The Night Is Watching (12 page)

She stopped where Sage was, almost on top of the dressing table. Because the ghost was insistent, she went down on her knees and inspected the floor.

At first, she saw nothing. Just old wood, so weathered that the planks seemed to blend into one another. Looking more closely, she realized that beneath the dressing table, there was something that wasn’t quite right. She ran her fingers over the floor and under the table. What had appeared to be a dark spot shielded by the costume rack and the dressing table was a metal ring.

Made of tarnished bronze, it had probably been long hidden by the position of the rack and the dressing table. The latter had no doubt stood in place for decades; the feet had worn small indentations in the floor. She gave the table a shove, moving it just a couple of inches but revealing the brass ring more clearly—and an area that, when carefully traced, proved
not
to be a stretch of wood planking.

Jane looked up at the ghost, who nodded gravely, and then back down at the loop. She slid her fingers over the flooring around it and saw that it had to be a knob or a pull and that it opened a trapdoor of some kind. She tugged at the metal ring but couldn’t get it to give.

As she worked at it, she heard a noise from the bar area of the theater. She wasn’t sure why it disturbed her; there were a number of other people in the building. The scraping sound had an odd, surreptitious quality. As she looked up at the ghost, the apparition of Sage McCormick faded away.

Jane didn’t like being where she was. She hadn’t dressed—and she hadn’t brought her gun.

She held still for several more minutes and listened. Nothing. Then she was sure she heard a faint noise—as if something was being dragged across the floor.

Jane crept silently from the dressing room and tiptoed back to the wings, across the stage and down the side aisle until she reached the point where the red velvet curtains were drawn back. She stayed there, glad that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the pale glow of the emergency lights. She used the curtain as a shield and looked out to the dining room. No one was there.

Had she imagined it? All of it? The ghost who’d come to her room and the sound from the dining area?

No, she’d heard
something.

Certain that whoever or whatever it was had gone, she stepped out. She moved quietly through the room, telling herself that perhaps someone had merely needed a glass of water. Or someone who couldn’t sleep had come down to get a snack from the refrigerator behind the bar. She still felt uneasy. But a quick run through the bar and the dining room showed her that she was right. No one was there—not then, at any rate.

The kitchen was immediately behind the bar. There was a large oven in the center, two stoves on either side, two large refrigerators, a freezer and two workstations. All were clean and shining, waiting for the next day’s business.

She left the kitchen and returned to the bar area. As she did, she heard someone fitting a key into the lock on the outer door.

The housekeeping staff was here.

She turned and raced up the stairs, slipping into her room just as the outer door opened.

She leaned against her own door, breathing hard.

Then she heard another door closing somewhere down the hallway.

Whose?

She couldn’t tell. She went back to bed, hoping for a few more hours of sleep.

Sage did not come again that night. Jane closed her eyes and wondered what lay beneath the trapdoor in the dressing room. Tomorrow, she would tell Sloan what had happened. They would get Henri’s permission to see what was beneath the floor.

It took a while for her to sleep, but at last she did.

She woke a few hours later and saw that it was 8:00 a.m. It wasn’t as though she was on a schedule; she now had a car. She could drive herself down to the station. She supposed, with a sense of wry humor, that she didn’t want to look like a slacker. She wanted Sheriff Sloan Trent’s respect.
And she wanted him to like her. She liked him. She more than liked him.
She felt a sweet rush of fever when she was near him, the urge to reach over and stroke his hair, run her fingers down his cheek, explore the movement of his muscles....

It had been years since she’d felt so attracted to a man. And now was not the time to feel this way. She loved her work. And she was here for just a short while....

Crazy. This was crazy. Even time itself seemed crazy. Maybe that was it; she’d barely arrived and so much had already happened. Not only that, so much had happened between the two of them....

She walked into the bathroom to start off with a shower. She stepped in, turning the water up to a nice hot level. She leaned against the tile, looking down—and stared incredulously.

Something red was mingling with the water and going down the drain.

Blood.

And it was coming from her feet.

* * *

Sloan rode Roo out to the replica Apache village along the trail.

Crime-scene tape still roped off the tepee where Jay Berman had been found. Sloan sank down and inspected the site; the crime-scene unit had been thorough. They were good at what they did, Sloan knew, so he didn’t know what he could find. There certainly weren’t going to be any useful prints, so he was really hoping, more than anything else, that he might figure out where Berman had been before his murder.

He rose, thinking about their present location and what was nearby. He wasn’t even sure how the victim—and his killer—had gotten out here.

They’d probably ridden. He made a mental note to ask about Ray Berman’s clothing, although the report would contain any of the information they needed on trace evidence. But if they
had
ridden here, had they come together?

Why come here at all?

There was nothing at the Apache village that could relate to the past; it had been created as an educational site. Yes, it had been created by Apaches, but that was only a few years ago. Before that, it had been a patch of sand with a few rocks and scrub and cacti.

He walked out of the tepee. Someone had dug up a body from the past—and murdered Berman. Why? Why leave the old body to be seen and Berman back in the tepee? To torment the police? Or someone else?

He stood outside looking around. Then he mounted Roo and rode around the village, studying his surroundings.

Not far back on the trail was the sealed entrance to an old silver mine. No one even knew where the one vein of gold had been found, and the silver had long ago run out.

Berman’s killing, the nature of it, was something you might expect in a big city, where mob, drug and gang violence existed.

He’d been from the city. One of the biggest cities in the world.

Sloan rode back to the sealed entrance to the silver mine. Dismounting, he moved to the entrance. Years ago, to prevent the unwary from going inside to explore and dying in a cave-in, the entrance had been dynamited shut.

Walking over, he inspected it. At first, all the rocks in front seemed to be as solidly in place as ever. He continued to poke at them and test them.

At the far right of the rock pile, he found a loose boulder. He shifted it—and it rolled free.

He stared into the darkness, wondering if the rock had just worked its way loose with time or if someone had been using the cavern for illicit purposes.

But what?

Silver and gold were part of the past. Lily survived on tourism now. Ranches dotted the area, but everyone needed the tourists.

As he stood there, his phone rang. It was Jane.

He felt a rush of heat as he heard her voice.

“Hey, Sheriff, you coming into the office anytime soon?”

“Yeah, I’m coming in. I asked Betty to let you know I’d be late.”

“You’re out at the crime scene?”

“Yes.”

“Anything?”

“Not directly.” He hesitated. “Why?”

“I might have found something, but I’d rather not pursue it until I talk to you.”

“Where are you? What did you find?”

“I’m at the station. And maybe nothing. I’ll explain when I see you. Meanwhile, I thought I’d work while I waited.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

He wedged the boulder back where it had been. He would need light to go farther into the old tunnel. He was rather fond of living, so he wasn’t exploring until he had one of his deputies with him—and until his whole crew knew where he was and what he was doing.

Before mounting up, he looked around again. Someone was running around the desert with a gun and executing people. Well, only one so far, but that could be just the beginning...

He wasn’t letting anyone take him that way.

Right now, he was damned certain that he was alone.

He rode home and took the car into the station, anxious now to see Jane and learn what she had discovered.

No, he realized.

He was anxious to see her.

* * *

By the time Sloan arrived, Jane had placed half of her clay “muscle” strips over the wooden depth-marker pegs she’d attached to the skull. When she heard him come in, she covered the skull—remembering that it had belonged to his great-great grandmother. He grimaced.

“I’m a sheriff. I can take it,” he told her. But he didn’t wait for her to move the cloth. “What did you find?” he asked.

She got up to close the door he’d left open.

“I saw Sage last night,” she told him.

He looked at her and arched his brows slowly. She wondered if he thought she might have imagined a sighting—because last night they’d spoken about the dead they saw.

“I woke up because she was standing over me.”

“That’s what the supposed ‘ghost expedition’ guy said when he ran out,” Sloan told her.

His voice was level. She still couldn’t tell if he was skeptical.

“She led me out of the room. It was late, in between the bar closing and the day staff coming in,” Jane said.

He was watching her with a deep frown but didn’t say anything so she went on. “I followed her down to the theater and into one of the dressing rooms. She wanted me to see that there’s a trapdoor in the flooring.”

“And what was under the trapdoor?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t budge it, and then...then I left because I thought I heard someone in the bar.”

“Who was it?”

“There was no one there, and then I just ran back up to the bedroom because the staff was coming in.”

“So, you want me to ask Henri Coque about opening the hatch in the dressing room,” he said.

“Yes. I mean, I shouldn’t even know it’s there. I’m a guest. I have no business being in that part of the theater at all.”

He nodded. “I guess I need a reason to prowl around the dressing rooms,” he said.

“There’s a little more....”

“What’s that?”

“When I woke up and showered...there was blood on my feet.”

“You cut yourself?” he asked in a thick voice.

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t have any cuts—not even a scratch. So, somewhere I walked, there was...blood. And when I heard those sounds, it was like something being dragged. But I didn’t see anything at all, so I don’t know if I imagined it. And I was in the kitchen, so it could’ve been blood from meat they used or...” She stopped, shaking her head again in disgust. “I’m not even sure it
was
blood. It had rinsed down the drain before I realized I’d tracked it in.”

“All right. Let me call Newsome and check in with my deputies, then we’ll head back to the theater,” he said.

He left, and she figured she had about fifteen minutes so she could get another few strips placed on the skull. She went back to work and was concentrating so fully that she didn’t hear him when he returned. He must have been watching her for a while.

“Muscles make the face,” she murmured. “And soft tissue. The mouth is such a major part of a person’s expression, but working with eyes and nose can give us a good idea of that person’s appearance and demeanor. A skull can tell you about a person’s health and development, too. The reconstruction done on the skull of Robert the Bruce clearly showed the leprosy he suffered before his death. And the skull of King Midas revealed that he’d had his head bound as a child to create a longer vault—something considered noble or beautiful at the time.” She dusted her hands on her work jacket and covered the skull again. She’d been rambling on about her work.

But, to her surprise, he didn’t refer to anything she’d said.

“What you did was really dangerous,” he told her instead.

“Pardon?”

“Last night. You took off in the middle of the night to follow a ghost. You were barefoot, so I’m assuming you were still in your pajamas. And you didn’t bring your Glock.”

She’d never mentioned that she carried a Glock, which she did—a Glock 23. A .40 caliber handgun with a magazine that allowed her seventeen bullets. He’d assumed it either because the Glock 23 was a common weapon among law enforcement personnel—or he hadn’t assumed it at all; he’d seen it beneath her jacket. But he’d homed right in on what she’d done the night before.

“Sloan, there are a number of people in that building.”

“And they were sound asleep. If they weren’t, they should have been. The cast
seems
to be a decent group of people—but someone in there probably dug up that skull somewhere...and used a mummified dead man to point the way to a recent murder victim.”

“I won’t leave my room again without my weapon,” she promised him.

He turned and left the room. She quickly threw on her coat and hurried into the kitchen to wash her hands.

As he drove, he was thoughtful. “So, you were in the shower, and you noticed blood going down the drain.”

She nodded. “I thought I’d stepped on something and cut myself and hadn’t realized it. But the blood wasn’t mine.” She glanced at him. “I suspect traces of it could be found. And the housekeeper is afraid of my room. I told her not to worry about it, just to bring me clean towels now and then. So, I must have tracked it into bed and...”

“And it’ll be on the sheets,” Sloan finished.

They neared town and he braked, sliding to the side of the road, surprising her. She looked into the yard where they’d stopped. A handsome young man in his late teens was helping an older woman into a house with groceries.