Michael nodded. “She has brown eyes, too.”

“So she’s not part of this?” I asked, my frown deepening.

“But we know the tabby was in the Forbidden Fruit.”

“Show her,” my father said.

I glanced first at him, then at Michael, as he held up the last page from the printer. “Forbidden Fruit has a Web site, with a ‘cast list,’

complete with photographs of the dancers. In costume.” He handed me the page, and I took it, dreading what I’d see. “Third from the end.”

But I’d already found her. Second row. Kellie Tandy, from the waist up, her ample cleavage bursting from the top of a black leather cat suit, à la Hal e Berry. However, the important part, the part that made her fit the pattern, was her hair. She wore a wig—a mass of straight black hair, with pointed cat ears sticking up from either side. She also wore white plastic whiskers glued to her face, on either side of a perfect little human nose. Beneath authentic-looking cat eyes.

They were theatrical contacts. They had to be. But they were eerily accurate, down to the striations in her irises that I was sure were various shades of green in real life, though they were gray in the photo.

Marc took my hand in his, stroking the side of my palm with his thumb, as if to comfort me. If only he knew what an impossibly Herculean task that was at the moment. “We stil don’t know who the tabby is, or why she’s following this psycho from club to club. But we should be able to figure out who he is now. Or at least narrow our list of suspects down from ‘every cat in the country’ to ‘someone Faythe knows.’”

“That can’t be too hard.” Smiling, Ethan dropped onto the love seat across from me and Marc. “She can’t know that many strays. She’s been at school for the past five years, and we’d have known if anyone was hanging around who shouldn’t have been.”

“What if it’s not someone she knows, but someone who knows her?”

Jace asked, settling onto the arm of the couch on my other side. “Or thinks he does.”

“Same thing,” Ethan insisted. “Either way, if there was another werecat on campus, we’d have known about it.”

Ethan was right. I’d been under constant surveillance by my father’s enforcers at school, and if another werecat had shown up, they’d have taken him out before I had the chance to break so much as a nail on the poor bastard. But the joke was on them, because the werecat in question wasn’t a werecat at all when we’d been on campus. He was a normal, human math major.

“Enough,” my father said. “Faythe, I think Marc’s right. The tom in question seems to know you. Or at least know what you look like.

Assuming it’s a tom at all, and I don’t think we should rule out anything at this point.”

Well, what do you know? It only took a female serial killer to bring my father into the gender-equal twenty-first century. I’d thought it would take ful -scale war.

Closing my eyes, I pulled in a long, slow breath, trying to ignore my galloping heartbeat. When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me. “Let me save you al a lot of trouble. I know who’s taking the strippers.”

“What?” Marc shifted on the sofa to face me, but I couldn’t look at him. I watched my father instead, as I said the rest of what had to be said.

“It’s Andrew Wallace.”

Silence greeted my announcement. Complete and total silence, except for the whispered breaths coming from around the room. And Marc’s might not even have been among them. I think he actually stopped breathing.

Michael was the first to speak, from his perch on the arm of the love seat, and I really should have seen that coming. “Andrew? That skinny guy you were sleeping with last spring?”

“Damn it, Michael!” I glared at him from across the rug as Marc tensed on the cushion next to me. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

He shrugged, crossing bulging arms over his spotless polo shirt. “I’m just getting my facts straight. So…you’re saying you were screwing a serial kidnapper for most of your last semester at school?” He turned then to face our

father as my blood boiled. “I’d say that was tuition money well spent.”

“Michael…” my father said, his voice thick with warning.

“What? I’m not the problem here. She is.” He whirled back to face me, fury and frustration battling for control of his expression. “Where Faythe goes, trouble fol ows, and as usual, we’re left to clean up her mess.”

“You son of a bitch!” My hands curled into fists, and I felt myself leaning forward, ready and more than wil ing to take some of my stress and frustration out on his face. “Ethan’s drilled half the state of Texas, and you’ve never once thrown that in his face—”

“Hey!” Ethan shouted, eyes going wide as he sat up straight on the couch across from me. “Don’t bring me into this.”

“—but I have one ex-boyfriend, and you declare me the Jezebel of the county.” Blood pounded in my ears, and my fingers tingled in fury, itching for something to beat, or shred. I sprang from the couch, stil -human fingers curled into claws. Michael jumped up from the love seat, hissing at me through bared teeth.

Marc caught me in midair, both arms wrapped around my waist. He spun me around in one smooth, fluid motion and dropped me none too gently in the middle of the couch. “Don’t move,” he ordered, watching me through the flood of confusion and suspicious anger shining in his eyes.