The Wolf at Bay (Big Bad Wolf)

by Charlie Adhara

  “No, it’s selfish,” she said. “I’m confident that my mother is innocent, but even a rumor can ruin a campaign, so I think you understand why I’d rather this not come up again while I’m running for office.” She paused. “I will always feel responsible for my friend’s death. But my mother is not and she certainly did not murder Alex Hardwick over nonexistent proof of a crime she did not commit.”

  Soon after, the Bell women made their goodbyes, Eliza shaking both their hands again and promising any help she could if they had more questions, and Catherine re-extending her invitation to the fund-raising event tomorrow to Park and Park alone.

  When she moved to Cooper, she rested her hand lightly on his arm and leaned in close. “Will you be staying in the Valley much longer?”

  “Why, do you think I’d enjoy coming to hear the wonderful music at the marina tomorrow, too?” Cooper said sarcastically.

  Her hand tightened just slightly. “I hope you do. Gabriel regrets he couldn’t make it tonight. But he had a previous engagement with his fiancée. Did he mention Katie this morning?”

  Cooper shrugged.

  “Sweet girl. Beautiful girl. I just thought you should know in case you planned on staying. But perhaps I’m mistaken. It’s not like there’s anything here for you to leave your nice life in DC for.” She leaned in. “Again, I’m very sorry about your father.” She squeezed his arm once and followed her daughter away into the crowd to schmooze or threaten some other poor sucker.

  “All right,” Park said, watching them walk away. “She’s not my favorite either.”

  “But seemed genuinely surprised to learn Rose was ever in and out of her house or friends with Eliza. Unfortunately.” He would dearly love to see Catherine arrested.

  Cooper checked his phone. There was a text from Dean.

  No charges. Just more questions. Don’t come. Dropping Dad home soon.

  He showed Park the message. “That’s good, right?” Park said, handing it back to him with a frown. “He cleared himself?”

  “Or it just means they want to wait until they can make an extra-solid case against him because they know when charging the ex-sheriff they’ll need it. Who knows what they’ll dig up next, but at the rate they’ve been going, it’ll be soon. Meanwhile, our investigation is back at square one.” Cooper ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands. Focus.

  “You think your father’s hiding something else?”

  “A couple hours ago I would have said he would never have assaulted someone, so who knows?”

  “I was thinking,” Park said slowly. “About what you said to Mrs. Bell and why Hardwick would confront her rather than go straight to the police.”

  “Some kind of shakedown,” Cooper said. “But I’m really starting to doubt there was any embezzlement. They were both way too confident just now.”

  “Right, but it made me wonder—why didn’t Hardwick tell the police about Rose’s blackmailer after her death? Wouldn’t he want to stop him or her from doing the same thing to someone else?”

  Cooper lowered his voice. “I thought the, uh, nature of the content would have made that impossible.”

  Park shook his head. “You heard Mrs. Hardwick. In one picture there’s an animal, in the next, a naked girl. Your average unaware is not going to see that and think, oh, duh, werewolf. They’re going to think this guy was a perv and cheapskate and he used that roll of film for more than one purpose.”

  Cooper considered that. “There wouldn’t be any, uh, in-between shots?” he asked delicately. He still had never seen a change himself but imagined it the way he’d seen on old movies. Some kind of agonized, stop-motion, American Werewolf in London–style transformation with middle stages where the person was neither fully human nor wolf.

  Park made a face, apparently guessing at his train of thought and disgusted by it. “With a disposable camera’s shutter speed? No. Which is another thing. Why hold on to the photos after Rose’s death?”

  “I don’t know, he was trash?”

  “Or,” Park said. “What if the person Hardwick was actually threatening to shake down was not Catherine, but whoever took those pictures, the real blackmailer, and he was going to use the camera as collateral?”

  “You mean the original blackmailer?” Cooper corrected wryly. “So Hardwick tries to turn the tables and gets hoed down.”

  Park shrugged. “It’s just a thought. No idea how we’d figure out who took the photos, though.”

  Cooper repeated Park’s earlier words, a suspicion forming in his mind: “He was a cheapskate. Mrs. Hardwick said there was lots of random crap on that camera besides Rose. Nature shots and ‘animals,’ yeah, but also old knickknacks and empty chairs. Who takes pictures of old knickknacks and empty chairs?”

  “Based on my last trip to Chelsea? Too many people.”

  “Besides artists. Maybe someone who needed to photograph stock? Sal West buys and sells antiques for a living. He’s also creepy enough to blackmail Rose, easy.” Cooper slapped his hands together, and a couple people around them jumped and looked over. “Let’s go have a word.”

  Park’s eyes widened. “Now?”

  “No, you’re right. We should wait for my dad’s court hearing. I’ll need something to distract me then.”

  “Fine,” Park grumbled. “We can try. But if he’s sleeping, don’t look at me to huff and puff and blow his door down.”

  * * *

  The neighborhood was quiet. Ed wasn’t home yet and the house was dark and eerily still. Cooper hoped it just meant Dean and Sophie had taken him somewhere else and not that he had been held up at the station after all.

  Mrs. Hardwick’s house was also dark. Cooper wondered if she’d gone out. Where did one go the day after discovering one was a widow? Depended on the marriage, surely. Not that she’d really been married for the last twenty-five years. Choice of outing also probably depended on whether or not she’d killed him, he reminded himself. He hoped that was the case and immediately felt bad for thinking it. But he needed this done with and over. Needed his father to stop being questioned by the FBI. Needed to get the hell out of Jagger Valley.

  There was a light on at the Bells’. Jacob home with Robert, probably. Cooper was tempted to go talk to him first. It would be satisfying, if just to piss Catherine off. But what was there to say? Rose hadn’t been sneaking in to see him, that seemed definite now, and what else could Jacob tell them that they didn’t already know? No, the Bells were a dead end. Hardwick’s death couldn’t have anything to do with the embezzlement if there was no embezzlement.

  As much as he wanted to get under Catherine’s skin, he didn’t particularly want to see Gabriel again, either. Not because of what she’d said about him being engaged. That was...fine. It actually really was. For the woman’s sake, Cooper hoped Gabriel was genuinely in love with the fiancée and not just in it to please his mother, but as far as lost loves went, Gabriel was not one he was holding on to. All of his anxiety around Gabriel came from him being a painful mistake, and Cooper was just about ready to forgive himself for that. He just didn’t need to be around Gabriel and his manipulative personality to do it.

  “Are you sure about this?” Park said as they walked up to West’s.

  “I’m sure I want to accomplish at least one thing today,” Cooper said, and knocked on the back door. This house was dark, too, but he didn’t believe West had gone out. The old man was always here, watching out those big windows of his. That was probably how he’d first noticed something was up with Rose. He’d seen her going into the woods a few times and followed her. Maybe just out of curiosity. Maybe to try and catch her using and blackmail her for that. What a bastard.

  Cooper knocked again, hard. He looked at Park, who was tilting his head and frowning. “You hear something?”

  “No,” Park said after, quietly. “There’s no one inside. But...” He traile
d off, sniffing the air.

  “What is it?”

  Park’s eyes flickered in the dark and he’d gone very still.

  “Is—”

  Park suddenly took a step back and then kicked in the door.

  “What the fuck, Oliver!” Cooper yelled. His voice echoed around the quiet field. The door had slammed into the inside wall and swung back into place, the center panel now cracked. Park didn’t answer, just pushed past it and into the house. “Seriously, what is going on with you—Oliver!” he hissed when Park disappeared deeper into the darkness.

  Cooper cursed. He looked behind him, but no one seemed to be coming out of their houses to investigate.

  Probably because they were inside, with the doors bolted, busy calling the cops, he thought miserably.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered, and followed after Park inside. Maybe he’d get lucky and share a cell with his dad. He was the only relationship in his life Cooper hadn’t had an overly personal conversation with today, and digging out an underground tunnel with a spoon was as good a time to share feelings as any.

  The inside of the house was pitch-black, much darker than the outside without the moon or the faint glow from the Bells’ windows. It was also so quiet that Cooper’s own breathing sounded like furnace bellows. He squinted, desperately trying to see. Something about the space felt wrong, still and watchful, and his scars tightened painfully. He wished he had his gun or Taser. Or frankly, his see-in-the-dark partner would do in a pinch.

  Very slowly his eyes adjusted and the shadows around him started to take shape. Many shapes. Tall and surrounding him.

  Cooper’s hands went up into fight position, and his heart beat deafeningly in his ears until he recognized the shadows as stacked furniture. Lots of it. Ornate chairs standing on tables. Hip-high vases that reflected the very little moonlight that was coming in from the outside. Art deco lamps with swooping necks, looking naked with no bulbs in their gaping mouths. For someone who never left the house, how did West transport all this stuff?

  Cooper walked through the foyer into a dark living room equally packed with antiques. There were stacks leaning against the walls and tables, covered in thick cloth canvases here, as well. He lifted one and found an oil painting of a woman reclining on a grass clearing, her translucent white gown slipping down over even whiter breasts while some sort of half man-half goat creature poured wine from a golden chalice into her mouth. Was everyone having a better weekend than him?

  “Oliver?” Cooper called again, softly, the air was so heavy it felt impossible to speak over a whisper, and heard a creaking above him. He located the stairs, which were also stacked with boxes and tchotchkes, and carefully picked his way up them without tripping to the second floor.

  The first room he poked his head into was clearly West’s bedroom. A huge canopied bed took up the majority of the space. Beside it a camera sat on a tripod. It was pointed out the window toward the field and not—thank you, god—at the bed.

  The flash in the window, Cooper thought. How many years had West sat up here spying on his neighbors? He shuddered. West could have been watching them in the field. With a lens like that he could even have seen Park’s eyes change, which explained those weird little comments about a big man like him feeling confined in the city he’d been dropping this morning. He would have recognized what Park was, just like Rose all those years ago.

  A wave of anger swept through Cooper like a fever. Had there been other wolves since then? Other lives ruined?

  Across from the window and tripod, there was a neat little Queen Anne against the wall. On it a laptop sat open, its screen still on and casting a white-blue glow around the room. A Word doc file was open. Cooper moved closer to read:

  I killed Alex Hardwick. I’m sorry. I can’t go to jail.

  “Hello?” Cooper yelled, very loudly now. The noise felt bad and invasive in this house.

  “Here,” Park called back, and Cooper followed his voice down the hall and finally into a dark bathroom. For a moment the only thing he could see was Park’s eyes, inhumanly reflective and the brightest thing in the room. Then he noticed the sleeves of Park’s shirt were plastered to his skin and dripping onto the tile.

  “What’s going on?” Cooper said, but by then even he could smell the metallic tang in the air.

  Park reached behind them and flipped the light on. Cooper winced at the sudden brightness and reached up to cover his eyes until the spots cleared. Then he saw West in the bathtub, naked and half-submerged in a pool of bloody water.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Sal West bought and sold antiques with a blackmail business on the side. He takes nude photos of Rose Daugherty without her permission and threatens to go public with them unless she pays him. Daugherty confides in her neighbor Alex Hardwick, who provides the cash in order to identify the blackmailer, then steals the photos. West reports a break-in but can’t admit what was actually taken without confessing his own crime. He confronts Hardwick instead and things go badly. So he kills him and buries him under your gazebo.”

  Agent Joon took a deep breath and held up her hand when Cooper tried to speak. “I’m not done. Twenty-five years later, Hardwick’s skeleton is dug up and, afraid that his crimes would come to light, West confesses to his murder in a suicide note and slits his own wrists. Now tell me, is that right so far?”

  Cooper leaned back in his chair and pressed his thumbs into his aching eyes, trying to get at the pounding headache behind them. They’d been in West’s living room for hours while the techs processed the scene upstairs. Beside him, Park was sitting on the edge of his seat, head in his hands, and tapping his foot manically. It wasn’t helping the headache or the interrogation.

  “Yes. That’s my interpretation of things.”

  “Is it your interpretation?” Primelles said from his position leaning against the wall behind a seated Joon. “Or is it the truth, Mr. Dayton?”

  “I can only tell you what I think. I don’t know anything.”

  “Clearly.”

  Joon held up her hand again, this time to silence her partner. “Let’s, for argument’s sake, say we believe you. Let’s say that West was a blackmailer. It isn’t incongruous with what we know about the man. Then let’s say that he was blackmailing the Daugherty girl with nude photos. Not exactly blackmail material, being naked, but I can accept it. We all do crazy things to avoid being embarrassed. Then you say instead of going to the police, Daugherty asks a neighbor for help. Now this one’s a little harder for me to wrap my little head around. By your own accord they had no relationship prior to this, so why Hardwick?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, which was good because Cooper didn’t have one. At least not one he could share with the unaware FBI. “But okay, I can accept that, too. Teenagers do crazy things. Hardwick then takes out thousands of dollars for a girl he barely knows, which neatly explains those pesky little cash withdrawals, robs West, and then holds on to the camera that Mrs. Hardwick remembers and tells you about twenty-five years later. Now, even if that’s right, it still doesn’t explain why you two broke into Mr. West’s house this evening and just happened to discover his body.”

  “We were here to ask Mr. West some questions,” Cooper repeated for the hundredth time.

  “And when a seventy-two-year-old man didn’t immediately answer his door at nine o’clock at night, you broke it down? Remind me, who is it that decided that?”

  Park picked his head up from his hands, though his leg didn’t stop jumping. “That was me. I had reason to believe Mr. West was in distress.”

  Joon’s face puckered in disbelief. “And what was it that gave you that impression?”

  Park shook his head. “Have you called my supervisor yet? Margaret Cola.”

  “Mr. Park, you don’t seem to understand the situation you’re in. You’re not in the position to be demanding we do anything. Unless
this Cola woman is the one who forced you to break and enter a man’s home this evening, I really don’t see what she has to do with you answering my question.”

  Park crossed his arms and closed his eyes.

  “Are we boring you, Mr. Park?” Primelles asked.

  Park bit his lip and didn’t answer.

  “What does why we’re here have to do with anything?” Cooper said. “If you want to charge us with B and E, fine, go ahead. It wouldn’t stand up a minute in court. And it won’t change the fact that West killed himself or that there’s a suicide note upstairs confessing to Hardwick’s murder. If you have another theory as to why that happened, I would love to hear it, but it’s not our job to come up with a satisfying motive for you.”

  “No, that’s true,” Joon said thoughtfully. “And I’d agree with you totally...if West had killed himself. But he didn’t.”

  Cooper stared. Beside him even Park’s leg stopped twitching for a moment before starting up again, worse than before. “What are you talking about? I saw the body. I saw the note.”

  “Our ME has yet to give an official statement, but Sal West sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the skull minutes before his death. The wound didn’t have time to coagulate and would likely have made West lose consciousness.”

  “So, he slipped and fell in the bathtub.”

  “How many suicides have you seen where the person slits their wrists while standing up? There was also no evidence of his skull hitting the bathtub. We did, however, find blood in the kitchen.” Joon was watching Cooper critically. Analyzing his reaction, surely. “West was murdered and his suicide staged. Sloppily, at that.”

  Cooper swallowed, his throat so dry it caught and clicked. “Why would anyone do that?” he asked roughly.

  “Well, we can assume it’s the same person who wrote that note. In other words, someone who wanted very much for us to think West killed Hardwick and to stop our investigation.”

  “Hardwick’s murderer,” Cooper breathed.

  “That’s certainly a possibility,” Joon said, nodding slowly. “Another possibility is it’s someone who cares about Hardwick’s killer. Someone who knew we were getting closer to making an arrest and tried to throw us off the trail.”