Dreaming of the Wolf

Chapter 14

When Jake and Alicia finally went down to breakfast, Tom and Darien both looked up at them as Jake steeled his expression and guided Alicia into the dining room, the large picture window facing out onto the woods, Jake’s photos of woodland flowers hanging on the walls, and the long oval table covered in golden sunflower place mats. Alicia’s attention was riveted on his floral photographs, and he saw real admiration in her eyes. But his brothers exchanged looks, and Jake knew that despite trying to keep his expression neutral, he’d conveyed strife in paradise.

Both observed Alicia, and he imagined they could tell she’d been crying.

“Good morning,” Darien said to Alicia, and Tom echoed his words, although Darien gave Jake a harsh look as if he’d been to blame for Alicia’s upset.

“Good morning,” Alicia said quietly, avoiding looking at them, while Jake only nodded.

Lelandi came out of the kitchen appearing tired. Jake imagined that the babies kicking in her belly were keeping her awake, although her expression brightened when she saw Alicia. A flicker of concern fluttered across Lelandi’s face when she noticed Alicia’s red eyes, but she quickly smiled and motioned to the table—where the yellow ceramic serving dishes were filled with eggs and ham, biscuits, and cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew melon.

“Have your pick,” Lelandi said cheerfully.

After Jake pulled out a chair for Alicia, she took her seat, and he sat beside her.

“I’m dying to hear about your chosen profession as a bounty hunter,” Lelandi said, her enthusiasm contagious as she took her seat next to Darien.

Jake thought Lelandi was the perfect person to help get Alicia’s mind off her troubles. Maybe the psychology courses were part of Lelandi’s need to analyze and try to help anyone in need, although he suspected those traits had more to do with her nurturing personality.

“You would not believe the kinds of cases I’ve been involved in.” Alicia forked some fruit onto her plate, and for the first time she seemed at ease.

“Coffee? Tea?” Jake asked her.

“No, neither.”

That surprised Jake because she’d had tea when she’d eaten breakfast before.

“Juice? Milk?” Lelandi asked.

“Milk.”

Lelandi returned to the kitchen and soon popped back into the dining room with a glass of milk. She handed it to Alicia, then sat across the table from her. “Okay, tell us about this bounty-hunting business of yours. It sounds like it could be fascinating.”

Alicia’s choice of beverages made Jake wonder if maybe there was something more to her being pregnant. He again glanced down at her waist, but she wasn’t showing yet. Too soon, he suspected. He wondered how he could get her in to see Doc Weber. Surely Doc could tell whether she was or not. Especially since seven weeks had passed since Ferdinand Massaro had turned her.

Alicia held up a finger as she finished chewing a sausage link.

Jake’s brothers had finished their breakfast, and it was past time for them to be on their way. Although as efficient as the pack was at running the town and the Silver businesses, they didn’t need the pack leader and his sub-leaders micromanaging any of it. Still, Jake had hoped they’d leave so he’d have more alone time with Alicia.

But they didn’t appear to be in any hurry to depart. He suspected that since Alicia was newly a member of the family, they wanted to know everything about her.

“Once,” Alicia said, “I was supposed to arrest a woman who’d stolen a good deal of money from the department store where she clerked. She would give a refund to a customer, then pocket a refund herself. It was a one-for-

you, one-for-me kind of affair. She was addicted to gambling and was a habitual lottery-ticket purchaser. But besides the obvious shortages in her register at the close of her shifts and the camera’s catching her pocketing the money, she skipped her trial. I had the job of serving the warrant, but her family was hiding her. So I put out the word that she had won a lottery ticket.” Alicia smiled.

“That did it. I delivered the search warrant in place of the winner’s fees and escorted her to jail.”

“Goes to show gambling doesn’t pay,” Lelandi said, smiling.

“Yeah. Most of the cases I’ve dealt with were petty criminal cases. One was a car thief who failed to see his parole officer and was ordered back to jail. I found him hiding underneath a mattress. Really brilliant since the one side of the mattress was elevated so high that any fool could have seen someone was wedged in between the mattress and the box springs even though he was fairly scrawny.

“Another time, I found a woman hiding underneath a flipped-over swimming pool in the backyard, while the dog stood wagging its tail at me right beside the plastic blue pool. Another time a guy hid in the attic. In his panic, he stepped through the ceiling. By the time I had him in plastic ties, he was a mess and covered in itchy insulation. I was lucky that I never had to arrest anyone really dangerous, though.”

Jake raised his brows at her. Her gaze shifted to him, knowing he would have something to say about that.

Looking a little flushed, she buttered a biscuit. “Until now. The bondsman I work with liked to give me cases where he needed a woman rearrested, so that there could be no threat of someone screaming about sexual misconduct. Or cases where the perp was not a member of a gang or anything. One of the other bounty hunters I knew had gotten into a real bind trying to take down an individual who was a drug dealer and had ended up in a house full of methamphetamines, money, drugged-out wackos, and guns.”

“But this time?” Lelandi probed.

Jake bit his tongue to keep from saying anything about this time being personal. But he was having a damn hard time not voicing his opinion. He sighed. He and his brothers would have reacted the same way as Alicia did, truth be told. Even Lelandi had responded the same way concerning her own sister, which had gotten her into a world of danger. So he couldn’t really blame Alicia.

Although in their case, they were wolves and the thought of a female human going it alone didn’t sit well with him.

“The man I worked for did me a favor. He let me go after Danny Massaro and Mario Constantino on my own,” Alicia said.

Lelandi rubbed her lower back. Evidently the babies were giving her spine trouble again, which prompted Darien to move his chair closer to hers and to begin rubbing the area she was attempting to soothe. She smiled at him. “Thanks, honey.” Then she frowned at Alicia. “It seems to me that these men are awfully dangerous sorts. I would think the man you worked for would have worried about your safety as well as your success.”

“I…” Alicia wouldn’t look at Jake, her head slightly bowed. Then she raised her chin in defiance. “I had inside knowledge. My informant wouldn’t deal with anyone else. So the bondsman had to let me do it if he wanted any assurances that the men would be taken into custody.”

“Hell, the informant was that bastard Ferdinand Massaro. And he was the one who changed you,” Jake growled. “Why did he have designs on you in the first place?”

He couldn’t help the way he felt about it. Not only was he pissed off that the man had turned her, still hating himself for not having been there to protect her, but the possibility that the man had raped her rested heavily on Jake’s mind. The vehemence in his voice had all eyes engaged on him. A ll except Alicia’s. She was wringing her hands in her lap, staring at the table.

Taking a deep breath to settle his irritation, Jake swept a curl away from her cheek and pressed a kiss to her temple. “We’ll take care of them.” His words were spoken quietly now but with dark resolution.

“But you don’t have a bounty hunter’s training. You can’t turn them in without it,” Alicia said, looking up at him.

“If they’re werewolves, Alicia,” he said, taking her hand in his and caressing the palm with his thumb, “they can’t go to jail.”

Her eyes were wide, filled with a fresh shimmer of tears. “But they can’t be allowed to get away with murdering my mother. They can’t!”

When she tried to pull her hand away from his, he held on even tighter, unwilling to let go of the tentative connection they had. He realized then she probably didn’t even know about werewolves’ longevity.

“We live long lives. Very long lives. If you’ve read any werewolf lore, you probably know it’s not easy to kill us.

But what you might not know is one of the reasons werewolf legends have persisted from ancient times is that we live so many years.”

“You… told me you… were thirty,” Alicia said cautiously.

He cleared his throat and glanced at his brothers, then at Lelandi. Their faces were expectant, almost pitying. He had never expected to fall in love with a woman who would be newly turned. He wasn’t sure how to acclimate her to their ways without upsetting her. Then he squeezed her hand as her eyes filled with worry and questioning.

“Thirty in human years. In werewolf? We have a very slow aging process. Once we turn eighteen, the aging process slows down. Many humans look youthful for years—and it’s hard to tell exactly what age they are, but for us, the length of time is even longer. Charles II was crowned the King of Scots at Scone, the year I was born.

The same year that the English forbade the transportation of goods produced in the colonies to England on non-English ships.”

Alicia glanced at Lelandi. She smiled. “I’m not quite that old. But any man who would ask a woman’s age is not a gentleman.”

Jake raised his brows at Lelandi, then turned to Alicia.

“That’s part of the reason we can’t go to jail. Let’s say the men did get life in prison. They would outlive everyone.

And appear to age way too slowly. If they’re not one of those who have very few human influences in their family roots, like Lelandi, a royal, they would have to shift sometime during the phases of the moon. Except for the new moon.”

He paused and stroked her hand again. “Can you imagine what the prison guards would say if they caught their prisoners pacing in their cells as wolves? Orange prison jumpsuits lying on the floor? The two men gone?

If we determine they’re not werewolves, they can go to prison. You can turn them in for the bounty money even.

But we’ll take them down.”

Alicia took a deep breath. “What if they are wolves?”

“We take care of ours in our own way. They won’t get away with murder, Alicia.”

She nodded and slid her free hand over his thigh. He smiled at her, sure that the look was as hungry as he felt for her.

“What did you plan to do today?” Darien asked Jake. “A couple of police detectives investigating the break-in at Alicia’s motel in Crestview called earlier this morning and said they wanted to get Alicia’s statement. I said they could speak with her in an hour or so. Hopefully, she won’t have the urge to shift. Beyond that, what do you intend to do?”

“I wanted to take Alicia to see Grandfather’s old homestead. But I need to locate Mario Constantino and Danny Massaro, too. And find out what happened to the other two thugs that vanished from the motel. The one she bit and the other who got away without injury. I need to learn if any of them were wolves.”

“I’ll have Tom and Peter check out the motel she was staying at. See if they can pick up any wolf scents. You stay here with Alicia,” Darien said.

“I can’t hide from him,” Alicia said. “I worry about your family.” She pointedly looked at Lelandi and her pregnant condition. “These men are ruthless.”

“You’re staying with us. You’re not going to act as bait,” Jake said, pointedly.

“What do you think we’re truly up against, Jake?”

Darien asked. “You’ve seen some of these men.”

“The one who tried to force Alicia out of the restaurant was human. The one she shot on the hiking trail and the other with him were also humans. I don’t know about Mario. The air conditioner was blowing in the wrong direction for me to get a whiff of him. I never even considered he might be a wolf.” He paused and looked at Alicia. “You’re perfectly sure Ferdinand was the one who bit you and no one else?”

“He was the only one with me. When I came to, I’d been bitten. The two men who were interrogating him before they murdered him didn’t know I was there. I doubt another man—werewolf—was there, then conveniently disappeared after he had bitten me. Come to think of it, I did smell that a wolf had been in the room. A t first, I thought it was just me. But all wolves give off a slightly different odor. I only got a whiff of the odor of decay from Ferdinand’s body since he’d been dead several hours before I could leave his apartment.”

“A ll right.” Jake considered the situation a moment more before speaking. “If Ferdinand Massaro was a wolf, then what about his brother, Danny?”

“They’re cousins to Mario,” Alicia explained.

“Then I’d say it’s very likely they could also be, but their henchmen are not,” Darien said. “I’ll make some inquiries into this Mario Constantino.”

Jake’s jaw tightened. Darien was the pack leader and it was his job to go after Mario, who was like the pack leader of a gang of thugs, whether he was a wolf or not.

But Jake wanted to take Mario down. Call it the instinct to prove to his mate that he loved her, that he had the mettle and the intelligence necessary to take down the bastard who had threatened her, but he wanted to take more of a role in this.

Alicia’s gaze met his, and recognition dawned that he was feeling antsy about this whole situation. She said softly, “If you want to go and chase after the bad guys, I’ll understand.”

Then it hit him. He didn’t need to go after anyone. He needed to be right here—with her, for her. He wasn’t leaving her alone again.

He smiled evilly at her. “Last time you sent me away, you tore off without a word. That’s not happening again.

Besides, like I said, I’m sticking by your side.”

She squeezed his hand in a way that said she was happy with his decision.

When the police from Crestview arrived to get Alicia’s story about the men breaking into her motel room and the one man’s death, they brought her purse and suitcase, for which she was grateful. They’d kept her gun, though, because she’d shot and killed one of the men who’d broken into her room.

She was more than nervous as Jake sat beside her in the great room filled with soft sofas and chairs enough for a big crowd. The room’s high, vaulted ceilings made it appear even more spacious, while more of Jake’s beautiful photographs adorned the walls. She wondered if he’d taken some of his photographs to the art gallery in Breckenridge because he’d run out of room in the house to hang any more.

Jake held her hand while Lelandi sat on the couch nearby, and Sheriff Peter, Darien, and Tom remained standing as they listened in.

Before the police detectives arrived, Jake had explained to Alicia how important it was to tell as much of the truth as she could to match the details of what the police might have uncovered without letting the werewolf tale out of the bag. She couldn’t help but be nervous as Jake’s family watched her, well aware that if she screwed this up and the police determined what really had happened, Jake and his brothers would most likely have to turn these detectives.

But she knew she must look as guilty as she felt about having to lie. Just as guilty as the people looked when she came for them as a bounty hunter with warrants for their arrest in hand.

Notebook and shining silver pen in hand, a dark-haired, mustached Detective Simpson now sat in a chair, leaning forward, intimidating, while his blond-haired, blue-eyed partner whose tie was just as blue, Detective Tandy, was standing nearby. Tandy had his hands shoved in pockets, his appearance solemn, trying for relaxed, but he was studying her every body movement, every hint of facial expression, waiting for her to give herself away before she even spoke.

Garnering her attention again, Detective Simpson said, “Tell us in your own words what happened exactly.” His voice was calm, but his posture denoted something else.

He appeared ready to pounce if she said one thing that wasn’t in line with his view of the crime scene.

She swallowed hard, her hand clammy in Jake’s. He squeezed her hand lightly to reassure her. And instantly both men’s gazes refocused on Alicia and Jake’s clasped hands. She feared she would get nothing past them but the God’s honest truth. And that she couldn’t give.

“I… I was asleep when I heard someone trying to break into my room at the Crestview Motel. A t first, I thought it was just a dream. I recalled someone was trying to unlock the door with a plastic card. I wasn’t sure what to do at first. But then I realized my gun was in my bag on the other side of the room. I rushed over to get it. When the man entered, using a flashlight to find his way, I was standing in a dark corner of the room. He saw the bed was empty and went into the bathroom. I heard him jerk the shower curtain aside.”

“Did you recognize him?” the detective asked.

“Yes, he was the man who tried to force me to leave Victoriana’s Restaurant in Breckenridge. I assumed he worked for Mario Constantino, the man I was tailing. I had information that Mario was meeting Danny Massaro, the man I intended to serve a warrant on.”

Alicia took a deep breath. So far, so good. Everything she’d said was the absolute truth.

Detective Simpson scribbled some notes, then looked up at her. “How could you see him so clearly? The room was dark. He couldn’t see you. He only had a flashlight.

How did you know him?”

She’d seen him because she was a wolf. She would have sworn, if she didn’t know any better, that her heart had stopped beating. But with her silence, her trying to come up with an explanation, the way her body heated with panicked concern, she worried she was signing these men’s death warrants or fates as werewolves if she didn’t come up with something fast that sounded plausible.

She gave a little nonchalant shrug, never taking her eyes off the detective, not wanting to see how Darien and the others were reacting or what the other detective was doing. Watching her? Watching them? She knew that if she saw their expressions, she’d fall apart more than she felt she was doing now.

“I assumed it was him from his build and the way he walked. When he was at the restaurant, he reminded me of a big disgruntled bear. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t really know for sure who he was until I felt his pulse after I shot him. Once I’d seen him up close, I realized it was him. He must have followed me to Crestview.” She frowned in feigned annoyance. “I forgot where I left off.”

She wondered if that had been a ploy on the detective’s part to disconcert her. Or if he was used to asking questions when they popped into his mind. He was right in asking her the question. She just wished she hadn’t made the slip. Then again, she supposed that made her appear more human.

The detective flipped back a page in his notebook and said, “You said you heard him jerk the shower curtain aside in the bathroom.”

“Oh. Yes. When he realized I wasn’t in the bathroom, he returned to the bedroom. That’s when he saw me in the corner of the room. He raised his gun and fired. I responded by firing three times in return. Because he was holding the flashlight, I was able to pinpoint him better.

He dropped his gun and sank to the floor. I worried others might be with him because the men usually travel in pairs, so I ran to lock the door, then checked his pulse to see if he was still alive. He wasn’t.

“I dressed.” She’d been naked. She couldn’t tell the detective that. Wouldn’t he wonder why? She faltered. “I mean, I changed out of my nightgown and into jeans and a sweatshirt.”

Now she sounded damned suspicious. He could have assumed she’d been dressed in her nightgown already.

She was getting rattled. Calm down, she told herself. She swallowed hard, her throat dry as a drought in summer.

Now she wished she’d had some water to drink. But if she asked for any, she’d sound like she was getting nervous because she was guilty of a crime.

Tom slipped out of the room, catching her eye and everyone else’s. She wished she was free to go also.

“Go on, Miss Greiston,” the detective prompted.

“I went to call the police, but when I punched in the number and held the receiver to my ear, I discovered the phone line was dead. My cell phone battery had run down so I was charging it and hoped it would work. I was able to use it to call 9-1-1. But then another man tried to get in. He tried the doorknob, found it locked, and then began kicking the door in.”

This was the hard part. How had she gotten past two armed men without getting herself killed? The one had undoubtedly left more shell casings behind from shooting wildly into the sky. But she hadn’t had her gun with her.

Not when she’d been tearing out of there as a wolf. And she’d left the gun behind, along with her cell phone and purse and everything. How could she have managed to escape them as a woman without any weapons?

“So only one other man was there?” the detective asked, pen and brows raised.

If there was only one other, the detective might have figured she had slipped past him and then he fired at her but missed. But how could she have avoided two gun-

toting men? But what if there had been eyewitnesses?

Oh, my God, what if someone had seen a wolf run across the parking lot?

“Miss Greiston?”

She jerked her head up to look at him. “Two of them. I was hiding in the dark. The one went to check on the guy I’d… killed, while the other hurried into the bathroom, looking for me. A t least I presume. I dashed outside.

Someone fired three shots, but I kept running and never looked back.”

Tom returned to the great room with a glass of water and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her eyes meeting his, his expression telling her she was doing fine. “Thank you,” she said again and took a swallow of the cold water.

“Did you have a dog with you in the room?” the detective asked in a consoling manner, his blue eyes fixed on her gaze.

She knew his ploy. Pretend to understand the perp’s situation, then throw the book at him or her. Just as she’d often done. Only in the case of the men and women she arrested, they were the bad guys.

“A dog?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

“Yes. Well, in truth, a wolf.”

Jake’s hand tightened fractionally on Alicia’s. Her teeth were clenched together, and she didn’t know what to say.

She was innocent, but if these men pushed her too hard, Jake and his family would be forced to turn them. She didn’t think the pack could kill them. That scenario would be too difficult to explain. But if they turned them, they’d have to take them into the pack, and Darien had already said he didn’t want two more newly turned pack members—male types, who probably had families of their own. And that would cause an even greater ripple effect of trouble.

The detective flipped through his notebook as if he needed to refresh his memory on the details of his investigation. She was certain this time it was a ploy to make her squirm. She didn’t squirm, although she felt light-headed and was afraid her face had drained of all color. She was barely breathing, and Jake looked anxiously at her. She scolded herself for not hiding her feelings better, but she couldn’t help it. They knew something. A bout the wolf.

And she was feeling damn guilty. How could she not?

She’d bitten one of the two men. She was guilty! Nothing in her bounty hunter training said she could bite a perp into submission. Not that she had been after these guys, but still…

The detective tapped his pen at the open page. “Says here two men in the room next to yours saw a dog run out of your room. A big dog. Like a German shepherd.

They never saw any sign of a woman leaving. One of the men had fired into the air, scared by the size of the wolf.”

Wolf. Twice he’d referred to it as a wolf. But if the eyewitnesses thought it was a dog, why did the detective think it was a wolf?

The detective flipped through some more pages of his notebook, while the other one continued to watch her expression. Her blood ran cold. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and force Darien’s hand. But she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t cause trouble for their kind.

“Blood was found on the rug near the door. A man’s blood. But not the same as the blood from the one who died. Wolf saliva was mixed in with the second man’s blood.” The detective looked up from his notes. “So what about the wolf?”

Her stomach bunched tightly into a knot, Alicia licked her suddenly very dry lips. Yet, she thought the detective was feeding her a story. No one would look to see if saliva was a wolf’s or a dog’s, would they?

“Wolf saliva?” she asked. “You mean, canine saliva, right? Is there a difference between a dog’s and a wolf’s?”

“Believe me,” the detective said with a smug expression, “The saliva sampled from the bite marks was wolf DNA . They can determine that to rule out that it wasn’t some other animal’s bites.”

She took a shallow breath and said, “I—”

“It’s not illegal to own a wolf,” Jake interjected, his voice quietly firm, as if he was a lawyer who knew her rights when it came to pet wolf ownership.

She supposed that to protect themselves, Jake and the rest of the pack would know about such a thing for self-

preservation.

The detective switched his attention to Jake. She thought Detective Simpson was fighting a smile. Jake to the rescue. But it was more than that. It was as if the detective had caught them in a falsehood. But she wasn’t rolling over and playing dead yet.

“No, you’re right, Mr. Silver,” the detective said with emphasis, “not unless the wolf owner takes the wolf within the city limits of some cities, which is illegal.

Crestview is not one of those cities. But the wolves have to be fenced in with at least eight-foot-tall fencing. Every access has to be locked to prevent the wolves from escaping.

“Taking a wolf into a motel room isn’t legal, nor a safe thing to do. If Miss Greiston was afraid for her life and was using the wolf for protection, it wasn’t really a smart idea. Nor was it legal. The wolf could have injured anyone. Since it has bitten someone now, we’ll have to hunt it down and make sure it wasn’t rabid.” He sat taller and turned to Alicia. “So what about this wolf, Miss Greiston?”

“He wasn’t mine,” she said stubbornly, head held high, voice confident.

The detective raised his brows.

She shrugged. “I don’t own any pets. Never have. I don’t know where the animal came from or where he went. You can check with my apartment manager. I’ve never had any pets at the place. They’re not allowed.”

A t least the part about not owning any pets was true.

But what if they checked out the hotel rooms where she’d stayed over the past month? What if they found wolf hairs on the carpet where she’d restlessly paced, trying to shift back into her human body?

“The wolf ran off into the woods, the eyewitnesses said.” The detective studied her for a moment more, then asked, “But where did you go? Why did you run away?”

“Jake came for me.”

“You’d left your phone charging on the dresser. Only one phone call had been made. To 9-1-1. The sound of the men breaking into the room was captured on tape.

They heard the one man cursing up a blue streak as he said, ‘Come on, Cicero, damn it. We’ve gotta get out of here before the police arrive. She’s run off. Holy crap.’ Then there was a lot of grunting and groaning and moaning. We assume that was when he helped the injured man outside. After several minutes, doors were opened and slammed shut. Then a car engine roared to life, and the vehicle tore off down the road. Detective Tandy and I arrived shortly after that.”

“They had guns, Detective. I wasn’t about to hang around to get shot at again. If they could have, they would have come after me, I’m sure.”

“So how did Mr. Silver know to meet you?”

“We had prearranged a meeting.” She patted Jake’s hand with her free hand. “We’ve been seeing each other.

We planned to get together last night. Only instead of finding me at the motel, he found me on the road heading for Silver Town.”

The detective’s brows arched heavenward. “Long hike.”

“I didn’t know where else to go, and I was sure Jake was already headed to Crestview. I couldn’t hang around to get shot at again,” she repeated. Then she had to explain her connection to Danny Massaro, who had also murdered her mother, and the other, Cicero, who she hadn’t seen before.

After two long, exhausting hours, the detectives finally left and Alicia felt drained. “They didn’t believe me about the wolf,” she said to the family as Darien walked back into the great room after seeing the detectives out.

“You did fine,” Darien said, his tone reassuring, and she believed he really meant it. “They won’t find a wolf, and Peter has learned that the man you bit never went to any hospital or clinic in the area to get the wound taken care of.”

“It had to have been awful,” Alicia whispered, still feeling bad about what she’d done. “I didn’t mean to bite so hard, but I… I think I crushed the bone. I didn’t know my own strength.”

“I believe he died,” Darien said, matter-of-factly. “Peter had already talked to the eyewitnesses, and they said the one man was practically carrying the other out to the car.

The injured man slumped in the seat, his face ice white.

If Danny Massaro had to take him someplace any distance from the motel, the man probably died. We know for sure he didn’t take him to any area medical facilities. Peter’s already checked. We still want to confirm the man died, but it appears that way.”

She narrowed her eyes at Darien. “If you already knew that the men had seen a dog, why didn’t you tell me before the detectives arrived?”

“The witnesses hadn’t mentioned a dog,” Peter said, speaking up in Darien’s defense. “I had asked them about the men who had broken into your room, trying to get a description so we could locate them before the police did.

The witnesses said the parking lot was dark. And so was the walk in front of the motel because the men had knocked out the lights.

“But when the car’s interior lights came on, the injured man looked pale as death, and the other man was shaking him and hollering at him. The wounded man was unresponsive. The other was cursing as he backed out of the parking lot and roared off. I assumed you’d shot the other man, too. I didn’t realize you had bitten him.” Peter looked contrite. “It was my fault that I didn’t think to ask the witnesses if they’d seen anything else near your room.”

“I have a question for you though, Alicia,” Darien said, his look stern. “Why did Danny Massaro and Mario Constantino kill your mother?”