Cry Wolf

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Laurel woke with a start and headache. Her breath came in pants as the residual uneasiness of a dream hung around her. Eyes. She'd felt eyes on her, staring from the dark. But she hadn't been able to see the face, had only known somehow that it was familiar.

It was only a dream, but the uneasiness lingered as she sat up slowly and took stock of herself and the room around her. It had rained. The glass of the French doors was spattered with windblown droplets. The weather system had moved on, but gray still clung to the sky where dawn should have been.

She rubbed a hand over her face, groaning a bit as the headache kicked the backs of her eyeballs. She didn't know how long she had slept. An hour, maybe two. The state of the bedclothes was a testimony to how badly she had slept. The sheets were torn loose from the foot of the bed, the spread was rumpled. The notes she had made were scattered.

Grimacing at the taste of bitter dreams in her mouth, she forced herself to get up and gather the papers and the pen. She snatched them up, one by one, following a trail of them across the floor. She dug her glasses out of the folds of the bedspread, slipped them on, and combed her bangs back with her fingers. The gears of her brain strained into motion with much creaking and grinding, slipping and catching.

Baldwin, Cooper, Leonce, Ross. Names and question marks filled the pages. Notes, hunches, feelings. Hunches and feelings weren't admissible in a court of law. She knew that better than most people.

She walked to the French doors, shuffling the pages, brow furrowed as she retraced the ramblings of her mind. Not Jack. The bold declaration caught her eye, and her heart gave a traitorous thump. Bits of evidence tried to surface in her mind-his duality, the way he could seemingly appear and disappear at will, his past, his profession. And she beat every one of them back down.

Through the windowpanes she could see a bit of L'Amour-mysterious, shabby, standing alone on the bank of the bayou-and she let herself wonder for just a second what he was doing, whether he regretted the things he'd said to her, whether he wished as strongly as she did for the feel of familiar arms around him.

"You've known him how long? A week?"

God, was it only that? It seemed so much longer. The minutes and hours of the past week had somehow been elongated, magnified, and packed densely with experience and needs and fears. It seemed like forever, and at the same time, it could never be enough.

Not productive thinking. He didn't want her, didn't want any chance at a relationship. He wanted his solitude and his self-inflicted pain. He wanted to play the party animal, then go home to his empty prison. And when she was thinking straight, she knew it was just as well that she leave him to it. She needed time to heal-the old wounds and the new. She needed to get her world back on its axis and find her own place in it. A fresh start was what she needed, not a man with a past haunting him.

Craving a breath of fresh, rain-washed morning air to clear her muzzy head, Laurel set the notes aside on a table, unlocked and swung open the doors, as she had done hundreds of times in her life.

A scream tore from her throat and she shot back across the room before her conscious mind could even register what she had seen. Hand clutched to a heart that was racing out of control, she forced her eyes to focus, forced her brain to accept the information sent to it.

Wound around the outside door handle was the limp, dead body of a cottonmouth snake.

"Goddamn it, I thought you were watching her, Deputy Pruitt!" Ke

The thin, pasty-faced young man stood on the balcony outside Laurel's room looking as if he were contemplating the advantages of jumping off.

"Yessir, I was, sir," he said, trying unsuccessfully to swallow the knot in his throat. His Adam's apple bobbed as his eyes darted to the body of the snake. Christ Almighty, he hated snakes. Everyone knew he hated snakes. Dollars to doughnuts, Ke

Ke

"You came on at four. Myers left. How long did the two of you stand around chewing the fat out by the cars?"

Despite his pallor, a hint of red managed to creep into the deputy's cheeks. "Just a while, sir. There wasn't nothin' goin' on. We'da heard."

Snarling, Ke

Pruitt clenched his jaw against the need to wince. "Yessir," he mumbled, miserable.

"Bag that snake as evidence, and don't touch one other goddamn thing. If you so much as smudge a fingerprint, I'll cram that cottonmouth down your throat. Do you understand me, Deputy Pruitt?"

"Yessir." Too well. The image had him on the brink of gagging.

Ke

She sat on the bed in jeans and the T-shirt she had slept in. Caroline stood beside her, wrapped in a white silk robe, her expression the fierce look of a tiger whose cub had been threatened. Mama Pearl, a vision in red chenille, had planted her enormous bulk on a vanity stool that all but disappeared beneath her.

"Y'all didn't hear anything, didn't see anything?" Ke

Laurel answered, pushing herself to her feet. "For the fourth time, no."

She hadn't seen anything, hadn't heard anything. She had awakened haunted by the feeling of eyes on her. Her skin crawled.

Caroline crossed her arms and started pacing beside the bed, her lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval. She cut a dark, sharp look at Ke

"The house was under surveillance, Miz Chandler."

"It would seem it was under better surveillance by the killer than by your deputies."

Ke

He'd been sca

"It won't happen again, ma'am," he growled. He dismissed Caroline and swung around to Deputy Wilson, a kid who had been built for the NFL but not blessed with speed. "Go see if Boudreaux is home. I want to have me a little talk with him downtown."

"Why?"

Laurel's question drew a narrow stare from the sheriff. "Why not?"

Because I know him. Because I've slept with him. The answers weren't going to dissuade Ke

He strode from the room with his linebacker at his heels, leaving the unhappy Pruitt to wrestle with the snake and the contents of his own stomach.

Mama Pearl rocked herself up from the little vanity chair and reached out to pat Laurel's arm. "You come on down to my kitchen, chère. I fix you tea and biscuits with honey."

"I'm sorry, Mama Pearl," she said, moving to the wardrobe to hunt for clothes. "I have to get down to the courthouse."

Caroline's brows snapped down over her dark eyes. "Laurel, you can't mean it! You've had no rest and one terrible shock after another! Stay here," she insisted, wrapping an arm around her niece's shoulders, keeping her from reaching for a blouse. She hugged Laurel hard, emotion suddenly clogging her throat. "Stay here with me, sweetheart," she whispered. "Please. I don't want you getting involved in this. I don't want to lose you, too."

Laurel looked from her aunt to the door, where the snake hung in a single loop and Deputy Pruitt leaned over the balcony disgracing himself all over the clematis vine. "I'm already in it, Aunt Caroline," she said softly. "And there's only one way out."

Jack woke with a pounding in his head and pounding on the front door of the house. He wished he could manage to ignore both. The banging in his head was the farewell gong of a substantial amount of Wild Turkey. The banging on the door turned out to be a very large deputy named Wilson, a man without sympathy or humor, who hauled him downtown to "have a little talk" with Sheriff Ke

Now he was sitting in a straight chair that had to be an antique from the Inquisition, staring across a scarred table at Ke

"Do you want a lawyer?"

"Do I need one?" Jack returned, arching a brow. "Am I being charged with something?"

"No. Should I be charging you?"

Depends, he thought. Heaven knew he was guilty of plenty. He dug a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his chambray shirt and dangled it from his lip. "You catch a lot of idiots with that question?"

"A few."

He struck a match and sucked crud deep into his lungs with the kind of greed known only to an ex-smoker fallen off the wagon.

"What do you call two thousand lawyers at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain?" He left the appropriate pause for an answer, even though Ke

Ke

"In my bed, dead sound asleep."

"Interesting choice of words."

Jack shrugged expansively. "C'est vrai. Words are my life."

"Yeah," Ke