Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “She already insisted to the sheriff that she didn’t want to press charges, but you know Rick.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately.”

  Whitney had caught mention of her father through the line and looked immediately displeased, but Shane was too distracted to address it.

  Troy went on to inform him, “Jack’s been taken in as well.”

  “What for?”

  “Apparently, good ol’ Jack slugged Rick right in the jaw.”

  Shane let out an uncontrollable punch of laughter and shook his head.

  “Let’s just say,” Troy went on, “that Jack isn’t happy with me.”

  “He’s blaming you for this?”

  “Yeah, but I have to take some responsibility. He’s been on edge over Angel and I haven’t been able to do a damn thing about it, frankly. I guess when Rick showed up it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “That’s one hell of a straw. Are you at the station now?”

  Troy confirmed, “I’m trying to get the bail money covered, but I could use you down here.”

  Shane glanced over at Whitney as he told his brother, “Shouldn’t take me long.” When he returned his cell phone to his pocket, he told Whitney, “Get dressed. We’re going to the precinct to see your father.”

  Whitney wasted no time clamoring up the stairs to change out of her Yellowstone uniform.

  Checking the perimeter of the cabin would have to wait, but Shane reasoned he could keep his eyes peeled on the way out. If someone was out there spying on Whitney’s every move, they’d slip up eventually, and reveal themselves.

  As he listened to the faint sounds of Whitney padding around her bedroom, opening and closing drawings, he pulled the purple amethyst crystal that his grandmother had provided him with from his pocket.

  If Dante was out there, if it was the rogue werewolf’s presence that had been filling Whitney with a doomed feeling of being watched, then the amethyst should’ve heated up. It hadn’t.

  Larry Hardcastle came to mind. Could the drunken disaster of a stepdad have made his slimy way all the way over to Whitney’s cabin the night Delilah was due to show up? Would he have known to lurk this way based on something Delilah might have told him that night? Shane had no way of knowing if Delilah went out to the plains to see Larry after Shane had sent her away empty-handed that night, but he was starting to think that she had.

  But why?

  That was the mystery of Delilah and her dark dynamic with her stepfather. She had always painted him out to be some kind of abusive monster, and yet it was always Delilah who showed up at Larry’s door and rarely was it the other way around. Unless, of course, Larry felt desperate and bold and angled to cross paths with her at Libations. Had she been giving him money?

  It was impossible to guess. All he knew was that someone had spied him and Delilah that night they’d argued in Shane’s cabin. That same someone had taken a picture—an incriminating one—and left it under Shane’s door.

  Was the same person spying on Whitney and making her feel watched?

  Shane was jarred from considering the possibility when Whitney barreled down the stairs wearing a pair of jean shorts and a loose-fitting sleeveless tee that would’ve been beyond revealing had she not thrown on a black lace bra underneath.

  “Ready?” she asked him as she slipped her feet into a pair of black Keds that had been resting on a shoe-rack beside the front door.

  He followed her out and watched to be sure she locked up. When they reached his pickup truck, he opened the passenger side door for her then hopped in behind the steering wheel.

  It wasn’t five minutes before he was pulling up along the curb just past the diner and across the street from the police station. He’d filled Whitney in on the way over and she’d sat stoically in silence, probably because she wouldn’t have been able to comment without defending her father, who she obviously knew Shane would be hard pressed to empathize with.

  “I hope Daddy’s okay,” she mentioned as they climbed out of his truck.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” he said dryly.

  To which she scowled hotly, “He was punched in the jaw. I doubt he’s fine.”

  “Well, he’s not at the hospital, is he?” he challenged then immediately regretted getting short with her.

  As he held the precinct door open for her, having crossed the desolate street, he reminded himself that if he wanted to be with this girl—and he did, for sure—then he was going to have to find some neutral ground where it came to Sheriff Rick Abernathy.

  He already knew that wouldn’t be easy.

  Luckily for Shane, the fact that Whitney preceded him into the precinct buffered him from the sheriff’s obviously displeased mood.

  “Daddy!” she exclaimed as she rushed to Rick and threw her arms around him. “I heard you were assaulted!”

  “I’m fine, pumpkin,” he assured her before it dawned on him how his daughter had heard the news of Jack having punched him and gotten here so quickly. His eyes narrowed into glaring slits at Shane and as he urged his daughter back and held her by the shoulders, he said, “Please tell me you didn’t come over here with a Quinn.”

  As always, Rick had spat Shane’s surname out like a bad taste in his mouth.

  Shane was feeling bold and antagonistic and there was no way to hold himself back from nearing the sheriff with a big ol’ grin on his face as he delivered the truth like a second slug to the guy’s already bruised face. “Whitney and I were getting to know each other a little better at her place.” He could see the rage ignite behind Rick’s eyes as the older man registered how late at night it was. “Would’ve kept on into the wee hours if my brother hadn’t given me a ring.”

  Rick advanced on him, his hands balling into fists, as he muttered, “Why, I ought to—”

  “Daddy!” Whitney shouted, holding her father back from taking a swing at Shane.

  “She’s a real peach, this one,” Shane told him, pushing the insult to Rick’s ego as far as it could go.

  But Troy interrupted the escalating confrontation when he called out, “Shane! Back here!”

  Troy was standing at the rear of the precinct where the jail cells were located.

  As Shane made his way back, he shot the sheriff a smug smile that even Whitney didn’t appreciate, and soon joined his brother, only marginally aware that Rick was scolding his adult daughter for having had a “boy” over so late.

  As he neared the bars that Jack was gripping so hard his knuckles had turned white, Jack complained in a seething hiss, “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d have let me bond with Angel, and you damn well know it, Troy!”

  “Let you?” Troy returned hotly. “I’m still working on how. You have my permission, Jack. It’s the how that’s tripping the whole process up.”

  “Now’s not the time to discuss it,” Shane reminded Jack. “Let’s see about getting you out of here.”

  “It’s not going to be so simple,” Troy informed him. “Not only did Jack assault a police officer, it was the sheriff of all people—”

  “A man who’s been hitting on my Angel,” Jack pointed out. “A man who used to be my friend! Of course, I slugged him.”

  Shane assured him, “No one’s blaming you, Jack. Hell, I’ll buy you a drink or two once we get you out of here. I think the real concern is Angel. How are we going to get her out?”

  “Reece is doing what she can,” Troy told him. “She was here earlier pleading with the sheriff. We’re going to need a good attorney, though.”

  “Damn,” said Shane. “But, silver lining? At least Dante can’t get to her while she’s locked up in here.”

  Jack snapped, “That’s very reassuring, Shane.” Then he rolled his eyes.

  “What’s with you and little miss firecracker over there?” Troy asked him, and they both glanced over to find Whitney angling her little, pointed finger right up into her father’s face.

  “It’s a long story,” Shane commented, hoping his
oldest brother would drop it.

  “It’s an irrelevant one!” Jack complained, desperate to pull the Quinns’ focus back onto him and Angel. “What if she shifts in here?”

  It wasn’t the most reasonable concern. Angel had gotten used to her shifts and the pull of the moon, which wouldn’t again be full for weeks.

  “Keep your voice down,” Troy barked, violating the rule he was trying to instill.

  As Troy spoke quietly, Angel nearing the bars of her cell that separated her and Jack, Shane glanced over his shoulder and found PO Rachel Clancy staring at him.

  Hard.

  ***

  Rachel Clancy cut her eyes away from Shane, but not quickly enough. He’d caught her watching him, staring. She tried to play it off as though she had only been glancing at Jack Quagmire in his jail cell, of course pulling that impression off required another glance in their collective direction, but Shane was still glaring at her, warningly. She shifted her gaze to Angel, who was slumped in a seated position on the bench in her own jail cell, her back to the bullpen.

  Rachel shifted her weight and set her forearms on her desk, angling over the paperwork she’d reprinted out on Gladstone case findings. It was puzzling. But not more so than the fact that, moments ago, Reece had been at the station insisting that the sheriff release Angel Mercer, the very woman who was solely responsible for having lured Reece out onto the old Halsey land. Why?

  Other than the evidential findings in front of her, Rachel was working with hunches and theories. She’d drawn a map of sorts, connecting the characters and jotting their potential motives. It was for her eyes only, this map. She didn’t need another of her precious files to be shoved in the trash by the Sheriff.

  In the top left side of her hand-scrawled map was Dante’s name with a circle around it. Under Dante’s name, Rachel had jotted Angel Mercer’s name, since Angel had been in cahoots with the currently MIA investor in order to get Reece out onto that abandoned land and into that cave.

  On the top right side of the map, she’d written Troy’s name, since he seemed to be leading the charge whenever the sheriff confronted Angel or one of his brothers.

  Given her findings, Rachel now wrote the word canine sideways next to Dante’s name. It had been his wine glass she’d tested for DNA, which had come back as such.

  Angel was now in jail. Rachel’s first order of business, which she had low hopes that the sheriff would allow, would be to get a cheek swab from Angel in order to test the gorgeous diner owner’s DNA. Rachel’s hunch was that, since Angel had been or still was working for Dante, her DNA might also come back as canine.

  Clandestinely, Rachel had pulled boxes from the evidence room of the old Holly van Dyke case. The poor young librarian had been attacked by a wolf behind the Devil’s Fist library. Her bloody clothes had been boxed and shoved in the basement. The DNA test results on Holly’s blood had finally come back. The girl was not canine.

  Rachel wasn’t sure where to place Holly on her map, but she knew exactly where to place the late Pamela Davenport, whose DNA she’d also had tested. She jotted Pamela’s name beneath Angel’s on Dante’s side of the paper. The girl had been canine as well, and also blamed for both the van Dyke and Whitaker wolf-attack murders.

  The list of werewolves in the Fist was building, thought Rachel, but they were also dropping off like flies.

  She had her suspicions about Holly van Dyke’s killer. It seemed far too tidy that Pamela Davenport would’ve killed the girl and then attacked and killed Leeanne Whitaker next. There was virtually no motive—human-wise—and if there was a werewolf motive, well, Rachel would’ve thought that the victims would’ve been eaten far more than they were. Wolves got hungry. When they hunted and fed, they favored the fattiest parts of their kills, but neither Holly nor Leeanne had been devoured around their thighs or rear-end. In fact, they hadn’t been devoured at all.

  Rachel tapped her pencil against Troy Quinn’s name and allowed her fast-working mind to latch onto some new angle that might crack this thing wide open.

  Her gut was telling her that Troy Quinn was at some degree of war with Dante Alighieri, but logically, it didn’t sit right. If he was, then why was Reece adamant about protecting Angel Mercer, a woman who was probably also canine—or werewolf—since she was working under Alighieri?

  At first, Rachel was functioning under the educated assumption that Troy, like the sheriff, was a justice seeker and invested in keep the residents of the Fist safe. That position would certainly pit him against Alighieri. Rachel had also assumed that since the youngest Quinn, Dean, had been shot with a silver bullet but had lived, that all of the Quinns should be exonerated from any werewolf suspicion, which would also support the vigilante-justice theory.

  But it was far less simple.

  When Rachel had heard a shot fired out on Main Street and rushed down to find blood on the streets and Whitney holding a smoking gun, both Whitney and Courtney Harrington had insisted that Kaleb Quinn had shifted from wolf to man right before their eyes. Whitney was dead-certain she’d shot the wolf who’d turned into Kaleb—with another silver bullet.

  The rules had changed or perhaps the notion that a silver bullet could kill a werewolf was nothing more than folklore.

  The complication that she was wrestling with centered on the possibility that Kaleb was a werewolf. Rachel wrote Kaleb’s name beneath Troy’s then Dean’s and began tapping her pencil on the paper as she studied the map. She scrawled werewolf with a question mark in the margin beside their names. If the Quinns were werewolves, and they were also against Alighieri—a proven werewolf—how had that rift come to pass? Why would one werewolf turn against the other?

  Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they were all in cahoots, all in the same pack, and that’s why Reece was vigilantly consistent in her effort to get Angel Mercer out from under a microscope.

  Rachel was distracted from studying her map of names and suspects when she heard the sheriff bark at his daughter, “Damn it, Whitney! Shane is worse than Lucy Cooper! Why must you insist on associating with these troublemakers!”

  “I’m twenty-six or have you forgotten!” Whitney hotly returned with another little stomp of her sneakered foot.

  Whitney Abernathy might be a full-grown twenty-six-year-old woman, thought Rachel, but she sure as hell didn’t act like it when she was around “daddy.” Rumor had it that the girl had never been burdened with the responsibilities of most adults either, thanks to good ol’ daddy. Rick had never charged her a dime in rent to live in that cabin, and as far as Rachel had heard, the sheriff was also covering just about every utility bill known to man on his daughter’s behalf.

  “Stay out of my personal life!” Whitney argued with a thick edge of warning in her shrill voice.

  Rachel cracked a chuckle at that one. Rick would never stay out of his daughter’s life so long as she went on breathing. She was his Whitney, after all.

  Of course, the statement Whitney had just made hotly implied a far worse revelation—that she had become sexually entangled with Shane Quinn, which had to be quite a blow to the sheriff who hated the Quinns almost as much as he loved his daughter.

  The implication wasn’t lost on Rick. He seethed, “You better not be dating that boy.”

  “What if I am?” she challenged.

  The telephone on Rachel’s desk rang and she had the phone to her ear in an instant.

  “Clancy,” she greeted the caller.

  It was a tech from the lab she’d been using in Jackson Hole. “Hey Rach, I’ve got the results of the Quinn DNA here. Do you have a second?”

  “I have all the seconds,” she said, so excited that her response hadn’t made a lick of sense.

  The woman on the other end of the line let out a breathy laugh as Rachel straightened her spine, poised to finally hear whether or not Kaleb Quinn was canine.

  “It’s definitely human,” said the lab tech.

  “What?”

  “I can fax the DNA panel over if—” />
  “Sure,” she interrupted. “But what do you mean it isn’t canine? Did you run it twice to be certain?”

  “Honey, the only instance where I’d run it twice was if the blood came back canine, which would indicate someone at this lab seriously f’ed up. I ran this sample myself. It’s human. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Thanks,” said Rachel, disturbed. She returned the phone to its cradle on the desk and slumped back in her chair. “What the hell is going on?” she muttered to herself as she cut her eyes back over to Troy and Shane near the jail cells. “What the hell, indeed.”

  Picking up her pencil, she leaned forward and drew a hard line through the scrawled question marked werewolves? on her map. But it didn’t sit right. It didn’t sit right one bit.

  Whitney was a lot of things—daddy’s little princess, hotheaded, and entitled—but she wasn’t a liar. Rachel had believed her when she’d insisted that she’d shot a wolf out on those streets. Courtney had been a second pair of eyes that had confirmed the otherworldly transformation, from wolf to a man that was, in her unofficial statement, undoubtedly Kaleb Quinn.

  So why hadn’t the DNA panel come back as canine like Alighieri’s had?

  “I’m a cop,” she told herself under her breath. “I work with facts, not fiction.”

  Sadly, she hadn’t seen the transformation with her own eyes. She’d heard the lone gunshot, but that was it. She had no choice but to trust the lab report, even though it went against every gut instinct she had.

  She really didn’t like it.

  Her desk phone rang again, this time a double-bleat that told her it was coming straight from Dispatch.

  “Clancy!” she barked.

  “The APB on one Dante Alighieri got a hit, Officer,” said the guy on the other end of the line.

  Rachel bolted upright, spine straight as an arrow. “What’s his locale?”

  “Right next door,” the man told her. “Found his vehicle parked right in front of Devil’s Advocate, on Bison Road.” He rattled off the make and model of the car, along with the license plate number, which she jotted down fast on her map.