"Then you will have to pay for..."
"You still cover the hotel and flight back. Consider it a business expense. You can, however, cancel the room service from here. I won't be at the hotel often enough to eat anyways."
He pursed his lips together to think about my proposal. Nicholas Bates was a hard man to read. Just spending a few minutes in front of him, I knew I wouldn't want to sit across from him at a poker table as his face was pure stone. There was, however, one last stipulation I had to stay, and I wasn't sure how much he would like it.
"Before you decide, there is one more thing. I need a check made out for seven thousand dollars. One week's retainer. Anything after that will be billed at the end. Payment is expected before I leave here. And I need it in writing."
Nicholas stood there for a few minutes, eyes focused on mine. It took everything I had not to blink or cringe at him, knowing full well it may cost me everything I just stood up for. Eventually his arms relaxed and he gave me a nod. "I'm glad to see my father wasn't the only one with any sense. Get in the car and we can get everything typed up."
And with that I exhaled sharply and got in the back seat.
- 4 -
Now that I had the check and contract in hand, I was willing to go back to the mausoleum. Nicholas stayed back at the parlor to handle some other paperwork and calls, leaving me to work alone.
Just the way I like it.
Once I was back to the scene, I pulled my phone back out and started taking pictures. I snapped photos of everything that could be important and from as many angles as I could. The last thing I wanted to do was miss taking a picture of something that might prove important later as it was only a matter of time before Nicholas had the mausoleum buried properly again. There was far too much real estate being displaced with it in its current state. That and he would have a hard enough time convincing someone to bury their loved ones here after the news reports, without seeing the concrete eyesore like it was.
After I was content with the pictures of the outside, I approached the doorway cautiously. I had no idea if the door to it was unlocked, but I had to find out. As I got close I noticed a silver chain lying on the ground. One of the links was split though the lock was still in place. Whatever had caused this had broken the lock and went inside.
I took a deep breath and pushed the metal doorway and crawled inside. It had a musky smell, like there was a water problem inside that hadn't been fixed. I pulled out my phone and activated a flashlight app and made my way inside.
There was a stone staircase leading to the main burial chamber. I had to get on my hands and knees to crawl down the passage as it had been built for normal foot traffic on the stairs, not for someone trying to crawl down the side walls. When I got to the bottom the remains of three wooden caskets were scattered along the mausoleum floor. The door to one of them was open, so I steeled my nerves and inched my way closer. Once I was as close as my body would let me go, I lifted my light in the air and shined it in the open lid.
The casket was empty, or the body had slid further inside. As much as I didn't want to, I forced myself closer to get a better look.
The fabric lining the inside was stained brown where the body would've lied. The side walls were decorated with red and yellow bows and ribbons that were still unphased by the corpse that had decomposed just inches away. I lowered my light in the open hole and tilted my head inside.
It was truly empty. So empty that if it wasn't for the stains of decomposition, you wouldn't have known there was a body in there just the other day. The smell wasn't even nearly half bad as I thought it would've been. Sure, there was a hint of decay, but it must've been drowned out by the open air.
I checked the other two caskets and found they were both empty as well. Why would someone destroy this place just to steal a few bodies. Surely it would've been a lot easier, not to mention quieter, to sneak on the ground in the middle of the night with a pair of bolt cutters and a few trash bags and not caused nearly as big of a scene. They could've even replaced the chain and the lock with new ones and nobody would've been any wiser until someone came to visit. Weeks later, there wouldn't have been any hope of collecting anything worthwhile.
No. This was deliberate. Whoever, or whatever, had done this, did it to make a point. I just needed to find out what that point was.
For good measure, I snapped a few pictures of the inside, once again trying to get as many angles as I could. It was difficult with the lack of light down there, but after a few minutes I settled with what I had.
I made the slow crawl back out of the mausoleum and walked back to the parlor to talk to Nicholas. There were a few questions I needed to ask him to speed up my investigation. Mentally, I was prepared for him to give me the runaround. To be fair, this was more about client confidentiality than anything, and I could respect that. I had a picture of the nameplate from the entrance, so it wasn't like I was starting from scratch.
I opened the door to the parlor and found Nicholas sitting behind a large wooden desk in the back part of the room. The place was decorated about like every other funeral parlor I'd ever been in, with flowers placed in nearly nook and cranny, leaving just enough room for a few chairs and two small couches. There were pictures on the wall, mostly of Jesus though there were a few others of beautiful scenery or even just flowers.
Nicholas looked up from his paperwork and acknowledged my entry into the room. "I assume you are done for the evening."
I nodded. "I've got more than enough pictures to go through. For the most part, I'll be spending the rest of the night and possibly into tomorrow in the hotel doing research." I decided to tell him my plans, even after our earlier conversation, simply to ease any concerns he may still have been having. My line of work is shady enough without having a communication barrier set up.
"Sounds good. I assume it would be OK for me to get the mausoleum properly buried again?"
"I wouldn't waste another second."
For a moment, I almost noticed a smile trying to form on the corners Nicholas' mouth. He caught himself before he went too far with it, so I settled for his blank expression instead.
"There is one other thing."
"Hm?"
"I need to have as much information about the family that owned the tomb as you can give me. I understand you may not be able to give me much, so whatever you can provide will be helpful."
"May I ask why you need to know this?"
"It may help give me a clue as to why this tomb was the only one messed with. If my hunch is correct, there was something inside that tomb that someone else wanted. They just sent something very nasty to get it."
"I will have to call the family to find out what I can share," he took a deep breath. "But the owners are the Leclair family. That much you could've learned by reading the nameplates on the tomb. I don't know much about them, except that Oliver Leclair was the man who made this graveyard possible. He always wanted to be buried here, close to the Mississippi. Before he passed, he paid my grandfather a hefty sum to make sure his heirs could also be buried here. His two sons took him up on the offer. Theirs were the other two caskets that were down there. I would like to tell you more, but I'm afraid I might have already said too much."
"What you gave me was more than enough to start with. If the family does give you consent, I would love to know more. Perhaps you can give your contact my number so I can talk direct."
That broke his facade and he smiled. "That, I can promise you will not happen. Any correspondence between the two of you will be handed through me." I half expected that to happen. It was the only leverage he had to keep me in line. If he realized I had a researcher on my team that could hang with the best, he might have just given up the goods, but I guess this allows me to keep that cat in the bag for a little while longer.
"Fair enough," I said, returning his smile. "If something else comes up, feel free to call or text me." I handed him a business card that had my cell phone number on it, normally res
erved for clients I'm personally working with at the time.
He reached into the top drawer of his desk, pulled out a pair of keys and placed them on the desk. "Your rental car is out front. It's the Cadillac that my driver brought you in. The car is owned by a good friend of mine over by the airport. Please don't strain that relationship by driving the car recklessly."
"I'll treat it like my own." The words almost sounded hollow to say. If he had any idea how rough I've been on cars over the last year or so, he might have thought twice about lending me this one. I planned on taking it easy with this one though. The last thing I needed was to get into a third car payment. Especially knowing I'd have to get this loan on my own credit, which would probably put my interest close to twenty percent, if not higher.
I took the car keys off the desk and walked out the door. Even though we were civil during that conversation, I didn't want to risk it going out of control, which I was sure it was going to if I had stayed much longer.
The car was freshly washed and waxed since I had ridden in it last. Nicholas probably had the driver give it a full once over as punishment for me being late. And as a metric to know what I'd done to the car, I thought.
I threw the airport Hilton into my phone GPS and let it plot my course. I decided against taking the highway and went with the river road back to the hotel. Long car rides normally help me think, which I needed to do a lot of to solve this case. To be fair, half the reason I wanted to take this route was to enjoy the view of the Mississippi from down here. In that, I was disappointed as the tree line following the river blocked my view.
I tried not to think about my view and instead started focusing on the case. As of now, I had an excavated mausoleum, hundreds of footprints near the loose soil around the tomb, at least three missing bodies, and the whole thing owned by a family I assumed had a bit of money at some point. How this whole thing blended together to create this mess was still up for debate, but it was looking about as deep as I had expected.
Before I could turn off towards the hotel I noticed a car pull behind me with a flashing red and blue light placed on the top. I had seen enough movies to know that this was either an unmarked car or a jerk looking to prank me. There really wasn't a safe place to pull over, so I stayed on the road until I came across a park on my left and pulled into what looked like a sad attempt at a gravel parking lot and stopped the car.
Two men exited the vehicle, both wearing matching black suits with white undershirts and even matching ties. If they had been wearing dark tinted sunglasses, I would've sworn they were extras on Men in Black, but as it was, I assumed these two worked for the feds.
I waited to roll my window down until the first one knocked on it. He was the taller of the men, with close shaved black hair and the beginnings of a five o'clock shadow forming on the sides of his face. He had straight face when he leaned over to speak.
"Raymond Gilmore?" the man asked, in a voice that instantly reminded me of Eeore from Winny the Pooh.
"That's me."
"I'm Agent Cummings," he motioned to the man on the other side of my car, "that's Agent Ross. We need to ask you a few questions."
- 5 -
"What kind of questions?" I asked, curious as to why I had drawn the attention of the Feds.
"What were you doing in Cincinnati late September last year?" He held his gaze waiting for me to speak. I didn't open my mouth immediately. Instead, I looked over at Ross who had pulled out a small pad of paper from his pocket and started writing.
"I was there on business." I said, keeping my gaze on Ross.
"What kind of business?"
"I'm an investigator. People call me when they have problems believing the things they see." I wish I had a better way to explain what I do to a layman without making me look any more silly, but I ran with what I had.
"I see." Cummings leaned into the window and looked around the car which was spotless as I hadn't had enough time to discard soda bottles and fast food wrappers on the floorboard yet. "You don't strike me as the cop type."
"I hate guns. What can I say?"
"So you like explosives instead."
My gaze jerked from Ross as the faintest beginning of a smile formed on the corner of his lips to Cummings who still held the same blank expression. "I can't say I do."
"Then you might care to explain how the Backstreet Gentleman's Club collapsed, one night before you drove out of the city and back to your home in," he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped it a few pages in, "Columbia, Missouri."
"No idea. Not a building expert."
"You may want to take this seriously, Mr. Gilmore. We have dozens of witness reports putting you and one Alfred Jacobs still in the club that evening. First responders only pulled out one body." He flipped his notebook closed. "Yours. The doctors at the hospital told us you sustained multiple injuries to your legs, arms and back. By all reports, they didn't expect to see you walking so soon."
They didn't expect to see me walking again at all. Agent Cummings knew a lot more about what happened there than I could've imagined. With all of this information, I guessed he was building a case against me for murder. There was one little thing he was missing from the equation, however.
The body.
Alfred Jacobs was a vampire. Both when he hired me and when I made the building collapse. The collapse wasn't what had killed him. History was full of tales of vampires that had survived horrific injuries and just walked away like nothing happened. A few tons of brick and other building materials is more like a drop in the hat to a supernatural being like that. What killed Alfred was the early morning sun that poured over the scene as the dust cloud settled. Being stuck out in the open, in the sunlight, was as good as a death sentence to him.
Thanks to his age, his body deteriorated rapidly. If he was half as old as Silas said he was, his body would've been dust within a few short minutes and would've been cleaned up with the rest of the debris from the club and nobody would've even known. Without a body. Without physical proof that I had killed the man, the feds didn't have a case. All they had was circumstantial evidence that rightfully pointed at me, but wouldn't be enough to implicate me in any crime.
"I received a miracle," I said, not finishing it to reference God. The miracle of living through the collapse may have come from him, but the reason I'm able to walk around today looking no worse than I did months before that trip was thanks to a witch named Astraea Renata, or Ast. I wasn't sure how deep their information went, so I avoided talking about any of the others besides myself.
"I've looked over the report from the first responders. The man that pulled you from the rubble mentioned that you had a sword duct taped to your hand. Would you care to explain why you had an illegal weapon strapped to you like that?"
"Not particularly," I said, staring Cummings in the eye. His once blank expression changed to one of frustration as his gaze met mine. Without saying another word I knew they didn't have anything on me. If they did, I would've been yanked out of the car and in custody by now. He was using a line of questioning in hopes that I said just enough for them to lock me away, which I didn't want to happen. The Feds play by another set of rules. Ones that could keep me locked away for a long time while they found the rest of the evidence they needed. Even without a body, they would bring the case before a judge and jury just to see how things go. That meant that I could've ended up spending a few years of my life behind bars while the process played out. And that's saying the jury found me innocent.
"The way I see it, your case is flawed. Yes, I was in Cincinnati when the club collapsed. And yes, I was in the club. But, I don't have an idea what happened to the building or Mr. Jacobs. Unless you plan to arrest me, I'm heading back to my hotel room for the evening. It has been a rough last few days and I still have work to do."
Cummings pulled the door open so hard, I swore he was trying to rip it free from the hinges. His once calm face was now a bright shade of red and his brow furrowed in
the center of his forehead and his teeth were bared as if to strike. I had awoken the bear, and I hate to admit it, but it felt good.
As soon as he placed his hand around my adrenaline shaking wrists, Ross spoke up. "That's enough Cummings. Let him go."
Cummings took in a few more deep breaths, still failing to calm himself down. He stared me in the eye, trying to pierce my soul with those evil looking blue eyes of his for a few more moments before tossing my hand back in my lap and stomping away.
Ross placed his notebook back in his shirt pocket, walked around the car and grabbed my door before I could shut it. "I realize you have a lot of luck on your side, Raymond. Luck that you survived a building collapse. Luck that you were found by first responders before your body gave up. Luck that your injuries have healed. Should I continue?"
I shook my head.
"One of these days your luck is going to run out. I don't know what you did with Alfred Jacob's body, but we have found traces of his DNA in the debris to know he was there with you when it collapsed. I would advise you to stay here in the city while we finish our investigation."
"You do realize I don't live here right? I'm just here on a call."
"We do. And before you can ask if we give a flying..." Cummings cleared his throat and Ross regained his poise. "We have reason to believe that you were responsible for Alfred's death and the collapse of the building. If we had his body, you would've been in cuffs the moment you stepped into the airport in Columbia."
"I thought local boys handle their own dirty work."
Ross let a smile betray his face. "They do, until the perp flees across state lines. That turns it into a Federal offense. You're going to wish you stayed in Ohio, Mr. Gilmore. We have far more resources at our disposal and we are more than happy to use them to take down dirtbags like you."
Dead of Night: The Nephalem Files (Book 3) Page 3