“Yes, yes, Jake’s here,” she said, nodding. It might be best to let them think that Jake had been in the cemetery with her from the beginning.
Two police cars pulled into the front. The driver of the first seemed to hesitate a minute, but then he pulled straight on down by the side of the house, slowly passing the onlookers who had gathered outside. The second car came to a halt by the first. Ashley quickly ran down the steps from the porch to meet the officer who exited the first car. It was Drew Montague, who had been on call when she had reported Charles Osgood as missing.
“Well, Ashley, what’s going on?” Drew Montague asked her. Behind him a uniformed man got out of the car.
“I found Charles Osgood. He’s in the cemetery. Someone bayoneted him and hung him on the family tomb,” she said. She spoke to Drew but kept glancing at the other man who had approached them.
“I’m Detective Mack Colby, Miss Donegal, with the parish sheriff’s office,” he explained. He was so pleasantly nondescript, she wondered whether that was part of his act. “Can you take me to the body and explain, please, how you happened to discover it?”
“I woke up after I’d gone to bed. I thought I saw lights out there, and I went to investigate,” she said.
“You ran into a cemetery in the middle of the night when you thought that someone might be out there?” Mack asked politely. He and Drew exchanged a glance. There was suspicion in his tone, despite the even level.
She let out an exasperated sigh. “I have lived here forever. My dead ancestors are in that cemetery. I’m not afraid of it!” she said. “The worst we’ve ever found before has been potheads and frat boys. I am not afraid of my own property,” she said indignantly.
“Looks like you should be,” Drew Montague murmured.
“Montague,” Mack Colby said, “can you keep people away from the gates? The forensic crew will be here shortly. Miss Donegal, please take me to the body. Did you touch him? Are you quite certain he’s dead?”
“He’s dead. And, no, I didn’t touch him,” Ashley said. By then, her grandfather was by her side.
“Perhaps,” he said icily, “it would be best if you investigated the dead man without giving my granddaughter difficulty?”
“If she’s right, this is a murder investigation,” Colby said, his eyes narrowing. “And you are—?”
“Frazier Donegal. We’ve not met, but you’ve surely known that this property was here and who owns it. My granddaughter insisted we call this man’s disappearance in last night, afraid that something bad had happened. None of you seemed interested at the time.”
More sirens blared in the night; a rescue vehicle came to a halt behind the police cars. Augie Merton, a medical pathologist from the coroner’s office, emerged from the passenger’s seat. He was a nice man; Ashley knew him. He sometimes came out to do lectures on Civil War medicine. Though the former New Yorker had lived in the parish for almost thirty years, he was still affectionately called the Yankee doc.
“Ashley, Frazier, sorry to see you here under unhappy circumstances,” he said, coming forward with his black bag.
“Damn it, let’s get to the corpse,” Mack Colby said. “Lead the way. With any luck, no one has disturbed the crime scene.”
“No one has. Jake Mallory is in the cemetery, watching over the scene,” Ashley said.
Mack Colby stopped walking. “And who the hell is Jake Mallory?”
“An old friend,” Ashley said.
“A good old boy. Great!” Mack Colby muttered.
“He’s with the federal government,” Frazier informed him.
“Feds have to be asked in. He’d best not be fiddling around in my jurisdiction!” Colby said.
“Frankly, I don’t think he and his team fiddle with cases. I think they solve them,” Ashley said, staring at him. Of course, she didn’t really know much of anything about Jake’s team, but this man was truly patronizing, and she was feeling just as indignant as Frazier.
Before he could respond, she said, “This way.”
“Ashley, they can surely find the body on their own,” Frazier said, worried about her and apparently not at all fond of Detective Mack Colby.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. She mentally drew herself up, though it was difficult to do so with dignity when she was running around in a white nightgown.
She turned quickly, assuming that the men would follow. They did. It was surprising that Beth and Frazier chose to follow as well; she was certain that corpses did not fall into Beth’s usual life. But she didn’t protest; Frazier was proud and would insist on seeing what happened on his property. And there was no stopping Beth when she made up her mind.
When they reached the gate, Mack Colby said, “Stop! Who has touched this gate?” he asked.
Ashley turned to stare at him. “Possibly? Hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. There was a reenactment here yesterday. It was after the reenactment that Charles Osgood disappeared—something that we reported to the police.”
“How long had he been missing when you called in the disappearance?” Colby asked.
“A few hours,” Ashley said.
“You called in about a missing adult after just a few hours?” Colby asked, his voice level, and yet there was something suspicious in his tone.
“He had very badly wanted to play my ancestor, which he did,” Ashley explained. “He should have been around to celebrate with the others afterwards.”
Augie let out a sound of impatience. “Where is my body, please?”
Mack Colby lifted a hand, put on a latex glove with a snap, and pushed the gate open to a wider degree. Ashley slipped through, followed by her strange posse: Mack Colby and Augie, her grandfather and Beth.
Jake Mallory waited at the end of the path, before the turn to the Donegal family vault. Jake had always had a certain presence. His arms were crossed over his chest; he stood with his feet planted slightly apart and appeared formidable and authoritative as he stood there. Part of it was his height. He wasn’t particularly heavily built, but his muscles were toned, his stance was straight, and, when he moved, it was with a swift agility one might not expect in a man so tall. He wasn’t easily ruffled, and his temper seldom stood in the way of his intentions.
“So you’re the fed, huh? Did you touch anything?” Mack Colby demanded. “And what the hell kind of federal officer are you?”
Jake remained calm as he reached into the pocket of his jeans for a slim leather wallet, which he opened and presented to Mack Colby. “Agent Jake Mallory,” he said. Colby frowned, stepping forward to examine the credentials Jake had offered. His frown didn’t disappear as he stepped back.
“How did you happen to be in the area?” he demanded. “And you do understand the concept of local jurisdiction? You have to be invited down if we have a problem, and I don’t think that we’ll have a problem here. We’re capable.”
“I’m sure you are capable. I’m a friend of the family. I happened to be on my way to the house. My boss is a friend of the Donegal family as well, and Frazier Donegal called him when Ashley was first worried about the disappearance of one of their reenactors. If you’ll check with your superiors, we have been asked to join in the investigation. Of course, we were looking for a missing man before. Now, we’re looking for a killer,” Jake said evenly.
Colby wasn’t satisfied; his gaze remained fixed on Jake.
Augie cleared his throat. “May I get to the body, please?”
“A minute, Augie,” Colby said. “They found a corpse—a man obviously not in need of an ambulance. I want the crime-scene people in here—I want pictures of the body in situ. I want every fiber, hair, fingerprint. And I want all the rest of you people out!”
“Detective, I’d like to stay,” Jake said.
Mack Colby grunted. “Let me tell you—this parish has amazing forensic facilities. And we’re not a bunch of local yokels just because we’re in bayou country. You like to come down here from the big cities and—”
“I
’m from Louisiana,” Jake interrupted. “I was born and raised in Orleans Parish.”
Mack Colby paused at that. He lifted his hands. “Fine. You stay.” He turned around and looked at Ashley, Frazier and Beth. “All right. The rest of you—out!”
Ashley looked at Jake. He gave her a small, reassuring smile. Despite the fact that she was standing in her family graveyard with a dead man not far away in the middle of a bizarre night, she did feel reassured. In fact, she wanted to run to him. The breeze lifted her hair and touched her face, and she kept eye contact with him. Jake Mallory had always been steady and reassuring—when they were kids, when he teased her, when he taught her how to hold a cue stick, when he played his guitar and patiently went through a melody or a beat over and over again.
When he made love to her….
She had still thought that it would be awkward to see him again. They had been so close for so many years, friends and then lovers, and she had shut him out as cleanly as if she’d shut a door in his face.
Nothing like a dead man to ease the transition into seeing one another again, she thought dryly.
The thought brought a rumble of something that threatened to be hysterical laughter from her throat, and she swallowed it down quickly.
“Out,” Colby repeated. “Good God, it’s a crime scene!”
She nodded, turned and said to Beth and her grandfather, “Shall we?”
“This is my property,” Frazier said to Mack Colby.
“And I am a law-abiding citizen, a veteran of foreign wars, and, Detective Colby, I will be kept informed of what has happened and is happening on my property. I asked Agent Mallory and his team down—he is here on my request.”
Frazier had said his piece. He turned to Ashley and nodded.
As they departed, a trio dressed in the parish’s crime-unit jumpsuits paused for a moment to ask the way to the scene. Ashley indicated the path through the vaults with their decaying elegance and hurried on out.
More officers were on crowd control; two in uniform, flanked by Drew Montague.
“Someone want to talk to that group?” Drew asked them.
“I’ve got it, Grampa,” Ashley said, hurrying forward.
One woman was weeping. Ashley quickly made her way through the officers and cars with their bright lights and reached the group of guests hovering by the old stables.
“As you know, we’ve just discovered a friend, dead, in the cemetery.” She winced. Her words sounded like an oxymoron, though they were not. “We’ll get you checked out quickly, and please, be assured, no one will be paying for the night.”
She had to lift a hand against the bright car beams that were now on her. “Please come through the front door of the main house, and we’ll be sure that you’re completely cleared of all charges.”
“I just want to go back to sleep!” one man called out.
She looked back at Drew Montague. He shrugged. “I guess it’s all right. We had a body in a hotel parking lot once, and they didn’t evacuate the hotel.”
“All right. Anyone who wants to go back to sleep is welcome to do so,” she said, hoping that was the right thing for an innkeeper to say under the circumstances. She didn’t know anything more about crime and murderers than what she had learned on television and the news, but it seemed that someone had killed Charles Osgood and displayed his body in a certain way for a reason. The scenario didn’t appear to offer danger to her guests for the rest of that night, especially since she was pretty sure the place would be crawling with police and crime-scene investigators until daylight and possibly beyond.
“Guess we’ll be safe enough tonight, with the police prowling around everywhere,” a woman said as if following Ashley’s own train of thought.
“What the hell happened?” someone else demanded.
“We don’t know anything right now,” Ashley said. “The police are here. I’m sure one of the most important things is that no one goes near the cemetery until the scene is cleared by the police. And, please, of course, be very careful.”
“Oh! He was murdered, he was murdered!” Another woman cried out. She was about fifty, in a house robe, and wearing curlers. “Oh, oh! We’ve got to get out of here, we’ve got to get out of here!” she cried, running forward and then running back.
“Calm down, Martha!” a man said firmly, stepping forward to grab her arm. “We have nothing to do with any of this. I’m going back to sleep. We’ll check out in the morning.”
“Please, all of you, I’ll be at the desk in front. Stay the night, or pack up and leave. Whichever you prefer,” Ashley said.
She noticed that Justin had appeared; he had come out of the stables alone, and she assumed that he had left Nancy with the children. He moved through the crowd and reached her side. “Charles?” he asked softly.
She nodded grimly.
“In the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“We searched there.”
“I know. I was in there myself,” she said dully. “I have to get in the house and start handling this situation. You have the children—I assume you want to get them out of here, and don’t worry, we—”
“We’re all right,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry about us. You’ve got enough on your hands right now.”
She smiled and raised her voice. “Anyone who—”
“Not so fast!”
She turned around to see that Mack Colby was striding toward her. He gazed at her impatiently and addressed the crowd. “I’m sorry, folks. I’ll need a few minutes with each of you before you pack up and leave. It can be tonight, or into the morning hours, but I’ll need to question you all.”
“About what?” Martha’s husband demanded indignantly. “We had nothing to do with this!”
“You’re here, and a man was murdered here. He took part in the reenactment, he disappeared and now he has reappeared—dead. You all were here. This is simple, people. Someone killed him, and you’re all suspects until you’re cleared. I’ll need to question every single one of you!”
“Oh, my God!” Martha shouted. And then she dropped to the ground in a dead faint.
* * *
Jake called Jackson, sorry to wake him up, but knowing that Jackson needed to be advised immediately about the situation and the arrival of Mack Colby on the scene.
“All right. Tread carefully,” Jackson said. “I’ll call Adam right now and have him get hold of his congressional friends and make sure they speak with the local officials again. They weren’t interested before—they’d already given us jurisdiction on the case. I doubt if there will be any trouble; Frazier Donegal is a force in this area, so it seems, and his contacts are endless. Do your best to get along with the local police. I’ll pack up with Angela, and we’ll be out right away. I’ll have the others follow as soon as they’ve gotten their equipment together.”
“Thanks,” Jake said.
He hung up; the pathologist from the coroner’s office had arrived. Jake continued to watch as the forensics team took pictures and combed the area. He remained a bit surprised that Mack Colby hadn’t forced him out when he had finished listening to the pathologist regarding the corpse.
Of course, there wouldn’t be a final determination until the body had been taken to the coroner’s office for a full autopsy. But according to Augie in his preliminary findings, Charles Osgood had probably been rendered unconscious by a blow to the head—there was a pre-mortem bruise appearing on his forehead—sometime yesterday; death had not occurred until two or three hours ago, when he had, quite simply, bled to death. He had received five stab wounds to the abdomen area, apparently after his inert body had been hung from the angel, the wounds obviously caused by a sharp instrument. His blood had slowly oozed from his body, creating the puddle on the ground.
With any luck, the blow to his head had been severe enough to have kept him unconscious until death had come, though, since it had been more than twenty-four hours since he had gone missing, Augie suspected they would fi
nd drugs of some kind in his system. It seemed that the killer had been intent on keeping his victim quiet until the act of murder had been completed, but, at the least, he had saved Charles Osgood from the agony and fear that surely would have accompanied his death had he been conscious.
Jake waited while Augie’s assistants brought the body down, carefully preserving the backpack and the straps that had kept him dangling from the tomb’s majestic angel. Meanwhile the team searched the ground for possible footprints and used specialized lights to seek fingerprints on the tomb wall itself. There were hundreds of fingerprints, so it seemed, and the hundreds were atop more hundreds. In a small way, the Donegal cemetery was a tourist attraction in itself. The gates were usually locked, but the wall was really no obstacle, and someone might have forgotten to lock up again.
Jake wished them well. It was going to be a difficult and long haul, trying to sort evidence. Unless something could be found on the body or the backpack itself, any fingerprints or evidence could have belonged to any of the visitors or tenants who had traversed the cemetery.
He’d been to the reenactment at the plantation several times throughout the years. He closed his eyes for a moment, imagining it. The real battle had ended in the cemetery, oddly and sadly for Marshall Donegal, in front of his family crypt—he had bled out there, just like the murder victim, Charles Osgood. Jake found it curious that the body had been left so…displayed. And that the murderer had waited until now, more than twenty-four hours after the disappearance of the victim. If someone’s intent had been just to ease Charles Osgood from his mortal life, that someone could have far more easily managed to stab him in the midst of the crowd that flocked around the reenactment. If the murderer had left him just lying there, the slim chance that it had been accidental—boys being boys and playing with real sharp weapons—would have existed. Someone, obviously, would have still been guilty of manslaughter, but the display meant murder for certain—and that the murderer wanted it known.
The body was wrapped, ready to be transported to the coroner’s office.
“Dr. Merton,” Jake said, addressing the pathologist. “Anything else you can tell me?”
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside Page 39