Krewe of Hunters 1 Phantom Evil

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

NEW ORLEANS RECIPES

The house on Dauphine

“Mommy.”

She had dozed, Regina Holloway thought. Sheer exhaustion from the work she engaged in at the house on Dauphine Street. Sheer exhaustion had finally allowed her to drift off to sleep. The word, the whisper, was something she had conjured in her mind; she had been so desperate to hear it spoken again.

Waking, not opening her eyes, she listened to what was real. The sound of musicians down the street, and the spattering of applause that followed their jazz numbers. The deep, sad heartbeat of the saxophone. The distant noise of the mule-driven carriages that took tourists around the historic French Quarter. Sometimes, the sound of laughter.

She breathed in the smell of pine cleaner, which they had been using on the house. Beneath it—drifting in from the
open French doors that led to the courtyard of the beautiful home—was the sweet scent of the magnolia trees that grew against the rear wall. They'd finally gotten their home in the French Quarter, with its subtle and underlying hint of strange days gone by.

Some said that it was haunted by those days, by that history, certainly not always so pleasant. This house had been, after all, owned by Madden C. Newton, the killer who had terrorized many a victim in the years following the Civil War. The tour group carriages rolled by with tales of ghosts and ghastly visions seen by previous owners. But neither she nor David believed in ghosts, and the house had been a steal. Now, of course, she longed with her whole heart to believe in ghosts. If they existed, she might see her Jacob again.

But ghosts were not real.

The house was a house. Brick, wood, mortar, lath, plaster and paint. She and David had both grown up on the “other” side of town; they had dreamed of owning such a house. They had, however, never dreamed that they would live in it alone.

Yes, she knew what was real, and what wasn't. She was learning to live without the painkillers that had gotten her through the first months after Jacob had been lost. The painkillers had given her several strange visions, but none of them ghostly.

“Mommy.”

But she heard the word, and she heard it clearly. She opened her eyes, and a scream froze in her throat.

A little boy stood there. A little boy just about Jacob's age, seven. He was dressed in Victorian-era breeches, a little vest and frock coat, knickers and boots.

And an ax blade cut into his skull, the shaft protruding from it. A trail of blood seeped down the sides of his face.

“Mommy, it hurts. It hurts so badly. Help me, Mommy,”
he said, looking at her with wide, blue, trusting eyes.

She so desperately wanted to scream. She had seen her son in dreams, but this wasn't her son. She knew the stories about the house, knew about the murders that had taken place here just after the Civil War….

Yes, she knew, but at the worst of times, she hadn't had such strange and horrible visions.

He wasn't real.

 

Sounds emitted from her at last. Not screams. Just sounds. Sounds of terror, like the nonsense chatter of an infant. She wanted to scream.

“Mommy, please. Mommy, I need you.”

It wasn't Jacob, and it wasn't Jacob's voice. And Jacob had been killed in a car accident six months ago; a drunk driver had nearly killed them all, veering over three lanes on I-10 late at night.

Jacob had died at the hospital, in her arms. He had been buried at Lafayette Cemetery, dressed in his baseball uniform, which he had loved so dearly. She wasn't hearing her son's voice.

Just his words.

Mommy, it hurts. It hurts so badly. Help me, Mommy.

Jacob's words, those he had spoken when she had held him at the hospital, just seconds before the internal bleeding had taken his sweet, young life.

This was not Jacob.

No.

She closed her eyes, unable to scream. She prayed that David would come home, Senator David Holloway. Her husband,
handsome, even, lucid, rational, wonderful, ever there for her in their shared grief. David could hold her, and she would find strength. He was due home. Dusk had come. Dusk, and yet, there had still been pink-and-yellow streaks remaining in the sky, casting light upon the dust motes that had danced in the room. Dust motes that became the image of a murdered child.

He would go away. He wasn't real. He was the result of the local lore about the house, that was all.

“Mommy, please, I need you. Please, just hold my hand.”

She opened her eyes. He hadn't gone away. He was standing there, anguished eyes on her, reproach and confusion in them. The boy was wondering how she could ignore him, stare at him with such horror in her own expression.

“Mommy?”

“You're not…not there,” she whispered.

“Mommy, don't leave me! I'm scared. I'm so scared. Take my hand, hold it, please, I'm so scared!”
he said.

 

And then, the little boy reached out. She recoiled inwardly, sheets of icy fear sweeping through her with the rage of a storm. And then…

She felt the little hand. That little hand, reaching for hers. It was warm, it was vital, and it seemed so alive.

The fingers squeezed hers. She squeezed back.

“I need you, Mommy,”
he said.

She didn't scream. She managed words. “It's all right,” she said.

Suddenly the twilight became infused with dust motes that sailed on pink-and-yellow ribbons of light, a palette fueled by the dying of the day. Soon, the harsh neon lights of night
would take over on Bourbon Street, and the rock bands would reign over the plaintive drumbeat of jazz. Soon, David would come home, and she would hear some psychobabble about her imagining the ghost of a long-dead child to take the place of Jacob.

No one could take her son's place.

But suddenly she wasn't frightened. She needed to reassure a child.

“It's all right,” she said again.

“It's going to be dark. See, outside, in the courtyard, it's going to be dark,”
the little boy said.

“There are lights everywhere. In the courtyard, on the gates,” Regina said. “I'll turn on the room light. I won't leave you in darkness.”

She sat up, still feeling the cling of that little hand. She walked to the French doors; it was spring, and the air was so fresh and beautiful, as if newly washed, and the scent of flowers was in the air. The inhabitants of the Quarter loved to twine vines and set flowers out on their patios and balconies. For a moment, Regina inhaled deeply.

Yes, she was desperate. In so much pain. They would say that she was seeking a companion to make up for Jacob, not replace him. That sounded insane. She would never make up a little child with an ax sticking out of his head.

“I love the courtyard, Mommy,”
he said, leading her.

“Yes, it's so pretty,” she said. Hysteria started to rise in her again. She was thirty-five years old, and now she had an imaginary friend.

He looked at her again, leaning against the railing. Suddenly, it seemed that the light hit the child's great blue eyes strangely. There was a look of cunning in those eyes.

She thought she heard something behind her. She turned and frowned with confusion.

And then shock.

She was dimly aware of being pushed.

She was fully aware of falling.

Her scream tore from her lips at last, until it was cut off abruptly.

Skull shattered, neck broken, Regina lay dead with her eyes wide open.

Jackson Crow sat staring at the pile of dossiers before him. This was his first meeting with the man on the other side of the desk: Adam Harrison, white haired, dignified, slim and a taste for designer suits. The office was modest, nicely appointed, but far from opulent. Plate-glass windows looked over row houses in Alexandria, Virginia, and other companies with shared space in the building had names such as Brickell and Sons, Attorneys-at-Law, Chase Real Estate and B. K. Blake, Criminal Investigation.

Adam had just handed him the folders. “Jackson, do you have any idea of why you're here?”

He'd returned to his old Behavioral Sciences Unit in D.C. to discover that he was being given a new assignment. His leave of absence, it seemed, was somehow permanent.

His last assignment, despite the excellent work done by him and his colleagues, had ended with three of them being dead.
Yet if it hadn't been for his intuition, two other fellow agents might have died as well. Local police had not responded to the call sent out, and there was no way to blame himself.

Naturally, he did.

Maybe the empathy of his superiors had caused them to give him a new assignment, in a different place—behind a desk.

He'd heard things
about
Adam Harrison. He'd worked solo over the years—and for the government where the government could not act officially. Adam went in where others did not.

It wasn't because of extreme danger. Rather, it might be considered that he went in because of extreme
weirdness.

“No,” he said simply.

“First, let me assure you, you are not being let go. You will still be working for Uncle Sam,” Adam told him. “The assignments will come from me, but you'll be heading up the team. A new team.”

A cushy job somewhere behind a desk that didn't involve serial killers, kidnapping or bodies discovered beneath concrete.

Jackson wasn't sure how he felt; numb, perhaps.

“Take a look at this.”

He hadn't had a chance to look at the files yet, but Adam now handed him a month-old New Orleans newspaper bearing the headline Wife of Senator David Holloway Dies from Fall into Courtyard.

He looked up at Adam.

“Read the full article,” Adam suggested.

He read silently.

An uneasy feeling swept over Jackson, but he calmly set the newspaper back on the desk and looked at Adam Harrison.

“That's a tragic story,” he said. “It sounds likely that the poor woman did commit suicide, and the senator is in denial. I'm afraid I've seen other instances in which a woman could not accept the loss of her child.”

“Many people are insistent that the house is haunted,” Adam said.

“And that a ghost committed this murder?” Jackson asked. He leaned forward in his chair. “I'm not at all sure I believe in ghosts, Adam. And if they did exist, wouldn't they be things of mist and imagination? Hardly capable of tossing a woman over a balcony.”

“The senator has friends in high places, though he's still
only a state senator. He absolutely insists that his wife did not commit suicide,” Adam said.

“Does he suspect murder?” Jackson asked.

“The house was locked, no lower windows were open, and the gate to the courtyard was locked as well.”

“Someone could have crawled over the wall or gotten through the gate,” Jackson suggested.

Adam nodded. “That's possible, of course. But no witnesses have come forward in the past month to suggest that such a thing might have happened. The death was determined to be a suicide fairly quickly. Are you familiar with the city of New Orleans, the French Quarter or Vieux Carré, specifically?”

An ironic smile curled Jackson's features. “Land of vampires, ghosts, voodoo and fantasy. But some of the world's best cooking, and some truly great music, too.”

“All right then. You work in behavioral science. Don't you agree that people's beliefs can create actions and reactions?”

“Yes, of course. Son of Sam… Berkowitz believed that howling dogs were demons commanding him to kill. Or, it was a damn good defense.”

“Always a skeptic,” Adam said. “And yet you're not really, are you?” Now, Adam smiled.

“I am a skeptic, yes. Am I open to possibility? Yes,” Jackson said carefully.

“You know, both of your parents were amazing believers,” Adam reminded him. Jackson hesitated.

Yes, they had been believers, both of them, always believing in a higher power, and it didn't matter what path someone took to that power. Jeremiah Crow had been born a member of the Cheyenne Nation, although his ancestry had been so
mixed God alone knew exactly what it was. He had loved the spiritualism of his People, and his mother had loved it as well. Nominally Anglican, his mother had once told him that religion wasn't bad; it was meant to be very good. Men corrupted religion; and a man's religious choice didn't matter in the least if it was his path to decency and remembering his fellow man.

But his maternal grandmother had come from the Highlands of Scotland, and her tales of witches and pixies and ghosts had filled his childhood. Maybe that's why it had been while he was in the Highlands, and not on his Native American dream quest, that he had found himself in a position to question life and death and eternity, and all that fell in between.

“You're here because you are the perfect man for this team, Jackson,” Adam said. “You're not going to refuse to investigate what seems like the impossible, but you're also not going to assume a ghost is the culprit.”

“All right. So you want me to go to New Orleans and find out exactly why this woman died? You do realize there's a good chance that, no matter what the husband wants to believe, she committed suicide.”

“Here's the thing, Jackson, most people will believe that she committed suicide. It is the most obvious answer. But I want the truth. Senator Holloway has given his passion to many critical committees in our country. He has made things happen often when the rest of the country sits around twiddling its collective thumbs. He is a man who can weigh the economy and the environment, and come up with solutions.
He
wants the truth. He's young in politics, barely forty, and if he doesn't bury himself in grief, he will continue to serve the American people with something our politicians have lacked heavily in
the past fifty years—complete integrity. People in Washington need him, and I'm asking that you lead the group.”

“If it's my assignment, I'll take it on,” Jackson paused. “But…do I really need a unit?”

“I believe so. I'm giving you a group to dispel or perhaps prove the existence of ghosts in the house. They all have their expertise as investigators as well.”

He was quiet, and Adam continued, “When several members of your last unit were killed, you got to the ranch house quickly enough to save Lawson and Donatello. No one knew where the Pick-Man was killing his victims. No one knew that he had arranged for your agents to be at the ranch house.”

Jackson felt his jaw lock, and despite the time he had taken for leave, he swallowed hard. They'd lost good agents. Among them Sally Jennings, forty-five, experienced, and yet vulnerable no matter how many years of service she had seen.

He'd felt that he'd seen Sally; dreamed that he'd seen her, standing there at the house.

And it had been that
dream
that had brought him to the ranch house, and there he had discovered that she had been the first to die.

“I shot the Pick-Man,” he said. “He's dead.”

“That was the only chance Lawson and Donatello had, since, had he seen you before you warned him and fired to kill, he'd have put that pick through Donatello's chest,” Adam said. “Trust me, I've watched you for years, Jackson. I actually knew your parents.”

That was surprising.

Adam might well have known about the event when Jackson had been riding near Stirling, Scotland, and been thrown. His friends had gone on, thinking that he had left them; that he'd
won the race and the bet. He'd encountered a stranger after, one who had saved his life. And then….

It had been long ago.

And yet, hell. He'd spent his life debunking ghost stories and dreams like the one he'd had. Finding the truth behind them. Proving that the plantation in Virginia was “haunted” by a cousin of the owner who wanted him out of the estate. Proving that there were no ghosts prowling the Rocky Mountains, that a human being named Andy Sitwell was the Pick-Man, even if he supposedly believed that the ghost of an old gold-seeking mountaineer was causing him to commit murder.

Six months had passed since he had shot and killed the Pick-Man. Six months in which he had tried to mourn the loss of his coworkers. He'd been back to Scotland to visit his mother's family, and he'd spent a month with his father's family—helping them organize their new casinos and hotels.

But he was ready to get back into the kind of work for which he knew he had a talent. Digging. Following clues. Whether it meant studying history, people, beliefs or a trail of blood. He was good at it.

He had the mind for it, and the mind for the kind of unit Adam Harrison was putting together.

“I'm open to possibilities,” he said to Adam. “Possibilities—there are a lot of people out there manipulating spiritualism and making a lot of money off the concept of ghosts.”

Adam smiled. “That's true, and I actually like your skepticism. As far as believing in ghosts, well, I do,” he said. “But that's not important. I've got you scheduled for a flight into Louis Armstrong International Airport at nine tomorrow morning. Is that sufficient time to allow you to get your situation here in order?”

His situation here?

The apartment in Crystal City had little in it. All right, a damn decent entertainment center because he loved music and old movies. A closet of adequate and workable clothing. Pictures of the family and friends he had lost.

He nodded. “Sure. What about these?” He lifted the file folders, the dossiers on his new unit. “When do I meet the crew?”

“They'll arrive tomorrow and Wednesday,” Adam said. “You've got the dossiers; read up on them first. I figured you might want the house all to yourself for a few hours. Angela arrives first—she'll get in tomorrow evening around six. You'll know who they all are when they arrive if you've done the reading.” Adam stood, a clear sign that the interview had come to an end. “Thank you for taking this on,” he said.

“Did I actually have a choice?” he asked with a rueful grin.

Adam returned the grin. Jackson was never really going to know.

He started out of the office. Adam called him back.

“You know, you have a gift for this, Jackson. And you can really take on anything you want.”

Jackson wasn't sure what that meant, either. “I'll do my best,” he promised.

“I know you will. And I know that we'll all know what really happened in that house on Dauphine.”

 

X-Files.
The thought came to Jackson's mind as he finished with Adam Harrison.

He went down to his car, still wondering exactly what it was he was getting into.

Yeah, it was sounding like the
X-Files.
Or Ghost-files.

And he was going to have Ghost-file helpers. Great.

In his car, he glanced through the dossiers, scanning the main, introductory page of each. Angela Hawkins, Whitney Tremont, Jake Mallory, Jenna Duffy and Will Chan. The first woman, at least, was coming from a Virginia police force. Whitney Tremont had started out life in the French Quarter; she had a Creole background and had recently done the camera work for a paranormal cable-television show. Jake Mallory—musician, but a man who had been heavily involved in searches after the summer of storms, and been called in as well during kidnapping cases and disappearances. Then there was Jenna Duffy. A registered nurse from Ireland. Well, they'd be covered in case of any poltergeist attacks. And Will Chan—the man had worked in theater, and as a
magician
.

It was one hell of a strange team.

Whatever, Jackson figured; it was time he went back to work. There was one thing he'd discovered to be correct—the
truth
was always out there, you just had to find it.

 

The house seemed to hold court on the corner. It sat on Dauphine, one block in back of Bourbon and three or four blocks in from Esplanade. The location was prime—just distant enough to keep the noise down in the wee hours of the morning when the music on Bourbon Street pulsed like an earthly drum, and still close enough to the wonders of the city.

The actual shape was like a horseshoe; a massive wooden gate gave entry to the courtyard, while the main entrance on Dauphine offered a sweeping curve of stairs to the front downstairs porch and a double-door entry that was historic and fantastic in its carvings.

Jackson turned the key in the lock. As he stepped in, the alarm began to chirp and he quickly keyed in the code he had been given.