Kelsey whirled around. Logan supposed that, if any visitors were watching, they’d think the two of them were staring at an imaginary friend.
Kelsey didn’t stand. She didn’t act as if she was about to shake hands with the air. She smiled, though, and said in a soft voice, “Mr. Chase! I’ve been hoping to meet you.”
Thus encouraged, the ghost of Zachary Chase came forward.
Kelsey made way for him to sit on the bench between them.
Zachary was in buckskin, the outfit he’d probably worn most of his life. His face was weathered and taut, but he was still capable of a shy grin as he looked at Kelsey. And, with him between them, they could converse as if Kelsey was talking to Logan, which would certainly create the appearance of a normal conversation.
“How do you do, miss,” Zachary said appreciatively as he greeted Kelsey. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“You, too, Zachary.” Kelsey nodded at him.
“This is Kelsey O’Brien,” Logan said. “She’s a U.S. Marshal. We’re both desperate for help, Zachary. Someone is stealing or seducing away women from this area, or so we believe—and killing them.”
Zachary frowned. “I had worried,” he said.
“Zachary, you didn’t say anything to me,” Logan chastised him.
“You haven’t been around much,” Zachary said. “When you were, it was as if you hadn’t noticed me. And I didn’t know the women were dying.”
“Can you tell us what you’ve seen?” Logan asked.
Zachary sighed, glancing toward the chapel, and Logan had to wonder just what the man was seeing. He knew the Alamo as they couldn’t, as the best scholar couldn’t, as the most historically accurate filmmaker could never quite portray it.
“There was one rather plump, pretty girl. And she saw me. She saw me, the way you see me. I watched the man following her. I was trying to tell her. To warn her. Then he approached her, and touched her, and I couldn’t hear what he said. She gave a startled look, and she seemed to fall toward him. I thought perhaps he’d given her bad news. They left together,” Zachary said.
“You mean…she sank against him? But she was still conscious? Moving on her own?”
“From what I saw, yes.” He pointed toward the street. “It was busy that day. I thought that if she was afraid or in trouble, she would cry out. But she didn’t. She went with him. It was as if she knew him, and yet, when he was following her, I didn’t think she did.”
“Can you describe him? What did he look like? Who was he?” Kelsey asked anxiously.
“He was Davy Crockett.”
Logan saw the surprise register on Kelsey’s face.
“Pardon me?” she said.
“Zachary, I’ve never seen the ghost of Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” Logan began. “You’ve told me before that you sit here and think about him, but you’ve never seen him, either. I don’t believe the ghost of Davy Crockett, if he was here, would be out to hurt people.”
Zachary shook his grizzled head. “Not the real Davy Crockett,” he said impatiently. “This man seemed to be one of the actors they bring in when they’re doing reenactments. Lord knows, I’ve watched enough of those through the years!”
“So, someone dressed up as Davy Crockett?” Kelsey asked.
“Someone trying to dress up like Davy,” Zachary said. “But he was ridiculous, this man. Oh, his clothing wasn’t bad. Had on buckskin and fringe, rather like my own trousers and jacket. Had on a cotton shirt in a plaid pattern. What looked so bad was his face. Fakest whiskers I’ve ever seen, and bad wig. Worse hat.”
“Think, Zachary,” Kelsey urged. “Had you ever seen the man before?”
Zachary shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. I mean, there’s so many of those actors who come and go, and around here, on Halloween, there are Davy Crocketts everywhere. When I did see him, I was barely aware of him at first. I thought a school group was coming. Then I noticed that he was following the young woman, and I tried to warn her. I think she even saw me, and she was laughing. She supposed I was playing with her. I tried to get her to follow me into the chapel. There were people there. Living, breathing people. I just felt he was…odd. Then he went up to her and I couldn’t get close enough to hear what he was saying. She sagged against him, like I told you, and they went away. I didn’t think much more about it. I’ve seen a lot here over the years. Many people pass through this place. Sometimes they’re smiling, sometimes they’re serious. Sometimes they leave together, and sometimes they leave alone.”
“Have you seen the man since?” Logan asked him.
“Don’t think I have,” Zachary said. “Hard to say, though. You get all kinds around here. The historical society is usually in on it, but you occasionally get folks who think they’d like to be heroes, too, and they dress up and come here. Every once in a while, you get the unemployed actor with a hat out for donations. But did I see this particular fellow again? I don’t rightly know.” He shook his head again and looked at Kelsey sorrowfully. “I didn’t know women were being killed. And I’d planned to talk to Logan the other day and find out if there was anything I needed to worry about, but he brushed me off. Rude, you know what I mean?” Zachary asked.
Kelsey actually smiled as she looked past him at Logan. “Incredibly rude,” she agreed.
“Zachary, you know damned well that you enjoy making me look like a fool who talks to himself,” Logan said. “We waited for you,” he added. “The other day.”
Zachary shrugged. “Sometimes I like to walk around where the walls once stood,” he said. “Sometimes I like to walk on, heading in the direction I did the day I left to get help.” He turned to Kelsey and said sadly, “Men might be willing to die. Don’t mean they want to die.”
Kelsey started to reach for him, but her hand ended up on Logan’s thigh, and she yanked it back.
“Zachary, I’m so sorry about all your friends here,” she said.
“It was a long time ago. I don’t know why I stay. Can’t help them now. I just keep thinking…. The provisional government was a mess. Who knows? More men might’ve come, and more might’ve died. And I didn’t get to see everything, but I did speak to some of the women afterward. Santa Anna, he was a bastard, executing people right and left. But he didn’t kill the women or the kids.”
Kelsey murmured sympathetically.
“I could never help them,” Zachary said.
“But you can help us. You can help us now,” Logan told him.
“What can I do?” Zachary asked. “You say women are being killed. I only saw what I did that one day, and even then… So what can I do now?”
“You can watch for us, Zachary. You can watch what goes on. I’ll stop by every day. Tell me if you see this man again or anyone who might have been this man,” Logan said.
“I can do that. Yes, I can do that.” Zachary nodded vigorously. He stared at the chapel entrance again. Tourists were flocking around; docents and interpreters were on duty. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue, and it was a beautiful day in Texas.
Zachary spoke directly to Kelsey. “Davy Crockett died in the fighting, you know. That’s what they told me. Travis, he was killed right away. Some say Davy was taken and executed, but I talked to Susanna Dickinson after the battle—she was the wife of my friend Almaron Dickinson—and she said there was a commotion, the women and children were hiding, but she heard that Davy went down fighting. Santa Anna sent her and Joe—Travis’s slave—on to Gonzalez to warn the folks they’d all be dead if they kept fighting. And can you imagine? Santa Anna offered to adopt her little girl! This was after her husband was killed. Good for Susanna—she didn’t give an inch.”
Logan let Zachary talk, although he’d heard his stories many times before.
They needed Zachary now. He could be a witness—the camera and the recording no one could find.
“I’m so sorry,” Kelsey was telling Zachary.
He shook his head. “So long ago, now. So long ago.” He suddenly turned to Logan
. “What’s going on with the birds?” he asked.
“What?” Frowning, Logan gave his attention to his surroundings.
The birds were back.
There were scores of them, and different varieties. Crows, of course. Black birds by the dozens, alighting here and there and everywhere around them. On cars, poles, wires, the eaves of the old chapel. And there were sparrows, pigeons, seagulls and more.
As he looked, an arrow of flapping wings passed overhead and soared toward the south.
He stood, saying, “Zachary, please keep watch for us. Tell me about anything you see, whether you think it’s important or not.”
Zachary was on his feet, as well, and Kelsey rose at his side, studying the birds. She frowned, then said to Zachary, “Thank you so much. I’m so glad to know you.”
“My pleasure to serve you, beautiful lady.” Zachary made a slight bow.
Logan regarded her for a moment himself. Kelsey was just that, a “beautiful lady.” He believed she could be tough, and he was sure she knew how to use her weapon, and that she was effective in law enforcement. But there was a ladylike quality about her, in her movements, her manner of speech, the empathy in her emerald eyes.
And yes, she was beautiful.
“We have to go,” he said.
Her level gaze reminded him that they’d searched before and found nothing.
But she nodded; they had to keep trying.
They returned to Logan’s car. “The birds were flying south,” he said.
“We already went south, but we could have missed something.” She stared out the window intently while Logan drove as slowly as he could.
“Are we looking for an actor?” she asked.
“It could be an actor,” he said. “Or someone who knows there are always actors and would-be actors around. It’s easy—strange as that sounds—to dress up in buckskin and look like you belong at the Alamo. I wish Zachary could’ve just said, yes, he saw the man—he was tall and light-haired or short and swarthy, blue-eyed, green-eyed, businesslike, a bum…. But all we know is someone’s using history.”
“Using history to find history,” she murmured. She turned to face him, her focus now on their quest, the anger gone from her voice. “I wonder if Zachary knew Rose Langley. The saloon would’ve been frequented by men who were at the Alamo—not when the siege happened, of course, but when they first came. There was a community here. And some of them must have known Rose.”
“We’ll talk to him again,” Logan said. “We’ll talk to him every day until we learn the truth. Keep your eye on the street, okay?”
“We’ve been here before,” she said.
“We didn’t look hard enough.”
“I’m keeping an eye out for trash piles, dumps, old construction heaps,” Kelsey said. “Fresh gardens, old gardens…”
“I think this guy likes hiding his victims in plain sight, if that makes sense. He wants them to rot, and then be discovered.”
“If he wants them discovered,” she said.
“Oddly enough, I think he does.”
“Stop!” Kelsey shouted.
“Where?”
“Anywhere around here.”
He saw a space between a massive GMC truck and a Mini Cooper. He moved his car smoothly in and turned off the ignition.
“What do you see?”
“The birds.”
He looked. They were across from a large wooden fence.
Black birds were perched on top of the fence.
On it were written the words Danger. Keep Out. Fourscore Construction.
He left the car and started toward it, aware that Kelsey was close behind.
There were chains where the wood ended and an aluminum gate had been erected. The fence itself had a jagged top—fine for birds, but not great for people.
Logan pulled out his Colt.
“What are you doing?” Kelsey snapped. “This is private property!”
“We’re feds now, or acting as feds, right?”
“I am a fed. It’s still private property.”
“I hear a distress cry. Don’t you?” he demanded, squinting at her.
As if on cue, one of the birds let out a raw scream.
“Well…” Kelsey shrugged. “We could just call someone from the company.”
“That takes time,” Logan objected.
The bird gave another loud screech.
“Hey, I hear a cry,” Logan said next. “It might be nothing, but…”
He shot the chain that was keeping them out, then pushed the gate open and entered the construction site.
Kelsey said something under her breath and followed.
The site was large, but no one seemed to be working that day. An old building had apparently been torn down to make way for a new one. Old foundations stood, surrounded by cheap wire and warning signs. Plywood covered some of the gaping holes in the ground.
Logan gestured toward the south. “Start over there. I’ll take the north corner.”
“Yes, sir,” she muttered, marching off in the direction he’d told her.
Logan went to the opposite corner. Here and there, sections of a wall had been built; he could see naked brick as he lifted the first plywood sheet. Below it he saw nothing but what would one day be a part of a basement.
He looked across at Kelsey. She’d lifted a sheet, too, and then let it fall. She was standing very still.
“Logan,” she called softly.
“Yes?” he called back.
“The birds.”
That was when he noticed them. They hovered over a section that would have been an entry, he imagined, or, perhaps a corner of the basement.
He heard sirens—someone had alerted the local police to gunfire.
They had to hurry.
He nodded, and they both skirted the other holes and went over to the area where the birds had been.
Facing each other, they raised the sheet of plywood.
Logan looked down expectantly but saw nothing except a hole in the ground littered with construction debris.
Kelsey hurried around to his side. “Slide me down there, Logan!”
She crouched close to the ground, heedless of her clothing—her tailored pants and jacket, her crisp white shirt. He caught her arms, guiding her, holding her tightly until she dangled just a few feet from the bottom.
Their eyes met, and in that moment, he thought, We are a team. We understand each other.
She dropped the rest of the way and righted herself. He twisted around, sliding into the hole himself and then falling.
Old broken boards were everywhere. So were plywood shavings and sawdust, with the occasional coffee or soda cup and fast-food wrappers.
He began to raise boards and sift through trash, and then Kelsey cried out.
He turned.
There, protruding from the ground, was an arm, the hand dangling.
And the hand was missing a finger.
Chapter 8
“Fentanyl,” Kat Sokolov said when they were back at the office.
Kelsey tried to recall what she knew about the drug. It was legally used as a painkiller and had improved the quality of life for many a cancer patient.
Not surprisingly, unscrupulous people were now selling it for use on the streets. Like all good things, it had been corrupted.
She waited for Kat to continue. Kelsey’s mind seemed as exhausted and dazed as her body. It had been a long day. Logan had managed to keep the local cops at bay while contacting Jackson and getting Kat down to the construction site so the body could be recovered without losing any evidence that might exist. They’d spent hours in the April sun, working the scene along with local forensics and keeping the “team” in the lead. Jane Everett had come to photograph every minute of the procedure, and she, Logan and Jackson Crow had kept watch to ensure that nothing that could provide a clue—a fiber, a fingerprint, a hair—was overlooked.
And once Vanessa Johnston had been removed from the ground, she�
�d been rushed in for autopsy while local investigators had set out to question every member of the construction team, from the contractor to the delivery boys. Kelsey had to admit that, like Logan, she didn’t believe they’d get much help from that direction. The site had been closed down for several weeks due to lack of funds. Vanessa Johnston had only been missing for about a week. Still, there was the fact that the lock on the gate was new and there was no other point of entry, unless one scaled the wooden walls with their arrow-tipped tops. It was extremely unlikely that anyone could have crawled over the fence, especially carrying a corpse or a drugged or unwilling woman. That mystery was solved when Logan began walking the perimeter and discovered that two of the side-by-side slats were no longer embedded in the earth. They slid easily enough when pushed to create an entrance allowing passage for a man, even a man bearing a burden as large as a human body.
The neighborhood was canvassed, although no one had heard anything, and only one woman complained about noise at the site.
“Birds!” she’d told the officer. “Birds shrieking and cawing at all hours of the night. I called in to complain twice.”
And she had; the construction site was on a list for the cops to check out.
The physical evidence at the site could take weeks to examine, even with all of Jackson Crow’s power and contacts. There were hundreds of wooden boards, there was dirt, bricks, refuse, and many other surfaces to be tested.
Vanessa Johnston’s body had not decayed to the same extent as the other bodies. Kat was optimistic that she’d be able to learn a great deal more about time and method of death than she could with the earlier victims.
Kelsey thought about Vanessa’s family and friends, those who had feared for her and would now learn the worst….
Everyone seemed as exhausted as she was. Jane had done what she could to establish images of the deceased; Kat, too, had worked without a break. Sean came later, having spent the day on the documentary. He’d plunged in without pausing for a meal.
Now they sat, the six of them, in the office, their chairs gathered in a circle, sharing the events of the day and discussing what they’d found out, with Sean listening.
“Fentanyl,” Kat repeated. She looked at Logan and Kelsey. “I’m sure you’ve come across it. Fentanyl is a synthetic narcotic analgesic, and it’s a hundred times more potent than morphine. For chronic pain, it’s often delivered to patients through a patch. It’s also combined with other drugs for surgery. Like I said, fentanyl’s hit the streets, and God knows how many overdoses there’ve been because of it. It’s sometimes mixed with Rohypnol—commonly known as a roofie—and I’m assuming that we’ve missed the combination because of the deterioration of the previous bodies and because we needed to use GC-MS testing. But that’s how the killer is grabbing these women. I think he’s mixing up a dose and getting close enough to prick them with some sort of needle or slap on a patch. I’m not positive of his method because I haven’t been able to find a needle mark or evidence of a patch on any of the women, although I’ll continue searching on Vanessa Johnston tomorrow.”
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 2: The Unseen ; The Unholy ; The Unspoken ; The Uninvited Page 12