Page 7 of The Evening Wolves

“Oh no,” Theo said with a laugh. He turned Lana back toward the living room. “You and Evie can play for a while. When the cookies are ready to frost, Colt’s going to help you. Then you can eat the cookies.”

That seemed to satisfy Lana, and she took off at a wild run, apparently completely oblivious to the brace on her leg.

Theo pushed back his bro flow of strawberry-blond hair as he sat at the counter. He wore a sweater that Auggie had obviously picked for him—a Christmas green, with reindeer stitched across the front. One of the reasons Auggie had clearly been the one to buy it was the fact that it accented Theo’s broad shoulders and solid physique. Another reason was that the reindeer were made of sequins.

They made small talk for a few minutes, catching up. Theo and Auggie had been part of Emery and John’s lives for a long time now. John had known them first, from his time as a detective, when Theo and Auggie had become involved in a series of strange disappearances and deaths connected to the college. Emery had met them later, but he hadn’t really known them until Theo had been Colt’s teacher the year before.

What had really brought them together, though, was what had happened over the summer. An escalating series of events had forced them to work together as they tried to uncover a criminal organization operating out of a place called the Cottonmouth Club. That investigation had collapsed after the deaths—murders—of two key witnesses and, in the process, Sheriff Engels.

Auggie, of course, was the one to break the flow of easy chatter. “Any luck?”

Emery shook his head.

Theo’s expression tightened. Auggie said, “God damn it. For real?”

Since August, Emery and John had been doing their best to continue the investigation into the people operating in—or through—the Cottonmouth Club. The reality, though, was that they had few avenues to pursue. They had sussed out a connection between a local politician, Eric Brey, and the Cottonmouth Club, although the extent and nature of that connection wasn’t clear, and Brey wasn’t cooperating. The opposite, in fact; he’d lawyered up and refused to talk, and after Emery had tried to press him for answers, Brey had threatened him with a restraining order, a harassment lawsuit, and a complaint with the state board.

“I finally thought we were on to something,” Auggie said. “I can’t believe this.”

“What happened?” Theo asked.

The break in the case had come a few weeks ago, when John had made an important connection. Earlier that year, Gray Dulac—one of John’s detectives with the Wahredua PD and, Emery was forced to admit grudgingly, one of their friends—had stumbled upon a van full of people being trafficked. Women and children, fourteen of them. And Dulac’s bust had come only because he’d spotted the van’s expired tags. It had been proof that, his personality aside, Dulac was a good cop. It had also been his last big case before he had been injured while trying to rescue Ashley from a killer. Those injuries had removed him from active duty until recently. And, in many ways, had also removed him from Emery and John’s life, with the rare exception of when they bumped into him.

“What happened is,” Emery said, “she was dead.”

Auggie let out a breath and rubbed his eyes.

“How?” Theo asked.

“Exposure. I heard from my contact today. Death by accident is the medical examiner’s ruling.”

“Are they sure?” Auggie asked.

“I don’t know, Auggie,” Emery said, “would you like to talk to my contact yourself?”

Theo shot Emery a warning look, but all he said was “That’s awful.”

“It is awful,” John agreed. “She’d been through a lot, and she was young, and it shouldn’t have happened to her.”

Emery didn’t say what he suspected most of them were thinking: it shouldn’t have happened, but it wasn’t uncommon either. John’s idea had been a good one—to track down the women and children Dulac had rescued and see if they could provide some sort of information that might lead back to the Cottonmouth Club or to the organization hiding behind it. It seemed unlikely, to say the least, that multiple trafficking organizations would be operating in the same rural area, and when John had made the connection and suggested the course of action, Emery had been optimistic. Hell, he’d been excited.

But the reality was that many of the victims of human trafficking—most, in fact—were marginalized people with weak social networks and very little in the way of safety nets. That was the whole point, of course. People who were unhoused, people abusing drugs, teenagers and children in foster care or group homes, and, of course, LGBTQ youth. Anyone, in other words, who was vulnerable. Anyone who could go missing without anyone noticing. Or, if they noticed, without caring.

Those same people, even after they were rescued, didn’t seem to be doing any better. Although the women and children rescued by Dulac had been offered some support and assistance, the reality was that the children had ended up in foster care, and the adults, after a short period, had disappeared again. To a degree, that was to be expected. They hadn’t come to Wahredua by choice, after all. But the problem was that these were still the same people they’d been before they’d been taken—and the same problems had hounded them.

The children in foster care, when John and Emery approached them under the umbrella of the Wahredua PD, had refused to disclose anything helpful. Perhaps they hadn’t known anything helpful. But more than one had seemed terrified by the questions, and it didn’t matter what promises Emery and John had made—the children refused to talk, and that seemed to be the end of it.

The adults—well, Deanna Vance had been the first one Emery had actually managed to find. And look how that had turned out.

“This is ridiculous,” Auggie said. “One of those women has got to be around here still. They can’t all have moved away.”

Theo nodded and settled one hand on the back of Auggie’s neck.

“Maybe,” John-Henry said. “In the meantime, we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing: we’ll check every massage parlor, every motel, every strip joint. In the state, if we have to. Eventually, somebody’s going to slip up.”

Frustration twisted Auggie’s face, but he nodded. Theo said, “They can’t get away with this forever.”

“People do,” Emery said. “All the time.”

---