Kill Her Again (A Thriller)

by Robert Gregory Browne

  This was pure speculation on Anna’s part, of course. A semi-educated guess. But she had a strong feeling she was right.

  Unfortunately, none of it brought her any closer to finding Red Cap.

  Depressed, she started to close the notebook when she spotted something. Inside the back cover was a small built-in pocket, normally used to store extra paper. Protruding slightly above the fold was the edge of what looked like a photograph.

  Anna pulled it out, feeling a slight kick in her gut as she looked at it.

  It was a photo of the young gypsy girl, staring solemnly at the camera. She looked about seventeen, with flawless dark skin, curly black hair, and defiant, almost hypnotic eyes. A regal beauty in a long, patterned skirt, and a stark white blouse, a shawl draped over her shoulders.

  Chavi.

  It was Chavi.

  But where, Anna wondered, had Susan gotten this? None of her writings made any reference to it.

  Turning the photo over, she read the caption in the upper left hand corner: Roma Vjestica by Jonathan O’Keefe.

  Just below this was a slightly smudged stamp that read:

  POWELL UNIVERSITY HISTORICAL ARCHIVES—DO NOT REMOVE.

  Stolen, apparently. Which meant it must have been very important to Susan.

  Near the center was a question mark, scribbled in blue ink, and next to this were thirteen letters, written in Susan’s precise handwriting:

  Y LMXM WZAIE MXX

  Another Caesar cypher.

  But this time, Susan had changed the key, and it took Anna a moment to decipher the code. When she was done, it translated to:

  M ZALA KNOWS ALL

  M Zala. Was this a source that Susan had found but had never bothered to follow up on?

  If so, what did he or she know?

  Something about Chavi?

  Red Cap?

  Feeling energized, Anna got to her feet and started pulling on her clothes.

  She needed to find a computer.

  39

  IT TOOK AN eternity for the motel manager to come out of his office, which wasn’t a surprise at four-thirty in the morning.

  Anna stood at the front desk, ringing the bell, when the door behind it finally blew open and a kid who looked as if he were still in high school stepped out, bleary-eyed. His T-shirt read: P2P RULES.

  “What?” he barked.

  She showed him her creds. “I need your help.”

  He squinted at her ID, then looked up at her with surprise. “You gotta be kidding me. You’re a fed?”

  “That’s the rumor,” Anna said.

  “Holy shit.”

  Anna moved around the counter. “I don’t see a computer out here. Do you have one inside?”

  “Huh?”

  “A computer,” she said. “You know that little box with a keyboard and a screen?”

  “Yeah, we got one, but what’s this about? We ain’t doing nothing illegal.”

  “I need to use it for a while.”

  “Why? You working for the RIAA or something? Think I’m downloading music?”

  “I don’t care if you’re downloading Warner Brothers’ entire catalog. Just let me in.”

  He eyed her defiantly. “You got a warrant?”

  Anna had reached the end of her patience. “Move,” she said, shoving him aside. She stepped through the office doorway into a cramped, untidy room with a desk, a chair, and an old, beige desktop computer that was about the size of a small car.

  Christ.

  A fucking dinosaur.

  The kid crowded in behind her. “You got no right,” he said. “You need a warrant before you can—”

  “Call your congressman,” Anna told him, then took a seat behind the computer. “Does this thing have an Internet connection?”

  “Yeah, but it’s dial-up.”

  “Wonderful.”

  When she touched the mouse, the screen saver disappeared and the monitor came to life, showing a Web page with two drunken college girls exposing their breasts to the camera.

  “Nice,” Anna said.

  The kid eyed her sheepishly. “That’s the day man’s computer, not mine.”

  She gestured. “Do me a favor and close the door on your way out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get out,” Anna said.

  The kid just stood there, staring at her until his brain finally caught up to the command. Then he turned on his heels and left, closing the door behind him.

  SHE WENT TO Sentinel first, the bureau’s Web interface for its automatic case-support system. But when she tried to log in to her personal work box, she discovered she’d been locked out.

  Royer.

  He’d probably spent the day convincing the brass that she was mentally unstable and couldn’t be trusted. The lockout would be temporary, pending an INSD investigation, but that didn’t help Anna much right now.

  Next she went to the Powell University Historical Archives Web site and found their search page. Checking the caption on the back of the photograph, she typed in the name Jonathan O’Keefe.

  The search engine began churning the information, then transferred her to O’Keefe’s bio page, which loaded so slowly that Anna could have taken a couple of bathroom breaks before the page filled the screen.

  She hadn’t used dial-up in years and remembered why she hated it. She started reading before the page had fully loaded.

  Jonathan O’Keefe was an adventurer and photography pioneer, a young genius, fluent in several languages, who had started traveling the world when he was only sixteen, camera in tow. His collection of photographs was voluminous, much of which was believed to have been lost.

  Until recently, Powell had only owned a small sampling of the photographer’s work. But thanks to persistence and a bit of luck, his entire library had been found in the possession of a private collector, whose family generously donated the work to Powell in 2007. The Web site now contained several of O’Keefe’s collections, recently brought online by the Powell Preservation Project.

  O’Keefe had died at a fairly young age, twenty-six, in 1882. He’d fallen victim, some claimed, to. . .

  —Anna felt another small kick to the stomach as she read this—

  . . . a gypsy curse.

  Place of death was Osijek, Slavonia.

  Slavonia, Anna thought. Home of the now-defunct cigarettes.

  That single kick turned into a flurry of punches that intensified when O’Keefe’s portrait finally loaded on the page. His face wasn’t familiar at all—

  —but his eyes were. Anna would recognize those intense dark eyes anywhere.

  They were Daniel Pope’s.

  THE COLLECTION SHE was looking for was called The Nomads of Osijek. It was O’Keefe’s last work.

  Clicking the link, Anna waited the interminably long time it took for the thumbnails to load. The text accompanying them said that O’Keefe had become fascinated by the Zalas, a Croatian gypsy clan, and had traveled with them in their caravan as they moved from town to town, following a traveling carnival troupe. At every stop, the Zalas would pitch their tents and set up fortune-telling booths near the carnival.

  It was unusual, it said, for an outsider, a gadje, to be allowed such access, but O’Keefe was known for his ability to get people to trust him.

  When the thumbnails had loaded, over two hundred in all, Anna studied shot after shot of the gypsy family—an assortment of young and old, some posed, some candid. Standing by campfires, wagons, in front of battered tents, telling fortunes to the locals. There was a haunted quality to many of the photos, as if these people had been trodden upon, and had carried their pain for centuries.

  Finding the one she wanted, Anna clicked the thumbnail and watched as a new window opened and a larger version of the photograph from Susan’s notebook slowly loaded.

  Roma Vjestica.

  Chavi.

  To Anna’s surprise, the accompanying text explained that the word “Vjestica” was Croatian for witch or wizard. And, according
to O’Keefe’s biographer, the Zalas were believed by many to be a magical family, with supernatural and psychic powers. This claim, however, was not all that unusual among the Roma people.

  Roma Vjestica.

  Gypsy Witch.

  Closing the window, Anna searched the thumbnails and found another shot of the girl.

  This one was a less formal pose, Chavi showing a hint of a smile. Subsequent shots found that smile widening, the body language loosening, as if Chavi had begun to trust her photographer, to feel comfortable with him—

  —just as Anna had become comfortable with Pope.

  If Anna was right, that this young girl was another of her past lives, and O’Keefe was one of Pope’s, then they had known each other for over a century. Which would explain why their mutual attraction had been so immediate. Why Pope’s kiss, his touch, seemed so familiar.

  Chavi and O’Keefe had been lovers.

  Anna went back to the thumbnails, clicking them at random, hoping for that sense of déjà vu, that vague stirring of recognition from one of the faces—the faces of her past. But no memories came.

  Then, without realizing it, she found one. She almost missed it at first, glancing at the thumbnail but not clicking it, about to move on, when she realized it was another shot of Chavi.

  Opening the larger version, Anna stiffened involuntarily as the photo filled the page.

  This one was labeled: Napasnica i raditi kao rob. Chavi was standing at the rear of a wagon, doing what, according to the text, was forbidden in gypsy culture. A precocious look on her face, she was lifting her long skirt, exposing her legs.

  A scandal, by Roma standards, apparently. But this wasn’t the part of the photograph that had caught Anna’s attention. Her focus was instead drawn to the back of the wagon, where the face of a teenage boy could clearly be seen. He was crouched inside, his unhappy gaze on Chavi.

  His face was lopsided. Severely deformed. A dark bandanna covered his misshapen skull.

  It was Red Cap.

  The bogeyman.

  Something skittered through Anna, leaving an icy trail behind.

  The accompanying text explained that the girl in the photograph was believed to be the Zala family’s youngest daughter.

  The boy in the wagon, however, was unknown.

  According to O’Keefe’s biographer, many believed—as Anna had suspected—that the girl and O’Keefe had been romantically involved, fueling rumors of a gypsy death curse against the photographer by one of her family members. These rumors had never been substantiated and the official cause of death was reported to be “bleeding of the brain.”

  Anna shuddered, staring at the photograph.

  Staring at Red Cap.

  Translated into English, O’Keefe’s caption, Napasnica i raditi kao rob, read: Temptress and Slave.

  ANNA’S NEXT STOP on the information superhighway—which was still plagued by speed bumps—was a people-finder Web site.

  There were dozens of them on the Internet, all claiming to have the most up-to-date databases. It was unlikely, however, that any of them were as accurate as the bureau’s own case-support system, but without access Anna was out of luck. So-she chose one at random and hoped for the best.

  Typing the name M Zala into the search field, she clicked the go button and waited.

  A minute and a half later, the list appeared, showing full names and locations of over sixty people around the country. Marion Zala, Manuel Zala, Michael Zala, Michelle Zala, and dozens of variations. But she was relying on instinct here, and none of them felt right to her.

  Anna decided to widen the search to include only the surname, and got back twice the number of entries. She carefully scanned the list, hoping one would pop out at her.

  At entry number thirty-nine, she got her wish.

  Name: Antonija Zala.

  Location: Allenwood, California.

  40

  “WAKE UP, sleepyhead.”

  Pope groaned. “What time is it?”

  “Almost seven. Come on.”

  He groaned again. “Give me a break. This is the best sleep I’ve had in a decade.”

  “So that’s how it is, huh? You have your way with me and now you want me to get lost?”

  Pope stifled a laugh. Opened his eyes. If any other woman had asked him this during the last couple of years, he probably would have said yes. He’d been a walking zombie, thinking about nobody but himself.

  Eat. Gamble. Get high. Fuck.

  Oh, and make sure you spend as much time as possible letting everyone around you know how miserable you are.

  This wasn’t something he was particularly proud of, but in one day—and one unbelievable night—McBride had changed all that.

  Just the sight of her now, sitting on the edge of the bed, fresh from a shower, her hair slicked back, a towel wrapped around her, made Pope want to reach out just to make sure she was really there. That she wouldn’t disappear on him.

  As crazy as it sounded, he was in love with her.

  And it was a feeling he’d never felt this strong before. Not even with Susan. A jump-up-on-Oprah’s-sofa kind of feeling that he would’ve made fun of only a day ago.

  But not now.

  Now he understood.

  And despite what they’d been through, he wanted her to understand, too.

  “Come here,” he said, taking her hand.

  She leaned forward and kissed him. “That’s more like it. But I wasn’t kidding, it’s time to get up. We have to go.”

  “Why? You’ve heard from Jake?”

  “No, but I’ve got a lead. At least I hope it’s one.”

  “What kind of lead?”

  “I won’t know until we get there,” Anna said, climbing off the bed. She went to a chair, tossed her towel aside, and picked up her panties, stepping into them. It’s funny what a night in bed can do to a woman’s modesty.

  Pope watched her and couldn’t help thinking lascivious thoughts. She was breathtaking.

  “Get where?” he asked. “Where are we going?”

  “Allenwood.”

  He sat up. “Allenwood?”

  “It’s near Salcedo, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive.”

  “I know. It’s where the amusement park is. Big Mountain.”

  “Was,” McBride said. “The place has been closed down for nearly twenty-five years. The town couldn’t afford to demolish it, so they just let it rot.”

  “And you know all this how?”

  McBride strapped her bra on. “I took a little field trip while you were sleeping.”

  “You what?” Pope got out of bed, approached her. “Jesus, Anna, what were you thinking? That guy could be out there somewhere. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “And interrupt the best sleep you’ve had in a decade? I don’t think so.”

  She grabbed her blouse, slipped into it, but he took hold of her arm. “Quit being so goddamn cavalier. I don’t know if what happened in here last night meant the same to you as it did to me, but I don’t want to lose you.”

  She stopped, touched his cheek. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t go far. Just to the manager’s office to use the computer.” She gestured to her Glock, which lay in its holster on the dresser nearby. “And I took protection.”

  Pope still wasn’t happy. But what could he say? When it came down to it, she’d probably handled herself better with the gypsy than he had. The twin defenders, too.

  He released her and let her button her blouse.

  “I saw him,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Red Cap. The gypsy.”

  “What?”

  “Relax. It was in a photograph. From 1881.”

  1881? What the hell?

  Pope was glad Jake wasn’t around to scream, Bullshit.

  McBride went to the dresser, picked up a photo, and showed it to him. A young gypsy girl. A dark-haired beauty.

  “I found this in Susan’s notebook. It’s the girl from the locket. I think it’s Ch
avi.”

  Then she turned it over, showing him a cryptic message written on the back in Susan’s handwriting, with Anna’s translation beneath it: M Zala Knows All.

  Anna told him about a morning spent searching the Internet and about an entire collection of photographs she’d seen online, one of which included Red Cap.

  “You sure it was him?”

  She picked up a sheet of paper and handed it across to him. “He’s younger, but it’s him, all right.”

  It was a computer print-out of another photograph. The quality wasn’t the best, and the face looked even more deformed, but it was, without a doubt, the same man who had attacked them in Pope’s upstairs hallway.

  “I don’t get it. How could he still be alive?”

  “How does he do anything he does? Maybe Antonija Zala can tell us.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She gestured to the name scrawled on the back of the photograph. M Zala. “Hopefully someone who knows her.”

  “There are probably dozens of Zalas all over the world,” Pope said. “What makes you think this one’s related?”

  “Because she lives in Allenwood and I don’t like coincidences. Besides, I’ve got nothing else.”

  Pope thought about this, then nodded. “I’ll take a shower and get dressed.”

  He started for the bathroom, but when he got to the doorway, McBride said, “By the way, have you ever done any photography?”

  He turned. “Not really, why?”

  “I saw a portrait of Jonathan O’Keefe—the one who took the photos? Rumor has it that he and Chavi were lovers.”

  “So?”

  “He had your eyes.”

  Pope smiled, holding her gaze. “That explains a lot,” he said.

  41

  JAKE WORTHINGTON WAS about a block from home when his cell phone rang.

  He groaned, hoping it wasn’t someone from the office. After leaving Danny and McBride at the motel, he’d worked straight through the night on the Fairweather case, waiting for the crime scene techs to send him the latents off the gypsy’s stun gun. Then he ran them through the office’s automated fingerprint identification system, waited a good three hours for the results—