Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  At about the time Kaleb was shoveling eggs and bacon into his mouth, across Main Street Sheriff Rick Abernathy sat hunched over his desk inside of the Devil’s Fist police station, pouring over the unsolved case that was seriously starting to nag at him.

  Holly van Dyke.

  Holly, a young college graduate who should’ve had her whole life ahead of her, had been brutally killed behind the library some weeks ago.

  Her killer had never been caught.

  But who in the good goddamn had been her killer? That’s what Rick wanted to know as he stared at the glossy crime scene photo that was resting on top of the open file.

  At first blush, it had seemed like a wolf attack, a terrible tragedy. Rick had hunted these streets for the rabid animal, determined to put it out of its crazed misery and set the collective minds of all his residents at ease.

  But now he wasn’t so sure that an animal had done this, rabid or otherwise.

  There’d been talk of a wolf-man roaming ‘round these parts. Crazy Lucy Cooper had seen it with her own, twinkling blue eyes, and he would’ve written the entire account off as some kind of drug-addled hallucination if his own daughter, Whitney, hadn’t backed her good friend up.

  It was gnawing at him.

  Wolf or wolf-man, he couldn’t decide.

  Angel Mercer had been attacked as well, not necessarily by a wolf and not that she could remember. She’d been acting odd. That’s all he knew, and he couldn’t shake from his troubled mind that he’d seen a shimmering white wolf out on the streets of the Fist where Angel had turned the corner, having taken off on foot from the back of the diner one dark night.

  Mysterious.

  There were too many unanswered questions. Too many bizarre events had cropped up in his town. They had to be linked somehow.

  He closed the file, set it aside, and sat back in his office chair, trying to relax.

  Daylight was pouring in through the windows and causing a terrible glare so he crossed over and pulled the blinds then returned to his desk and opened the next unsolved mystery file.

  Reece Gladstone, another librarian, had been unlawfully imprisoned by a man who she knew only as Dante. Rick had searched high and low throughout the Fist, hunting to find him. But the man had either left town without a trace or had never existed. Reece was found shackled inside a cage in a cave on the old Halsey land, and Angel had somehow gotten her there.

  Angel. The woman who couldn’t remember how in the hell she’d wound up covered in mud in the woods behind her own house. The woman who’d been acting strange and feverish, and who may or may not have turned into a shimmering white wolf that night. What had her role been in luring Reece out into that land that afternoon? And did it connect, by some twisted logic, to the van Dyke attack?

  As Rick stewed, unable to understand why Reece had dodged his questions about Angel and ultimately insisted to him that she only wanted to move on with her life and let Dante—and also Angel Mercer—fade away into her past like a dark memory, Troy Quinn came to mind.

  All of the Quinn men had been a thorn in Rick’s side for far too long. And now Reece Gladstone was married to the eldest of that clan. She wasn’t talking, and neither was Troy.

  It didn’t bode well.

  But wrestling with idle speculation would get him nowhere so he rose to his feet, figuring he ought to head on over the diner to question Angel again, but as he left his office and crossed through the precinct bullpen, his most aggressive PO, Rachel Clancy, stepped in his path and cut her big, brown eyes up at him with that look of desperately needing his approval written all over her determined face.

  Rachel might have been tall for a woman. Standing at an athletic 5’9” she kept her wavy, chocolate brown hair pulled up in a serious ponytail whenever she was on duty, kept her uniform starched and clean, as well, but that didn’t mean she belonged here. His heart had threatened to warm up to her a few times over, but he’d since reasoned that neither he nor the residents of his town would benefit from her having joined the force. Her pipe dream of making detective was just that. Some pie in the sky aspiration that he’d never allow.

  He hoped she wouldn’t bother him with much more than asking if she could fetch him a mug of coffee, but as soon as she opened her mouth, it became abundantly clear that those hopes of his were much, much too high.

  “Sheriff,” she said with a bright ray of optimism in her voice as she thrust a filing folder under his nose. “I’ve made some headway with the Gladstone case that I think you’ll really appreciate.”

  “Not now, Clancy,” he barked without taking the file as he deposited her slender frame to the side with both hands. “I don’t have time.”

  “But, Sir,” she said behind him as he tore through the precinct.

  She kept at his heels for a moment, but didn’t slip outside with him when he passed through the door.

  When he glanced back at her over his shoulder as he neared his SUV, she was standing on the other side of the glass, her big brown eyes round with disappointment.

  He almost felt bad for her.

  Almost.

  ***

  Just as Rachel returned to her desk in the bullpen, sucked in a fortifying breath, and reminded herself that she’d have to toughen up if she wanted to really join the boys’ club and make detective, Kaleb pushed his breakfast plate away from his side of the table, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and glanced up in time to see the sheriff enter the diner, nearing good ol’ Jack Quagmire who had taken up in one of the barstools at the counter to keep an even closer eye on Angel Mercer.

  The diner was busy as ever, though some customers had finished their meals and shuffled off to start their day. Over the clinks and scrapes of silverware over porcelain and murmuring conversations, Kaleb listened as one of his own initiated light pleasantries with Rick.

  How in the hell Jack could stand a man like Rick Abernathy was beyond him, that was for damn sure.

  Rick mentioned he’d like to have a chat with Angel, but she wasn’t right there flitting around behind the counter. In fact, come to think of it, she’d disappeared into the kitchen awhile ago and hadn’t come out onto the floor since.

  Kaleb sincerely hoped that Jack hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel again. The last thing this town needed, the last thing every member of his pack needed, was for Angel to suffer another unexpected transformation and raise even more questions and curiosities than had already been raised.

  Because Angel had been turned by Dante, a lost soul who was truly damned, Kaleb and all of his brothers had to figure that Angel had been damned as well, so he pulled the amethyst crystal from the front pocket of his jeans—thank God he hadn’t lost it in Courtney’s frilly one-bedroom when she’d jerked his jeans down in a lustful fit of passion last night—and held the smooth stone in his palm.

  It didn’t heat up, white-hot and searing, which would’ve indicated that somewhere nearby Angel was shifting into her shimmering white wolf form.

  Good.

  On the other side of the diner, Rick mentioned to Jack, “I’ll try her later when she’s available.”

  “Sorry about that, Sheriff,” said Jack, as Rick turned for the door and left.

  Stone cold. No dangers rising. Kaleb studied the purple amethyst crystal for a beat then returned it to his jeans, just as Lucy was rounding through to top off his mug of coffee.

  “How was everything?” she asked.

  “Excellent,” he assured her, grinning up at her and hoping she’d angle those pretty blue eyes down at him.

  He liked it when they made eye contact. It gave him a little thrill, and if he wasn’t mistaken, she liked it, too.

  “How’s your mama doin’ these days?” she asked as she sank into her hip and finally met his gaze, his mug of coffee now filled and steaming.

  “Good as ever,” he told her. “Happy that her eldest finally tied the knot.”

  “And your grandmama?” she asked politely. “How’s she gettin’ on up there near Yellowst
one? She’s gotta be, what? Almost a hundred by now, right? Miracle of miracles, you know, you ought to tell the sheriff and plan out a big, ol’ birthday party for her. Wouldn’t that be somethin’?”

  Lucy was attentive and gracious, a real lady despite her folksy manner, which he also happened to like, so he told her, “Your parents did a good job raising you, Lucy Cooper, you know that?”

  From seemingly out of nowhere, she fell silent, a somber look of remorse clouding over her otherwise friendly face. Lowering her eyes as though some kind of painful memory had just taken hold, she turned and walked briskly away from him.

  Kaleb had no idea what he’d done wrong that had caused her to rush off like that.

  “Ow!” he blurted when Leeanne thwacked him in the arm with a stack of laminated menus from behind. “What’d ya do that for?”

  “Why’d ya have to bring that up?” she snapped over him.

  “Bring what up?” he asked, confused. “That she was raised right?”

  Leeanne’s face opened up with a duh! expression and she said, “Don’t you know her folks were murdered when she was twelve? If you’re trying to get into that one’s pants, mentioning her dead parents ain’t the way to go, hot shot.”

  Chapter Two

  LUCY

  Having ducked into the brutally hot kitchen after being hit with a wave of emotion thanks to Kaleb’s off-handed and inadvertently insensitive compliment—it hadn’t been his fault, he didn’t know enough about her to cater to her sensitivities—Lucy gripped the side of the steel table in the back, leaning forward and letting her long, blonde hair spill in front of her face as tears stung and filled her eyes.

  This shouldn’t be happening. She shouldn’t be crying right now in the back of the kitchen. She hoped none of the cooks had taken notice. She didn’t want anyone paying her any mind. She should be over it by now. But she wasn’t. She’d never gotten over what had happened to her parents that day.

  Feeling her shoulders begin to tremble as a silent shudder of rolling sobs came up—good lord, she prayed she’d get a grip—she remembered that day with harrowing clarity and though she tried with every fiber of her remorseful being to shove the memory back down into the darkest corner of her mind and pull herself together, she felt completely helpless in her failure to do so.

  She’d only been twelve years old, a spindly little girl with gap teeth and bright eyes. When she’d returned home from school, having relished the crisp autumn air in her lungs the entire walk home, she’d found her mother on the living room floor.

  Blood.

  There had been so much blood, her mother lying lifelessly in a tremendous pool of it. The slick mess of it hadn’t stopped young Lucy from rushing to her mama, dropping to her knees, and trying to hold her. She’d been so heavy, dead weight, that Lucy’s skinny arms hadn’t been able to lift her. She hadn’t cried, hadn’t reacted with so much as a peep, she’d been so overcome with shock. It had been like her mind had gone blank and numb, and some eerie urge had pushed her farther through the house and into her daddy’s study.

  She’d found him dead and bloody as well, slumped over his desk.

  By the time the authorities had arrived, Lucy having only a vague awareness that she’d called the police, chaos and commotion had swept through the house. There had been so many police officers, so many shouted orders, so many questions she hadn’t been able to answer. That day and the weeks, months, and years following the murders, she’d never been told the exact manner in which her parents had been killed. Had they been stabbed or shot? Bludgeoned or gutted? Lucy never learned the truth. No one had had the heart, or gall, to tell her.

  She was jarred from the painful memory when she felt a warm hand on her back.

  “Kaleb’s an idiot,” Leeanne told her in a kind voice. “I rue the day I was drunk enough to go home with him.”

  Lucy let out a sad, wet laugh and sniffled as she released the steel countertop to face her friend.

  “You okay?” asked Leeanne.

  “Sure,” she said as she wiped her eyes. “I’m fine.”

  But her hands were shaky, which didn’t escape Leeanne’s attention one bit. “You don’t look fine. You’re trembling.”

  “Really,” she tried to insist, but even her voice was a stuttering, fragile indication that she was far from fine.

  She made her way to the row of employee lockers deeper in the back of the kitchen, Leeanne sticking by her side.

  “I just need my pills,” she said as she opened her locker and began rummaging through her purse.

  But the anti-anxiety medication that she’d been on since the day a social worker determined that she wouldn’t survive the aftermath of what had happened to her parents without pharmaceutical help wasn’t in her purse.

  “Damn,” said Lucy.

  It was no secret to her closest friends like Whitney Abernathy and Leeanne Whitaker that Lucy heavily relied on her Xanax in order to make it through bursts of uncontrollable emotion like the one she was caught in now, which was probably why Leeanne asked, “Did you leave them upstairs in your apartment?”

  Breaking down into another irrational fit of silent sobbing, Lucy nodded that she had, and Leeanne immediately steered her over to a stack of milk crates where she plopped down. Her friend left her for a brief moment then returned with a cool glass of water.

  “Drink this,” she advised as she grabbed the apartment keys out of Lucy’s purse. “I’ll be back in two shakes with your medication, okay?”

  Leeanne gave Lucy a parting rub across her back then padded off through the rear door of Angel’s Food where she would be able to round into the back entrance of the building and get to Lucy’s apartment that was directly above the diner.

  Being in a numb fog wasn’t ideal. She hated her medication for that reason. But it was better than collapsing into an uncontrollable fit of emotion like she had. If she wanted to make it through the rest of her shift, she would need to numb-out, welcome the soft fog that would settle over her as soon as she swallowed two pills, and get on with her day, avoiding Kaleb and his kind comments if she could.

  But Leeanne didn’t return in two shakes.

  She didn’t return at all.

  ***

  Back at the police station, Rachel was seated at her desk. In front of her was the file she’d put together that the sheriff didn’t think he had time to review. He had best make the time, she thought. She was staring at facts, labs reports, paper trails. This was nothing like her other attempts. Sure, she’d been trying to make detective for years now. To Rachel, it felt more like decades, she wanted it so bad. The promotion. The silver badge that would represent her dedication to keeping Devil’s Fist safe. In the past, she’d tried to go above and beyond on an investigation by trying her hand at suspect profiling—a skill she wasn’t technically trained in—and also theorizing puzzling aspects of a case such as motives and timelines that, in retrospect, didn’t necessarily jibe. She’d been met with long sighs, rolled eyes, and sometimes even laughter from the sheriff. But it would be different this time. No one could laugh at stone cold evidence.

  The first image in the open filing folder was that of Reece Gladstone’s unlawful imprisonment that one of the officers had taken before Rick had managed to snap his heavy-duty wire cutters through the iron padlock that had held the cage she’d been thrown into shut.

  Rachel leaned in, staring closely at the photo where shards of glass and red wine had covered the rear edge of the floor of her cage, lining the stone wall.

  She flipped the photo and re-read the lab results that followed.

  Rachel had collected every piece of glass she could find once Rick had gotten Reece Gladstone safely out of that cage. She’d gotten lucky in that the lower half of the wine glass had still been intact. She’d sent it off to a lab in Jackson Hole for testing, hoping to pull up a complete fingerprint, and though there’d only been a partial print that wasn’t good enough to match up with any registered offenders in the database,
there had been DNA on the glass.

  She skimmed the lab report, grazing her finger down the sheet of paper until it rested beneath the DNA conclusion at the bottom of the page. Canine. Not human.

  If the strange occurrences around the Fist that had unfolded actually hadn’t, she would’ve called the lab to ream them out something fierce, accusing them of cross contamination and incompetence. But that wasn’t the case here. She trusted the lab and its results. And the report only confirmed what she and the sheriff had been fearing. The rumors that had taken root in their small town were true. Werewolves were among them.

  Another piece of evidence she’d collected near the scene was a sack of firearms. She’d found them out in the woods when Rick had ordered her, three of his deputies, and four officers to comb the wilderness for the assailant who had unlawfully imprisoned Gladstone. That assailant, who Rachel could’ve told the sheriff would be nowhere to be found—she’d chased after him in hot pursuit, gaining on a tremendous raven-black wolf that was also after him, but lost them both—was long gone by the time the sheriff had sent them off into those woods. But Rachel hadn’t come back empty handed.

  The bullets inside of every single weapon she’d recovered were silver-plated. She hadn’t needed a lab test to know it. It had been clear as day to the naked eye, but she’d had them tested anyway.

  According to what she’d known about werewolves and according to all the reading and research she’d busied herself with over the last week, there was only one tried and true way to kill a werewolf. Shoot it with a silver bullet. And Dante had equipped himself with an arsenal of them.

  He’d also shot Dean Quinn.

  Which told Rachel that Dean, and likely all of the Quinn men who the sheriff despised so deeply, couldn’t possibly be werewolves.

  But the silver bullets weren’t what was so exciting about finding the sack of firearms. Rachel had been able to trace each and every weapon, from the rifles and shotguns to the Glocks and revolvers, because every firearm had to be registered to an owner.

  The majority just plain weren’t traceable, unfortunately. Bought with cash at gun shows, which was a loophole that Rachel herself would love to close one day. But political ventures were far too tedious for her to really get actively involved. Despite the cash sales, however, one of the firearms had been bought on the up-and-up and formally registered.