Death Night

by Ritter, Todd

  Their drinks arrived. Lucia swirled the amber liquid around the glass before taking a sip. Henry merely gulped his. After the day he had had, he needed a good belt of something.

  “A fan of small towns, are you?”

  Lucia grimaced. “Hardly. I keep track to make sure I didn’t fuck up royally.”

  “You’re the one who picked Perry Hollow?”

  “It wasn’t Fanelli, that’s for damn sure,” Lucia said. “He has no grasp of United States geography. He just wanted land for his first American venture. He didn’t care where it was. That was my job, to find the perfect place. I looked for proximity to major cities, reasonable land prices, low tax bases. Perry Hollow had everything we needed, not to mention a freshly cleared patch of lakefront property. Plus, it was in Pennsylvania, which is important with this kind of thing.”

  Henry’s notebooks had been turned to ash during the fire at the Sleepy Hollow Inn, and he hadn’t thought to stop at some point during the day and get more. With nothing to write on—or with—he begged a pen from the bartender and began taking notes on cocktail napkins.

  “Is everything okay?” Lucia stared at him with bemused concern. “I have to say, you look frazzled.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Henry said. “Back to Mr. Fanelli’s project, what does being in Pennsylvania have to do with it?”

  “The laws, of course. While more and more states are allowing it, we wanted a place that had been at it but not too long. We didn’t want to go someplace where competition was already entrenched. So New Jersey was out. Louisiana was out. We didn’t even think about Nevada.”

  Henry stopped writing. He gave Lucia a quizzical look while scratching his head with the end of his pen. “What exactly does Mr. Fanelli plan on building here?”

  Lucia Trapani laughed—a throaty, incredulous laugh that Henry had only heard before in the movies.

  “You honestly don’t know?” she said. “He’s entering the United States gaming industry. Fanelli Entertainment USA is going to build a casino in Perry Hollow.”

  Henry, a pale man to begin with, was certain the news made his face a whole lot whiter. He knew from the way he got cold in an instant, like all the warm blood had just left his body. It wasn’t surprise from learning about the casino project that did it. It was the fact that building a casino in Perry Hollow was about the worst idea he had ever heard. The town’s roads weren’t built for that kind of traffic. The burning of the Sleepy Hollow Inn meant the town had exactly zero hotels.

  Then there was Kat and her practically nonexistent police force. Henry knew without a doubt that she and Carl Bauersox were good cops, but they’d be overwhelmed by having a casino dropped into their midst.

  Years earlier, about three lives ago, he had gone to Atlantic City for fun and Las Vegas for work. He liked both places well enough. He’d even consider going back someday. But the glitziest hotels and brightest neon couldn’t quite hide the seedier parts of both cities. Pawnshops and gambling addicts. Prostitutes and junkies. Where casinos went, they were sure to follow. Picturing all of that in tiny, sleepy Perry Hollow broke his heart.

  “Is it a done deal?” he asked. “Has it been approved by town officials?”

  “Almost. We still need to introduce it before the planning board next month.”

  “It’s going to be a tough sell. People in this town like things the way they are. They won’t want it approved.”

  “Considering the state Perry Hollow is in at the moment,” Lucia said, “I don’t think they’ll have a choice. Besides, we’re working on a great pitch. You should see the concept art for the hotel. It puts the Bellagio to shame. Mr. Fanelli doesn’t believe in moderation. He goes big.”

  Her BlackBerry started to vibrate, buzzing its way down the bar toward her hand. She glanced at it before sighing. “Speaking of the devil. That man never sleeps. It’s probably why he’s so fucking rich.”

  Excusing herself, she slipped off the stool and headed deeper into the empty restaurant, hips swaying. Her heels clicked on the hardwood floor, quickly and steadily. It sounded like somebody trying to tap out a rhythm on a typewriter. Henry echoed the sound with the tip of his borrowed pen, rapping it against the bar.

  It took at least five taps to make him realize he had heard that sound once before that day.

  10 P.M.

  Kat was yawning so hard she thought she’d never stop. Her hands felt numb on the Crown Vic’s wheel, barely steering. Despite discovering Rebecca Bradford’s grave, she was still more tired than she had been all day. No more adrenaline rush to keep her going. She was running on fumes.

  When her cell phone rang, she answered it quickly, in mid-yawn.

  “Hey, Chief.” It was Carl, sounding just as tired as she did. “Randall Stroup got a hit on Danny Batallas’s vehicle. He drives a black Ford pickup. Want the license plate number?”

  “Text it to me,” Kat said. She was too busy driving to write it down and she knew she’d never remember it. Her brain was mush.

  “Righto, Chief.”

  Kat ended the call and turned down Main Street. It was mostly empty, populated by a few stragglers rushing home. It reminded her of how the town had looked in the days after the mill closed. Barren. Deserted. A ghost town haunted by the few people who had decided to stick it out.

  Her phone buzzed, alerting her that Carl had sent the text. She tapped the touchscreen, revealing the message that Danny had a vanity plate. fyrman. Either he took his job too seriously or he enjoyed it far too much. Knowing what she had found in his apartment, Kat assumed it was the latter.

  The phone rang again while she was still eyeing the text. She answered it, even though the number was one she didn’t recognize.

  “Kat?” It was Henry, his voice a rushed whisper. “I know what Dave and Betty Freeman heard.”

  Kat was confused, unshakable exhaustion clouding her brain. “What?”

  “The clicking they heard outside last night,” Henry said. “It was a woman. Walking in high heels. And she’s here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Maison D’Avignon. At the bar.”

  Kat, still steering down Main Street, glanced out the window and saw the striped awning and red door of Perry Hollow’s finest restaurant. She slammed on the brakes.

  “I’m right outside,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She was there in two, plopping down on the stool next to Henry and ordering a tall glass of water from the bartender. No more coffee for her, no matter how many hours she stayed awake. Sipping her drink, she followed Henry’s gaze to a well-dressed woman standing between the bar and the equally empty restaurant. She was on her phone, talking rapidly in what Kat could only assume was Italian. The woman wasn’t a native of Perry Hollow, that much was certain. Even the wealthiest folks in town didn’t dress like that.

  “Who is she?”

  Henry told her everything. The woman’s name. The fact that she worked for Giuseppe Fanelli. By the time he got to the part about their plans to build a casino alongside Lake Squall, Kat started to feel nauseated. Perry Hollow wasn’t equipped to handle something as big and unpredictable as a casino. If it was built, it would be the end of the town as she knew it.

  Across the room, the woman ended the call. She quickly made her way back to the bar, heels clicking sharply on the floor. The sound stopped when she saw Kat’s uniform.

  “I have a feeling I’ve just been hoodwinked.” She turned to Henry. “Was this whole interview a setup?”

  “Lucia Trapani,” Henry said, “meet Chief Kat Campbell.”

  Kat offered her hand, but Lucia refused to shake it. Instead, she slid onto the bar stool far more elegantly than Kat had done and ordered another drink.

  “If you’re here to ask me about the fires,” she said, taking a moment to size up Kat before dismissing her, “then start now. My time is valuable.”

  “Were you in town last night?” Kat asked.

  Henry answered the question for her. �
�She was. When I spoke to her on the phone this morning, she said she had driven in last night.”

  “You have a good memory.” While the tone of Lucia’s voice was polite, her expression was anything but. She stared daggers at them, making Kat feel lucky that looks couldn’t kill. The glare on Lucia Trapani’s face seemed lethal enough.

  “What brought you to Perry Hollow?”

  “Business. I attended the fund-raiser held by your local Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Who invited you?”

  “No one,” Lucia replied. “I crashed it.”

  During the whole exchange, Henry had been hunched over the bar, scribbling notes on a seemingly endless series of cocktail napkins. Glancing up from them, he asked, “How did you find out about it?”

  “Through someone at the realty firm who sold Mr. Fanelli the land. David Brandt is his name. He plays golf with the mayor. Said it might be a good way to introduce myself to some of the other business owners here.”

  Kat assumed Lucia Trapani had made a very good impression, at least to the men in the room. She was undeniably beautiful, with just a hint of maturity that made her seem attainable. The women, however, probably hated her. Women such as Lucia excelled at making other women feel inferior.

  “What time did you arrive at the fund-raiser?” she asked.

  “Around ten,” Lucia said, taking another sip of bourbon.

  “So you went to the history museum before the fund-raiser?”

  Lucia stopped mid-sip. Lowering her glass, she looked at Kat with a combination of admiration and annoyance. At last, her expression seemed to say, a formidable opponent.

  “How did you know?”

  “Your heels,” Kat told her. “The neighbors across the street from the museum heard them around nine last night. Next time you’re thinking about sneaking around town, it might be a good idea to wear flats.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” Lucia said.

  “Then what were you doing?” It was Henry this time, giving Kat a break from asking all the questions.

  “Stopping by the museum, of course.”

  “Wasn’t it closed?” Kat said, taking over again.

  “I had an appointment of sorts.”

  “With Constance Bishop?”

  “That’s correct. We had some business to discuss.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as why the bitch was trying to blackmail Mr. Fanelli.”

  It wasn’t the answer Kat had been expecting. She recoiled in surprise, knocking over her glass of water in the process. Liquid rushed over the bar and landed on her lap. She reached for a napkin, but it was stolen by Henry before she could grab it.

  His notes. Of course.

  “That doesn’t sound like something Constance would do,” Kat said, off the bar stool and trying to flick away the water seeping into her trousers. “Are you sure she was blackmailing you?”

  “She denied it,” Lucia said. “She swore up and down that wasn’t her intention. But I didn’t buy it. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

  “This is about Rebecca Bradford, isn’t it?”

  Once again, Lucia gave her that impressed-but-pissed-off look. “Yes. It recently came to my attention that an event of some historical merit happened on the land Mr. Fanelli purchased.”

  Kat, resigned to spending the rest of the conversation wet, returned to the stool. “How did you find out?”

  “Because someone sent me this.” Lucia reached for a leather satchel on the floor that had been tilted against her stool. She pulled out a book, handing it to Kat. It was a copy of Witchcraft in America, Connor Hawthorne’s book. “It was mailed to my office two days ago. No return address. No way to track it. Just the book and that paper.”

  Kat turned the book in her hands. It was a new copy, shiny and clean. A slip of paper had been inserted into one of the later chapters, drawing attention to the passage about Judge William Daniel Paul. Typed across the paper was a terse note: “The witch’s name is Rebecca Bradford. She and four other women were brutally murdered on your land and buried there. Meet me Friday at the Perry Hollow Historical Society. Midnight. Bring money.”

  “And you think Constance sent this to you?”

  “Of course,” Lucia said. “It’s not that unusual. You know, president of a struggling historical society maybe trying to get some cash. It’s happened before and it will surely happen again.”

  “So you went to the museum and confronted her?”

  “I did. But not at midnight. The element of surprise is one of a businesswoman’s best secret weapons.”

  “You went early,” Kat said. “At nine. Was Constance there?”

  “She was. I told her that I knew all about Rebecca Bradford, and I expressed my concern about the situation.”

  Concern. That was an understatement. The company Lucia worked for was planning to build a casino on the same site where a massacre had occurred. Kat didn’t know too much about business, but she assumed something like that didn’t make for good PR. And if the land was declared a historic spot—which it very well could be, considering what had happened there—Giuseppe Fanelli’s first project in America wouldn’t even see the light of day.

  “So,” Lucia continued, “I made Mrs. Bishop an offer to keep quiet about it.”

  “A bribe?”

  Lucia sighed. “Mr. Fanelli doesn’t offer bribes. He offers philanthropic donations.”

  “How much was this donation?” Kat used air quotes when saying it. Even though she hated it when others used them, the situation called for it.

  “A million dollars.”

  Once again, Kat was stunned. If Fanelli was willing to offer a million bucks in hush money, imagine how big—and profitable—he expected the casino to be.

  “Did she accept it?”

  Lucia shook her head slowly, as if she still couldn’t believe it twenty-four hours after the fact. “Constance said that while the historical society needed the money, she couldn’t accept it if it meant rewriting local history.”

  Constance Bishop had turned down a cool million because taking it wasn’t the right thing to do, a fact that made Kat’s heart swell with both pride and sorrow. There were few people she could think of who would have rejected such money. Certainly no other members of the historical society. Kat imagined that Claude Dobson or Emma Pulsifer would have grabbed the money without a second thought. Burt Hammond would have given her a pen to write the check.

  “Did it make you angry that she turned down your offer?”

  Lucia gave her a smile that looked as lethal as her glare. “I’m assuming that’s a veiled way of asking me if I killed her.”

  Kat knew Lucia couldn’t have hit Constance over the head or started the fire at that time. It was far too early. But she definitely could have come back later in the night, especially once the fire alarm cleared the restaurant. Instead of taking Main Street, Lucia could have slipped through the backyards to the museum, just as Kat and Connor had done earlier. It took two minutes total.

  “It’s simply a question.”

  “I wasn’t pleased, of course,” Lucia said. “But I respected her decision. It didn’t change the fact that the casino would be built. All it really did was save the company a million dollars. But I did wonder why she had sent me a copy of the book. I mean, why else send it if not for blackmail purposes? When I asked her, she acted surprised.”

  Again, Henry looked up from his notes long enough to ask a question. “So she denied sending it?”

  “That’s right,” Lucia said. “She said she hadn’t told anyone about what happened on that land. That’s when I showed her the book and note I got in the mail. When Constance saw it, she demanded to know who had sent it. She said it wasn’t a well-known book. Actually, she seemed shocked that I had a copy.”

  As well she should have been, Kat thought. Constance Bishop had tried to keep her research under wraps. Sneaking out in the night. Hiding everything she knew from everyone but Connor Hawthorne. That’s wh
y she had been so unnerved by Lucia’s presence. She had just learned that someone else knew what she was researching.

  “When we spoke earlier today,” Henry told Lucia, “you mentioned talking to a reporter about the land here in Perry Hollow.”

  Lucia nodded at the memory. “Yesterday, yes. I tried to brush him off, but he was as persistent as you.”

  “So it was a man?” Henry said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Although this was all news to Kat, she understood where Henry was going with his questions. “Did he give a name?”

  “He didn’t,” Lucia said. “He just said he was a reporter and wanted to know what Mr. Fanelli planned on building here. He said he worked for the local newspaper. Since I knew it was going to get out one way or another, I told him it was a casino. He thanked me and hung up.”

  “Then you weren’t talking to a reporter,” Henry said, shaking his head at the thought of a professional journalist not asking a few follow-up questions. “I’d be fired if I did something like that.”

  “We know this man didn’t give you a name,” Kat said. “But did he mention a newspaper?”

  “He did. It was this town’s paper. The Perry Hollow something or other.”

  “The Perry Hollow Gazette,” Henry said, naming his former employer.

  Lucia snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I remember being surprised because I had never heard of it before.”

  That’s because it no longer existed. The Perry Hollow Gazette had been defunct for a year. Its last issue, still sitting in a locked honor box outside its old building, featured a story about the Grim Reaper killings—a constant reminder that bad things had taken place in town. Every time Kat walked past it, she felt like kicking the box in, stealing the remaining papers and torching them.

  “Was I duped?” Lucia said, looking like she could use another stiff drink.

  “You were,” Kat told her. “Someone was only posing as a reporter. Possibly the same person who’s starting these fires.”

  It wasn’t hard to piece together. Someone else knew about Rebecca Bradford. He also knew Fanelli was going to build on the land where she had been buried. He’d sent a copy of the book to Lucia before calling to get the scoop on what was being built.