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Now Wilder and I were stuck in the shit heap, and once the sheriff figured out we were werewolves too, the situation would go from bad to worse. Timothy already had a wolf to pin a murder on. Soon he’d be able to add resisting arrest and assaulting an officer to the list.
This was bad.
The doorknob jostled, and the door swung open. Josie stood just outside, and next to her was a tall man with dark hair going gray at the temples. He had two black eyes and a bandage over his nose, but his uniform was impeccably clean.
“Deputy Anderson, I presume.” I tried to sound cool, but I’d want to break his nose again if I found out he’d hurt Wilder.
“Get up.” There was an unspoken threat in his voice, and I decided I was better off not pushing his buttons. If I’d been more like my sister, I might have kept poking the angry bear, but it wasn’t yet in my nature to make trouble worse. Secret was a master of turning a bad situation into a truly dire one. It was no wonder she’d almost been killed a dozen different times.
Instead of throwing a cheeky one-liner at Anderson, I got to my feet and approached them in the most nonconfrontational posture possible. It made no difference. He still grabbed my arm forcefully and dragged me out of the room. I gritted my teeth and focused on Josie’s round cheeks and bright blue eyes. She looked appalled by his behavior but did nothing to stop him.
There might be hope for Josie, but not the kind that would be of any benefit to me.
As he shoved me down the hall, another door opened, and Wilder was brought out of a room.
As Josie had promised, he appeared unhurt. That didn’t mean they hadn’t done anything to him, but it did mean they hadn’t done anything recently.
“You’re okay,” I breathed, before realizing I’d have been better off keeping my mouth shut.
Wilder nodded but was smart enough to not speak. I wanted to tell him everything I’d learned. That someone was dead and I was pretty sure they were blaming Hank, but with four deputies around us all I could do was stare at him and hope he understood I hadn’t given up on this yet.
We passed without saying anything else, and I was ushered into a small meeting room before I had a chance to see where they took him. Anderson not-so-subtly manhandled me into a chair, then handcuffed me to the table. The sheriff, who’d been sitting there the whole time, said nothing about my treatment.
In fact, he said nothing at all until Anderson and Josie left.
Then he opened the slim folder sitting on the table in front of him and cleared his throat to be sure he had my attention.
“Do you know what I found when I ran your prints through our database, Miss McQueen?”
“Nothing,” I replied.
He gave me the same thin-lipped smile he’d used the previous night right before arresting us. Sheriff McGraw wasn’t an unattractive man. He was probably in his late forties, with dark blond hair receding in a widow’s peak. He had cheekbones a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon would go wild over, and a sharp, hawklike nose. If cowboys were my thing, I might have called him handsome.
Since he was giving me a shit-eating grin and I knew he had let his men beat Wilder, I was less inclined to think warmly about him just because he wasn’t ugly.
“Nothing,” he parroted back to me.
“Yeah, I know. I think I’d remember having a criminal record.”
“Well, funny thing about that, Eugenia, because when I couldn’t find anything in our database about you, I fired up the old Internet search engine.”
“Oh yeah? Did you send me a Facebook friend request?” There was some fight left in me, it seemed. A bit of the famous McQueen spitfire coming through after all. I didn’t want to piss this guy off, but I also wanted him to know he couldn’t intimidate me.
“I found out plenty about you. I know all about your family.”
That was impossible, naturally. If he knew all about my family, we wouldn’t be playing this game because he wouldn’t want the wrath of an FBI special investigation team coming down on his head. And that’s exactly what would happen if Secret and her crew found out we were being held on trumped-up charges.
I assumed he was talking about Callum. “Good for you.”
“Thing is, rich girls like you have a habit of getting their big mistakes wiped under the rug. Money can buy a lot of things, including a clean record. So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not awed by your blank sheet.”
He was skirting the issue. If he’d Googled me and he’d found Callum, then he had to know what I was. The McQueens were the public face of werewolves in the South, and both Callum and I had been interviewed in papers and profiled on TV. If he knew my name, he knew I was a werewolf. I wasn’t sure why he was beating around the bush and why deputies like Josie were still out of the loop.
“I don’t have a record because I’ve never been arrested. We had no idea we were on private property. Last time I checked most churches are open to the public.”
“The church might be, but the land around it isn’t. Care to tell me what you and your boyfriend were doing out there?”
This was the second time someone had called Wilder my boyfriend, and for the second time I ignored it. If they thought they could use it against me somehow, I didn’t want to take away a bargaining chip they assumed they could use.
