“I met with Alan King, Bernie Firestone and Earl Candy last evening, as soon as Jackson reached me,” Will explained, studying her across the table. “Earl wanted to destroy his film—he doesn’t want gawkers watching the discovery of a man’s death. I promised him that when the investigation’s over, I’ll destroy this copy.”
“Of course,” Kat murmured. She pushed the iPad toward him, frowning. “I just don’t see how anyone could have gotten to Brady between the time he went down and when his coworkers and the film crew arrived.”
“Easy enough, I suppose. Down in Lake Michigan, it’s damned dark. If someone was already down there, knew the lake and was a good diver, he—or she—could have found Brady’s coordinates just before Brady did…and waited for him. Remember, Brady had made a big thing of his belief that he could find the Jerry McGuen. If someone hacked into his computer or even read his blogs, they could follow his reasoning and figure out where the ship might have ended up. That’s one idea. Or, perhaps, someone could’ve been surprised by Brady. If you know the area, you keep to the depth, follow your compass and then come up at a distant point.”
“True,” Kat said. “But still, the timing…”
“How much diving experience have you had?” he asked her.
She tensed inwardly. “A fair amount in the Caribbean—around a number of the islands. I’ve dived cold-water springs in Florida and caves in Mexico. I haven’t done a lot of cold-water diving, so I admit I’m grateful it’s still summer.”
“I don’t see the temperature as much of an issue. Think about how much time—at that depth, with safety stops—it took Amanda and Jon to get down there. And then to go back up—and call a search and rescue boat. The depth isn’t that great, but we’re talking time and water pressure.”
She nodded. “So you think it could be Landry? Or Simonton?”
“Maybe neither,” he said with a grimace. “And I don’t know whether Brady Laurie died because he surprised someone down there, or if the intent was to start killing people so the search would end.”
“Let’s hope it’s the first.”
Their meals arrived; they’d both ordered fish. “I would’ve taken you for a steak eater—in Chicago, anyway,” she told Will.
“Ah, but we’re going down nearly a hundred feet tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going to keep it light.”
“But you do eat steak?”
“Yes. You’re a vegetarian?”
“I’m a wannabe. I like cows. They do no ill, not to my life, at any rate.”
“Russian?” he asked her.
He changed focus quickly, she thought. “My dad,” she said. “My mom is a good old American mix of English, Irish and Scandinavian. You?”
“I was born in the States. My parents are Trinidadian. A mix of English, Chinese and Indian,” he said. “Your first time?”
She sat back at the question, stunned at his audacity.
He laughed. “I meant your first time with a ghost.”
She wished she wasn’t so pale and that a flush didn’t instantly cover her from head to toe. “A ghost. Of course,” she said, looking down. She raised her eyes again. “I was at a Civil War reenactment with my parents. I was about ten. I talked with a soldier. Everyone assumed I’d talked to a reenactor, and I believed them. Years later…I was at my grandfather’s funeral. He was desperate that my grandmother find his financial records. He died suddenly, you see, and had barely written a will, much less made sure that his affairs were in order. She was old school and hadn’t paid bills or known anything about finance. He told me where to look for his papers.” She hesitated. “I think my grandmother had something of whatever this…ability is, too. She seemed to understand right away how I knew things—and she warned me to be careful. People would make fun of me, or worse, she said. They’d see that I was locked up. And then…when I was in residency after med school, I was present at the death of a child. There’s nothing worse. But she’d written a letter to her parents, filled with love. She’d had a severe case of cystic fibrosis and wanted them to know she was at peace, and that she loved them and her sister. She told them that her time with them had been happy. After that…an old M.E. I knew talked me into changing course. Who knows? Maybe he had a bit of it, too. So I went to work as an M.E., and I wound up working with the San Antonio police a lot—and with Logan Raintree, who was with the Rangers’ office then. Eventually, we all met Jackson Crow and worked a San Antonio case before becoming, unofficially, the Texas Krewe. And you?”
“I was born in the States but I spent a lot of time in Trinidad and the other islands. Conversing with the dead is far more accepted in some of those places. I think I was five. I was in Jamaica. A fisherman had been murdered.” He shrugged. “The corpse told me who did it. If only it was always that simple.” His grin was engaging. “Actually, of course, it wasn’t that simple. I told my father, who told the cops, who almost arrested my father. But when they investigated, they found out that what I’d said was true. Then, of course, they wanted to arrest my father for being an accomplice. So I learned to keep quiet. I didn’t go into law enforcement at all. I went into magic—I’m a really good magician, should you ever need one—and from there, I segued into film. And then I was called in to work with Jackson Crow, and wound up taking the training at Quantico…and here I am.”
“Strange how we were all found,” Kat said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Adam Harrison worked quietly with the FBI for years before his units were formed. And for him, it came from not having the gift, while his son, who died young, had been blessed with it. After that he began to seek out those who did.”
“I guess if you know it exists, you can find it,” Kat said.
Will glanced at his watch. “We should get some sleep. We’ll be at the dock early in the morning. I’ll meet you in the restaurant at seven. We should have something to eat before we head out.”
Kat felt her teeth grind. He was taking control again. She decided that was a childish reaction, telling herself he was right; they were going diving.
But for some reason, that made her grab the bill the moment it came to the table. He didn’t protest. Apparently, he had no hang-ups about a woman paying. She tried to take a deep breath; she really was acting childish. It was just that this was the first time she’d been on an investigation without Logan and the others, and she couldn’t help remembering that the whole thing had begun because her unit knew the filmmakers who’d requested that they step in. So she felt a little proprietary.…
They left the dining room and headed for the elevator. She hit the button for the fifth floor. He didn’t hit a button at all. She should have known. Their rooms were next to each other.
The accommodations had been booked from their central office in Virginia. Tomorrow, Kat was certain, she’d discover that Logan and the rest of her unit were booked into the surrounding rooms. Logan’s would be a suite with a big round table where they could work on their computers and discuss their findings.
“Good night,” Will said.
She wished him a brusque good-night as well and entered her room.
She shouldn’t have been tired; she should still have been on L.A. time. But, as she’d said earlier, it had been a long day.
A very long day, she thought.
Just last night she’d been in a comfortable bed in L.A., dreaming about being on a ship.
She flinched, unsure why it bothered her so much that she’d dreamed about the ship—and then been sent out to investigate a death in a shipwreck.
She really wanted to sleep. She didn’t want to dream.
Before climbing into bed, she pulled out her octopus, dive boots, mask and flippers. It had seemed prudent to bring her own equipment. With those objects packed in a rolling dive bag, she was ready for morning.
When she did fall asleep, her dream wasn’t the same.
This time, it was about mummies.
She was somewhere…somewhere in a green darkness. There were wall sconces th
at burned bright blue here and there along the walls. She didn’t seem to be walking, but floating.
Suddenly, ahead of her—a plethora of mummies. They all had their arms outstretched and moved with the slow, staccato movement she’d seen in classic mummy movies.
Even in her dream she paused to think that such an image was ridiculous. Mummies were bound with their arms crossed over the body. In any case, a mummy couldn’t just reach out an arm—it would break off!
But these mummies were coming toward her. And behind them, she saw a man. It was, of course, none other than the evil, robe-wearing high priest Amun Mopat. The priest who had wanted to be a pharaoh, a god.
He was laughing. In old movies, all villains had a maniacal laugh.
They were coming closer and closer and she kept floating toward them. Now that, too, was totally idiotic. She never understood why people in films just stood there and screamed. The mummies moved so slowly. If she turned and ran—or floated more quickly—she could easily escape them. In movies, the heroines usually tripped, and then lay on the ground screaming as the mummy or monster closed in on them. Scenes like that made for great movie posters!
In her dream, she reminded herself that she was a medical examiner and that she understood the human body. She understood the nature of human remains in any condition, even mummified. If she met the mummies, she could fight them—break them into a million pieces—and she’d be fine. But there were so many….
She floated into the fray. As she’d expected, the mummies were brittle, dry and fragile. They weren’t much for fighting.
But behind them was Amun Mopat, watching her from beneath his hooded cape.
They stared at each other, and she wanted to run but couldn’t and then—
Then she woke, startled by a sound. Glancing at the clock radio, she noted the time—4:31 a.m.
For a moment, she lay in bed, vividly remembering her dream and puzzled by the sound that had awakened her.
It came again and her eyes flashed to the door. Someone had tried to enter her room. The sound had been that of an electronic key card.
She rolled over and reached into the bedside table for her FBI-issue firearm and jumped to her feet, instantly alert. There was no sound now. She walked to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw nothing. Thinking quickly, she grabbed her key card from the side table and dropped it in the little pocket of her nightshirt and walked back to the door, looking out again.
She waited, then slid the top bolt, cringing when she heard the noise it made. Gun at the ready, she threw open the door.
There was no one out there, but Will Chan’s door had opened, too. She knew he was standing much as she was—his firearm leveled.
“Will?” She whispered his name.
He stepped out of his room, wearing floor-length pajama pants and nothing else, and his hair, while dead straight, was disheveled, as well. He gave her a nod, which she knew to mean cover me, and walked out into the hall, turning from one direction to another, striding away from the elevator bank, and then back toward it.
There was definitely no one in the hall.
“The elevator,” he said softly. He was standing by it.
She nodded. “I’ll take the stairs.”
As she went down the stairs in her long T-shirt of a nightgown and bare feet, stopping to look out at every floor, she thought she should have opted for the elevator.
Will was waiting for her when she got to the bottom.
One lone clerk was on duty at the reception desk across the lobby. Kat arched a brow at Will. “Did he see anyone?”
“Nope. What did you hear?” he asked her. “What woke you?”
“It sounded as if someone was trying to get into my room with a key card. What did you hear? Did they try your room, too? Maybe it was just a drunk on the wrong floor,” Kat said.
“Maybe. Or maybe someone was trying to get into our rooms. And maybe that someone has a room at the hotel.”
She shook her head. “That’s rather stupid, isn’t it? Trying to break in on agents in their rooms? Obviously we’re armed. And even more obvious—we’re going to have the doors bolted.”
“Maybe the intent wasn’t to hurt us, just to throw us off,” Will said.
“The clerk says no one’s gone through the lobby?”
“Not since about 1:30 a.m. And he assured me he would’ve noticed. The last customers left the restaurant at about 11:00 p.m., and the last drinker left the bar at one-thirty. He says it’s been quiet ever since—quiet as a tomb.”
“But there must be back entrances to the hotel,” Kat pointed out.
“True. But if someone came or went, that someone is long gone. However, we can go get dressed, come back down and speak to the security guard.”
“There’s a security guard on duty tonight?”
“It’s a legit hotel. Yes, there’s a security guard.”
“And I guess he didn’t see anything alarming?”
“He’s watching the cameras—except that all the cameras are watching the entrances. They aren’t installed in the hallways yet.”
“What about the elevators?”
He shook his head. “The cameras in the elevators inexplicably went down sometime this afternoon. They have a call in to their service center for tomorrow.”
“Coincidence?”
“Ah, what do you think?”
“I don’t put a lot of faith in such convenient coincidences,” she replied.
“The guard makes a sweep every thirty minutes and watches the screens in between.”
“So he’ll know if anyone went in or out of the building.”
“No one went in or out. I already asked,” Will said. “You were slow coming down those stairs.”
“I was not!” Kat protested. “I checked out each landing.”
“Naturally. But it gave me time to talk to the clerk and have him call security. I don’t think the guard’s bad at his job—I’m sure he’d handle rowdy young drunks or a bar fight just fine—but I doubt that he’s ready for a major espionage job. I’ll go over the tapes tomorrow, but whoever got in was, I’m afraid, one up on the guard.”
“But we didn’t imagine someone in the hallway,” Kat said stubbornly.
“No, we didn’t,” he agreed. “Okay, let’s go back up. We’re not going to get anywhere now. I’ll ask for the tapes and inspect the machinery when I’ve showered and dressed. It’s almost 5:00 a.m., and we have to be up and out in a few hours. I know cameras and security systems. I can check it all out and you can grab an hour’s sleep.”
“Right. Like I’ll be able to go back to sleep now,” Kat muttered.
“Later on, you’re going to wish you got more sleep,” Will warned. Kat noted that the clerk was staring over at them. She was barefoot, and her T-shirt only made it halfway down to her knees. She smiled and waved at him.
“You guys okay?” he called over to them. He had to be in his early twenties. Crew cut, wearing a suit, he still had the voice of a young man. “You want me to call the police or anything?” he asked worriedly.
“No, no, we’re fine,” Kat assured him. She held her Glock behind her back and realized that Will had already moved his from sight. She wondered how he’d managed to hide it while talking to the clerk—a half-naked man with a gun approaching him at five in the morning would surely have upset the young man.
Will bent down and scooped something from a large ornamental planter. Ah, that explained it.
He hit the elevator button. Waving to the clerk, they both backed in.
“Maybe we should have contacted the local police,” Kat said. “They could have done a more thorough search.”
“No. Whoever it was is gone or back in a room somewhere in the hotel. I’ll make sure the elevator cameras are working by tomorrow night. I don’t like to bring the police in unless we really need them. If they don’t find anything, we become the boy who cried wolf and I don’t want to create that impression.”
He was r
ight, Kat decided. Again.
“But it’s your call, of course,” Will said.
“Quit that,” she told him.
“Quit…deferring to you?” he asked.
She scowled at him. “You seem to defer to me only when you want to annoy me.”
“That’s not my intent.”
“Then quit it!”
“What? You are the lead investigator. You’ve stated as much.”
Kat wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be angry. She let out a sigh of exasperation. “You hit on it today. We’re here to work. And we work as a team,” she said. “Logan isn’t here, and Jackson isn’t here. That makes us the only Krewe members present right now. That means we need to cooperate.”
“Makes sense,” he said.
“Does the clerk know we’re FBI?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” Will said, shrugging. “The manager does, since this is Adam Harrison’s hangout when he’s in Chicago. But as for the night clerk, I have no idea.”
Back on their own floor, he was alert as they walked down the hall. “Until tomorrow, we’re supposed to be the only people on this floor.”
“So someone wasn’t just at the wrong room.”
“Rooms,” Will said. “I heard a key card slide into my door, too. There are eight rooms on each floor. It’s a ‘boutique’ hotel, remember?”
“But sometimes people do get off on the wrong floor.”
“They do—but not after they’ve slipped invisibly past a night clerk.”
“What if the clerk had earphones on and was listening to AC/DC?” she asked.
“What about the security guard?”
“Maybe he was listening to another heavy-metal band,” Kat said.
He grinned, then paused, staring at the wall by her room, frowning.
“What…” she began to ask.
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 2: The Unseen ; The Unholy ; The Unspoken ; The Uninvited Page 63