Krewe of Hunters 1 Phantom Evil (2 page)

“Straight out of
Gone with the Wind,
” Jackson murmured aloud as he surveyed the house. “Tara meets city streets.” The front room here served as an elegant reception area, perhaps even a ballroom at one point in time. He could almost see Southern belles in their elegant gowns swirling around, led by handsome men in frock coats. A piano sat to the far end near an enormous hearth with tiled backing and a marble mantel. A second, identical fireplace was at the other end of the wall. Midroom was the grand, curving staircase.

What furniture remained was covered in dust sheets.

The hallway on the second floor led to the right and left as he headed up.

He moved on around an ell and came to a long hallway of bedrooms. Here. At the end.

This was the room.

He turned on the light. It seemed to be completely benign, a pretty room, one that had already been prepared for occupancy—or that
had been
occupied. A beautiful four-poster canopy bed sat on a Persian rug, covered in white. Handsome deco dressing tables sat to either side of the room, and large French doors, draped in white chintz and lace, opened out to the balcony that wrapped around the house as it faced the courtyard. Would he feel anything? He did not.

He walked over to the French doors and threw them open, stepping out on the balcony.

The courtyard below explained why a house that came with such a tragic history could still win over buyer after buyer. It was paved with brick, and in the center, typical of New
Orleans, was a fountain and sculpture. A beautiful crane spread its metal wings above the bowl and the water splashed melodically below it into a large basin.

There was a car park to the side, and elegant little wrought-iron tables, shaded by colorful umbrellas, sat across from them. He realized that the kitchen and dining room were behind the round tables, and that food could easily be passed out from the kitchen through a pass-over counter area. He wasn't sure that had been part of the original house. He was going to have to study the blueprints again.

The only thing that marred the beauty stretched before him was the chalk mark down on the bricks where Regina Holloway had lain after she had fallen.

And died.

The blood stain had been cleaned, and yet it seemed to remain.

The courtyard was closed in by the house itself, and by a nine-foot brick wall, and the double wooden gate, large enough to let a car in. But the gate was locked, and it had a key-in pad the same as the main entrances to the house. Senator Holloway had never been a fool; the alarm had gone in the second his signature had been dry on purchase papers. All this Jackson knew because he had read the police reports on the “suicide.”

He noted, though, that it would be almost impossible to reach the wall from the end of the house. There was a good four feet between the end of the balcony and the wall; a statue of Poseidon with a trident was positioned there, so it would be a pleasant fall if one were to attempt a leap—and not make it. But, again—not impossible.

Just so damn improbable.

Maybe it was a good case for his first back in the working world; it was incredibly sad to think about the death of Regina Holloway, but he could hardly begin to imagine the loss she must have felt. He'd seen it before. Parents weren't supposed to outlive their children. Any loss of a child was unbearable.

He heard the doorbell ringing and grimaced, thinking that the house had definitely been built at a time when the third floor housed a number of servants; the main entrance was a good distance from this wing. But he was expecting Detective Andy Devereaux, so he left the balcony and the room, pausing one minute in the doorway. Still, he felt nothing. The room was just a room. He hurried on back to the front door.

Andy Devereaux was a tall man, light mahogany in color, with powder-blue eyes that testified to his mixed heritage, if the attractive shading of his skin did not. He was bald, clean-shaven, fit and trim and tall. He wore a baseball cap to protect his pate, jeans and a tailored shirt beneath a casual, zip-up jacket. He offered Jackson a firm handshake when they met.

“Detective Andrew Devereaux, Andy, to my friends,” he said briefly.

“Jackson—first name, not last—and that's what I am to my friends,” Jackson told him. “Thanks so much for meeting me here.”

Devereaux nodded grimly. “Hey, I'd do anything I could for the senator and his family. It's a crying shame about Regina. A sweeter woman never drew breath.”

“Come on in, and just give me the lay of the land, will you? I got as far as Regina's master bedroom at the end of the horseshoe,” Jackson told him.

Devereaux stepped into the house, removing the Saints cap that had shielded his eyes and sticking it into his jacket pocket
after unzipping it. When the jacket front moved, Jackson could see that the man was on duty—and armed.

“You know the history of the house, right?” Andy asked him.

“Basically, the ‘ghost' stories began back after the Civil War. And, apparently, there have been a number of suicides, or murders made to look like suicides, since then,” Jackson said.

“Yep. You'd never know it, though, standing in this parlor,” Andy said. “Rich folks keep buying the place. It's usually a good deal. One time, it went higher than a kite—folks were
trying
to buy places like this, chock-full of stories. Though before Senator Holloway bought the house, it had been empty for several years. Before that, it was bought by some hotshot New York banker. The fellow wanted to make a haunted bed-and-breakfast out of it.”

“Yes. And one of his first guests wound up dead—in the courtyard—and he sold out, right?” Jackson asked. He hadn't read all the material on the house—that would have taken several years. But he'd gotten the gist of what had gone down.

“That one was cut-and-dried, too, I'm pretty damn sure, though I was still a kid in high school when it happened. Apparently, the banker was expecting all the people who oohed and aahed over a good ghost story. What he got was a fellow who had just had his life seized by the IRS. Man's wife left him, and his kids disowned him. Guess he figured it would be a good place to check in—and check out. There was lots of whispering when it happened,” Andy said. “But, from what I understand, the police work that was done was solid back then, too. That was about fifteen years ago, now. Place was sitting around, mostly all renovated but covered in dust, when Senator Holloway bought it. His son was killed in an accident
soon after, which set them back on the renovations, for want of a better way to put it. He and his wife had just started fixing up the place until a couple of weeks ago.”

“The senator is absolutely convinced that she didn't commit suicide,” Jackson said.

Andy grimaced, angling his head to the side. “And what do you think?” he asked. “That a ghost pushed her over the balcony?”

Jackson shook his head. “No.”

“Then?”

“We're just here to explore every possibility. I don't believe that ghosts push people to their deaths. I do believe that people do.”

“The alarm never went off. No one tampered with the locks. Maybe Mrs. Holloway let someone in, but how did he get out? I suppose it's possible that someone scaled the wall, but hopping down? He'd have surely broken a few bones,” Andy said.

“Unless he had help from the outside,” Jackson said.

“I don't say that something of the kind is impossible, but I can tell you that we searched this place up and down and inside out. There was just no evidence, no evidence whatsoever that anyone else was ever in the house.”

“I believe you,” Jackson said.

“But you're still here.”

Jackson shrugged and grimaced. “I work for the man. I go where I'm told,” he said. And it was pretty much so the truth. The last thing he wanted to do was offend a good officer who had probably made all the right moves. Hell, he wanted the police on his side—and because they wanted to be, not because they had been told they had to be.

“Thing is,” Andy told him, “we all wish to hell there was
something that we could tell him. Senator Holloway is a fellow who isn't all talk, air out the backside, you know what I mean? Not many can keep their souls once they get into politics. He's rare. He's one of the few representatives the people have faith in these days.”

“But he must have enemies,” Jackson said. “What about the people around him? Anybody have arguments with his wife? Someone who wanted something from him, and she might have been the naysayer?”

“Not that I know about. David Holloway insisted it wasn't anybody close to him,” Andy said.

“What about household staff?” Jackson asked.

“There were two maids. They were employed full time, nine to five, but they're not working anymore. I'll get you the files on them,” Andy told him. “And those closest to the family. That would include the chauffeur, a fellow named Grable Haines, and…” He was thoughtful for a minute, scratching his chin. “Well, most importantly, the senator's aide, Martin DuPre. He can help you with other things you might want to know. He's with the senator all the time. Then there's Blake Conroy. He's Senator Holloway's bodyguard. I've got those files all set for you.” He studied Jackson for a minute. “I've got two shootings and an apparent drug overdose right now, but I'm here to help you anytime you want. You get top priority. I can even drop the files by.”

Andy Devereaux was telling the truth when he said that he liked the senator; Jackson wasn't sure that investigating what had already been investigated and ruled a suicide was more important than the other cases in his workload.

“I'll bother you as little as possible,” he promised.

“You bother me when you need to. I understand there are others coming?” Andy asked.

“Five,” Jackson said. “They're here to inspect the house, more than anything else. A woman named Angela Hawkins is due tonight. She's good at talking to people, so she'll probably have a few conversations with the senator and those around him. I—”

“What's inspecting the house going to do?” Andy asked. “I'm telling you that our forensics people are damn good.”

“And I don't have a problem in the world believing that,” Jackson assured him. “And that means you know this house.”

“Yes, I do,” Andy told him. Hands on his hips, he looked around. “It sure is a beautiful place. No one mucked it up too much, modernizing it. Back before the 1880s, the kitchen was on the outside. They attached the place after that point, according to the plans. Added the second two stories over there, and added it all on together. It became an academy for young ladies in the 1890s, but…”

“But there was a suicide. One of the girls went out a third-story window,” Jackson said.

“You've done your reading,” Andy said approvingly. “Some say there was just an evil presence in the house, and it caused people to do bad things. The local rags picked it up at the time. There's rumor the girl was pregnant, but there wasn't an autopsy on her. The parents wanted her interred right off, and they were rich and they got their way. The records still exist, they just don't say much,” Andy told him. “I've got copies of all the old stuff at the station—the house has become a bit of an obsession for me.” He paused for a minute, and then said, “I guess that history is why you ghost people are here, right?”

“We're not ghost people,” Jackson said.

Andy shrugged. “Sure. But it's odd, I'll say that. It all goes back to Madden C. Newton. He was pure
evil,
and evil doesn't just go away.”

No one answered Angela Hawkins's knock on the door. She'd arrived at twilight. For a moment, she appreciated the fine lines of the house, and the size of it. She'd been in New Orleans plenty of times before, and she had always loved the city and the architecture.

But Jackson Crow was supposed to have been there.

She had a key, but she didn't want to take him by surprise. He had been an ace agent who had brought down one of the country's most heinous serial killers of recent times.

He might be quick on the draw.

Hopefully, a member of the Behavioral Science Unit of the bureau would have the sense not to shoot her, but she did know that he'd been out on leave, and she really didn't want to die that way.

She knocked again, saw the bell and rang it, and waited, and no one came. He was in the city, she knew, because
she'd received a terse text from him. At the house. She hadn't even known how to reply.
Good? Good for you, hope you're comfortable?

About to board the plane, seemed the simplest response.

She checked her phone. She had received another text from him. At the station.

What station? She had to assume he meant the police station. Wherever, he wasn't here. She used her key and entered the house.

She paused in the entry, the door still open, hoping that the atmosphere inside wasn't overwhelming. It wasn't. It wasn't depressing. The room was simply beautiful, huge, and when she flicked the switch by the door, a glittering chandelier dead center came to life, casting glorious prisms of light about the room. Amazing that something so beautiful could have remained so for almost two hundred years. People had a tendency to destroy the old to make way for the new, something that was sometimes necessary. But that progress had kept the house so pristine and so unchanged it was just short of miraculous.

She left her luggage and carry-on at the door, pausing to delve into her bag for the book she read on the plane. It was a little out-of-print bargain she had managed to acquire from a show with which she traded frequently. One nice thing about her side job was that her antiques business created a network of friends with strange and awesome things—including books. Might as well find a place to wait until Jackson chose to show himself.

 

Departing the entrance hall was like entering a different home; the foyer might have remained in limbo for centuries, while here the modern world had burst in hard.
An entertainment room caught her eye. She didn't have a good sense of dimension, and could only think that the TV screen was
huge;
it was surrounded by cabinets that offered all manner of audiovisual equipment. Here, too, there was plenty of space for visitors; there was a wet bar—just in case the kitchen, right around the corner, she believed, was too far—a refrigerator, microwave station and a half-dozen plush chairs, recliners and sofas. Entertainment had definitely been done right.

Moving into the kitchen, she was met with a pleasant surprise. The room was absolutely beautiful, remodeled and state-of-the-art with an enormous butcher-block workstation in the center with rows of pots and pans and cooking utensils above it on wire stainless-steel hangers. The sink and counter area had a large window that was a bypass to a counter outside on the courtyard. There was a massive refrigerator-freezer combination, dishwasher, trash compactor, microwave, all manner of mixers, and all was shining and immaculate.

The senator's wife had intended to entertain, so it seemed.

There were eight chairs around the kitchen table, and Angela drew one out and took a seat. She opened the book she had found—her true treasure trove of information on the house.

Angela paused. She looked around the kitchen and felt nothing. It was so modern. Yet, this was still the home in which the atrocities had taken place.

She flipped a few pages.

Angela twisted the book to read the old, fraying dust jacket. It had been written by a man named James Stuart Douglas, born and bred in New Orleans in 1890, when the Civil War, and the era of Reconstruction, would have been fresh in historical memory. There was definitely a bit of skew in his telling of the story.

According to Douglas, the killer, Newton, found those who had newly arrived in the city, and offered them a place to stay. He also found those who were suddenly homeless—apt to leave the city and look for an income somewhere else. The first known murder had been of the Henderson family from Slidell. They had been about to leave for the North, searching for a place where Mr. Henderson could find work. His son, Percy, had been twelve; his daughter, Annabelle, had been ten. All four of the Hendersons had perished after accepting Newton's offer of hospitality. The children had been brutally killed with an ax in the room where they had slept; Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had died after being tied to chairs in the basement, cut to ribbons and allowed to bleed to death. Newton had found watching people bleed to death particularly stimulating. Before Newton's execution, twenty-three known
victims later, he described his crimes, and told police where to find most of the bodies.

Angela stopped reading again. No wonder the house was on all the ghost tours in the city.

Darkness had come. She reminded herself that she wasn't afraid of the dark.

Maybe that wasn't true—here. The house suddenly seemed to be alive with shadows. It was probably a bad idea to read the book when she was alone and night was coming on. She wasn't really afraid of the dark, but she didn't want to start seeing things in her mind's eye that weren't there.

She sat still for a minute, thinking about the past. She could recall the day of the plane crash she had survived—but which had killed her parents and everyone else on board—at any given time.

So clearly.

She was incredibly lucky to be alive.

Alive and still so aware of the strange events that had occurred when she had opened her eyes with flames and sirens all around her…

A doctor had told her once that strange things could happen when the neurons in the brain were affected, causing such things as the “light” so many people with near-death experiences saw, so, according to him, she hadn't seen the “light” of spirits leaving their mortal forms; she had experienced neurons crashing in her head. After her sessions with the doctor, she had learned to keep quiet. Nor did she ever explain why it seemed that sometimes she had more than intuition. She'd always had a good grip on the world—in many ways there were very thin lines between the truth and insanity. People's perception of the truth was often the difference between leading a normal and
productive life—and having someone lock you up for your own welfare.

Adam Harrison seemed to be different, as had many of the officers she had worked with at the police force in Virginia. She had become known for her use of logic, careful study of a crime scene and the victim, and the possible personality of the perpetrator or perpetrators. Police officers tended to believe in intuition; good detectives always seemed to rely upon gut instinct.

Sometimes, she had almost been frightened of herself. But she had to tamp down the fear; good could come when she allowed the thoughts and “instincts” to run through her.

Take the Abernathy case. The one in which she had really made a difference. The baby had been kidnapped by kids just wanting to make money. Two teens, seventeen and sixteen. They'd easily managed to steal the baby from the babysitter. But they'd buried the little boy, and if she hadn't come to the house, if she hadn't added it all up—no break-in, no signs of disturbance, no prints or even smudges on the windowsill—and felt certain that the child was close, they might never have found the baby, buried in the crate right in the backyard. She would never forget the joy in the mother's face when they had dug up that baby, and she had heard her awaken at last and cry….

She had entered the mind of the Virginia Stalker, and found the remains of Valerie Abreu, allowing the courts the evidence to put the man away.

There were battles, of course, that she couldn't win. Life was full of them.

She had lost her parents. And she had lost Griffin.

Griffin, her fiancé, had died in her arms, with his mother softly sobbing at his side. Cancer was as cruel as any enemy she could ever face and she had been helpless against the disease. Griffin, who had seemed to understand her and love her for all that she was.

But Griffin had found peace, and Griffin had loved her. He told her that she had a special gift, and that she should always use it to the best of her ability.

Yes, she had a gift. And now she had knowledge and experience. The police academy had saved her and she'd served with the force as an officer just before the call had come from her superiors, informing her that she'd been asked to meet with a “Federal” man named Adam Harrison.

Thanks to her time with the police, she now dared to take chances she might not have before.

 

She stood up, determined to know, now, while she was in the house alone, why the area was driving her so crazy, making her feel so uncomfortable. Some of the houses in the French Quarter actually had basements, she remembered. Getting a better sense of the physical place would definitely be the
logical
move to make now.

The French Quarter was barely above sea level, but it was “high ground” for the area. The basement was only halfway below the ground, and its roof was the floor where she stood now. She still needed to spend time studying the original blueprints of the house first.

But she felt a draw she couldn't withstand.

Angela walked toward the door and turned the handle.

The door opened, and darkness stretched before her. The basement.

Andy Devereaux appeared to be easy and low-key, something that probably served him well when interrogating suspects. His voice lulled. He was soft-spoken. Everything about him seemed easy—except that he had the sharpest gaze known to man. And like a lazy-looking, tail-twitching great cat, he could move in the blink of an eye. The uniformed officers at the station seemed to like
and
respect him.

Jackson stayed at the station long enough to meet some of the district personnel with whom he might come in contact when exploring all angles of the Holloway case, and then Andy drove him back to the house on Dauphine. Jackson realized that he was lucky; Devereaux seemed to like him.

Andy loved the city of New Orleans, and he loved being a cop. He wanted Jackson to understand the city, and the police force. “This department is a damn good one, and believe me, it's had its ups and downs, and we still go through some hell now and then—God knows, things that test a man's patience to the core. Katrina, the oil spill—we just get on our feet again and get knocked down, so you've got destruction, desperation and poverty, and all of them clashing together. Some folks love the city, some folks just sweep down to make a living on the misfortunes of others. We had a force down here early on, early 1800s, and then just like now, some years were good, the city was organized and reorganized—the French Quarter, Vieux Carré, that's the original city—but the Marigny came in on it early, just like the area we call the CBD now, Central Business District. And the Americans came in to form the Garden District—or the ‘English' area. Anyway, they get a police force going, but along came the Civil War. By 1862, the Union had taken over and you have military rule. Then, the war ends, and carpetbaggers sweep down. Lincoln is dead, and
Johnson isn't really sure he wants black men to be equal with white men, but the ball is rolling. For years, that ball bounces up and down, equality—kill the upstart Africans—equality, no not really, just don't own the man.” He glanced sideways at Jackson. “I don't have any chips on my shoulder. History is history,” he said.

“Amen,” Jackson told him. “Remember when we were talking earlier and you asked me if I believed that a ghost had pushed Regina Holloway over the balcony? Well, I said no, and I meant it. But I think that people can play on the emotions of others with the power of suggestion, and the history of the house is tremendously important in that respect. And the history of the New Orleans police force fits right in there, because everything written about Madden C. Newton suggests that he managed to get away with all those murders because the city was in such a knot—emotionally, socially and governmentally—when he was committing the killings.”