The Unforgiven

by Heather Graham

  The man grinned. “Dr. Browne, remember?”

  “Doctor of what?” Ryder asked.

  “Does it matter?” Browne asked. “I had the ID.”

  “Did you kill a Dr. Browne to get it?” Ryder asked.

  Browne smiled broadly, displaying a crooked smile that might have often been taken as charming.

  “No, made that one with a little help from an ex-con in Mississippi,” he said.

  “What is your real name?” Axel asked.

  Browne started to laugh. “Ah, how brilliant! Neither the cops nor the famed FBI knows who I am. Well, of course not. I’m immortal, I come and go as I please. You’ll see! My name is Demon, but you wouldn’t understand that. So just call me Browne. Dr. Browne.”

  “So, this six... There’s the one you refer to as he. Then there was Jennie... Were the couple you killed in Baton Rouge originally part of the six?” Dan asked.

  “Hey, those guys are rising up in immortality, sacrificing pretty decent mortal shells to rise up to be superpowers!” Browne said.

  “So they were. But they’re dead—”

  “Immortal,” Browne corrected.

  “Gone, and Jennie’s gone. So that’s minus three. And that leaves you, the man you call he, and one more. Unless you did get Nathan Lawrence to join with you,” Dan said.

  “Nathan Lawrence,” Browne said thoughtfully. “No, he was not deserving, I’m afraid. Sad little guy. So much power. Money is power, you know, especially when mixed with immortality.”

  Ryder turned to Dan and muttered, “We’re talking to a complete maniac.”

  “But he does know what’s going on,” Axel said quietly.

  “But I’m not telling!” Browne said, and his smile deepened.

  There was a tap at the door. Dan saw Special Agent Andre Broussard through the small paned window high up on the door.

  Axel stood. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “I understand you’re not afraid to die, that you’re immortal,” Dan said to Browne. “But shedding this skin isn’t easy. I think you were ordered to send Jennie on to her immortality, but what you did was hack her head just about in two. Must have hurt like a son of a bitch. And she must have been so surprised...shocked, even.”

  He thought he might have finally gotten through to the man, despite Browne’s efforts to display minimal emotion.

  Dan went on. “Lethal injection is supposed to be the most humane way to execute murderers... Well, I’ve been in the viewing room for a lethal injection. It isn’t pretty. The body jerks and spasms as the organs fail and... Well, like I said, not pretty.”

  “He will come for me, long before we reach that point. I mean, if you can even get anything on me. Really. Besides...well, whatever it is you can get me on for last night. People are going to doubt I could have killed anyone.”

  Dan kept his own face impassive, yet he feared he knew exactly what Browne meant.

  There must have been another victim during the night. The big man in the black coat and the slouch hat had probably struck again. There was something to the number six. If different killers were at work, anyone caught would have an alibi.

  But Neil Browne still wasn’t getting off so easily. He’d been seen by dozens of people wielding a gun and threatening death.

  Dan smiled and leaned back. “Pretty sure I’ve been right so far. Your new identities, they were stolen from the Baton Rouge couple, but live by the sword, die by the sword. So, before New Orleans, you were a lovely little group of six. Killing goats for fun when human beings weren’t on the agenda. But it was you and Jennie, we’ll say, and the Baton Rouge couple. Now there’s also the big he and one other. That one other would be...well, someone here. Someone in New Orleans planned the murders, and you think they’re all part of some cosmic grand plan. I think they’re revenge. Your big he wanted to kill Lou Delaney, and it just fell in with all this. You all started killing and believed you were immortal and special. And it became a game. But now, it’s just you and the big he and one other...unless Nathan Lawrence became part of your little group. You’re still short.”

  “I think I may take that offer for an attorney,” Browne said and yawned.

  Dan leaned closer again. “Why has it taken you so long to ask? Was your immortal leader supposed to send you one? But he’d be afraid of an association with you, wouldn’t he? I mean, he had you kill Jennie, and now he’s denying you an attorney!”

  “I’ll take the lawyer,” Browne said flatly. He wasn’t smiling. He glared at Dan, and Dan was glad—he had hit a nerve.

  Dan nodded. “Think about helping us, though. Keeping that mortal shell of yours. I know you all are careful. Gloves, hair caps probably. You leave nothing behind. But you see, you weren’t wearing gloves the whole time you were with Jennie, and there’s this amazing way of getting fingerprints off a body now. I believe they found yours, and that puts you with her—”

  “Yes, so? That doesn’t prove I killed her!”

  “Well, yes, it does.” He was playing, grabbing at straws, but good ones, Dan hoped. “Because you didn’t want to kill Jennie, you were just terrified not to do it. And you touched her face, you had your gloves off, and you touched her face. So you see, there’s blood on those prints we’re going to get. Won’t matter if we know who you really are or not. Your fingerprints here, same prints on Jennie’s corpse...”

  He let his voice trail.

  “Lawyer!” Browne said. His voice had changed.

  “Suit yourself,” Dan said, standing. Ryder followed suit. He pretended to be oblivious to the fact that Browne was listening as he spoke to Ryder. “We need to figure out that sixth person, and I don’t think it will be that hard. We have records on the Baton Rouge couple, and we have Browne’s phone now... We can trace some calls. When we don’t need this asshole anymore, we won’t have to worry about trying to get the federal and state prosecutors to make any kind of concessions.”

  He let the door close on his last words, feeling just a little bit triumphant.

  But that feeling was quickly gone.

  Axel and Andre were looking at him and Ryder with grim expressions, and Dan knew; Browne was going to be able to make people doubt his guilt when it came to the axe murders.

  Because someone else had been attacked.

  “Who? Where?” he asked, feeling his heart sink. “When was it called in. How fast can we get there?”

  “The Bywater area. The victims are Jillian and Andy Dean, and Andy’s sister Ashley,” Axel said. They started walking quickly down the hall away from the interrogation room.

  “But,” Andre said, keeping pace easily, “here’s the good part—”

  “There’s a good part to axe murders?” Dan asked, feeling numb.

  “They’re not dead,” Andre said. “Seriously injured, but it was almost as if—”

  “As if the Axeman’s Protégé was never out to kill them?” Dan asked. “They were victims because this group needed something to happen. Something that might help make Neil Browne appear to be different, not one of them, a gun-toting wannabe.”

  “Dammit!” Ryder hammered his fist against the wall. “We didn’t stop him. Agents and officers are combing the city and environs, and we didn’t stop this attack.” He frowned. “Are any of them conscious? Did they identify anything about the Axeman?”

  “Yes,” Axel said dryly. “Big tall man, slouch hat, boots, dark coat to his feet.”

  “The description we already received,” Axel said. “This guy wants everyone in the city to believe the Axeman is immortal and he’s back.”

  Katie was waiting in the reception area. She stood as she saw them all coming. Her face paled. “Has there been another attack?”

  “Katie, stay here,” Dan said.

  “Was there another attack while Neil Browne was in custody?”

  Dan caught her by the
shoulders. “Yes. We’re going there now. You need to stay here. Right here. It’s safe, Katie.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “Katie, you’re a civilian—” Dan said.

  “So are you!” she exclaimed.

  “You don’t want to see...” Dan realized that his excuse was a poor one, considering all that Katie had already seen.

  “Ambulances will already be on scene, so there won’t be much to see,” Axel explained. “But Katie, we’ll have to leave you with one of the patrol officers. The crime-scene investigators won’t want any of us destroying possible evidence, so we’ll need to tread carefully.”

  Dan started moving toward the exit. “All right, Katie’s in. Let’s just get there!”

  Axel had a big Bureau SUV; he drove with Andre Broussard in the passenger seat. Dan sat in the back with Katie. Ryder followed in his own vehicle.

  When they arrived at the scene, Dan hopped out quickly—an ambulance was about to leave the scene.

  “I’m heading in with it!” he said.

  “Go,” Axel agreed.

  Dan left the car, called out to one of the officers to stay with Katie and leaped into the ambulance, surprising the EMT on the scene.

  “I’m with the FBI,” he said. He looked at the stretcher in place in the ambulance. She was a pretty young girl, maybe seventeen. Or she would have been pretty, if not for the blood dripping down her head. “She’s alive and may make it?” he asked quietly.

  The EMT nodded. “We have oxygen and a drip going. She’s lost a lot of blood. He was going for a major artery in her thigh, I think, but he didn’t hit the main. We have the bleeding stopped.”

  “It’s incredibly important that I speak with her. May I? Gently, carefully?”

  The young EMT nodded solemnly.

  “Thank you. And the others?”

  “Andy Dean is unconscious, and they just left with him. He’ll need surgery. His wife is unconscious, and until they can stabilize her, they’ll probably put her in medically induced coma. But Ashley rolled under the bed. She received two good whacks, but she’s conscious. She’s in pain, but we’re getting her to the hospital ASAP. Be brief, because we’ll be rushing her into Emergency.”

  As if to verify his words, the ambulance revved into gear.

  “How did she get help?” Dan asked the EMT.

  “Smart kid—had her cell phone with her. We arrived about fifteen minutes before you. Once the call was received, it went out to every agency and to Special Agent Axel Tiger. As far as I know, he was in an interrogation with a suspect and another of his team took the call, but you guys got here almost as fast as we did.”

  “We hurried,” Dan said. The ambulance swayed as it took a corner.

  “So, I guess you didn’t get him,” the EMT said, looking at Dan sorrowfully.

  “We got one. And it isn’t just a him, it’s a them,” Dan explained.

  The EMT was shaking his head. He was young, about twenty-five, but had a dignified manner.

  “I have a wife. And kids. A two-year-old son and an infant daughter. The Axeman killed a baby. You’ve gotta stop them.”

  “We will,” Dan vowed. “And we need every bit of help. This isn’t an immortal being returned to earth. It’s a group of sick people. We will get them all.”

  Still solemn, the EMT nodded. The ambulance hit a bump, bouncing Dan sideways a step. The EMT indicated Dan could take the little seat by Ashley Dean.

  An IV dripped fluids into her.

  Her eyes were closed. Dan gently took her hand. “Ashley, my name is Dan Oliver. Your courage is amazing. I know you’re in pain. And I know you’re worried about your brother and sister-in-law. But you were smart. You got help out here quickly and may have saved your own life and theirs. And I’m so sorry to bother you, but if there’s anything you can give me, we need to know.”

  “The Axeman,” she said.

  “Yes, a man came in with an axe—”

  “He was big. My brother had opened the door to get the paper. He’s old fashioned and gets a physical copy delivered. He...he forgot to lock the door. But it was daytime. He walked back up to the bedroom with coffee and then... I guess the man came in behind him. I heard Jillian scream, and I rushed in, and my brother... Andy lying in a pool of blood. The man was going after Jillian. He saw me. He attacked me, but I fell, and he hit me again, and I rolled so he couldn’t get me... My phone was in my pocket. I dialed 9-1-1.”

  “Tell me more about the man.”

  Her eyes opened. They were enormous and green, with a dazed light in them. She earnestly told him, “It was the Axeman, exactly as the stories about him go. He was big, his hat was big and low, and he was dressed in a long trench coat of some kind. His face...was dark, as if shadowed, but the hat was so low... I thought I saw his eyes. They were red, and they blazed, and when he heard me talking...heard the emergency operator...he took off. He was just gone.”

  “He ran back down the stairs?”

  “I—I don’t know. He was gone.”

  A big man. Tall and sturdy, and delighting in the fact he was taking on the persona of a long-dead killer. He’d had others do his killing before, but here...now...in New Orleans, he was embracing the legend himself.

  Dan thanked her and tried to assure her that she and her family would be okay.

  He didn’t want to be a liar. He had no idea if her brother and sister-in-law would make it.

  But there, in the ambulance, encouragement seemed the best. The EMT nodded at him.

  When they reached the hospital, Dan leaped out and called Axel immediately to tell him what he had learned. “Did you find anything?” Dan asked.

  “Well, maybe,” Axel said.

  * * *

  She was a civilian. Katie understood that perfectly. Dan had gone off in the ambulance. Axel and Andre and Ryder were in the house with the crime-scene investigators.

  She leaned against one of the patrol cars surveying the CSI, police, and federal vehicles drawn in on the lawn. Crime-scene tape had been set up around the house.

  Officers were canvasing the crowd that had gathered and going door-to-door.

  It was daytime. Someone had to have seen something.

  She was restless. Everyone was busy, doing something.

  No one thought she should be alone now; they thought she needed to be protected at all times. That wasn’t a bad thing.

  In the middle of the crowd, she saw a woman.

  No one else seemed to see her, though a few started as she went by, as if they’d felt a bug or something brush their skin.

  It was Mabel. She was watching the scene, too.

  Then she saw Katie.

  With a grim expression, she made her way to the back of the patrol car where Katie was leaning.

  “I know you can’t respond or talk to me with all these people around,” Mabel told her. “But I’ve been going through this crowd, listening. And there’s a little girl out there who saw him. She saw the man running out of the house. She said he looked like a giant Darkwing Duck. All in black, and he dropped something as he exited the house.”

  Katie lowered her head and spoke softly. “The axe he used. They found it by the front steps.”

  “Well, she saw him leave. She saw a car pick him up.”

  “A car? What kind of a car?”

  “I don’t know. She was with her parents. They were shushing her and telling her she couldn’t be sure of what she saw. She’s only about five or six. The parents are terrified, thinking they could make themselves targets.”

  “Can you point her out to me?” Katie asked.

  Mabel pointed. It wasn’t easy to see, there were so many people milling about. But finally, behind them all, in front of a single-story shotgun house, she saw the family. It looked as if the young parents were watching the scene worried
ly from the sanctity of their yard.

  They both held a hand of their child, a little girl with red ringlets and a cherubic but serious face.

  Katie pushed silently away from the car and made her way through gawking bystanders, saying “Excuse me,” over and over again. Glancing back, she saw she had managed to get away without the officer who was watching her even aware that she had left. But he wasn’t supposed to have been worried about her taking off, he was just supposed to make sure no one approached her and hurt her. But nothing was going to happen in a crowd that size.

  She reached the family standing on their lawn and quickly introduced herself. She didn’t say she was a tour guide and carriage driver; she said she was working with the FBI. In a way, though she hadn’t been hired officially as a consultant, she figured it was true.

  “We’re hoping someone saw the attacker as he was arriving or leaving. Any help, any idea, an inkling of anything might be useful,” she said. She knelt by the little girl and offered her a gentle smile. “You have beautiful hair,” she said.

  “Thank you,” the little cherub said. “You have it, too,” she continued, smiling. “Like mine, it’s red!”

  “Yes, I have red hair, too. Mine is a little darker, but we have the same hair!” Katie said.

  “Miss... Agent... I’m sorry,” her father said. “We...we were just getting ready for the day, you know. Getting Margot here ready for school. Me, needing to head off to work, you know, and my wife was at the coffee machine—”

  “I was at the window!” little Margot said. “He was a big black thing, like a giant bat, and he was heading down the street and he was picked up by a sleigh!”

  “A sleigh?” Katie asked.

  “A fancy, red sleigh, but with no reindeer,” Margot said.

  “She’s just a child,” Margot’s mother said. “Please, this is all terribly upsetting! Margot needs to go now. Jubal, you need to take Margot and go—”

  “Ooh. Like a flashy sports car?” Katie asked.

  “Oh, yeah, maybe!”

  “Red and sleek... Did you see who was driving it?” Katie asked.

  Margot shook her head.