Crowley left the room. “Hm,” Jackson murmured. He looked over at Thor and grinned. “Sometimes, the older, the kinkier.”
“Please, Lord, don’t give me any mental pictures!” Thor told him. He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes.
“What do you think—seriously?” Jackson asked him.
“Seriously—don’t paint any mental pictures!” Thor said, and then shook his head, looking at his old partner. It had been over a decade since he and Jackson had worked together. They’d been good partners—great partners, really, even knowing what each other was thinking most of the time. They had an unspoken rule: there was no sense in doing what they were doing if it fell short of real humanity. They tended to be by the book and courteous until they couldn’t go by the book and courtesy just wasn’t in the cards anymore.
“I think that they can search this island for days and miss nooks and crannies,” he told Jackson. “I think that the film crew and the Celtic American people were taken completely by surprise. Then again, the group from the ship are actors, and the film crew are in ‘reality’ TV. As for Mr. and Mrs. Crowley—they’re either cantankerous from too much cold or just downright creepy.”
“Do you think someone else is on the island?” Jackson asked him.
Thor hesitated. “There has to be someone else—or, at the very least, a cache somewhere out here. There’s not even a speck of stage blood on anyone in this house. And yet…I still believe that one of them had to have seen something. Because, at some time, Amelia Carson was killed here or brought here. We know that. We go backward from there.” He looked at Jackson again. “I can’t help but believe that Tate Morley is here somehow. That he is out there on the island. And he’s watching us.”
* * *
They weren’t being offered any means off the island—not yet.
And it had been hours, or so it seemed. Hard to tell in Alaska in the summer—the sun never seemed to really set. Clara didn’t wear a watch, but she knew that lunch and dinner had come and gone.
State police—ready to draw their weapons at the drop of a hat!—watched over them. The crew of Wickedly Weird Productions had been brought to the entertainment room in back to wait while she, Ralph, Simon and Larry were in the parlor.
They’d all had sandwiches, provided by the police officers. They’d been offered power bars and fruit. Ralph had complained a bit about not having a proper dinner as time had gone on, but she didn’t think that he was even hungry.
It was a nice enough waiting area. The fireplace was huge and the room was done with stone and natural wood. The sofas were worn, plush leather. While the entertainment center was out in back where the TV people were gathered, there was a smaller screen in the living room.
There was no stopping the media; while neither the police nor the FBI had given out any particulars, the news that producer Natalie Fontaine and celebrity TV hostess Amelia Carson had been murdered was plastered all over the screen.
Every news channel was broadcasting the information. Reporters interviewed other guests and employees at the Nordic Lights Hotel. They spoke in serious tones.
Not one of them missed the opportunity to say that both women had now become part of the sensationalist television they had promoted during their lives. And while a man named Enfield gave a press conference along with the chief of police, neither let out the information that one woman had been beheaded and another had been cut in half.
Law enforcement was doing its best to see that the murders did not become speculative gossip.
After the third or fourth program, Larry had suggested they watch a music channel.
They had all quickly agreed.
She and her cast mates had talked for a while—a little awkwardly, since a uniformed man watched them at all times—and then they had grown silent. It wasn’t a bad silence; they were all comfortable with one another. They were not only part of an ensemble cast, they had lived aboard the Destiny in close proximity, and knew each other very well. Larry and Ralph were now partners, living together, close as could be.
And, she thought, afraid. They were all scared. Every now and then, she caught her cast mates looking at her. Though they were on edge, they were men—and the killer had targeted two women.
But even she could distance herself a little. The two women killed had been with Wickedly Weird Productions.
She was not.
Becca Marle was. Clara had heard a bit of a few of her conversations with Tommy Marchant and Nate Mahoney. They were anxious. They wanted off the island.
Becca didn’t. She felt safer here than she would elsewhere. She liked the armed policeman watching over her amid a sea of cops and the FBI men, who were in the house, as well.
Clara wished that Jackson was out there with them. But now, of course, he was with the man she thought of as Agent Viking. She hoped he was taking charge; she certainly felt more secure when he was with them.
“It’s good that Crow is here,” Ralph said.
“Definitely,” Simon agreed.
Larry grinned. “I don’t know. That Thor guy looks pretty tough to me. We’re going to be all right.” He patted Clara on the knee. “Hey, don’t go wishing you were back in NOLA. Bad things can happen anywhere. Wait—very bad things did happen out of NOLA.”
She frowned, looking at him. She couldn’t help it; she did wish she was back in New Orleans. She had been born there, grown up in the French Quarter; her parents were there, and her younger brother was getting his master’s at Tulane. Home would feel good right now. Actually, New Orleans was where she’d gotten to know Jackson Crow and his wife, Angela, and where the “Krewe of Hunters” had been formed in pursuit of a killer on a high-profile case.
And when they’d been on the Destiny…
Her friend Alexi Cromwell had been there, and the cast of Les Miz had been large—lots of friends. When they were nervous, they’d stayed together. They’d kept working.
Hell, they’d polished their nails and done all kinds of mundane things.
She reminded herself that it had really only been a matter of hours that they’d been here. Long hours, but not a full day and night.
People had died—horribly.
There’d been a few minutes when she had tried to convince herself that the whole thing was an episode of Gotcha. Natalie Fontaine would come walking in and announce cheerfully that wow! They had all been really gotten. Special Agent Thor Erikson would prove to be an actor/stripper and the whole thing would have been a farce in extremely bad taste.
She couldn’t pretend at all anymore—if she’d ever been able to convince herself of such a thing. Jackson Crow was here now. She knew this was real.
“Yeah, you know, this isn’t right,” Ralph said. “Not right, and not fair. I’m reminded of The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, you know. Wonderful quotes from that story. ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.’ Well! To be in one horrendous situation is certainly misfortune, but how in God’s name did we all manage two?” he demanded. “Carelessness?” he asked.
Clara, Simon and even Larry stared at him.
“Sorry, sorry, yes, no one’s fault. Still…” Ralph let his sentence end with a sigh. “I’m scared again, I guess. God! I hate being scared.”
“We’re all right, Ralph. Really. We’re all right,” Simon said. “Two things. Both of the people killed were with reality TV, not with the cruise line or the cast. And the other—both people killed were women.”
He winced, looking over at Clara.
“It’s okay, Simon. I had noted that fact already,” Clara told him drily.
“Hey!” Simon said suddenly. “Someone else is entering the fray!”
Clara had been curled on the sofa in the parlor beneath the large picture window that looked onto t
he porch; at Simon’s words, she sat up and looked out.
Someone was coming. A handsome man of about forty-five, medium height, with dark hair. He wore a double sweater beneath a thick parka and he was followed by a police officer and a shivering woman carrying a notepad.
The police officer with him appeared to be frazzled.
The woman looked as nervous as a cartoon rat. She was pinched thin, and wore a parka as if it were a heavy burden upon her.
The officer, the man and the pinched-rat-like woman were stopped at the door by another state policeman.
They talked for several minutes. At last, the officer in charge of guarding the front door opened it and let them in.
For a moment, the man looked around the room. Then his eyes lit on Clara. He looked confused, as if he’d seen a mannequin come to life or a ghost return from the dead. Then he smiled. “My God—it’s you!”
Clara didn’t have the least idea of what he was talking about.
“Hello?” she said politely. She stood; the others had done the same at the man’s entry.
He smiled—a great smile, she thought.
“I’ve seen you! You performed a Sandra Dee character in Grease! You were amazing. I was a little bit in love!” the man said.
“I was in Grease,” Ralph murmured.
No one paid him any heed.
“Thank you. And I’m sorry. Who are you?” Clara asked.
“Marc. Marc Kimball,” he said. “I own Black Bear Island.”
“Oh!”
The murmur seemed like a chorus line—it so perfectly seemed to come from everyone in the room at the same time.
“How do you do?”
“It’s a pleasure.”
“Marc Kimball!”
The greetings seemed to sail around the room.
Clara didn’t speak. She felt uneasy.
She loved being a performer. She’d received good reviews and bad reviews. She’d been in casts when she’d been the low man on the totem pole, totally ignored by those seeking autographs. She’d had lead roles and signed and greeted people, as well. She’d been panned by critics and loved by critics and she’d been careful never to take any of it too seriously.
She’d been admired before, and that was nice. But something about the way this man looked at her made her feel queasy.
She tried to smile. He hadn’t done an evil thing to her.
“It is you, right? I wasn’t sure about all the particulars, but I heard about Annabelle Lee being done on the Fate. And, I knew, of course, that Wickedly Weird Productions was using cruise line employees for Vacation USA, and I had hoped…”
Simon sprang to her rescue.
“We’re all in the cast, sir. Ralph Martini and Larry Hepburn are the gentlemen over there. I’m Simon Green. And, yes, our leading lady is Clara Avery,” he said.
“Miss Avery!” Kimball said, walking over to her. He took her hand. She wanted to scream and wrench it away.
He kept looking at her as he spoke again. “I came as soon as I heard about what happened. They said it wasn’t necessary, but…I’m so glad I’m here.”
CHAPTER 4
“We’ve got to make some decisions,” Mike said, joining Thor and Jackson after the initial interviews. “The groups out there are getting restless. I’ve still got the film crew separated from the caretaker couple and from the ship’s cast, but they’re all getting edgy. One of the film guys was saying he was already getting cabin fever, but his mate, Becca Marle, was saying that she didn’t want to be out of sight of a cop for the next year. Are we getting them all on a boat or holding them here for a while longer?”
“None of them is under arrest,” Jackson said. “We can’t really hold them.”
“Some of them, I think, want to be held,” Mike said. “Until we find this guy.”
They were all silent. It was a dream that a killer such as this could be caught quickly. Many serial killers had reigned for more than a decade before being caught.
Some never were.
“Do we have anything else? Anything more from the forensic crews?” Thor asked.
“Still not a damned thing,” Mike said. “Doc Andropov has taken the body—says because of the snow, he’ll try to run some tests and pin down time of death. He says that from the data he has so far, she was most likely killed early this morning, murdered and bisected elsewhere. Said it’s hard to be certain because the body was packed in snow, but Amelia Carson was with the film crew last night until about eight. I just got off the walkie-talkie—talked to Detective Brennan, head on the case via the state police—Bill Meyer patched me in from the Coast Guard cutter. This is the info I have from him. They were all staying at the Nordic Lights Hotel on the waterfront in Seward,” he said, pausing to look at Thor and reminding him, “Where we arrived at the investigation into Natalie Fontaine’s murder this morning.”
Thor nodded. “Yes, we knew that they all had rooms at the hotel—and, of course, that other than Misty and Miss Fontaine’s remains, none of them were in their rooms. Thanks to Misty, we knew what we’d find at the Mansion as well, and that a ship’s show cast were out here, too. That’s why we came to the island as quickly as possible.”
“I spoke with Brennan this morning, too,” Jackson said. “Director Enfield put us together. He’s the man who made arrangements to get me out here as quickly as possible. Seems like a really good cop—solid and quick. Enfield likes him.”
“He is a good cop. We’ve worked with him before,” Thor said.
“Anyway,” Mike continued, “Detective Brennan has been interviewing everyone he can find at the hotel. There’s a desk clerk who was on the night shift, Arnold Haskell, who says that he saw Amelia Carson up and heading out before it was really light.”
“Sunrise was just about 5:00 a.m.,” Jackson said.
Thor murmured, “That would have meant that morning twilight began at about 3:00 or 3:30 a.m.” In Alaska, summer days were long. Because of Alaska’s position near the North Pole, it was really only truly dark from about midnight until three or three thirty at this time of year. Some people couldn’t stand the continuous light in summer and the equally continuous darkness in winter. It didn’t bother Thor at all, but he knew that visitors often found themselves wide-awake far too much of the day.
“Did she leave the hotel?” he asked.
“He wasn’t sure. She stopped to demand to know why there was no coffee in the lobby yet—he told her that coffee didn’t go out in the lobby until six thirty and that there were little pots in the room. She was not nice to him.” He hesitated, looking at Jackson and Thor and grimacing. “Apparently, after speaking with other employees at the hotel, Detective Brennan came to the conclusion that while Natalie Fontaine was all right—not someone you gush over, but all right—Amelia Carson was not liked by many people. She was all smiles in front of a camera, and self-centered and entitled off camera. Brennan told me that a maid at the hotel said Amelia treated her as if she was little better than a cockroach.”
“Are there cockroaches in Alaska?” Jackson wondered aloud.
“There are cockroaches everywhere,” Mike assured him.
“In every way,” Thor murmured. “So what did Haskell say? She did or she didn’t go out?”
“Haskell didn’t know—she bitched at him and he did his best to be polite and explain hotel policy and she walked off. He didn’t wait to see if she went up the elevator or out the door—he had paperwork and he went back to it. He did say that she had been on her cell phone, bitching at someone on the other end, even while she was bitching at him about there being no coffee for an hour or so.”
“People don’t usually kill people and cut them in half just because they’re not nice people,” Thor said.
“May depend on who they’re not nice to,” Jackson
said.
“True,” Thor agreed. “So, by this time frame—if everyone was right about time—it seems that Miss Fontaine was killed first in her hotel room. The killer apparently kept it down, though he was heard, which brought security up. Somehow he killed her, left that room as it was and got out of the hotel with whatever he used to sever her head, and went on to meet up with Amelia Carson, catch her, kill her, slice her in half and deposit her on the snow.”
“And no one saw him,” Jackson said.
Thor met his eyes. “I doubt that,” he said softly.
“The body was behind that snowbank or rise,” Mike said. “If Miss Avery had run about fifty feet parallel from where she was, she might not have seen it.”
That was true.
“Hey, I work with you daily, Thor, and you’re confusing me,” Mike said. “You think that there is someone on the island, and you also think that someone saw something?”
“This is all too clean—too neat,” Thor said. “And here’s another thought. What if there are two killers? One who decapitated Natalie Fontaine, and one who chopped Amelia Carson in half?”
“Two killers?” Jackson asked. “God, I sure as hell hate to think that there might be two such demented people in the area.”
“There really are a lot of people who hate reality TV,” Mike said. He was serious, Thor realized.
“You just change the channel,” Jackson said. He was looking at Thor, and he knew that they were both thinking the same thing. Tate Morley—the Fairy Tale Killer—was out. These killings had not been carried out in any way like the murders he’d committed before. But he had been locked away for over a decade. He might have changed.
Then again, Thor and Jackson might have such traumatic memories of the man’s previous victims that they were ready to pin anything on him.
Realistically, there were new sociopathic and psychotic killers cropping up constantly.
“Our director doesn’t believe that the Fairy Tale Killer, Tate Morley, could have anything to do with this,” Thor said to Jackson.
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 6: Haunted Destiny ; Deadly Fate ; Darkest Journey Page 37
