David slipped in through the window after Wade, observing everything for himself, two pairs of eyes being better than one.
Wade looked around the bathroom where muddied white towels lay scattered on the floor. The towels were no longer wet, and there were no droplets of water in the tub. Dirt had collected near the drain of the tub and dried. Toothpaste spittle was dried on the sink. The men hadn’t been here for a couple of days. From the disarray, he figured they must have told the staff they didn’t want maid service.
He moved into the room where the beds sat. The top sheets were rumpled on the queen bed as if it had been slept in. Discarded dirty briefs, socks, muddy jeans, and a T-shirt lay on the floor beside the bed. In the other bedroom, he found the queen comforter hanging half off the bed. Various articles of clothing smelling of sweat and heavily splattered with mud were scattered on the floor.
In the living area, he smelled the odor of two other men who had stood in the front entryway—a fainter scent as if they’d walked in and left right away. Jaguar shifters. They were two of the men he’d seen at the shifter club in Houston, he thought darkly.
Bill Bettinger, the one who’d struck David in the head with the bottle, and the other who had shoulder-length blond hair—the one Maya called Lion Mane and thought she’d seen at the airport. Hell. Their own kind was selling out non-shifter jaguars?
He growled low. Bastards.
David joined him, sniffed the air, and swore under his breath when he smelled the men’s scents. “Do you think they’re wild?”
“Might be, and they may be serving as the guides rather than hiring someone they didn’t know.”
When humans hunted jaguars, it was bad enough. He couldn’t understand why his kind would harm the jaguars when they had a kinship to them and the jaguars’ only predator was man. Then again, some would sell their own family if meant they’d get money for it.
Wade glanced around the living room. “If Bettinger and the other shifter return to the cabana, they’ll know you and I have been here snooping around. They’d most likely assume we’re with the Service. And we’re after them. Since the smugglers are human, if they return here before we find them, they won’t know we’ve been here.”
“Hell,” David said. “You’re right.”
“I hope the shifters won’t revisit the cabana so we have a better chance at reporting the information to the boss and keeping our business here secret until we can learn who the buyer is. Too bad Internet service is only available at the main lodge and not in the cabanas. We’ll have to let Martin know what we learn later.”
David walked toward one of the bedrooms. “I’ll search this one.”
Wade opened each of the drawers in a couple of dressers in the other bedroom, finding them empty. A bag sat on the floor next to the dresser. Inside the bag, the man had left behind civilian clothes—jeans, T-shirts. He must have planned to return and wear these when not in the jungle, or he would have taken them with him. Wade found the man’s airline ticket itinerary, showing he had already been here two days.
“The hunters came early,” Wade called out to his brother. “I wonder why Bettinger and the blond guy were at the club and not down here?”
He found no return flight information and assumed that was because they’d be here until they located the jaguar and took the cat out of the country via some means other than by plane. He noted a tag on the man’s bags. Address and phone number. “Mylar Cranston’s name is on the bag in here.” Now he knew his scent from the other by name.
Mentally, Wade filed the information away.
“This one belongs to Tierney Smith, according to the luggage tag. They apparently aren’t worried about anyone checking up on them,” David said from the other room.
Wade searched underneath the mattresses for anything of importance that might have been tucked away. His hand touched something metal beneath the mattress, and he lifted it to see what he’d found. A wicked-looking dagger. Wade smelled blood on it, though the weapon had been wiped clean.
“Looks like I might have found a murder weapon,” Wade said, grabbing a T-shirt from Mylar Cranston’s bag. “He probably kept it under his mattress, being paranoid that someone might break in and attempt to kill him.”
David joined him in the bedroom and studied the dagger. “Smells like old blood. Maybe a murder committed?”
“Yeah. It’ll undoubtedly have Cranston’s fingerprints on it, and the T-shirt has some of his beard trimmings. We should send these to Martin first chance we get. Did you find anything in the other room?”
“No. It was clean.”
“Let’s take a run through the jungle and see where they headed.”
David nodded. “Think Lion Mane and Bettinger will be with them?”
“Yeah. That means we’ll be dealing with at least four of them.”
David and Wade returned to their cabana and stripped. Wade opened the window in the bathroom, easy enough for them to get in and out of as cats, and with no lights in the jungle beyond. Perfect for a nighttime run.
He didn’t know if the two men were using their cabana as their place of operation while looking for the cats, or if they had set up tents in the rainforest and searched for the elusive jaguar from there.
They wouldn’t have to get a guide if Bettinger and Lion Mane knew their way around the jungle. They might have to pay a couple of men to help them carry the big cat to a waiting vehicle, then take off for Mexico and the States. Wade’s mission for now was to try to locate them and then take it from there.
Two miles from the resort, in the thick of the jungle, he smelled Connor and Kat’s scent. All he could think of was Maya and her safety, and his mission flew straight out the window.
David looked in the direction Wade did, and then Wade took off in the direction of her treetop cottage.
David bolted after him.
Chapter 10
Eating dinner was next on the agenda because Maya and Kat said they were starving.
Connor almost felt left out when Maya and Kat linked arms and strolled ahead of him on the narrow walkway as they headed toward the main lodge. “Tell me what the club was like,” Kat coaxed.
“Maya started a brawl,” Connor said, “and the place will probably never be the same.”
Kat glanced back at Connor. Maya rolled her eyes at him. He smiled.
Maya said, “We had drinks and…”
“Dancing?” Connor suddenly asked. “You danced with Wade Patterson?”
“And Thompson…”
“The guy from the zoo?” Connor asked, not believing this.
“Yeah, he was protecting me from the other shifters who wanted to dance with me.”
“Where the hell was Wade when all of this was going on?” Even though Connor still wasn’t sure about the man’s intentions with regard to Maya or Kat, he thought Wade would have looked out for her welfare better than that. “Where were our cousins?”
“They wanted to talk to Wade about business—you know, as it pertained to their line of work.”
Connor shook his head.
“The club sounds like fun,” Kat said, a sparkle in her eye.
“You’re not going,” Connor said.
Kat frowned over her shoulder at him. “For your information, I believe I’ve been to one like that in Florida. I didn’t know that’s what it was, of course. But I loved the jungle theme and seeing the men and women dancing on stage in loincloths.”
“You weren’t a wild cat back then, Kathleen,” he said. “It would be different now. Hell, as bad as Maya made the fight sound, can you imagine the two of you together, stirring things up? We’d be banned from ever entering the club again.”