Heath came back to the table and he picked up on the change in mood really quick. “What’s happened?”
I looked up at him. “Kendra’s playing hardball.”
The corner of Heath’s mouth quirked as he set down her coffee. “What’d you expect?”
I focused again on Kendra. “Maybe that she’d cut me a break.”
To her credit, Kendra appeared a little chagrined. “Sorry, guys. It’s my job.”
I sighed. “Fine. Then how about we work out a deal?”
“What kind of a deal?”
“We’re investigating the murder of Brook Astor and maybe even a few others. I think we’ll end up getting to the bottom of it soon. So, how about we share information with you as we get it, and you protect us as your source, and after this all blows over, you interview me and get an exclusive.”
Kendra sipped her coffee and eyed me over the rim. “What’s in this for you?”
I decided to be straight with her. “We could use someone with your investigative talents to help us figure out exactly what’s going on here. Heath and I have identified a spook that’s been taking over the minds of the men who live in that house on Stoughton. This thing is pure evil and it’s either convincing them to commit murder or influencing the dark violent nature they already have within them.”
Kendra choked on her coffee. “Hold on,” she said when she recovered herself. “You mean to tell me you think there’s some sort of possession story happening here?”
“Yes,” Heath and I said together.
Kendra looked at us like she was waiting for the punch line, but neither of us even cracked a smile. “Guys,” she said. “Come on. You can’t be serious!”
“We can and we are,” I told her. “Kendra, you yourself found the connection to two murderers and one suspected murderer all having a previous residence at that house on Stoughton Street. Do you think that’s just a coincidence?”
“Well . . . no . . . but . . . really? I mean, come on, this isn’t Hollywood. If I start writing about a case of possession and haunted houses, do you know what my producer is gonna say?”
“Great story?” Heath said, just to give her a hard time.
“No,” she told him, a flash of anger in her eye. “He’s gonna say, ‘Kendra, here’s a box. Fill it with your stuff and good luck getting another reporting gig in this market.’”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Kendra. Heath and I have seen this spook firsthand. We’ve seen it take over Guy Walker, in fact, and if you’d been there and seen what we’d seen, you’d be a believer too.”
Kendra frowned at me like I was starting to really irritate her.
“You saw what M.J.’s capable of,” Heath said, trying to convince her. “You even have it on film, right?”
Kendra pointed to him. “That’s what I wanted M.J. to talk about. I wanted her to tell me how she knew about things that weren’t reported in the news or introduced as evidence in the case against Dan Foster.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “I interacted with Bethany’s ghost. How else would I have gotten that info?”
Kendra inhaled deeply and let out a long low sigh. “If I go on the air and report that ghosts and spirits are real, I’ll be the laughingstock of the news world. Don’t you get it? I have to play the skeptic here.”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to play anything, Kendra. You can simply present the evidence objectively and let the general public come to its own conclusions.”
Heath set his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “All we’re asking is for you to keep an open mind while the three of us investigate this.”
Kendra tapped her index finger on her coffee cup as she considered our proposal. “Fine,” she said. “But once this wraps up, I get an exclusive interview with you, M.J. On the record. On air.”
I struck out my hand. “Deal.”
We shook on it and got down to business. I showed Kendra a photo of the interior of the closet in the house on Stoughton Street and her eyes widened. “What is that?” she asked, grabbing for my phone.
“It’s the closet in the master bedroom of the rental house where Luke, Dan Foster, and Guy Walker all lived at some time or another.”
“Who wrote these names on the wall?”
“We assume Dan and Guy did,” Heath said. “We’re not sure about Luke. And his attorney would prevent us from asking him about it.”
Kendra made several notes on her notepad. “Who’re these other guys?” she asked. “Killer Ken, Sy the Slayer, and Butcher Bill.”
“Don’t know,” I said. “That’s what we’d like your help in finding out. Basically, that house on Stoughton is a big fat mystery. We’ve learned that it’s held in a trust, but who the members of that trust are, we can’t tell, and we don’t know how to go about finding out. The landlord, Ray Eades, has only been managing that house for the past couple of years, and he claims that he doesn’t know anything about it being haunted, but I’m willing to bet that the owner might. We need to find out the name of the owner of that house and talk to him or her.”
Kendra’s gaze lifted up from my phone, and I could see the eagerness in her eyes. She had an even hotter story than she’d first realized, and she knew it. “Have you tried public records?” she asked us. “You could research the address and come up with a list of owners going all the way back to when the house was built. Most of that section of Boston was built in the twenties and thirties, and that house looks to be about that old. If you dig, you might be able to come up with the name of the owner who held the title right before the trust was enacted. That’s probably going to be a relative of the person or persons who currently hold the trust. From there you can do a little more digging and see if the last name crops up online in connection with that address.”
“Wow,” I said to her. “Impressive that you’d know that.”
Kendra shrugged, but a grin spread to her lips. “They teach you a few things in reporting school,” she kidded. “Anyway, an afternoon down at the public records department should yield a result or two.”
“I can tell you’ve spent some time down there. Maybe you could take the lead on that search?” Heath said, dropping a not so subtle hint.
Kendra laughed lightly. “So, I’m supposed to do all the grunt work, huh?”
“We’ll help,” I promised, even though digging through old records was the last thing I wanted to do.
Kendra jotted a few more notes to herself. Then she looked back up at us and I could tell she was already on to the next topic. “So, tenants of this house like to write their names on the walls of this closet with a creepy tagline. And some of them then go on to commit murder. That’s the seed of a story, but not something my producer is going to green-light automatically.”
“We don’t know that only some of them go on to commit murder,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Until we can identify who this Butcher Bill, Killer Ken, and Sy Slayer are, we have no idea what crimes they may have committed.”
Kendra’s brow furrowed. “I only found three criminal names connected to that house. Luke Decker, Guy Walker, and Dan Foster.”
“That doesn’t mean other murders didn’t take place with a connection to that house,” I reasoned. “Only that there may or may not be any public record of other criminals. In other words, either these other four were never caught, or they moved on to other residences and no connection was ever publicly traced back to what happened in that house.”
Kendra toyed with her pen. “Okay, I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here and ask, what do you think happens inside that house?”
I turned to Heath. “Let’s show her the video.”
Heath pulled out Gilley’s iPad and angled it so Kendra could see. He then hit PLAY and our interview with Guy Walker began. She gasped a couple of times
and when the video ended, she sat back in her chair, her complexion a little less rosy. “That was freaky!”
“Now you know why we’re staying on the case.”
But Kendra was still clearly thinking about the video. “Did you catch that creepy shadow behind Walker?” she asked. “I mean, it’s like it went right into him and then he becomes a different person! And what was up with that voice?”
I cocked my head. “What voice?”
“Didn’t you hear it? His voice changed. I swear it went down an octave or two.”
I hadn’t noticed, but when I turned to Heath, he was nodding. “Whatever happens to turn these guys into monsters, it starts in that house.”
“But you were in there,” Kendra said. “You had to be in order to take that photo of the closet. Didn’t you get some sort of vibe or something with your psychic sense?”
“That’s the truly creepy thing,” I told her. “We could both pick up on the sort of residual presence of something evil in that house, but whatever it is, it wasn’t there when we visited.”
“Where’d it go?”
“Well,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “I think that whatever this spook is, it doesn’t haunt a specific location for long. I think it prefers to haunt people. Men in particular. And it’s relentless. It wears these guys down until they’re vulnerable to its evil influence, and then it gets inside their minds and maybe it even coaxes them to commit murder.”
Kendra laughed, but I could see that she was starting to get rattled by what she’d seen on the video and our insistence that this stuff was real. “This is all so far-fetched and unbelievable,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. “How can an evil spirit actually take over someone’s mind? Don’t we all have free will?”
“You’d hope so,” Heath said. “But, Kendra, I’ve felt a little of this thing, and it sort of sneaks up on you. Luke told us that while he lived in that house, he’d have nightmares so intense that he stopped sleeping. That lowered his defenses and allowed this spook access to his thoughts.”
“So you think he did it?” she asked him. “You think he really did kill Brook Astor?”
“No,” I said quickly. “We don’t.”
“You mean, this spook made him do it,” she said.
“No,” I repeated. “I don’t think Luke did anything but try to save Brook. I think someone else murdered her and he came across her as she lay dying and tried to revive her. But she was already gone and he panicked and ran home.”
Kendra looked puzzled. “But I thought you guys were making a case for ‘the devil made me do it’?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “But suffice it to say that at this moment we’re convinced Luke didn’t murder Brook.”
“What’s your theory on Dan Foster and Guy Walker? Think someone else committed those murders and they’ve been wrongly convicted?”
I shook my head. “Guy Walker is an evil man,” I said. “You can see it in his eyes. I think he was only encouraged by this spook. He would’ve killed someone either way. And I know Dan Foster killed Bethany Sullivan because I saw the murder through Bethany’s eyes.”
Kendra nodded. “Yeah, that freaky thing you did out at the park. You really connected to her ghost?”
“It’s what I do.”
“I’m still on the fence about whether or not to believe you.”
“As is your right,” I said. I wasn’t irked that she didn’t believe. She’d be slow to come around, which was fine. Some people just took longer to convince.
“The question is, was Dan influenced by this spook, as you call it, or did he really just want to kill his ex-girlfriend?”
I shifted in my chair, eager to ask her my next favor. “I don’t know. And I have no way of finding out. But you could.”
“I could?”
“Yes. There’s no way I’ll get in to see Dan Foster. I have no credentials and no connection to him. But you do. As a news reporter, you could request an interview and talk to him about this spook.”
Kendra laughed like I’d just said the funniest thing. “M.J., Dan Foster’s attorney isn’t going to let any reporter close to him until after the sentencing phase is over, and that won’t be for another three months.”
“Don’t go through his attorney,” I suggested. We needed to hear Dan’s side of the story, because he could hold a clue about the origins of this spook. “Send a message to him directly, Kendra. I’ll even tell you what to say. If this spook did get inside his head, then I think he’ll want to talk to someone who understands the nightmare it must’ve been for him.”
Kendra tapped her pen on the notepad. “Fine,” she said. “But if he bites, you’re coming with me.”
“How’re you gonna pull that off?” I asked. I had no press credentials and I doubted I’d be allowed to see Foster without them.
“I’ve got a press pass you can use. I’ll take you in as my producer.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling both excited and nervous about the prospect of meeting Dan Foster after what Bethany’s ghost had shown me. And that’s when I had a thought and closed my eyes, trying to recall the moment when Bethany had been inside my head, showing me her murder. She’d seen Dan coming toward her, and she’d felt a tiny moment of relief to see him after being spooked by those disembodied footsteps out in the park, but then she’d seen the murderous intent in his eyes and the knife in his hands. . . .
“Em?” Heath said, and I felt his hand on my arm.
I opened my eyes. “Kendra, do you happen to know if Dan Foster is right-handed or left?”
She eyed me curiously. “Right-handed or left? No. I don’t know which hand is his dominant. Why?”
The image in my mind of Dan coming toward Bethany was crystal clear; he’d been holding the knife with his left hand. It kept replaying in my mind too—as if Bethany’s spirit was helping the image cement firmly in my memory. Instead of answering Kendra, I asked another question. “Do you happen to have any footage of Foster in court? Any footage where we might be able to see him write something?”
Kendra’s brow furrowed. “Not with me, but I’m pretty sure we’ll have something like that back at the station. Why?”
“I’m positive that Foster killed Bethany with his left hand. And if he’s normally right-handed, then I think this spook really did take him over at the time of the murder.”
Heath, who’d been fiddling with his iPad, said, “You’re right, Em. He’s right-handed.” He swiveled the screen around so that I could see the footage he’d pulled up from the Web of Foster bent over a legal pad, scribbling with his right hand during his trial.
“How does that help us?” Kendra asked after she too had looked at the footage.
“We can offer that up as an excuse to interview him. Tell him that we know it wasn’t really him that murdered Bethany and we think we can prove it.”
“How can we prove it?” Kendra asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe say something like, based on the forensic evidence, we can tell that the man who murdered Bethany was left-handed.”
Kendra cocked her head at me again. “That’s actually somewhat true,” she said. “According to the coroner’s report, several of Bethany’s injuries occurred on the right side of her body, appearing to come from a left-handed assailant.” When Heath and I both stared at her in surprise, she added, “I’ve been covering this murder trial for four months. I know it like the back of my hand.”
“Ah, well, let’s put some of that in the e-mail to Foster, then,” I said.
But Kendra held up her hand and said, “That’s not all of it, though, M.J. The coroner also reported that there was an odd anomaly to the wounds on Bethany’s body. While several of the initial thrusts of the knife to Bethany’s body were made with Dan’s left hand, it appears that at some point during the attack, he switched hands and made several more
using his right hand and the final wound, which was a slash to Bethany’s throat, appeared to be made from left to right at an upward angle, clearly the mark of a right-handed killer.”
“Huh,” I said. That stumped me a little, but then I thought about what a bad man Guy Walker was, even without the spook’s influence. Like attracts like, so maybe Dan Foster was no exception. “Maybe at the start this spook took over Dan’s mind and got him to begin stabbing Bethany,” I said. “But maybe it let go of his mind toward the end, and he dealt the final blow.”
Kendra nodded. “In court, the coroner explained the anomaly by suggesting that during the attack the knife became slippery and that’s why Foster switched hands. It sort of took apart the defense’s claim that Foster had been sleepwalking at the time of Bethany’s murder and wasn’t conscious enough to realize what he was doing. Foster’s lawyer said he’d taken an over-the-counter sleeping pill that’d put him into a sleepwalking state and he hadn’t remembered anything about the murder, but I think the jury thought the fact that Foster had switched hands during the attack suggested he was far more conscious than he claimed to be.”
What Kendra revealed about the coroner’s report stunned me a little. I didn’t believe there’d been any sleeping pill, but I did think the shadow spook had gotten into his head and maybe at some point the knife had become slippery. . . . But then, maybe Foster at that moment had actually come back into his own mind and he wanted to make sure he finished off his ex-girlfriend. I had no sense of Foster; I didn’t know if he was a bad man or a good guy, so I couldn’t really judge him until after we interviewed him, if we got that lucky.
To that end, I advised Kendra a little further about the e-mail she’d send to Foster. “Leave out the part about the throat slashing and switching hands,” I said. “Just put in there that you think someone else with a connection to the Stoughton Street house might have murdered her. They may have even framed Foster for the crime. Tell him you poked around in the closet and uncovered several other names of suspected murderers.”
The Ghoul Next Door Page 19
