Undying

by V. K. Forrest

  Because she had to.

  Because it was her penance.

  “Special Agent Kahill,” the female voice repeated.

  “Fia, it’s me. Maggie.” Macy had picked the name. No last name, just Maggie for Magnolia. For her mother.

  There was a pause. “How are you, Maggie?”

  “Anything more on the McNaughton case?” Macy said softly. The McNaughton family had been the last to die.

  A blue Toyota pulled into the driveway. The photographer. Macy would have to go.

  “Not really, Maggie. I check on it from time to time. The agents are keeping the investigation active, but no significant changes.”

  Macy ran her fingers through her fine, long blond hair. It was hot. She needed a band to pull it back into a ponytail.

  “What can I do for you, Maggie?”

  Macy exhaled. “He…” Her throat constricted. She stopped and started again. “You need to check the morning reports. Today. The next couple of days.”

  She didn’t have to say any more. She and Special Agent Fia Kahill had an interesting relationship. The agent accepted Macy for what she could offer, what she would offer and what she would not. Other law enforcement agents might have pushed her until Macy completely disengaged and stopped calling. But Fia seemed to understand how brittle her informant was.

  “Sweet Mary, Mother of God,” the FBI agent whispered. “So soon after the last? This is unexpected.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” Macy murmured. But the silence between them that followed made it evident that neither thought so. Not in their bones. Fia understood knowing something in your bones.

  The photographer had climbed out of her car. She had her hatchback up and was pulling bags from the trunk.

  Macy turned her back to the car. “I…I’m at work so I can’t really talk. I don’t know anything, Fia, except that Teddy’s out there. He’s on the move. He’s going to do it again…if he hasn’t already.”

  Fia sighed. Macy imagined her running her hand over her pretty face. They had never met in person, but Macy had seen Fia’s photograph in the news last year when she’d solved a string of murders in her own hometown. It was after that that Macy had contacted her. They talked about once a month but this would be the second time she made this kind of call. Last time, Macy had been right on the money. Upstate New York. Mother. Father. Two little girls and an infant boy.

  “Where do you think he is?”

  The photographer headed up the driveway toward the house, cameras swinging on both her shoulders. She waved to Macy, smiling. Macy waved back and turned away again, gripping the cell tighter in her hand.

  “Listen, I have to go. Check it out. There was nothing on the news this morning, but you know how it goes. Sometimes it takes a few hours to find them.” Once it had taken four days.

  “Can I call you back, Maggie? After I look into it?”

  Macy hesitated. She usually didn’t do things that way, but the cell only had a few minutes left on it. Then she would toss it. She already had a new one on the floor of the back of her car. She’d bought it at a Piggly Wiggly two days ago. “Sure, you can call me.”

  “What’s the number?” Fia played it cool.

  Macy almost smiled. She liked Fia Kahill. In another life, they might even have been friends. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Special Agent Kahill. You’re not going to find me. It’s a disposable, as always. I’m tossing it tonight whether I hear from you or not.”

  “You’re good, Maggie-With-No-Last-Name.”

  Macy gave her the number and hung up. She met the photographer at the wrought iron gate covered in crepe myrtle and shifted into work mode, setting Special Agent Kahill and Teddy aside for a few hours.

  Arlan turned on his cell phone as the seat belt light on the overhead cabin went out. He checked the last missed calls. There was only one he cared about.

  “Fee,” he said when she picked up the phone.

  “Arlan.” She sounded stressed. “You’re home?” She was making a point to sound professional, maybe for the sake of someone near, but Arlan knew her, maybe better than she knew herself. She was upset.

  “Just landed. Still on the tarmac.” Although the plane was still moving, passengers were beginning to get up and mill around in search of carry-ons and lost shoes.

  “Your trip successful?”

  “Yup.”

  “This was a big one, Arlan.” She didn’t hide the pride in her voice.

  “They all are, Fee. What’s going on?” She never called just to chat. She showed up on his porch in the middle of the night for that.

  “Want to take a ride with me?”

  The plane nosed into the terminal and passengers began moving toward the door. “Sure. Where we going?” He tried to sound light, but he sensed this wasn’t a pleasure trip. Neither he nor Fia were very good at telepathing long distance, but he knew from the tone of her voice that this was business. Ugly business, if he had to guess.

  “Northeast Virginia. On the peninsula. I need—” she was quiet for a breath—“I need your perspective.”

  “This an official case?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He smiled. “No.”

  “I’m already on my way.”

  He heard an elevator ding.

  “Pick you up outside of baggage,” she said.

  “I don’t have any baggage.”

  “Yeah,” she chuckled. “Right.”

  Macy was done by midafternoon and made arrangements with the homeowners to return in a week. By then, she would have had time to look at the photographer’s prelim shots and have a better idea of exactly what she wanted her to take for the spread.

  Ordinarily, Macy would have gone home. Home to read. Home to work. Instead, she drove east, not knowing where she was going or why. She wasn’t surprised when the disposable cell phone on the car seat beside her rang.

  “Special Agent Kahill,” Macy said into the phone.

  “You were expecting me.”

  “I don’t give my number out to many people,” she said glibly.

  “If you’d give me your permanent number, this would be a whole lot easier.”

  “But it wouldn’t be as much fun, would it, Special Agent Kahill? You wouldn’t be able to spend all those hours contemplating who I am and why I picked you.”

  “Good point,” Fia agreed.

  They were both stalling. Macy could feel the dread again, creeping up with long, black claws. In the moment of silence, she knew Fia felt it, too.

  “You were right,” the FBI agent said on the other end of the phone. There was no emotion in her voice.

  “Where?”

  “Outside a little town called Accomack on the eastern shore of Virginia.”

  Macy knew the area. She knew the whole country. She’d been to almost every state in the Union. Driven through most. Running. Always running.

  “Maggie?” Fia said after a moment.

  “I’m still here.”

  “I want you to think about meeting me. There,” she said.

  “There?” Macy shook her head. She signaled, glanced over her shoulder and passed an SUV pulling a pop-up camper. She tried not to look at the happy faces of the family inside as she cruised by. “Oh, no. I’m not going there. I don’t want to see them.”

  “No. You don’t have to,” Fia said quickly. “It wouldn’t be allowed, anyway. Let me go to the scene, then we could meet. Maybe you could help me out. Help us catch this guy.”

  “I can’t help you,” Macy said incredulously. “This was a bad idea. I should never have called you. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “No, no. Don’t hang up. Maggie?”

  Macy signaled and edged back into the right lane.

  “Maggie, listen to me. I don’t know what your connection is to the guy, but I know it’s got to be personal. I know you want me to catch him.”

  Macy didn’t say anything.

  “If you didn’t want to help catch him, you wouldn’t keep
calling me. You wouldn’t keep checking on the cases. You wouldn’t keep making sure we were doing our job.”

  “I…I just call because I want him caught. He…he’s a monster.”

  “It’s more than that. We’ve got plenty of monsters out there, Maggie. This is personal, somehow, between you and him. You want to help me. You need to.”

  Was that true? Did Macy want to help the FBI catch him? The idea was ridiculous. She couldn’t help. What could she do? She was helpless. She had always been helpless when it came to him.

  “Maggie?”

  “I…I don’t know if I can do it,” Macy said, her voice shaky.

  “I think you can.”

  Macy gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead. She was going in the right direction. She had been for more than an hour. It was as if she had known, subconsciously, where the murders had taken place. It was as if she had known she would go this time. She could be there in a couple of hours.

  “Maggie?”

  “I’ll think about it.” The phone beeped in her ear. “Look, my time’s about to run out on this phone. I’m going to have to go. Sorry.”

  “Maggie—”

  Macy hit the End Call button and tossed the phone on the car seat beside her. She wanted to turn the car around and head back to her cottage.

  She didn’t.

  Couldn’t.

  Chapter 4

  Arlan watched Fia set her cell phone on the console between them. He glanced out the window at the scenery flying by. Green grass. Trees. She was driving a good fifteen miles over the speed limit on Delaware Route 1 South. She always drove this car too fast. She’d had the old BMW for years, a six speed. Arlan owned a pickup truck. He didn’t understand Fia’s need for speed. Being immortal, they had forever.

  “Weird call,” he commented when she said nothing about the conversation he’d just overheard.

  She kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock. They had learned to drive together around 1910. The two of them had spun circles in a cornfield for hours. Fia had laughed, hanging out the open window, letting the wind blow her then short-cropped red hair. It had been a Model T pickup belonging to one of the old guys in town. Arlan wished he still had that Model T. He wished he could see Fia laugh the way she had laughed that day. But they had been young. Seen less. Killed fewer.

  “What’s she got to do with this?” He pointed his index finger in the direction of the cell phone.

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  Arlan watched Fia. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her black Ray-Ban sunglasses. They looked as good on her as they did on Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Better. Very clandestine and FBIish. “You don’t know what she’s got to do with the case? Is she an informant?”

  She lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “Sort of. It’s an unusual situation.”

  She had removed her navy suit jacket and was wearing a tight, silky sleeveless shirt that showed off her muscular shoulders. She was hot, for an FBI agent. Way hotter than Will Smith.

  “But she was the one who tipped you off to this case before anyone else did?”

  “She called me for the first time about a year ago.” Fia glanced at him, and then back at the road. “She saw me on TV after the beheadings. She asked me to look over the Buried Alive Killings. I didn’t get any further than anyone else in the bureau, but I kept up with the cases. She checks in periodically. Now he’s killed again.”

  “How many does this make, if it’s the same perp?”

  “Oh, it’s the same one.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t been to the scene yet.”

  “Just wait until you see them. You won’t be sleeping tonight.”

  He glanced out the window again, fighting the shiver that crept up his spine. This was part of his job, seeing the horrendous atrocities humans could commit. Witnessing so that he could justify their deaths. So why didn’t it get any easier? “How many times has he killed?”

  “This makes eleven families.”

  Arlan was always amazed by how calm and removed she could be from what she did. It came so easily to her, setting aside her emotions. He wished he could be more like her. In a morphed state, the way he usually conducted sept business, he was always emotionally raw. Always on the edge. He felt as if he carried that into his personal life. His niece Kaleigh always said he wore his heart on his sleeve.

  “Could he have killed more? Cases not yet connected? It happens with serial killers.”

  “I don’t think so,” Fia said slowly. “Maggie would know.”

  “How would she know?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know her connection to this guy, but she knows him. Knows what he’s doing, but can’t stop him. It’s a brother, a father, maybe a boyfriend. Women get trapped in the middle of this sort of thing all the time. You know that. Pretty common.”

  “Pretty freakin’ weird. Doesn’t that make her an accessory? Shouldn’t you arrest her?”

  “I’ve never met her. She uses disposable cell phones to call me. It’s always from a different number and untraceable. Once in a while, I get an e-mail from her, but she somehow manages to hack into other people’s e-mail accounts. She’s made sure I can’t track her down.”

  “Sounds like she definitely has something to hide.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “How do you know she’s not helping the killer? And calling you to appease her guilt? Hell, how do you know she isn’t the killer? Sounds guilty as hell to me.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that she’s scared of him. But more than scared.” She glanced at Arlan and then back at the road again. “This is even more complicated than I understand, yet. I just get that feeling. You know?”

  “Is there anything about your life that isn’t more complicated than either of us understands?” He kept his tone good-natured.

  She smiled, which was what he was hoping for.

  “So, how’s the HM?” he asked.

  “I hate it when you call him that.” Now she was frowning.

  “What?” Arlan opened his arms innocently. “He is, isn’t he?”

  “Glen is fine. We’re fine.”

  He glanced at her. “Pretty quick to throw that detail in.” He made a clicking sound between his teeth. “Doesn’t sound good, Fee. Doesn’t sound good at all. Bloom wearing off the rose? Getting tired of stealing into the kitchen after he’s asleep, waiting on the blood to thaw in the microwave and then having to sneak into the bathroom with it?”

  He was just teasing her. They all did it at some point. It was part of the price of living among mortals. Trying to fit in. But the look on her face made him want to take it back. There was something wrong. She and her human were having problems.

  “Can we talk about something else?” she asked.

  “Like when you’re going to marry me and have my babies?” It was an old joke with them. Sept members could only marry their own spouses, lifetime after lifetime, and reproduction was impossible. One of God’s blessings.

  “Something else,” she said.

  “Nice weather we’re having.”

  Macy parked her car alongside the road behind an older model BMW and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment. She debated whether or not she should drag out the press badge she kept in her glove compartment. The seven or eight vehicles parked on both sides of the street faced in the same direction.

  A loose stone driveway led east off the paved road, through neat rows of maple trees, disappearing over a hill. The Virginia Peninsula was narrow here, and even though she couldn’t see the bay or ocean surrounding the point of land, she could smell it. The family had lived on the bay side, a couple of miles south and west of town. The property had been easy to find. She had followed the emergency vehicles that she knew would be racing up and down the highways and byways for the next twenty-four hours. A case like this took time to process.

  She could see only the rooftop of the family’s farmhouse from the road. And the red a
nd blue flashing lights of the emergency vehicles…

  In the end, she decided to tuck her press badge into the pocket of her jean jacket. There were TV and radio news vans parked on the road, but she doubted they were being permitted to actually gain access. The police never let the news hounds too close to a scene this grim. There was too great a chance some fool looking for a viewer-ratings increase would run a clip no one should have to see.

  Macy left her keys in the ignition, her backpack with her wallet on the floor of the car. There was no ID in it. Nothing to steal. No credit cards and little money. She kept her credit cards and various IDs locked in the trunk in the wheel well. Mostly she operated in cash, but sometimes prepaid credit cards that could now be purchased in mini-marts. She did take the new cell phone she’d pried out of its package while stopped at a gas station. She didn’t know yet if she would call Fia. She wouldn’t know what she was going to do until she reached the farmhouse down the hill.

  Macy followed the driveway, passing several state and local cops. She kept her head down and strode purposely, as if she belonged there. She had been amazed, over the years, as to how well the tactic worked for her.

  The pebbles under the soles of her shoes were rough. Bumpy. The early evening air was warm, and even above the sound of the rocks crunching underfoot, she could hear frogs croaking. Insects chirping. The air smelled of the Chesapeake Bay, and of the faintest scent of honeysuckle, which grew along the woods line to the north of the property. As she walked around the bend in the driveway, her feet feeling leaden, the farmhouse came into view. It was white clapboard, two story, typical for the turn of the century in the area. She’d done a piece on a similar house in Maryland the year before. The lawn had recently been mowed and clusters of bright orange flowers bloomed at the posts of the split rail fence that encircled the yard. Daylilies.

  A serene setting for a mass murder.

  Chapter 5