Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Jenny frowned. “This is the same Detective Costa who stepped all over the Cortlandt Museum thing, right?”

  Abbie nodded.

  “That’s a little too convenient.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jenny stood up from the seat and stretched her back, the vertebrae cracking. She’d been spending way too much time sitting. “I mean, we already know the robbery attempt up in Ticonderoga was an inside job. They had a member of the coven working for the museum. So what about down here? Nobody more inside than a cop. And then she conveniently shoots the only lead we have on where this coven is.”

  The look Abbie was giving Jenny now was like a knife right in her belly. It was the same expression that Abbie had on her face as a teenager, right after the incident in the woods. Jenny had insisted to the grown-ups—against Abbie’s express wishes—that they had seen some kind of monster. The whole time Jenny was pouring her heart out, Abbie gave her the same look she was giving Jenny now. Then, when Abbie was asked if she would corroborate what her sister said, she had said no. Abbie had denied everything.

  That started both of them down a couple of very bad roads, roads that remained separate until very recently. Ironically, both of them were rescued by August Corbin, albeit separately. And it took Corbin’s death to bring them together.

  Abbie then turned away. “I don’t like it. She’s a cop.”

  “Yeah, well, so was Andy Brooks.”

  That got Abbie to turn back. Brooks had been a fellow lieutenant under Corbin, who turned out to be a servant of Moloch, the demon they’d spent the last several months battling. Even after his death at Moloch’s hands, he’d continued to be an undead servant of Moloch—among other things, he was the one who facilitated Serilda’s last attempt at resurrecting herself.

  Jenny continued. “Why didn’t she wait for you to go into the mother’s place?”

  “She was home, she said she was a block away.”

  Putting her hands on her hips, Jenny said, “That’s pretty convenient, too.”

  Abbie closed her eyes and blew out a long breath. “All right, let’s check Costa’s place out. Dunno how I’m gonna get a warrant, but—”

  Unable to believe her ears, Jenny cried, “We don’t have time for a warrant! There’s only a few hours before sunset. We need to get over there now, and there isn’t time to do it legally.”

  “Yeah.” Abbie shook her head. “I was really enjoying being a cop again, too. Fine, let’s get over there, and hope she has her broomstick and cauldron in the living room.”

  “Eureka!”

  Jenny jumped in surprise, and turned to look at Crane, whose presence she had temporarily forgotten. He’d been unusually quiet.

  “Please tell me that’s a good eureka, Crane,” Abbie said.

  “It is indeed, Lieutenant.” Crane was actually grinning. “I have, at last, located the appropriate spell in this tome.”

  “Good. What’s the next step?”

  “Memorizing it.” Crane rose and stretched his back. Jenny held back a chuckle as his vertebrae made the exact same snapping sounds that Jenny’s had a few moments ago.

  “Thought just looking at it got you to memorize it.”

  “Not quite.” Crane took a sip of the mug of tea he had been nursing. “My being eidetic allows me to recall what the words on the page look like at any time. However, there is the rather important matter of pronunciation. That will require rehearsal, preferably in solitude.”

  Abbie smiled. “Lucky for you, we were just leaving. We’ll keep you posted.”

  THE DRIVE TO Costa’s house in Tarrytown was a quick one—Abbie made sure to take a roundabout route that wouldn’t take them past the nearby house owned by Polchinski’s mother, since that was a crime scene.

  Breaking into the place proved to be fairly simple, though it required both of them to do it. Abbie was, to Jenny’s annoyance, the better lockpick and got into Costa’s back door in thirty seconds, but Jenny was the one who knew the universal stop code for the alarm system that Costa used.

  “How’d you know that?” Abbie asked in an accusing tone.

  Jenny grinned, recalling the many things she picked up on while hanging out with the Weavers militia group. “I refuse to answer that question without my attorney present, Officer.”

  “Hardy har har.” Abbie shook her head and entered the kitchen. “The good news is, we’re pretty unlikely to be interrupted. Officer-involved shooting usually means interviews and paperwork for at least the rest of your shift. Costa won’t be coming home for hours yet.”

  They moved into the living room. Jenny was disappointed to see no broomstick, nor a cauldron, just a lot of beige furniture. “Shouldn’t witches be better interior decorators?”

  Abbie shrugged. “Maybe it’s her way of staying incognito.”

  Looking around, Jenny spied a police file on the coffee table. She made a beeline for it and started flipping through it.

  “Hey!” Abbie practically ran across the room and snatched the file folder out of Jenny’s hand. “You’re not supposed to look at it.”

  Jenny stared at Abbie as if she were insane. “Says the woman who just committed a felony to get into this room.”

  Abbie just stared back, then looked away to read the file.

  Smiling, Jenny decided that Abbie’s looking away first was a moral victory. Besides, she was just going to read over her shoulder anyhow.

  “Oh, man. She was already looking into Polchinski.” Abbie sat down on the beige couch and started flipping through pages. “One of her CIs gave Polchinski up. She was in the middle of looking into him when I called her.” She flipped another page and then chuckled. “One of the notes says ‘no fixed address.’ She was probably turning cartwheels when I gave her one.”

  Now Jenny was confused. “I thought she was the bad guy.”

  “I don’t think so.” She flipped another page. “Here are his phone records. Only calls he made in the last three weeks were to one New York City number. Three weeks ago was also when he stopped talking to his family and his girlfriend.”

  Peering at the phone records, Jenny noted a variety of phone calls prior to mid-December, and then only this one 347 number after that.

  There was also a note scrawled on the side that read, “Run this #.”

  Jenny looked at her sister. “She hadn’t checked that number yet?”

  “Doesn’t look it.” Abbie pulled out her cell phone. After a few rings: “Hey, Jones. Listen, I need you to pull a phone record.”

  After she gave this Jones person the number, Jenny heard a tinny male voice say, “Hang on, I think I know that number. Lemme check.” A few seconds later, he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s a burner phone. But I think I know where it’s from.”

  “Where?” Abbie asked sharply.

  “Okay, last year some kids had a meth ring going over at the high school. They all used burner phones that they got down in the Bronx. Prob’ly thought they were being clever. But all the phones they used had the same exchange, and it was this one.”

  Jones then gave an address on West 238th Street in the Bronx.

  “Thanks, Jones, I owe you one.” She ended the call and then grabbed Jenny’s arm. “C’mon, we’re taking a drive to the city.”

  As Jenny allowed her sister to pull her toward the back door, she asked, “Aren’t we gonna check the rest of this place?”

  Abbie shook her head. “I don’t think Costa’s our bad guy. I think she’s a stone-cold bitch for freezing me out of the investigation, since if we’d cooperated, we’d be closer to finding our coven, but I think she was on the same track as we were. We just gotta follow it.”

  “What about the judge’s order to keep me in Westchester?”

  Abbie shrugged. “I won’t tell the judge if you won’t.”

  Jenny grinned, pleased at forcing her sister to take another step down the road to the dark side.

  It took twenty minutes on the Saw Mill River Parkway to get
into the Bronx, the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. She got off at the exit for Broadway, which was only the second exit in the Bronx, and then drove down that road to a bodega right on the corner of West 238th Street, underneath the elevated train.

  Walking in, Jenny saw a fairly typical bodega setup: narrow aisles with shelves stuffed floor-to-ceiling with a variety of stuff, ranging from candy to staple foods to toiletries to drinks of every type, from milk and juice to sodas from all over the world to various brands of beer.

  A Latino man sat behind the bulletproof Plexiglas with a small window through which to exchange merchandise and payment. Behind him, Jenny saw a bunch of disposable cell phones hanging from a rack.

  The clerk put down the copy of the Daily News he’d been reading. “Can I help you?” he asked in a bored tone.

  Holding up her badge with one hand, Abbie pointed at an upper corner of the bodega with the other. “I’m Lieutenant Mills, and I need to know if you still have your security feed from three weeks ago.”

  Frowning, the clerk said, “You ain’t from the 50th. That badge ain’t even NYPD. Whatchoo want here, lady?”

  “I just told you. I’m from Sleepy Hollow, and I think a person responsible for the death of ten people, including four cops, purchased a burner phone here three weeks ago. Two of the cops who were killed were NYPD at the museum last night.” She pointed at the newspaper, which had the MCNY break-in on the front page. “You can read all about it while I look at your footage.”

  Holding up both hands, the clerk said, “Hey, it’s cool. I didn’t know this was about no cop-killing. Yeah, I got everything from the last year backed up on a flash drive. Gimme five, I’ll make a copy for you.”

  While they waited for the clerk to copy the flash drive, Abbie wandered over to the wire rack that held copies of newspapers. She grabbed another copy of the News that had the front-page story on the MCNY break-in. There were formal portraits of the two cops who were killed and a long shot of the museum with Irving and some short, stout lady standing on the big staircase in front of it. Irving looked even more like a stewed prune than usual.

  The clerk came back in less than five minutes with a flash drive that was shaped like a duck.

  “That’s five bucks for the drive and seventy-five cents for the paper,” the clerk said as he slid the former through the opening in the Plexiglas.

  Abbie just gave the clerk her patented death glare.

  Without missing a beat, the man added, “But for you, on the house!”

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s all December. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Actually, yeah.” She rattled off the number on Polchinski’s phone records. “You know when you sold that phone?”

  “Normally, I say no, but after those kids used my phones for their filthy drugs, I keep track of everything in a spreadsheet, and … Hey!” His eyes widened. “That was Sleepy Hollow, too! Ay, dios, you people have some kind of crime wave epidemic up there?”

  Jenny just laughed, which diluted the effect of Abbie’s death glare. “Do you know when you sold this one?”

  “Yeah, yeah, hang on a sec.” The clerk went over to a battered old laptop that looked like it had a busted hinge. After a few keystrokes and peering at the screen for several seconds, he said, “Here we go. It sold on the tenth at one-oh-seven p.m. Cash.”

  Shaking her head, Abbie said, “Figures. Can I borrow that laptop?”

  Jenny could tell that the clerk was about to say no on general principles, but then he got another look at the death glare, and then unplugged it from its power cord and two USB cords and handed it through the slot in the Plexiglas without a word.

  As they found a corner of the bodega to stand with a bit of privacy, Jenny regarded her sister with something like admiration. “He changed his tone pretty quick.”

  “That guy relies on the local cops in case he ever gets robbed. They find out he got in the way of a cop-killer investigation, he’s gonna find himself at the bottom of the local precinct’s list. It may be a crime, but people obstruct justice all the time, and mostly we don’t care. But you do not mess with a cop-killer.”

  Calling up the files on the flash drive, she found the footage from the tenth of December last year. It was a single video file, and she scrolled ahead to early afternoon.

  At one o’clock, she played it at normal speed. Five minutes in, Abbie saw someone enter the bodega that caused her to say, “Oh, crap.”

  “Who is it?” Jenny did not recognize the woman in question. “Is that Costa?”

  Abbie shook her head, but said nothing.

  Within two minutes, the woman purchased a burner phone from a different clerk, as well as a bottle of some pineapple-flavored soda and a chocolate bar.

  Closing the laptop, Abbie handed it back to the clerk with a quickly muttered thank-you, and then headed out the door.

  Jenny ran to catch up with her sister, who was moving at so quick a pace that Jenny, despite her longer legs, was having trouble keeping up.

  “Abbie, who was that?”

  When she got to the car she stared right at Jenny and held up the News, pointing at the woman next to Irving. Jenny realized that it was the same woman who was on the footage.

  “You were right,” Abbie said. “It was an inside person. But not Costa. The person who bought Polchinski’s burner phone was Irving’s old partner, Beth Nugent.”

  FOURTEEN

  BRONX, NEW YORK

  OCTOBER 2013

  BETH LOOKED AT the other three women in the large, well-appointed living room of her house on Delafield Avenue in Riverdale, an upscale neighborhood of the Bronx. She sat on the large recliner that was perpendicular to the couch, and facing the rocking chair. A coffee table sat between all of them, and Beth had just lit the bayberry candle that sat at the center of it. The autumn sun was setting outside on this early October night.

  Formally, she said, “The October 2013 gathering of the Coven of Serilda of Abaddon shall now come to order.” Then she leaned back and smiled. “Let’s get to it, okay?”

  “Get to what, exactly?” Frieda asked from her spot on the rocking chair. She moved back and forth, the curved legs of the chair making a divot in the green carpet. “Look at us. We down to four. This ain’t no coven, it’s a damn book club with delusions’a grandeur.”

  Stacy sat cross-legged on the couch closer to Frieda. “I dunno, felt like a coven when we took care of that delivery guy.”

  Frieda held up both hands. “I admit, it felt good to fry his ass after what he pulled, but we coulda just reported him to the cops, too. The kid was just a college student who got greedy and handsy. I don’t mean to be rude or nothin’, but we been gettin’ together every month ’cause our moms and grandmothers and great-grandmothers did, and we been studying the texts, and we been doin’ the whole sisterhood thing, and we been waitin’. Well, I’m sick’a waitin’. Serilda’s been dead for two hundred and fifty years and she’s gonna be dead for another two hundred and fifty years.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” Sophia said in her quiet voice. As always, she kept her head down so that Beth saw more of her blond hair than her face. Her hands were sitting demurely in her lap on the couch. “The signs are all for her returning this month. There were several strange animal deaths, reports of possessions are up, and the blood moon next week is the most powerful one in decades.”

  “You said that last fall, too, Sophia. Every damn blood moon, you—”

  “This is different!” Sophia actually looked up at that. Her hands were still placed demurely on her lap, but her voice had risen to almost a conversational tone.

  Beth finally decided to speak up. “It isn’t just the signs Sophia saw. Death is active in Sleepy Hollow.”

  Frieda snorted. “Since when do you get all flowery?”

  Rolling her eyes, Beth said, “I don’t mean the concept or event of death, I mean capital-D Death—the Horseman of the Apocalypse. He’s risen
from the grave, and he’s already killed Reverend Knapp and Sheriff Corbin and some farmer.”

  Stacy shook her head. “You know I was saying we should’ve killed that sheriff years ago, right?”

  “No.” Beth shook her head emphatically. “Delivery boys and other scum-suckers are one thing, but we can’t go around killing cops. Trust me, I used—”

  “—to be one, we know, we know.” Stacy stuck her tongue out at Beth. “We heard it the first fifty times. Anyhow, I guess the Horseman doesn’t care about being dainty the way we do.”

  Frieda folded her arms. “So what’s this mean, exactly?”

  “It means Serilda’s allies are finally making a real move,” Beth said. “Not this pussyfooting around they’ve been doing. Which means that Sophia’s signs are probably real ones.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Frieda shook her head.

  Sophia actually stood up from the couch, which was the most aggressive move she’d ever made in Beth’s presence, and faced Frieda. “Why do you keep doing that? We’re trying to do something important here, and the rest of us take it seriously! If you’re not going to, why don’t you just quit the way Miriam and Rachael and Kirsten and Gretchen did?”

  Beth had never seen Frieda’s eyes go as wide as they were now. She had stopped rocking the chair and planted her feet on the carpet. “Easy, girl! I ain’t sayin’ we should quit, I’m sayin’ that we heard this song before. Right now, all we got is a dead sheriff an’ a dead priest.”

  “A dead immortal priest,” Stacy said. “That’s some serious mojo right there.”

  “Could just be some demon making a power play.” Frieda shook her head. “Look, I’d love it if you were right, Sophia, but I just can’t get my hopes up again. I’m gettin’ too old t’get excited about somethin’ that probably ain’t gonna happen.”

  You are a fool to doubt, Frieda Abernathy.

  Beth looked up and around her house. The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and it felt as if it were echoing off her bones. She shivered, as the temperature in the house suddenly lowered.