The Betrayed (Krewe of Hunters) (24 page)

Aidan nodded and left.

In the lobby, he ran into Richard Highsmith’s retinue. Taylor Branch called out to him. “Agent Mahoney, what’s happening?” The man seemed to be grinning.

As if he knew something had happened.

“We just keep working,” Aidan said. “We just keep working. Good evening,” he told the others and hurried out. Maybe Branch was pleased about whatever was going on. Maybe he
knew
what was going on.

Well, Aidan was pleased, too. When the group left, their moves would be tracked.

The thing was...

He knew damned well that one of them had to be involved.

And that there had to be an accomplice on the outside.

But who could that second person be? Someone who knew both Richard and Wendy. Someone who’d had an agenda.

What was he missing? If he could just understand
why
they’d been killed, he’d be on his way to identifying the killers.

* * *

The night drew to an uneventful end. The last group of squealing visitors went out. They’d been a group of college-age kids, eight of them, and they’d been especially silly, screaming constantly.

Of course, “haunted” venues made their reputations on screaming and scaring, so she supposed that was good.

On the other hand, Mo was getting tired and the screaming had just seemed...

Annoying.

A voice boomed over the loudspeaker, informing them that the last group had gone through. A floodlight didn’t brighten the entire graveyard, but it did a lot to dispel the shadows—and to show the actors for what they were.

Fading.

Makeup was beginning to crack or congeal, and they were all looking a little the worse for wear.

Grace came over to Mo’s area and said with a sigh, “Another night down! At least we’re doing really well. We’ve sold out for Halloween a week early, Sondra was telling me.” She grimaced at Mo. “I’m so glad you’ve done this. You
are
the Woman in White, one of our most famous legends!”

Mo smiled. No, she wasn’t
the
Woman in White.

Phil walked over to join them, rolling his shoulders to work out muscle kinks. “You’re divine, ladies. Divine. Are we going to eat? I’m starved.”

“Sure,” Grace said. “Mo?”

Ron came out from the setup area. “Everyone accounted for?” he asked. “Me, Phil, Grace and Mo. Come on out, kiddies. I just don’t know where Sondra went. I’m dying to get out of here—no pun intended. Starved. Too bad we get off so late that even Tommy’s is closed. That means the café. Maybe Mr. FBI agent will show up at the café again, huh, Mo?”

“Let’s hope not. I don’t want anything else to be wrong anywhere,” Mo said.

Phil frowned. “You said everyone’s accounted for?” he asked Ron.

“Except Sondra, and we can’t leave without her!” Ron said. “Have you seen her?”

“This afternoon, when I came by,” Mo said. “And then when I was in makeup.”

“That’s odd,” Phil muttered.

“What?” Grace demanded.

Phil pointed. One of the “cracked” coffins was leaning against a tomb. There still seemed to be someone in it.

“That’s Joshua Kirbin’s spot,” Phil said. “And I said good-night to Joshua already. He lit out of here in a hurry, trying to catch up with some friends working the hayride.”

Mo didn’t know
how
she knew. She just knew it was bad. Really bad.

They all turned to look in the direction Phil had pointed.

There was definitely a body in the coffin. It was loosely covered in what appeared to be a black shroud. The coffin was a prop, of course, built to appear like an old Victorian coffin but with a glass window at the head area. The bottom half of the lid was broken off; the head area with the window remained.

The four of them looked at one another.

Mo didn’t want to take a step toward the coffin. It was across a field of broken gravestones, scattered “bones” and thick webbing.

“We have to go and see,” she said flatly.

She started across the center of the graveyard. She could hear Grace behind her, pushing Phil. “Get up there! Help her.”

“I’m going, I’m going!” Phil said. “Why me? Why is the heterosexual male supposed to be the brave one all the time?”

“Oh, please, just get out of the way!” Ron told him.

Mo heard them, but she reached the coffin first.

She peered through the Victorian window....

And there was nothing.

For a moment she dared to breathe, dared to hope, that it was a prank—in extremely bad taste—being played on them.

But she reached out and opened the broken lid.

And she saw it.

The bloody stump of a neck.

She’d seen nothing through the window...

Because the corpse had no head.

* * *

When Aidan reached the Appleby house, Van Camp and police had already arrived.

“Crime scene units are on the way,” Van Camp told him. “The place is trashed. What someone was looking for, I have no idea.”

“The neighbors heard a commotion, but no one saw anything?” Aidan asked.

“Hey, you expected this to be easy?” Van Camp asked dryly.

“I wish to hell
something
would be easy,” Aidan said. “Who called it in?”

“The guy in the sweater over there, talking to the woman in the cat slippers with the trench coat over her pajamas. I’ve talked to them both. You go give it a try.” He glanced down at his notebook. “The guy is Marshall Long. The lady is Penelope Seaford. Like I said, he called it in. She came out once we got here. She lives right next door, and the house on the other side of Wendy’s is empty. Long, who lives across the street, met the cops out here. He didn’t see a car or anything, although he’s pretty sure he heard someone burn out of here while he was on the phone.”

Aidan walked over and introduced himself to the neighbors and fielded their questions. Marshall told him he was a teacher. Penelope Seaford, an attractive woman of about fifty, told him she worked for the chamber of commerce. She’d loved Wendy Appleby. “Wendy was a great neighbor. She caught my escape-cat for me several times,” Penelope said. “Everyone in the neighborhood was devastated to hear that she’d died.”

“And so horribly!” Marshall said, shaking his head. “A lovely woman.”

“Did she date much? Was she seeing anyone?” Aidan asked. The police had been through that round of questions already, Aidan knew, but he’d yet to talk to anyone other than Debbie who’d been close to her.

“Date? No. No boyfriend. She was devoted to her child,” Penelope said.

He asked them a few more questions, then went into the house.

The least affected area was J.J.’s room. Wendy Appleby’s bedroom, office and kitchen had been ripped to smithereens. The intruder’s first area of concentration had been the office, Aidan thought.

“There’s no computer,” he pointed out as Van Camp came into the room with Gina Mason, the head of the forensic unit, whom he’d met before.

“But there was evidently one here,” Grace said. “You can see the outline on the mat. Looks like it had a seventeen-inch screen.”

He nodded to Gina. “Thanks. I think I remember it being here when we came and searched the house once Debbie Howell gave us Wendy’s identity.”

“Someone was after something,” Gina said. “Every desk drawer has been dumped. It’s the same in her bedroom. Clothing all over the floor. I just gather up the evidence and I’m no rocket scientist, but I’d say, yeah—whoever came through here was looking for something. And if it’s the same person—or persons—we’ve been dealing with on the murders, they’re smart. I guarantee you we won’t find a fingerprint. The best I’m going to come up with is some answers from the tire print out front. Someone did burn rubber. We’ll know what kind of tire it was pretty quickly,” she promised him.

Aidan paused. A framed picture had fallen over.

He picked it up.

The photo was of Wendy Appleby as she’d appeared in life, with her son, J.J. He studied the picture, and a sort of epiphany came over him. It was often hard to tell with kids, but...

He’d been friends with Richard when they were both J.J.’s age.

And there was something about J.J. that reminded him of Richard. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before—but, of course, he hadn’t been looking for it or expecting it.

The picture had been taken at one of the cemeteries. As he narrowed his eyes to study the shot, he saw the mausoleum with the name Bakker engraved in the stone.

They were both smiling for the camera. There were other children in the background and a woman who seemed to be trying to herd them.

A school trip?

Wendy and J.J. looked happy. As if they’d been having a great day. Maybe Wendy had volunteered to chaperone the outing.

He decided to take the picture out of the frame. When he did, he was startled when he turned it around to study the back.

There were two words written there:
Lizzie grave.

There it was again. Puzzle pieces would somehow fit together if he could just maneuver them properly.

He stared at the picture, wishing, hoping, that it could give him more.

Then his phone rang.

He saw that it was Mo. She should’ve gotten out of the Haunted Mausoleum a few minutes ago. She was probably heading out with her friends for their late-late dinner or very early breakfast.

“Mo?”

Her voice was controlled, but he could still hear the terror in it. “There’s another one, Aidan. There’s another. A body here. A real one, I mean. We think it’s Sondra...but it—the body—has no head!”

* * *

Mo was pretty sure she’d acted as quickly and competently as possible under the circumstances.

Having discovered that they definitely had a dead body on their hands, she’d called Aidan immediately.

She’d told the others not to touch the body.

“Touch it? Are you crazy?” Phil demanded.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Grace said. “Whoever did this... Oh, my God! The actors have barely left. Someone was in here while we were...while we were scaring people! Oh, my God, they did this after Joshua Kirbin left. That means it was just a few minutes ago. That means—”

“Grace, they’ve done what they came to do. They’re gone,” Mo said. She was trying for courage; Aidan was on the way.

She’d found corpses before. But she’d been with cops—and Rollo. Or Heidi. She’d never been with just a few terrified friends in the middle of a cemetery.

“Let’s go out front. Let’s get the hell out of here!” Ron shouted.

“We can’t just go. We have to watch this scene until the cops show up,” Mo said.

“Watch it? For what? Are we worried about what can happen to this...this woman?”

“You’re sure it’s a woman?” Grace asked.

“That—or a man with boobs!” Ron said. “Oh, my God. It’s Sondra. It has to be Sondra. That looks like of her little scoop neck tops.
This
is why we haven’t been able to find her.”

“Where’s her head?” Phil asked.

They were all silent for a moment.

“I don’t want to know!” Ron said softly.

They stood there, silent again. The weird lights and the fog machine had been turned off, but it felt as if they were very alone in a vast sea where the floodlight seemed useless against the darkness of the night.

“We gotta get out of here,” Phil said. “We—”

“Wait!” Mo broke in. “I hear a siren.”

They all paused. It was distant at first, but then the sound became stronger.

“I have to go let them in. I locked the front gates,” Ron said.

He left, and the remaining three stood there as if frozen, waiting.

Then Mo saw Aidan. He was leading the way. Van Camp was right behind him, along with several men in uniform. Relief flooded through her and she abandoned her post by the coffin and raced to him. She didn’t throw herself into his arms.

She plummeted into them.

“Hey, hey, it’s all right!” he told her softly. “Well, it’s not all right, but we’re here. Your hands are frozen.” He rubbed them for a moment before extricating himself from her hold. Walking over to the others, he moved past them to get to the coffin. Van Camp joined him; everyone else stepped back as the agent and the detective studied the body.

“Could we go in where it’s warm?” Grace asked, shaking.

“Yes, yes,” Aidan said, turning to them. “Go into the parlor and sit. We’ll be there shortly. Officer Calloway, will you take them in, please?”

A young man in uniform escorted their group into the parlor of the mortuary. And now they sat among fake spiderwebs, by the piano with a bony hand atop the keys, red velvet draping and black all around them as well as a chandelier that seemed to hold centuries of dust.

Usually, it was just...where they worked. Where they knew what was fun and spooky, what was real and what wasn’t.

They sat there, the four of them, not talking, the officer standing guard. Mo sat on a Duncan Phyfe sofa with Ron; Phil and Grace sat in wingback chairs, both so pale they’d never made better ghouls.

It felt as though time was never-ending—and yet Mo was fairly certain it wasn’t that long before Aidan came in with Van Camp.

“We need you to tell us what happened and in what order,” Aidan said.

“It was closing time, ” Phil began.

“The others took off,” Ron added.

“We were planning to go to the café,” Grace said.

“Whoa, hold it!” Aidan said. “Ron, Grace, you two go over there with Detective Van Camp and tell him what you saw it. Mo, you and Mr. Ainsley stay with me.”

She looked at Phil, who nodded and then turned to Aidan. “The last group for the night had gone through,” he said. “We’re out in the distant reaches of the property here—Mo, Grace and me. We meet on that path to go back in. Mo has so much makeup on, she likes to wash it off. Sondra usually closes up, locks everything for the night. Ron came out to check on us, see who was still here. He said everyone was accounted for—other than the four of us, they’d all left—but that he couldn’t find Sondra. At some point, I was just looking around and I saw that fake coffin. It’s where an actor named Joshua Kirbin is usually posted, but I knew Joshua had taken off the minute we got the last tour announcement.”