The Betrayed (Krewe of Hunters) (18 page)

“I won’t say a word.” When he left, he observed the parking lot again. Suddenly anxious, he put through a call to Will, who told him the Krewe were assembled at the hotel. Taylor Branch and Jillian Durfey, now released on bail, had returned to their rooms. Taylor had assured the police—voluntarily—that they didn’t plan on leaving the city until the real murderer of Richard Highsmith was discovered. Richard’s death, he’d stated in a press interview, was more than just a murder, it was a crime against the people of the United States.

“It’s a regular love-fest here,” Will said dryly. “Logan’s gone up to speak with Branch. Logan is good at getting people to talk because he makes them feel he’s on their side. So, it looks like we’re hunkered down here for a while.”

“We’ll need some extra help tonight,” Aidan told him. “Keeping track of everything. I’d really like to get our Krewe to the convention center.”

“Van Camp and Voorhaven are at the vault, trying to put together what went on there. I’m sure they’ll arrange all the police help we need.”

“I’m on my way to see them,” Aidan said.

He ended the call and keyed the ignition of his car. He hesitated before driving off; instead, he dialed Mo Deauville’s number.

Her phone just rang. He felt a surge of unease.

But then, on the seventh ring, she picked up.

“Just checking in,” he said.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Did you get some sleep?” he asked.

“Several hours, actually. You?”

“Ah, yeah, thanks.” He cleared his throat. “I’m heading out to join Detectives Voorhaven and Van Camp at the vault,” he said. “And, at some point, I’m going to go see J.J. at the hospital.”

“I was planning on going to see him, too,” she said. “I told him I’d bring Rollo.”

“Yeah, I remember. Wait for me. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go together.”

“I have to be back here for about five. I’m working the Haunted Mausoleum again,” she said. “Wow. Does it ever seem strange to say that today?”

“Give me a couple of hours.” He glanced at his watch. It was 1:00 p.m. “I’ll come by around three.”

“Okay.”

It was important that he keep her in on this. As he’d seen, and as he’d told her, she had
something.
She might well have the ability to get to Richard—even if he didn’t.

His Krewe was here. While he hadn’t wanted to be part of it, he knew that the group he was working with was reputed to be special. They might be referred to as ghostbusters, but they solved cases where others failed.

Maybe they were a lot like Mo.

And him.

He needed to stop lying to himself.

He should just sit down with the group and tell them he knew what they had, what made them different—and that he understood why they’d thought he’d be a good fit for them. And yet he believed he just didn’t have it anymore himself. He needed one of them to try and discover the truth of the situation—through the dead.

Then he could leave Mo Deauville alone.

The problem was, he realized, he didn’t
want
to leave her alone.

* * *

Mo had barely hung up the phone when Candy came running to her. “Mo, come quick!”

Candy was on her way to the front door, and Mo ran after her. Candy went right through the door.

Mo shook her head and opened it to follow her out, the dog at her heels. He woofed and pushed through ahead of her.

Just outside, Mo paused.

Her Confederate colonel, Daniel Parker, was on the lawn. He seemed pale and ethereal in the bright light of day, but she could still see him clearly.

And she could see the man he was standing with!

Richard Highsmith.

Daniel pointed at the house—and at Mo. The other man nodded. Daniel made a motion that Richard should join him.

He did.

He walked toward Mo, and he seemed to marvel as he realized she could see him. He came forward offering his hand, then let it fall.

“Ms. Deauville.” His voice was raspy and yet faint. Like a ripple on the wind. He was still learning how to make himself heard—to those who could hear him.

“Mo,” she said, “Mr. Highsmith, I do see you. Please don’t be afraid to come to me. I’m trying to help. Your friend Aidan is up here, hunting for your killer. If I can be a go-between, that’s wonderful. If I can tell him anything—”

“I don’t know what happened,” he broke in. “One minute I was standing, the next I was not. And then it seemed that I was removed from my body and I was in darkness. And I...”

He was fading. “I can’t!” he whispered. “I need to...I’ll come back,” he told her in dismay.

He was gone.

“He’s having a very difficult time adjusting, learning,” Candy said, compassion in her voice.

Daniel was back by her side. “You forget, my love, we’ve had many years to gather strength and to learn.”

“He sucks as a ghost,” Candy muttered.

“Candy, my dear—such a manner of speech!” Daniel shook his head disapprovingly.

“My love, we must keep up with the decades!” she said.

Daniel let out a sigh. “My belief is that we should retain what is best in each decade and allow what is not fine or eloquent to slip away. I’m sorry, Mo. I thought I had breached the gap, that I had gotten him to come forward for you.”

“You did, Daniel,” she assured him. “He’ll come back. And I won’t waste any time when he does. I’ll be ready with the right questions.”

She called Rollo, who had decided to roll in the leaves for a while. He was coated in autumn’s colors when he ran up to her.

“Rollo!” she chastised softly, dusting the leaves from his coat. “I’m going to give you a good brushing and dress you up in your best service-dog coat. You have a little boy who’s lost his mother to visit today.”

Rollo wagged his tail happily.

She looked around, feeling oddly uncomfortable. The wind had picked up, creating an eerie whistle in the trees. Mo and Rollo went inside and closed the door, then carefully locked it.

There was no danger out there; Rollo would have let her know. But she was anxious for Agent Mahoney to come and get her.

Strange, she reflected. She wasn’t afraid of being painted up as a ghost to walk around an old mausoleum all night—and yet she was unnerved in her own cottage, a place she loved.

Yes, that was it. She was nervous about everything that was going on, all the unexplained events, so she wanted to see him.

No, that wasn’t it at all.

She just wanted to see him.

* * *

The vines had been pulled away from the old vault entrance and the heavy brass and lichen-covered door had been fully opened. Rigging had been set up for lights to flood the interior of the vault.

When Aidan arrived, crime scene workers were still taking out whatever small specks or fibers could prove to be evidence.

Van Camp and Voorhaven stood in front of the tomb, watching the proceedings.

Voorhaven greeted Aidan with a friendly handshake. “Hey, glad you’re here. I sketched a diagram of what the vault looked like before they took out the hatchet and the knife, scraped off the blood and collected any hair and fiber they could find. Naturally, Van Camp and I went through first in booties to try to reconstruct what happened. I’ve also included the outside environs. Can I show you what I’ve done?”

“Of course.” As he spoke, the head of the forensics unit, introduced to Aidan as Gina Mason, stopped by to tell him and the detectives that her people had finished.

“They’ll send someone to clean up the blood. Not that anyone should be in this old place, anyway, but we don’t want to create a possible health hazard,” she told them. “But, Detectives, Agent, you’re free to try out more theories.”

“Did you get anything promising? A cigarette butt, a thread, a hair?” Aidan asked her.

“Hair. Plenty of it on the altar. Where the heads were hacked off. I believe, however, that we’ll discover that the murderer was aware of what we’d be looking for, since he wore gloves. Maybe even a snood to protect his own hair—or, hell, maybe he shaved himself bald. Not a button, a cigarette butt or even old beer cans. College kids didn’t get in here for frat night or anything—so there’s no unrelated evidence. That should make it a little easier for us. The killer left the hatchet and the knife. That’s it. I’ll report on them as soon as I can.”

Aidan nodded. “Thank you.”

“I hope we can help!” she said. “I
really
hope we can help.”

She waved goodbye and walked to her truck.

Van Camp turned to Aidan. “I think the kid here has done a good job with that sketch,” he said.

Voorhaven looked at Van Camp and then at Aidan. “The
kid?
Lee just has to refer to me as ‘the kid’? Old man, I’m thirty-three,” he said. The “old man” was said teasingly. Aidan could see that the two partners cared about each other and despite Jimmy Voorhaven’s initial hostility to the FBI’s moving in, he wanted to be a good cop.

“Hey.” Aidan grinned at Van Camp. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t mind being a kid again. And when a job’s done right, doesn’t matter how old someone is.”

Van Camp shook his head wearily. “Let’s just do this,” he said.

“All right,” Jimmy said, holding out his sketch and pointing at two parallel lines he’d drawn. “Here’s the way in. We might have gotten tire tracks if we’d found this place early enough. Not many people use this road, since it’s almost more of a trail and it goes through a line of forgotten vaults in a hill. Access is through one of the cemetery roads. But our killer knows this. He has his victims in a car—I’m thinking a van or SUV. He stops. Moves the vines and cracks open the door.”

He indicated the opening to the vault on his sketch. “We had to use crowbars to get it all the way open, the way I’ve got it here. Okay, so then he has to bring his victims in one by one, but that’s not hard if they’re knocked out. I think they might all have been alive when they got here, but maybe he didn’t want the kind of blood spatter he’d have on him if he chopped off their heads when they were alive. Okay, so—”

Voorhaven paused. “Say I’m the killer. I have one victim hoisted over my shoulder. I slip in. I probably have a light in here because I go straight to the deep end—way beneath the earth.” He stared down at his drawing. “I’m guessing these murders were personal because it takes a lot of strength to strangle an adult man or woman—a lot of adrenaline, a lot of passion. Or desperation, if you’re in a fight, but I don’t think there was any fight. So, he drops off one victim, then goes back for the next. Of course, the kid’s a different matter. Now, if our killer had balls, he did all this with the van parked out there. If he was worried, he moved it and came back.”

“Or he or she had an accomplice,” Aidan said. “We’ve been leaning that way.”

“Right,” Voorhaven agreed. “So, he slips through with one victim over his shoulder and then walks back to his van.” The young detective thrust his crumpled sketch in his jacket pocket and mimed the action he described; Aidan and Van Camp followed.

“He throws the kid down. He’s not really interested in the kid. He
is
interested in making it look like a psycho’s busy in town. Okay, his victims are dead. He has a chopping block on the old altar and he left his weapons there in advance. He cuts off the heads—kind of a clumsy job, according to the coroner. He’s never beheaded anyone before. But he gets the heads off. Now here’s the thing. He had to know about the mausoleums here as well as the vaults.”

“His next step would’ve been to get the bodies up to the mausoleum,” Aidan put in. “He would’ve been counting on the darkness.”

“That’s a little risky,” Jimmy said, “because—over at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery—lantern tours could be going on as late as midnight. But, then again, I’ve taken that tour and if you’re not close to the lantern light, it’s still dark as all hell. Maybe he enjoys the risk. Anyway, the bodies first. Then he’s practically across the street from the Headless Horseman restaurant. He makes sure he gets Richard Highsmith’s head where he wants it. By then, everything is closed up. Who can see anything on these streets at night and at that hour? Who’s even around to see anything? All he has to do next is move down the street about half a mile to the dry cleaner’s display. Put Ms. Appleby’s head in his little assembly of witches and spiders and ghastly things—including the headless horseman.”

Aidan nodded. “I think your theory is right.”

“Yeah?” Voorhaven asked.

“Yeah. Here’s the next puzzle, though. Richard disappeared before his speech. It was still daylight. Wendy Appleby must’ve been grabbed about the same time. You’re thinking a van or SUV as a vehicle—that sounds logical. I know most car trunks wouldn’t fit two adults and a child. So, did he bring them here and kill them and go back—or did he hide them in plain sight, knocked out in the back of a van before coming here?”

“If Jillian Durfey, Taylor Branch and that security crew of Richard’s was involved,” Van Camp said, “they couldn’t have been driving out here. They were all seen at the convention center.”

“J.J. told us how he and his mother were taken. We know there had to be two people. I’m thinking someone in that bunch is guilty—whether it’s Jillian Durfey or not—and that there was someone on the outside, as well. Someone who wanted Richard and Wendy Appleby dead,” Aidan said.

“We need to find out why this person wanted to kill them
both,
” Voorhaven said.

Van Camp nodded.

“Anything else?”

“To summarize, it sounds like hoods or pieces of cloth soaked in chloroform were thrown over their heads,” Van Camp said. “We’re agreed that suggests two attackers. You think Wendy Appleby and the boy were taken first—and then Richard?”

“Getting Richard out would be harder, so, yes, probably,” Aidan agreed. “Let me just do a walk-through,” he said.

He left them and tried to focus on the task at hand. He returned to the entry of the tomb. By day, it was stark and dreary, with broken and chipped seals on either side. It had been abandoned by family and friends for a long time, perhaps a hundred years or so.

A rat ran over Aidan’s foot. He found himself thinking about J. J. Appleby, waking in the dark, screaming until he was hoarse, crawling around, seeking a way out.