Phantom Evil (Krewe of Hunters #1)

Phantom Evil (Krewe of Hunters #1) Page 43

But that night, her sleep was disrupted by dreams. Scattered dreams and nightmares.

She saw herself walking down a long hall. There were doorways along the hall, and though she didn’t want to open them, she had to.

The first doorway led to Regina Holloway’s room. She saw the children, playing with their jacks on the floor.

Young Percy looked up at her. “I wanted to help the nice lady. Honestly. I wanted to help the nice lady. I knew what they did with the one before her. I saw what they did.”

The door slammed shut, and she was impelled to keep walking.

She saw her hand as she turned the knob to the next room. When she opened that door, she saw Madden C. Newton. He looked at her; looked her straight in the eyes. He smiled slowly, knowing that she knew he saw her. “Evil begets evil,” he told her.

He turned. There was an ax in his hand. Blood dripped from the blade to the floor. “Come closer, Angela. Come see what I’ve done.”

She closed the door; she didn’t want to see.

As she walked down the hallway, knowing that she would have to open another door, she heard Will’s voice repeating the words he had said when they were at Café du Monde.

“Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors.”

She opened the next door.

She saw Madden C. Newton again, the ax in his hand. This time, the mutilated corpses of the children lay at his feet.

“You bastard, you’re dead,” she told him.

And he started to laugh, a gleeful laugh. “Evil never dies,” he told her. “They say that it’s love, but I tell you, it’s evil that never dies. It follows me, and I live while the evil lives.”

“Evil can die, and it will,” she told him, but she was in the hallway, and he was in the room, and somehow, she could speak bravely because he was captured in the room. It wasn’t the bedroom. It wasn’t the basement. It was somewhere in-between.

But even as she spoke, fear slipped into her. She had been a cop; she was an agent.

But you couldn’t shoot and kill a ghost.

She froze within her dream; a scream caught in her throat. There was someone behind her. She turned quickly, thinking there was no escape from the being in the hallway because she couldn’t go into the room.

But when she turned, it was the girl. The girl she had seen in the mirror.

“He lets it live,” she said. “He lets it live, and the evil is alive. Help me. God help us all.”

Angela jackknifed to a sitting position, forcing herself to wake, forcing the dream to fade away.

Jackson’s arm swept around her instantly, pulling her to him.

“What? What is it?” he asked her.

She was shivering, and she couldn’t stop. “He’s here. He’s in this house, and we have to find him, we have to stop him before—”

“Before?”

“Before he stops us.”

Jackson sat with Jake in the kitchen, following various sites regarding missing young women, and cross-referencing them with inquiries that had come into the NOLA police stations.

“What about this one?” Jake asked, pointing to one of the pages he had just brought up. “Susanne Crimshaw, twenty-one. Last seen three months ago at her home in Grand Biloxi. She had a fight with her mom, and took off to meet up with friends in New Orleans, but the friends claim they never saw her. She withdrew a thousand dollars from her bank the day she left. There’s no credit card trail on her after that, and her mother didn’t report her missing until she’d been gone a week, since they’d argued, and Susanne left for her trip. Since she was twenty-one, and not speaking to her mom, the mother didn’t realize she was missing until she didn’t come home—and the friends reported that they hadn’t seen her, and figured that she’d decided just not to come.”

Jackson jotted down the case number, and they went back to work.

A Lettie Hughes had been reported missing the week before Susanne Crimshaw, but a follow-up report stated that she’d been found living with a junkie in Slidell. Shelley Dumont had disappeared, but her body had been discovered near the south side of Lake Pontchartrain; she had been shot in the back of the head, and her boyfriend had admitted they’d been involved in a drug deal gone bad.

They went through three more cases, and finally wrote down the names of Susanne Crimshaw and June Leven. June had now been missing four months. She had left New York City for Los Angeles to go to school out there. Due to a scandal at her college—a professor she’d been sleeping with had been arrested for statutory rape—her name had been in the papers, she had left town a marked woman, and her mother had received one postcard from her—postmarked from New Orleans—saying that she was miraculously on the road to recovery, and all would be well. She told her parents not to look for her.

Jackson pulled out his phone and put a call through to Andy Devereaux, gave him the case numbers and asked him if anything else had been discovered about either girl.

“They’re both still MIA,” Andy told him. “We had the pictures out on the media and in the newspaper, and received zero response. The patrol officers have all this, too, so if they saw them partying on Bourbon, we would have heard.”

“If they recognized them, of course,” Jackson said.

“Of course. Want me to put out a bulletin again on these two?”

“I would deeply appreciate it.”

He hung up. Jake looked at him. “Did you see either of these girls when you were in the Church of Christ Arisen?” Jackson asked.

Jake shook his head and asked, “So what now?”

Angela came down as they were talking. She started to pour a cup of coffee, glanced over to where they were sitting, and at the picture up on the computer screen.

She dropped her cup and the coffeepot. Both shattered, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Jackson and Jake leaped up. Jake pulled her away from the shattered glass. Jackson quickly ran his eyes and then his hands over the bottoms of her jean-clad legs.

She didn’t even seem to notice them. She stared at the computer screen. She pointed.

“That’s her.”

Jackson looked back at the computer. The picture of Susanne Crimshaw was up on the screen. She was a pretty young woman with a generous mouth, wide green eyes and tawny hair.

“That’s her?” Jake asked.

“She’s dead,” Angela said. “I’ve seen her. That’s the face in the mirror. She looks back at me, then decays and rots and becomes bone.” She looked at them both. “She’s here. She’s here somewhere in the house.”

Before either of them could reply to that comment, Jenna came running into the kitchen. “Come—come here quickly, all of you!”

Jackson grasped Angela’s arm and they ran after Jenna. She led them up the stairs and she drew them all to her window.

From that vantage point, they could see the house next door, and, by craning, the front of the house.

At first, Jackson had no idea what she was talking about. And then, by twisting his neck and leaning, he could see.

Blake Conroy had just exited a car in front of the house next door. He looked around nervously, shifting the brim of his baseball cap back and forth, and then hurried to the gate, opened it and walked up the steps to the porch. He twisted a key in the lock, looked around once again.

And went into the house.

“Keep an eye on the front door, and the house,” Jackson said briskly.

“Okay, and then what?” Jenna asked.

Jackson hurried down the stairs and to the computer. He keyed in the address of the house next door. It was owned by a business called Central Marketing. He keyed in Central Marketing and discovered that the business was a DBA of a company called H Family Associates. H Family Associates proved to be part of Genesis Urban Renewal, a parent company that had David Holloway as its CEO.

Jackson stared at the screen for several minutes. He ran up the stairs and to his room, slipped into his shoulder holster and took his service Glock from the bedside drawer. He slipped his jacket over his holster and the gun, and walked back to the hallway and called up to Jenna, Jake and Angela. “Hey!”

Angela appeared at the door.

“I’m going to pay a visit. Keep a lookout.”

Angela nodded, and hurried back.

He exited the house, careful to lock the door behind him. And when he walked up to the neighboring house, he found that the man who had just entered had been careful enough to lock his door, too.

Jackson opted for a walk around the house.

It was a shotgun house—built long, with a front door and a back door that were in one even line, a technique that allowed for ventilation in the days before air-conditioning. A second story had been built on the rear portion of the older facade.

The back door he found was locked as well. He heard a sound behind him and instinctively set his hand in his jacket for his weapon.

“Stop right where you are!” a voice warned. “Hands clear from your pockets. Let me see them! Let me see them now!”

He wasn’t about to be taken in such a manner; he drew his Glock as he turned.

He was facing Blake Conroy, who had a Smith & Wesson drawn on him.

“Looks like an impasse,” Conroy said, eyeing him narrowly.

“I don’t think so!” came a shout.

Both men looked up. Angela had the window to the Newton house open, her service weapon trained on Conroy. Jake was at her side.

Conroy began to swear. “What the hell are you doing, Crow?” he demanded.

“Trying to find out what you’re doing in the house next door. Managed by a company that is, in actuality, David Holloway’s.”

Conroy’s big, florid face became a serious shade of red and he lowered his gun.

“Holloway doesn’t know that I’m here,” he said.

“So what are you doing here?” Jackson demanded.

“I’m not—I’m not at liberty to say.”

Jackson spun around as he heard the door open behind him. To his astonishment, Lisa Drummond, David Holloway’s secretary, stepped out.