Deadly Curiosities

by Gail Z. Martin

  “So his luck changed?”

  Teag nodded, twirling a pencil as he thought. “He was under indictment for fraud. His real estate investments took a big hit when the economy soured, and he owed money to the wrong people. He had gambling debts. The Feds were looking at him for insider trading, and if they had nailed drug dealers using the facility, the government could have seized the property under the racketeering laws.”

  “Sounds like a perfect storm,” I said. “And right about that time, Landrieu and his team disappear, Moran summons his demon, and the killings start.”

  “And Kenner might have been Victim Number Two,” Teag said. “They found his badly mutilated body inside the storage unit security fence right when all the shit was about to hit the fan around his business dealings.”

  He looked up. “They charged the office manager, Flora Beam, with the crime. Her attorney claimed insanity and so she’s locked up in a psychiatric facility.”

  My blood ran cold. “When?”

  “If my dates are right, Fred Kenner died about a week before the murder near the Navy yard,” Teag replied. “Which means he might have been the first death after the sacrifice we found.”

  Something Teag had said jiggled a memory. “You know, when I had the vision at the Dennison house, I caught something about Kevin stealing things from his stash. Do you think he meant the storage facility?”

  Teag shrugged. “It’s possible, although he might have been dumpster diving.”

  “What about Jimmy Redshoes?” I asked. “Do you remember the kinds of things he sold? They were more like what you’d find in a yard sale than from a street vendor, because he almost never had two of the same thing. What if he supplied his merchandise by breaking into an abandoned storage facility?”

  Teag frowned. “Could be. But if it was abandoned, wouldn’t the tenants have cleared out all their things before it shut down?”

  “Maybe some of them did,” I speculated. “But if Kenner was such a shady character, and the facility closed up on short notice, maybe some of them didn’t get word in time. Or maybe they never got the notice. You said it yourself,” I continued, “people who store things often don’t pay any attention.”

  “That makes sense,” Teag replied. “That’s why there are those reality TV shows about selling unclaimed items.”

  I nodded. “But if Kenner was dead and his estate’s been tied up in litigation, they might not have been able to sell things off, or maybe no one’s even gotten to dealing with it yet.”

  Just then, the phone rang and Maggie grabbed it before I got there. “Cassidy,” Maggie called, “call on line one.”

  I greeted the caller and listened to the voice on the other end. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate your going to all that bother.” I turned to Teag with a Cheshire-cat grin. “That was Mrs. Butler. Says the linens were stored at Stor-Your-Own until about six months ago.”

  Teag fist-pumped the air in victory. “Gotcha!”

  I poured a new cup of coffee and leaned against the break room counter. “We still don’t know why the bad juju seems to be picking up momentum,” I said. “The murders are happening more often, and it’s only been recently that there are reports of haunted objects causing problems.”

  “Landrieu thought he was being stalked,” Teag said. “We know Moran approached him. I wouldn’t put it past Moran to make Landrieu and his team disappear if they got in his way.”

  “Meaning that once Landrieu located the Cristobal, and Moran had recuperated from the damage Sorren did to him, Moran got rid of Landrieu and retrieved what he wanted himself.”

  Teag nodded. “As far as the objects go, maybe Moran’s demon-binding artifact needed time – or exposure to something – to gain strength,” he theorized. “So the objects started out normal, and then got contaminated as the energy in the storage facility strengthened.”

  “Could be,” I agreed. “Trinket said that no one else had reported having an incident with the opera glasses.”

  “It makes sense,” Teag said. “The people who owned the haunted items had them for years without anything freaky happening. Then there’s a move, a death, a need to clear out space, and the pieces go into storage for a while. And when they come back, they’re not the same.”

  I frowned. “Then why wouldn’t the malicious magic register when the pieces came to us at the store?”

  I mused.

  “Maybe some power at the storage unit made the pieces vulnerable, but the magic didn’t show up until it was triggered – by something, or someone,” Teag ventured.

  “I’d love to get my hands on Stor-Your-Own’s files to find out who else had things stored there about the time everything started to go bad,” I said. “And I’d really like to talk to Flora Beam and see what she knows.” I met Teag’s gaze. “If her boss made a deal with a demon, she might have every reason to have gone insane.” And more than a few reasons to kill Kenner, I thought.

  “I told you, I haven’t started hacking yet,” Teag said with a mischievous grin. “If the storage facility had information online, I should be able to get in. As for Flora, let me work on Anthony. If we play enough angles, we’re bound to come up with something.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Teag and I were heading to a rural area on the outskirts of Charleston to visit the Wendover Psychiatric Hospital. Anthony had taken the morning off to go with us, and he had already used his connections to gain permission to talk with Flora Beam.

  “If there wasn’t the possibility of this connecting to those murder cases, I wouldn’t be doing this,”

  Anthony said, for about the tenth time.

  “You’re the one who told me about the deposition,” Teag said. “Flora Beam was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial because she raved about demons and ghosts and claimed that she had to kill Fred Kenner because he was possessed.”

  I knew that Teag had spent the afternoon online, using his magic and the darker recesses of the Internet to get a look at the court records regarding Flora’s testimony. It wasn’t hard to see why the judge ruled her unable to stand trial, with talk about demons demanding blood sacrifices, malicious ghosts, haunted objects and supernatural menace. But to Teag and me, Flora was dead-on. What she said she witnessed would put any normal person around the bend.

  “I saw photos from the trial,” Teag said, turning toward Anthony, who was driving. I sat in the back.

  “Not many people ever showed up on Flora’s side of the courtroom. But there was one man who was there every day. Fifty-ish, balding, looked like he might have been ex-military. Any idea who he was?”

  Anthony shook his head. “Probably a friend or relative. There wouldn’t be a record of who attended if they weren’t part of the proceedings.”

  Teag had shown me the photos, and we both agreed the older man’s consistent presence raised questions. Was he a loyal friend, sticking with Flora despite the awful testimony, or one of Moran’s people, sent to keep an eye on things?

  Anthony coached us on how to get past security. Teag and I had dressed up, looking like paralegals in our spiffy business suits. It was interesting watching the up-and-coming young lawyer in his element.

  Teag just grinned, proud of his partner.

  The interior of the psychiatric hospital tried to be homey looking, in a high-security institutional kind of way. Meaning that the room where individuals committed to the hospital could have supervised visits had upholstered furnishings instead of hard plastic prison chairs, but the couches, tables and chairs were all bolted to the floor.

  An aide brought Flora out to meet us. I caught my breath. Teag had shown me the employee photo in the Stor-Your-Own database that had been taken when Flora was hired. She had been a plump, grandmotherly looking woman with gray hair, cheerful blue eyes and a welcoming smile. In the photos from the trial, she had looked understandably haggard from stress. But now, with her baggy state facility jumpsuit, handcuffs and the ankle manacles that hobbled her, she looked emaciated and haunted, like
someone who has stared into hell and found something staring back.

  “Hello, Flora,” Anthony said in his kindest tone. “We have some questions for you about what happened at the storage unit.”

  I met Flora’s gaze and saw madness there, but I also saw intelligence. Maybe the madness was a form of self-defense, I thought. Maybe it’s how normal people deal with finding out there really are monsters under the bed.

  “I said everything I mean to say,” Flora replied. She didn’t sound belligerent, just weary. No doubt she had done her best to warn people of the danger, alert them to the real source of the problem, only to have her testimony disregarded out of hand and her reports mocked.

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Corban Moran?” I asked.

  Flora slowly turned to look me in the eyes. “Best you forget you ever heard that name.”

  “Did he do business with Fred Kenner? Was he around the storage facility?” I hoped Flora would trust me, woman-to-woman. I saw wariness in her expression, along with the longing to have someone, anyone, believe her.

  “Yes,” she said. “To both questions. And when he showed up, all hell broke loose.” “What about Russ Landrieu?” Teag asked. “Did he and Moran cross paths?”

  A pained look came over Flora’s face, and she began to rock back and forth in her chair. The aide started toward us from where he waited by the door, but Anthony shook his head and the man withdrew.

  “Oh, Lordy. Oh, Lordy,” Flora said. “Yes, Mr. Landrieu and his folks used to come by when they went out on their boat. Nice fellow. Always waved when he came in or out, paid his bill on time, never caused any trouble. When I found out he was a celebrity with all those treasure dives, I asked him for an autograph. He seemed to get a kick out of that.”

  For someone who had been portrayed as a raving lunatic at the trial, Flora was calm and well-spoken.

  Then again, so are most serial killers, I reminded myself. Intuition could be mistaken, but I didn’t sense that Flora was dangerous. If Kenner really had been possessed, she might have done us a public service in getting rid of him, although I suspected Moran had done the killing and let Flora take the fall.

  “What about Landrieu and Moran?” I prompted. Flora’s mind seemed to wander, and I wondered if she couldn’t remember, or didn’t want to.

  “The last time I saw Mr. Landrieu, he and his team came out to get their things. He told me that this was the ‘big one’, the dive that was going to put them in the big time,” she said. She rocked back and forth as she talked, and her palms ran up and down her forearms, self-soothing her way through memories that had caused her plenty of trouble.

  “Mr. Moran was there,” Flora recalled. “And they had a big argument, him and Mr. Landrieu. I was up in the office, so I couldn’t hear what it was about, but I could see them arguing on the surveillance cameras.” She shook her head. “That was a bad thing to do. You don’t want to argue with Mr. Moran.”

  “How did Moran know Kenner?” I probed.

  Flora shivered. “Moran’s trouble,” she whispered. “And Mr. Kenner didn’t need more problems. I figured Mr. Moran loaned him money, since Mr. Kenner had a lot of people looking for him to pay them.” She leaned forward. “I don’t mean bill collectors – they called, too. I mean guys who would throw a brick through your window when you were late with your payment.”

  “Did Moran store anything at the units?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Flora said, and I saw her gaze grow distant, as if she was retreating into herself.

  I leaned forward. “Yes, I do. Because the thing that killed Mr. Kenner is back, and it’ll keep on killing until we know enough about Moran to stop him.”

  Relief warred with the need to shield herself from what she had seen. “You believe… about the thing I saw? The demon?”

  I nodded. “I’ve seen it too, Flora. We both have. We’re going to stop it, but we need to know what you saw – what you really saw.”

  We had read her deposition, but it was clear that the claims she made seemed so far-fetched that the attending psychologist and lawyers had taken it with a grain of salt. It was also possible that Moran had somehow managed to tamper with the evidence. I wanted to hear it straight from Flora’s lips.

  Flora drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “All right,” she said. “But it ain’t pretty.”

  “I know,” I said. “But we need to hear it. All of it. Please, don’t leave anything out. It’s important.”

  Flora’s arrest paperwork said she was sixty-two, but she looked at least ten years older since the trial.

  Outside of work, Flora had volunteered with the local garden club, collected canned goods for the food bank and helped out at her neighborhood animal shelter. Nothing in her past would have suggested she would be convicted of murder, especially of such a gruesome killing. Now, as she mustered the courage to revisit her story, I saw strength in her features that even madness could not erase.

  “Mr. Kenner wasn’t a mean man,” Flora said. “He was just weak. Took the easy way. Money got tight and trouble came. He got scared. Didn’t know what to do. Then Moran showed up with lots of money. Mr. Kenner was in so deep, he’d have bargained with the devil himself.”

  She gave a short, harsh laugh. Kenner had done just that. “For a while it got better. Moran took some units down in Building Four, and kept to himself. Mr. Kenner told me to stay clear of his units, and I did.

  But then it got bad, real bad.”

  “Bad, how?” I asked.

  Flora shut her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself, but I could see a determination in her features to keep on talking. “I started seeing things, hearing things when I’d close up at night. I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but it kept happening.”

  She let out a long breath. “Mr. Kenner started to act real strange, got mean as a junkyard dog. His eyes went funny, like he wasn’t in there anymore.” She shivered. “I didn’t watch many horror movies, but it was like something got in his head and made him someone else.”

  She shook her head. “Not my imagination. Ghosts. Haints. And creatures that shouldn’t be. Like on TV, except real.” She was quiet for a moment, still rocking back and forth. “Then one day, I heard something that sounded like a man moaning, like he was gonna die. I went looking to see if someone got hurt, and I come around the corner and see Mr. Moran and this monster, and a whole lot of blood.”

  Her voice got soft. “So much blood. Blood everywhere. And Mr. Moran looked at me, and his monster looked at me, too. Ugly as sin, with big sharp teeth like a shark and skin like a lizard, like what it might be if you crossed a man with a crocodile. And it was covered in blood.”

  “Where was Mr. Kenner?” Teag asked gently.

  Flora opened her eyes and met his gaze. “He was where the blood was coming from. They killed him.

  They… took him apart. I ran.” She shook her head.

  It was the same story she had told the court, the story no one believed. She hadn’t killed Fred Kenner, but what she saw had damaged her. Maybe she was safer in here. I counted her as one more of Moran’s victims, someone else to avenge. And I had one more question left to ask. “There was a man who came to the trial,” I said. “Who was he?”

  Flora nodded. “Clockman,” she said. “He tried to warn me. He knew… He knew…”

  The aide tapped Anthony on the shoulder. “Your time’s up,” he said. “I need to take her back to her room.”

  Anthony, Teag and I rose. I leaned over toward Flora. “Thank you,” I murmured.

  She seized my hand so suddenly, Teag jumped and the aide moved in to protect me. “Stop him,” she begged. “Stop him.”

  The aide interposed himself, removing her hands from mine and hustled her away. I stared after her.

  Stop Moran. Stop the demon. Silently, I made her the same promise I had made to Jimmy Redshoes. We’d make it right. Come hell or high water.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ANT
HONY HAD TO go back to the office, so he dropped Teag and me off at the store after we were done interviewing Flora. Teag headed to his place, with a promise to do magically-enhanced Internet research in order to follow up on the information Flora had given us. I was looking forward to having a quiet evening at home.

  I knew when I walked up to my door and Baxter wasn’t barking that Sorren was there. Sure enough, he and Baxter were sitting on the couch together in the dark. He lifted Baxter down to the floor and my little Maltese scampered over to greet me.

  “You’re going to scramble his circuits if you keep glamoring him,” I said.

  “If it counts to ingratiate me, I fed him.” Sorren’s face was halfway in shadow, but from what I could see, he seemed to be in much better shape than the last time I had seen him.

  “How are you?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been worse. Immortality often means you can’t die, even when you want to.”

  There wasn’t really any response I could make to that, so I let it go. “Any news from your sources?”

  “People in my circles tend to move around a lot. Not all of them embrace modern conveniences, like cell phones. I have left messages. Whether or not we hear in a timely matter is hard to say. Over the centuries, one’s view of timeliness changes.”

  “I saw an oil painting at the Historical Archive,” I said. The meeting with Mrs. Morrissey seemed like forever ago. “There’s a man who looks a great deal like you.”

  A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “I tried to be inconspicuous.” I chuckled. “Do you remember when it was painted?”

  Sorren nodded. “It’s a curious thing about immortality. Mortals forget so much, yet live such a short while. We live so long, and forget nothing.” He met my gaze. “I’ve come to believe that’s part of the curse.”

  “Is immortality a curse?”

  Sorren’s expression grew pensive. “Sometimes I think so. Other times, not. I haven’t decided yet.”