Staged

Colleen Underwood’s POV

I bolted upright in bed, shocked as my sleeping brain had put together for me what had been bothering me. “SHIT!” Jumping up, I went to the bathroom as I used the link to warn my Luna. “LUNA ADRIENNE! WAKE UP!”

A Pack member could send, but an Alpha didn’t always receive routine sends, or they might never get anything done, including sleep. Our wolves were smart, though; when it was Pack safety, her wolf would feel my wolf’s intent and make sure the warning got through. “Huh? Colleen?”

“I figured out what was missing at the crime scene. I’m getting dressed; we need to talk to the others in the conference room right away.”

“It’s four-thirty in the morning, give me ten minutes,” she said. “Make sure they have coffee.”

I quickly dressed and headed down the hall to the elevator, arriving at the conference room. After knocking, the door opened to someone I hadn’t seen before. She was a small woman with long black hair; behind her, a taller white male stood protectively. “You must be Colleen,” she said as she looked me over and stepped aside for me to come in.

“Yes, Colleen Underwood, warrior of the Miesville Pack,” I said with a slight bow of my head. They were Beta rank, and I could feel the power.

“I wanted to hear your story myself,” she said. “I am Kaia, and this is my mate, Jack Steele, Beta of the Three Sisters Pack. Amy is our daughter-in-law.”

“I wish we were meeting under more pleasant circumstances,” I said as Jack ushered me to an empty chair. Only the new couple and Alpha Dauntless were in the room this late at night.

“Time is of the essence,” Alpha Dauntless said. “The Steeles just arrived with another ten of my Pack; they had to fly into Cozumel and take a shuttle to here.”

“I’m approaching,” Luna Adrienne said to me. I got up and opened the door for her; she swept into the room, and I could see all of them deferring to her, even Alpha Steven. She greeted the Steeles as old friends, then sat down. “What’s going on, Colleen?”

“Something was bothering me about the crime scene, but I didn’t put it together until I was asleep,” I said. “I think it was a setup.”

Eyes got wide, and Steven leaned forward. “A setup for what?”

“To blame Lawrence Fenwick and the Council for the abductions.” I had their attention. Standing, I went to the big monitor displaying the satellite view of the compound. This screen was touch-sensitive, so I took the digital pen and started marking things up. “In law enforcement, you sometimes run across a crime scene where the bad guys have changed things around to meet the story they want you to believe. Changing what really happened into something else isn’t easy, though. There can be dozens of little things that can give away how the crime scene changed. Moving a body means blood evidence doesn’t match up; there might be scuff marks where they dragged it, or the positioning might be wrong. Most of the time, the changes happen quickly and without thinking everything through. It all looks right at first until you start thinking about what isn’t there. And that brings us to this.”

I circled the area around the parking, where bleach had wiped out the scents. “This is the area where bleach wiped out scents, and it worked. I smelled nothing except the other vampires here. Now, I’ll use white to show where I found the bad guy scents.” I marked the dead men and the trails that led between the two buildings and the parking area. Switching to red, I continued. “These are the scents of the six women.” The lines went from the bleached area to the cells, with one line to the house. I switched to blue. “And this is where I found Lawrence’s scent.” This time, the marks were all inside the small building.

“Fuck,” Steven said as he picked it up. “Why isn’t Lawrence’s scent going back and forth to the parking area like the others?”

“Exactly. It’s the one thing missing, and I didn’t figure that out until a few minutes ago. Lawrence’s scent appeared on the doorway and the collars, nowhere else. That doesn’t make sense either; the only way to leave a scent on the collar is to touch it with bare hands, but that would leave fingerprints for the police to find. Sloppy and unthinking, and Lawrence is neither.”

“How would they get his scent there if he’s not involved,” Jack asked.

I picked up one of the ziplock bags on the table that had Makani’s shirt with her scent on it. “The same way you have her scent here. Wipe the collars with his shirt, and transfer the scent but not the fingerprints.” I thought about it a little more. “We didn’t burn the small building. If the Mexican police don’t find prints on the collars, we know it was a setup.”

“I didn’t want to believe Lawrence could do this to us,” Adrienne said. “How did they do this?”

“It wouldn’t be hard to sneak a maid into their room in Jamaica and swipe a dirty t-shirt,” I said. “Far easier for vampires, who could compel the cleaning staff. If someone DID steal it with the intent to set Lawrence up, we have a much bigger problem.”

“What?”

“The girls met Lawrence when they arrived in Jamaica. They had one day of appearances and one day of diving, then a travel day where Vicki went to Los Angeles, finally a day of shooting in Cancun before the diving day. That means the vampires have been planning this for at least five days.”

Adrienne caught what I meant. “They would have hired the gang to take them, then killed them to hide their involvement,” she said. “To the police, it would be slave trading or kidnapping.”

“Yes. I’m convinced that the vampires wiped the humans out.” Going back to the screen, I picked green for the vampires. “All the brass was found here, in the bleached area. As I said, it was a professional job. The vamps want us to believe it was a Cartel team, but what scents are missing?”

Adrienne picked it up. “You never mentioned any human scents other than the six kidnappers.”

“Exactly. There never was a Cartel hit team; I would have picked their scents up near the gangsters when they checked to make sure they were dead or in the house or holding room. I never smelled anything except vampires. There would be no reason for a Cartel hit team to use bleach at all! The only people who would do that would be the vampires, knowing I was coming and wanting to destroy evidence before I arrived. The simple explanation is that there was never a Cartel hit team, and it was the Vampires all along.”

No one said anything for a moment, then Adrienne’s eyes got big. “LAWRENCE!” She grabbed her phone, calling a number, but it didn’t answer. I could see her frustration as it went to voice mail. “Baby, it’s me. Our friend from New Hampshire may be innocent after all. Call me.” She called two more numbers, leaving the same message. Tossing her phone onto the table, she leaned back and let out a sigh. “Leo should arrive later today in Jamaica, but he sent some of our people to grab Lawrence and his mate if they are still in town. Hopefully, they didn’t rough him up.”

“His framing is a theory, Luna. Lawrence still might be in on it, and we don’t know about the Council’s potential involvement,” Alpha Steven said. “Best to keep all options on the table until we get more information. There are too many suspects with too many reasons to want Vicki out of the way. We can’t focus on only one right now.”

“We don’t have enough to go after the Council OR the vampires right now,” Adrienne said. “Colleen, is it possible you are wrong? Could Lawrence be working with the vampires?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “The evidence neither convicts nor clears him. If the Council is involved, they could have hired the Vampires to take her, and they used a local gang to lead the authorities astray. The Mexican covens are well known for their illicit activities.”

I hadn’t convinced Jack about my theories yet. “If the Vampires are involved, why the whole charade with you at the compound? Why not simply pile the bodies and torch the whole place after they take the girls?”

“The tracking necklaces,” Alpha Steven concluded. “The kidnappers didn’t remove them, and we had the track of their progress to their hideout. That place is so remote they could have left the girls there for weeks. Giving over the tracking data forced their hand; they knew we’d be going there with or without them. They had to wipe out the kidnappers and stage things before we arrived. By picking Colleen up from the airport, they controlled how Colleen would see the scene.”

“While the rest of the coven escaped with our girls,” Adrienne concluded. “Who could be anywhere now.”

“Better with the vampires than on a container ship or private jet heading to the Mideast,” I said. “If Master Vespucci has them, they will stay in Mexico.”

“If the vampires have them, they will wish they were slaves to Arab sheiks,” Adrienne said. “It makes things much more complicated, and a wrong move could mean war.”

“Who can we trust,” Alpha Steven asked.

“No one who isn’t family,” Adrienne replied. “Master Vespucci is involved somehow, and Master Cyprian gave us his name. I don’t trust the Werewolf Council, and we can’t trust Lawrence Fenwick. At this point, I don’t trust Linda either. Her story is that the kidnappers didn’t see her, but it’s also possible that she was working with them. The last dive site was on private property, known only to the dive guides.” She tapped a finger on the table as she thought. “As far as anyone knows, we suspect the Cartel took them, and the Vampires are helping us find them. The only people who can know of our suspicions are the mates of the girls, their parents, and their Alphas. If it gets out that we suspect the Mexico City Coven, they might decide to kill and bury them before we can get them back.”

Fuck. I reached behind me, pulling out the Glock I’d taken earlier. I placed it on the table. “The Coven gave us these, but as tourists in possession of firearms, it’s leverage for them too. One phone call to the police, or one checkpoint with a search, and we’re spending twenty years in a Mexican prison.”

Steven nodded. “They won’t do anything against vampires anyway. Take the bag and hide it for now,” he said. “The rest of you? Get some sleep. I’ll have breakfast delivered here at eight, and we’ll go over our plans for the day.”

I stood up and grabbed a napkin, wiping my prints from the gun before holding it inside the folds. Walking over to the bag of guns in the corner of the room, I returned mine. The bag was heavy, but I pretended it wasn’t as I left the room. I walked down the stairs to the garden area; the pool was empty at this time of night, and the only people were in the bars. Walking through the landscaped garden area, I noticed that most of the plants were in removable containers buried in the mulch. Walking through the area looking for a place hidden from any surveillance cameras, I picked my spot. Lifting out a thirty-inch diameter flowerpot, I used my hands to dig a hole in the sand underneath and buried the bag before putting the pot back. The flowerpot stuck out a little higher, but not noticeably so. I pushed the mulch around it and walked off, finding a towel by the pool to wipe off my hands before going back inside.

Sleep didn’t come easy, but it finally came.