The Wolf at the Door

by Charlie Adhara

  Cooper looked at Miller expecting a “told you so” expression, but Miller wasn’t paying attention. He had a dark look on his face and was watching the interaction between Park and Jenny closely. Annoyed at being edged out, probably. Now that she was genuinely pleased to see someone, it was painfully obvious how disinterested in him she’d been before.

  “Agent Park, I didn’t know you’d been to Florence before,” Miller said abruptly.

  Park blinked at him and tilted his head. “I grew up here.”

  “Here? In Florence?” Cooper asked, stunned.

  Park shrugged and looked away. What, he wasn’t sure now? “Pretty much. On the edge of town.”

  There was an odd, casual tone to his voice. Was Cooper supposed to have known this? It certainly fit what he’d seen so far. Cooper could easily picture Park growing up in a small town like this. The sort of place where people knew him and said things like “That Park boy. Damn good kid.” The ease he had with his own body and status in the world, his natural take-charge and take-care attitude. The way he seemed so...untouchable. The whole town had probably knelt at his feet.

  Cooper had grown up in a small town like that, too. Except he’d been the kid scowling in the back seat, listening to his father dote on the latest rising star. Why can’t you be more like him, son?

  “Surprised you didn’t know,” Jenny said to Miller. “The Parks are one of the oldest families around town.”

  Oh. That kind of family. Cooper’s surprise soured to unease. He had known the Trust agent they were pairing him with was familiar with some of the local wolves, but he didn’t realize “familiar” was short for goddamn family reunions.

  “The Parks who live out by Hyde?” Miller asked.

  “That’s right,” Park said, though he sounded less pleased with it than even Cooper, and Cooper was pissed. He couldn’t believe Park still had immediate family in the area. What if they were involved? Jefferson would have called the whole thing a conspirashit, and Cooper had to agree. Make it work, indeed. Park was making it work for himself, all right.

  Park was watching him closely. “My family isn’t here now and haven’t been in town for a while,” he said directly to Cooper, as if they were alone in a room, and then, after a pause, added in a more casual tone, “They always spend the summers and vacations in Canada. But we’d come back for the school in Florence. My nieces and nephews do too now.”

  “Woot, woot! Florence High represent!” Jenny said, and jokingly pumped her fist in the air. “I ran track with his big sister Camille. Shit, she was fast. I thought for sure she’d go pro or something.”

  Park nodded solemnly. “She absolutely could have, if she wasn’t the laziest person I’ve ever known,” he said, and Jenny giggled.

  “I’ll tell her you said that, you little shit,” she said, shoving him, and Park swayed backward believably, as though she didn’t only come up to his shoulder. “Same bratty little brother. You would not believe how annoying this guy was back then. Always trying to stick his nose into everything, get everyone to play with him, read to him, carry him around. Such a middle child, oh my god. And then his little lip would get all trembly when you told him to go away.”

  Park cleared his throat. It was the first time Cooper had seen him look distinctly uncomfortable. “I think you’re confusing me with one of my younger brothers.” He glanced at Cooper so quickly he may have imagined it.

  “Nope. That was definitely you.” Jenny grinned slyly. “The way I hear it, you’re still a slut for attention.”

  Park gave Jenny his most bland smile yet, though Cooper could swear he saw something flash in his eyes and it made the scars across his belly twitch. “Cam better hope she’s still fast,” Park said evenly.

  Jenny eventually pulled Park away to pay for his food. Cooper watched them bump shoulders by the register, obviously teasing each other comfortably. Did Jenny still see the kid brother of an old school friend or...what? He jumped when Miller slapped a couple of bills on the bar.

  “I’m heading out.” Miller stood, flexing his shoulders, a sour look on his face, leaving his second beer untouched.

  Cooper stood too, unwilling to be left behind to watch his partner charm yet more locals. Miller definitely didn’t want to see it and was already heading toward the door. “See you in the morning, Miller,” Cooper said, and Miller raised a twitchy hand over his shoulder in reply.

  Cooper gave him a couple minutes’ head start before leaving as well. He didn’t want to get caught awkwardly walking behind Miller down Main Street.

  Park was still chatting with Jenny, who was laughing and loading a huge bag of takeaway with multiple food containers. For both of them? Was Park meeting someone else? At this hour? That could be only one kind of meeting. But who knew how many other old friends he had hanging around town?

  Cooper left the bar without saying goodbye. He didn’t want to leave so late that he got Park walking awkwardly behind him, either. If Park was even planning on returning to the motel. He glared around the deserted street as if Park’s secret dinner companion was waiting for him out here. But all he saw were a few empty parked cars, including a police cruiser. Miller must have kept walking to clear his head. The idiot was so obviously jealous of the waitress and Park.

  Yeah, while the way you’re acting isn’t idiotic at all.

  Cooper stopped short. It wasn’t the same. He was not jealous, for god’s sake.

  Back in his room Cooper felt too twitchy to go straight to bed. He waited, pacing behind his closed curtain, until he saw a tall, broad shadow pass his room on the outside walkway. For just a moment the shadow seemed to hesitate outside his window and Cooper held his breath. But the shadow moved on and Cooper wondered if he had imagined it.

  He waited, watching, but no one followed. Park was alone.

  Cooper told himself his relief was because he didn’t want to have to confront Park on code of conduct.

  That lie kept him up for hours.

  * * *

  Cooper downed the last dregs of his second coffee and resisted the urge to crush the flimsy paper cup in his hand. He’d had a dissatisfying night’s sleep and it had been an equally dissatisfying morning reading through statements and looking for connections between the victims. Any hope he’d had of Florence PD already assembling a clear timeline or solid groundwork investigation was shot. Nobody liked doing paperwork, but that was no excuse for the sloppiness here.

  Park, who had been frowning at the same page for five minutes—not that Cooper was watching or anything—sighed and tossed his folder onto the conference table they’d taken over that morning. He had already looked through Bornestein and Gould’s known associates for names he recognized as wolves, to no avail. Not a single friend or acquaintance in common, wolf or not.

  “I think we should check out the vics’ homes,” Cooper said. His voice sounded uncomfortably loud after hours of near silence. They’d hardly spoken six words that morning. Cooper, still unsettled by the knowledge that there were multiple Parks in this town, had been more than a little standoffish when he’d found Park tucking into an absurd amount of carbs in the motel’s buffet room that morning. Park, either picking up on Cooper’s mood or with his own shit to think about, hadn’t pushed conversation.

  But now Cooper felt oddly anxious to talk to Park. Odd not because he was so used to company and chatty partners—god knew Jefferson was no social butterfly—but because he usually hated having to talk it out with anyone. Ever. But he was getting tired of watching the wolf out of the corner of his eye and not knowing what was going on behind that unflappable façade. It wasn’t often Cooper couldn’t get a clear read on someone.

  “What do you think, ah, of doing that?”

  Park looked at him like he was just as puzzling as the papers they’d slogged through for the past two hours. “I think it’s a good idea.”

  I think it was
my idea yesterday, Cooper mentally filled in Park’s hesitation. He nodded and went to look for the chief. He sensed Park following on his six at a slightly wary distance.

  Brown had her desk phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. A spread of maps covered her desk. “I got to go. Call me back. Please.” Chief Brown hesitated and then hung up the phone. She looked exhausted, new lines spider-webbing around her mouth and a painfully tight jaw.

  “Well, the public’s officially named the killer the ‘Swamp Slasher,’” she said, and Cooper winced. “Tell me you got something from the statements.”

  “Nothing concrete.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to complain about the sloppy state of the files. “Any progress on identifying John Doe?”

  “No. No prints on file, no matching missing person reports across the county. Hell, we even checked dental records locally. Nothing.”

  “Agent Park and I want to check out the victims’ homes.”

  “Bornestein’s?”

  “And Gould’s.”

  “Robbie Gould lives with his mother...” Brown trailed off. She sounded reluctant. What did she expect Cooper to say? Oh, never mind then?

  Dealing with a victim’s family was never pleasant, but that was the job. If it wasn’t a bad time, the bureau wouldn’t be there. Avoiding Gould’s house to spare his mother would be insane. Was the chief seriously still hoping the two were unrelated? Or was something else going on?

  Cooper said, “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to her as well. There are some gaps in the timeline.”

  “If you think so.” The chief sighed and picked up her phone again. “Delano, send Tim in to my office, please.” She hung up. “Officer Harris can take you out there.”

  Harris entered the office a moment later. He looked as exhausted as Brown but still smiled that same bulldog grin. “Morning, boys. Chief, you wanted me?”

  “I need you to take the agents to Gould’s and Bornestein’s.”

  Harris scratched at his face, rough with blond bristle this morning. “I was just heading out to the search site, Chief.”

  “I need you to make introductions to Kelly. Gould’s mother,” she explained.

  Harris’s normally cheerful face seemed forced, his eyes tired. Cooper understood it was frustrating for a man like Harris who wanted to be on the front lines to be demoted to babysitter. Cooper said, “Miller can take us.”

  “Miller’s out sick this morning,” Brown said.

  Out sick? What was this, middle school? “Is that like him?”

  “No. And it’s damn shitty timing to start,” Brown said, and exchanged a pointed look with Harris.

  Cooper thought of how edgy Miller had been last night. How quickly he’d rushed out of there. Perhaps he’d been ill rather than jealous last night. He’d also been acting odd, sticking to those stupid theories, and tossed back his beer rather quickly. He couldn’t possibly be calling out because he was hungover, could he?

  With a young man’s life on the line, it was damn irresponsible. Surprising too, given how eager to impress his superiors Miller had seemed. Though now that Cooper thought about it, it was those types of people who made the most foolish mistakes of them all. As a recovering people-pleaser himself, he should know.

  * * *

  Park and Cooper followed Officer Harris’s dark green pickup in the rental down more pothole-littered roads that gradually gave up pretending to be paved and turned right to dirt. Kyle Bornestein lived by himself in a mobile park at the edge of town, so they’d decided to go to the Goulds’ first.

  Cooper tried to discreetly watch Park drive in his peripheral, without staring directly at him. “So. Family in the area. I didn’t know.”

  Park hummed.

  Cooper pushed. “‘Family’ meaning...?”

  “The normal stuff,” Park started slowly, and seemed to consider Cooper for a moment. “My five siblings and their respective families, a few aunts and uncles, my grandparents.”

  “What about you? Do you have a ‘respective’ family?”

  “No.”

  “And they all live together?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Parents?”

  Park hesitated. “No,” he said. “I lost them.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It was years ago. We were all raised by my grandparents.”

  “Here in Florence.”

  “Seasonally. Everyone’s in Canada now. Have been for over a month.”

  “Already establishing alibis?” Cooper said, which was maybe unfair but they were dealing with a wolf serial killer here. Between the two of them, Park wasn’t going to be the one with a critical eye for investigating his own family.

  Park didn’t even blink. It was like he’d been expecting this. “Yes, Agent Dayton. That was the plan we all hatched together. They’d murder people and then I would specifically request to be put on the case so the BSI would be sure to know the Parks are werewolves. You got us bang to rights, guv’nor.”

  Cooper smiled despite himself. “Why did you ask to be put on this case?”

  “I grew up here. I didn’t like the idea of someone hunting here on my land.”

  Cooper studied him. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t buy it.”

  Park looked amused. “You’d prefer to think I requested this case because one of my family members is the killer?”

  “No, no,” Cooper said. “You’re right. That would be stupid. And regardless of everything else, you’re obviously not stupid.”

  “Just when I think you can’t get any sweeter, Special Agent Cooper Dayton, you add another coat of sugar,” Park said dryly. “You tell me then, why am I on this case?”

  “I don’t know why,” Cooper said honestly. “But I know it’s not some bullshit territorial wolf no-hunting-on-my-land thing.”

  “Oh? I didn’t realize they taught wolf psychology in your criminology master’s program,” Park said.

  Cooper felt a brief jolt of surprise that Park had looked into his background and responded a little huffily, “You don’t need to know wolf psychology to pick up on the obvious. Your grandparents, your siblings, your nieces and nephews are all living here together or—” he held up his hand to cut off any protest “—traipsing over the border for the season, I know. Multiple generations all sticking together and you’re the only one plane-distance away? You’re not part of your family pack. Thus you have no...primal urge to protect their land.” It was a total shot in the dark, but as he said it Cooper felt confident he was right.

  Park was looking at him with a curious expression on his face. “What?” Cooper said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Not wrong,” Park said finally, and Cooper grinned, absurdly pleased with his off-the-cuff analysis. “You’re a lot more sensitive than you like to pretend to be,” Park continued, and the grin slid off Cooper’s face.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Sensitive? As in weak?

  “No, I didn’t mean sensitive in that way,” Park said.

  “In what way?”

  “In whatever way that’s got your fur up, Dayton. I mean sensitive like you’re in tune to things around you. You pretend to be this act-first, think-later guy, but you pay attention. You’ve got a knack for noticing the little things.”

  Cooper relaxed a little. “Reading cues is part of the FBI training. We’re all trained to do it.”

  Park smiled at him. Clearly it was a “whatever you want to tell yourself” smile. “I don’t notice that much,” Cooper mumbled, bizarrely self-conscious all of a sudden. The hell was he doing? Was he so bent on arguing with Park that he couldn’t even take a compliment?

  Cooper tried to shift the conversation. “I don’t even know your first name.”

  “That right?” Park said seriously.

  Cooper waited for him to say something el
se. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to tell him his name, Cooper muttered, “Fuck you.” He looked out the window as Park laughed. He had a nice laugh, warm and low. Cooper shifted in his seat. “Christ, how far out is this place? I thought Florence was a small town.”

  “Small population,” Park said. “Lots of—” He stopped when Cooper’s cell vibrated. Sheriff Dayton, the screen said. Some people thought it was odd he had his dad listed like that, but they had never met the sheriff. Warm and fuzzy, he was not. Cooper let it ring and put it back in his pocket.

  “So. Robert Gould. Twenty-three. Lives with his single mother. Works part-time doing trail maintenance for the Forest Service,” Cooper said, reciting the bare facts that had been in the vic profile. “What else do we know about him?” He hesitated, remembering something Miller had said yesterday. “Is he a wolf?”

  Park raised his eyebrows at that. “Gould? No. I would have told you by now if he was. He’s a big guy, though. Got into a lot of, ah, physical altercations. He was the Florence High School wrestling team’s star. Everyone thought wrestling was his ticket out, including Robert. He’d walk on the mat and the crowd would chant, ‘Go for the Gould.’”

  Cooper snorted. “That doesn’t even make sense unless they were rooting for his opponents.”

  “And you say you don’t notice things. With insight like that I’d say we’re close to cracking this case wide-open.”

  “You’re in a chipper mood today.”

  “You’re in a talkative one,” Park replied, as if that explained it. Maybe it did. Cooper thought about what the waitress, Jenny, had said last night. About Park being a middle child and...the other thing. He shifted in his seat. Had he really been so standoffish yesterday? He winced.

  “Okay, okay. So what happened to Gould’s dreams? His big ticket out?”

  “Life happened. Ticket out didn’t have sufficient fare for the big, bad world. Dropped out of school. Disillusioned and destitute, he returned home to live with Mom after a couple of years. Did a lot of drinking. Did a lot of fighting. Ranger Christie got him a part-time job maintaining trails about a year ago.”