Impassable Force: Force of Nature Series (8 page)

Molly was passing out some pads of paper and pens for notes when she realized what Austin had said.
She looked over at Randy, and he smiled. Okay, he got it and was okay. So she guessed they were now alphas. Molly needed to set up some time to talk to CJ. That woman knew everything.

~~~

Randy looked around the groaning table. They were all here and working hard to to bring justice for the death of Mary Ravenhall. He’d never been more proud in his entire life. When he turned to one of the children who was tugging on his arm, he smiled down at little Gordon. He was the cutest kid he’d seen, and he started to pick him up when he spoke.

“You think that lady is ever gonna pick me up?” Randy looked at where he was pointing and saw that he meant Molly. “She sure has a lot of excuses why I can’t be sitting on her lap.
And her being a wolf and all. Don’t she get it that we like to cuddle? I don’t like it as much as some of the girls do, but I can get used to it. She sure is pretty, huh?”

“She’s never held a kid before.” Gordon looked at him with total
disbelief and could see the kid was falling in love with his mate too. “I’m not kidding. She told me today that she had no idea about kids and babies. I think she’s more afraid of that than all the bad guys in the world. Do you think you can help me out with this?”

“That’s a lot of bad guys
, Uncle Randy. A whole lot of them.” Gordon looked at his little sister, then at him. “You think she’d hold little Daisy? I’ll make sure she don’t drop her or nothing. I bet that would make her not scared anymore. My Daisy is the best sister in the world.”

Gordon loved his little sister more than he did ice cream
, he’d told him once. He also told him she didn’t stink, especially after his mom put that butt powder all over her. When Randy nodded, Gordon went to his dad and pulled him down to talk to him. Randy nearly burst out laughing when Gordon was handed his seven-month-old sister, and then he took her to Molly.

“Oh kid, I don’t think so. She might scream or something.”
Gordon shoved his sister at her again, and when her fingers touched Daisy, he took a step back. She’d either hold her or drop her. Thankfully, she held the little girl.

To say who was more confused would have been a toss-up. Daisy looked at Molly
, and she right back at her. Of course, she was holding the baby under her arms and as far from her body as she could. When Daisy started to pucker her lower lip in what no doubt would have been a monstrous wail, Molly looked at Randy.

“Fix her.”
He moved closer to her but didn’t take the baby when she tried to shove her back at him. “She’s going to scream, and that will piss them off. And I’ll get pissy, too, because I’ll feel stupid. You so don’t want me to feel stupid. I get nasty.”

“Hold her better and she won’t need fixing.”
Molly tried again to give Daisy to him, but he showed her how to hold her. “She likes to look around. Just set her on your knee and wrap your hands around her waist like this.”

Molly perched the baby on her knee and wrapped her arms around her like she was a football. After a few more lessons, Daisy tu
rned to look at Molly as if to say, “It’s about fucking time.” And once she realized that the woman who held her wasn’t going to hurt her, she turned to the room and began jabbering again. Within minutes, the other kids, with Gordon as their leader, came to stand next to Randy and ask more questions than he thought possible. And Molly answered them all. A few of them had him thinking Molly might need a lesson or two in how much was too much concerning children, but they hung on her every word like it was gospel. And after another hour, she was letting them take turns sitting with her in the big chair. He moved away from her when his chair was commandeered.

It was nearing midnight when they all left.
Reid and Jodie had stayed over; their little boy had fallen asleep on one of the beds in the upstairs bedrooms. A girl from the pack had volunteered to watch him there. Randy yawned and stretched out before the fireplace as Reid and Jodie sat in an overstuffed chair. Molly was leaning against the opposite side of the couch that he was on so he pulled her feet to his lap.

“So, you’re a new alpha.”
Randy nodded but didn’t commit. He and Molly still had to talk about it. Not just that but with everything that was going on, money was going to be a big topic, he thought. “About this thing we’re doing tomorrow, you think it’s a good plan?”

“I do.”
Molly answered before he did. “The DNA will be a few more days to come back, and we might find out it’s from some kid out looking for mushrooms. I’m not sure Carter will be stupid enough to give us a name, but with you guys there, you can get something from him.”

The plan was for them to go in as a group.
Jodie was going to be Mary and move around the office and the area surrounding the building where Carter was holed up to scare him shitless. Then she was going to go in and make tar-tar of his ass. Not really, but she was going to make the man sit up and take notice. They’d even downloaded a map of the building he was in so they could have a few wolves there in the event that something went wrong. Not that any of them thought it would, but Randy had insisted on it.

The few times
Jodie shifted to her sister, he’d had to hold onto Molly. The pain was great, but she said that Jodie had it right. And the few more times she’d shifted, to get her used to seeing her sister, the better she’d been at handling it. But Randy was still worried for her.

“Your
sister and brother-in-law? Why did they marry in the first place, do you know? I mean, no offense, but your sister could have done a good deal better than that slimy shit.” Jodie looked at Molly when she realized what she’d said. “I’m so sorry. Sometimes I don’t think before I speak.”

“It’s okay. I know what you meant. And she could have
, but he’d blackmailed her. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d told her that if he went to the police and told them what had really happened that night was that I’d killed that girl, then I’d lose my scholarship and be out on my ass. I didn’t of course, but instead of coming to me with the threat, she married him. I don’t think he was ever planning to stay with her, but when she started making it big, he hung around for the money.” Molly wiped at her face, and Randy could feel her sorrow. “I miss her more and more every day. She really thought she was saving me, but I couldn’t save her when she needed me most.”

“You did to
o.” They all looked at Reid when he spoke. “You saved her every time you came to see her. And why do you think she filed for divorce in the first place? It wasn’t because she’d suddenly had enough. It was because you told her you were there for her. And you were. From what Phil told me, when she came to his office she was more terrified of disappointing you than what Carter would do to her. She didn’t want that from you. But you have to explain about that night. What happened?”

“
He killed a girl. In a drunken rage, I guess you could say. Mary wouldn’t go out with him and he was pissed. We started to walk home, but he wasn’t having it. The story he told said that he’d gotten out of the car and it slipped out of park.” She shook her head. “He never put it into park. As soon as he was clear of it, it started to roll. And he’d knocked Sandra Middleton, a girl that Mary went to school with, in the path of it. He crushed her head with the car and then told the police that stupid story about her falling.” Molly got up to pace. “The next morning before I left for college again, I went to see his coach. Carter was this big shit football player and had all kinds of people wanting him to sign with him. It’s where the car came from. But the coach told me to fuck off basically and that if it got out that he’d been drinking as well as the girl was murdered and not involved in an accident, then the whole school would suffer. So I headed to the bigger paper across town. The one in the opposing team as a matter of fact. The shit hit the fan, and he lost it all.”

“You did that?”
She nodded at Reid, and he laughed. “Good for you! Christ, I wish I had been there. I would love to have seen his face when he found out he was getting nothing. Must have been a big hole put in his ego.”

“He got his revenge
, I guess.” Randy pulled her to him when he felt her pain again. “I guess he won in the long run. My sister is dead, and he’s still out there living it up. If this doesn’t work and we can’t convict him, I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s such a nightmare. I’d gone to see Carter after Mary told me what he’d done. I can’t help but think he might not have killed her had I just held my tongue. But he’d pissed me off. The fucking bastard was taking everything from her, including her happiness. I hated him for that.”

“Well of course you did.
The fucking prick is going to get his payback or I’ll kill him myself.” Randy looked at Jodie to see if she might be kidding. And when he wasn’t sure, he looked at Reid. His shrug was not helpful at all.

After another hour, they all went up to bed.
Randy thought about staying down and talking to Reid a little more, but Molly looked so sad that he went up with her. As soon as he got into bed with her, she rolled over into his arms and cried herself to sleep.

It was the longest and most painful night of his life.

Chapter 8

Carter was looking over his lack of finances when someone knocked on the door. He looked up when the door opened without his permission and was startled to see his secretary being held at gunpoint by none other than Molly Barker.

“You should know that when you let her go
, I’m going to have you arrested.” Molly snorted at him but didn’t move. “Let her go and let’s talk about what you’re going to give me or I’ll have you brought up on charges.”

“I’m not worried about you. You know as well as I do that whatever you think you have against me, it
’s nothing compared to the hurt I’m going to bring down on you when I can prove you killed my sister.” Carter started to reach under his desk for the gun, but something poked him in the head. “I’d like you to meet my lawyer, Phil Campbell. I understand you’ve been looking for us.”

That fucking idiot he had sent to bring Molly and Phil to his office had been arrested yesterday.
Trespassing of all things. And then they’d found his car. Carter had no idea what the fool thought he was going to do with enough firepower to take on a small country, but now he was in jail awaiting a hearing. As far as Carter was concerned, he could rot there. He looked at Molly when he saw a movement and felt his body freeze again. There she was again.

“Do you see that?” Before he finished the question, Mary was gone again.
Carter was having hallucinations, and now they had followed him to his work. “She was right there.”

The first time he’d seen Mary, he’d been standing in his bathroom shaving. The hotel had shitty service
, but he knew this was only temporary and had overlooked the cheap faucets and non-heated floors. He was going to get his house back if it was the last thing he did. But the image of Mary standing behind him had him cutting his face as he jerked around.

The second time he’d seen her, he’d been in his limo. Carter really didn’t have a lot of things to look up on his computer on the way to his job
, so he’d been playing a game. But again a movement caught his eye. This time she spoke.

“Hello, asshole.
How are you getting along without my money?” He nearly wet himself when she suddenly disappeared. Carter sat there until his car came to a stop. Then he nearly leapt from the car. And now this.

“See what?”
Molly smiled at him and for whatever reason, he thought she knew what he was seeing. She moved toward his desk and helped his secretary sit down. “Alice tells me that you’re planning a big raid on my house. It seems you’ve hidden things everywhere on the estate and plan to go back and get it.”

“Who?”
He had no idea who this Alice person was, and Carter was equally sure she’d had a camera in his office. There was no way she had this plan that well versed. “I want you to leave here right now.”

“She’s this woman here
. She’s been working for you for years, you idiot.” Carter looked at the woman in the chair, and she nodded. Christ, how the hell was he supposed to know all the people who worked for him? The man still holding a gun to his head laughed before he spoke.

“You’re so fucked. You know that
, right? A man who gives away secrets during pillow talk can’t have all that long to live.” Carter stood up to turn on him, completely forgetting the gun for a few seconds. It smacked him hard between the eyes, and he sat back down. “Move again and I’ll shoot you because I can.”

“I never slept with her.
I don’t care that much about sex to go around fucking women that are beneath me.” He looked at Alice and smiled. “Tell them that we’ve never had sex and I’ll get you out of this.”

He was going to kill her
was what he was going to do. Just as soon as he was free he was going to wrap his fingers around her fucking neck and squeeze the life out of her. He had no idea how she knew what he was going to do, but Molly had too much information not to have gotten it from someone. Carter started to speak when he saw Mary again. This time she looked as she had when he’d gone to the coroner’s office to identify her body.

“You should know that I’m going to haunt you forever, Carter.
And when you’re dead and in your own hell, I’m going to continue to haunt you because you’re a lying son of a bitch and I hate you.” Carter felt his heart take a hit, like he’d been stabbed there, and put his hand out to grab for his meds. But the man behind him knocked them away. “You really don’t expect anyone to help you, do you? I mean, what did you ever do for me but make my life a living hell?”

“You had a good life despite the hurt I’d put on you. And I quit hitting you in the face when you lost that big part.
How the hell…? You should know better than to piss me off. We’ve had this conversation enough for you to get it by now.” Carter looked at Molly and Alice. “My dear wife is threatening me. She seems to think that I’m going to be haunted by her for the rest of my days.”

“Mr. Ravenhall, you do know that your wife is dead, don’t you?”
Carter snarled at Alice when she spoke. But when Mary moved behind her and put her fingers on her head, Alice looked around, but Mary had already disappeared.

“She’s been popping in and out all day. She was even in the bathroom with me this morning.”
He felt a burble of laughter bubble up, and he had to fight hard to swallow it. He wasn’t going to have them think he was insane. If they did, they’d have grounds to have him committed. Then he couldn’t kill Molly and now it seemed Mary from a padded cell. “I think she’s trying to have me admit something that will get me into trouble.”

“D
o you have something to admit?” He looked at Molly and wondered if she really thought he’d answer that. “You killed her and tried to have me killed too. Why? She was your ticket to a better life.”

“If it were true that I had something to do with her death and you being hurt, what do you think might have happened had she divorced me?
And you kept egging her on and on, didn’t you? Do you supposed you might have been the cause of her death?”

He knew he’d hit a nerve but had little time to relish the fact. The man behind him put him in a world of hurt as he did something that made him slam his head twice on the desk. When Carter could see again, he noticed that any pain he might have caused Molly was covered up now by hatred.
Christ, he’d never realized before how beautiful she really was.

“You’ll answer my questions
, not make up shit on your own.” He hit the table again just as Molly finished speaking. “Tell me who you hired to shoot us and I might let you live for another day.”

“You mean the rule follower Molly Barker is now going to be the bad guy?
Oh no, say it isn’t so.” Mary appeared behind her again, and he looked right at her this time. “You fucking cunt. All you had to do was leave me the fuck alone and let me spend all that money when I wanted to. What the hell were you going to do with it? You never spent a fucking dime on anyone, not even yourself. And that house? I hope to Christ no one ever finds the shit I have hidden all over it. It would be just what you deserve.”

“Oh but I have found it.” He looked at her hard, trying to figure out if she was bullshitting him.
“The money in the safe in the floor of your bedroom? Then there was the wall safe you had put in behind the bookshelves in my office. I also have found the money you had hidden in my studio. You just couldn’t let me have any space of my own, could you? You had to go in and rearrange things to suit what you had thought of as a queen of the big screen.”

“You lie.” The small safe hit his desk with a loud thud.
He started to reach for it but looked up to see Alice looking as his spectra. “You see her? Do you see my wife?”

“I’m not sure.” The woman looked at him
, and Carter had a moment of profound terror. She looked…the wolf staring back at him made his bladder loosen just enough to have him feel a dampness cover his thigh. “You should have been a better husband. Do you know what she’s going to do to you now? Your ex-wife and her sister are going to make you pay.”

The wolf changed again into a man. Then he was his wife
, then a panther. Carter wet himself. Fear made his mind close down and he had no idea what to do now. Looking up at the man who still held the gun to his head, he looked at the fangs that seemed to stretch from his mouth and reach for him. Carter let the darkness take him and didn’t even care about the fact that when found, if they ever found his body, he would be covered in shit as well as piss. He was so fucked.

~~~

Randy was still laughing when they got to their home. The look on the man’s face when he’d changed was priceless. He could have done without the smell, of course, but Carter Ravenhall had crapped himself because they had scared him that badly. He looked over at Reid when he cleared his throat. His nod toward Molly made him sober up quickly.

“Honey, we’re closer than ever to getting him to pay for what he did.” She nodded
, but he could feel her pain as if he, too, were hurting. “I’m so sorry, baby. I shouldn’t have laughed. I’m sorry.”

“He really did kill her.” Randy pulled her into his arms and held her as she snuggled into his throat.
“He killed her and thought he’d get away with it. Why? What did she do to him that he didn’t deserve?”

“He wanted it all and she wasn’t going to take it any longer. You gave her that strength.”
They both looked at Jodie. “When I become a person, I’m not just looking like them but sometimes I take a little of them on. Like your sister. She was so happy to be ending this with him.”

“But she’s dead because I told her to file for divorce.”
Jodie shook her head and reached for the strongbox they’d taken from Carter’s office. “There is nothing in there that will make me believe that Mary would have left him without my telling her to. She’d be alive had I just kept my—”

“Read that.” When she didn’t touch it, Jodie picked up the folded paper and opened it for her. This time when she handed it back to her, Molly took it.
“It’s a contact sheet. Most of those names on there I know. And you should, too, if you’re half as good at being a cop as I think you are. But what you might not know is that most of those names are not humans. Most of them, about ninety percent of them, are were’s and they’re on our list. They’re known to be killers.”

“So.”
Molly started to hand it back but at the last second pulled it to her again. “This is dated a year before my sister died. He was looking for someone to kill her back then?”

“I’d say that’s a good bet.
But look at the papers in the back. You’ll see something else.” While she thumbed through the last few papers, Randy looked at the ones she’d looked at first. On the first page were the names of nine men who he knew had come through the office where he and Phil worked. He looked at Reid.

“Yeah, I didn’t know if you’d seen them or not. Two
, I know for a fact, Phil has tried his best to get put away in one case or another. And there are more on the pages that Molly has now.”
Randy looked over each sheet as it was handed to him from Molly. The names were mounting up and he wanted to contact Phil now, but knew that he’d gone to rest for the day.

“How did he get this list?”
Reid shrugged and looked at Jodie, who was still talking to Molly.
“You don’t think someone we know gave this to him, do you? They would have had to have….”

It hit him. Just like that he knew who had given this list up.
When he was ready to say something about it, Jodie touched his mind. She was still talking to Molly, and he was surprised at that.

“Don’t. Not yet. She
has enough to deal with right now, and if you tell her right now, she’ll implode. I think she will deal with this in her own way, but if you give him up to her, she might not be as good as we need her to be when the time comes.”
He looked at Molly, who was staring out the window behind them. His heart broke for what she’d have to do now.
“She’s a good deal stronger than she looks right now, but with seeing her sister today and dealing with Carter, she has taken too much.”

Randy knew that her seeing Mary as she’d been hurt had taken a good deal out of her. He’d been having so much fun pretending to be Alice that he’d forgotten what seeing her sister was doing to her.
He pulled her closer to him as his brother and Jodie got up to leave. Both of them told him good-bye through their link, but he never said anything to Molly. It was perhaps an hour later when she looked around the room.

“They left?”
He nodded. “I guess I’m not a very good hostess right now. I was thinking of Mary and Carter.”

“Understandable. You’ve been dealing with a lot lately.” She nodded and stood up to stretch. Randy felt his cock stretch too
, and his wolf ran along his skin. She turned to look at him.

“What was that?”
He let his wolf go just a little and saw hers come to the surface too. “I can feel her. She’s very strong, isn’t she? And I think she wants something from me.”

“She’s a
s strong as you are. And I suppose that’s one way to look at it. She does want something. Me. More when you need her to be, but she’s needing her mate too.” Molly moved to the doors that led to a private deck at the back of the room. He’d loved that part of this room and was going to ask Molly if he could have this office for his own. He would put in a new desk, but loved the books and the other furniture in here.