Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside

by Heather Graham

  He rose slowly against her then, and her arms cradled his neck, and she tried to retrieve the soap from him. Her fingers slick and filled with friction, she began to bathe him in return, capturing his erection in her hands, and caressing it hard with the satiny fluid of the suds to create an urgently sensual tug and pull, meeting his mouth as she did so, then falling low against him as well and taking him into her mouth. Hunger shot through him like elemental electricity and he drew her up to him; they staggered together in the water for a moment, and he hiked her up against him, nearly slamming her against the tile wall, and as the heat and beat continued to rain down upon them, he raised her hips high around his and eased her down onto his sex, and the world seemed to take on the rampant beat of the water, swirling around them and into them like liquid fire. They moved swiftly together, and the need arising between them was equally urgent, and in a matter of minutes they were both clinging to one another as they climaxed violently, staggering against the tile then, and then laughing again as they tried to balance. Dirt and spiderwebs were gone, they rinsed off the sheen of the soap, and Jackson reached for the spray to stop it at last, and pull her into his arms for one last kiss with her body full against his, and still as hot as the spray of the water.

  “We should get out before we trip and kill ourselves,” she said.

  “True. Very true. It won’t be a good thing if the headlines read, Ghost-busting Team Heads Die in Tragic Sex Accident in Haunted House,” he agreed.

  They emerged, reaching for towels, and finding that they drew together again then, enveloped in the towels, drying one another.

  “Wow. You were right, we could have had the pizza in ten minutes,” he said, holding her close.

  “Well, speed does seem of the essence when you are facing death by slippery shower,” Angela said.

  She laughed at her own remark, and left her towel to fall behind as she headed out of the bathroom and toward the bed. She turned around to look at him, and she was natural, fluid in her movement, and so sensually easy with him. “Want to risk death by four-poster?” she teased.

  “I’ve always lived an at-risk life,” he said, and followed her out, catching her up at the end of the bed and crashing down on it with her, swiftly stoking her arousal once more.

  Later, he nudged her. “Pizza in five.”

  “In five!” she exclaimed, bolting out of bed. “It can’t have gotten that late…”

  “Hey,” he protested, rising with her. “I had a lot to prove after those cracks you made about me last night!”

  She shook her head at him, and raced through to the bathroom for a quick rinse-off, slipping by him before they could touch again.

  * * *

  The pizzas had arrived when Angela reached the kitchen with Jackson following behind her. Bottles of soda and a pitcher of iced tea were on the table, along with glasses, flatware, napkins, paper plates and a bowl of salad. They all slid into their seats.

  “We really need to figure this out,” Whitney said, dishing salad into paper bowls and passing them down. “I’ve been rerunning film from the basement. From the time we were down there, digging.”

  “What’s on the film?” Angela asked.

  “Well, us, of course. And the shadow. It seems to lurk by the far side of the twist in the ell—leading to your rooms above, and somewhere here, in the kitchen area,” Whitney said.

  “We’ll take a look when we’re finished here,” Jackson said.

  “I think that Angela has to be right. Someone must have brought the body back here to bury in the house,” Jake said.

  “We don’t know that,” Jenna said.

  “But it makes sense,” Angela said quietly. “One totally psychotic killer’s body missing, and something in this house that just won’t go away.”

  “Who would have brought him back here?” Jackson asked. “The answers might be in your book, Angela. At least, the answers to the past.”

  “I’ve read the book now, over and over. It’s really just gory imaginings about the murders,” Angela said. “I still have a log-on for Tulane, though. I can start looking back into some of the newspaper accounts from the day, and I can go back to the museum and go through their archives. Jake, hand me a piece with all the peppers and veggies on it, please.”

  Jake did so. For a few minutes, food traveled around the table, and was consumed, and they all commented on the fact that either the pizzas were really good, or they were really hungry.

  When they finished, they quickly disposed of the boxes and paper plates, and headed down to the grand ballroom where Whitney reran the film. She sped through some, as they had been in the basement for a long time. But then she slowed the film. “Here,” she said.

  It did appear that there was something dark rising in the room. Shadows formed along the baseboards, rising in jerking motion here and there around them, but falling again as someone spoke, raising a pick or a shovel, or moved back to one another.

  “He was really a coward,” Jackson said quietly. “In life, he was a coward. He had to isolate and control his victims. With an entire family, he had to separate the children from the parents, and he had to tie up the parents one by one because he couldn’t control more than one person at a time.”

  He looked at them. “That’s often the case with a serial killer. He gets his sense of power from disabling his victims. He makes sure that they’re drugged or unconscious or securely tied up or shackled, and then he has the power. Life or death, except, of course, the end will bring death. That’s why we saw the shadows rising over Angela when she was alone—and we see them rising and falling now.”

  “Does that mean that he might have terrified Regina Holloway, and that we might be wrong about a killer in the house with her?” Jenna asked.

  Frowning, Jackson shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think that the force needed to send her over could have possibly happened because of a ghost—or even fear of a ghost. We’re still looking at two different situations. What we have to do is discover the link.” He rose. “I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “We’ll take turn manning the camera overnight again,” Will told him.

  “Two and two,” Jackson said firmly.

  “Okay, Whitney, how about you and me on the first shift. Jenna and Will can take over at first light, and then we get to sleep until noon?” Jake suggested.

  “Reverse it,” Jackson said. “I’m going to need you on the computer tomorrow morning,” Jackson told Jake.

  “You got it, boss,” Whitney said.

  “Wait, I should be taking a turn at this,” Angela said.

  But Jake came to her and set an arm around her. “Oh, no. You old folks need your rest. We’re fine on this detail. Go to sleep. You’re our divining rod, Angela, remember? And Jackson is our mighty leader. Go on. Get some sleep. We can handle this.”

  “All right, then, kiddies, good night,” she said.

  Jackson bid them good-night as well, and they headed back up the stairs together.

  “They know we’re sleeping together,” Angela said.

  “Probably. I like to think that Adam didn’t bring stupid people into our fold,” he said, grinning.

  She looked at him and smiled, and wondered how life could change so entirely and so quickly. But it had changed. And she knew that what she was sharing with Jackson was far more than the sexual attraction that was so strong, and seemed to be so natural and so easy. Maybe they were just a bit broken inside by the blows life had dealt them, and maybe that was just right. Maybe they were destined to heal together.

  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 wa
nted 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 fo
und 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.