Bone Island 01 - Ghost Shadow (28 page)

“Is that a fact?” Pete demanded. “What are you, some kind of a sicko? You killed your own sister, and now you’re back at the scene of the crime?”

“No!” Sam cried out. “Get this jerk off me, for God’s sake.”

Sean stood. Pete pulled out his cuffs. “Time to pay the piper, you little snot-nose creep!” Pete said.

Pete was here. It was all under control.

“Whether he killed anyone or not, Pete, he was breaking and entering here,” Katie said.

“Oh, what, it’s your place because you’re sleeping with Beckett?” Sam demanded. “That asshole-my sister dies over him and he’s still out there poking everything in a skirt!”

Katie ignored him. “I have to run upstairs for just a minute. It’s important. Pete, you’ve got Sam, right? Sean, you can fill Pete in? I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t give them a chance to answer. Danny was beckoning, and he looked worried, as if speed might be of the essence.

“I’m calling it in,” Pete said, “but I’ll drag the little goon in myself. Tell me exactly what happened, Sean.”

“Katie, what the hell…?” Sean demanded angrily.

“I’ll be right back down!” she swore.

She wasn’t afraid. Her brother was there, and Pete had Sam Barnard-he’d be cuffed any minute, and safe.

She came out upstairs. The auxiliary lights had come on, giving her a footpath to follow. In the very strange orange-and-purple light that filtered in from the sky of the dying day, figures rose all around her. Pirates, smugglers, scalawags. Navy men and soldiers, Union soldiers, Confederate soldiers. They posed, ready to speak, ready to move.

She made her way to the hanging tree.

The figure there was posed with its back to her as it dangled from the tree. She stepped up. There was a large plaque on the floor, noting the tree, telling its present location, stating its grim utility as a means of execution.

On the wall, closer to the exhibit, was a small handwritten explanation. Craig Beckett had lovingly written up small wall plaques when the place had been younger, when no velvet ropes had barred visitors from getting too close.

“The hanging of Eli Smith,” the plaque read. “Justice was hard; another man hanged for his crimes, lynched by a mob. But truth caught up with a reckless killer.”

Underneath it Craig Beckett had noted that Smith still had descendants living in the city today. He had left behind a daughter.

The cursive handwriting was difficult to read. Katie leaned closer.

As she did so, there was a tremendous thud from down below.

The auxiliary lights went out.

As they did so, her mind comprehended Craig’s cursive handwriting, and she gasped as the room fell into a shadow land of darkness.

She knew the killer.

And she knew he was in the museum with her.

He already had Sean.

“Everything is fine,” Liam assured David, snapping his phone shut.

“What the hell do you mean, fine?”

“I guess there was some trouble-and that you might have been right.”

“What?”

“Sam Barnard was at the museum. Sean and Katie heard him, and there was a major tussle, I guess between Sam and Sean. But Katie had gotten through to Pete Dryer and he arrested Sam. Katie might have lost her phone, what with everything going on. Anyway, she’s supposed to be at work now. Should I leave you there?”

“Yeah. You’re sure everything is all right?”

“The lieutenant called it in. He had it under control,” Liam said. “Look, I’ll leave you at the bar, and I’ll head to Katie’s house, and then, if she’s not working or at her place, I’ll meet up with you at Craig’s place. Your place. Whatever.”

“All right, thanks,” David said.

He didn’t know why. He’d been the one pointing out all the reasons that it had to have been Sam Barnard. But was it?

Liam let him off before reaching the insanity of Duval Street. David turned the corner and headed into O’Hara’s. Katie had not set up.

He found Clarinda and caught her by the arm. “Katie, where’s Katie?” he demanded.

“She hasn’t come in yet.” Clarinda’s eyes widened. “She isn’t with you?”

“She’s with Sean. She was with Sean.”

“Jamie just sent Jonas to the house. She hasn’t answered her phone, and neither has Sean. Jamie is breathing fire,” Clarinda said. “Oh, my God! Has something happened?”

“I’m heading to my house. If she shows up here, call me immediately. Screw Jamie and every customer in this place, Clarinda, and call me!”

“Oh, my God, David, you’re scaring the hell out of me!” Clarinda said.

“Just call me!”

He didn’t have time to reassure Clarinda, not when suddenly he was so convinced that he didn’t have time. He left the bar, and ran down the backstreets. A drunken party of six swaggered by him, almost knocking him over. A woman, in ridiculously high heels, staggered and caught his arm.

“Cool, thanks… Hey, help us along there, shoulders, will ya?” she asked.

He pressed her onto the nearest man; if they all fell flat on their faces, so be it.

He hopped a hedge to race across the lawn and up the porch steps of his house. He inserted the key in the lock, and twisted it. He reached inside to flick on the lights.

The electricity was out.

Her heard movement in the bushes and swung around. Liam.

“What’s going on?” Liam asked.

“Electric.”

Liam swore. He reached for his phone. David stopped him. “If he has them, they might still be alive. No alarms.”

Liam nodded. He drew his service revolver and they went into the house. “Fuse box?” Liam asked.

David nodded. “I can see-I can see enough.”

He went up the stairs and made a hurried sweep of the house. He came back down the stairs and went into the dining room.

The books lay on the table, undisturbed.

He turned to go back and look for his cousin.

But he was shoved. Shoved, back toward the table.

He swung around, ready to fight, ready to survive. There was no one there.

He was shoved toward the table again.

The top book flew open.

He drew out a penlight and threw the glow onto the page. He looked at it, puzzled. It was a family tree. He turned the page.

The paper nearly ripped as the page turned back.

“What? What?” he demanded aloud. The book offered a host of pages of old names, the kind of names the streets had taken on in honor of early residents, and names of those who had gone before and not been honored.

He studied the page again that the unseen entity wanted him to read. The headline read, Smith.

He ran his fingers down the page, following the descendants through the ages, births, marriages and deaths.

He swore aloud as Liam came back into the house. “Search this place, top to bottom!” he told him. “Get someone here, Liam, quickly, for the love of God!”

David burst out into the night and started running.

Katie was stunned as she heard movement-real movement-behind her. She blinked, trying to adjust to the slim filter of outside light that made its way in.

She longed to cry out; she was terrified for Sean. Tears stung her eyes.

She couldn’t cry out. She had to find Sean in silence.

A noise startled her.

She swung around. It was as if the museum had been activated. Next to the hanging tree, military ruler Porter waved a broadside that promised death to all pirates. His arms were jerking spasmodically. His jaw jerked and there was an awful moment when he talked without sound.

Then a bad recording came on. Rasping and hollow. “Death…death…death…to…to…all…all…all…pirates!”

She moved quickly by Porter, only to crash into a tall robotic of a wrecker.

“Storm! Storrrrm…warning. First ta’ reach her, salvage is mine…mine…mine…mine.”

She had to stay calm. She couldn’t heed the jerky movements or the eerie voices of the robotics. When she moved again, a sailor with the insignia for the Maine seemed to leap ahead of her in her path. He hadn’t moved. She was terrified, and she knew that someone had hit the mechanization that Craig Beckett made.

They were just robotics. Just robotics coming to mechanical life. She had to ignore them.

She had to get downstairs to Sean.

She started to walk again, and then she heard stealthy movement. Not a robotic.

Someone was stalking her in the darkness. She made her way carefully then, letting the robotics talk and move, and using them for cover.

She came to the robotic of Ernest Hemingway. He jerked and spoke, complaining about his wife, Pauline. He said, in grating and broken words, that he’d set a penny into his patio-because his wife had certainly taken his very last penny. Katie slipped by him, glad of the noise he was making, and headed down the servants’ stairs to the exhibits below.

She paused, having reached the first floor. She was going to have to sneak across the open entryway to get to the left bank of rooms if she didn’t go through the pantry corridor in the back.

She didn’t want to go through the pantry corridor; it was too narrow. If there was someone there, that someone could too easily nail her.

As she hesitated, she heard a strange whooshing noise, and, at first, she thought one of the robotics was speaking in a rusty voice once again.

“You…you…you…you…you. You are going to die. Come out, come out, wherever you are! We’re locked in, and your poor brother! Paying for the fact that you had to sleep with a Beckett!”

She froze. The voice was near. But from which direction?

She streaked out from the passage beneath the stairway and raced over to the left hall of exhibits where she had left her brother. She burst in on Robert the Doll. In silence, he was jerking back and forth on his stand.

She nearly tripped over a body. She hunched down. It was Sam Barnard. He was wearing handcuffs, and when she gingerly touched him, she discovered a plastic bag wound tightly around his head. With trembling fingers, she ripped it away from him.

“Katie!”

The whisper was Bartholomew’s. His hands were on her shoulders. He motioned her to silence, but beckoned her to follow him.

Her brother was stretched out in the facsimile of the cemetery, where the servicemen from the Maine were buried and honored. A bag was on his head; it wasn’t tightened. She ripped it away from him, and lay against him, desperate to hear his breathing.

He had a pulse. There was a gash on his head; she knew from the stickiness beneath her fingers when she touched him.

“Oh, God!” she prayed in a breath.

“Katie!” Bartholomew warned her again.

“You…you…you…you…you…are dead!” The words were followed by laughter. She tried to rise carefully, to start to move.

“Katie, the other way!” Bartholomew urged her.

Too late. She ducked to avoid a nineteen-twenties flapper, and crashed right into the wall of a big man’s chest.

He reached for her. He was wearing gloves. The gloves he had always known to wear. Diver’s gloves, so plentiful in the Keys!

His hands wound around her neck. She struggled.

He winced and jerked suddenly, as if he’d been hit from behind.

Katie took the moment. She pushed against him and bit his arm, bit as hard as she could. She clawed at his flesh.

If she died, which well she might, the bastard wasn’t getting away with it again.

Nor would he blame David Beckett.

“Bitch!” he roared.

His huge hand came flying across her cheek. The blow was stunning; she felt it with her jaw and head, stars sprung up before her eyes.

And then a darkness deeper than any she had ever imagined.

David slowed when he reached the lawn of the museum. Any alarm now would cost Katie her life, and he knew it. He had to believe that he had a chance. That the killer was determined to tease and taunt her before ending it. He wondered if she was meant to be his finest work. Katie O’Hara, so well-known and beloved in Key West. Beautiful, and a songstress. With a family as old and renowned as his own.

And Sean was in there, somewhere.

The door hadn’t been locked. It remained open. He couldn’t be sure how the killer would act and react, and he was certain that Liam would turn the house upside down. But he had to hurry-if sirens suddenly riddled the streets, if he knew that time was nearly up, the killer would work faster.

The killer had made a mistake. He wouldn’t be able to cast suspicion on David or anyone else. But David thought that he was so overconfident now in his quest for some kind of belated family vengeance that he wouldn’t believe that. He would still believe himself invincible.

And he would have taken care.

David didn’t enter right away. He stared at the floor behind the doorway. It took him a moment, and then he saw it. A trip wire. Somehow it would alert the killer that he was here.

His eyes had attuned well to darkness. He paused for just a moment at the entry, then leapt the turnstile as silently as he could. He hurried toward the left hall.

There was a body on the floor. Heart in his throat, he hurried to it.

Sam Barnard. David checked for a pulse. The man was breathing.

“Ch-cha-cha-Charleston!” A flapper warbled out in a gritty voice.

David jerked around. There was movement. He hadn’t intended to ever have these robotics work; he’d have brought in some experts and gotten them off to good homes elsewhere.

But tonight, they had a life of their own.

They’d been activated to hide other noises in the museum. They had been turned on to scare and frighten, and distract.

He wouldn’t be distracted. But he had to be very careful. He knew where the killer was. And he knew that the killer would be waiting for him.

Hurriedly, he searched the room, but he could only find Sam Barnard. He silently swore to the unconscious man that he would arrange for an ambulance the second he could. Once he had found Sean. And Katie. Katie…

Alive. She had to be alive!

He thanked God that he was good in darkness, and silence. He started through the museum. The killer would be waiting. He prayed that there was a way to surprise him.

Katie felt a stunning pain in her head. She blinked, and the world was still a realm of murky darkness-with odd, milky shapes blurring her vision.

She tried to move, and she could not. She tried to twist around, and she realized that she was strapped to a table.

She was covered in…

White. White. A white wedding dress.

She was wearing a wedding dress and veil, and she was strapped down on the slab that was a bed in the Elena de Hoyos exhibit in the museum.

Terror streaked through her, filling her with horror and panic. She almost squirmed; she would have screamed in hysteria if it hadn’t been for the gag in her mouth and the tape over it.

“Katie, Katie O’Hara!”

She was more horrified as she heard the crooning voice. For a moment, things seemed to jiggle above her, and then come into focus.

Pete. Lieutenant Peter Dryer. Of course. They’d been so stupid.

Who knew the families? Who could get keys to houses and museums? Who could be at any crime scene, and be expected?

Who had been the great-great-great-grandson of a man named Smith, Smith who had left behind a daughter who had married an immigrant named Dryer?

“Oh, Katie, I’ve saved the best for you. There’s a trip cord there, by the door. When David Beckett comes to save you, he’ll pull the wire. So cleverly planned. See-well, you can’t really see, so I’ll explain. I have your brother all trussed up and dressed like Carl Tanzler. All right, all right, so you saved your brother once! But I’m very good, and I can change my plans, and I really like this. I like this so much. Tanzler! Ha-ha. Sure, sure, Sean is young and much, much better looking, but… He’s got himself a syringe full of embalming fluid and other toxins, and if I’ve got this right, he’ll plunge them right into your heart when David enters. Then, of course, I’ll shoot the bastard for what he’s done to you. At first, I thought about letting him squirm in prison, but there are so many appeals, and hell, this is Key West, and the State of Florida considers us their wacky tailpiece to begin with. He might not get the death penalty. So! Old Key West justice. He dies here on the spot.”

She shook her head, unable to speak.

He fixed that for her, ripping off the gauze, jerking out the gag. It was horrible. She thought that she would choke.

She opened her mouth to scream, “David! It’s a trap!”

“Ah, loverboy isn’t here yet,” Pete said. “You can scream for a moment. Oh, yes, and it’s so good, so damned good! See what I did for your brother? He is a fine, strapping lad! Had that Sam Barnard down for me, and in a lock. Held him while I handcuffed him. And didn’t blink until I crushed his skull with the butt of my gun! There you go. Even the big and powerful fall to knowledge and careful planning. Remember that. Ah, well, you won’t really need to remember it long.”

“You’re a cop!” she told him.