King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  A few minutes later Denise got fed up with waiting. I felt her stir beside me and then the door opened. “Come on, I’m done sitting on my ass. Let’s go find the Marshal ourselves.”

  See why I like her?

  Denise took my arm and led me across what I took to be a parking lot and inside a building where it was only a few degrees cooler inside than out; it seemed the Marshal didn’t believe in air conditioning. Dmitri followed close behind.

  We hadn’t gone five steps across the lobby before a voice spoke from a doorway to our right.

  “Where the hell do you three think you’re going?”

  I recognized the voice as Goatee’s, and from the sound of it, he was more than a bit pissed that we hadn’t done what he’d told us to do.

  “To see the Marshal. Isn’t that why you brought us here?”

  Denise’s tone was equally clear: we’ll do what we damn well please.

  Goatee wasn’t done trying to impose order on the situation, however.

  “The Marshal is tied up at the moment. You’re going to have to wait.”

  “Oh, no we’re not!” she snapped, her anger finally spilling free. In response, Dmitri moved closer, ready to intervene if it became necessary.

  “The Marshal asked to see us and we’ve honored that request. But my patience has limits, and I’m not waiting around all day until he deigns to entertain us. I’ve got better things to do. So he can either see us while we’re standing here or come find us later when it’s more ‘convenient.’ Either way, I don’t really give a shit.”

  Goatee laughed.

  And not just a little chuckle either. From the sound of it, he threw back his head and guffawed at the ceiling like a crazy man.

  I thought Denise was going to blow a gasket. She wasn’t someone who enjoyed being the butt of anyone’s humor, intentionally or otherwise. I waited for the explosion, but she must have pulled an extra helping of patience today because it never came.

  Finally, Goatee got himself back under control.

  “Aren’t you the little spitfire?” he said to Denise.

  That did it.

  Denise’s voice got very soft, something that was never a good sign.

  “What did you call me?” she asked, and I felt the air around us stir with her anger.

  Goatee began to look a bit nervous, but his ringing cell phone saved the day.

  “Yes?” he said into it, then, “We’re on our way.”

  Hanging up, he said, “The Marshal will see you now.”

  Saved by the bell.

  11

  ROBERTSON

  He’s out there.

  Somewhere.

  Special Agent Dale Robertson stared out the window at the rain-swept Washington streets, his thoughts on Jeremiah Hunt, the man he’d been pursuing for the last several months. Wanted for the murder of a Massachusetts police detective, as well as at least a dozen civilians in just as many states, Hunt was considered a cold-blooded killer, and Robertson had every intention of bringing him to justice.

  But he had to find him in order to do that and it was turning out to be more difficult than he’d anticipated.

  From his many years in law enforcement, Robertson knew that most fugitives made the same simple mistakes. They’d call home to speak with their spouses or families, never thinking that the lines would be tapped or the calls recorded. They’d buy things with their credit or ATM cards, never realizing that each time they did so they were revealing their general whereabouts to the authorities who were searching for them. They’d dye their hair a different color, maybe even grow a beard or a mustache, and then spoil the disguise by wearing clothes that revealed their tattoos or other body art.

  People were creatures of habit, Robertson knew, and it was often those habits that proved to be their downfall when they went on the run.

  Hunt, apparently, was different.

  In the wake of the events at the old Danvers State Hospital outside of Boston last fall, Hunt had gone to ground. More than fifteen thousand tips and sighting reports had come in to the office of the task force in that time period from various sources. Each and every one of them had been followed up and investigated to the fullest extent possible. None of them had yielded usable leads.

  Hunt had been on the run for more than three months, and in all that time he hadn’t made a single mistake. He’d disappeared from the radar screen so thoroughly that Robertson was half convinced he’d crawled into a hole somewhere and had then pulled the hole in after him.

  Hunt had simply vanished.

  But Robertson wasn’t yet ready to give up. Not by a long shot.

  I know you’re out there, you bastard, and I’m going to find you.

  There was a knock at his office door behind him.

  “Come in,” he called.

  He turned away from the window to find a younger man standing uncertainly in the office doorway, a file in his hands.

  “What is it?” Robertson asked, while doing his best to remember the man’s name. Dalton? Dawson? Something like that …

  “Um … Agent Doherty, sir. I’m on the task force? On the tip line?”

  His voice rose at the end of every sentence, turning his statements into questions and betraying his nervousness.

  Given Robertson’s current mood, he found the man’s hesitancy annoying.

  “Are you asking or telling me, Agent?” he snapped at him.

  Doherty’s head pulled back sharply, doing a good imitation of a turtle trying to retreat into his shell. “Sir?”

  Robertson shook his head and took a deep breath.

  Calm yourself. Don’t let that asshole Hunt get to you like this.

  “Never mind,” he said, extending a hand. “Give it here.”

  Doherty quickly passed the folder over and then stepped back. Without the documents to hold onto, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He clasped them together in front of his waist, then pulled them apart and let them hang at his sides. His left hand crept up and tugged at his tie, then smoothed his hair.

  Robertson glared at him until the other man forced himself to stand still, then turned his attention to the file.

  The report was one of thousands just like it that they received every day, a snippet of information that might or might not have anything to do with one of the Bureau’s open cases. Each and every one of them needed to be tagged, filed, and assigned to an agent so that it could be followed up on appropriately, regardless of how small or insignificant it sounded. Any qualified investigator knew that a thorough investigation left no stone unturned and Robertson was more aware than most of just how valuable a seemingly unrelated piece of information could be when it came to solving something. He’d gotten the break he’d needed in the Reaper case last year through a tip that had come in from the phone bank and he’d learned to pay attention to even the most unusual tips. He glanced at the case designation in the upper right-hand corner of the report and his eyebrows rose at what he saw.

  BRC-2009-8753.

  The Reaper case.

  He looked up to find Doherty watching him nervously.

  “You have my attention, Agent Doherty.”

  “Um, right. Okay. Like I said, sir, I’m part of the task force and my current assignment is to monitor the N-DEx.”

  The National Data Exchange, or N-DEx as it was more routinely called, was a database that collected reports from 200,000 law enforcement agents from around the country at the local, state, and federal levels. Designed as a one-stop shop for criminal justice information and accessing millions of records from databases all across the country, N-DEx had proved to be a valuable resource in the short time it had been operational. An investigator could search the database with just a few clicks of the mouse and rifle through millions of records in minutes.

  Robertson had assigned three junior agents to go through the latest N-DEx reports on a daily basis, searching for anything that could be even remotely tied to the Reaper case. He hadn’t expected them to find a
nything of value, but he was too methodical to leave any stone unturned.

  “That report,” Doherty said, inclining his head toward the file in Robertson’s hands, “came in yesterday. My gut tells me it’s important, sir.”

  Robertson glared. “Your gut?” he asked, putting emphasis on the last word, as if the very idea were distasteful.

  To his surprise, Doherty stood his ground. “Yes, sir.”

  Plenty of investigators relied on hunches, or gut instincts, to help them solve a case, so the act itself wasn’t all that surprising. That a junior agent would bring a file to the senior agent in charge on just a “hunch” was, however.

  Interesting.

  He focused on the file. There wasn’t much to it, just a single report from a Tennessee state trooper named Hendricks regarding a traffic stop he’d made on Interstate 40.

  Robertson skimmed the first part of the report, taking in the background information. Trooper Hendricks had spotted a black Dodge Charger traveling west on I-40 with one of its taillights out. It being a slow month for citations, he’d pulled the vehicle over, intending to hand out a traffic ticket. Upon approach, he’d discovered that the vehicle was carrying three passengers, two males and one female.

  He kept reading, still not seeing anything of interest until the phrase “temporary blindness” jumped out at him. He slowed down and focused on that particular section.

  The female passenger abruptly began screaming and thrashing about in her seat. Not knowing if her behavior was a result of narcotics or an epileptic fit, I stepped back and reached for my radio, intending to call for help.

  It was at that point that the male passenger in the front seat reached out of the vehicle and grabbed my wrist. When he did, I could see a row of intricate tattoos running up his arm. They started at the wrist and disappeared beneath the sleeve of his shirt. While I was focused on his tattoos he must have thrown something in my eyes with his other hand, for a sharp pain filled my head and I suffered some kind of temporary blindness that prevented me from acting further to detain the suspects.

  Tattoos.

  Hunt had tattoos running up both arms, Robertson knew. He’d seen them when he’d interviewed Hunt while Hunt was being held by the Boston police.

  So what? asked a voice in the back of his mind. Thousands of people have tattoos.

  And yet … and yet there was something here. He could feel it, too. He wasn’t sure what it was, maybe the mention of blindness, given Hunt’s own familiarity with that state, but something about the report made Robertson feel it was connected to the case.

  He looked up to find Doherty watching him closely.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  Doherty swallowed, but again, held his ground. “Yes, sir. While it isn’t in the official report, the officer who was forced to help Hunt escape from police headquarters in Boston said something similar, and I thought the similarity too important to ignore.”

  Robertson thought about it for a moment and then gave the file back to the junior agent.

  “Get your coat, Agent Doherty. You and I are going to Tennessee.”

  12

  CLEARWATER

  Goatee led them out of the foyer they’d been standing in and up a broad staircase to the second floor. It was obvious that the building they were in had once been someone’s home; Denise had caught sight of a kitchen at the end of the hall on the lower floor, and a quick glance in the two rooms they passed revealed them to be bedrooms. Given the level of dust she’d seen on the windowsills, she guessed that they hadn’t been used in a while.

  Goatee stopped at the third doorway he came to, opened it, and then ushered them inside with the sweep of one hand. The room had probably once been a bedroom like the others they’d passed but was now set up as an office, with a desk in the center and narrow bookshelves filled with thick texts flanking it on either side.

  It was also empty.

  “He’ll be right with you,” Goatee said and left them alone.

  Denise was about to go after him when a door she hadn’t noticed on the other side of the room opened and another man walked in.

  He was medium height and muscular, too, with thick arms and a rough-skinned face. His red hair was cut extremely short in that military style commonly referred to as a flattop, and he walked with a slight limp.

  Upon seeing his guests, he stopped short.

  Denise could only stare.

  “S-Simon?” she gasped out, right about the same time the newcomer was saying her name, and then each of them moved forward and Denise found herself wrapped up in one of her old coven mate’s bear hugs.

  When he finally let her go, he held her at arm’s length and looked at her in amazement.

  “Denise!” he exclaimed. “When they told me there was a new Artist in town, I never dreamed it would be you!”

  Before she could puzzle through the implications of that statement, Simon turned to her companions.

  “Dmitri,” he said, to the big man beside her. “It’s been a while.” He extended his hand in welcome.

  For a moment, Denise was afraid Dmitri wasn’t going to accept it, the events of the past still standing like a specter between the two men, but then the big Russian grasped his former comrade’s hand in his own and gave it a firm shake.

  Denise found herself breathing a sigh of relief without even realizing she’d been holding her breath.

  Simon extended his hand to Hunt. “And you are…?”

  Denise knew Hunt was about to give the fake name he was traveling under, so she answered for him. “Jeremiah, meet Simon Gallagher. Simon, Jeremiah Hunt.”

  There would be no sense trying to keep a secret from Simon; he was too damn good at ferreting them out, and if they were going to be here for a while it was best if they were clear about who was who right from the start.

  Which brought her back to the reason she’d come here in the first place.

  “The Lord Marshal asked to see us,” she told him, as he let go of Hunt’s hand and turned to face her again. “Do you have any idea why?”

  Simon smiled. “I should hope I do,” he said, with a slight smirk on his face, “particularly since I’m he.”

  It took her a minute to parse what he was saying.

  Simon was Lord Marshal of New Orleans?

  Perhaps that, more than anything else so far, made her realize that something was rotten in Denmark.

  Just what the hell was going on around here?

  Still grinning, Simon said, “Please, sit down,” indicating the chairs in front of his desk. When they had, he asked, “Can I get you anything? A drink? Coffee maybe?”

  Hunt practically started salivating at the word coffee, but Clearwater declined. Simon picked up the phone and ordered two coffees, black, one for Dmitri and one for Hunt, from whoever answered the phone.

  While he did, Denise took a moment to study him. They’d been little more than kids when she’d last seen him; she’d been nineteen, maybe twenty, and he was just a year older. She’d left New Orleans eight years ago, but Simon looked as if he’d aged two decades in the time since. His face had deep lines cut into it, evidence that the years had been neither easy nor kind. The Simon she’d known and loved had laughed a lot; this Simon didn’t look like he’d laughed in quite some time.

  She wondered how much of that was due to his present position. Being the Lord Marshal of a major city was often a thankless and particularly difficult job.

  Just how in Gaia’s name did he end up in that position? she wondered.

  Most of the Lord Marshals she’d known had been older men, individuals with far more experience than she suspected Simon had. He was a strong practitioner of the Arts, but she wouldn’t have imagined he’d be in the running for a position like that, never mind be appointed to the job. It just didn’t make sense.

  The coffee came, strong and black just the way both men liked it, and they finally got down to business.

  “All right, Simon,” Denise said. “Tell us wh
at on earth is going on.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, feigning confusion, but she wasn’t buying it.

  “Come on!” she said, letting her annoyance show. “I’m not some fool off the street.”

  He shook his head. “I never said you were, Denise.”

  “Then cut the bullshit, Simon! We aren’t in town more than fourteen, fifteen hours max and your boys show up, inviting us to have an informal chat with the Lord Marshal? Never mind making it clear that we’re going to have that chat whether we really want to or not?”

  They stared at each other for a moment, and Denise was gratified when Simon turned away first.

  He blew out a long breath and then parked himself on the edge of his desk.

  “First, I’m sorry if Spencer came across a bit strong.”

  He paused, giving her time to respond, but all she did was nod her head. She’d reserve judgment on Spencer for another time.

  Seeing he wasn’t going to get any more from her, Simon continued. “There’s been some trouble lately and everyone is on edge because of it.”

  For the first time since entering the room, Hunt spoke up. “You mean the illness?”

  Denise was shocked to see Simon’s eyes narrow in suspicion as he turned to look at Hunt. Safe behind his sunglasses, Hunt didn’t seem to notice.

  Simon shook himself and then went on. “Yes, the illness. It started a few weeks ago and has been escalating rapidly ever since. As far as we can tell, only the Gifted are being targeted.”

  Denise thought about how quickly Simon’s men had learned of their entrance to the city, the nature of the response that followed, and his use just now of the word targeted, adding it all up in her head.

  “You think it’s deliberate,” she said.

  Simon nodded. “I do.”

  They were all quiet, digesting that for a moment. Hunt broke the silence.

  “Just what, exactly, are we talking about here?” he asked. “Gene warfare? Magical terrorism? How do they, whoever the hell they are, even know who to target, for that matter? It’s not like you go around with signs on your heads, right?”