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

by Heather Graham

  But Emma was not going to appear for her, or so it seemed. Sighing, she flicked on one of the small lights over a display cabinet containing family letters and other artifacts. She slid open the case, thankful now that the cases were never locked—which, of course, had made it easy for the killer to take the Enfield and the bayonet.

  She picked up a letter and began to read it. She couldn’t make out who it had been written to; the script was all but illegible. She’d catalogued everything in the room, and had reviewed them recently for the team, but she’d never read this one in depth. It was too difficult to decipher. She narrowed her eyes, hoping that swirly cursive would become easier to read, but she couldn’t really tell. She saw that it was signed on the bottom—twice. Ramsay Clayton…and there was another name. The letter, she finally realized, had been written to Ginnie. Ginnie H. And it had been signed by Ramsay Clayton—and someone else. Either someone had written the letter for Ramsay Clayton, or Ramsay Clayton had written it for someone else. She thought that she saw an oddly shaped 4 beneath the name Ramsay Clayton. “My dear wife,” she read aloud. “Forgive that this is not my hand; it has been broken in a ski…ski accident?” she said, and almost laughed at herself. “Skirmish! It says skirmish.”

  The sound of her own words faded away. She turned and saw her.

  Emma was pale and almost a shadow against the far wall, where she had once urged her children to gather.

  “Help me,” Ashley whispered. “Please, only you know!”

  The phantom figure of Emma started to move toward her. She was going to speak. She seemed to be pointing toward the letter.

  Ashley’s phone began to ring again. She cursed the sound; the phantom figure coming toward her evaporated into thin air. She set the letter down in the case as she answered the phone.

  She answered tersely. “Hello?”

  The line went dead again. She muted the phone and tried calling back quickly, but she got her friend’s voice mail again. At least she was able to call. She looked around, but saw nothing but the shadows of the darkening day fill the room. “Please,” she said softly, “Please, come back.”

  * * *

  Cliff stopped raking hay off the main floor and looked up. Varina was whinnying loudly, as if she was in distress.

  Once Varina started up, Jeff decided he was going to make some noise, too.

  “Hey, girl, what’s the problem?” he asked. He walked over to pat the horse, gentle as he stroked the softness of her nose. “It’s all right, girl, it’s all right.”

  She tossed her head back, unappeased by his words.

  “Calm down, girl. You’re the one they all look to here, just like your mistress, you know. Calm down.”

  The horse let him soothe her. Then the mare gave another toss of her head again, letting out another loud whinny.

  On the other side of the stables, Tigger grew restless. Cliff heard something like a bang from his stall, and he walked over to soothe the young gelding. “Tigger, don’t you go getting feisty on me, now. These are tiring days, boy.”

  He hoped that kick hadn’t broken off part of the stall’s side. He couldn’t see. It was getting dark. He cursed and went to flick on the overhead bulb that would light up the entire stables.

  Though the light banished the shadows, he was still uneasy. He stepped back into his apartment for his shotgun and came out again, looking around.

  The horses were still restless.

  * * *

  Ashley stood in the near darkness when she felt the tremor of her phone. She had just about thought that she had seen a figure growing from the shadows.

  “Damn it!” she swore. She glanced at the caller ID. “Beth!”

  “What is it, where the hell are you that this number keeps going dead?” she said aloud. She punched the return key.

  This time, there was a click.

  “Beth, damn! This has been driving me crazy. Where are you? Are you having fun in the city?” she said, realizing she was speaking in a rush.

  There was silence at the other end, and then the sound of breathing.

  “Beth?”

  A throaty, masculine voice came to her—not Beth’s.

  “Ashley.”

  “Who is this? Where is Beth?”

  The chuckle that sounded in her ears seemed barely human. She shook her head. There was no devil on the other end of the line. There was a human monster, and she had to be very careful now.

  “What do you want? Who is this? Where is Beth?” she asked again.

  “Beth is still alive.”

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “I can see you,” the voice said.

  She froze. “If you can see me, where am I?” she demanded.

  Her heart was racing; she wanted to find Angela and the others, but she was afraid that he really did see her.

  And that he really had Beth.

  The chuckle came to her again; the chuckle that seemed to make her heart stop and her blood turn to ice.

  “You’re in the attic,” he said.

  It was dark here; he couldn’t possibly see her now.

  “No, I’m not. Actually, I’m in the parlor, and everyone around me can hear the call,” she said.

  The laugh—more irritated now. “You’re in the attic, and if you talk to any of the people in that house with you, Beth is going to die. You know that I’ll do it. And you know that I don’t care how. I can cut her, I can shoot her…drown her. She’s going to die, and it will be all your fault.”

  She tried to control her sense of raw panic and fear. She had to be sensible. There was a chance that Beth was already dead.

  “You know that I have her. I have her phone,” he said.

  “I still don’t know what you want.”

  “What I want? Well, at this point, that should be obvious, Ashley. I want you. So listen to me, and listen to me good. Do exactly as I say. If you come out, I’ll let Beth go. Even trade. You for her.”

  “How do I know that you’ll let her live?”

  “I can’t exactly sign a contract, can I? What if I were to swear to God? Hmm, I don’t believe in any God, other than myself, really. So, here it is. You meet me in the cemetery, or I kill Beth. I’ll string her up on a tomb, just like good old Charles Osgood.”

  “The cemetery?” she said. “You know that the group inside is watching screens. They’ll see what I’m doing.”

  “They will, but they won’t think anything of it, because you’re going to bring a dish of food out to Cliff.” He started to laugh. “Oh, yeah, you’re going to bring a bowl of food out to Cliff! And then, Ashley, I’ll take it from there. I see you heading across the yard to the stables in three minutes precisely, or Beth dies.”

  The phone line died in her hand.

  Interlude

  Good God, who had ever expected such a windfall to come directly into his hands?

  This was it—the pinnacle!

  He frowned for a minute; it had actually come so quickly and so easily.

  To really savor this, he had to take his time.

  How much time did he have? He had to make sure that they all wound up shooting one another when the going got rough. But he knew how to do that; he knew how to accomplish exactly what he wanted. Ashley wasn’t stupid; she would know that he meant to kill her.

  But she was too good a person to risk the life of a friend when she just might save it.

  She would come; she would come.

  And when she did, he was prepared.

  Truly, tonight could be a wonderful bloodbath.

  14

  Jake chafed, growing restless. They’d had to make a detour to the coroner’s office; Augie had called Jackson.

  The facilities here were state-of-the-art. He’d been to the morgues plenty of times before—just the way that his life had gone—and he was impressed with the shiny steel gurneys and sinks and equipment, and the sterility of the place.

  Too many times when he had been involved with death, the morgu
e had been an empty building somewhere, and the rats had already become kings.

  Bright lights were now on over the bodies of Marty Dean and Toby Keaton; they had been cleaned up, and with the sheets partially covering their torsos, they looked far better than they had when he had last seen them.

  Augie, in green scrubs, a cap and mask, held a chart in front of him and rattled off the amount of drugs that had been found in both bodies.

  Jake wanted to grab the chart; it didn’t matter how much—the drugs had been present. And the two on the tables, though looking better, were still corpses.

  “Here’s what’s interesting,” Augie said, using a gloved finger to point out Marty Dean’s lips. “Marty was drowned. Her lungs were full of water, and you can see the blue coloration around her neck. Toby Keaton, on the other hand, was strangled.” He looked at them over his mask. “Despite the fact that they were drugged, I think you’ll realize what this means.”

  “He had to change tactics?” Jake asked. “What do you think happened?”

  “It looks as if the two struggled. There were tufts of some kind of black material, which I’ve sent to the lab, caught up in Toby Keaton’s clothing—hard to find, I assure you, when everything is the color black,” Augie told him. He smiled grimly. “Our lab is good. The tufts are not the same fabric as the jacket Toby was wearing.”

  “Ashley did see someone else that night. She climbed up that tree to escape him,” Jake said.

  His feeling of urgency and restlessness was growing. He needed to escape the morgue. He didn’t give a damn how many times he had been in one. There was still the smell. The smell of chemicals. And death.

  “We believe we’ve narrowed the field to three suspects,” Jake said. “Ramsay Clayton, Griffin Grant and Hank Trebly.”

  “And Cliff Boudreaux,” Jackson said. “We can’t eliminate him yet. He’s had access, he’s on the property—”

  “He was at the stables when I rushed out to find Ashley,” Jake reminded him.

  “Yes, and he could have circled those woods around just about anyone. He has lived on that property all his life,” Jackson said.

  “The police searched his apartment with his full cooperation,” Jake said, stating the fact.

  “We still can’t eliminate him—he knows the property like the back of his hand,” Jackson reminded him.

  Jake didn’t argue.

  “Well, gentlemen, here’s why I brought you in here,” Augie said. “Look at Toby’s neck there.”

  They both studied the neck. There was heavy bruising and signs of fingers having pressed in.

  “He was strangled by hand, wouldn’t you agree?

  There are no ligature marks,” Augie said.

  They both looked at him.

  “Well,” he said, exasperated. “I can guarantee you, you’re down one suspect. Hank Trebly didn’t do this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He had surgery in his left wrist about six months ago. I know, because we discussed it at an Elks meeting the other month. He wouldn’t have been able to use both hands as they were used on this victim. So, you see, if you’re right, you are down to three men—Ramsay Clayton, Griffin Grant, or Cliff Boudreaux.”

  When they left the morgue, they were no more than a twenty-minute ride away from the house, but the compulsion Jake felt—the mounting pressure—did not let up. He called Ashley; when he got her voice mail, he nearly drove off the road.

  “She’s not answering!” he told Jackson.

  “I’ll call Angela,” Jackson said calmly.

  He smiled at Jake when Angela answered her phone. “Jake is in a dither. He just called Ashley, and she didn’t answer.”

  “I see. No, we’re almost there,” he said. “Fifteen minutes or so.”

  He hung up.

  “So, where’s Ashley?” Jake demanded.

  “It’s all right. Angela said that she’s up with Frazier. She just brought him some tea, and she was sitting with him. She said that they’ve been following computer trails all day, but that going from site to site is about to make them all buggy. They’re anxious to see you.”

  “I’m anxious to see them,” Jake said.

  He stepped on the gas.

  “Hey, let’s arrive alive!” Jackson said.

  “Call Angela back,” he said. “Please, have her get Ashley to her phone.”

  Jackson sighed, and called back.

  This time, there was no answer on Angela’s phone.

  * * *

  Ashley carried a big bowl of gumbo in her hand. She looked up to see that Angela had followed her into the kitchen.

  “What’s up?” Angela asked.

  “Cliff just called. He’s hungry.”

  “He should come to the house.”

  “It’s no bother, and he knows you all are watching the grounds,” Ashley said.

  “Jake called a few minutes ago. Hon, where did I leave my phone after that? Oh, hell, I have no idea. Anyway, they’re almost back.”

  “Thank God!” Ashley said.

  “I’ll reserve one camera to watch you walk over.”

  “It’s all right. Really, please.”

  Angela wasn’t stupid. She could see something in Ashley’s eyes.

  “All right.” Ashley let out a sigh. She wasn’t alone; Ashley knew that she didn’t dare do anything other than what she was doing.

  She walked out of the house, relieved, knowing that someone would follow, someone would carefully follow, and stop whatever terrible thing was being planned.

  She felt ill; now her stomach was churning, too.

  Cliff!

  She couldn’t believe it.

  But she couldn’t forget the voice. Cliff is hungry. Cliff wants food.

  And then the laughter.

  She walked toward the stables; she hadn’t come unprepared.

  She didn’t know what she expected. She saw Cliff standing in front of Tigger’s stall, his shotgun in his hand.

  Where had he stashed Beth?

  He turned to look at her and frowned. She hurried toward him, pretty certain that she was going to have only one chance.

  “Here. Take it,” she said, thrusting the bowl of cold gumbo toward him.

  Human instinct. He went to grasp the bowl; his shotgun was loose in his hand.

  She dropped the bowl into his hands and grabbed the shotgun from him; before he could utter a word, she slammed the butt of it against his head as hard as she could.

  He looked at her in disbelief as he fell back against the gate to Tigger’s stall and slumped to the ground.

  “Ashley,” he said.

  And then the lights on the property went out. Someone had hit the breaker.

  * * *

  Jake drove the car down the long, oak-lined path to the house. Just when he reached the drive in front, the lights went out. All of them.

  The world became a misty shade of gray; dusk was upon them.

  Jackson swore; Jake set a hand on his arm. “The generators will kick in!” he said.

  But the generators didn’t kick in.

  Jackson took off for the house; Jake started to follow him, but he stopped.

  She was there.

  Emma Donegal was there, and she was standing on the path by the side of the house. She beckoned to him.

  He followed her. She led him around to the stables. He could barely see in the near dark. The moon was rising, not quite full, but it lent an eerie glow to his surroundings.

  “Where, Emma, where?” he demanded.

  He heard a groan. He hurried over to the sound. Cliff Boudreaux was down on the ground, holding the side of his head.

  “Cliff, what the hell happened?” Jake demanded.

  “Ashley…”

  “Ashley did this to you?” Jake demanded.

  “Behind her…someone behind her.” Cliff grasped his arm. “I couldn’t see…couldn’t tell…it went dark so fast. But I saw her face. He had to have called her out here. I didn’t know what the hell
was going on…the horses…I’ll help you….”

  Cliff caught his arm and tried to struggle to his feet.

  He didn’t make it. He slipped back down to the ground. His head slumped to the side.

  Ashley was out there. The killer had her.

  Where?

  * * *

  Ashley didn’t know what in the hell had hit her; she’d felt a sting, and then nothing more.

  And now, she didn’t know where she was.

  Her eyes were open, she thought. But the world was still dark.

  She tried to blink; even blinking seemed an in credible effort.

  Then she felt…something. She realized that she was being carried. Her head bobbed and smacked against a man’s shoulders, and she had absolutely no control over it. She tried to focus, and she realized that she couldn’t see because there were no lights. Struggling to regain some clarity, she decided that he must be carrying her away from the stables.

  She blinked and she could begin to see shapes around her; the moon was rising against the swiftly falling twilight. Her focus was bad, but she could try to see. She felt the man’s exertion as she was hefted over some obstacle in his path.

  Cliff!

  She had practically shattered his skull, thinking that he was the one who had called. That he was the one who had somehow managed to kidnap Beth.

  But it wasn’t Cliff; she had just left him behind, staring at her as if she were the worst traitor known to man, which, of course, she was….

  I’m so sorry, Cliff! she thought. But what was that going to matter now?

  Thump, thump, grind…

  Her chin fell against the man’s back. He was a big man. Strong, powerful in the chest and shoulders.

  She heard a creaking sound. They were back in the cemetery, she realized. She was surrounded by the towering white architecture of her ancestral city of the dead. The tombs seemed to glisten a silvery white against the dusky sky.

  She’d always been meant for the Donegal tomb eventually.

  It seemed that time was now.

  She could barely see; barely think, barely function. But she was aware! Was this how it had been for Charles Osgood, Marty Dean and Toby Keaton?