Krewe of Hunters 3 Sacred Evil (14 page)

She’d liked working with him. They’d begun to…bond, after a fashion.

And now…

“Well, Jackson is just the man who can really add experience to the investigation,” she said briskly.

“We need to finish up here then. I have my own agenda,” Jude said. “There are five from the film I want to interview personally—the two stars, Blanco and Walden, Samuel Vintner and the girls who saw Virginia Rockford last, Missy Everett and Jane Deaver.” Jude paused, looking at Whitney. “I don’t give a damn where the Ripper might have wound up. I’m certain Jonathan Black, Jack the Ripper or whoever the fellow might have been did not arise from the grave to start murdering people!”

“But,” Whitney said, “Jude, we do need to know who researched Jonathan Black and the murders that happened in that age. It is obvious now that someone is repeating them. Checking the library records at NYU and Pierpont might help us find out who.”

Jude took a deep breath, staring at her.

“Yes,” he said. “It does seem apparent now.” Disgusted, he shook his head, and leaned toward her, his tone like solid steel as he said, “One thing, however, is true. Jack is
not
back. There is a killer out there, and I swear, this time, he’s
not
going to become a mystery for the ages. I’m going to find the bastard.”

“C
ome on, clue me in on everything,” Angela said, and walked down the hallway and through the door to the kitchen. There was a little table in the breakfast-nook area. She poured herself a cup of coffee and headed toward it. “I want more of a feel for what’s going on.”

Ellis had made the trip to the airport to collect the rest of the team—and all their equipment. But he left them to settle in with Jude after they stopped by the station to introduce the team around. Whitney wasn’t sure about her own feelings toward Ellis. He always appeared weary and tired. But Jude seemed to believe in him. And if Jude believed in him, he had to be one of the good ones. He was different, though. He didn’t seem to have much of an open mind regarding anything that wasn’t hard evidence. He was a cop who worked by the book. He would be methodical and thorough, she thought.

“Tragic, scary events,” Whitney assured her, but she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked over to join Angela at the table.

“Well, I know that. But, you believe that whatever’s going on calls for our skills set? I was surprised that Jude whisked Jenna away with him to the autopsy, but she might bring out the answers about that death,” Angela said.

As Whitney had suspected, Jude and Jackson had hit it off immediately. They were both no-nonsense and determined, low-key and yet as steadfast and persistent as a pair of bulldozers. When Jude left with the two agents, Jake Mallory paired off with Will Chan to set up the equipment as she had determined it should be.

“The cops seem to be treading water—all we have to go on is the similarity to the Ripper and a possible link to that movie,” Whitney told her.

Angela nodded. “Whatever the reason, I’m glad to be here. The house is quite beautiful, and it’s amazing that it has remained as untouched and pristine as it has all these years, what with the continual progress and rebuilding in a city the size of New York,” she said.

Whitney was glad to see Angela, as she had been glad to see the rest of the team. They had come to a point where they worked wonderfully together; they knew one another, and they were actually something of a family. And, of course, if they were a family of any kind, Angela was the matriarch even if she was in her early thirties. But she’d come from law enforcement, and despite her lovely and fragile blond appearance, she was tough as nails, and wasn’t afraid of her talents dealing with the past—including the dead.

“If I’m reading and understanding all the information correctly, it’s the property next door that is so notorious. And still, Blair House has been here forever. It must have some salacious history somewhere in there!”

“It might all be connected, you know. Jude’s dad was a cop, and he’s an amazing researcher. He has a library you wouldn’t believe. Anyway, he found a copy of a ledger kept at the Pierpont Library—the family took in boarders…among them, Jonathan Black.”

“Interesting,” Angela said. “We’ll need to get to the library and see what we can find out. But Blair House itself doesn’t have a history of terrible violence or the like.”

Whitney shook her head. “Not that I’ve discovered yet.”

“Have you come across the unusual?” Angela asked Whitney.

“Not what we would consider unusual,” Whitney told her. “But…” She thought Angela Hawkins the most intuitive in their group. If there were spirits—or energy—left behind, Angela was the one who could usually sense them first and open her mind to the pain and loss of the past, drawing them out.

They’d all learned quickly to respect one another’s talents. Jackson was still the one to insist they find the flesh-and-blood truth in any situation, and he tended to be quiet when it came to his belief in his own
intuition,
but he respected the opinions, feelings and intuitions of his group.

“Ah! You
do
know. You just doubt yourself,” Angela told her. She shivered. “Though, it’s really strange down here—with that…abyss next door. I can only imagine the night, the darkness, the loneliness… I might imagine a thing or two myself. What did you see?”

Whitney laughed ruefully. “I tried all night, speaking aloud to any ghosts that might be around, and they totally ignored me. But when I woke in the morning, there was a woman looking at me. She never seemed solid—when I blinked, she was gone. She was in late-Victorian attire, and if I had to guess, I’d say she’d been around in the 1890s. So, I might have wanted to see someone so badly that I imagined her, or she was someone who does haunt this house.” She hesitated a minute. “And, I saw a dog—her dog, I imagine.”

“A dog?” Angela sounded curious. “How interesting!”

“We’ve seen animals before,” Whitney reminded her. “Civil War soldiers on horses.”

“I’m not doubting you at all,” Angela assured her. “It’s possible your vision might have died by violence, and that the dog might have died first, trying to protect her.”

“Well, they both disappeared quickly,” Whitney told her.

“Hmm.” Angela ran her fingers through her mane of blond hair thoughtfully. “Sometimes, as we know, ghosts are shy, terrified of the living, or they don’t know how to communicate, even when you’re open to them. When we can get closer and closer to the reason they’ve remained, we can coax them out… I’m going to spend the early part of the afternoon just getting to know the house. Later, maybe before sunset, we should explore the property next to us—en masse, of course.”

“Have
you
felt anything about the house?” Whitney asked her.

“I’m not sure yet, either,” Angela told her. “Places this old always seem to speak to something inside us—give us an inner awe—whether they’re inhabited by spirits that can’t move on or not. They’re filled with history and time. But I can’t say that the local ghosts ran out to meet me,” she said, smiling. “Patience is needed. And, as we’ve all learned, we don’t know why certain people…communicate with other people. Dead or alive,” she added. “Where do you feel we’re going to be as a team? I liked Crosby—very much. And he seemed perfectly willing to have the team on his task force.”

Whitney shrugged. “Relatively accepted, no one smirked at me too visibly at the task force meeting. And you saw how intrigued they all were to meet you at the station house. They’ve had to have seen the press about us being ghost hunters, but our solve rate always has a perfectly rational explanation. Jude wouldn’t believe in a ghost if the entire population of Trinity Cemetery crawled out of their graves to say boo. But he’s a decent guy.”

“Are you still convinced that it all has to do with Jack the Ripper and someone obsessed with him?” Angela asked.

“Angela,” Whitney said, “yes, I’m convinced. There were two pre-Ripper murders—Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman—and those coincide with the Jane Does. And now, Virginia Rockford and Melody Tatum. I was there when the medical examiner gave his preliminary on Melody. I don’t think there’s a doubt that this killer intends to carry out the same streak of murders as Jack the Ripper.”

“Then Jude’s father’s library might help us.”

Angela laughed suddenly. “I just realized—you met the detective’s father. Have you two set a date yet?” she teased. “He’s impressive. His size alone must intimidate the criminals in his world from the onset of any investigation. Quick work.”

“No, no,” Whitney protested. She hoped she wasn’t blushing. If she was, she hoped that her biracial coloring was hiding the fact. “Like I said, Jude’s father is a retired cop. I think Jude often speaks with him about his cases. Anyway, I’m still reading the book, but it was written by a retired cop who was in New York when Carrie Brown, the so-called American victim of Jack the Ripper, was murdered. What’s difficult is that there are no records on the man, Jonathan Black, who this author suspected of the crimes—and of being the Ripper. The only real mention of him seems to be in that ledger. I haven’t had a chance to verify that no other records exist on such a person coming into the country, or living at Blair House, or at the House of Spiritualism. But one theory is that he became so debauched and terrifying that he scared the devil worshippers he lived with, and that they killed and interred him somewhere at the site.”

Angela was thoughtful. “If there’s more information regarding either of the properties to be found on the computer, Jake Mallory can find it,” she said. “And we can get a list at the library—they take names before allowing people to handle rare books.”

“Oh, there’s a tech at the police station Detective Crosby seems to believe in implicitly. Her name is Hannah Mills, and I get the feeling that if he asked for her to be on the task force, she had to be good.”

“I’ll have Jake get down to speak with her. If they combine their efforts, I’m sure we’ll be better off,” Angela said. She glanced out the window at the construction site.

“Jude’s father is pretty good, too, so it seems,” Whitney said.

“The more I think about it…he’s a civilian now…we’ll keep track of his findings, but we can’t really bring him on this,” Angela said.

“Andrew’s not afraid of much,” Whitney said.

“We always take any help—we just need to keep civilians safe, you know?”

“Of course.”

“And I’m sure that Jude is grateful, and that he’s also careful to see that what information he receives from his father is kept under his hat,” Angela said.

“Do you know what Jackson is thinking about the situation?” Whitney asked Angela. She hoped that her team leader would agree with the psychological assessment she had made of the killer at the task force meeting earlier. Jackson had worked with behavioral science units for years, had a firm understanding of psychology—and was extremely familiar with that of killers.

This case had become personal somehow. Maybe because she empathized too much with the victims. Maybe because she had been the first to arrive in New York; Jackson had figured that she knew Lower Manhattan well since she’d gone to NYU, and that she’d make an excellent team representative while the rest of them gathered information and equipment.

She’d never walked the streets as a hooker, she thought dryly, but she had seen a lot of pain and desperation in the streets of her native New Orleans, and she had seen how easy it could be for people to become desperate for the simplest necessities of life.

“The killer is so controlled,” she murmured, shivering suddenly. “Angela, the two Jane Does were killed like Emma Smith and Martha Tabrum—murders that are accepted not as Ripper killings but as precursors to the events, precursors that wound up in the police files of the time. Down to the one being attacked, and dying en route to the hospital—the other was pulled from the river. Assuming that we have someone trying to reenact what happened in Victorian London, he is still willing to take major chances, because the one girl was left alive, though so near death that she couldn’t really help the police. That takes nerve—I mean, killing someone that way was such an incredible risk! I’m worried this killer could go on and on, because there are other victims in the original investigations and old files as well. Today, the cops and experts who study the files seem to agree on the five nineteenth-century victims—but that’s not the point. There were so many other victims who were being investigated at the time. Then, of course, there’s the belief that he came to the States and killed Carrie Brown here. Police records say that Carrie Brown was the only woman butchered like a true Ripper victim, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other murders—or that the Ripper did die in New York if indeed he came here.”

“That’s a lot of killing for someone to reenact,” Angela said.

Whitney nodded, frowning. “There were ‘accidents’ at the site, too, when they were setting up to film the movie. Angus Avery, the director, believes beyond a doubt that there’s something evil about the site. There’s something going on, but, of course, I don’t know what. I do think that once we’ve had a chance to explore the construction area, we’ll…well, we’ll be on to something.”

Angela rose to put her coffee cup in the sink. “No one goes there alone, Whitney.”

Whitney laughed. “Trust me! I have no wish to wander around there alone. Ugh! But I do think that we need to get some cameras going in that area.”

“I agree. Tell Will, and the two of you decide just what equipment you’re going to need and we’ll all be your grunts this evening,” Angela said.

“There is something very different in the contemporary murders,” Whitney said, looking at Angela.

“Yes, this is far more than a century later,” Angela said.

Whitney shook her head gravely. “The Ripper’s second victim was found more than a week after the first. But this man has killed two nights in a row. He’s accelerating.”

“I think we should get to the library,” Angela said.

“Let’s do it,” Whitney agreed.

“Our poor girl was already suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, but she hadn’t been drinking the night she was killed. Stomach contents were well-digested, suggesting that it had been some time since she’d eaten. I don’t believe that the murderer had to have had a medical degree, but he definitely had some knowledge of anatomy—the uterus and its appendages have been removed. The incisions have no hesitation, and are clean. There is no injury to the
cervix uteri
. The rectum has been avoided, while the upper portions of the vagina and two-thirds of the bladder have been taken from the body. They were not discovered on or anywhere near Melody Tatum.” He paused, looking at Jude. “To my knowledge, they have yet to be discovered anywhere.”

Jude shook his head. Dr. Fullbright had been meticulous. Officers had canvassed the entire area. The forensics team had been over the entire alley. Dumpsters had been pulled apart; not an inch had been overlooked.

He heard Fullbright’s voice drone on; it didn’t matter what he was saying. The woman on the autopsy table had been brutally butchered—that much was apparent to the most untrained eye. And Jude knew as well that everything that Fullbright found was going to be consistent with the findings on the body of the Ripper’s second victim, Annie Chapman.