The Betrayed (Krewe of Hunters) (14 page)

“A friend? A parent?” Aidan asked urgently.

Debbie shook her head. “Wendy’s husband died in a car accident and her parents were older and they’re gone and she had no sisters or brothers. She had distant cousins in Great Britain, and that’s it! If she needed to go out, she usually asked me to watch J.J.—John Jacob—for her. He’s a darling, eight years old. Agent Mahoney, that little boy is out there somewhere! Oh, my God! You don’t think he’s dead, too?”

The possibility was a horrible one. Aidan tried to reassure her. “We’ll find him. Write down Wendy’s address for me. I’ll start at her house. We’ll check with the neighbors, and—”

Debbie shook he head, even more wildly this time. “He won’t be there! He was supposed to go to New York with her! She would’ve had me watch him if he hadn’t gone with her. You have to find him!”

“What about the school? Wouldn’t the school have called?”

“She told the school they were going out of town!”

She took the paper he handed her and wrote down an address. Aidan stood and summoned Sloan, who left the man he’d been questioning and strode over. Aidan introduced him to Debbie and tersely explained that they had the identity of their second victim—and that she had a child. “We need an APB immediately, an Amber Alert—everything we can blast out. Agent Everett needs to question the Highsmith party again. We have a missing child on our hands. I’m going to go straight to the Appleby house. Can you grab one of the officers and a cruiser, and get more information from Ms. Howell here? See that she gets home safely tonight, and call me once you’ve dropped her off.”

“Sure.”

“I haven’t come up with a connection between Richard and Wendy Appleby yet,” Aidan said in a low voice. “Also...there’s another venue here for finding a missing child. Mo Deauville and her dog.”

Sloan smiled encouragingly at Debbie Howell, who was sitting with a blank stare and misty eyes. “Where the hell would she even start? There’s a lot of territory here.”

“I don’t know how she does what she does, she just does it,” Aidan responded. “And I think, with her record of success, she’s the person we need.”

Sloan wasn’t a man prone to waste a lot of time—or ask too many questions. He nodded and turned to Debbie.

“Ms. Howell, my pleasure,” he said. He had taken out his cell phone and was calling Purbeck to get the notices going. Then he nodded at Aidan.

As Aidan left, he heard Sloan ask, “Debbie, do you have a picture of J.J. on your phone? We need to get that to the media. And tell me anything else you can about him.”

Aidan was already out the door. He felt his stomach churning.

Didn’t matter how long he’d done this, how many times.

There was a little kid out there. Dead or alive.

* * *

It wasn’t much of a challenge playing the Woman in White. If not for the current situation in Sleepy Hollow, she would actually have had fun. She wasn’t one of the terrifying characters, so she wasn’t expected to elicit terror. She was merely creepy.

But half the scare tactics at such a venue came from the art of surprise. All she did was walk—but when she appeared on the path unexpectedly, people screamed. She never broke character, never cracked a smile.

Yes, it could have been fun.

Except that she spent most of her time waiting to see if the ghost of Major Andre would appear again.

Andre made no more appearances.

When they were called in for the night and she went to scrub her face, she paused. Her makeup was really good. She looked both ethereal and very real.

“Hey, are we going to go out with the others?” Grace asked her.

Mo was tired; she should go home. But she didn’t think she’d sleep, anyway. “Sure.”

She and Grace headed out, followed by Ron, the makeup man, her old friend Phil and two young women who played historical characters, Greta Sanders and Mindy Cheswick. Phil extolled the blueberry pancakes at the diner, and Mo decided she was actually hungry. They ordered, and she was in the middle of learning how Mindy and Greta were costume designers in from the city for the season—they had begged for jobs as actors for the event after they’d been hired to design the costumes—when she heard the little bell at the door. When she turned casually to look, she was startled to see Aidan Mahoney entering the café.

Initially she thought he’d come in for coffee and food after work, just as she and her group had done— She couldn’t imagine why he’d be looking for her at 2:00 a.m.

But he walked straight to her table.

Aidan reached them and excused himself to the others. “Sorry to bother you. Mo, we need you. Now. There’s a missing child.”

She stared at him for a few seconds, stunned—and slightly ill. She’d been hungry. She wasn’t hungry anymore.

Child.

The word seemed to echo in her ears.

Finding a missing child. It was something she and Rollo often did. Families visited the local museums and parks, and parents lost track of their kids. Little kids could move like bats out of hell. They could easily go missing in the myriad historic venues in the area.

She was always optimistic; she’d been called out at least ten times in the past few years.

In all of those cases they’d found the missing children, alive and mostly well. One ten-year-old had broken his arm playing in a tree. One little girl had fallen down into a hollow in the woods and sprained an ankle.

They’d been dirty, frightened and crying—but alive.

But there hadn’t been a known murderer in the area at the time—beheading his victims.

“A child?” she said weakly.

“Please,” Aidan said quietly.

The others at her table were silent—just watching. Listening.

“Of course. Excuse me,” she told them. As she rose, she told Aidan, “I’ll need Rollo.”

“I’ll take you to get him right now.”

“I have several articles of clothing that belonged to the boy,” Aidan said. “I got them at his house.”

“Good. Rollo will need a scent,” Mo said.

As they left the restaurant, Mo was aware that Ron and the others were plying Grace with questions and Grace was explaining that Mo had a search-and-rescue dog named Rollo.

“A kid. Damn, that sucks,” she heard Ron say.

Outside, she found Van Camp and Voorhaven standing by their car; two patrol cars were parked next to them, the officers awaiting their next order.

“Hey, Mo,” Van Camp called to her. He walked over and pressed something into her hands. “We went to the Appleby house to see if the boy was there—he wasn’t. Here,” he said, and she realized he’d brought her the boy’s clothing in a plastic bag. She could see the shirt he must have worn for his Little League games and a small polo shirt with a school logo on it. “The boy’s name is John Jacob Appleby. Goes by J.J. He’s eight years old,” Van Camp said.

“You found his mother yesterday morning,” Aidan told her.

“Oh, no,” Mo murmured. Her heart sank. “So...you learned the identity of Jane Doe?” she asked in a whisper.

Aidan nodded. “Wendy Appleby. Her son, J.J., is just...gone. You can help, right?”

“Rollo can help,” she said. “Except that we need somewhere to start.”

“His house? I don’t really know what else to suggest. They would’ve been there recently. And they might have been kidnapped from there.” He paused. “Wendy Appleby and her son were supposed to be going on a trip to New York. That’s why they weren’t missed.”

“I guess the house makes sense. But...”

Her voice trailed off. The mother had been dead for almost forty-eight hours. That didn’t bode well for the child.

“We have to find him,” Aidan said firmly. “And we will.”

Within ten minutes they were at Mo’s house. As they drove, Aidan filled her in on the situation regarding Wendy and her son. It took less than five minutes at her cottage to pick up Rollo. Ten minutes after that, they were at the Appleby home. It was a newer house for the area, a ranch style that was about sixty years old. It was spotless; Wendy Appleby had obviously been a meticulous housekeeper. The house was also charmingly decorated for Halloween. There were drawings that J.J. had done proudly displayed on the refrigerator, and scattered around the house were pictures of the boy and his mother at various places.

She’d had a beautiful smile.

Mo let Rollo free in the house. “You’re sure they were taken from here?” she asked Aidan. “There’s no sign of a struggle.”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Aidan said.

Rollo went to the front door and began to bark.

She followed the dog—and tried to open her own mind, tried to watch and listen with every instinct, every power she had.

It wasn’t difficult to find the dead. They seemed to call out to her. She heard their voices in her mind.

Oddly enough, it was usually harder with the living. And always, she used logic together with whatever sense it was that helped her.

Rollo sniffed around in a frenzy and then stood in the drive barking.

“The boy’s scent ends there,” Mo said. “The boy was put into a vehicle of some kind, I imagine.”

“That’s it?” Aidan asked. His disappointment was evident.

For a moment, she wanted to snap at him. This wasn’t easy. It involved creating a mental map of the area in her head and making an attempt to touch the mind of a killer or kidnapper. Or a child who’d wandered off.

She closed her eyes.

Wendy Appleby had been murdered. They didn’t know if she’d been home or somewhere else when she’d been kidnapped and then killed. There was no car in the yard; Wendy could have left the house with her son. Maybe they’d even set off on their trip and been intercepted. Sleepy Hollow’s earth had been accepting the dead for hundreds of years. Many of the old vaults led deep into the hills.

Where things could happen and remain unheard.

Where the dead might be beheaded and prepared for a macabre display.

And where a child, not part of the design, might be kept prisoner.

Or just left to die.

“The cemetery,” she said with certainty.

“Which cemetery?” Aidan asked.

“The one where we found his mother’s body,” Mo told him.

He looked at her, eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?” he asked.

She repeated his earlier words. “I’m not sure of anything.”

“Are you saying you believe he’s been killed and displayed somewhere, too?”

“No,” Mo said. “No.” She couldn’t tell if she was denying that possibility for Aidan or herself. “I don’t think he fit the plan. I think we may find him there. Injured, perhaps. Terrified, certainly.”

He nodded, studying her. She felt he was watching her again, that he knew about her again—that he looked into her mind or soul and saw that there was something different about her.

You have it, too!
she wanted to scream.

She refrained.

Van Camp walked over to them. Aidan said, “Mo has a good suggestion. We have Rollo, who can find the scent so we’ll have something to go on, but since the two bodies were found in the cemetery, it’s possible the boy wound up there, too.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Voorhaven murmured.

“We don’t know where the murderer brought the victims to behead them. And Mo’s suggestion gives us a place to start looking,” Aidan said.

“No, wait.” Mo raised one hand. Van Camp turned to her and waited for her to speak.

“One of the vaults,” Mo began. “They’re deep in the earth. Some are very big—when we were kids, we used to play in the old Stewart vault. Time destroyed that one. The gate was gone, the seal was broken, and who knows what happened over the years. It was just a big empty space with a lot of coffin shelves when I was growing up. I’m assuming the authorities took care of the bodies. When I was a teenager, it was filled in. But we know there are dozens more.”

“Let’s go,” Aidan said. “Time has passed—but time may still be everything.”

Van Camp nodded and gave directions to the other officers present. Mo opened the door of Aidan’s car for Rollo to hop in and then slipped into the driver’s seat.

Aidan was on the phone. She watched him as he spoke.

“Anything? Anything at all?” she asked as he ended the call.

He hung up. “As I mentioned earlier, we discovered today that the victims had been knocked out with chloroform. We found some in the room of Richard’s assistant. Two of my colleagues have arrived, and they’ve been questioning the assistant, Richard’s campaign manager and his security detail.”

“And they haven’t told you anything?” she asked.

“We have them all at the station. We can actually charge Richard’s assistant, a woman named Jillian Durfey, but we haven’t got anything on the others. She swears the chloroform was planted in her room, which we haven’t been able to prove one way or the other. The rest of them continue to deny they know anything about it.” He was quiet a minute. “I haven’t been with my unit for very long, but I know that the members are exceptionally good. If anyone could get something out of this group—even a shred of information—they’re the people. But right now we have to find the child, Mo. That’s our immediate focus.”

She looked at him. “You just said ‘we.’ I hope you mean that because I’m going to need your help. This isn’t flat land. There are hills everywhere and who knows how many forgotten dead. Nature has taken over in a lot of these areas.”

“Obviously, I’m here with you,” he said stiffly.

She didn’t respond.

They drove to the cemetery and he parked on the rise, just steps away from the point where she and Rollo had run up the hill yesterday, when they’d found the bodies of Richard Highsmith and Wendy Appleby.

Mo got out of the car and went to open the back door. She showed Rollo the shirts again, letting him get a good whiff. She didn’t put him on a lead.

Barking, he jumped out of the car. She raced after him with Aidan Mahoney close behind.

There was no real path. There’d been burials here for so long that the ground had shifted; stones stuck out at odd angles. She nearly tripped but grabbed one of the stones, righted herself and hurried after Rollo.

She reached the top of the hill and looked around. She could see the vault they’d come upon during the early hours of the previous morning—where the body of Wendy Appleby had reclined, as if asking them in.