Heart of the Wolf

Devlyn parked the SUV in Nicol’s driveway and considered the house. “No lights on, unless he’s sleeping. Wonder if any of the rest of the pack live in the vicinity. Next-door neighbors, even.”



He climbed out of the SUV and Bella joined him. “Gray-haired lady peeking through her blinds across the street is watching every move we make,” she said.



At a leisurely pace, Devlyn checked the mailbox and pulled out a flyer. Then he headed straight for the front door as if he were a regular visitor. “No sounds inside the house. Won’t take long for us to check out the place, sense any signs of blood, see if either the murdering red or the girl were here before. We’ll be gone long before anyone can get here.”



“Unless someone calls the police.”



Devlyn picked up the newspaper lying on the front step, shoved it under his arm, and brought out his lock picks. Within seconds, he had the door open and they were in.



Both listened for any sounds that would indicate that Nicol or anyone else was in the house, but they heard nothing. The place was silent, vacant, unless Nicol was cowering somewhere or sleeping.



“The neighbors will see us drop off his paper and mail for him, stay a few minutes, and then leave without taking anything, and figure we have to be friends of his.”



“Is that how you and your cousins got away with snooping through people’s homes when you were younger?”



“Works like a charm. It’s the sneaky ones that get caught. And, thankfully, it’s cold enough here that no one will be suspicious of us for wearing gloves either. Although it won’t matter at the reds’ places. They’ll smell that we’ve been there, and catching a trace of your scent will drive them crazy to know you were there and all they can enjoy of you is the delicious fragrance you left behind.” He lifted his chin and took a deep breath. “Smells like Nicol and the strong odor of dead animals.”



Bella pointed at the stag heads mounted over the mantle as she made her way across the jungle of a living room. The couch covered in zebra and the chairs in leopard skins caught her eye, and she wondered if Nicol killed one of the women and took a trophy from her, too. When she walked into the cluttered kitchen, she found dirty dishes stacked in the sink, and the kitchen counter was buried in papers and half-eaten sandwiches, dried out and spotted with spreading black mold.



“A woman’s been here,” Devlyn called out from down the hall. “Well, make that a few.”



But was one of them the murdered woman?



Bella peeked into the fridge. Half-soured milk and green fuzzy cheese. She wrinkled her nose and shut the door. Ransacking the drawers, she found nothing.



“Computer back here. You want to hack into his email?” Devlyn shouted.



Bella bolted for the sound of his voice and found him hunched over the keyboard, Windows starting up on the screen. He moved out of the chair to let her sit down.



“AOL. He’s got it set up where he can just log in automatically.” She clicked enter and the page took forever to upload. “Direct dial-up.” She studied the email message subjects and chose one that said, “Looking forward to Sunday!” dated three weeks earlier. Here’s a newer picture of me, and, yes, Nicol, my hair is really red! Not a Clairol-bottle red! I’ve told all my friends how we’ve met on the dating service. They’re going to try it next, too. Got any brothers?



“Omigod, Devlyn, he was looking for redheads on an online dating service. Look.” As if Devlyn already wasn’t. His heated breath caressed her neck while he looked over her shoulder.



Bella’s breathing slowed as she clicked on the attachment. After several excruciatingly slow seconds, the picture appeared. “It’s her,” Bella said. “I recognize it from the police photos in the papers — the murdered girl, Linn McGowan.”



She hurriedly looked through several more emails, finding pictures of four more redheads from the online dating service.



“Where’s Linn’s residence?” Devlyn asked, his voice hard.



Bella pulled the papers out of her jacket pocket and fumbled through them. “South side of Portland.”



“What about the other redheads he’d contacted?”



“The other girls listed in this dating service live in other parts of Oregon. They’re not among those found dead here in Portland. He may never have met them once he found Linn.”



“Or if he did and they met bad ends, he might have killed them in other locations of the state, and the police may not have connected them with the killings here.”



Bella’s stomach clenched while she sifted through the emails and then she shut the computer down. “What about his bedroom? Find anything there?”



“He’s been with a few women in there. I thought he might not have brought the woman who was murdered here. But maybe so. We’ll have to check out her place to pick up her scent and compare.”



Bella headed into the bedroom and took a deep breath. “Lusty little red wolf. Ready to go to Linn’s place?”



Devlyn pulled out a date book from his pocket and flipped it open.



“Nicol’s?”



“Yep. Found it on his desk. When was the girl murdered?”



“A week before the mystery red’s murder.”



“This just about confirms it then. ‘Date with Linn, noon.’”



“What if he met her somewhere else?” Bella asked, as Devlyn guided her out of the house, pretending to lock the door, and then escorted her to the car.



“In his little black book, he had listed several dates with her beforehand. The last one is the day she was found murdered. I’d bet either he brought her here at least once, or he went to her place sometime during their courtship before her death.”



“The neighbor’s still watching us. She undoubtedly took down our license plate number.”



“No problem. We’ve acted above suspicion. Why would anyone break into a house and then not haul off computer equipment and a bunch of other valuable items?”



“You’re right.” Bella snapped her seatbelt in place. “Do you want to chance going to Woodburn to check out Ross’s place? We should make it before his business closes for the evening.”



“Yeah. Then we can check out the murdered girls’ places.”



“And Alfred?”



“We’ll have to leave him until tomorrow, unless we want to try checking his place out while he’s there.”



“We might have a police surveillance car back at our place before we return home,” Bella cautioned.



“Okay, Bella honey. We’ll make it an all-night sleuthing venture. The hunt is on.”



The sky was dark, with massive clouds threatening to rain, and the air was heavy with cold moisture. Devlyn hoped the impending storm would hold off until they were through. He sure preferred his drier Colorado weather to this.



The search for Ross’s place took longer than expected because, even though his address was Woodburn, he lived a couple of miles out on a gravel road. Because of the thick trees and winding road, they couldn’t see the houses hidden back off the lane until they were right on top of the drives leading to them.



When Devlyn finally spied the redwood house tucked back in the forest, he pulled off the main road and parked a few hundred yards from the place. Lights were on inside, and two vehicles were parked out front.



“Still want to check it out?” Devlyn asked, glancing at Bella.



She rubbed her arms. “No. Let’s go to where the women were murdered. Maybe we’ll pick up Ross’s scent at one of their places. Then we can check out Alfred’s house in town.”



Devlyn pulled back onto the main road and returned to Portland, where Bella directed him to Linn’s apartment. The rain was spitting by the time they reached the apartment’s door, and Devlyn mused that folks in Oregon couldn’t ever tan — they just rusted.



Devlyn picked the lock, but before they opened the door, a woman wearing pink foam curlers in her white hair, a pinstriped housecoat, and purple sneakers peeked out her door. She gave Bella a sad kind of smile. “Hi. You must be Linn’s sister. The poor thing. When I was laid up with a broken leg several months ago, she brought me canned chicken soup — she didn’t cook, you know. I told the police there were half a dozen guys or more seeing her. She told me it was some online dating service.”



The woman shook her head, making the curlers jiggle. “Darn foolishness and dangerous, I thought. Meet them at church, I told her. But she wouldn’t go to church. Do you go to services? See, if she’d been in Bible studies and listened to a sermon about the Lord and not seeing whoever murdered her that Sunday, she’d have been fine, I figure. I was away at a social gathering after services so didn’t get home until that evening. But by then it was too late. She sure wasn’t lonely. Do you need anything?”



“No, thank you,” Bella said in a small voice.



Devlyn rubbed her arm and the neighbor smiled. “You two must be newlyweds. Congratulations.”



“Thank you,” Bella said.



Devlyn pushed the door open. “It was nice meeting you.” He didn’t have time for niceties. Then he closed the door after them.



Taking a deep breath, Devlyn pulled Bella into his embrace. “Are you okay?”



“I... I didn’t expect a nosey neighbor.”



But he knew Bella’s upset was due to more than that. The more they learned about the dead girls and the reds, the more personal the situation got.



“The old woman’s lonely. Probably doesn’t have anything much to keep her occupied. But I bet you anything that, if it was Ross’s doing, he planned the Sunday killing because the next-door neighbor wasn’t going to be home.”



Bella agreed and turned on Linn’s computer. Before long, Bella was hacking into her email. “The only emails linking her to the dating service were sent to nine other men. Nothing that she emailed to Ross.”



“He deleted them to cover his trail,” Devlyn concluded. He took a deep breath. “His scent is in here, and the smell of antiseptic and blood. He cleaned the place thoroughly, but he didn’t expect lupus garous to be checking for his scent.”