“It’s nice to meet you, Sue,” said Anna. “I’m surprised to hear about the traffic as well.”
“Apparently,” said Sue. “Some idiot set off some fireworks and, seeing as it is the middle of winter and we are not nearing any major holidays, some of the town’s… simpler folks thought they were hearing gunshots. Next thing you know people start whizzing down the highway and cause a major crash.”
“Oh my goodness!” said Stella. “I hope everyone is alright.”
“Dunno,” said Sue. “I didn’t stick around long enough to see. I got passed the jam and came right here.”
Anna wasn’t sure why she was telling her all this. Maybe Sue thought being callous and focused strictly on the job at hand would win her points with Anna. Anna, however, wasn’t the type to give and take points that easily, it was harder than that to make any sort of impression on her. Stella, on the other hand, was impressionable, and as Sue continued to talk about how stupid some people in Idle Waters were and how annoyed she was at traffic, it was obvious she was losing dozens of points with the receptionist.
“Listen,” said Anna, interrupting Sue’s little tirade. “We need to go over some things and then I need you to start tailing this guy right away. You’re here for the whole night shift, correct?”
“Yes mam’,” said Sue. “Another security guard should be coming around tomorrow morning to relieve me.”
“Okay, good,” said Anna. “I’m going to come with you for the first little while. I’d like to see where Sam Cottons live, if you don’t mind me crashing the stake out?”
“Not at all,” said Sue.
“I take it you won’t be home for dinner than?” said Stella. “I was going to make fettuccine.”
“Sorry Stella,” said Anna. “Tomorrow night, promise.” She turned back to Sue. “Come with me to my desk, I want you to read over some things, and I’d like to ask you a few questions if we have time.”
Sue followed her to her desk and Stella said goodbye, heading out into the bitter cold.
It was another hour before Sue and Anna hit the road in search of Sam Cottons. They had it on pretty good authority that Sam liked to spend his Friday nights at a local bar called Idle Spirits and Brewery. Pulling into the large plot of dirt which served as the parking lot for the bar, Anna immediately spotted Sam’s truck.
“That’s his,” she said pointing at the hunk of metal. “He’s here.”
“I’ll park around the back of the bar,” said Sue. “That way we can watch his car but we won’t be so out in plain sight.”
“Good thinking. This is a nice car, which is nice when you’re doing long stake outs, but it sort of sticks out around here amongst all the run down clunkers.”
“I can request a different car for the next shift,” said Sue. “We have less obvious vehicles, but since Noah didn’t tell me there were any specifications regarding the car, I picked the one I like best. It has heated seats.” She pushed a button right above the cup holders and Anna felt warmth begin to emanate from, onto her legs.
Sue pulled into a spot near the dumpsters. This gave them a good vantage point to see the driver's seat of Sam’s car while also appearing as inconspicuous as possible. She turned the engine off, which killed the seat heaters, but they were both bundled up pretty tight—enough to keep them warm in the car for at least an hour.
“How much did Noah tell you about this particular assignment?”
Sue shrugged. “Not much I didn’t already know. I’ve been working security at the Oliver’s place for a while now, even before Valerie was murdered, and these murders are all anyone seems to talk about up there. I was a little surprised to hear that it was Sam Cottons we were investigating.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Sam and Valerie used to date.”
Anna’s breath caught in her chest. “They used to date?”
“Yeah, back in high school,” said Sue.
Anna shook her head. “What? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Does Noah know?”
“Not sure,” said Sue. “I only know because Valerie talked to me about it a few weeks before she died.”
“Why was she talking to you about her high school love life?”
Sue sighed. “Usually I don’t like to get this too close to clients. I like to do my job, get in, get out, and don’t get attached. But I had a sort of soft spot for Valerie, she reminded me a lot of myself when I was her age. Anyway, one day, maybe two weeks before she was murdered, somebody left a dozen red roses on the front porch and a card that said, ‘I’m sorry. Can we talk?’ I found the flowers and at first I thought they were for Mrs. Oliver from her husband, since the two of them had gotten into a very loud, very public fight just the day before.” Sue leaned back in her seat and undid her seatbelt. “I brought them inside the house where Valerie was sitting at the kitchen table. She took the flowers and rolled her eyes, saying she cannot believe Sam was still trying to win her back.
“I wasn’t going to ask her about it at first, seeing as it was none of my business, but then I noticed she was tearing up a little while reading the card. I inquired, as politely as possible, and she told me that they had a terrible break up just before Senior prom and Sam has been trying ever since to earn her forgiveness.”
“Did she say why the two of them broke up?” asked Anna.
Sue nodded. “I guess Sam changed a lot. Valerie didn’t say it outright, but I could tell from the changes she was explaining that Sam was starting to go through his transition from human to werewolf.”
“At eighteen?” Anna gawked. “That’s how late they start changing?”
“I don’t know much about it,” said Sue. “Maybe he was a late bloomer?”
Anna nodded, accepting this explanation for now. “Go on.”
“Valerie said these changes made him more aggressive and antagonist. Apparently, Sam used to be a really sweet, gentle kid. Then, one day, he started hanging out with Pauly more and Valerie saw less and less of him. When they went to dinner at Sal’s before the dance, Sam and Pauly started messing with a waiter or something, I can’t remember exactly, but Valerie said she’d had enough, that Sam wasn’t the person she’d fallen in love with, and she walked out. That was that.”
Anna reached into her bag and pulled out a notepad and a pen. She quickly jotted down the key points in the story Sue had just told her, read them back to herself, and tried to figure out how these new pieces fit into the puzzle.
“Does that change your theory much?” Sue asked.
“That,” said Anna. “Changes everything.”
Sam spent nearly three hours in the bar. After sitting for close to two, Anna told Sue she should turn the car back on for a minute, so they can have the heat on and warm up a bit. They did this twice more before Sam stumbled out into the parking lot, Pauly on his heels, and headed for his car. He was yelling something, but Anna couldn’t quite hear what he was saying and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by rolling down her window.
Sue waited until Sam got in his car and was pulling out of the parking lot before she turned the key in the ignition and began to follow them. She kept the headlights off.
He drove manically, swerving into the other lane more than once. Luckily, it was late enough that not many people were on the road. Seeing as Anna was the main deputy of this area, and the Sheriff was probably in bed sleeping right now, she knew there was little chance of Sam getting pulled over. Unless there was a cop from one of the nearby towns that happened to be driving through, in which case, she and Sue would also be in trouble seeing as they were driving without their lights on and speeding in order to keep up with Sam.
Sam turned off the main road and onto a dirt one a few miles from the town square. Anna looked down at her file and asked Sue if she knew whether or not this was where Sam lived. “It has his address here,” Anna said. “But being knew to the town, the street name and zip code don’t mean much to me.”
Sue glanced down at the sheet of paper
, where Anna was pointing to the scribbled address. “That’s in a neighborhood not too far from the Oliver house. It must be his parents address.”
“I take it from your tone we are not currently heading towards that neighborhood.”
Sue shook her head. “No mam’, we are headed to the area locally referred to as ‘the gravels’. It’s where all the drug attics and night walkers hang out.”
Sure enough, as the two women drove further down the road, Anna, who had to squint to see in the dark, started to notice the boarded up houses with bottles and various trash items strewn about the now dead lawns.
Sam’s car stopped at the fork in the road up ahead and he went to the right. When they reached the fork, Sue let the car sit for a moment. “I was getting too close to him,” she said. “I need to make sure we are far enough to not be seen.”
Up ahead, Anna saw Sam’s car stop and pull into the driveway of a run-down house with a giant hole in the ceiling.
“He stopped,” she said.
“Then we should probably stop,” said Sue. She brought the car over to the shoulder and put it in park. “It’s so quiet out here at night, he will hear the engine if we approach the house.”
“But I can’t see anything from here!” said Anna. “I need to know who he and Pauly are meeting in that house.”
“I have a camera that can zoom in pretty far,” said Sue. She reached behind her seat and pulled a big leather bag from the floor of the backseat. It took her a moment to assemble her camera, twisting the massive lens onto the base and taking a few test shots. She held the thing up to her eye and peered through. “I can see all the way into the living room window.”
“Really?” Anna asked, impressed.
“Yeah, but it’s too dark to make anything out… Oh wait! They turned a light on, now I can see.” She clicked another photo and then handed it over to Anna.
The weight of the camera took Anna by surprise and she nearly dropped the thing into her lap. She had to use both hands to steady it, but once she got a good grip, she was able to easily figure out how to zoom. At first, the image was blurry, but the camera soon corrected itself and Anna could see through the window two figures. One of them was Sam, she guessed, since she could make out a bright red shirt like the one he had been wearing when he left the bar. The other figure was noticeably taller than Sam, bigger in general, which told Anna it likely wasn’t Pauly since he and Sam were close to the same size. She took a picture and then waited while the two men had, what appeared to be, a very heated conversation. They were both waving their arms and the bigger guy eventually reached out and shoved Sam.
“Can we really not get any closer?” asked Anna. “I can barely see anything.”
“You can come back tomorrow on the second shift, during the day, maybe you will be able to see more then, but this is as close as I am willing to get.” Sue raised her eyebrows and gave Anna a sort of ‘sorry, but I’m not sorry’ look. “I have to follow protocol, and this is how Noah has trained me to do stakeouts.”
“If he’s going to be so particular about these things,” said Anna. “Why doesn’t he just come and do the job himself?” Anna handed the camera back to Sue and relaxed into her seat. She wasn’t going to get any more information from this far away, so she figured she might as well take a beat.
“Noah doesn’t do much investigating these days,” said Sue.
“Oh?” said Anna. “I guess why do the dirty work if you have the money to hire other people to do it.”
“It’s not like that,” said Sue. “He messed up a really important case a few months back and it really shook him.”
“What was the case?”
Sue drew her eye away from the camera and glanced at Anna. “Ever heard of Senator Lewtin?”
Lewtin. Lewtin. Why did that name sound so familiar?
“Maybe,” said Anna. “What about him?”
“Noah was hired as a bodyguard. Lewtin asked for him specifically, he wanted the best of the best. The senator was worried he was being targeted by a hate group that didn’t appreciate his liberal politics. He was getting death threats, for both him and his family.”
Sue paused and Anna let out a short whistle. “Well, aren’t you just a well of knowledge. So what happened?”
“Noah worked for him for a while, kept him safe, and the two became good friends. Then one day, Noah dropped his guard for a slip second, and a sniper got Lewtin, right in the neck.” Sue made a gross noise in the back of her throat and touched her fingers to the side of her neck.
Anna took a deep breath in. “That’s heavy.”
Sue laughed. “Everything is heavy in our line of work.”
A week later, Anna looked over her notes from the various stakeouts. She herself had been on three, and the for rest she insisted that whichever one of Noah’s employees was working the shift took extensive notes on the goings on of Sam Cottons.
After five straight days of tailing the guy and over a dozen pages of notes, Anna had nothing. Besides the first night, when him and Sue followed Sam to the gravels, he exhibited no suspicious behavior. He had gone home to his parents’ house around two thirty that night, and from then on he was only ever found there, at his dad’s auto shop where he worked, and at the bar. He didn’t talk to anyone besides Pauly and he never once went back to the abandoned house.
“I can’t believe this,” said Anna. She was rifling through the notes for what had to be the twentieth time, but couldn’t find anything new. “He had to know we were following him, right?” She looked up at Stella, who was sitting on the couch knitting. She’d insisted Anna come home from the office that night at a reasonable hour, instead of staying late as she had every night that week. Of course, Anna only agreed to come back to Stella’s under the condition she could bring her files home with her.
“That’s the only explanation,” Anna continued. “I mean, why else would Sam suddenly start acting all normal, going to work and sleeping at home like nothing’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing really is wrong,” said Stella. “Maybe Sam got in a fight with that guy the other night because he said he didn’t want to be a part of their shenanigans anymore.”
“It doesn’t just work like that,” said Anna. “If this gang is behind all these murders, they are not the type to just let one of their men go his own way.”
“Then maybe Sam wasn’t a part of any of this at all,” said Stella. “Maybe he was in the gravel that night because he… was… uh…. volunteering!”
“Volunteering?”
“Yeah, there’s a soup kitchen down there, my family used to volunteer there every Christmas.”
“It was the middle of the night, Stella,” said Anna. “And he wasn’t at a soup kitchen.”
“Okay fine!” Stella put her knitting down in her lap. “Then maybe was buying drugs or a prostitute, but that doesn’t mean he’s been murdering people!”
“Why are you defending him?” said Anna. “You sound just like Sheriff Wells.”
“It’s just… I knew Sam, I used to give him piano lessons when he was in middle school. He was a really good little boy, so polite and talented. I just have a hard time believing he’s become this monster you are making him out to be.”
“I told you what Sue said, Valerie thinks he started changing once his wolf side started to develop,” said Anna. “He isn’t the same Sam you used to know.”
“Well that may be, but I’ll tell you what, if Sam really did change, if he really did start to become violent, I don’t think it’s the wolf that did it to him, I think it was his no-good father.”
“Mr. Cottons?”
Stella nodded. “He was always so hard on Sam, and… not to spread rumors but... “ She looked around as if to make sure nobody was listening in at 10:30 in the comfort of her own home. “I think he may have abused the boy.”
“You think?”
“Well I never actually saw it,” she admitted. “But sometimes Sam would come to his piano lesson with bruis
es on his arms and he was always so scared of being late when his father came to pick him up. He’d insist on sitting outside, fifteen minutes before his lesson was over, that way his father didn’t have to wait for a single second.”
Anna looked back down at her notes and made a new one. Sam - May have been abused. Regardless of whether or not it was true, his childhood trauma didn’t excuse him for his crimes. If he did have something to do with these murders, he was going to answer for them, Anna would make sure of that.
She was still up two hours later when the phone rang. Anna hurried to pick it up before the shrill noise woke Stella, who had gone to bed some time before.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Anna?”
“... Yes.”
“It’s Noah.”
Anna’s body relaxed. “Oh. Hi.”
“How are you?”
She let out a small laugh. “Just tell me why you are calling. It’s late and I don’t have time for pleasantries.”
“I was wondering if you wanted to go on a few errands with me tomorrow?”
“Errands?” Anna balanced the receiver between her ear and shoulder and crossed her arms. “Like grocery shopping and car washing?”
“No,” said Noah. “Like investigative errands. I want to bring you with me to interview the youngest Oliver children. I was hoping your intuition might be able to pick up on something. We could go for lunch or something afterwards. My treat.”
“How about after we talk to them we go to the gravel and check out the abandoned house Sam visited the other night? I’ve been so busy this week I haven’t had a chance to go back there.”
“Sounds very romantic.”
Anna opened her mouth, about to say something playful back, flirt even, but then she paused. “Just pick me up at the office okay? Let’s say nine?”
“You’re going in on a Saturday? Do you ever take a break?”
“Not until a case is solved,” she said.
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