“I don’t know. I have some things I need to wrap up here.” My mind drifts over the things I need to do, like quitting my job and packing up the apartment before I realize that everything I actually care about will probably fit in the back seat of my car and take me all of an hour to pack up. “Actually, never mind. I can probably be on the road in two days.”
He sighs. “What the fuck is going on, Rowan? You don’t sound like yourself and you’re really starting to fucking worry me.”
“I promise I’m okay, Linc, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m in Louisiana, okay?” I bite my lip as he lets out another heavy sigh and I wonder if he’s actually going to let me get away with this. Lincoln tends to be overprotective, especially after our sister Nora was killed by her crazy ex-boyfriend eleven years ago, and I know that even if he lets me off of this phone call without telling him what is going on, he’ll worry himself sick about it until I get to Baton Rouge and spill my guts. Finally, he groans.
“Fine, but you bet your ass that as soon as you step foot in Baton Rouge, you are going to tell me everything.”
I roll my eyes and fight back a smile. “So fucking bossy. Hasn’t your wife broken you of that nasty habit yet?”
“Girl, I fucking wish!” Tate, Lincoln’s wife, hollers from the background and I laugh, feeling lighter than I have in days.
“Shut up before I shut you up myself, woman,” he growls at her. I bite my lip to hold back the giggle as I shake my head. Tate is not a woman I would ever want to mess with but apparently, my brother likes playing with fire.
“You’re getting stupid in your old age, Archer.”
“Who in the fuck are you calling old, woman?” he yells and I can’t hold back my laughter any longer.
“Okay, well, I’m going to let you go deal with that but I’ll call you before I hit the road,” I tell him and he hums in agreement.
“Damn right, you will. I want constant updates so I know you’re safe, you hear me?”
After promising to call him with nightly updates and reassuring him that I can take care of myself at least four times, I finally manage to hang up. As I step out of my car and turn toward the hotel where I’m staying tonight, I’m surprised by how hopeful and excited I feel about this move and I can only hope that it turns out to be just the thing I need to heal all this hurt I’ve been carrying around.
Chapter Two
Travis
“Fuck. This can’t be right,” I hiss, staring at the social media profile I just stumbled across on the screen in front of me before releasing a heavy breath. For months, my brothers and I have been doing everything we can think of to find the asshole that has been targeting the club and coming after women we have helped in the past but I may have just found something that rules out the only suspect we’ve been able to come up with. Mitch Harris was married to Dina, the first girl that was killed, and after we came to her rescue and helped her escape him, he lost his goddamn mind. When she was murdered, we all just assumed that he was the one that did it. The problem was, we didn’t have any proof and when two other girls were also killed, we turned our focus away from him. But then Fuzz suggested that he was still behind it all, killing people close to us in an act of revenge for our role in his wife leaving him and since he is such a shifty character, it wasn’t much of a leap. Plus, he didn’t have the best alibi for the night Dina died but if what I just found is true… there is no way he is behind these deaths.
Scrolling through the profile, I shake my head. I was lost, looking for any kind of lead when I decided to go peruse Mitch’s social media and noticed his new girlfriend. She likes to tag him in her check-ins every time they go somewhere together and as I was scrolling through her profile, I found a check-in for the date the latest girl, Sammy, was killed. Shaking my head and hoping like hell this is somehow wrong, I click the like for the little diner she checked in at and start flipping through photos on their page. In one photo, I spot a security camera and grin as I open a new window to hack into their system. It is surprisingly easy and I roll my eyes at how lazy and complacent some people can be. For fucks sake, it is not hard for someone like me to gain access to someone’s system but they make it even easier on me when they don’t change the password from the default code from the factory.
Sighing, I scroll through the dates listed until I find the one I need and click on it, selecting the camera in the dining room. The video starts at midnight so I fast forward through the entire morning until just after lunch when Eve, Mitch’s girlfriend, checked in to the diner. As the video begins playing, I hold my breath and hiss a curse when Mitch walks in with Eve on his arm. Chucking my pen across the room, I lean back in my chair and it smacks against the wall, falling to the floor as I watch Mitch and Eve slip into a back booth and start making out.
“Goddamn it!”
“Problem?”
I glance over my shoulder as Storm walks into my room and arches a brow in question. Nodding, I release a breath and point to my computer screen. “Only if you count discovering an alibi for Mitch a problem.”
“Fuck… seriously?”
“Afraid so.” I turn back to the screen and sneer at Mitch pawing all over Eve in the corner of the booth. “This is him and his new girlfriend, Eve, making out in a diner an hour away from here while Sammy was being murdered.”
“Shit.” He turns away for a moment before turning back to watch the video. “What about the other two murders? Does he have an alibi for them as well?”
“He has a shaky alibi on the day Dina was murdered,” I say, clicking back over to Eve’s profile and scrolling down until I find the date in question and resist the urge to smash my fist into the table. “But, he was with Eve again on the day Laney was killed.”
“Doing what?”
I point to the check-in. “Bowling. Apparently, they won third place.”
“Can you verify that?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest and I nod as I click the link for the bowling alley and bring up their website. I jump over to the winner’s page and scroll down until their picture pops up on the screen. Turning back to him, I point to it and he sighs.
“Fuck.”
I nod in agreement. “Yep.”
“All right…” he says, running a hand through his hair. “We’ll deal with that later. Veronica is downstairs in the war room and she might have new leads for us. You coming?”
“Absolutely,” I answer, closing out of the websites and grabbing my phone off of my desk. He nods, turning to leave and I follow behind him as he walks out of my room and down the hallway to the stairs. The low murmur of multiple conversations greet us as we descend the stairs but I can’t make out anything that is said since we are literally packed to the rafters in here these days.
The Bayou Devils MC wasn’t always the family friendly environment it is now. In fact, it used to be a real outlaw club with its members running guns, drugs, women… anything to bring in the cash but everything changed when our President, Blaze, was shot by a rival dealer and one of our members, Henn, was sent to jail for seven years on a drug charge. Blaze started to see the error of his ways and backed away from anything illegal to open a legitimate business and when a terrified woman crashed into him in a gas station, we kind of fell into the work we do now - helping those that have nowhere else to go. Or, at least, that’s the way it started. These days, we’ve made quite the name for ourselves and we’ve taken on other jobs like security and P.I. work. I didn’t join the club until things had turned around and I was drawn here by their mission and I knew my computer hacking skills would come in handy but I haven’t been a whole lot of help lately with this threat coming after us.