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

by Heather Graham

  “I know. I’ll get over to see Gertrude.”

  Jude appeared frustrated but resigned. “All right, Mrs. Dean, thank you for your time. No one has touched anything in this room since Captain Tyler was here?”

  “The cleaning crew comes in from 7:00 a.m. through 4:00 p.m. every day,” Mrs. Dean told them. “But we received Detective Sayer’s call, and we were able to stop them before they came in the room.”

  “So, it was left like this, with the bed made?” Jude asked.

  “Just as you see it,” Mrs. Dean agreed.

  Jude flashed Ellis a look of gratitude and Ellis Sayer nodded. “I’ve already been in here. There were no glasses, cups or anything else. And the crime scene unit will dust all the furniture.”

  “Mrs. Dean, you didn’t see anyone here last night that shouldn’t have been here, or anything unusual?”

  “No, nothing… I didn’t even think the alarm was unusual until you asked, and we knew that Captain Tyler was gone. Thank God that he’s all right, but then he has been living on the streets a very long time—he does know his way around, bless him,” she said.

  Whitney set a hand on her shoulder. “This is a home, not a fortress or a prison, and I can see that you try very hard to make the veterans happy.”

  “But I should have…I should have been aware. We take precautions with our senile guests, and certainly, with those suffering from brain damage. I should have thought about that alarm and—”

  “Mrs. Dean, if you should think of anything, or hear anything, please notify me right away,” Jude said, handing her a card.

  “Of course,” she agreed.

  She turned and walked out of the room. They followed.

  Major Radison hadn’t gone to bingo. He was still standing in the foyer, smiling, as he looked at the pictures of the administrators. “Major Radison, bingo is about to begin,” Mrs. Dean reminded him.

  The elderly man looked at Whitney and smiled again. “Marnie, are you coming?”

  She was about to make a polite response when she saw the first ghost who had seemed to recognize her in the hallway. He was frowning, watching her. Slowly, he pointed a finger at Major Radison.

  Whitney frowned in turn, but then she wondered if the ghost was trying to help her.

  “Major, before you go, did you hear or see anything unusual last night?” Whitney asked him.

  “Miss,” Mrs. Dean said softly, “the man suffers from Alzheimer’s. I’m afraid that he can’t help you.”

  “Shh,” Jude said softly. “Whitney?”

  “Major?” Whitney prompted.

  “Why, come to think of it, child…” Major Radison said thoughtfully. “Someone walked into my room with a cup and said that I needed my medicine. But then he looked at me, and said he had the wrong room, he was very sorry,” the major said.

  “Was he—a nurse?” Whitney asked.

  “Well, a most unusual nurse, if you ask me. He was wearing some kind of ridiculous cloak—in a hospital! It’s not even cold in the hospital. And he had a big hat—he looked like something out of an old-time movie! Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous!” Major Radison said, shaking his head with confusion and disgust.

  “I told you that he couldn’t help you!” Mrs. Dean said.

  “Major, I’m going to send a sketch artist to see you,” Jude said. “Do you think he could help you draw the man you saw?”

  “Why, of course!” the major told him, apparently quite happy to be of service. He turned to Mrs. Dean. “I know what I saw,” he said with quiet dignity.

  “Or, better yet, if you’re willing, I’ll send an officer to pick you up and bring you downtown. I’d like to have you look at some pictures as well, and see if you recognize anyone.”

  “I am willing, sir, always to serve my country!” He bowed to Whitney. “But, it must be tomorrow morning, sir! You see, now, I am on to bingo!”

  “What if I sent out the artist tonight, but had you picked up to come down to the station in the morning?” Jude asked.

  “I shall be happy to assist, after bingo,” Major Radison said.

  With a clipped bow, he left them.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dean,” Jude said. Then he smiled at Whitney and opened the door for her.

  Whitney turned back to see the ghost soldier who had pointed to the major when they’d been about to leave.

  He saluted her gravely. She didn’t give a damn what anyone thought; she saluted in return, and then stepped on out the front door, and into the gray mist of a fog-filled twilight.

  * * *

  Little felt as good as the hot shower Jude took when he reached his apartment at last. He scrubbed thoroughly, and the water seemed uplifting, allowing him to believe that they would sift through the haystack and find the truth. As Agent Mulder from the X-Files always said, The truth was out there. He’d been a fan of the show; seeking the truth about aliens was more entertaining than that sought in the mind of a human psychopath.

  Sometimes, it did seem that the truth was hidden in a vast galaxy, but he had hope that Major Radison did have moments of pure lucidity, and that he could give them some kind of picture of the man who had come to drug and kidnap Captain Tyler.

  Emerging from the shower, he longed to forget the case.

  He knew that he could not. Jude had no problem believing that, whether he suffered from Alzheimer’s or not, Major Radison still met the killer entering the wrong room. Somehow, he had known about Tyler, and decided that the homeless veteran would make a good scapegoat. Except that something about the situation was disturbing.

  If the killer was playing Jack the Ripper, they knew damn well he wasn’t done.

  He felt refreshed, and yet restless.

  And at odds.

  He worked fine alone. When he was off, he knew how to play alone, or enjoy time with his father, friends, or even heading out for the night, when there were those times he’d meet a woman, and they’d wind up spending the night. Since his last fiasco, however, he’d determined to keep it casual, and not out of vindictiveness or bitterness. He knew cops who had good marriages. He knew more cops—especially detectives—who had broken marriages. Better to keep his distance.

  He deserved a break, and he knew he had the right to take it. And that he wasn’t a one-man island—the NYPD didn’t work that way. But there were too many threads unraveling; he was almost certain that the blood discovered via Luminol at the site would prove that the first two women had been attacked there, at the pentagram, just as the others had been attacked before them more than a century earlier. He’d be lucky to get test results tomorrow from the crime scene unit techs working on the blood and trace at the site, and from those working on trace from the limos he’d asked to be inspected. Still, he was restless; he wanted to get into the killer’s mind.

  And, tonight, he didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t want to pull out his jazz or blues collections, and didn’t want to wander the streets, or watch sports in one of his favorite bars. He didn’t even want to drop in on his father—who was wonderful at helping him sort out his mind.

  He wanted to return to Blair House.

  And he had a very sound reason; Jackson Crow was a behavioral specialist, a profiler. And while he was forming his own suspicions, there was no one better to discuss such suspicions than the head of the crack team sent to help him.

  And, of course, he’d spent the day out with Whitney, and he needed to see what headway, if any, members of the special unit had made.

  As he drove, he pondered the way that Whitney had been at the veterans’ home—strange. At first, it had almost seemed that her mind was wandering. Yet when they had interviewed Mrs. Dean, she had, as usual, stepped back, speaking only softly at what always became the right time.

  Good cop, bad cop, he thought. He and Monty had played that game often enough. It seemed that he and Whitney had fallen into the strategy as well. He was too curt and too quick, and she stepped in, flashing her beautiful smile with her soft green-and-gold eyes, and h
er words would never try to excuse his behavior, just clarify and soften.

  But her intuition in speaking with Major Radison had been uncanny.

  Just as her suggestion that they dig beneath the bricks in the flooring at the House of Spiritualism. She’d found bodies; many of them.

  When he parked in front of the house, he half expected to find that the team wasn’t there, that they’d gone next door again, perhaps to dig in new ground. But he saw that patrol cars were sitting in front of the construction site, and that Blair House was aglow with lights.

  He parked and headed up the walk. He was surprised that the door opened before he could reach it. “I was hoping you’d come,” Whitney said, smiling as she greeted him. She was wearing a casual knit dress that bared the fine structure of her throat and collarbone, and the sleekly muscled perfection of her lower legs. He felt an instant heat sweep through him; it wasn’t unpleasant. It was caused by seeing her there, and by the sound of her voice.

  “Showered even,” he said lightly.

  “You look fine in the dirt of the ages, at least to me,” she assured him. “Do you like sushi? Will was our cook tonight. We’re having a working dinner—Jackson has a board going like the one you use at your task force meetings, and we’re all discussing what we know about the case. I hope you’ve come with a little time?”

  “I love sushi and I’m more than intrigued to see what you behavior people have to say about our killer,” Jude said. Yet, at the moment, he didn’t really want to see Jackson, or any of the rest of the team. He wanted to reach out and draw Whitney to him, and forget everything around them.

  Dangerous, he warned himself. Crazy.

  “Come on into the kitchen,” she said.

  He did so. The others greeted him as if it was perfectly natural that he had come. In fact, it seemed they’d been expecting him.

  “Whitney has filled us in on the events at the veterans’ home,” Jackson said, shaking his hand in greeting. “Hopefully, that evidence will lead right to the killer. Take a seat, please, have something to eat, and I’ll explain our board. What we’ve done here is connect the past with the present.” Jackson pointed out the mapgraph they had created.

  “Yes, I think I can follow it pretty easily,” Jude said. “You have Emma Smith and Martha Tabrum…the woman reported attacked by soldiers, who died the morning following the attack…and the woman whose throat was slit, whom the experts don’t believe were Ripper victims aligned with Sarah Larson and our Jane Doe whom we still can’t name. You have Virginia Rockford and Melody Tatum aligned with Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. On the other side of the line, you have Carrie Brown—the New York victim of a like murder, and then…I’m not sure about the other names.”

  “These are people I’ve dismissed, though to some speculators they’re also victims of the New York Jack the Ripper,” Jackson said. “Personally, I don’t believe that Carrie Brown was killed by Jack the Ripper. There were too many differences outweighing the similarities, in my mind. The Ripper’s victims were manually strangled and their throats were slit. In the Carrie Brown case, she was strangled with a piece of her clothing, and her throat was not slit. The other cases are even more ridiculous. One was killed in her house in the midst of a robbery, and the mutilations didn’t occur in the same manner, or at all. The Ripper never left his knife—the Carrie Brown murderer did. So, in my mind, our American ‘Ripper’ was not the same man. I do believe, however, that he was the elusive Jonathan Black.”

  “So what the hell is our killer doing?” Jude said. “In my opinion, the Jack the Ripper of Victorian London fame was either in a mental hospital or dead after the Mary Kelly killing—if her killing wasn’t just a copycat killing. Whatever it might have been, I don’t see such a murderer sanely taking a break so as not to be detected. Our killer is imitating Jack the Ripper—as if he had come to America, and so, he believes the Carrie Brown killing to be attributable to the Ripper. But here’s where I grow extremely wary—with the coat deliberately given to the captain, it appears that the killer is trying to set someone up to take the fall.”

  Jackson sat down. “I’ve been mulling this over all day, ever since Ellis appeared with Captain Tyler. If it didn’t appear that the killer was doing his best to imitate the Ripper, I’d assume he was just trying to cast blame on someone else, in fact, to pin the murders on someone else. But I find it unlikely.”

  “Could we be looking at another person’s involvement? When you consider the London murders, it’s clear they grew steadily more violent,” Jude pointed out. “Polly Nichols was severely slashed. By the time he got to his next victim, he hacked up her organs. He grew fonder of killing—and mutilation. I don’t see such a man calmly determining that he’d better make it look as if the butler did it. So, who tried to set up Captain Tyler—and why?”

  “Hopefully, you’ll have luck in the morning when you bring Major Radison to the station and show him some mug shots, along with pictures of a few of our principal players,” Jackson said.

  “I’m glad you’re bringing him down to the station,” Will said.

  “You don’t think the surroundings will bother him?” Jude asked.

  “No,” Jenna told him. “I think he will actually feel better. Everyone will be kind to him at the station and will want his opinion.”

  “Yes, and I’m glad. I just wonder how much he’s actually going to be able to help,” Will said.

  “Why?” Jude asked him.

  “Whoever it was bothered to come to the hospital in a cloak, or something similar—and a hat. He might have gone all the way—with stage makeup,” Will said.

  “It always seems to bring us back to the movie being made—O’Leary’s,” Whitney said. “And Will is right. Anyone working around a set long enough has to learn something about makeup. So, was it really a mistake that the kidnapper who drugged and took Captain Tyler went to the wrong room—or did he do it on purpose? He was perpetuating the Jack the Ripper myth, even in ‘stealing’ and setting up Captain Tyler.”

  “Whitney, tomorrow you need to get to the location where O’Leary’s is now shooting,” Jackson said.

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “A task force meeting will take place tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.,” Jude said.

  “We’ll be there,” Jackson assured him gravely.

  “How’s the sushi?” Will asked.

  “Pardon?” Jude asked.

  “Sushi—dinner,” Will said, waving his chopsticks in the air.

  Jude laughed. “Sorry, it’s great, and thanks.”

  When they finished, Will and Angela went to study the bank of screens in the hallway. Whitney urged him to come back to the den, where Jake Mallory was set up. “You know that Hannah and I are sharing our information. We’ve done personality studies with Jackson on some of your movie principals.”

  “And what are your conclusions?” Jude asked him.

  “That you’re looking at three possible suspects. Obviously, that’s if the killer is working with someone. None of us believes that Sherry Blanco—though certainly a narcissist—has the necessary strength to pull off the murders. But it could be that she is in on what’s happening, if there are two people at work, which seems possible.”

  Whitney looked at Jude. “You know, the royal family conspiracy theory maintained that the prince had help in the killings—his physician, Sir Richard Gull.”

  “Gull was the carriage driver—there to whisk the prince away,” Jude said.

  “So, Sherry could be the person making sure that the killer makes a clean escape,” Jake told him.

  “And she could just be a spoiled star,” Whitney said. “And we could be barking up the wrong tree entirely.”

  She leaned back, stretching. A yawn escaped her. “I’m so sorry!” she said.

  Jude rose. “I’ll get out of here, let you have your house back and get some rest for the night.”

  “You should just move in here while the investigation is going on,” Jake told him.


  “Hey, I’ve got an apartment not that far,” Jude said.

  Move in. Nice idea. Close to Whitney. Not having to leave…

  “Well, good night. I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

  But he didn’t get out that quickly. As they started through the hallway toward the front door, they passed the bank of screens. Angela was leaning forward, pointing at something on it. “It’s still there, the shadow that seems to lurk just above the ground.”

  Jude walked over to look. Lights set up at the empty excavation site glinted off the patrol cars now permanently parked along the chain-link fence. But despite the lights, a shadow undulated just above the surface of the ground.

  “Is it the film?” Jude asked.

  “No,” Whitney said firmly. “It’s high-speed film…captures light, shadow, movement and changes in temperature, really. Movement in the air.”

  “Then it’s just a breeze—and the night is foggy,” he said.

  No one answered him.

  “It’s ghosts?”

  “Really, there should be no activity,” Angela murmured. “The bodies there were found, and they were dug out of the pit where they were buried without prayer or ceremony.”

  “Those bodies were discovered,” Whitney said.

  Jude groaned. “You’re suggesting there are more?”

  “Perhaps,” she replied.

  “More victims?” he demanded.

  Whitney looked at him at last. “Maybe not. According to the Honeywell book your father loaned me, Jonathan Black just disappeared. The city was in an uproar; the House of Spiritualism came under so much fire that the city fathers decided that it was going to be razed, and it was. They’d lost power. According to the book, the followers had grown afraid of Jonathan Black, who, it seemed, was their power for some time. It is possible that they got together and basically assassinated him. And if they did so…”

  “They buried him in the walls or the foundations somewhere,” Jude finished for her. He stared at Whitney. “Do you know where he’s buried? I mean, like you knew how to find the bodies last night?”

  Whitney shook her head. “No. We don’t know where his body might be, if it is there,” she said. “And, of course, a new Satanist might have worshipped his body, a piece of his body…or even some kind of relic he might have used as his ‘cross’ for others to respect as a symbol of some kind of supernatural power.”