“We need help with this thing. A lot of it.” Kelly tasted blood in her mouth and realized she had nervously bitten through her lower lip.
Kelly and Harris looked at the glowing house. It looked so welcoming now. Then they turned away, as if they didn’t want Summer Place to know it had succeeded in scaring the hell out of both of them.
five
Detective Jackson waited for Wallace Lindemann on the second floor landing. With the ornate hallway fully illuminated, the detective could see that Lindemann wanted to be anywhere but here—even with the six armed Pennsylvania State Police escorting him.
Jackson looked down at the fallen stationary camera. It looked intact. Then he saw, at the midpoint of the hallway, the fallen stepladder and an open toolbox against the wall. He walked slowly down the hallway, looking the scene over. Reaching up, he felt the cast iron grating that covered the heating vent. When he brought his hand away, there was no dust. Then he knelt down to one knee and touched the hardwood floor between the Persian runner and the wall. He rubbed the old plaster between his fingers and then stood and looked at the grill again.
“Look in that tool box and get me a flathead screwdriver.” He gestured, and one of the troopers handed him the screwdriver. The five troopers and Lindemann watched as Jackson set the stepladder upright, then climbed up and started unscrewing the grill from the wall.
“What are you doing?” Lindemann asked. “You don’t actually believe that guy was pulled into the vent, do you?”
“This grill has been removed in the last few hours, that plaster is pretty fresh, and Eunice isn’t the kind of housekeeper that would skip vacuuming this hallway—not the way she keeps this place,” he said as he removed the last large screw. “Besides, our friend had to go somewhere. We may as well start checking here.”
Lindemann cleared his throat and shifted nervously, but didn’t answer. He didn’t want to be standing here if the lights went out again.
Lieutenant Jackson pulled the heavy grate off the wall and handed it down to one of his men. Then he looked inside and then frowned.
“I hate to ask, but who’s the smallest man we have?”
The five troopers looked from Jackson, who still had his head in the vent, to each other. The smallest of the five grimaced and shook his head and silently mouthed the word fuck.
“I guess I am…sir.” He removed his Smokey the Bear hat and handed it to the trooper standing next to him, who was smiling from ear to ear.
“Okay. Get in there and see what you can see. There’s no dust inside, so someone has been in here recently.” Jackson pulled his head out and climbed down from the ladder.
The small trooper grimaced and then went up the ladder. With one last look back at the others, a few of whom were trying to hide their snickering behind their hands, he pulled himself up and inside. Once in, he clicked on his heavy-duty flashlight and started crawling. When he thought he was far enough away from the opening and prying eyes, he silently and carefully pulled his service weapon from its holster, and then continued down the steel vent, feeling a little better with the weight of his nine millimeter.
Jackson turned to the four remaining troopers. “While we wait for our tunnel rat, let’s start checking these rooms.”
“All of these rooms were locked and I have the only key,” Lindemann said. He looked like he was about to bolt from the hallway—his eyes refused to leave the vent’s opening. To him, it had looked like the trooper had willingly climbed into an open maw of an animal. He didn’t want to be there when that darkened mouth closed.
“Mr. Lindemann, I have a worried mother and a pissed off television crew down there. Now, you say you have the only set of keys?” Jackson asked.
“I do.”
“Well, we happen to have a missing boy. Do you think he may have had access to a set of keys, considering that he’s one of the caretakers?”
Lindemann lowered his head, but didn’t answer.
“Start unlocking doors, Mr. Lindemann. This is a big house and we don’t have that many men to cover it.” He looked at his watch. “Now. Someone may be hurt in this monstrosity, and I would like to find them before they decompose.” The large black man leaned closer to Wallace.
Lindemann produced his keys. Anything to stop the large man from looming over him, making him feel smaller than he actually was.
As the first door was unlocked, Jackson glanced back at the vent for a few moments. He gestured one of the troopers to stand by in the hallway, in case the man in there became uneasy. Regardless of his own outward calm, he knew he wouldn’t want to be left alone inside a steel hamster cage, either.
“This room is clear, Lieutenant,” one of the men said as the three of them stepped out of the first bedroom.
“Keep going. We have a lot to check.” He turned to one of the troopers. “The trooper in the vent—his name is Thomas?”
“Yes, sir. Andy Thomas,” the man replied.
“Thomas, are you all right in there?” Jackson called out toward the vent.
“Hell no, it’s hot as hell in here, and—wait, wait. What the hell is this?” His voice echoed inside the vent. “Oh god—what the—?”
Jackson brushed by the officer standing beside the stepladder.
“Are you going to tell us what the hell you’re doing?” he called out angrily.
“It looks like a speaker or something, and uh…a little box with an antenna on it. But it’s covered in, I don’t know, puke or something.”
“All right. Gather it up and keep going.”
“No can do, Lieutenant. The vent drops—oh, shit, it drops straight down and then up from here. I guess I’m at the junction where the vent peels—”
“I don’t need a description. Get that speaker, or whatever it is, and get the hell out of there.”
As Lindemann turned the key in the next door along the hallway, a piercing scream emerged from the room and the door flew open toward him. Wallace was so shocked that he screamed as well, and fell backward into the three state policemen standing ready to enter the room.
Jackson turned around, his small service revolver drawn. A blur of motion shot through the door and into the mass of stunned men. The state trooper standing next to Jackson knocked over the ladder getting his nine-millimeter out. He aimed it at the blur, wide-eyed.
“No!” Jackson yelled and slammed his hand down on the trooper’s gun.
Damian Jackson stared, shocked, at the boy who was trying desperately to crawl down the hallway. His hair was ghostly white and he was jabbering in incoherent words.
“Jimmy—Jimmy Johansson!” he called out, but the boy kept up his gibberish and started crawling even faster.
Jackson stepped around the stunned troopers and Wallace Lindemann. In a few long strides he reached the boy, grabbing the back of his jeans to pull him to a stop. When the boy screamed again, it froze the blood of every man in the hallway. When Jackson turned Jimmy over, he saw that the boy’s eyes were wide and the whites were blood red. He was shaking uncontrollably and he smelled as if he had soiled himself. His fingers were broken, twisted and bloody, and scraps of flesh hung from his knuckles. All of his fingernails with the exception of the thumbs were curled back like banana peels. Yet despite all his injuries, it was the color of his hair that had the men standing over him staring in rapt fascination.
“My God.” Wallace Lindemann choked. He turned away from the boy and shoved through the line of police to vomit against the baseboard.
A loud crash sounded. The police turned with their guns drawn and pointed at the heating vent. Thomas was on the floor behind them, having fallen out with his hands full of speaker and receiver.
“Who moved the goddamn ladder—” The sight of four guns pointed at him made him close his mouth. He swallowed, staring down the barrel of the nearest weapon. “I take it I missed something?”
It was close to 2:30 AM. The crew of Hunters of the Paranormal watched the ambulance carrying Jimmy Johansson drive away from the estate with a Pen
nsylvania State Police car for escort. Kelly could see Eunice and Charles through the ambulance’s back windows, trying desperately to get their son to respond to them.
“Jesus Christ.” Harris Dalton rubbed his forehead. “What happened to that kid?”
“His hair...what the hell could do that?” Jason Sanborn asked. He stared wide-eyed after the red and white ambulance lights as they went through the main gate. He tried to light his empty pipe with shaking hands.
“Whatever took Paul and Kyle, the kid must have seen it,” Kelly said. “He was in the room right across from where they were. He had to have seen something.”
Harris was tired of Kelly speculating without as much as a thread of evidence. She was taking this disaster far too calmly for his comfort, considering that she had two people missing and a teenager that seemed to have gone insane. Before Harris could say anything to her, a trooper approached them.
“The Lieutenant is in the main dining room. He wants to see you—all three of you.”
Kelly, Jason and Harris slowly followed the trooper inside, each of them with their own personal reservations about going into the brightly lit, cheerful-looking Summer Place.
“The fucking house almost—well, it feels sated, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not as bad as it was earlier.”
“Kelly, I’ll tell you one time only: cut that crap out. Stop writing script for the goddamn show.”
Kelly looked at Dalton, but decided to let it go.
As they entered the main dining salon, past two troopers standing on either side of the double doors, they saw Damian Jackson with his coat removed, sitting on the edge of the long polished table. He was drinking a cup of coffee. Wallace Lindemann was pacing not far away with a large drink in his hand, talking on a cell phone. They could hear the ice tinkling in the glass from his shaking.
Jackson stood and placed his cup on the table. “Come on in. I have a couple of questions for you.”
Lindemann, without missing a beat, tucked the cell phone between his neck and shoulder and shot forward, lifting the cup and placing a piece of paper under it as a makeshift coaster. The policeman looked from the owner of Summer Place to the cup of coffee and shook his head. Lindemann had vomited on a ten thousand dollar Persian rug runner, but freaked out over the chance of getting a cup ring on his table.
Kelly turned on a small tape recorder and made sure that the lieutenant saw her do it.
“First,” Jackson said, “I want the tape that reportedly shows this…this, incident.” The falsity of his smile was clear, and its intent also.
“Well, we—” Dalton started.
“The tape was accidentally erased when we tried to show it to New York, sorry,” Kelly cut in smoothly. She matched Jackson’s glare.
“Is that right?” the lieutenant asked Jason Sanborn, and then turned to Harris Dalton.
“I never saw it and I don’t know anything about it,” Jason answered truthfully.
Dalton tried not to shift his eyes toward Kelly, who was standing her ground like the greatest liar in the world. He tried with every effort to hold his temper in check. Then he reminded himself that he was a television man—regardless of what he thought of Kelly, that tape was great television.
“I’m afraid she’s telling the truth,” he said. “However, we will supply you with it, nonetheless. We are gong to make a copy of the erased tape and send it to New York. Maybe our technicians will be able to get something off of it. If we do, we’ll shoot you down a copy.”
Jackson didn’t respond, but Kelly and Dalton both saw the man’s jaw muscles clinch under his smile.
“Okay, you can play it like that, if that’s the way you want it. But let me warn you, if I see that damn thing on television and I don’t have a copy of it sitting in my crime lab, I’ll get arrest warrants for all three of you for withholding evidence from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Kelly tilted her head, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dalton suspected she knew exactly what size shoe it was going to be.
“Now, maybe you can explain what this is.” Jackson reached behind him, and with a handkerchief, picked up the small speaker and the miniature transmitter.
“It looks like a remote sound unit,” Kelly said before Dalton could. Jason rolled his eyes and Kelly could only hope that was all he would do.
“Can you tell me what this was doing in the vent your crewman supposedly disappeared from? Call me suspicious, but it doesn’t look like it’s original to the house.”
“We were conducting a sound test for the Halloween show, in case we wanted to place microphones in the heating vents for coverage.” She looked at Harris Dalton. “I forgot to mention that Kyle had placed it—that was why he was in here.”
Dalton frowned. He now had his evidence that Kelly had been using a gag—and a bad gag, at that. He now knew she was desperate enough to have engineered this whole stunt. He was tempted to come clean right then about the tape and his suspicions, but decided he would just report it to corporate and let them handle it.
“I don’t see what this has to do with our missing people,” he said instead.
“Is that right, detective Dalton?” Jackson said snidely. He placed the speaker and remote down on the tabletop. “Right now, everything has to do with your missing people and that traumatized boy.” He raised his eyebrow again and pulled a sheet of paper from his inside suit jacket.
Kelly looked from the paper to Harris. He refused to look her way. She knew he was going to explode directly in New York’s direction the first chance he got.
“We ran a check on this gag-man of yours. It seems Kyle Prichard did time in prison—three years in Chino, to be exact.” He looked up from the report. “For...guess what?” he asked smugly.
Kelly glared at Jackson. Anything he had to say about Kyle would news to her. He had been an acquaintance of one of the special effects guys at the network lot.
“No guesses?” His smile faded. “He did time for sexually assaulting a child.”
“Look, we didn’t—”
“It was just a boy, not much younger than Jimmy Johansson,” he said. “Now, we have a boy that’s obviously been traumatized severely, and we discover that one of your crew has a lurid criminal history and is capable of inflicting such trauma. And then, amazingly, he comes up missing.”
“As I was trying to say, we—”
Again, Jackson didn’t allow Kelly to speak. “If we don’t find your men, I’m going to charge you and your entire production crew with criminal endangerment of a minor for having this man on your crew.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Kelly said. “Is this what you did to Professor Kennedy, railroad him like you’re trying to do to us?”
“You’ve already lost one host—he’s probably out in the woods, hiding your child molester.” He stood. “I want to speak with the other host.”
“Answer my question. Is this the way you treated Professor Kennedy?”
Jackson glared at Kelly. He was just starting to respond angrily when two men walked in through the double doors.
“Ms. Delaphoy, please, I advise you to not say anything more, other than what you directly witnessed.”
The two men wore brand new jeans and cotton shirts. One had a briefcase; the other, older man, a scowl.
“My name is Harvey Dresser, Attorney at Law. My partner and I have been retained by the UBC television network to represent your interests.”
“Were you hiding in one of their vans?” Jackson asked.
“No, Lieutenant, we were actually staying about ten miles from here on a fishing vacation. I received a call from Abraham Feuerstein, the Chairman of the Board of General Television and Electronics. I don’t know him personally, but someone I do know does, who also knew I was up here.”
“Now that’s what I call pull,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “Another coincidence.”
“Not pull, Detective Jackson, we’ll call it fortuitous, since I believe you were about to cast an
awful lot of circumstantial perversions of this strange situation at the people I now represent. Any other questions can be asked after you conclude your immediate investigation. My clients will, of course, be amenable to further interview at any time. But until then, I have instructions for them to return to New York posthaste.”
Jackson reached out and removed his trenchcoat from the back of a chair. He put it on, following it slowly with his brown hat.
“You bet, Counselor. We’ll be in touch,” he said. His smile didn’t reach his dark eyes.
The attorney and his associate continued into the room, toward Wallace Lindemann. The estate’s heir had stopped pacing and was watching the exchange. He lowered his cell phone and took a quick drink from his glass.
“Mr. Lindemann, I was instructed to pass on to you the network’s sincere apology for what has transpired on your property this evening.”
Wallace nodded and puffed out his chest, looking from the attorney to the other faces watching him.
“Well, that’s the least of your worries my friend. I plan to—”
“Also, I am to pass on to you that if you attempt to break the lease for the dates and times specified in your contract with UBC, we will sue you for the price of said lease, in a breach of said contract. It is my understanding that would be almost all the remaining liquid funds available to you.”
Wallace suddenly lost the liquor-induced bravado he had been feeling just a moment before.
“By the way, sir, I was a great admirer of your family.”
The attorneys turned away and gestured for Jason, Harris and Kelly to follow them out of the salon.
“Detective, the network and their legal department will be eagerly awaiting your findings,” he said to Jackson as they left.
“I’ll be sure to get your bosses everything, Counselor. You can count on that.”
On her way past the large gate, Kelly leaned out of the van and looked back at the brightly illuminated house. If and when she returned, she needed to be armed with the best people money could buy. She had a distinct, inexplicable feeling that the house wanted her next.
The Supernaturals Page 11
