Police Bear: Bear Shifter Romance: B.E.A.R.S., #2

By Candace Ayers

Who knew justice was so poetic?

Maverick has a rep as a hard-boiled investigator.
He's never had a case he's been unable to crack.
When a decade-old cold case falls on his desk,
his homicide investigation leads to Sunkissed Key,
and to his main suspect, Sinclair Townsend—
his mate.

For almost ten years, Sinclair has managed to
deny the events that forever changed her life.
But when her house of cards falls, it implodes.
By a twist of fate, Kade Maverick is her mate—and her nemesis.

B.E.A.R.S. (Bruin Evaluation Assessment and Reconnaissance Specialists)

SERIES READING ORDER:
1. P.O.L.A.R.
2. Cybermates
3. B.E.A.R.S.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lovestruck Romance
• Release date: Jul 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201171391

Book preview

1

MAVERICK

Murphy’s wide ass nearly toppled the tower of paperwork stacked precariously on the edge of an overcrowded desk. I stifled a groan as he weaved through the congested precinct, his beady-eyed scowl focused intently on me. The Special Cases Division of the Las Vegas Police Department was small, cramped, and frenzied. Swerving just in time, Murph jostled Novak’s elbow, sloshing coffee over the rim of her Styrofoam cup and down the front of her blouse.

It wasn’t abnormal for Murphy to be wearing a scowl as he sought me out. That didn’t faze me. It was the evidence box clutched in his meaty paws that sparked my irritation.

I’d just gotten back from an undercover job cracking a wolf shifter fighting ring. I was tired and more than a little cranky. I would still be in a world of hurt too, if not for my shifter healing abilities.

Good goddamn, it had been a hard week.

Mav, glad to see you back. And good work on the underground fighting ring.

With a clenched jaw, I nodded and forced my lips to contort into something that may or may not have resembled a smile.

Something came across my desk. It’s a cold case from just shy of a decade ago. He saw the tick in my jaw and raised his chin defensively. I know, I know. Cold cases are no one’s favorite, but I need this one taken care of. Dover’s out and Grady is too green to take on something like this. Besides, I think it involves one of your kind.

By your kind, Murphy meant shifters, and if shifters were involved, the case was mine whether I wanted it or not.

Technically, I didn’t work for the Vegas PD. I was on loan to them from the Organization—B.E.A.R.S. Division, to be precise. The Organization had at least one specialist planted in every large metropolitan police department to deal with sensitive cases involving shifters.

I watched as Murphy deposited the file box on my desk, right on top of the report I was working on. I let out a sigh and massaged the bridge of my nose. I’ll get started on it as soon as I finish up this paperwork.

Should’ve had that done already. He shook his head. It’s never a part of the job that you hotshots like, but it’s what puts the bad guys behind bars and keeps them there. With that parting shot, he zigzagged back to his office and slammed his door.

I dropped the box on the floor next to my chair and proceeded to ignore it while I finished typing page after page of notes and cataloging evidence. I would have rather spent the time slowly and methodically beating my head against the wall. When I felt as though my eyes would permanently cross if I had to type one more sentence, I stood, stretched, grabbed the cold case box, and headed to the conference room to review it.

Everyone else hated the space designated as a conference room because it was located in an especially dark corner of the basement. But, as a bear shifter, its den-like quality appealed to me, not to mention the fact that it provided plenty of quiet, and solitude.

When I flicked a switch, a lone, bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling illuminated the space. If one could call its dim glow illumination. It flickered pitifully and left all but the center of the room still bathed in shadows.

With an extended claw, I sliced through the tape securing the evidence box, well aware that this particular box had spent the last decade gathering dust on a shelf in the LVPD evidence locker, completely ignored.

As I removed the lid and got my first glimpse of its contents, I vaguely wondered why now. Why, after a decade, was this case being reworked? It wasn’t as though we were experiencing a shortage of criminal activity around here. This place wasn’t called Sin City for nothing.

But my job was not to wonder why. Scratch that. My job was exactly that—to wonder why. And then to follow up my speculation with solid investigative work. Fortunately, I had a natural curiosity and an innate tenacity, the combination of which made me perfectly suited for my profession.

My eyes landed first on a stack of crime scene photos. The poor fuck looking back at me from the glossy eight-by-tens was a gruesome sight. The phrase ripped to shreds sprang to mind. He had deep gashes across his face and chest, marks made from a weapon I instantly identified.

Bear claws.

The victim’s throat had been torn out in what was clearly a very vicious bear attack. A huge chunk of flesh was missing—clear to the bone. Not entirely missing, I discovered as I stared at another photo. The mangled lump of flesh had been spit out on the ground a few feet away.

Claw marks extended farther down the victim’s body, crisscrossing randomly as though the attack had been manic and crazed. It was grisly, but I’d worked enough homicides over the years to have grown a thick outer shell. So thick that my coworkers in the department had coined a nickname for me—Hard-boiled. The adjectives callous, cynical, and merciless were also quite frequently applied to me.

Truth be told, it had been years since I’d been affected by the atrocities I saw all too frequently in this line of work. I’d grown accustomed to things that would turn the stomach of anyone with even a shred of humanity left—like a wolf pack who sacrificed their own pups to illegal dogfighting rings.

Brushing the crime scene photos aside, I rummaged through labeled plastic evidence bags—the vic’s clothing and personal belongings, which had been stored as evidence all these years and never released to the family. If there was any family. If—I stared down at the victim’s Nevada driver’s license—David Gaines had any family.

I busied myself laying out the crime scene photos on the conference table. Next, I spread out the evidence bags so I could mentally catalog them. It was then that I noticed a small, rectangular piece of plastic at the bottom of the box. A flash drive.

Fuck, I hated the digital world. Yes, I knew it was the twenty-first century and microchips permeated almost every aspect of our modern lives, including law enforcement, but staring at a monitor was not my forte. I did my best work out in the field. I tapped the drive against my palm. It was unlabeled…which was highly unusual. I wondered for a moment if it had somehow made its way into the box by accident. Maybe it contained someone’s kid’s graduation photos or their child’s eighth birthday party, and some lazy schmuck didn’t notice it had gotten scooped up and stored with case evidence where it didn’t belong. Welp, I had little choice but to view it.

I waited what felt like eons for the ancient desktop computer in the corner to boot up. The dusty unit in the conference room was primordial, but it was preferable to the one upstairs on my desk simply because it wasn’t smack dab in the middle of department chaos.

Once the home screen appeared, I plugged the thumb drive into a USB port, sank into the creaky desk chair, and waited for the data to load.

And waited. And waited.

I tapped my fingers along my thigh.

I tapped them on the desk.

I tapped them on the primitive beast of a monitor, encouraging the old girl.

Finally, a popup appeared with three video files.

I knew better than to pin my hopes too high. True, video evidence often yielded some of the best leads since, even if the video footage itself was inadmissible, it was usually quite telling and therefore helpful in a case. But if there had been anything of value in these video files, this case wouldn’t have gone cold and remained unsolved for ten years.

As I opened the first file, I inexplicably held my breath. I had no idea why, but I suddenly felt pins and needles. The strange sensation made my gut clench—a premonition, perhaps?

The first picture that flashed on the screen was of the mouth of an alley. I recognized it from the crime scene photos laid out on the table. It was the alley where the victim had been found. My fingertips tingled. I leaned forward a little more, causing the chair to groan under my weight.

After twenty minutes of watching footage of the alley, a woman came into view. She was just a grainy smudge at first, then gradually her form became clearer. The image was still slightly grainy since the security camera wasn’t top quality and the footage was old. Although it didn’t have as much detail as I would have liked, my breath lodged in my lungs as I watched.

Chin up, shoulders back, the woman’s hips swayed in a graceful, cocky, sexy-as-hell way that was one hundred percent female as she strutted down the sidewalk.

My head swam. The walls closed in as though the oxygen in the room was quickly being depleted. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Just the way she held herself with that air of confidence was magnetic. As the woman passed someone who was just out of camera range—a stranger perhaps, just a random passerby—she smiled and nodded. My pulse raced in response.

My face was inches from the monitor screen as I studied her.

Her hair was styled in long, elaborate African box braids gathered at the back of her head into a ponytail that swayed slightly with each step. The video wasn’t crystal clear. Still, it was impossible to deny even from a black-and-white semi-grainy security video that the woman was a knockout—a cross between a sassy flirt and a seductive Nubian goddess. A goddess with more curves than the average man would know what to do with.

You’re not the average man, Maverick.

No, I wasn’t. I knew exactly what I’d do—what I wanted to do—with curves like that.

I felt an almost painful tightening at the crotch of my pants just from watching this beauty move. As she turned down the alley, her head was bent. She was looking down at…something. I paused the playback to take a closer look.

A phone. She was stopped at the mouth of the alley, just a few feet from the street, and was looking down at a cellphone in her hand. I resumed the video.

Seconds later, a man appeared behind her. Even with his face and throat intact, I recognized him as the victim, David Gaines. He stopped just beyond the alley—between the woman and the street—and glanced around.

My gut twisted.

I found myself on my feet, fists propped on the desk and glaring at the screen as I watched the man I’d previously assumed to be an innocent victim of an out-of-control bear shifter grab the woman by her braids and violently yank her farther into the alley.

The move had been so quick, so polished, that she hadn’t had a moment to react before they were both out of the camera’s view and I was once again staring at a vacant street.

There was more footage on the video.

I hit the fast-forward button, desperate to see if any more of this story had been recorded as evidence.

What the hell happened? Was she okay?

I held my breath. Involuntarily. My lungs simply refused to fill. Seconds ticked by as the footage continued forward at full speed. It was still clearly devoid of any human activity. My eyes strained. My chest tightened until I saw a faint movement and slowed the video to normal speed. There was just a shadow at first, then the woman stumbled back into view.

Her hands were trembling. Even with the video’s lack of clarity, her tremor was evident as she clutched the neckline of her blouse. She held tightly as though she was keeping the garment secured around her.

Was it stretched? Torn?

She turned slightly—enough so that the light entering the alley illuminated her from the front. Her shirt was in tatters, as though it had been shredded or had burst at the seams, and there were smudges on the light-colored fabric. Those smudges hadn’t been there before, but I knew what I was seeing.

Blood.

I squinted. Bloody handprints.

The video was black and white, but I would bet my ass that her hands were covered in blood. Her head turned from side to side, looking around desperately. Her shoulders heaved as though she was retching. Her body shook violently as she hurriedly stumbled away and again out of