Cry Baby Hollow

by Love, Aimee

  could explain what she wanted she was placed on hold.

  “Heard you had a little excitement last night,” a man’s voice said after only a moment of muzak. “Sorry. This is Larry. You okay?”

  “Hi Sheriff,” Aubrey said, surprised he was in this early and that a report of a prowler warranted his personal attention. “I’m fine. I just wanted to check and see what was going on. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “It’s no bother,” Larry assured her. “For one thing, you got my predecessor fired so I guess I better keep you happy. For another, Joe keeps an eye on my girls while they’re down at school, least I can do is return the favor.”

  “Well, I appreciate the personal service,” Aubrey said with a grin. “But as long as you don’t conspire to kill me, I’ll let you keep your job.”

  “Deal,” he told her. “So tell me what happened. Everything I got was third hand from a deputy who talked to the dispatcher.”

  “There’s really not much to tell,” Aubrey admitted. “I saw someone over at Joe’s. I’m not sure how late it was… I’d been asleep.”

  “Your call came in a little after 3 a.m.,” he told her helpfully.

  Aubrey hadn’t realized it had been so late. She hoped her antics hadn’t woken the entire neighborhood, and wondered what Vina had been doing up at that hour.

  “I sent a car over, but they didn’t see anyone. I told ‘em not to bother you unless your lights were on. I hope that was okay. They circled the lake until the shift change just a little while ago. I don’t guess you got whoever it was on tape?”

  “No,” Aubrey lied. “Like I said, they were all the way over at Joe’s.” She didn’t know if you could see her muzzle flash on the tape, or if Larry would know the difference between an M4 and a Beretta if you could, but she wasn’t going to risk it. She’d let Matt take a look at the footage first, since he’d be in as much trouble over it as she would if it came out that she had a machine gun.

  “Well, they musta been scared off,” Larry told her. “Tonight shouldn’t be a problem, since me and half the sheriff’s department will all be over your way for the party, but tomorrow I’ll step up the random patrols we’ve had goin’. I reckon you and I both know this wasn’t just some kids messin’ around. I also reckon you’ll be wonderin’ about who you hit.”

  Aubrey sucked in her breath.

  “There’s a good bit of blood on the dock,” he told her quietly. “But I didn’t wanna run any tests on it yet. I’d have to file a mess of reports and I figured I’d just pass the buck to Agent Heck as soon as his office opened. He can have a state police boy over there in no time, and his forensics are better and faster than mine. I’ve had a watch on all the area hospitals and clinics, but nobody’s been in with any suspicious injuries. Any idea where you hit ‘em?”

  Aubrey thought about it. Trying to lie anymore was obviously useless as well as counterproductive. Larry was being helpful. She decided to give him as much of the truth as she could without getting Matt in trouble.

  “I was aiming for a knee, but it was dark and he was crouched down. I generally hit what I aim at but… If I missed I could have hit shoulder, arm, or foot. He was gone a second later so I probably only winged him.”

  “Hell, next time you get your sights on ‘em, you aim for the head or chest. About the only thing we know for sure about Noah Mosley’s killer is it couldn’t a been Sheriff Dunn or Celestine Wynn.”

  “Nice to know I’ve got your permission. I wasn’t sure what the laws were about killing someone who was trespassing on a neighbor’s property.”

  Larry scoffed. “I had a look at your Navy record when we were doing your background. We had to since you’ll be a witness in the Wynn and Dunn trials and we can’t get surprised while you’re up there,” he explained. “Anyway, you got enough trainin’ and specialties and medals to fill a pretty thick jacket. I figure your judgment about who needs shootin’ is as good or better ‘n mine.”

  Aubrey knew her record looked a lot more impressive than it actually was. The Navy had a habit of training women to do hazardous jobs so they could put them on the cover of the Navy Times and look progressive, but when it came to letting them actually DO the jobs well… Aubrey had spent a lot of time safeguarding weapons that other people were going to use. She was trained to handle dozens of firearms as well as various other ordinances, including mines, but most of the action she’d seen had been as a rescue diver. Still, it was nice to know it had all served a purpose, even if only to impress civilians.

  “Thanks for everything, Larry. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

  “Sure thing. You call if you need me.”

  After they hung up, Aubrey wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and go back to sleep, but she didn’t let herself. Instead, she limped down the stairs, silently thumbing her nose at the doctors who told her she’d never be able to take a flight again, and pulled on a jacket and a pair of shoes. She replaced the Mossberg in the closet beside the M4, checked her Beretta, grabbed her cane and headed out.

  She could have driven. It certainly would have been faster, but her leg was stiff from her awkward sleep and she knew she probably wouldn’t have time to exercise later, anyway. She hobbled over to Joe’s, missing Drake and her tennis ball stops, but heartened to know she could make it in one long slog.

  It hadn’t rained recently and the ground around Joe’s trailer was too hard to show any footprints, but Aubrey wouldn’t have known how to read them anyway, so she didn’t really care. She limped straight out to the end of the dock and examined it. There was a dark stain, satisfyingly large without looking big enough to get her sent to prison. She walked back toward Joe’s slowly, examining the ground. There was no blood trail, so she decided she must have hit a shoulder or arm. A knee or foot wound would have made the person’s speedy getaway considerably more difficult. The M4 packed a considerable punch. Even a small wound would be a big problem for whoever had received it.

  She started to walk back, very much aware that Larry would be calling Matt soon and that, not very long after that, he would be calling her. She was not particularly looking forward to the conversation, and didn’t want to have it on her cell phone as she struggled to get back home.

  Something amid the gravel where Joe’s driveway met the road caught her eye. She bent down to examine it, and then jerked away, as if it might jump up and bite her. She rummaged through her jacket pockets and found a half-empty pocket pack of Kleenex, left over from a head cold she’d had last year. She pulled all the tissues out and, using the plastic package like a glove, reached down and picked it up, careful not to touch it. She wrapped the plastic inside out around it, twisted it closed, and put it in her pocket.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  When she finally arrived home, Aubrey sat down at her desk and watched the footage from the security tapes again. She was stil

  l doing it when her doorbell rang several hours later. She stood up, neck stiff and back aching, and went to answer it.

  “I’m going to need the M4 back,” Matt told her testily as soon as she’d let him in.

  “Okay.” Aubrey might have protested more if she’d had more ammo for it. Twenty-eight rounds, in an automatic weapon, equaled a second of serious stopping power. The element of surprise was gone, so its precision was pretty useless as well. “I get to keep the others, right?”

  Matt nodded.

  “But only because they’re legal and I know you’d just go to a store and replace them yourself as soon as I was gone,” he told her. “I assume that Larry is mistaken, and there is some video that needs to be reviewed?”

  Aubrey nodded and led him over to the desk. She pulled up the footage from both of the cameras at Joe’s and played them in sync, so he wouldn’t have to flip back and forth to watch the action unfold.

  “Okay, this is weird,” Matt said, watching
the man emerge from the group of wolves in his costume.

  “You have no idea,” Aubrey said. She pulled the Kleenex wrapper from her pocket and dropped it on the table with a loud thunk.

  Matt shot her a questioning glance and warily picked up the little package, opening it gingerly, careful not to touch the contents. When he saw what was inside he let out the breath he’d been holding in a rapid hiss.

  “So you missed?” Matt asked, looking at the badly deformed bullet fragment.

  Aubrey pointed at the screen again. Matt leaned in close and watched as the man took the shot. He fiddled with the touchpad of the laptop and rewound it, watching it again.

  “I’d swear that’s a hit,” he said.

  “It looked like a hit through the scope too,” Aubrey agreed. “And if I’d missed, there wouldn’t be blood on the dock or the bullet, which there is.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “It was in the gravel at the end of Joe’s driveway,” Aubrey told him. “It wasn’t imbedded, and I don’t think I could have hit that spot from here anyway, since the driveway curves and there are trees in the way.”

  “You only fired once?” Matt asked, skeptically. “Are you sure it wasn’t a burst?”

  Aubrey shot him a dirty look.

  “You can count the cartridges. You’ll find there are only two missing. I fired one at a can for target practice and I recovered it and the can I shot days ago.”

  “So he wouldn’t know you were armed. That’s what we call premeditation…”

  “Failure to plan is the same thing as planning to fail,” Aubrey quoted the familiar military aphorism.

  “These days, I prefer ‘Failure to plan saves you ten to fifteen years off your sentence,’” Matt told her wryly.

  “Semantics,” Aubrey told him with a shrug.

  Matt shook his head in wonder, staring at the bullet fragment.

  “It looks like it hit something pretty solid,” he mused. “Maybe the guy had on a bullet proof vest.”

  “Those weren’t standard NATO rounds you gave me. Can they penetrate a vest?”

  “They’re 6.5 mm Grendals,” he informed her. “They have better fragmentation in the short barreled M4 builds. At this range they may be able to go through a vest and still do some damage. Maybe most of the bullet hit the vest and part of it fragmented and nicked him somewhere…”

  Aubrey shrugged again.

  “There’s a pretty big pool of blood, and besides, how did the fragment get all the way to where I found it? Did he stop after he was sure he was out of the camera’s range and rip it out? And if it had been deformed like this from hitting the vest and it was another fragment that hit him, why is there blood on this one?”

  “And why the hell would he be wearing a vest under a Halloween costume in the first place?” Matt added.

  “It’s not a Halloween costume,” Aubrey corrected. “I’ve seen him in it before.”

  “The night before you found Noah?”

  “No, if it was the same guy that night, he wasn’t wearing that. He was just in a raincoat. I saw him the night I first arrived.”

  Aubrey explained about the near-miss with the deer when she’d first driven into the hollow what seemed like a lifetime ago. She told him about the reflective eyes she’d seem in the fog, and the all too human hand she’d seen pulling at the carcass as she sped away.

  He blanched.

  Then she told him about all the times she’d seen wolves in the area and the night she’d come across the witches.

  “I don’t understand what all this could mean,” he admitted. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Maybe they’re breeding them. Is that illegal? They’re an endangered species and according to everything I’ve read, they aren’t supposed to be in this area anymore. There were some released in the nineties but there was such an uproar they were moved to an island off the Carolinas. What if they bred with the local coyotes or each other and some of their descendants are still here and the Mosleys are using them in some kind of weird, wolf cult? It’s the only thing that makes any sense and it explains why Vina erased my security footage from before.”

  “Vina?!?” He sputtered.

  “I meant to tell you but I only found out right before I went into shock. She said she did it to protect one of our friends, but that it didn’t have anything to do with Noah’s death. She swore that she’d looked at all the pictures and there was nothing in them that could help us with that.”

  “So what was she covering up? Who do you think she was protecting? The Mosleys?”

  “When I was little and I came to visit, Erma lived here, but Rose and Charlie had a place further down the Dixie Highway. Charlie had his veterinary clinic in town, but they also ran a volunteer wildlife rehab center in their back yard. I used to love it when Erma would take me over there. They had hawks and all kinds of things that had been found injured. They’d nurse them back to health and release them.”

  “And?” Matt didn’t see the connection.

  “And what if it was Rose and Charlie who found the wolves initially? Maybe they found some puppies or one that had been injured and released them without telling anyone? If Vina saw wolves on the tape she might have been afraid Rose and Charlie would get in trouble for what they’d done. She wouldn’t have known that the Mosleys had captured some of the offspring and were breeding them as pets.”

  “So you think Noah was killed by wolves and witches?”

  Aubrey shrugged.

  “It doesn’t sound plausible to me either,” she told him. “But there are so many strange things going on. Besides, if he was killed in a ritualistic cult sacrifice or something, wouldn’t that help explain the other bodies they’ve found? And why they were all killed in the same way my grandmother was?”

  Matt sighed.

  “I’m going to tell you something now, but you have to promise me it doesn’t leave this room. You can’t tell a single soul.”

  Aubrey nodded, trying not to look too eager.

  “You know Dunn is in negotiations for a plea bargain, right?”

  Aubrey nodded again, confused at the change of subject.

  “Well, it looks like Celestine Wynn will never go to trial, either. They’ve got her in a maximum security facility for the insane and I don’t think she’ll ever be judged sane enough for a trial.”

  No secret there. Aubrey tapped her foot.

  “I’ve read the transcripts of her interview with the court appointed psychiatrist. Most of it is just venomous nonsense, but apparently she got violent with a guard one night, and had to be heavily drugged. When the shrink got there the next day, she was still pretty out of it. In that interview…” Matt took a deep breath. “In that interview she claimed that she was a werewolf.”

  Aubrey burst out laughing.

  Matt shrugged.

  “I figured it was just the drugs talking when I read it, but seeing this video… Maybe you’re right. Maybe they have some kind of weird wolf cult over there.”

  Aubrey shook her head in wonder.

  “When I was little, my mother used to caution me before I’d come here. She said that people around here didn’t go crazy when they got old, they started out that way and just got worse. I guess by the time you get to Celestine Wynn’s age, you can work up to stark raving mad.”

  “So what now?” Matt asked. “I go over to their church and see if there’s a stuffed wolf on the alter instead of a cross?”

  Aubrey shook her head.

  “Now, I think you should find a costume. Vina’s Halloween party is tonight and there will be quite a crowd. If it were me, and I’d been shot at last night, I’d show up or send someone in my place and try to find out what the opposition was up to. Mosleys make up half the county and have married into the o
ther half. Some of them are bound to be there.”

  Erma came over to help Aubrey get ready almost as soon as Matt had gone. She had a huge tackle box full of cosmetics, pastes and gum, as well as two patches of fake skin. Aubrey looked at them skeptically, but when they were glued in place and blended in with make-up, they did a remarkable job of covering her real wounds with bigger, fresher, and more grotesque fake ones.

  “What am I supposed to be?” Aubrey asked.

  Rose knocked on the door and Erma let her in. Drake trotted in beside her and gave Aubrey a look of indignant disapproval. He had been dyed a tawny gold, his bushy tail slicked down with gel, except the end, which had been teased out, and a fake mane had been attached to his head. He looked as much like a lion as a dog possibly could.

  “What’s on his face?” Aubrey asked. Drakes muzzle was caked with something red and sticky.

  “You are, silly,” Rose told her with a grin.

  Aubrey looked down at her artfully mangled leg and neck. Rose handed her a whip.

  “You’re the lion tamer!” She announced.

  “Not a very good one, it would seem,” Aubrey said, chuckling at their clever plan.

  “Go put on the rest of your costume,” Rose begged. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  Aubrey went into the bathroom and changed into the complete ensemble, stocking ripped to expose her mangled leg, a sequined leotard, and tailcoat with blood at the neck where a second patch of fake mauling covered the scar there, a sparkly cane, high-healed boots, and a top hat.

  She walked out and cracked the whip for her tiny audience.

  Drake barked enthusiastically. Rose and Erma cheered.

  “You look wonderful,” Rose gushed.

  Erma looked at her watch.

  “We’d better get to it, or we’re not going to have time to get ready ourselves,” she said.