Krewe of Hunters, Volume 2: The Unseen ; The Unholy ; The Unspoken ; The Uninvited

by Heather Graham

  A man.

  She saw him only as a silhouette at first. Then he turned to her, his expression grave. It was Logan Raintree, so tall and lean and solid, his face like chiseled marble, his hazel eyes alive and burning.

  “You saw a man?” he asked her.

  She heard wings again, and now she seemed to be outside. The black birds, the crows, settling all around them, on the ground, the benches and the nearby power lines and poles.

  And then he was gone, and the darkness swept around her.

  When she woke in the morning, she remembered her dream about the murder of Rose Langley, her vision of Vanessa Johnston.

  And the appearance of Logan Raintree in her room.

  Surrounded by crows.

  * * *

  The Bexar County morgue was large, and a special room had been set aside for the victims who might have been associated with a single killer.

  Jackson Crow did have all the right connections. Logan had been at the morgue often enough in years gone by, and he was familiar with various members of the staff. But he’d never seen anything like the way people scurried for Jackson Crow, nor had he been there when an entire facility was dedicated to one pursuit.

  There were eight gurneys in the room. Each had a sheet draped over the length of a body.

  One sheet was almost flat. He assumed it covered a victim who was little more than bones.

  One of the bodies had already been in the morgue, along with those of Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. Five others had been exhumed. They walked from gurney to gurney with Dr. Frazier Gaylord, medical examiner. He carried a clipboard with his notes on the remains of Chelsea and Tara—and the unknowns. The unknowns, of course, had been buried by the county and exhumed by the county, but they had numbers rather than names. Gaylord was thorough in his discussion of each one. Logan kept silent as he followed Jackson and Kelsey. The first body was skeletal and the second had no discernible features. Medical reports indicated that all the women had been between twenty-two and thirty-five; none had borne children. Hair proved to be of every color. Five had been Caucasian and two were Hispanic. One, according to Gaylord, was Asian—Logan didn’t ask what had given him that impression. The girl still had a pretty face beneath the damage and decay. “Or possibly American Indian?” he suggested.

  “No, I believe she was Chinese,” Gaylord told him. “Based on the set of the skull and the cast of the eyes. There’s enough left…as you can see.”

  Kelsey O’Brien hadn’t said a word. He liked that about her. If she had a question, she asked it. If she didn’t, she listened. Absorbed.

  “I’m puzzled as to why you’ve put these deaths together,” Gaylord mused, looking at Jackson Crow, “since the cause of death isn’t consistent.” He glanced at his notes. “There are nicks on this woman’s skeletal remains, suggesting that she was stabbed to death. Broken hyoid bone in the next one suggests strangulation. The young woman over there—” he pointed to the farthest gurney “—was drowned. So, we have, in our collection of Jane Does, two strangulations, three stabbings and a drowning. And, then, of course, we get to the bodies of the two young women who have been identified, Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. This is a big city, and that means big-city crime. These poor souls might have encountered any member of the criminal element. Or they might have been murdered by someone in a fit of anger.”

  “We don’t know yet, Doctor,” Crow said. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

  They walked to the last two gurneys, those holding the remains of Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. “We’re facing the same inconsistency of method.” Gaylord paused to pull back one of the sheets. “Chelsea Martin,” he said quietly, “identified from dental records. As you can see, there wasn’t much left when she was discovered.”

  Chelsea Martin had been found in a trash heap in almost skeletal form. There were still bits of flesh adhering to the bone here and there, and strands of pretty brown hair attached to the scalp that remained. Dr. Gaylord pointed to her throat. “Hyoid bone broken. My guess is that this young woman, too, was strangled.”

  They paused for a moment, looking at the gurneys with their sad burdens. Logan found himself thinking of a pirate slogan: Dead men tell no tales!

  Except that the dead could tell tales—when something of the killer stayed behind. When there was a shred of physical evidence. A hair, fiber, skin cells caught in the fingernails of a murder victim. And the dead could tell many tales when they left clues about where they’d been going, who they’d been with….

  Or when they could actually come back.

  The others were moving on. Logan trailed after them.

  Gaylord removed the last sheet. The remains of Tara Grissom were so gruesome they appeared to be something created by a special-effects master for a horror movie. “Half-covered. Half in the ground, half out,” Gaylord said. He indicated areas of the body. “But you’ll see here that a knife was used on her. It was thrust into the abdomen several times, once in the throat, and the fatal blow chipped a rib—here—and pierced the heart. Death couldn’t have been easy for this poor girl.”

  Tara Grissom had half a decaying face.

  Gaylord went on talking to Jackson Crow, telling him they’d been thorough with the autopsy. Scraping had been done under the nails, the crime-scene units had considered every conceivable clue or chance of DNA evidence. He launched into an explanation of their procedures, but Logan had ceased to hear him. He was vaguely aware that Kelsey O’Brien was giving him, rather than Crow or Gaylord, her attention. She was still, silent, as she gazed at him, standing a few feet back.

  Logan didn’t care that she was watching him. He stepped closer to the gurney.

  He closed his eyes briefly, then touched the remains.

  Speak to me.

  He looked down. For a moment, he saw her as she’d been in life. Young, beautiful, vivacious, a dancer with a dancer’s grace of movement. She opened her eyes, and they were both there, lime-green eyes that were striking with the lovely blond hair. She tried to offer him a wistful smile. Her lips moved.

  “I barely saw him,” she seemed to say. “He came out of the darkness, and he was in darkness. I fought so hard, but I was bleeding…. I just kept thinking that I’d never dance again. I didn’t even realize at first that I’d never breathe again.”

  Her voice was real to him. He could hear her as plainly as if Gaylord were saying the words.

  Where were you? he asked in silence.

  But she didn’t reply.

  * * *

  Back at the station, in the dedicated room, Logan sat contemplatively, watching Kelsey O’Brien as she worked. Besides the computer screen, she used a board and markers, attaching photos of the victims’ remains. By each of them, she made notes. They were alone in the room.

  “All right,” she said, “we know that we’re looking at one woman who disappeared a year and a half ago, and one who disappeared a year ago. Because of the deterioration, Dr. Gaylord can’t precisely pin down the time of death, but…” She paused, pointing at one of the pictures. He’d already learned that Kelsey couldn’t think of the unidentified victims as Jane Doe I, II, III and so on, and she’d given them names. They were Jane Doe, Jenny Doe, Judy Doe, Jodie Doe, Julie Doe and, finally, Josie Doe. He’d seen that she had tremendous empathy for all their victims, although she was professional as she handled photos that could churn any stomach. She indicated Julie Doe. “But! Dr. Gaylord believes Julie is the most recent victim, and that she’s been dead around a month.” She went back to the photo of Tara Grissom. “As you know, Tara was found half-hidden by a tarp in a boatyard on the river, one that had been closed down for a year. Chelsea was found at the bottom of a compost heap at a nursery. There was no known connection between her and anyone there, and all the employees checked out when the police investigated. Let’s get to our other women. Jane, discovered by a rock pile near a pond at a public park. Strangled. Jenny was found by garbage men at a trash dump—stabbed to death. Judy in another p
ark, again by some rocks, half in and half out of the water, strangled. Jodie was dragged out of the river. Cause of death, drowning. Julie was found when divers were cleaning out a park pond. She was strangled. And Josie was in a compost heap, too. She’d been stabbed. The killer is incredibly lucky. He keeps disposing of the bodies in almost public ways, and yet he’s never seen, and he doesn’t leave anything behind. Not a fiber, a hair…nothing. To the best of Gaylord’s ability to discern, considering the amount of decomposition, the women weren’t sexually molested. But…it appears that our killer is escalating his activities. Say his first murder was a year and a half ago, then a year ago…and then every couple of months, and now every month. We have another missing woman at the moment, who may or may not be his ninth victim.” She stopped speaking and looked at him. He’d heard her voice and her words, but he realized he’d been concentrating on the woman herself more than anything she had to say. Kelsey was young, but she was grave. Mature. Only when he’d seen her really smile, while they talked at the Alamo, had it occurred to him that she was probably in her mid-to-late twenties. When she smiled, her face lit up, and her emerald-green eyes became enchanting.

  She was the same age as their victims.

  “I don’t think the drowning victim was attacked by the same killer,” he said. “The rest, I believe, were. And he’s local. He knows exactly where people will and won’t look. But why? And how has he managed to kill them without anyone seeing a thing?”

  She was pensive. “At the Alamo,” she said quietly, meeting his eyes.

  He admitted that he was glad they were by themselves. Jackson Crow had stayed at the morgue where Jake had joined him to take photographs; they were going to work with artists to reconstruct the faces of the dead.

  He studied her a moment longer. He winced, staring down at the floor. He felt strangely close to her, although he had no idea why. And he felt guilty. He’d loved his wife with his whole heart. He’d been responsible for her death, not directly but responsible nonetheless. It wasn’t that he hadn’t found another woman attractive since her death. He’d dated casually in the past year, and even gone home with a woman from a bar a time or two. There was something different about that, something that, for good or ill, spoke of a lack of feeling.

  But he had a connection with Kelsey O’Brien, and before he’d recognized that, he’d noted how beautiful she was, how conscientious, competent, bright and…appealing.

  And so now, although they’d scarcely touched, he felt that he’d become too involved with her. Intimate in an unfamiliar way.

  He steeled himself; this was a professional matter. Women were dead. More women could die. A killer had gotten away with heinous acts for a long time.

  “Don’t shut me out, please,” she said, and he had to look away again. He wasn’t shutting her out—not deliberately, and not on a professional level.

  “You saw Zachary at the Alamo yesterday,” he said, his voice louder than he’d intended.

  “Zachary? The guy in costume?” she asked.

  He smiled, amused despite himself. The question was so innocent.

  “He wasn’t in costume. He’s dead,” Logan told her.

  He’d taken her by surprise. That was certain. Eyes wide, she groped for a chair, then sat down across from him.

  “Dead.”

  “Long dead,” Logan went on, feeling a bit incredulous. “Come on, you must be aware that you’re a wind-spirit.”

  “Wind-spirit?” she repeated, like an automaton.

  “That term came from my dad’s family,” he said. “It means you speak with the dead. You see ghosts. You hear them and see them, and you can actually carry on conversations with them.”

  Kelsey swallowed hard. She set her hands on the table, and they were trembling.

  “That’s why we’re here,” she murmured.

  “Yes. But you knew that.”

  “Yes, I guess I did,” she said. “And so did you.”

  “Yes.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I suppose I didn’t want to admit it. I thought it was a part of my life that I just kept quiet, and used when I needed to. When it didn’t fail me,” he added, and he could hear the rasp in his voice. He cleared his throat; there was no reason to make Kelsey think he hated her for what had been his own shortcoming. “I know all about Adam Harrison, his early links to the government and various strange cases, and his decision to start Jackson Crow’s Krewe of Hunters team. I even know about the cases they’ve solved, and some of their considerable accomplishments.”

  She regarded him with her beautiful gemlike eyes. They reminded him of emeralds, they were such a deep, true green.

  “Then why are you so determined to be against Jackson Crow?”

  “Because I’ve failed, miserably, upon occasion,” he told her flatly.

  “But people fail in many situations, and maybe this kind of force can make a difference,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. “For the moment, I’m in. I am a Texas Ranger, this is my state and I’m appalled that these poor women are dead and we weren’t even aware of a connection. And now there’s another missing girl.”

  He saw an expression of shock on her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s dead,” Kelsey whispered.

  He frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Last night…well, it could just be a dream.” He looked at her steadily and she blinked, then explained. “I’m not sure—maybe I simply have a cinematic imagination. But I see what I suppose they call residual haunting. I see the murder in Room 207, the one that took place in the nineteenth century. When Rose Langley was killed. The first time I saw it was yesterday, right before we met for lunch. I really didn’t have any experiences at the inn before that. But last night I moved into Room 207. The Longhorn is filling up—there’s a rodeo here next week, and Sandy asked me to stay in 207, as a favor to her. When I went to sleep, the same scene played out before me. Then there was a tremendous flapping of wings—”

  “Wings?” he interrupted.

  “Yes, as though birds were whirling around.” She paused. “Like they did yesterday, at the Alamo.”

  He was silent.

  “Hmm, wait. I saw the first haunting, the residual one, and then, when that faded away, I saw her face.”

  “How did you know it was hers?”

  “Because Jake Mallory showed it to me on the screen before I left yesterday.”

  “But if you’d seen her face, maybe you were just recalling it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But?”

  “She said, ‘Too late.’ Then the birds seemed to take up the cry. Over and over again. Too late, too late, too late.”

  He watched her as she spoke. She never took her eyes from his, and he sensed how hard it was for her to say all this to him. He didn’t speak for a moment. “You figure…I’m a little on the unbalanced side?” she finally asked. She tried to smile.

  He shook his head slowly and offered her a wry smile. “I have Apache in me. The Apache believe in the dream state. They’re very religious people. Spirits take on the form of humans, and there’s an afterlife, in which everyone lives in happiness and abundance.”

  “Does that mean you do think it’s possible that the dead speak to us in dreams?”

  He laughed suddenly. “Well, you already know that I speak to a dead man at the Alamo.”

  “No, I hadn’t known he was dead until you told me. He died at the Alamo?”

  “Yes, but not the way you probably think. He’d been a courier—he was sent out by Travis during the siege. Travis kept sending out letters, because he was desperate for more men. Zachary Chase rode out on March 5, and Santa Anna’s troops attacked in full strength before dawn the next morning. So Zachary survived the Alamo and went on to fight at San Jacinto—the battle that won independence for Texas. He survived it, too, but returned to live in San Antonio. He died near the bench where we were sitting, a heart attack most likely brought on by th
e wounds he’d received fighting.”

  “So, he’s real. I mean, as real as a ghost can be. Maybe he can help us?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “If he’d seen anything, he would have told me already.”

  “You speak to him often?” she asked. “Really speak to him?” She hesitated. “Like the girl on the gurney this morning. Tara Grissom.”

  “Often enough,” he said. He winced a little. “Zachary loves to play games. He finds it hysterical to make me talk to him when there are people around. He loves it when they stare at me as if I’m insane. I keep trying to tell him it’s not a good thing to make people think that a Ranger with a gun is a crazy man.”

  She smiled at that but quickly turned serious again. “If he didn’t die there, why does he haunt the Alamo?” she asked.

  “Guilt, I imagine,” Logan replied. “He was chosen to ride out the day before. His friends and comrades all died, and he didn’t.”

  “But he risked his own life, riding through enemy lines to get the message out,” Kelsey said.

  “I agree. And yet if we feel guilt, if we believe it in our own minds, that’s what’s true to us,” he said.

  He heard his own words.

  It was certainly true for him.

  But I am guilty! he told himself. I arrested Rory Norton. I brought him down, and I brought him in, and he sat on death row. And Alana died because of it.

  Rory Norton had viciously killed at least a dozen people. He’d shot anyone who had gone against him, and if he hadn’t carried out the murder himself, he’d ordered it. He’d also been responsible for dozens of other deaths with the hardcore drugs he’d supplied.

  If Logan hadn’t been so determined to bring him down, if he’d let another Ranger or another law enforcement agent take him in…

  “We can carry guilt all the way to the grave,” Kelsey said. “That’s so sad.” She stood suddenly. “We have to go and speak with him.”

  Logan groaned. “In broad daylight—two of us talking to a ghost? Kelsey, there are going to be tourists all over right now!”

  He realized he’d just called her by her given name for the first time. She hadn’t even noticed.