting caught has been moving them through somebody’s territory. Make some calls.”
Chapter
Thirteen
Stella lockedthe front door of the diner and stepped off the porch into the rain when headlights cut across the lot. She knew the truck. It was one of Steel Protection’s black Suburbans.
The truck stopped, the driver door opened, and Blaze got out into the rain. Stella paused in front of the diner, keys in one hand. The lot was empty except for the two of them.
“I have news. About the case.”
Her stomach went cold. She saw his face under the lot lights. Whatever he was about to tell her, it wasn’t good. But she wasn’t going to make him tell her in a parking lot in the rain.
“Come inside.”
She turned and unlocked the deadbolt, disarmed the alarm, and turned on low lights behind the counter. She then started a pot of coffee. Blaze sat on a stool across the counter from her. It was the first time in two years that a Savage Steel MC member had sat down in her restaurant. He waited until she had the pot brewing.
“Siren built a pattern this morning.” He told her about the seven missing women. “Nell is the eighth.”
She didn’t speak. Her eyes burned, her throat was hot, but she didn’t cry. The crying she’d done in his apartment last night had used up everything she had. He told her about the wren video Nell posted three weeks ago that was geotagged to the trail behind her apartment.
“She was searching for self-defense techniques. How to tell if you’re being followed. Whether pepper spray was legal in Oregon. Whether you could call the police if you weren’t sure something was wrong.”
Nell had been scared for days, and she hadn’t come to Stella. She’d typed those questions into her phone alone in her apartment at night and hadn’t said a word to the woman who’d become her mentor and friend.
The rain was loud on the roof, and the coffee maker finished its cycle. Stella grabbed mugs from a stack and poured two coffees. She slid one across the counter to Blaze. They sipped their coffee in silence. His hair was wet, and the light behind the counter caught the line of his jaw and the broken set of his nose.
“What now?”
“Siren’s continuing to research the pattern. Axel’s looking into the socials of all the other missing women, looking for connected accounts. Dom has me working my contacts from my fighting days. I’ve got a few leads, but nothing solid yet.”
She poured herself a refill from the pot. “How did you end up a fighter?” She wanted to know what had made him who he was.
