Killer in the Band

by Lauren Carr

  As he swept the area with the flashlight, J.J. could see that the fallen leaves had recently been overturned in what appeared to have been a scuffle. There had recently been a fight. J.J. suspected that Karrie had lost the battle.

  Rising to his feet, he searched the woods for some indication of where Silas could have taken her.

  Icehouse. Cameron said that there’s an icehouse. Silas had converted it into a shrine for Wendy.

  J.J. shone the flashlight through the trees and up the hill. It could’ve been anywhere. His heartbeat quickened. Karrie might already be dead. If Silas had murdered Wendy and Dylan, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Karrie to protect his secret.

  He was about to set out in search of Karrie and the icehouse when he heard the loud crack of a branch breaking under the weight of a foot. Turning off the light, J.J. dropped back behind a tree and peered in the direction of the noise. The rustle of fallen leaves and twigs breaking drew closer. Squinting for any indication of who was approaching, he slipped his hand behind his back and eased his gun out of his waistband. Slowing his breath, J.J. aimed the gun and his flashlight at the ground.

  Finally, he was able to make out the shape of the dark figure approaching him. J.J. had no trouble identifying the short, exceedingly slender man as Silas. From where he was crouched behind a tree, J.J. could see that he had something braced against his shoulder—something that had a long handle and a square, heavy object attached to one end of it.

  Silas moved through the trees like a man on a mission. Although it was completely dark, he moved without the aid of his flashlight and as though he had walked that way over and over again both in the daylight and under the cover of darkness.

  To J.J.’s horror, Silas hurried directly toward him. Even though J.J. was still unable to see Silas’ facial features, he was finally able to see what he had slung across his shoulder.

  It was an ax.

  Dropping back behind the tree, J.J. placed his finger on the trigger of his gun and prepared to take aim and to fire if—or when—Silas threatened him with the ax.

  J.J.’s heart beat against his chest.

  The sound of Silas’ feet shuffling through the leaves grew louder as he came closer.

  J.J. considered making the first move and demanding that he tell him what he had done to Karrie. Realizing that if he did, Silas would deny everything, he decided to allow Silas to make the first move—but to be ready for anything.

  The decision proved to be a good one when J.J. realized that the sound of leaves and twigs snapping under Silas’ footsteps was moving farther away. J.J. squinted into the darkness and saw that Silas’ silhouette was then moving away from him. He had walked right past him and was making his way up the hill.

  Silas was so focused on his destination that he appeared to be unaware that J.J. was following far behind him, concealed by the trees and the blackness of the night. Seeing that it would be impossible to move in complete silence, J.J. had opted to keep his distance and to stay on Silas’ blind side.

  Eventually, J.J.’s eyes adjusted to the dark, and he was able to make out Silas’ features and his surroundings, which made it easier to follow him without stumbling too much.

  Halfway up the hill, the incline increased, and J.J. made out a building that was the size and shape of an old-fashioned outhouse and built into the hillside. As they drew nearer to it, J.J. saw that it was constructed of stone—exactly as Karrie had said it would be.

  Upon reaching the building, Silas stopped and abruptly turned around.

  J.J., who was far away from him, ducked behind a tree. Holding his breath, he watched Silas lower the ax from his shoulder, tug on the heavy wooden door of the stone building, step inside it, and close the door behind him.

  J.J. took out his cell phone, brought up his father’s number, and sent him a text message: “Found icehouse. Here’s location.”

  He then attached his GPS coordinates to the message. Leaving the phone’s GPS on, he tucked the phone back into its case. With his gun aimed and ready to fire, he made his way up to the stone building. Upon reaching the door, he sucked in a deep breath and prayed that it would not creak when he eased it open. Beyond the door was a dark stone stairwell that led down into the earth. There was a faint light at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I knew you were a twerp the first time I met you,” J.J. heard Karrie say.

  “If I’m such a twerp, why did Vendetta choose to stay with me?”

  “She didn’t choose to stay with you! She chose to leave with me—that’s why you killed her! If she had left with me, she’d still be alive. She’d be immortal!”

  Leading with his gun, J.J. carefully made his way down the stone steps, keeping his back up against the stone wall. The cold sent a chill through his body. Worn smooth from over a century of use, the stone steps felt slippery under his feet, which made it difficult for him to keep from stumbling down to the bottom of the stairs.

  “She belonged with me!”

  Karrie’s formerly angry tone changed to one of terror. “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think? To kill a vampire, you have to drive a stake through her heart or chop off her head. I’m going to do the latter.”

  J.J. picked up his pace, but in doing so, his foot slipped out from under him. His gun and flashlight went flying. Suddenly, he found himself on his back sliding feet-first down the steps until he reached the bottom—and landed flat on his back at Silas’ feet.

  The room was still spinning around J.J. when he looked up and saw Silas standing over him with the ax raised over his head.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When an ax is bearing down on you, the normal reaction is to freeze. But J.J. didn’t have time to freeze. He had no idea where his gun and the flashlight had fallen when he’d spilled down the steps. The only thing that he could use to save his life was his own body.

  As the ax came swinging down toward his chest, J.J. rolled toward Silas, rose up onto his knees, and grabbed his hips, tackling him. Silas’ body buckled under the attack. Dropping the ax, he fell back.

  The ax struck the stone floor.

  The two men collided with what J.J. quickly realized was an open coffin with a glass cover. When he shoved Silas, J.J. was startled to see that the coffin contained the decomposed body of woman dressed in a black wedding gown.

  The force of J.J.’s attack sent both men across the table on which the coffin was displayed to tumble to the floor on the other side—tablecloth, coffin, and all fell with it.

  The glass cover shattered, allowing the coffin’s occupant to spill across J.J.’s chest. Her black veil caught in the air to flutter down upon the two of them.

  As if being trapped within a dusty veil that reeked of death wasn’t bad enough, upon being released from her chamber, the ebony cladded bride slapped J.J. across the face with her skeletal hand.

  It took all of J.J.’s self-control not to scream like a little girl when he shoved the skeleton off him only to find that the train-length veil had him trapped like a fish in a net.

  Decades of decomposition had rendered the bride and her gown so fragile that neither was able to withstand J.J.’s violent attempt to disengage her body from his.

  Black lace, silk, and bones went flying everywhere in J.J.’s frantic attempt to escape what seemed to him to have become a very ugly scene from a very bad low-budget horror film. The harder he fought to escape the clutches of the skeletal bride in black, the more tightly she clung to him.

  “Stop!” Wailing, Silas threw himself onto the stone floor to collect the bones in order to reassemble his bride. Hysterical about seeing his beloved Vendetta torn apart like a jigsaw puzzle, he didn’t notice the cuts he was inflicting on himself while crawling through the broken glass in his desperate attempt to collect her broken remains.

  With a final swing of his arm, J.J. dislodged the sku
ll, which wore a black tiara in her dark hair, that had somehow managed to attach itself to his wrist. The force of his blow disconnected the head from the rest of its bony body. The skull bounced off the side of the table and hit the floor to roll over to Silas, who was sobbing on his hands and knees.

  Seeing the skull wrapped in black lace, Silas stopped weeping and uttered a hiccup. He took the head up into his hands and lifted his gaze to where J.J. was regaining his composure after the skeleton’s assault.

  “You killed her,” Silas said in a low tone. “Murderer!” He sprung from the floor to grab J.J. by the throat with both hands.

  Years of sparring with his twin as well as with his sister Sarah had taught J.J. to react with a move that had become instinct. He broke loose from the stranglehold with a simple martial arts move and then punched Silas in the nose. He felt Silas’ nose break under the blow.

  The punch was hard enough to make Silas’ eyes roll back into his head before he collapsed, unconscious, at J.J.’s feet.

  “It’s about time!” Karrie shouted from somewhere on the other end of the long dark room.

  For the first time since entering the ice house, J.J. was able to take in the stone room, which was dimly lit by candles on shelves lining the walls. One whole wall was taken up with what looked like a mural of a young woman dressed in a black wedding gown. J.J. recognized her as Wendy.

  Not wanting Silas to regain consciousness while he searched the dimly lit room for Karrie, J.J. rolled him over onto his stomach and pinned his arms behind his back, at which point he realized that he didn’t have anything with which to secure Silas’ hands. “I need something that I can use to tie his hands together,” he called out to Karrie.

  “You can use these.”

  J.J. looked up to see a pair of handcuffs thrust out to him. He recognized the voice as that of Cameron. He followed her hand to her arm and then looked up at her face. Her expression was not one of pleasure. “I’ll need them back,” she said. “They were a gift from your father.”

  Joshua was standing directly behind her. “Cameron told you not to start without us.”

  “Karrie was in trouble.” J.J. took the handcuffs and snapped them on Silas’ wrists.

  “And she’s still in trouble,” Karrie called from out of the darkness. “Can you wait until after you untie me to give Junior his time-out?”

  Following the voice, Joshua picked his way around the overturned coffin and through the broken glass, torn pieces of wedding gown and veil, and dismembered skeleton.

  Using his pen light for a guide, Joshua continued beyond the wreckage and into the dark shadows of the long narrow room, where he found Karrie, dressed in a black gown, bodice and all, propped up against the stone wall with her hands bound behind her back and her feet, which were in Victorian-style lace-up boots, bound together with rope.

  Across from her was yet another skeleton in a rocking chair. This one was dressed in a yellowed, dirt-covered nursing uniform and even a white nurse’s cap from decades ago. Joshua instantly recognized the brown splotches that covered the hat and the top portion and shoulders of the uniform.

  “Who’s that?” Cameron asked when she reached them.

  “I thought you’d know,” Joshua said.

  When J.J. joined them, they both turned to him. “Don’t look at me. I just got here.”

  The three of them looked down at Karrie, who scoffed. “She didn’t come with me.”

  Once again, Silas Starling found himself handcuffed to a table in an interrogation room with his lawyer. This time, he had a broken nose, and there was no chance that he’d be getting bail.

  A quick DNA comparison had shown that the bride in the black gown in the coffin was the sister of the body that had been found in the freezer at Dixmont State Hospital. Karrie had recognized the gown as the one that Wendy Matthews was wearing in her wedding pictures.

  The medical examiner’s report indicated that Wendy Matthews had been strangled.

  There was still the mystery of who the skeleton in the nurse’s uniform was. But after she looked at Silas’ background, Cameron suspected that she’d solved it.

  “Was it really necessary for your partner to break my client’s nose?” the lawyer asked as Cameron carried three case files into the interrogation room. “We could make a case for harassment against Mr. Thornton. First, he shot Mr. Starling in the arm and the butt—”

  “I have hemorrhoids,” Silas said. “Never had them before. Then your partner shot me in the butt, and now I have them. I’m going to sue him for pain and suffering.”

  “Then he snuck onto my client’s private property, broke into his family’s vault, and broke his nose while he was paying respect to his dead wife.”

  Cameron responded with a laugh. “One, Mr. Thornton is not my partner. Two, your client tried to cut his head off with an ax.”

  “I thought he was a thief,” Silas said.

  “What did you think he was going to steal? The wife you murdered and reported as being abducted and then had declared dead?”

  “Of course, I had her declared dead,” Silas said. “The life insurance company wouldn’t pay up until a judge said she was legally dead.”

  “You have no proof that it was in fact my client who murdered her,” the lawyer said.

  “Karrie killed her and put her body in that icehouse on my property to frame me,” Silas said.

  “You’re telling me that eighteen years after killing her, she put Wendy’s body, coffin and all, into the back of her little MINI Cooper and drove it out to the icehouse behind your property to frame you for her murder?”

  Silas sat back and folded his arms. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

  “Did she kill your mother, too?”

  “Don’t answer that,” the lawyer said.

  “I suppose all of this was her fault because she held you too much as a baby,” Cameron said with a sly grin.

  “She did more than hug me,” Silas said with a hiss. “Then, when I got interested in other women, she actually got jealous and said that no woman could satisfy me like she could. Girls didn’t want to go out with me, and I know”—he pounded the tabletop—“that she told them our secret.” He grinned. “So I put an end to our secret. Good thing I did. Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ended up in foster care and met Vendetta, and we never would have been together.”

  “Vendetta wasn’t just your wife,” Cameron said. “She was your muse.”

  Silas cocked his head at her.

  “Karrie told us about the secret that Vendetta had revealed to her,” Cameron said. “All of the original songs that Vendetta wrote were really yours. You wrote all of them…for her.” She leaned across the table, and in a quiet voice, she asked, “How many songs have you written since you killed Vendetta?”

  “Don’t—” the lawyer said, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  “None,” Silas said with a hint of sorrow.

  “Vendetta brought out your talent,” Cameron said. “She inspired you in a way that no one ever had before. I can only imagine the courage it took for you to reveal the depth of your love to Vendetta by sharing your songs with her—”

  Lost in the memory, Silas’ eyes glazed over. He nodded his head in agreement.

  “I can only imagine how furious you were when Dylan stole them,” she said.

  “Yeah—no,” Silas said.

  “Now, what are you accusing my client of doing?” the lawyer asked.

  “Dylan Matthews—my original case. Vendetta’s brother. Your client had two motives for killing him. Dylan Matthews was not only taking Vendetta away from your client but also stealing the songs that Silas had written for Vendetta and selling them as his own.”

  Silas shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about, lady?”

  Cameron removed two sets of sheet music from one of t
he folders. “The last song Vendetta sang during her farewell concert in Baltimore on the Fourth of July, the night you killed her.”

  “Yeah?”

  Realizing that his client had just confessed to killing his wife, the lawyer cursed.

  “You wrote that song. Am I correct about that?” Cameron said.

  Silas grinned with pride. “It was one of the first songs I wrote for her.”

  Cameron slid the two sets of sheet music across the table. “Dylan took your song, erased the lyrics, and gave it to a songwriter who could write words for it. He intended to take your song to Hollywood with new lyrics and to sell it as his own.”

  “No.” Silas cursed. “He never would’ve done that.”

  “Dylan was stealing not only the songs you’d written for the woman you loved but he was also stealing your muse.” She slipped the songs back into the folder. “That’s why you killed him.”

  “What evidence do you have that my client killed Dylan Matthews?” the lawyer asked.

  “He was the only one of the suspects who was familiar with Dixmont State Hospital,” Cameron said. “Dylan Matthews’ body was hidden in a location that only someone who had been there and was familiar with the grounds would have known about.”

  “I wasn’t the only one who knew about Dixmont,” Silas said.

  “Vendetta was devoted to Dylan,” Cameron said.

  “No.” Silas shook his head. “Vendetta didn’t kill him. I was with her the whole time after he went to get gas—the whole time before my grandma came to pick us up and even after.”

  “No one else in the group who had a motive to kill him—like anger over the fact that he’d abandoned the band—was familiar with Dixmont,” Cameron said.

  “Oh yeah? Well, you’re wrong there, lady!” Silas said. “One of them knew about Dixmont. I know that because I took them on a tour of the place.”

  That caught Cameron’s complete attention. “Really? Tell me about it.”

  “Do you think he’s telling you the truth?” Joshua asked Cameron as he rolled a cherry from their sundae in her direction.