Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside

by Heather Graham

  Angela, Beth and Frazier had come down to the embankment near the cemetery while they checked and rechecked their equipment and the flashlights they’d be working with.

  Angela had watched Jake walk over and over the embankment near the cemetery wall. He found a spot that seemed to satisfy him.

  “Here,” he said, looking at them all.

  Jackson, apparently, knew what he was talking about. He came over and hunkered down next to Jake, inspecting the ground. He stood after a moment. “Hard to tell, but possible. We’ll go in here. Time for tanks, children,” he said.

  The three assisted each other, buckling into the heavy dive tanks. “You’re just walking in, right?” Angela asked. “Seriously, shouldn’t we be waiting for the police? They’ll have metal detectors—”

  Jake lifted a rod he had on a cord at his wrist. “Jackson has one, too,” he told her.

  “It is one big damned river,” Frazier said. “And then there’s the bayou—”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” Jake said. “This is how he managed the movement of the body. This is where he’ll have ditched the weapon.”

  Frazier nodded. He gazed at Ashley, and she knew that he was worried about her. It was only fair; she was worried about him. She blew him a kiss.

  “I’ll follow the current and watch for you down by the public ramp,” Angela reminded them. “Don’t try to get back—I’ll be there.”

  “Keep up with us,” Jake warned, catching Ashley’s hand.

  Pride dictated that she draw away, pride and maybe fear that it was too easy to depend on him so swiftly. But she didn’t draw away; they were diving together, and she wasn’t going to be uncooperative.

  They eased into the water over the embankment, a difficult task as it was shallow next to the levee and they sank into the mud. She immediately felt the strength of the current, and she knew what Jake was thinking: if the killer had indeed followed this route, he had gone with the current in whatever little boat he had been maneuvering. He wouldn’t have used a motor; a motor might have been heard.

  The brown, muddy waters of the Mississippi covered their heads, and they went with the current themselves, using their flippers to thrust them downward. Ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet…forty feet. She’d been in the water here before, but only ever to clear growth from the seawall or work with their little strip of dock. The water was filled with silt, and everything before her eyes was curtained behind a brown haze. The sun didn’t penetrate deeply.

  A massive catfish glided by them, taking a look, moving off quickly. They passed over the ruins of a broken-up tugboat. Gar drifted by, and in the few feet she could see ahead, even with her diving light, Ashley saw that a blue suckerfish was watching them avidly. There seemed to be little else of interest. Diving in clear waters was beautiful, but the Mississippi wasn’t clear. It seemed as if the light dimmed quickly, as if the riverbed sucked it up into the mottled brown darkness.

  She heard the rhythmic sound of her regulator, air moving in and out of her own lungs. She usually loved that sound. She glanced over to see that Jake was still moving fluidly at her side, inspecting the river bottom as they drifted along, barely using their fins, the current was so strong.

  She tried to give her concentration over to the task at hand.

  She felt a jerk on her hand; she turned and saw Jake’s blue-green eyes through his mask. He motioned that they needed to go down. His metal detector had come upon something.

  Fighting the current, they shot downward, only to discover car parts that had been in the river long enough to acquire massive growth. She and Jake, with Jackson close behind, started to move onward again.

  She wasn’t at all sure how she saw it, but suddenly it seemed that something bright flickered in the glow of her beam.

  She started toward it.

  A jerk on her ankle made her panic for a moment; alligators didn’t usually travel out into the depths of the river—they preferred the bayou and the shallows. But it would be quite ridiculous if she were to be consumed by a natural predator she knew and respected in the hunt for a human monster.

  It wasn’t an alligator; it was Jake. He frowned at her, indicating that she wasn’t to take off without him.

  She nodded and pointed. Then, of course, her beam picked up nothing, but he nodded and followed her downward.

  They were in an area of soft packed mud and underwater growth. At first Ashley thought she had imagined the glitter in the water. It was dark, and with the current, once the muck was disturbed, it spread out, creating an even darker brown haze.

  Then she felt Jake squeeze her hand, and he indicated the metal detector.

  There was definitely something there.

  They had to move quickly, because the water around them was becoming browner by the second. There was nothing easy about maintaining their position in the water; they fought the current hard. But Jake was digging in the mud, and she did the same.

  There, beneath one of the plumes Jake had just started.

  She saw it.

  It was still in excellent shape; it looked as if it had just been set down on the river bottom. The 1853 Enfield rifle that shot a Burton-Minie ball still had its bayonet, which had surely glittered in the glow of her flashlight, soundly attached.

  It was the weapon that had been carried not just by the defenders, but by all of the federals on the day of the skirmish that had taken place in 1861. It would have a thirty-nine-inch barrel with three grooves, and the stock had three metal bands, so that it was sometimes called the popular “three-banded” rifle. Reproductions of the rifle were carried by all the reenactors. At the beginning of the war, it had been quite typical, appreciated on both sides of the great conflict.

  She pointed; Jake reached down a hand and collected the weapon by the stock. He nodded to Ashley and indicated that they head toward the riverbank.

  They emerged about a hundred feet shy of the boat ramp. Sludging up the muddy bank, Ashley saw that Angela had been true to her word and was there leaning against Jake’s car down by the public ramp.

  She saw them right away and came hurrying toward them, heedless of the marshy terrain. She had something in her hand, which turned out to be a large plastic bag of some kind—an evidence bag for the weapon retrieved. Angela, apparently, had had faith in their findings, while Ashley had to admit she hadn’t expected that the four of them would find anything in the Mississippi. Of course, this team had probably been trained, but then again…

  She had been the one to spot the weapon.

  “You found it!” Angela cried, wrinkling her nose as she stepped into a deep pit and struggled to free her foot.

  “Ashley actually made the discovery—without a metal detector,” Jake said. He held the weapon out while Angela opened the bag.

  “Wait!” Ashley said.

  They both paused, staring at her.

  She studied the weapon.

  The manufacturers of historical weaponry were good—really good. They could replicate weapons to a T.

  But there was something about this one.

  She didn’t touch it, but she moved closer. Mud encrusted the weapon, and there was no choice. She delicately took a finger protected by her diver glove and dusted aside a speck of the mud.

  And it was there. Deeply, roughly gouged into the stock near the barrel, there were initials.

  She looked up at Jake and Angela, chilled to the bone.

  “This weapon is real. I mean, authentic to the period—and our house. It belonged to Marshall Donegal. You can see his initials right there, MPD. He carved them by hand himself with his knife. Marshall Patrick Donegal.”

  Interlude

  He watched it again. There she was, that blasted reporter, talking to Jake Mallory.

  Mallory, so cool and solemn and yet easy with the reporter, revealing nothing at all.

  They didn’t have good new footage to show; so far, none of the reporters or their crews had been allowed on the property, and thus they had noth
ing new to say. Of course, the world now knew that Charles Osgood was dead, and everyone everywhere was deliberating. It was absolutely amusing to discover just how many people were certain that a bitter Confederate ghost had committed the crime.

  Or even a Yankee. Hell, four Yankees had “died” on the property that day.

  Ridiculous. No one was putting blame where it belonged. Or maybe they were.

  The canned video was replaced by the reporter again, the pretty woman who seemed to have a hard edge. It was the hardness of a woman who wanted to rise in her field and was willing to do just about anything to do so. She’d sleep with the boss while making her cameraman traipse through dangerous territory before setting her pretty face in front of the camera. She’d sleep with the producer. He knew that look. He’d seen it often enough in the business world. With men, it just meant that they’d stab you in the back; with a woman, it meant that she’d do just about anything.

  The reporter’s face was replaced again by the image of a sea of pictures; they were artistically angled in the shot, from, clockwise, left to right, Frazier Donegal, Emma Donegal, Marshall Donegal and Ashley Donegal.

  Ah, and it seemed that the generations had taken DNA from all—Ashley looked like her great-great-however-many-grandfather, and like Emma Donegal. All these decades later.

  The newscast ended.

  He should have felt satisfied. He’d caused the havoc he wanted. They were never going to catch him; there was just no way to prove that he had done any of this.

  But then the newscast changed; there was a “this just in!” alert.

  The reporter came back on. Anchorwoman Marty Dean identified herself again and announced that police believed that they had the murder weapon, an historic Enfield rifle once owned by the Civil War master of Donegal Plantation, Marshall Donegal. Tests were being done by forensic experts, seeking proof that the weapon, pulled from the Mississippi, had indeed been used in the murder.

  Naturally, Marty’s station would be right on the investigation, bringing news about the heinous events at the plantation the second they became available.

  He clicked off the television, startled.

  The weapon shouldn’t have been found so quickly. He had left no traces; he had ditched the damn thing in the Mississippi River, and he had been careful in every possible forensic way.

  He paced, trying to calm down, and he did.

  They had the weapon. Even if they found old Charles’s blood, they could never trace it to him. Even if they knew how he had gotten there and killed the man, they couldn’t trace it to him.

  Pity, though. The image must have been so brilliant, the dead man—dead. Blood dripping. He’d been in Marshall Donegal’s uniform. The possibilities for amazing ghost stories were endless….

  He sat down again. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to really choke the life out of the place.

  So…

  They’d be watching the cemetery. And they’d be watching the river.

  There was always the bayou, and before you reached the bayou from the house, there were endless trails with pines, giving way to marshland….

  “‘It is well that war is so terrible—lest we should grow too fond of it,’” he whispered aloud, quoting Robert E. Lee, the South’s—no, the country’s—greatest general.

  He smiled, his faith in himself restored.

  “It is well that bloodletting is so complicated—because it is so actually sweet and entertaining!” he said.

  The killing was the best.

  8

  The Enfield and bayonet had been turned over to the forensics lab, and there was nothing to do on that angle but wait—and, determine, of course, how the priceless family heirloom had gone from its glass-encased place of honor in a small attic museum that guarded such precious pieces into the hands of a murderer, and then into the river.

  Frazier was horrified. Of course, it had never been locked up. They didn’t lock up their artifacts at Donegal Plantation. Marshall Donegal had been buried with his dress sword, but not the Enfield rifle he would have carried into the war. At his death, Emma had kept the weapon above the fireplace in the rear parlor, should they come under attack again at any time. It was most likely that she kept it there until her death in 1890. One of her children had probably moved the rifle and other artifacts from the mid-1860s to the attic. Frazier knew that his father had been the one to purchase the box it had been displayed in now. No one had even known it was missing; when they all returned to the house, he asked Ashley a dozen times at least if she was sure that the weapon they had found had been Marshall Donegal’s, and he had gone upstairs himself to assure himself that the box was empty.

  It was.

  The reality of the Mississippi River was that it was not the nicest place in the world to dive; returning to the house—once the initial questions were asked and answered—Jake hurried up to his room and straight into the shower. He was sure the others were doing the same. But he had barely stripped out of his swim trunks when there was a knock at the door. He frowned, wrapped a towel around his waist and went to it. He opened it a crack.

  Ashley was out there. She had stripped off her dive suit and wore a terry robe over her bathing suit. Her hair was still damp and tangled from the water, but she looked restless and uneasy.

  He opened the door fully without moving aside.

  “What? Is anything wrong?” he asked.

  She looked at him with her huge sapphire eyes. It was suddenly impossible—despite the five years that had passed since they’d been together—not to feel an uncomfortable rise of his libido.

  God, he’d loved her, always. Not true, he tried to correct himself. Once, she had been a bright, entertaining, but annoying little precocious kid. But not long; she’d caught up so quickly. And when he had realized that he’d teased her the same way boys had teased girls they had secretly coveted since the be ginning of time, he had just fallen head over heels. It was the sapphire of her eyes, maybe. The perfection of her skin, the softness and the glitter in the color of her hair. Ah, but that was just lust. He’d loved her tomboy antics, the way she could ride, race, challenge, laugh, and argue her side of any matter. It was the sound of her voice….

  “Well, a man is dead,” she said flatly. “Killed—with a family heirloom!”

  He started, his reverie fading. “Yes, we all know that. Is something wrong? I need to take a shower.”

  He was a fool, of course. She was standing there; he was standing there. He was naked beneath the towel; she wore flimsy pieces of a bikini beneath a terry robe. He had never really fallen out of love, and he’d have to be a hell of a lot older or infirm to fall out of lust.

  But that wasn’t the point here.

  What was the point?

  He didn’t know why she was here. He didn’t want to be used because he was convenient and her world was going to hell.

  Yes, I do want to be used! his mind raged.

  No.

  “Ashley, let me jump in the shower, and I’ll be right with you,” he said. “I suggest you do the same. You wear even river mud well, but I think you’ll be more comfortable without it.”

  He stepped back and forced himself to close the door.

  His shower was pure torment.

  * * *

  Marty Dean sat at her office desk, studying her phone, and wondering what she could say once she’d reached Jake Mallory. She’d had such a crush on him in high school. His guitar had gained him quite a reputation, and he’d played with some pretty extraordinary bands. Everybody had a crush on Jake! And he’d just gotten better, really. Some of those boys—the big football-hero types—were just downright pudgy now. And Jake? He still had those probing eyes, that sculpted face, those shoulders…. It had been something to see him again. And he had looked right at her—and not given her a thing.

  Well, she thought, pouting, he’d come around. He was a man, and she knew how to make a man come around.

  Her pout became a frown. But, of course, he wa
s at Donegal Plantation, and he and Ashley Donegal had been quite a thing. If he was sleeping with her again…

  Hmm. The promise of an affair might not do it.

  Maybe she had to promise that she would promote Donegal Plantation, though she would love it if there were a mystical ghost story involved.

  She was still pondering the mode by which she would get him to agree to an interview when the switchboard signaled a call for her.

  “Line four,” the operator told her.

  “Who is it?”

  “Some man who insists you’re going to want what he has to give you,” the operator told her, bored. “Look, I’m not the FBI. I don’t know who he is. You said to send through anything promising—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it, thanks.”

  She picked up the phone.

  “Marty?”

  The voice was deep, quiet and husky.

  “Yes?” she said. “Who is—”

  “You want an interview. You want to know what’s really going on. You want to break it free. Well, I’ll do it for you.”

  Jake! It had to be Jake. Oh, and he was FBI now, or something governmental, and he was one of the big shots on the case. But he did remember high school, did remember that they’d flirted and teased and that she’d been the hottest thing in his class.

  “Oh, you sweetie!” she said. “Thank you, thank you! Can you come in—”

  “No, but you can come out,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to leave your car so that it’s not seen. And I’ll tell you the easiest way to get to me. No cameras. This is between you and me. But it will help you get to the truth. I can’t say more—you have to really solve this on your own after what I tell you. But I won’t speak if there’s anyone else there, so come alone. I mean it. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. I can’t be involved in this when the news gets out.”

  “All right, all right. Where should I be? When?”

  She listened. She hung up, delighted.

  Her secretary stopped her as she headed out for her car. “You have the newscast at eleven, remember?”