Headlight beams bobbed down the uneven road, followed by a black car. Lieutenant McConnell stepped out and rubbed the sleep from his right eye. “You all want to take this inside?”
They followed him to the police briefing room, where they sat at the front table. On the wall ahead, the crime scene photos of all five murder victims hung alongside the pictures of their missing children. Rachel looked at them, imagining a sixth photo: her own slack-jawed mug shot. At least I don’t have any children to lose. It was how her father would cope that scared her more than death.
McConnell sipped from a Styrofoam coffee cup. “I want to exercise the possibility that it was a prank caller.”
Rachel planted her feet. “It wasn’t.”
McConnell sighed. “If that’s the case, Harroway, maybe you should back down.”
The words stuck in Rachel like knives. “I’m not giving him what he wants.”
“He wants to antagonize you. It’s a power play. The best way to deal with these types of people is to do what they want, lull them into a false sense of security, and hope their pride is their downfall. Which it often is.”
Peak nodded in agreement.
For some reason, that felt like a betrayal.
McConnell smiled softly at her. “You escaped a burning house less than twenty-four hours ago. It’s okay for you to sit this one out. If you’d like to cash in those vacation days you waste every year, I’m more than happy to oblige. I can have everyone at the station chip in a few bucks, and you and your father can go somewhere nice.”
Rachel bounced her eyes between the men. “Who would take over for me?”
McConnell replied, “We can make use of Jones or Kelly. I’ve been wanting to train some new blood anyway.”
“Jones and Kelly.” Rachel scoffed. “They’re beat cops.”
“Now is as good a time as any to learn,” McConnell replied.
“What about you, Peak?” Rachel asked. “Are you fine staying on?”
Detective Peak slowly nodded. “I live for this stuff. Besides, I’ve not received any death threats.”
“You don’t answer any anonymous calls, either.” Rachel glared at him.
“That could be the reason why,” Peak replied.
McConnell set aside his cup. “I know detectives receive all manner of threats on a daily basis, but I see how this worries you, Harroway.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Rachel replied. “But once a detective takes a case, it is theirs until the end. I will not back down.” Not for my sake, but for the women and children this monster has and will hurt.
“Very well,” McConnell said and snatched up his cup. “I’ll see you detectives tomorrow. And remember what I said—keep this case clean. Our salary depends on it.”
Rachel and Peak didn’t say anything until they got to their cars, which were parked parallel to one another.
Peak opened his door. “We’ll get the guy before anything happens, Rachel.”
“I know,” Rachel replied.
Hadley House seemed much more hollow and ominous upon her return. Its pale-green coat of paint curled back, revealing wood more than a century old. With her pistol drawn, Rachel searched the first floor, the second floor, and the basement before locking every window latch and putting a safety bar under the front and back doors. She sank into her small dining room chair under her dim yellow light. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she tried to kill her migraine. It didn’t help.
All of her homicide cases up to this point had been solved in a matter of weeks, thanks to the Gift. This Poisoner case had overstayed its welcome. Something had to give. She felt it in her gut. Rachel looked up at her kitchen cupboard, knowing what she had to do.
After pulling out her dusty bottle of whiskey from the top shelf, Rachel returned to the old wooden table and poured herself a splash. She gulped it down. It rolled down her throat like tongues of fire. She grimaced, having forgotten how strong the stuff tasted. She poured herself another. Downed it. Coughed. And went for round three.
Her whole body felt light as a feather. It didn’t soothe her throbbing head, but it did make her want to sleep. She pushed the bottle away and waited. All of the lights in her house were out except for the small chandelier in the dining room spilling light into the living room and kitchen.
In the corner of her vision, something moved.
Rachel slid her fingers onto her pistol, which was lying beside her bottle of scotch and the depleted glass. She scanned the living room with half-shut eyes.
Something shattered in the kitchen.
Rachel looked over the table, seeing the shattered plate on the laminate floor. She stayed seated.
“You can come out,” Rachel said into her big empty house.
Rachel listened. Over the harsh gusts outside and strange groans of the ancient house, Rachel heard crying—not the quiet kind but dread-filled sobs. The stairs creaked on the other side of the house. Rachel watched from the table. A small foot stepped down the first step, followed by another, and soon Martha’s entire figure could be seen descending the stairs. Her face was buried in her palms, but it did little to mute her weeping. She continued her descent and stopped at the front door, keeping her profile toward Rachel.
The tiny hairs on Rachel’s flesh pulled toward the kitchen doorway. Rachel directed her attention that way, seeing the silhouette of the large woman glaring at her with eyes so bloodshot they looked entirely red apart from the large black pupil in the center. The woman stepped forward, her flowing red dress dragging on the ground behind her. Parted at her crown, her long, dyed-red hair ran like a river down her shoulders and back. She stopped at the edge of the table.
“Anastasia,” Rachel said, still under the intoxicating effects of the whiskey.
Anastasia kept glaring with her crimson eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, causing blood and bile to spill out and splat on the floor. Red wine and blood stained her tiny teeth, making it look as if she had eaten a human heart.
Rachel glanced back at Martha. The wailing woman had vanished. The stairs and front entrance hall were deathly quiet.
Droplets of blood and bile plopped down on the living room floor. Drip. Drip. Drip. Rachel traced the leaking from the hardwood floor upward. Crawling upside down on the ceiling with her palms and feet, a woman with short blond hair twisted her neck too far for any human and stared at Rachel with wide, unblinking blue eyes. Blue, red, and green paint splattered her loosely fitted white bathrobe, which was nearly falling off of her pasty skin. More paint splattered her blond hair and her face, covering one eye with a wet indigo blob. From her slightly parted lips, blood and bile fell and went splat on the floor. Tears of paint trickled as well.
Cora Brewster. Rachel recalled her photo from the crime wall. The poison had hit Cora early in the morning when she was painting. Her limp corpse had fallen onto the easel and paint supplies. Now Cora was on Rachel’s ceiling, walking like a spider. In all of Rachel’s years, she had never seen anything like it.
A loud crash sounded in the kitchen. Through the doorway behind Anastasia, drawers full of knives, forks, and spoons flew across the kitchen and exploded into clanging fragments on the opposite wall.
“Martha?” Rachel called out.
A loud scream sounded right in Rachel’s ear, sending her toppling from her chair. She looked at the wailing Orphan with brunette hair flowing down her crying face. It was Martha.
More drawers and kitchen appliances took flight, hitting the ceiling, floor, and wall. Glass fragments, knives, and drawers bounced on impact and then took flight again. It was as though someone had tossed in an invisible bundle of frag grenades that kept exploding one after another.
Rachel grabbed the edge of the table and forced herself up. She yelled a command, but the screaming and clamor blocked out her voice.
On the living room ceiling, Cora slowly started crawling toward the dining area, keeping her neck twisted and her unblinking blue eyes on Rachel.
The table wh
ere Rachel rested her hands slid across the floor, slamming into Rachel’s waist. Before she could move, the table jolted forward at high speed. Its legs scarred the hardwood as Rachel was slammed into the wall and window behind her. Splinter cracks grew across the glass behind her, and a harsh downpour of sheets of rain slammed against the window.
Rachel pushed with all her might, watching all her arms’ muscles flex as she tried to remove the table from her midsection. Her face turned blood red and her eyes watered, but the table didn’t give way.
With the kitchen still in pure pandemonium behind her, Anastasia took a few steps forward. Wailing Martha neared from the right of Rachel. Cora crawled closer.
A whisper seemed to speak over the chaos and into Rachel’s mind. “I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I’m not dead.”
Rachel turned her attention to the woman cowering in the corner beside her. She had chocolate-brown skin and curly black hair. She kept mumbling to herself. “It’s all a bad dream. Wake up, Jasmine. Your daughter needs you. Wake up.”
Cora made it into the dining area and hid behind the chandelier. She bobbed her twisted head from the right side to the left of the crystalline ornaments and flame-shaped bulbs, trying to determine which side had a better view of Rachel.
Dragging her dress’s tail behind her, Anastasia walked to the left of the table, on Jasmine’s side. Martha was to the right. Cora was above. There was still one more Orphan that wasn’t present.
Suddenly, all the flying objects in the kitchen froze in midair for a second. With a series of loud clangs, the pots, pans, knives, forks, and all else in the kitchen dropped to the floor. The sound of Martha’s sobbing and the steady multicolored dripping from Cora filled Hadley House.
That was when the Delinquent made herself known.
Rachel had first met one years ago when she was still a green detective. It was a little boy that time. He had sent the house into an uproar, screamed every night, would inflict pain upon himself and do everything in his power to make Rachel’s life a living hell. It wasn’t until Rachel found his killer, another one of his classmates, that he had left this world. However, unlike Orphans, Delinquents didn’t care if they went home or not. Their very issue was that they didn’t care about anything, and a supernatural power without direction was a dangerous thing.
Carolina Thurston, the Poisoner’s second victim, walked out of the kitchen and stopped at the end of the table. Her hair was chopped up, and she had uneven black bangs and patchy bald spots on her head. There were slashes curving out of both corners of her mouth all the way to her ears. When she smiled, which she did with crazed eyes, one bigger than the other, the lacerations split open, revealing a little bit of her teeth. When Rachel had found Carolina’s body, she had nice hair and an undamaged face. The wounds this Delinquent suffered were self-inflicted.
A long steak knife hovered over Thurston’s shoulder, its sharp point aimed at Rachel.
“Unpin me,” Rachel said with clenched teeth, trying to move the table that had her jammed against the window.
The knife zipped through the air, ending its deadly trek a centimeter from Rachel’s left eye. Though it didn’t touch Rachel, she could somehow feel the point digging into her cornea. The knife’s edge was so close Rachel didn’t want to blink. Her eye was drying out at an alarming rate. A tear snaked from her duct and down the side of her nose. “Carolina. Put down the knife. Please.”
The Delinquent’s smile widened, opening the entire lower half of her face into a sinister grin. Like a fat, pink worm, her tongue slid from one side of her mouth to the other, parting the cut skin as it went.
Rachel couldn’t keep her eye open any longer. Her whole body shook. Above her, Cora watched from behind the chandelier. The other mothers stared at her expectantly from around the table.
Sliding through the air, the knife pulled away from Rachel’s face and clanged on the tabletop, where it started to spin rapidly. It swiftly became a blurry circle of shiny metal. The Delinquent nodded, and the blade flew out in a random direction. It shot hilt-deep into Anastasia’s thick neck. The Orphan didn’t seem to notice the crimson flow slipping onto her red dress.
Slowly, she turned her big head to Carolina. The Delinquent smiled at her.
Rachel tried to push the table once again. It didn’t give. Anastasia and Carolina eyed one another. Whatever they had planned was not going to be good for Rachel or her house.
“Enough!” Rachel yelled.
All of the mothers turned to Rachel.
“You are acting like children,” Rachel said, struggling to breathe. “I know it’s been months. You long to leave this place. I’m not blind to that, but if we want to solve this case, we need to work together.”
The mothers stared at her unblinkingly. I’m talking to a brick wall. “I know Giovanni killed you, Martha. Were any of the rest of you dating a man with a similar name during the time of your death?”
Jasmine slammed her fist on the table. “I’m not dead!”
“Sure, fine, whatever. Were you or are you seeing someone?” Rachel asked.
With a heavy frown, Jasmine said, “Antonio Berti.”
“Good, good. How about the rest of you?” Rachel winced in pain. “Carolina, please move the table.”
With a loud screech, the table moved a few inches but not far enough for Rachel to get out. She gave Carolina the evil eye. The Delinquent didn’t respond. Rachel asked around the table, talking to Anastasia next. The knife in her throat made her voice froggy. “I wasn’t seeing… anyone… Marco was my friend…”
Rachel got his last name, Gallo. She committed it to memory. She directed her attention to Cora, not quite sure how to have a conversation with such a hideous thing. The Orphan must’ve noticed, as she dropped from the ceiling, twisted herself in the air, and landed with her hands and bare feet, grasping the edges of the table. Her neck was still twisted, meaning that Rachel was talking to an upside-down face. With a snakelike voice, she said, “Kill Donte Pace.”
The last time Rachel had killed a serial killer, it was not good news.
“I’m going to bring him to justice,” Rachel promised.
The only one left who hadn’t spoken was Carolina. She didn’t say anything but kept on smiling her scary grin. She pointed outside. Rachel twisted back as far as she could to the cracked window. All she saw was rain and blackness. A lightning bolt touched down, revealing the winding road and leafless trees, but no sign of what Carolina saw.
“You know where he is?” Rachel asked.
The Delinquent nodded.
The small chandelier blinked out for a second. When it returned, the table had gone back to normal, Rachel didn’t have a pain in her side, and the Orphans were gone.
The window behind her was the only thing that was damaged. Outside in the rain, Rachel saw the five women standing in the middle of the single-lane road to Hadley House.
They want me to follow them. The thought made Rachel uneasy. She didn’t trust any one of them, even if they couldn’t really hurt her. But they can make you hurt yourself. Slinging on a raincoat and grabbing an umbrella, Rachel headed out the door. Perhaps the alcohol had dulled her system, but this felt like her best shot at finding the Poisoner and putting an end to this nonsense.
She traveled out into the rain. The droplets pattered on the top of her black umbrella as she locked the front door and made her way to the car. The mothers appeared every half mile or so as she drove. They would stand in a bundle like a group of trick-or-treaters and point in a single direction. Rachel gnashed her teeth as she drove. If they knew where the killer was, why didn’t they tell me long ago? Rachel hoped that Carolina hadn’t twisted their minds. An Orphan’s influences on the world were useless, but Rachel had never explored the relationship between two Orphans. Did they talk? Hang out? They didn’t view the world as living people did, Rachel knew from her mother’s journal and by experience. Like many things in the supernatural, their actions didn’t always make sense.
Rachel found her car drifting to the wrong side of the road. She straightened herself. The whiskey was still strong in her system. She wondered what type of media crap-storm would happen if Highlands’s lead detective got arrested for a DUI. For the sake of Lieutenant McConnell’s stress levels and the well-being of every other person driving on the road, Rachel pulled over when she got into the downtown area and parked her car at a meter. She got out and paid the fee for a two-hour slot. A few raindrops splashed on her head before she was able to raise the umbrella.
Highlands was a ghost town this late at night. All of the mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, and antique stores were closed. The nearby houses had gone dark. Lampposts from yesteryear lined either side of the road, giving the quiet street an eerie glow. She glanced up at the black sky. A thunderhead concealed the moon. Up the road, Cora crawled across the general store’s face and vanished behind the upper lip of the building. Rachel involuntarily touched her pistol holster. Tennis shoes splashing through sidewalk puddles, Rachel followed after the disturbing woman. It must be Halloween, Rachel concluded. That’s the only reason why she would be acting this way.
Rachel stayed on Main Street. The clothing outlets and bookstore where she frequently shopped lined her trek. The Orphans eventually put her on Spring Street. It ran parallel with Main but consisted mostly of residential housing. The road rose and dipped in the mountainous terrain, but there were many areas of flat ground as well. The homes were large, owned mostly by the town’s elite and Appalachian-blooded socialites that had been in Highlands since its inception in the late 1800s. Their designs were all unique. One would be modern, and then the next would be a 1930s mini-mansion. It was like walking through a time machine of the city, knowing the order of what was built and when the people had moved in simply by the home’s appearance. Near the end of Spring Street, Rachel’s knees felt weak, and the bruises from her inferno escape were painful. She stopped at a rusty chain-link fence and looked up at an old home with Victorian-era influences. Its design was symmetrical. Its walls were the color of wet wood and lacked any paint. A few steps led up to its front door. Rachel stared at the two-story home with its truncated roof. She chuckled, recalling the famous Appalachian ghost stories that were told about this place every Halloween. You want to see a real haunted house, come to my home, Rachel thought, almost taking pride in the statement.
The Lost Orphans Omnibus: A Riveting Mystery Page 17