Chapter Thirty Two

Anthony took a moment to think about it before he relaxed, pulling his phone out from his pocket and dialling in a number. "Hello, yeah, take down the traps. We'll let her walk for now," he said. Katie's eyes widened in shock at the revelation the Director had just made. She knew she could get away from him, but she hadn't expected him to put up that much of a resistance. There was a great possibility that the traps he spoke of would have got her.

"What happens now? A member of my pack has been killed," Cole spoke up.

"I'll find whoever did this, Cole," Katie spoke up, breaking from her mother's embrace.

"Don't make me wait too long," he grumbled, "This wolfsbane doesn't let me catch even the slightest of the killer's scent."

"Where is the hunter I sent to look at the cameras?" Anthony shouted.

"Right here, sir. I came when you were in the middle of the brawl with Katie and slipped my mind while I was waiting for you two," a female hunter replied timidly. Anthony's commanding presence kept most of those who worked under him to be scared whenever they were in his presence. Well, all of those who weren't well acquainted with him anyway.

"It slipped your mind," this irked the bulky man, but he wasn't in a mood to reprimand the hunter either, "Never mind, proceed with the report of what you found."

I checked the cameras and found that the room footage had been erased, so I checked through the footage of all the other classrooms looking for a sign of a missing student in the three-hour span of this incident. I was able to discover that the video of the two of the classrooms had been looped, probably to throw us off the trail of the class the culprit was supposed to be in. There is no telling if the killer was in the class of those videos that were looped or not at all.

"In that case, populate a suspect list of all the students in the classes that were looped and those of the students that did not attend those lessons. Check the library cameras and cross out the names of those that you find were instead studying in the library all that time. The rest of the students that remain on the list are to be put under strict surveillance and searched for any sort of motives or malicious intent," Anthony barked his orders.

"Yes, sir… Do you want me to suspect the werewolves and junior hunters alone, or humans as well," the lady asked him, unsure whether it was even possible for a human to overpower a werewolf if they had never had any training and were still only in high school.

"Do not leave anyone out even if they happen to be your family or in some way related to the Hunter's association. Work with Katie to solve this as soon as possible and leave no stone unturned. The sooner we catch the killer, the faster we can put an end to this mess and let the one we've lost rest in peace," he said.

His last phrase was all the werewolves needed to know that these heartless machines called Hunters still retained their humanity regardless of the way they worked. This somewhat soothed their rage and allowed them to look at the hunters in a new light… as helpers and not merely as people who were trying to keep the school's image and bring everything back to normal just because a student died. They also felt the anger and disgust that Cole and his friends did.

"What can we do to help out?" Cole asked.

"I'm glad you're with us again, Alpha Cole. What you can do is… take the day off. We'll handle this. You have nothing to be worried about. Take time off for your fallen comrade," Anthony said, his voice low again for the second time this day, rarity among rarities.

Cole was not as pleased with the answer he received as he might have wanted to be and turned to Katie who stared him right in the eye. Something glinted behind her beautiful deep blue orbs, an unspoken message that they would still have their evening as planned and everything was going to be okay. Regardless, it did not change the fact that an innocent boy of fifteen years had been killed and there was no reversing this. Until the killer was caught, Cole's hunger for his blood was not going to go down.

"Fine then, we'll take three days off and won't interfere with the investigation, but after that, we will find this killer using our own methods," he said before walking out of the room, sending one last glance in Katie's direction as he passed by her to the exit. Caden and Jason followed him quietly, their palms folding into fists and slowly unfolding in an effort to keep their emotions in check.

............

Katie was led to the camera room, Sandra in tow, to look at the footage for anything that could help her. She checked the footage of her locker and saw that it was not tampered with. Every hunter was issued a leather sleeveless jacket of a design of their liking but equipped with dagger, knives and darts laced with the poisons that were used to combat werewolves.

This was something that was not to be taken lightly and only two people in the entire school were allowed to touch this jacket without Katie's permission. These were Sandra and Kyle, however, none of them would have any interest in touching this jacket as it meant nothing to them. Katie also did not like using the thing and usually kept it with either Kyle or Sandra. It was unlikely for a werewolf to seek it since the poisons could affect it just by sniffing it.

That meant there was either a human that had committed this atrocity or there was another rogue in the school that was suppressing their wolves in the name of being a spy. The room's whose footage had been looped turned out to be Katie's room and another of the same taking a different subject from the one they were learning at that time. It was impossible to miss the moment of Katie's room being looped because it did not show her leaving the room with the principal.

However, it did show the principal coming to pick her and then vanishing. The killer probably made this obvious so that they would suspect that class to be the one that had the culprit, but then again, another camera had been looked at just as well, its timer restarting after two hours to show the footage of the hallway seamlessly, but for a time that did not match.

Discussions on which room the killer belonged to were pointless since a lot of different opinions could be thought of without knowing what it was that the killer was trying to hide by looping two classes. Maybe they didn't have enough time to tamper with the footage and just tampered with the classes they were from to by some time at least, but it didn't make sense. If that was the case, then they only needed to question all the students from those two classes and the ones that were absent on that day to verify their whereabouts.

It soon came to light that the cameras had been left unattended for nearly an hour which would have been enough time to have all the footage tampered with. The computer experts were also able to find out the time it took for the footage to be altered and proved that it was done at leisure as the person who altered had been at the computers for twenty whole minutes. More than enough time to deal with everything.

It was even possible that this person had watched them from the cameras as they walked into the room they had left the body in. This was frustrating. The number of students that were in question easily numbered up to seventy, but that was a small group for someone who was trying to be inconspicuous. 'What was your plan this whole time?' Katie thought, puzzled by the killer's boldness.

At the end of the day, after having questioned all seventy students that were being suspected with no one turning up anything suspicious, they called it a day. Katie put her head on the desk and sighed in exasperation as the last suspect walked out of the room. "This is getting us nowhere," she groaned.

"We'll find the culprit soon enough. We just have to keep looking," Sandra tried to comfort her.

"I'm not disobeying my gut ever again," Katie yelled into her palms.

"What do you mean?"

"When the principal called me out to go with him, I felt something was about to go very wrong, but I thought that was because I was not going to like what Shaemus had to say to me. Now I see that was not the issue," she explained.