Chapter 13
Miles grabbed the rattlesnake in the pillowcase and headed out of the bedroom.
Vaughn called his pack leaders to confirm the situation about the money. When he ended the call, Jillian said, “Thank you.”
Vaughn shrugged. “Miles was a great help. I couldn’t have done a better job.”
“Miles took off to return the rattlesnake to its den. I’m glad they’re in hibernation when we come here. We’ll find out who injured Douglas and why this happened,” Jillian said.
“You think you know someone, and then something like this happens. Let’s head back to the ranch.”
“Okay.” She looked up at him. “Vaughn?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for the way you handled things with my brother.”
“He was good with the snake. I’ll give him that. He was a real help with locating the journal and helping us to secure it until Douglas recovers.” But Vaughn couldn’t say with a clear conscience that he totally trusted her brother. It seemed too convenient that Miles had known where to look. Who was to say that Miles had really planned to call his sister? He could just as easily have pulled his phone out and had it in his hand when they entered the cabin to give a cover story. He probably assumed he had to come up with a really good reason to be here, if he wasn’t trying to hide evidence of his own complicity or take the money for his own personal use. He hadn’t known the money wasn’t where he smelled it. At that point, maybe Miles felt it was just better to give up the money.
“I want to check something out first.” Vaughn headed into Douglas’s room.
“What are you looking for?” Jillian asked.
“What if Douglas hid something else, only this time under his bed? It would be bad if he had hidden more money and someone else came along and stole it. Better to keep it safe for him until he recovers.” Vaughn wasn’t really looking under the bed for that reason, because he didn’t think Douglas had had secret hidey-holes all over the cabin. Vaughn wanted to see if Miles had searched under all the beds, or just the one because he already knew Douglas hadn’t been hiding anything under his own bed or anywhere else.
“Do you want to get the cats’ help to move the bed?” she asked.
“No. This will only take a second.” Vaughn began to slide the bed over with Jillian’s aid, but Howard and Everett quickly joined them and helped.
No secret hideaway here.
“Looking for more cash hidden away here?” Howard sounded surprised.
Vaughn smelled Miles’s scent, indicating he’d been checking under the bed. “Yeah, just in case.”
“Good idea.”
Miles joined them, stood in the doorway, and folded his arms across his chest. “That was the first place I looked.”
Or had he left his scent there on purpose to throw them off? Then again, if Miles had known where the money was, why wouldn’t he have just grabbed it and run? It would have taken time to leave his scent under the other beds.
“You can check the bed in the last bedroom too. I didn’t find any hidden compartment there either. You know how it always goes. Last place you look, there it is.”
“Since we’re here, we might as well check it out too just in case you missed anything,” Vaughn said while Howard and Everett moved the other bed back.
“We’ll move the bed this time,” Howard said, his voice stern. “If you don’t give your shoulder a break, you’ll never heal.”
They moved the bed in the spare room, and while Vaughn crouched low and felt for loose boards, he breathed in the scents again. Miles’s scent was there too. Now Vaughn was satisfied.
They moved the bed back, then headed into the living room.
“Now that we have the DNA sample for the bite wound,” Vaughn said, “all we need is a swab of the cats’ mouths. That could confirm whether one of them is innocent or guilty.”
“Yeah. We already took a bunch of jaguar hairs to the doctor to see if he could get a match. Problem was that some of them were ours,” Everett said. “And without an actual hair root, he can’t make a positive match either.”
“You don’t happen to have a glass that Kira used that hasn’t been washed, have you, Miles?” Jillian asked.
“No. We weren’t doing any eating or drinking,” Miles said.
“I turned her panties over to the doc,” Howard said, “in case he could get anything from them. But he said no. You were asleep when we returned to the guest house, and it slipped my mind.”
“I’ll see if Leidolf can put me up at another house so Miles can stay at the one we are at for now,” Howard said.
“I can do that. No sense in having you move,” Miles said.
“We’ll decide when we get there then,” Howard said.
Then Vaughn and Jillian headed to the guest house, where they met up with the rest of the gang. They all had ice-cream bars, and Jillian downloaded the pictures from Douglas’s phone to her laptop so they could be brightened and seen in a larger view.
While she did that, Miles flipped through the coloring book. “So this is what Howard was talking about. Who would have thought a bunch of combat-trained jaguars and wolves would be coloring pages in their spare time.”
“Pick a page,” Everett said. “This is how we de-stress.”
Miles smiled and found a giraffe.
“Okay, I’ve downloaded all the pictures. While I’m brightening the dark ones, why don’t you look at the pictures on Douglas’s phone, Miles, and see what you think of them. See if there’s anyone you suspect could have hurt Douglas.”
“Will do.” Miles took the phone and began to go through them.
Howard watched over his shoulder. Vaughn sat next to Jillian and watched her lighten the ones at the Kitty Cat Club and others that were too dark to see well. That meant they were grainier, the color not as true, but at least they could make out the people in the photo.
“Okay, so that’s you and your date,” Jillian said to Vaughn.
“Yeah. And that’s Douglas’s with Brock and his date. We all went out the one time, and that was it.”
“Did you return to the club the next day or any other?” Jillian asked.
“We did for about an hour. I’d ditched my date.”
She looked up at Vaughn. “Really?”
“Hell yeah.”
“You…were alone?”
“Just in case I got damn lucky.”
She smiled, thinking he meant he would have liked to have danced with her. But maybe he hadn’t meant that at all. “I wasn’t able to go the next day. Had an important case that came up.”
“That’s why I was only there for an hour. Nobody who interested me was there the next night.”
“You mean me?” Jillian asked.
“Hell yeah, you.”
Howard laughed and shook his head.
“Okay, here’s a photo of…?” Jillian asked.
“Douglas’s date, my brother, and his date.”
“Okay, here’s the one of me with Kira when we were in Belize,” Miles said, bringing the phone over to show them.
Vaughn frowned. “She’s the one who danced with me at the club. No last name, just Kira. She smelled of cat… Well, all the women I danced with did. Once I saved the dancer, I swear every woman in the club wanted to dance with me to show their appreciation.”
“Because the dancer was a jaguar and so were they. Probably friends of hers,” Jillian said. “Here is Kira’s picture. Douglas took one with you up close and personal with her on the dance floor.”
“And she danced with Douglas too,” Vaughn said.
Jillian continued to brighten up the photos, sharpening them.
Miles started to look over her shoulder. “Wait! Increase the size of that photo Douglas took of me with my date at the club.”
Jillian did.
“Crop us out, and focus on the two men and the woman slightly behind us.”
Jillian cropped the three people so they took center stage.
They all looked them over. “That’s Kira in the red dress,” Demetria said.
“And the two guys with her?” Miles showed them the picture of him in Belize with the others on the scuba-diving trip on the phone. “That one with the blond hair is her brother, Brutus, and the one with black hair is their friend Wayne.”
“They were all at the club at the same time,” Everett said. “And you and Douglas mentioned going to Belize while you were there.”
“Yeah. We were talking about the trip. I didn’t want Jillian to know about it, so Douglas and I were off by ourselves. It was noisy in there. We had to practically shout about our trip plans.”
“So there was a good chance Kira, her brother, and their friend scheduled to be there at the same time because they’d overheard you talking. Or at least one of them,” Vaughn said.
“Yeah, but why?” Miles asked.
“Like you said, all they had to do was do a search for your names. They could have easily found Douglas’s and information about his treasure-hunting experience and successes. They figured on cashing in on his success by stealing his secrets. The money for the expedition would have been a boon too. But they had to get rid of Douglas,” Howard said.
“Could be,” Jillian said, “but what if there’s more to this? That they’d hoped to hook up with the guys like they did in Belize. If Douglas is the golden goose, wouldn’t it be more prudent to solicit his friendship like they seem to have done and help him and Miles find treasure, sharing in it even?”
“So you think something changed? Maybe that’s why Douglas was upset about something and wanted to talk to me about it,” Miles asked.
“Maybe he learned you were seeing Kira, and he was concerned she was a gold digger,” Howard said. “Excuse the pun.”
“Or maybe one of them approached Douglas about having a partnership with the two of you and he said no, and the one jaguar nearly killed him.” Jillian continued to lighten up the club photos while Demetria straightened up the kitchen.
“Wait,” Miles said, looking at another picture Jillian had just brightened up. “Well, hell.”
Everyone came over to look at the photo. They all gaped at the shot. “Is that who I think it is doing what I think they’re doing?” Howard said.
“Kira kissing Brutus in a totally sexual way while he’s got his hand firmly planted on her butt,” Miles said. “Yeah.”
In that instant, Jillian felt sorry for her brother. Nothing worse than being lied to by a person he’d been intimate with.
“You don’t think they have an incestuous relationship, do you?” Miles asked, sounding revolted.
“I suspect they’re lovers, and he’s no relation to her whatsoever,” Jillian said. “They don’t look alike at all, if they’re jaguars and twins. Not that all twins look alike, but after seeing them in this pose, I’d say they’re not brother and sister or anything else that makes them relations.” Jillian turned to her brother. “So tell us more about the treasure hunts you’ve been on.”
“I’ve gone on treasure hunts with Douglas a number of times. Once, I was supposed to find a lost treasure in a lake. He gave me the coordinates, and I located it. We split the profits fifty-fifty because he needed a dive-certified wolf.”
“I dive, and I’m in his pack,” Vaughn said.
“Yeah, I know, because you’re a SEAL. He said a SEAL was in his pack, but you were out of the country on a mission.”
“What was the treasure that time?” Jillian asked.
“Gold Confederate coins. He’d found the whereabouts of the ship, and he knew I was a diver. So he contacted me. He was excited about it, and I was out of work at the moment, so it sounded like a great deal to me. Even if we didn’t find any gold on board, I still loved the idea of searching for it. The ship had sunk in Lake Michigan and the temperature was thirty-seven degrees when I went diving. I found a safe, and we hauled it up. Three hundred and fifty thousand in gold coins were in the safe. I got half.”
“You never told me about that,” Jillian said. “I thought you were always broke.”
“I spent most of it when I first got it. Replaced my old car. Got more high-tech dive equipment. Before long, I was broke again. When Douglas said he’d located a shipwreck off the Florida Keys, I flew out to help him with that one too. We made only about twenty thousand in salvage that time, but I loved it. We work really well together. He did all the research about sunken ships carrying treasure and located the area where he thought they’d be. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren’t. When he said he had a job that would be worth ten thousand, I said sure. We’d had other jobs that didn’t pan out, of course, but I didn’t have anything to lose. I trusted him completely, both with the money and the jobs. Why wouldn’t I have?”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Jillian asked.
“You are so good at saving practically every penny you earn. If you learned how much money I blew through after a job, I knew you’d be even more disappointed in me than you already were.”
“You can verify all of this?” Vaughn asked.
“Yeah. Ask Fred Greyton. He’s in your pack. He’s the one who used to go with Douglas on treasure hunts. I’m certain newspapers published articles about the treasure finds Douglas and I made. I didn’t hang around for fame, just the fortune. You can probably find the stories online even.”
“We did, but no mention of you. Douglas didn’t seem to have a lot of extra money on hand. My pack leaders checked his accounts,” Vaughn said.
“He was like me. Big windfalls, paid taxes on them, spent the rest. With our current longevity issues, we figured life was too short now. We might as well enjoy it while we could. Once, he said something about keeping some of his money hidden away for a rainy day. I didn’t know how much, but I figured he was just better at saving money than I was. If I had money in the house like that, I would have spent it. We haven’t had another successful treasure hunt like that in two years. You can check his accounts further back and see some more activity, I’m certain.”
“I probably would have saved every dime of it,” Demetria said. “Maybe we can learn something about these jaguars in San Diego tomorrow. Who they really are. If Kira even has a brother, and who this guy might be. Maybe someone knows where they are now. Good work on finding the treasure journal.” Demetria took Everett’s hand. “Everett made a super-early flight for us. We’re off to bed. Get some rest. We’ll see you in the morning.” They headed for the master bedroom on the other side of the house.
“Hey, why don’t you and I stay at the other house,” Howard said to Miles. “We can talk some more. Leidolf’s arranged for us to have another couple of rooms.”
“Yeah, sure.” Miles frowned at his sister, but then said good night to her and Vaughn, and then he and Howard left.
Vaughn placed his arm over Jillian’s shoulders and walked her down the hall to her bedroom. “I still have a mission.”
“Keep me safe?”
“Yeah, that too.” He pulled her into her room and shut the door. “Doctor’s orders. I have to wake you every two to three hours. If I’m in the other room, I’m going to sleep right through it.”
“Somehow, I don’t see you as someone who would forget to do his duty. And knowing you, you’ll set your alarm again.” She sat down on the bed, but before she could, he removed her boots.
Then he sat down on the other side and removed his. Déjà vu. “You’re right, if I hadn’t been injured too. How are you feeling?”
“Actually? Much better.” She pulled off her socks, then grabbed some things from a drawer. “I’m taking a shower. I’ll be right back.”
Vaughn removed everything but his boxer briefs, lay back on the bedcovers, and stared up at the ceiling. He’d never worked with this many people on an assignment before, except with his SEAL team. When he worked as a PI, he always went off to do his own investigations. He thought he preferred it that way. But Jillian had changed his mind about that. Not only did he want to protect her while she helped him investigate this case and was on his side, watching his back, but he valued her opinion concerning what was going on. Two heads were definitely better than one.
While he listened to her taking a shower again, he wondered what she had in mind after this mission was through. He was thinking how much he’d like to take a vacation for the first time in eons—only this time with one savvy and sexy she-wolf.