Page 21 of Wolfish
“Don’t. Answer. It,” the man reiterated.
The sandy-haired man walked around the store, still carrying the jack-o’-lantern, and she knew he had no intention of buying it.
“What do you want?”
“You had your boyfriend force us out of the Silver Town Tavern the other night,” the man said.
“He’s a deputy sheriff. He did that of his own accord.” She didn’t believe that was the only reason they were here.
“You put our dad away for life.”
Now she understood. It had to do with one of her forensic cases. Who would even have thought someone would come all the way from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to harass her in Silver Town?
“Who is your dad?”
“Benny Whittington.”
The ex-husband of her distant cousin. She’d been murdered in cold blood because of a contentious divorce. Instead of just dividing the property they had together equally, he wanted all of it and ended up in prison for life, getting none of it.
“I only shared the facts of the case concerning a forensic analysis of the murdered victim’s bones. The detectives pieced the rest of the case together.” But she had proven the ex-husband had injured her multiple times, with the injuries healing, but traces of the damage still showing. Which was why she had finally left him, and he couldn’t handle it.
Selena did not doubt their father’s guilt.
“Her boyfriend is likely to check on her when she doesn’t answer her phone,” the other dark-haired man said.
When she observed them closer, she thought the three of them were brothers. But they were all human. Her distant cousin would have been a wolf and would have had to have been their stepmother. She had never heard of her cousin before. There was never any mention of Benny having sons in the news reporting on the case, and they were never seen in the courtroom.
Maybe that’s why the boys had no empathy for her death—she was just the stepmother. She had only married Benny two years earlier, and the men appeared to be in their thirties, so she wouldn’t have raised them.
The blond-haired guy smashed the jack-o’-lantern on the wood floor, where it crashed and broke into a million pieces, infuriating her. Then the youngest man grabbed one, too, and smashed it, as if he had to prove he was tough, too.
She wanted to smash both of the men!
“Your dad can appeal his conviction.”
“He is, no thanks to you.”
Roxie came to the front door, and the men hurried out the back door. Selena rushed after them. They got into the black Mazda with the damaged fenders and tore off. The hit-and-run vehicle.
“What in the world happened here?” Roxie asked as Selena returned to the shop and locked the back door.
Selena frowned at the broken jack-o’-lanterns. “Don’t touch them. They’re part of a crime scene.”
“What?”
Daniel drove up, parked, and headed inside the shop. At once, he saw the broken pumpkins. “What has happened here?” He pulled her into his arms and gave her a warm embrace.
She appreciated it after what she’d been through. “Three men came into my shop. The same three men who arrived drunk at the Silver Town Tavern.”
“And I chased them off?”
“Roxie did. But they’re also the ones driving the black Mazda. They drove it down the back alley to stay out of sight.”
“Hell. Your storage unit was broken into. I came to get you to inventory what, if anything, was damaged or stolen. I haven’t been there yet. But if they’re driving the black Mazda and it was outside the gates of the storage units, were you getting some things in there?” He gave her a tighter squeeze as if protecting her from the threat.
“Yeah. I grabbed the box of clothes that you carried into the hotel later and saw the Mazda.” She hugged him back, so glad he was here and that Roxie had scared the men off. Though she wished they had been arrested.
“So they knew which storage unit you had rented.”
