7. Avery #2
“The Hurleys told me Remy Talmadge was putting omegas into les fausses chaleurs , so I’m thinking that to protect himself, he had to have had those cameras hooked up throughout the house. Plus,” I added, grimacing, “I’m wondering if he had footage of what he was doing with the omegas.”
“I have no idea what you just said. Lay-what?”
“ Les —mock heat,” I corrected myself. “Sorry.”
“I’m afraid to even ask, but what does putting them into mock heat entail?” Wade’s face scrunched up, bracing himself for the answer.
“You really want to know?”
“Hell no, but I think I have to.”
“The alpha gets them all hot and bothered, aroused and ready, and then shoves ’em out the door. It’s all the edging, none of the screwing,” I explained bluntly.
“And why would omegas want to be in that state?”
“Because then they’re oozing pheromones.”
“Which I’m guessing gets an alpha all horny.”
“Bingo.”
“And then?”
“And then the omega says, ‘You want me, sign my contract.’”
“But what if an alpha just bangs the omega in their car?”
“An alpha can’t bang an omega without a contract.
” Which was, for all intents and purposes, correct.
Only an omega who didn’t need to find a mate, who was completely self-sufficient, could afford to screw an alpha without a signed contract.
As far as I knew, into that group fell only one, and that was me.
Because others, like Linden and Bridget, could afford to be picky.
They came from rich families, so they could wait on the best match possible, but I was the only one who had a job and a way to take care of myself if my family ever tossed me out on the street.
And that would never happen, they loved me too much, but it would not have been the end of me if it did.
No other omega I’d ever met could make that same claim.
“Can’t?” Wade questioned my word choice, drawing me from my thoughts.
“Fine. They can, it’s just against lupine law, and the alpha is screwed if anyone finds out.”
“So all omegas are virgins until they get married?”
“Hardly. Lots of them have sex with humans and betas and gammas. They just don’t fuck alphas.”
“Why?”
“Because of the contracts. A beta or gamma can bang an omega and leave once they’re done, and it doesn’t matter who knows. But an alpha has to put a ring on it.”
He nodded. “You know, it occurs to me that even though alphas are supposedly at the top of the food chain, they get the short end of the stick in a lot of scenarios.”
“Yeah, but they can have sex with betas and gammas, even other alphas. No one’s telling them they have to fuck an omega.”
“That’s true, I guess; though aren’t omegas supposed to be really hot?”
When we first became partners, Wade made the assumption that I was a beta, and I never set him straight. At this point, it was unnecessary to reveal my true nature to him; for all I knew, he’d be hurt that I hadn’t told him the truth. It was, I was certain, best to let sleeping dogs lie.
“I think, much like many things in life, the reality has been greatly exaggerated.”
“As in, not all female omegas are Victoria’s Secret models, and the guys aren’t all right out of the pages of Esquire .”
“Exactly.”
“Okay.”
“Regardless of what you’ve heard about omegas,” I added, “they are far worse off than alphas. They don’t always get to choose where they go.”
“Yeah, I agree. Being stuck in some fucked-up Regency nightmare sounds like a horrible way to live.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
We hit the motherload in the panic room, in a cabinet built flush into the wall.
“Why wouldn’t Talmadge just use a flash drive or two instead of all these DVDs?” Wade asked me, holding one up between his gloved fingers.
There were shelves full of them, named and dated, and while we concluded that Remy didn’t want what amounted to his pheromone-fluffer collection on the cloud where it could be hacked, the DVDs made little sense.
“I bet he’s got them all stored on an external hard drive as well, but I think this way, he has a DVD ready to go for his viewing pleasure or, more importantly, for blackmail.”
“I guess,” Wade concluded. “Whatever his reasoning, this is a racket.”
He started unloading boxes of DVDs from the cabinet and stacked them on the floor. “We know the omegas pay Remy to put them in mock heat. Once they’ve snared an alpha, he then most likely threatens to tell the new spouses how they got honey trapped unless the omegas pay him again.”
“Our suspect list could be endless,” I groaned, watching him pull more boxes from the cabinet. “Jesus, how many more are there?”
He stepped back, and I saw three more shelves behind him, with boxes stacked two high.
Christ.
“I really hope Remy can identify the murderer,” Wade said, turning to me. “Or you and I are gonna be watching werewolf porn for days.”
Neither of us was looking forward to that.
I called Highmore’s family once we got back to the station. It was early in the morning there in Paris, just after eight, and I got his mother on the line before his father joined us. They were devastated over the news, his mother openly sobbing.
His sister was in Manhattan, his father apprised me, on a buying trip for her jewelry business, so she would be the one making arrangements for the body, as well as dealing with his finances and the house in River North.
Once the scandal had hit the year prior, the rest of Highmore’s family had relocated overseas to the city of love.
They couldn’t face people they knew, even as they assured anyone who asked of his innocence.
In the end, they were right, nothing could be proven, but most people were of the opinion that was because the women were paid off not to come forward.
Sitting at my desk, I was contemplating whether to go get food or have it delivered when Bannerman came out of his office, into the bullpen, and crossed to Wade and me.
“You guys need to go home or you’ll be useless in the morning,” he ordered in that raspy tone of his.
“We’re gonna nap in the waiting area upstairs,” I informed him. “We wanna go by the hospital first thing, and that’s only a few hours away at this point.”
He nodded. “Well, after that, give me a status update, and then both of you go home. I don’t need you sleepwalking through your days, missing shit, or being assholes.”
I snickered.
“Bigger assholes than usual,” he amended irritably.
“Yessir,” we both agreed.
“Where are you with this at the moment?” he wanted to know.
We brought him up to speed, and he told us to hold off looking at the videos until we talked to Mr. Talmadge.
“No use having that shit fused into your cerebral cortex if it doesn’t have to be.”
It was good advice. We had slept maybe an hour and a half when Ness and Peck came tromping up the stairs, which were creaky and old on a good day, and woke us up.
Peck nearly sat on Wade before my partner moved his legs, and Ness grabbed a chair and flipped it around close to the couch where I was lying, near my shoulder.
“The hell’re you doin’, Peckinpah?” Wade groused at him.
“Give it a rest, Massey,” he growled back. “It’s Peck, and you know it.”
Wade may have just woken up, but he still had a savage grin for him. “Do I?”
“Hey,” Ness barked, and when I turned to him, he passed me a tablet.
Sitting up, I swung my legs around and put my feet on the floor. Wade flopped down beside me as I made the picture on the screen bigger so I could see what was left of the face of a dead girl. “Why am I looking at your victim?” I asked him.
“We confirmed her identity,” Ness told me. “Not a hooker at all. You’re lookin’ at Imogen Lowell with her throat torn out.”
I lifted my head to meet his gaze. “And who is she?”
“She’s an omega who had her debut earlier this year,” he informed me.
I couldn’t place her, didn’t remember the name, but that didn’t mean anything. I was in and out of the gatherings, saw Linden and Bridget and a couple others, but for the most part I didn’t socialize with the male and female debutantes.
“I checked the society pages, found her pictures,” Ness explained.
I went back to examining the photos with Wade. The attack had been particularly vicious. “So why show us?”
“Guess where the GPS on her phone shows her as being earlier tonight?”
I looked up at him. “At the home of Remy Talmadge?”
“Yep. Right before Highmore’s time of death. That’s what the ME is saying. She may be off by a little but never a lot. She’s a wolf, yanno; she can smell it.”
One of the things that had happened, from the Feds on down to police departments all over the country, was that there were two MEs in each department, one human and one lupine.
And if there was only one position available, it would be held by a lupine.
Because, like all wolves, they had a heightened sense of smell, but in lupines, they were specifically trained to scent certain biological markers as they broke down.
I could tell if someone was dead from their scent, but our ME could scent, during the autopsy, each postmortem interval like algor, rigor, and livor mortis.
Each carried its own smell specific to lupines, and our ME could gauge, with a fair amount of accuracy, the decomposition rate, to then trace it back to a narrower time window.
Wade sighed deeply and turned to look at Peck. “What’re you thinking?”
He shrugged. “Maybe things got rough between her and Trent Highmore. He ends up losing it, wolfing out––”
“That hardly ever happens,” I said defensively.
“I know,” Ness snapped at me. “I got a brother-in-law who’s a wolf, Rhine, so don’t bust my balls.”
Betas, gammas, and even omegas could marry humans, and some of them did. Alphas could not. Many alphas were far too powerful to have sex with humans. Some of them with absolutely rigid discipline could, but having sex when you had to be careful wasn’t something alphas were known for.
“But it does happen,” Peck jumped in. “Alphas especially can get overstimulated and freak the fuck out.”