Green-Eyed Envy (5 page)

Harper stared at the array of crime scene photos spread before her, face growing paler with each image she shuffled through. Jove Does 18-4 and 20-1 didn’t look any better in death than Bryant Wilkins had, although at least they hadn’t had their tongues cut out and replaced with catnip. I still hadn’t worked up the courage to share that little tidbit with Harper.

Finally unable to take any more, she jerked the pictures facedown and let Penn take her into his arms. Normally I wouldn’t have allowed a civilian—arcane or not—into my inner sanctum or to view grisly crime scene photos unless he was a suspect or relative, but I just didn’t have the heart to watch Harper go through something like this alone. Especially considering the less-than-understanding mood my own Hound was currently in.

I let her mourn for a couple of silent moments before breaking in gently. “Familiar to you, Harp?”

She gave a jerky nod, face still buried in Penn’s chest. Her voice was muffled but audible when she spoke out loud. “Carlos Mendez and Simon Xavier.” The names clearly didn’t mean anything to Penn, but Scott let out his breath sharply. “B-boyfriends from high school. The only two I dated seriously.”

This time it wasn’t jealousy I saw in Penn’s eyes when they met mine. It was, pure and simple, fear. Someone was systematically—and violently—eradicating past lovers of his brand-new fiancée. Apparently in chronological order. Possibly to send a brutal message to one or both of them: Cats and Hounds are
not
to mix. The logical assumption would be that someone from Penn’s family was offing the Cats to warn her off from him, but there’s that whole saying about ASS-U-ME-ing I try to live by. Some jealous psycho stalker
could
be offing Harper’s ex-boyfriends on the way up the ladder to the juiciest prize: newest flame and Warhound tycoon, Pennington Banoub.

There was no gentle way to ask my next question, so I just spit it out. “How many people know you two are seriously involved?”

Penn’s body stiffened, and Harper whirled to face me. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then opened again when realization hit. “You think someone’s trying to break us up.”

“I think it’s a damned good possibility someone is not at
all
happy you two are bridging the species divide between Cat and Hound. Just how long
have
you been seeing each other?”

Mr. Adonis growled and leaned toward me in a threatening manner. Which, of course, set off
my
Hound, who growled and leaned toward his not-so-beloved cousin.
Hmm, a dogfight instead of a catfight.
Harper and I shared an amused expression in wake of all that figuratively bristled fur and raised hackles. Yeah, she was definitely growing on me.

She patted Penn’s arm soothingly, which calmed him enough to back off. Physically anyway. “If you’re trying to suggest that one of us is in any way involved—”

Busy soothing my own savage beast—Scott—I glanced over my shoulder and let out a snort. “Down, boy. If that’s what I thought, I wouldn’t
suggest
it at all. I’d flat out accuse you, and we’d be in an interrogation room. What I
am
suggesting is that someone
else
is pissed off about you two being involved, and going to no small lengths to make that pissiness known.”

His features grew thoughtful instead of confrontational. “Harper and I have been together for more than a year.” Scott muttered something under his breath. “Though we’ve only started making it more open over the past few weeks. For most of that time, only a handful of trusted people knew that we were seriously involved.”

From Scott’s sour expression, I was willing to bet that Harper had hooked up with the other Hound not too long after his own one-night stand with her. According to him, they’d been casual friends for several years before that, growing closer once they admitted that romance was not in the cards for them. Probably a big part of the reason he was so resentful that she had taken up with his detested cousin. Not only did it sting that she’d done so, but it had to be even worse that she’d kept it secret for more than a year, only confessing to him after she accidentally outed herself by showing up at the morgue with her new beau. Penn’s comment about only
trusted people
knowing had only rubbed salt in the wound.

Scott’s extreme bitchiness was starting to make a little more sense.

I forced my brain back to the professional rather than the personal, jotting down notes on my steno pad. “I’ll want the names of every person who
did
know of your involvement the entire time. Even more importantly, you’ll need to give me all the details of your becoming more open about the relationship over the past few weeks. Names of people you told, places you went to openly, that sort of thing. Basically the who, what, when, where, and how of your love life.” Harper nodded, fierce determination in her eyes, though Penn seemed way less than thrilled. My next comment would probably thrill him even less. “Most important of all, though, is for you to make me a list of all of your exes, Harp. I need a chronological list going back to high school along with basic details like when you were involved, how serious you were with them, and how long you dated. We’ll start with the most serious exes, since that seems to be the killer’s focus, and we’ll work our way down from there.”

Penn’s gritted teeth spoke volumes for how he felt about
that
.
Whew, if I were Harper, I wouldn’t write up that list while lover boy’s around.
Granted, my love life over the past couple of years had been pretty stagnant—except for the on-again portions of my relationship with Scott—but the ten years prior to
that
had been about as unsaintlike as it could get. Partly because I was a red-blooded American woman, with all that entailed, and partly because Furies were no strangers to raging hormones and emotions of
all
kinds.

Harper took a deep breath, grief and tension written even larger on her face than before. “Is it okay if I e-mail all this to you? I need—I just have to get out of here.” I nodded sympathetically. “I’ll get you that last list first, since . . . ”

Her voice trailed off, but any one of us could have finished that sentence:
since one of them will be the killer’s next victim.

“You know we’re both here if you need us.” I elbowed Scott in his side. He muttered something that sounded halfway appropriate. “Harp, I really am sorry about all this.”

“Yeah, you and me both, Riss. Sorry for every one of the men I’ve dated . . . ”

She jerked to her feet and rushed out of my office before anyone could say anything, guilt chasing her as surely as any physical demon could have. Penn nodded to me, purposely ignored Scott, and hurried after his fiancée. Leaving me behind to ponder her parting words and be extremely grateful that she hadn’t been romantically involved with Scott for more than twenty-four hours. The guys the killer was going after were long-term boyfriends—as far as I knew, no one other than me, Harper, and Scott knew they were anything more than pals. At least, that’s what I had to hope.

 

 

I HAD TO SAY ONE THING FOR HARPER: THE woman had an impressive track record, based on the list she e-mailed the next morning. She put even me to shame, which was saying something. Then again, fortunately for the MCU’s resources, only eight of those relationships fell under what I would have called the
serious
category—and three of
those
could be checked off the list by virtue of being dead.

That didn’t count Penn, but I was willing to bet the killer would either save him for last—or turn out to be someone who cared about him too much to off him. Besides, now that he and Harper knew about the threat waiting in the wings, they wouldn’t be taken unawares like the others had been.

Scott padded up behind me, the aroma of freshly brewed gourmet coffee teasing my nostrils and making me lean back in my office chair with a happy little sigh. He set a large mug—one of the few surviving from my mother’s failed ceramics hobby years ago—on the credenza next to my desk, leaning down to plant a kiss atop my bedhead hair. “Morning, sunshine. You’re up and at ’em early.”

I reached up to pat him absently on the way to snatching the coffee mug. After taking a long, slow gulp and giving another, zestier sigh, I smiled. “The jackass neighbor woke me up by revving his motorcycle at oh-gods-early, and I decided to check e-mail on my way back from cussing at him. Harp e-mailed the list of potential vics.”

He sipped his own coffee as he read over my shoulder. “So. Five that seem to be in the highest-risk category. Leaving off”—his voice grew derisive—“ His Highness Pennington Kazemde Banoub.”

Bitter much?
Wisely, I kept that thought to myself. “And if we go by chronological order, the two she dated in the year following her breakup with Bryant Wilkins would be in the most immediate danger, and the two she dated in the couple of years prior to hooking up with His Highness being in the least immediate danger.”

Scott tapped the laptop monitor. “And leaving good ole Vic the Slick smack dab in the middle of the road. As usual.”

I read the line he indicated before turning to look up at him.
Victor Esteban, dated seriously for eight months five years ago, close friends ever since breakup.
“Vic the Slick?”

My Hound rolled expressive amber eyes. “He’s a scrawny little guy, about as feminine as a guy can get and still be this side of straight.”

“Ahh, metrosexual.”

“Takes a comb and hair gel everywhere, spends as much time in the john as a woman, and has been known to cart around a purse. If that’s what you call it, then yeah.” He did fake quotation marks in the air. “Flaming ‘
metrosexual
.’”

“Man bag,” I corrected while adding a few notes behind Victor Esteban’s name.

“Say what?”

My lips twitched with the effort to hold back laughter in the face of Scott’s incredulity. “Man bag. Not purse. That’s what they call bags that guys carry around.”

“Whatever. He and Harp are tight, real tight. I bet he numbers among the
trusted people
who knew when she started screwing around with Prince Asswipe. ”

Okay, this time I couldn’t just let it pass. “Hmm, feeling a little bit jealous, are we?”

“
Jealous?
Of a prissy little guy who’s shorter than
you
? ”

“Watch it, buster.”

His lips twitched. “No offense to you.”

“ Whatev. Look, I’m sure Harp had her reasons for keeping you in the dark.” Another mutinous twist of his lips. Pretty damned ironic, really, considering how he’d kept
me
in the dark about his sister Amaya’s abduction but
had
told Harper about it. Fortunately, we’d recovered Amaya. “Did you ever think about the fact she was trying to protect you?”

Incredulity etched itself across his face. “
Protect
me? Why the hell would
I
need protecting from
her
? ”

A couple clicks on the mouse and the battered body of Bryant Wilkins stared out at us sightlessly. “From the crazies out there. Those who think that Cats and Hounds shouldn’t mix on even a platonic basis. Though there
is
one little difference between you and this
Vic the Slick
guy.” When he smirked and opened his mouth to make an undoubtedly smart-ass remark, I hurried on. “Be
sides
his height. I’m talking about the fact he’s a Cat. Which should have put him at
less
risk than you from backlash if someone found out about her relationship with
His Royal Highness
.”

He looked a little less cranky and a little more intrigued. “How do you figure?”

“Well, if we were dealing with your garden-variety brand of racist fanatic, they’d be striking out at the Hounds in her life to scare her away from them, rather than starting with the Cats. That would be the
logical
thing to assume anyway. Harper and Penn wanted to keep their relationship as much on the down-low as possible. The best way to do that was to (A) limit the number of people they told about it, and (B) tell those they considered at highest risk of endangering it as little as absolutely possible.”

A grunt, and then his hands settled on my shoulders to caress absentmindedly. “I think I like the way your mind works, baby. ’Cause in this equation, her telling Vic the Slick as much as she did actually means she likes me more.”

I rolled my eyes. Leave it to a ridiculously alpha-type Hound to reach
that
conclusion. Still, if that’s what it took to get him
out
of his whiny funk, it sure as heck worked for me.

“Fortunately for us, Trinity commandeered our newbie detective to help inform Bryant Wilkins’s next of kin about his murder before the two of them start digging into Bryant’s activities over the past few days. Harper’s e-mail said she’s planning to go along with them for moral support. That leaves you and me the task of interviewing and offering protection to the highest-risk of Harp’s exes.”

His eyes lit up with that avaricious gleam that didn’t bode well for the MCU’s bottom line. “Gonna take more manpower than the PD boasts to handle
that
job.”

What he meant was more
arcane
manpower. Which, right now, consisted of exactly three official officers—
moi
, of course, and the remaining two permanent members of the MCU: a husband-and-wife pair of nightowls. Literally. Kale and Mahina shape-shifted into humongous predatory owls who owed their abilities and existence to the Hawaiian goddess Hina. My recent hiring of those two to handle the night shift so I could sleep most nights through was hands down one of the brightest moments I’d enjoyed since forming the Magical Crimes Unit.

Though moving closer to the coffee machine still ranked pretty high up there.

“And I bet you know just the right people for the job. Who just
happen
to be related to you by blood.”

“Well, not
all
of them are related by blood.”