Secret Sanctuary

by Amanda Stevens

  “Just stay out of my way, okay? And don’t let me catch you playing Nancy Drew with this case. I’m warning you, Elizabeth…”

  Nancy Drew! The nerve, Elizabeth fumed, as she huddled more deeply into her leather seat. Did Nancy Drew have a Ph.D. in criminology? Had Nancy Drew struck up an e-mail correspondence with one of the most famous profilers in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico? Did Nancy Drew have an IQ of—

  Okay, okay, a little voice complained inside her. Enough already. You’re starting to annoy me, for God’s sake.

  It was true she never knew when to give up, but Elizabeth had always considered persistence a virtue, not a vice. And she was certain she could help solve this case if Cullen would just give her a chance.

  But he was hung up on her age, just like everyone else. If she were a man, if it had taken her the usual amount of time to complete her graduate degree and subsequent field training, no one would question her expertise. No one would think twice about using her on this case.

  But she was only twenty, looked even younger, and because of that, Cullen was shutting her out.

  Be honest, that same little voice taunted her. Are you really upset because he won’t use you in the investigation, or because he still sees you as an immature schoolgirl? Someone he could never be interested in romantically or…sexually.

  Elizabeth sighed. She might as well be a brain without a body for all the male attention she elicited. Unless you counted Dr. Paul Fortier, a biology professor at Heathrow, and since his reputation with the opposite sex was a bit notorious, Elizabeth didn’t think she could consider him a conquest.

  Besides, she wasn’t absolutely certain he’d made a pass at her. She’d had a high fever when he’d approached her a few weeks ago after a faculty meeting. It was entirely possible she’d misinterpreted his gesture—and what he’d said to her—but whatever the case, there was something about the man that creeped her out big-time. The way his eyes had seemed to slide all over her when he’d looked at her. The way her skin had crawled when he’d touched her.

  Shivering, she rose in her seat and glanced out the window. Tires swished against the wet pavement as the hearse and the police car turned into the drive of the narrow, three-story structure which housed not only the mortuary and crematorium, but the private residence of Ned Krauter, the town mortician.

  Out of respect for the dead, or perhaps the late hour, car doors closed quietly as the attendants got out of the hearse and the officer climbed out of the squad car. The three men stood talking for a moment, and Elizabeth let her gaze scan the funeral home.

  Windows were lit on the second story of the building where Mr. Krauter resided, and on the ground floor where the mortuary facilities were located.

  The third story had been converted into an apartment for lease, and in spite of all the activity below, the windows up there remained dark. Exactly what kind of person would want to live over a funeral home and crematorium, Elizabeth couldn’t imagine, but her concern tonight wasn’t for Mr. Krauter’s lodger, but with Mr. Krauter himself, and how she might be able to sneak into the building without him knowing.

  It was a risky proposition, but Elizabeth desperately wanted a closer look at Bethany’s body. Once the postmortem took place, it might be too late. Whatever it was that had disturbed her earlier might be lost forever.

  After another moment of quiet conversation, the attendants opened the back doors of the hearse and slid out the gurney. A sheet covering the body fluttered in the wind as the attendants wheeled the gurney to the back door of the mortuary. Once they and the police officer had disappeared inside, Elizabeth got out of her car and ran along the street toward the funeral home, clutching her cloak tightly against her. Now that the storm had passed, the temperature was plummeting, and she could feel the chill seeping into her bones.

  As she’d expected, the back entrance had been left temporarily unlocked. Elizabeth opened the door a crack and peered inside. No one was about, so she slipped in.

  She’d never been in that portion of the funeral home, but the layout of the house was not unlike that of dozens of other clapboard homes in Moriah’s Landing.

  In fact, the entire structure had once been a private residence. Ned Krauter’s grandfather had immigrated from Europe right after the First World War, bringing with him the family mortuary trade which had been passed down for generations. Why he’d left Europe no one seemed to know, but soon after his arrival in Moriah’s Landing, he’d bought the large house for a song from a widow who’d found herself in a desperate financial situation after her third husband had unexpectedly committed suicide.

  Krauter had turned the residence into a funeral home, and when he’d died back in the fifties, he’d left his only son a flourishing business which Krauter the Second had, in turn, passed on to his only son, along with an assortment of odd family traits that had been for years the source of no small amount of speculation in Moriah’s Landing.

  The current Mr. Krauter had never married and thus had no heir. Elizabeth couldn’t decide whether she considered his childless state a pity or a blessing.

  The room she stood in had once been the kitchen of the original residence. The sinks and cupboards had been upgraded to stainless steel, but most everything else had been stripped away. It was now used as a receiving room—the entry point for bodies to the funeral home. There were signs posted in prominent areas which proclaimed that the room met all state and federal requirements for blood-borne pathogens. Although it wasn’t a formaldehyde area, Elizabeth could smell a strong disinfectant that made her slightly queasy.

  Several doors radiated from the receiving room, most of them clearly marked. The embalming room, straight ahead. To the right, near where she stood, the crematory. To her left, the coolers. To her far right, an unmarked door that led presumably into the other areas of the funeral home.

  It would take only a few moments for the attendants and the officer to transfer the body to one of the coolers, and then they’d come back in here. The officer would probably remain on guard all night, in his squad car she hoped. If he stayed near the coolers or in the receiving area, Elizabeth would have a big problem. But she didn’t think that too likely. People in Moriah’s Landing were nothing if not superstitious, and that included most of the police force.

  All she needed to do was find a place to hide until the coast was clear. She surveyed her options once again. The embalming room. The crematory. The unmarked door.

  Duh, as her students would say.

  Elizabeth opened door number three and cautiously stepped through.

  A narrow, dark hallway stretched before her, and she hesitated just inside the door, trying to get her bearings. But it was no use. The corridor was windowless, making navigation highly precarious. Elizabeth hated to use her flashlight, but unless she wanted to stumble around and risk detection, she had no other choice. Pressing the switch, she angled the beam down the hallway.

  If she could locate the lobby or the chapel, that wouldn’t be so bad. She could find a pew and sit quietly. Meditate on how much trouble she would be in if Cullen were to find her there.

  Maybe he would even threaten her with…dire repercussions. For a moment Elizabeth let herself fantasize about the possibilities.

  Then she snapped out of it. Kinky wishful thinking, coming from a girl—a woman—who’d barely even been kissed.

  She suppressed a sigh just as a light came on at the end of the hallway and she heard footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs.

  Elizabeth’s heart started to pump in overdrive. There was a door just ahead, and she rushed toward it, the skirts of her costume rustling noisily. She doused her flashlight and melted inside the room just as the footsteps sounded down the hallway.

  They came closer. Closer. And then they slowed.

  Elizabeth held her breath. She glanced around frantically for a place to hide, but she could see nothing in the darkened room, and she didn’t dare turn her flashlight back on.

  T
he door opened, and she pressed herself against the wall behind it, praying that the abundant folds of her dress would not spill out and reveal her hiding place.

  For a moment, her luck seemed to hold. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Elizabeth didn’t even dare breathe. She stood there, pulse hammering in her throat as she tried to will away whoever stood on the other side of the door.

  And then the light came on, and she blinked, certain that she’d been caught. When her eyes became accustomed to the blinding glare, she glanced around.

  Whoever stood in the doorway did not come into the room, but Elizabeth wasn’t alone.

  Not five feet from where she stood squeezed against the wall, a woman she didn’t recognize rested peacefully in a satin-lined coffin.

  “Good night, Mrs. Presco,” a voice whispered from the doorway.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Elizabeth crept from the funeral home lobby where she’d been hiding and glanced down the hallway. The light at the end of the corridor had been extinguished once again when Mr. Krauter had gone back upstairs, and as far as Elizabeth could tell, the coast was clear.

  Earlier, she’d waited in the viewing room with Mrs. Presco just long enough for the door to close and for Mr. Krauter—presumably the visitor—to disappear down the hallway toward the receiving area where he’d undoubtedly gone to oversee the arrival of Bethany’s remains.

  While Elizabeth had been scrunched behind the door in the viewing room, she’d tried to tell herself there was nothing wrong with Mr. Krauter conversing with the dead. It was rather…sweet.

  But images had started to form in her head, visions that had made her break out in a cold sweat. She’d barely allowed Mr. Krauter time to get to the receiving area before she’d opened the door of the viewing room and all but tumbled into the hallway. Then she’d found herself a new place to hide until she’d heard him return to his living quarters upstairs.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t coming back downstairs, that the two attendants had gone home and the police officer was standing guard somewhere outside, Elizabeth decided it was time to make her move.

  She paused in the corridor now, listening to the quiet of the funeral home. Like any old structure, the house had its fair share of creaks and rattles. Cold drafts. Nothing that was overly alarming.

  But she was still uneasy, and she pulled her cloak tightly around her as she tiptoed toward the receiving area. A light over the sink had been left on, and she could see at once the room was empty. She was tempted to draw open the back door and try to determine where the police officer might be. But if he was just outside, he would see her. Best to proceed on the assumption that he was safely ensconced in his squad car. Maybe even snoozing by this time.

  Before she had a chance to lose her nerve—or regain her sensibilities—Elizabeth hurried over to the cooler-room door, pulled it open, and stepped inside. The door closed behind her with a swish, and she resisted the urge to try the knob to make sure she wasn’t locked inside. If she was trapped, it might be better to prolong her ignorance.

  The room was completely dark. Elizabeth groped along the wall for the light switch, but when she couldn’t find it, she realized the control was probably on the other side of the wall, in the receiving area. The funeral-home personnel would know to turn on the lights before entering the vault-like cooler room.

  She flicked on her flashlight. The room came slowly into focus as the beam played off stainless-steel fixtures and a torturous-looking device suspended from the ceiling that she presumed was used for lifting and lowering bodies. She remembered reading once that back injuries were prevalent in the mortuary business.

  Spotting the metal cooler, she moved toward it, gooseflesh prickling at the back of her neck.

  Being alone in a mortuary cooler room was not for the faint of heart. Elizabeth wasn’t usually squeamish, but she had a healthy respect for the unknown. The metaphysical. The dark forces at work in the world which couldn’t be explained by any amount of scientific research and experimentation.

  Early on in her studies, she’d become interested in more than just means, motive and opportunity in murder. Criminal personality profilers had long since determined that most serial killers shared certain characteristics from their childhood. The big three warning signs, as they were known, were: chronic bedwetting, the torture of small animals and an obsession with pyrotechnics. In addition, most had suffered child abuse. But Elizabeth had wanted to know if there were other forces at play. She’d wanted to delve even more deeply into the killer’s mind to determine if there was a kind of base instinct that drove men to kill, not just once but over and over.

  In graduate school, her fascination had taken a new twist. Could there be something more than instinct or abuse that drove a mind to the dark side? What about where the killer grew up, where he lived, where he worked?

  In other words, could a place be evil?

  Elizabeth didn’t know why, but ever since childhood, she’d been very attuned to the strange vibrations in Moriah’s Landing. Sometimes when she lay awake at night, she could sense the supernatural undercurrents that rippled through the town. She could feel the evil that lingered from the witch executions of the 1600s and from the murders of twenty years ago. She could almost taste the bloodlust.

  And when she felt those dark stirrings, she came back to the same question. Could a place drive a man to kill? Was that why the women twenty years ago had been murdered in Moriah’s Landing? Was that why poor Claire had been tortured?

  Was that why Bethany Peters lay stone-cold in a mortuary cooler?

  A frigid blast of air encompassed Elizabeth as she opened the cooler door. The unit was equipped with two removable trays, one on top of the other, so that bodies, or even gurneys and caskets, could be slid in and out without much effort. Bethany had been placed on the top tray, her features frozen in death, her face bluish in the gleam of the flashlight. She looked pale and perfect, almost ethereally beautiful.

  As Elizabeth placed her hand on the tray and slid it out, something moved in the darkness behind her. A rustle. A tiny whisper of noise that could have been nothing more than imagination.

  But a finger of dread slipped up her backbone.

  She turned, playing the flashlight over the room once again. In a far corner, almost concealed by shadow, a gurney covered with a sheet had been shoved against the wall. The white cloth molded itself to the body that lay beneath it.

  The sheet moved.

  A pale hand lifted.

  And Elizabeth felt her entire body go rigid with fear.

  Chapter Five

  Elizabeth gasped and jumped back, smashing into the cooler with a hard thud. The flashlight slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor. The bulb flickered, then went out, plunging the room into total darkness.

  Heart knocking, Elizabeth kept her gaze fixed on the spot where she’d last seen the gurney. She could see nothing. Could hear nothing but the sound of her own pulse roaring in her ears.

  But she knew she wasn’t alone.

  The air around her seemed to shift and quiver with an unknown presence, a malevolent entity that watched and waited. Elizabeth could feel those invisible eyes on her in the darkness.

  Cold air from the open cooler whispered along her backbone as she pressed herself against the metal. For a moment, nothing happened. All was silent. And then in a flurry of movement, someone—something— rushed toward her in the blackness.

  Elizabeth screamed and tried to move out of the way, but the gurney caught her in the midsection, knocking the breath from her lungs as she slammed backward into the cooler.

  She dropped to the floor, banging her head on the metal tray as she fell. In a daze, she heard footsteps scurry across the tile. The door opened into the receiving area and light seeped in for just a split second before the door closed behind an escaping form. Then all was quiet again. All was pitch-black.

  Elizabeth shoved the gurney out of her way. Groaning, she tried to get up, but something rested on her sho
ulder, holding her down. She lifted her hand, felt cold flesh. Dead flesh. Bethany’s arm had dropped over the side of the tray and her hand had come to rest on Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  Scrambling away, Elizabeth managed to rise on shaky legs just as the light came on in the cooler room. The sudden brilliance blinded her, disoriented her, and for one terror-stricken moment, she thought the intruder was coming back to finish her off. Her mouth went dry with fear as she watched the door slowly open, and then a dark figure stepped into the room.

  Elizabeth collapsed against the wall, her breath almost a sob. “Cullen!”

  His gaze widened when he saw her. He glanced at her, the open cooler, then back at her. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  He must have seen then that something was very wrong because he strode across the room and took her arm. In spite of the lingering shock and the protection of her velvet cloak, Elizabeth’s skin tingled all the way up to her shoulder.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” But her voice sounded as unsteady as her legs felt. “Someone was in here, Cullen. He shoved the gurney against me and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Cullen said grimly. “What are you doing in here?”

  She gave him a weak shrug. “Never mind that now. I’ll explain everything later, but we have to see if we can find who was in here. It might have been the killer—” She broke off when she spotted something lying on the floor. “What’s that?”

  Cullen glanced in the direction she indicated. He walked over and bent down. “Looks like a test tube.”

  Elizabeth came to stand above him. The empty glass vial was about four inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter, capped with a rubber stopper.

  “Cullen!” In her excitement, Elizabeth placed her hand on his shoulder, then immediately removed it. “Whoever was in here must have dropped it.”

  “You don’t know that. Someone on the mortuary staff could have left it.”