Keaty nodded, trusting my assessment of my uncle’s motivation. “So there aren’t any obvious suspects, none that would make kidnapping appear likely. And without a ransom request, I think you’re correct. She’s probably on vacation. ”
“All the same, I’d like to use some of your less seemly contacts to make sure no one has seen her around or heard anything differently about her well-being. Just so I can put Lucas at ease. ”
“Why do you care how he feels?”
I looked at my hands, rubbing my damp palms on my jeans before I spoke again. “I don’t care how Lucas feels. But I can’t change my ties to the pack. And he isn’t…right. I need him to get right so he can take care of his people. Otherwise it’s my job to make sure men like my uncle, and like Marcus Sullivan, don’t try to take advantage of a perceived weakness. ”
I’d killed a would-be usurper to Lucas’s throne once, over a year earlier, and it had given me the illustrious and unwanted title of pack protector. Supernatural job titles were like Pokemon to me, apparently. Gotta catch them all.
I didn’t want to be queen, but I’d earned the pack-protector position in a legitimate way, and I took the role seriously. And with only a week until the next full moon, I wanted to be on good terms with the pack. When I’d been in Louisiana, I’d shifted form for the first time in my adult life. I didn’t know if the same thing would happen this month, but my ability to resist the change had been compromised. If becoming a werewolf was going to be a new monthly trend, I didn’t want to do it alone. I’d had a difficult time controlling my inner wolf, and the pack would be able to help me if things went badly.
I needed them, so I couldn’t simply dismiss them now that Lucas and I weren’t together.
That meant I needed to live up to my perceived duties.
“Okay,” Keaty said. “I’ll ask about the girl. Now do you want to know what I need you for?”
I’d almost forgotten this was a quid pro quo situation. “Sure. ”
He tapped something into his computer and spun it around.
A glassy-eyed corpse stared back at me.
Chapter Seven
“Whoa,” I cried. “A little warning next time. ”
The body was hardly the scariest I’d ever seen. My line of work meant I was constantly being shown the grim and bloody handiwork of any number of creatures, and I’d encountered everything from dismembered human corpses to rotting, dead vampires. But when you’re not expecting it, death has a habit of smacking you in the face.
On Keaty’s laptop was a color photo of a dead teenaged boy. His skin had the telltale gray pallor of death a few days’ old, and his eyes had a milky-white hue, the pupil having faded into an almost imperceptible blue. My eyes roved over the photo, ensuring there were no bite marks on his neck. It didn’t mean there wouldn’t be marks anywhere else, but the neck was the best, easiest place to drain someone.
This didn’t look like a vampire kill.
I slid the laptop closer, seeing that this was only the first in a full gallery of photos, and clicked through the rest of them. The boy wore a Papa John’s pizza uniform with a small plastic nametag telling me his name was Petey.
Petey.
Sickness flooded my belly. This kid shouldn’t be dead, no matter what had killed him. If he was so young he hadn’t outgrown a nickname like Petey, he hadn’t been old enough to die. It might not be my first time seeing a dead teenager, but seeing death take someone before they’d reached their prime tended to strike a chord with me.
My teenaged years had been spent fighting for my life and learning how to survive in a world filled with monsters and all forms of despicable evil. I hadn’t gotten to participate in the innocence of youth. Petey had been killed by those monsters, and I felt guilty for it.
There was no blood on him, and no signs of violent death, but he was dead and the case was in Keaty’s hands. I did the math, and weird potential murder plus my boss almost always added up to supernatural killer.
“What did it?”
“I don’t know. The coroner ruled it a heart attack, but his parents aren’t buying it. Someone said I was the right person to find out what had killed their beloved son. That’s what they said. What, not who. ”
“And what do you need my help for?”
“Funny thing about his last delivery the night of his death. ”
“Oh?”
“It went to a Starbucks three blocks from your apartment. ”
In a roundabout way, Keaty was suggesting Marilyn Monroe had killed a pizza delivery boy.
I had, during my time associated with the vampire council, gotten to know a truly unusual c