“You did? When?”
“Last night,” Onyx said. “I was out late.”
“Oh,” Noah said. Being out late was Onyx’s way of telling Noah she’d taken someone the night before. “I thought you looked particularly healthy this morning.”
Onyx was an exceptionally beautiful woman—so much so that sometimes Noah felt like she was from another world. Which, of course, she was.
But after Onyx had taken someone, it was like God had sprinkled her with an extra touch of perfection that made her literally glow.
Noah found it interesting that Onyx felt compelled to tell him when she’d been out late—her explanation being that because Noah witnessed the fight between her and Claudia, there was no need to hide it. Besides, she said, she didn’t want him to hear about it in the local paper.
Noah thought it went deeper than that.
As if telling him her deepest, darkest secrets made their relationship more normal somehow. Which, of course, it wasn’t.
Onyx was dead.
Onyx was a ghost.
Noah had gotten used to being around Onyx, but to think that their relationship was normal? How could it be?
“Come with me,” Onyx said walking toward the front door. “I want to take you somewhere.”
“Where are we going?” Noah asked as Onyx led him down a narrow dirt path that hugged the edge of the cliffs. “This is dangerous, you know.”
“Just stay to the inside, and you’ll be fine,” Onyx said.
Noah continued to follow Onyx down the path until, eventually, they reached the beach.
“Come here,” Onyx said, waving him over to a group of jagged rocks at the base of the cliffs.
“What is this?” Noah said.
“Besides being atop the lighthouse, this is my favorite place,” Onyx said. “It’s also the reason they call it Crimson Cove.”
“I thought they called it Crimson Cove because of the sunsets,” Noah said.
“Yes, well, that’s what the Chamber of Commerce would like you to believe, but the truth is far more—unpleasant,” Onyx said. “For hundreds of years these cliffs have attracted the hopeless and the depressed—those who have lost the will and desire to carry on.”
“Jumpers,” Noah said, understanding finally.
“Yes,” Onyx said. “The problem is that when people jump they think they’re throwing themselves into the sea, but the beach is wider than it looks from up above. They don’t make it to the water. They only make it here—to the rocks. It’s not until later that the tide comes in and washes them away.”
Onyx allowed the words to hang in the air.
“Crimson Cove,” Noah said finally.
Onyx nodded.
“Why did you bring me here?” Noah asked.
“Because I wanted you to see where I met your grandfather and grandmother for the first time,” Onyx said. “It’s also where I saw your mother for the first time.”
“My mother?”
“Yes,” Onyx said. “She was young, just a teenager. The three of them had stopped here on their way up from San Francisco. They were going to pitch a tent for the night, but it got too dark to see so they climbed in their sleeping bags, right over there.”
“You were eavesdropping on them?” Noah asked.
“It’s hard not to eavesdrop, Noah. I hear everything. Right now, I hear animals walking through fallen leaves in the forest. I hear your heart beating. I hear people talking on the deck of that boat,” Onyx said, pointing to a pinpoint of light on the water several hundred yards offshore.
“Okay,” Noah said. “But, again, why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you this because there was a man out here that night—an evil man who meant them harm,” Onyx said.
“So, you—?”
“Killed him? Yes. I killed him,” Onyx said. “Had I not, I’m fairly certain he’d have killed both your grandmother and your grandfather.”
“And my mother,” Noah added.
“Probably,” Onyx said. “But not until after he’d had his way with her.”
Noah said nothing.
“But that’s not my reason for sharing this with you.”
“Then what is?” Noah asked.
“I want to tell you something else—something important,” Onyx said. “But I’m not sure you’ll understand.”
Noah reached out and took Onyx’s hand in hisers and looked her directly in the eye. “Go ahead, Onyx. You can tell me anything,” Noah said. “It will be okay. I promise.”
When they’d met, Onyx had two secrets. The first secret was that she was dead. It was a secret Noah discovered, yet he was still with her.
The second secret was the more dangerous of the two. The secret she lacked the courage to share.
If she told him, would she lose him?
Perhaps.
“Tell me, Onyx,” Noah said. “What is it?”
Onyx looked down and saw that Noah was still holding her hand, and for the briefest moment she thought she could feel the warmth of his skin on hers.
“I just wanted to tell you how important you’ve become to me,” Onyx said.
Onyx could not lose Noah.
Not now.
The truth about her having taken his mother that night in the cabin so long ago would have to wait.
LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA
DECEMBER 11, 2010
Newt found himself reviewing the information Koda Mulvaney had given him—grinding and processing it over and over in his mind—as best he could in his medicated state.
There hadn’t been a new lead to follow in years, and now there was: Sergent Elton Nahum.
It did not faze Newt that the information had come from a ghost who claimed to have been murdered by the one-time police photographer. Nor would it faze his old boss, Pipi Esperanza, since Pipi was a ghost herself.
It had been fifteen years since the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, and Pipi hadn’t aged a day since. People would begin to notice eventually. What would she do then? Newt wondered.
Not his problem.
Catching the Leg Collector wasn’t his problem either, not any more—not since leaving his job at the FBI.
But Newt was making it his job again.
Enough was enough.
Newt sat up in bed and decided to get dressed. Maybe a walk would relax him enough to sleep.
Newt pushed through the front door of the Commonwealth Hotel and immediately spotted a dark blue Ford Taurus parked halfway down the block. The car stuck out like a sore thumb on the otherwise empty, desolate street.
Someone was watching the building. That or his paranoia was ascending to a new level.
Newt started up the street in the direction of the car. The car’s headlights came on and it drove off.
An hour later, Newt turned the corner onto Commerce Street, a block from the hotel, and saw the blue Taurus sitting at the curb.
Newt started up the street toward the car, but this time the car didn’t drive off. As he got closer, he could see someone was sitting behind the steering wheel. And he recognized who it was.
It was Maggie.
Newt approached the car, and Maggie rolled the window down. “Hello, Newt. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
“Why would I be? I made you an hour ago,” Newt said.
“Well, I never have been any good at surveillance.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Newt asked. “To surveil me?”
“No, I’m here because Pipi’s worried about you,” Maggie said. She reached in her purse and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights, shook one loose, and lit it. “I’m worried about you, too.”
“When did you start smoking?” Newt asked. “Or have you always smoked, and you just hid that, too?”
“You’re angry about what happened. I don’t blame you—I’d be angry, too, if it were the other way around.”
“I’m not angry, Maggie,” Newt said. “I moved from ang
er to apathy a long time ago.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know. Can we please talk?”
Newt remained silent. “There’s a Mexican place around the block on Main Street. Get a booth, somewhere in the back. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Are you really going to come?” Maggie said.
“Yes. There’s something I need to tell you.”
Maggie waited in a booth in the back of the restaurant, sipping a margarita. She saw Newt come in and waved him over. Newt pulled his jacket off and slid in the booth opposite her, setting a manila file folder on the table.
“You look thin,” Maggie said.
“It’s the meds,” Newt said. “And I don’t have a car. But you know that already, don’t you? This isn’t the first time you’ve been here, is it?”
“What makes you think—?”
“No more bullshit, okay. You and Pipi have been keeping tabs on me all along.”
“Okay, this isn’t my first time down.”
“How many times have you been here?” Newt asked.
Maggie took a sip of her margarita. “Officially? I come down every three months, per Pipi’s instructions.”
“And unofficially?”
“In the beginning, I was here every weekend,” Maggie said. “But when I realized you weren’t going to talk to me again, I cut back.”
Newt nodded. “Tell Pipi I caught you and told you to never come back here again.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want,” Maggie said. “Is that what you want?”
Newt didn’t answer. Instead, he opened the file folder and slid a stack of postcards across the table.
Maggie examined the cards. “Are these—?”
“From him?” Newt asked. “Yes.”
“You’ve been getting mail from the Leg Collector? For how long?”
“A couple of weeks almost,” Newt said.
“And you’ve been handling these?”
Newt shrugged. “I don’t work for the FBI anymore, Mags. I get to open mail like the rest of the world without putting gloves on first. Besides, he never leaves prints.”
A waiter appeared. “Another margarita?”
Maggie nodded.
“And you?”
“Just water,” Newt said.
Maggie waited for the waiter to leave and then flipped through the postcards again. “So, why is he sending them?”
“Why else? He wants me to know he’s smarter than I am,” Newt said. “And right now, I’d say he’s right.”
Maggie motioned to the file. “Is there more?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?” Maggie asked.
“On if you intend to tell Pipi,” Newt said.
“Newt, please don’t do this to me,” Maggie said.
Newt shrugged. “Life is full of choices, Maggie.”
Newt spent the next half hour telling Maggie about the police photographer without telling her where he got the information.
“Do you really think this is the guy?” Maggie said looking over a Savannah PD employment record from the file.
“Yes,” Newt said. “Now he’s on the run.”
“The spelling of the name is strange,” Maggie said. “Who names their kid Sergent? Spelled wrong, no less.”
“No one,” Newt said. “I think he backed into it—reversed engineered it from his real name. I think it’s an anagram.”
“Of course,” Maggie said.
Newt pulled a sheet of paper from the folder and slid it across the table. “I came up with thirteen possibilities.”
Maggie looked at the list:
“There’s got to be more than thirteen,” Maggie said. “If we use my laptop—”
“No,” Newt said. “He likes thinking them up in his head. That’s what we should do, too. Think like he does.”
Maggie studied Newt’s face for a moment. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I called the Savannah PD.” Newt said. “It seems they’re in possession of a camera. Someone found it in the parking lot right after this guy visited the station. What I can’t figure out is why he would have done that.”
“Done what?” Maggie asked.
“Well, this Nahum character supposedly died in a fire years ago, and then, for some random reason, he suddenly rolled into the station in a wheelchair, dressed in the same outfit everyone there remembers him wearing back when he worked there, with a camera in his lap. Why? He’d managed to convince everyone he was dead—why do something to blow his cover?”
“Yeah. It seems like an odd thing to do,” Maggie said.
Newt’s mind drifted to the spider research and the crazy webs he remembered looking at when they were on a drug of some kind. “Anyway, someone finds the camera in the parking lot and, lo and behold, it has pictures of a girl on it—alive and then after she’d been killed. His latest victim presumably.”
“How’d you get the Savannah PD to share all of this with you?”
“I told them I was still working with the FBI,” Newt said.
“You didn’t.”
The waiter appeared. “Another margarita?”
“God, yes,” Maggie said.
“I’ll have one, too,” Newt said. “Cadillac rocks, no salt.”
“I thought you couldn’t drink while taking your meds,” Maggie said once the waiter had gone.
“I stopped taking my meds three days ago.”
“Jesus, Newt,” Maggie said. “I can’t keep this from Pipi.”
“Yes, you can,” Newt said. “You’re also going to get me copies of everything you’ve got on the case from over the last three years. And I need your laptop.”
Maggie sat in the front seat of the Taurus, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Returning to Quantico and providing Pipi with an incomplete update was one thing—going back and flat-out lying to her was another.
There was only one reason she’d even consider it.
Newt.
She not only believed in him, but she also still loved him. And after all she’d put him through, the least she could do is trust him.
Maggie reached in her purse and dug around until she found her engagement ring and put it back on. There was no way she was going to tell Newt she was engaged.
Not yet at least.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
DECEMBER 12, 2010
Olympia took her coffee from the kitchen into the living room and set it on the table and then went to the bedroom to get her cigarettes from the nightstand. When she returned, the coffee was gone.
“Damn it, Nathaniel,” Olympia said aloud to the empty room. “Give a working girl a break, will you?”
“Working girl? That’s a good one,” a man said from the other side of the room. Olympia looked over and saw Nathaniel standing in the doorway, holding her coffee cup in his hand—and he was completely naked.
“Jesus,” Olympia said, momentarily diverting her eyes. But that’s what Nathaniel wanted, wasn’t it? To shock her. Olympia returned her gaze to the doorway, but Nathaniel was gone.
“You know what’s funny, Olympia? There was a time when a cup of coffee used to bring me to life in the morning. Now? I can’t even smell it. Let alone drink it.”
Olympia spun around to find Nathaniel standing directly behind her. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to get your attention,” Nathaniel said. Nathaniel held the coffee cup out for Olympia to take, but when she reached for it he let the mug drop from his hand—sending it to the hardwood floor—shards of ceramic and coffee flying in every direction. “Oops, looks like a coffee break.”
Remain calm, Olympia thought. “You know, you could just say hello like normal people.”
Nathaniel snorted and shook his head. “Yes, that is what normal people do, isn’t it? But maybe you’ve forgotten, Olympia—I’m not a normal person. I’m—”
“What? Dead? That you’re dead?” Olympia snapped. “No, Nath
aniel, I haven’t forgotten. I’m reminded of it every second of every day, thanks in large part to you and your petulant, drama-queen antics. Now, go put some damn clothes on, will you please? Then we’ll talk about anything you want.”
As expected, Nathaniel wanted the same thing he always wanted. He wanted Olympia to find his killer—Stormy Boyd—the man in the bowler hat.
Nathaniel had no idea that Olympia had found Boyd already. And she had no intention of telling him.
Olympia wasn’t sure what she expected from her unannounced visit to the Mulvaney mansion three nights earlier. She hoped the man in the bowler hat would offer her advice on how to deal with the situation with Nathaniel, but she also didn’t expect it.
Yet that’s exactly what happened.
After Stormy appeared in her car, he listened to Olympia tell her story. When she left, she had hope—and a step-by-step blueprint for getting rid of Nathaniel.
Now, considering Nathaniel’s most recent shenanigans, Olympia knew it was time for her to do more than hope the pesky spirit would simply go away.
It was time to take some action.
First, Olympia set about gathering all the things Stormy told her to get:
Garlic
Salt
Sage, incense, sandalwood, and pine needles
White candles
Energy stones, including crystal quartz, black obsidian, black tourmaline, and black onyx
A gold cross
A St. Michael’s medal
A small hand-held bell
Five to ten yards of black cloth, depending on the number of mirrors she had in her apartment
And a bottle of holy water
“Are you sure I really need all this shit?” Olympia had asked Stormy while they sat in the front seat of Olympia’s car. “We’re talking about one scrawny gay ghost here, not an entire army of the walking dead.”
“Do you want to get rid of the ghost, or don’t you?” Stormy asked.
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