Page 12 of The Alpha's Grave Secrets

I’d asked her to stay behind after seeing her nerves at our meeting earlier, and I think she could use a bit of rest and time to get herself together. We’ve got this between Bruce, Gun, Hati, and me.

“Hello, what can I get for you?” The bartender asks kindly enough, but the look in his eyes says he’s sizing me up.Smart man.

“Can you tell me if you’ve seen any of these women here?” I ask putting the photographs down on the bar one by one.

“Are you some kind of creep?” He asks, polishing a cup with blue cloth.

“I’m looking for one,” I counter, and he sighs, putting the glass down and stepping closer. “I’m Agent Blackwood with the SPIU.” I flash my badge, and he eyes it for a second before nodding.

The bartender looks at each photo intensely. Before saying a word, he separates the photos into two different piles: “I recognize these ones,” he says, finally pointing to the larger stack of photos.

“How often did they come here?”

“Often enough that I recognize them but not so much that I remember their names or know much about them, those two,” he pulls out a photo of a blond and a redhead, “I haven’t seen in at least a year, maybe two but it’s hard to remember exactly I see so many faces in a night. A lot of young women following similar fashion trends and styles, it’s not always easy to differentiate them all.”

“What about this one?” I ask, pulling out one more photo from my suit jacket.

“Elara,” he says, eyebrows knitting together. “I know her.”

“So, you know her well enough to know her name but not the others?” My jaw sets. I don’t like the idea of this man ‘knowing’ Elara.

“Mhm, she comes here often enough and is my girlfriend’s therapist.” His eyes flutter back to the stack of photos. “Is this about what happened to her? Did it happen to them too?”

It’s good to know the media has yet to report too much. That means we’ve been doing a good job of keeping this case under wraps.

“My girlfriend said she wasn’t taking appointments for a while. I guess she’s taking time off to recover from an attack?”

“That’s right, she was attacked,” I nod, weighing my options about how much I’m willing to divulge. “These other women in the photographs were attacked as well. Only by the time we found them, they weren’t alive.”

Pink creeps over the bartender’s cheeks as his jaw sets, and he looks down at the photos, shuffling through them once again. “I can tell you that these three have been harassed in the past by a regular here. He does a good enough job of not going over the line to get kicked out, but let’s just say if it came down to walking past his table or taking the long way to the bathroom, these women would always take the long way.”

“And who is this regular?”

“Jackson,” the bartender says, lowering his voice to a near whisper as he glances at the clock. “He won’t be in for another hour or two, but he’ll be here. He’s here every night.”

“You got a last name?”

“Hughes.”

I scribble the name down, “is there anyone else that any of these women might have had problems with?”

“Nothing that sticks out to me.”

“Alright, thank you.”

I pull out my phone and text Minna, asking her to use her I.T. skills to investigate this Jackson Hughes guy and to give me whatever she can find within an hour.

“You are lucky that I’m salaried, handsome, this is not the after-hours call I was waiting for.”

I roll my eyes, a smile lifting the corners of my lips.

“What are you smiling about over here?” Hati asks, I hadn’t even noticed him appearing next to me.

“Minna.”

“Ah, what have you found out then?”

“I’ve found out that we will need to be back here in an hour or two.”

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