Kill Her Again (A Thriller) (31 page)

Their neighborhood adventures. Their days at school. Their favorite teachers. Friends. Enemies. Crushes.

Through it all, however, Anna sensed an undercurrent of both envy and worship in Susan’s words. Jillian was the pretty one, the popular one. Susan, the hanger-on. Yet despite that trace of envy, there was no malice intended. It was clear to Anna that Susan loved her friend.

And as she read, Anna was surprised to find that she remembered some of the events and people Susan wrote about. Only vague glimpses here and there, but enough to fill her with a profound sense of loss.

Jillian had been taken away so young.

What would have happened if she had lived? What kind of life would she have had?

When Anna reached the passages chronicling those terrible moments in the alley and the discovery of Jillian’s body in Foster Park, she had trouble breathing.

Susan’s pain was so raw that all Anna could think about was how this one incident had led to so much heartache. A trail of devastation that could be traced forward to this very moment in time.

She looked across at Pope, still fast asleep. How different would
his
life be, if Susan had never suffered such a blow? Would they still be happily married, raising a beautiful son?

As she continued to read, Anna noticed a change of tone in the narrative. A darkness that had settled into Susan’s words. This was where the passages became less coherent. A rambling screed against Red Cap. Part rant, part analysis, with detailed, but often confusing, commentary on the newspaper clippings and photographs.

She wrote of the failed police investigation. When the Rambler was found abandoned in the parking lot of Big Mountain—the same place from which it had been stolen—the police expanded their investigation to Allenwood, questioning neighbors near the amusement park. But none of them had seen the man young Suzie had described.

He was a phantom. A mystery.

But the police’s failure to find this mystery man didn’t stop Susan. As the years went by, and Susan got older, she spent hours in libraries, sitting behind microfiche machines, searching through decades-old newspaper articles, always looking for the same thing. Always hunting for that symbol of Red Cap’s broken soul:

The gypsy wheel.

From what Anna could decipher, Susan’s take on all of the material she’d gathered was much the same as hers and Pope’s and Worthington’s. The past lives, the chain of killings—all linked by that simple, circular symbol . . .

But then the notebook abruptly ended.

No further conclusions, no new observations, nothing.

A dead end.

Disappointed, Anna looked across at Pope again and thought she knew the reason. This had to have been the moment that Pope had entered Susan’s life. The moment
she
became the center of attention, the focus of his world.

And for many years, she had managed to fake it, to repress her pain and play the loving, devoted wife. When her son was born, their household was undoubtedly filled with joy—

—until Ben started to overshadow Susan, getting most of his father’s attention. Then old insecurities had surfaced, and coupled with the damage Jillian’s death had done to her, Susan’s illness could no longer be contained, morphing into something different now. Something deadly.

This was pure speculation on Anna’s part, of course. A semi-educated guess. But she had a strong feeling she was right.

Unfortunately, none of it brought her any closer to finding Red Cap.

Depressed, she started to close the notebook when she spotted something. Inside the back cover was a small built-in pocket, normally used to store extra paper. Protruding slightly above the fold was the edge of what looked like a photograph.

Anna pulled it out, feeling a slight kick in her gut as she looked at it.

It was a photo of the young gypsy girl, staring solemnly at the camera. She looked about seventeen, with flawless dark skin, curly black hair, and defiant, almost hypnotic eyes. A regal beauty in a long, patterned skirt, and a stark white blouse, a shawl draped over her shoulders.

Chavi.

It was Chavi.

But where, Anna wondered, had Susan gotten this? None of her writings made any reference to it.

Turning the photo over, she read the caption in the upper left hand corner:
Roma Vjestica
by Jonathan O’Keefe.

Just below this was a slightly smudged stamp that read:

POWELL UNIVERSITY HISTORICAL ARCHIVES—DO NOT REMOVE.

Stolen, apparently. Which meant it must have been very important to Susan.

Near the center was a question mark, scribbled in blue ink, and next to this were thirteen letters, written in Susan’s precise handwriting:

Y LMXM WZAIE MXX

Another Caesar cypher.

But this time, Susan had changed the key, and it took Anna a moment to decipher the code. When she was done, it translated to:

M ZALA KNOWS ALL

M Zala. Was this a source that Susan had found but had never bothered to follow up on?

If so, what did he or she know?

Something about Chavi?

Red Cap?

Feeling energized, Anna got to her feet and started pulling on her clothes.

She needed to find a computer.

3
9

I
T TOOK AN
eternity for the motel manager to come out of his office, which wasn’t a surprise at four-thirty in the morning.

Anna stood at the front desk, ringing the bell, when the door behind it finally blew open and a kid who looked as if he were still in high school stepped out, bleary-eyed. His T-shirt read: P2P RULES.

“
What
?” he barked.

She showed him her creds. “I need your help.”

He squinted at her ID, then looked up at her with surprise. “You gotta be kidding me. You’re a fed?”

“That’s the rumor,” Anna said.

“Holy shit.”

Anna moved around the counter. “I don’t see a computer out here. Do you have one inside?”

“Huh?”

“A computer,” she said. “You know that little box with a keyboard and a screen?”

“Yeah, we got one, but what’s this about? We ain’t doing nothing illegal.”

“I need to use it for a while.”

“Why? You working for the RIAA or something? Think I’m downloading music?”

“I don’t care if you’re downloading Warner Brothers’ entire catalog. Just let me in.”

He eyed her defiantly. “You got a warrant?”

Anna had reached the end of her patience. “
Move
,” she said, shoving him aside. She stepped through the office doorway into a cramped, untidy room with a desk, a chair, and an old, beige desktop computer that was about the size of a small car.

Christ.

A fucking dinosaur.

The kid crowded in behind her. “You got no right,” he said. “You need a warrant before you can—”

“Call your congressman,” Anna told him, then took a seat behind the computer. “Does this thing have an Internet connection?”

“Yeah, but it’s dial-up.”

“Wonderful.”

When she touched the mouse, the screen saver disappeared and the monitor came to life, showing a Web page with two drunken college girls exposing their breasts to the camera.

“Nice,” Anna said.

The kid eyed her sheepishly. “That’s the day man’s computer, not mine.”

She gestured. “Do me a favor and close the door on your way out.”

“Huh?”

“Get out,” Anna said.

The kid just stood there, staring at her until his brain finally caught up to the command. Then he turned on his heels and left, closing the door behind him.

S
HE WENT TO
Sentinel first, the bureau’s Web interface for its automatic case-support system. But when she tried to log in to her personal work box, she discovered she’d been locked out.

Royer.

He’d probably spent the day convincing the brass that she was mentally unstable and couldn’t be trusted. The lockout would be temporary, pending an INSD investigation, but that didn’t help Anna much right now.

Next she went to the Powell University Historical Archives Web site and found their search page. Checking the caption on the back of the photograph, she typed in the name
Jonathan O’Keefe
.

The search engine began churning the information, then transferred her to O’Keefe’s bio page, which loaded so slowly that Anna could have taken a couple of bathroom breaks before the page filled the screen.

She hadn’t used dial-up in years and remembered why she hated it. She started reading before the page had fully loaded.

Jonathan O’Keefe was an adventurer and photography pioneer, a young genius, fluent in several languages, who had started traveling the world when he was only sixteen, camera in tow. His collection of photographs was voluminous, much of which was believed to have been lost.

Until recently, Powell had only owned a small sampling of the photographer’s work. But thanks to persistence and a bit of luck, his entire library had been found in the possession of a private collector, whose family generously donated the work to Powell in 2007. The Web site now contained several of O’Keefe’s collections, recently brought online by the Powell Preservation Project.

O’Keefe had died at a fairly young age, twenty-six, in 1882. He’d fallen victim, some claimed, to. . .

—Anna felt another small kick to the stomach as she read this—

. . . a gypsy curse.

Place of death was Osijek, Slavonia.

Slavonia, Anna thought. Home of the now-defunct cigarettes.

That single kick turned into a flurry of punches that intensified when O’Keefe’s portrait finally loaded on the page. His face wasn’t familiar at all—

—but his eyes were. Anna would recognize those intense dark eyes anywhere.

They were Daniel Pope’s.

T
HE COLLECTION SHE
was looking for was called
The Nomads of Osijek
. It was O’Keefe’s last work.

Clicking the link, Anna waited the interminably long time it took for the thumbnails to load. The text accompanying them said that O’Keefe had become fascinated by the Zalas, a Croatian gypsy clan, and had traveled with them in their caravan as they moved from town to town, following a traveling carnival troupe. At every stop, the Zalas would pitch their tents and set up fortune-telling booths near the carnival.

It was unusual, it said, for an outsider, a
gadje
, to be allowed such access, but O’Keefe was known for his ability to get people to trust him.

When the thumbnails had loaded, over two hundred in all, Anna studied shot after shot of the gypsy family—an assortment of young and old, some posed, some candid. Standing by campfires, wagons, in front of battered tents, telling fortunes to the locals. There was a haunted quality to many of the photos, as if these people had been trodden upon, and had carried their pain for centuries.

Finding the one she wanted, Anna clicked the thumbnail and watched as a new window opened and a larger version of the photograph from Susan’s notebook slowly loaded.

Roma Vjestica
.

Chavi.

To Anna’s surprise, the accompanying text explained that the word “Vjestica” was Croatian for witch or wizard. And, according to O’Keefe’s biographer, the Zalas were believed by many to be a magical family, with supernatural and psychic powers. This claim, however, was not all that unusual among the Roma people.

Roma Vjestica
.

Gypsy Witch.

Closing the window, Anna searched the thumbnails and found another shot of the girl.

This one was a less formal pose, Chavi showing a hint of a smile. Subsequent shots found that smile widening, the body language loosening, as if Chavi had begun to trust her photographer, to feel comfortable with him—

—just as Anna had become comfortable with Pope.

If Anna was right, that this young girl was another of her past lives, and O’Keefe was one of Pope’s, then they had known each other for over a century. Which would explain why their mutual attraction had been so immediate. Why Pope’s kiss, his touch, seemed so familiar.

Chavi and O’Keefe had been lovers.

Anna went back to the thumbnails, clicking them at random, hoping for that sense of déjà vu, that vague stirring of recognition from one of the faces—the faces of her past. But no memories came.