Undying (4 page)

“You were right,” the FBI agent said on the other end of the phone. There was no emotion in her voice.

“Where?”

“Outside a little town called Accomack on the eastern shore of Virginia.”

Macy knew the area. She knew the whole country. She’d been to almost every state in the Union. Driven through most. Running. Always running.

“Maggie?” Fia said after a moment.

“I’m still here.”

“I want you to think about meeting me. There,” she said.

“There?” Macy shook her head. She signaled, glanced over her shoulder and passed an SUV pulling a pop-up camper. She tried not to look at the happy faces of the family inside as she cruised by. “Oh, no. I’m not going there. I don’t want to see them.”

“No. You don’t have to,” Fia said quickly. “It wouldn’t be allowed, anyway. Let me go to the scene, then we could meet. Maybe you could help me out. Help us catch this guy.”

“I can’t help you,” Macy said incredulously. “This was a bad idea. I should never have called you. I’m going to hang up now.”

“No, no. Don’t hang up. Maggie?”

Macy signaled and edged back into the right lane.

“Maggie, listen to me. I don’t know what your connection is to the guy, but I know it’s got to be personal. I know you want me to catch him.”

Macy didn’t say anything.

“If you didn’t want to help catch him, you wouldn’t keep calling me. You wouldn’t keep checking on the cases. You wouldn’t keep making sure we were doing our job.”

“I…I just call because I want him caught. He…he’s a monster.”

“It’s more than that. We’ve got plenty of monsters out there, Maggie. This is personal, somehow, between you and him. You want to help me. You need to.”

Was that true?
Did Macy want to
help
the FBI catch him? The idea was ridiculous. She couldn’t help. What could she do? She was helpless. She had always been helpless when it came to him.

“Maggie?”

“I…I don’t know if I can do it,” Macy said, her voice shaky.

“I think you can.”

Macy gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead. She was going in the right direction. She had been for more than an hour. It was as if she had known, subconsciously, where the murders had taken place. It was as if she had known she would go this time. She could be there in a couple of hours.

“Maggie?”

“I’ll think about it.” The phone beeped in her ear. “Look, my time’s about to run out on this phone. I’m going to have to go. Sorry.”

“Maggie—”

Macy hit the End Call button and tossed the phone on the car seat beside her. She wanted to turn the car around and head back to her cottage.

She didn’t.

Couldn’t.

A
rlan watched Fia set her cell phone on the console between them. He glanced out the window at the scenery flying by. Green grass. Trees. She was driving a good fifteen miles over the speed limit on Delaware Route 1 South. She always drove this car too fast. She’d had the old BMW for years, a six speed. Arlan owned a pickup truck. He didn’t understand Fia’s need for speed. Being immortal, they had forever.

“Weird call,” he commented when she said nothing about the conversation he’d just overheard.

She kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock. They had learned to drive together around 1910. The two of them had spun circles in a cornfield for hours. Fia had laughed, hanging out the open window, letting the wind blow her then short-cropped red hair. It had been a Model T pickup belonging to one of the old guys in town. Arlan wished he still had that Model T. He wished he could see Fia laugh the way she had laughed that day. But they had been young. Seen less. Killed fewer.

“What’s she got to do with this?” He pointed his index finger in the direction of the cell phone.

“I don’t know exactly.”

Arlan watched Fia. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her black Ray-Ban sunglasses. They looked as good on her as they did on Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Better. Very clandestine and
FBIish.
“You don’t know what she’s got to do with the case? Is she an informant?”

She lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “Sort of. It’s an unusual situation.”

She had removed her navy suit jacket and was wearing a tight, silky sleeveless shirt that showed off her muscular shoulders. She was hot, for an FBI agent. Way hotter than Will Smith.

“But she was the one who tipped you off to this case before anyone else did?”

“She called me for the first time about a year ago.” Fia glanced at him, and then back at the road. “She saw me on TV after the beheadings. She asked me to look over the Buried Alive Killings. I didn’t get any further than anyone else in the bureau, but I kept up with the cases. She checks in periodically. Now he’s killed again.”

“How many does this make, if it’s the same perp?”

“Oh, it’s the same one.”

“How do you know? You haven’t been to the scene yet.”

“Just wait until you see them. You won’t be sleeping tonight.”

He glanced out the window again, fighting the shiver that crept up his spine. This was part of his job, seeing the horrendous atrocities humans could commit. Witnessing so that he could justify their deaths. So why didn’t it get any easier? “How many times has he killed?”

“This makes eleven families.”

Arlan was always amazed by how calm and removed she could be from what she did. It came so easily to her, setting aside her emotions. He wished he could be more like her. In a morphed state, the way he usually conducted sept business, he was always emotionally raw. Always on the edge. He felt as if he carried that into his personal life. His niece Kaleigh always said he wore his heart on his sleeve.

“Could he have killed more? Cases not yet connected? It happens with serial killers.”

“I don’t think so,” Fia said slowly. “Maggie would know.”

“How would she know?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know her connection to this guy, but she knows him. Knows what he’s doing, but can’t stop him. It’s a brother, a father, maybe a boyfriend. Women get trapped in the middle of this sort of thing all the time. You know that. Pretty common.”

“Pretty freakin’ weird. Doesn’t that make her an accessory? Shouldn’t you arrest her?”

“I’ve never met her. She uses disposable cell phones to call me. It’s always from a different number and untraceable. Once in a while, I get an e-mail from her, but she somehow manages to hack into other people’s e-mail accounts. She’s made sure I can’t track her down.”

“Sounds like she definitely has something to hide.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “How do you know she’s not helping the killer? And calling you to appease her guilt? Hell, how do you know she isn’t the killer? Sounds guilty as hell to me.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that she’s scared of him. But more than scared.” She glanced at Arlan and then back at the road again. “This is even more complicated than I understand, yet. I just get that feeling. You know?”

“Is there anything about your life that isn’t more complicated than either of us understands?” He kept his tone good-natured.

She smiled, which was what he was hoping for.

“So, how’s the HM?” he asked.

“I hate it when you call him that.” Now she was frowning.

“What?” Arlan opened his arms innocently. “He is, isn’t he?”

“Glen is fine.
We’re
fine.”

He glanced at her. “Pretty quick to throw that detail in.” He made a clicking sound between his teeth. “Doesn’t sound good, Fee. Doesn’t sound good at all. Bloom wearing off the rose? Getting tired of stealing into the kitchen after he’s asleep, waiting on the blood to thaw in the microwave and then having to sneak into the bathroom with it?”

He was just teasing her. They all did it at some point. It was part of the price of living among mortals. Trying to fit in. But the look on her face made him want to take it back. There
was
something wrong. She and her human
were
having problems.

“Can we talk about something else?” she asked.

“Like when you’re going to marry me and have my babies?” It was an old joke with them. Sept members could only marry their own spouses, lifetime after lifetime, and reproduction was impossible. One of God’s blessings.

“Something else,” she said.

“Nice weather we’re having.”

Macy parked her car alongside the road behind an older model BMW and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment. She debated whether or not she should drag out the press badge she kept in her glove compartment. The seven or eight vehicles parked on both sides of the street faced in the same direction.

A loose stone driveway led east off the paved road, through neat rows of maple trees, disappearing over a hill. The Virginia Peninsula was narrow here, and even though she couldn’t see the bay or ocean surrounding the point of land, she could smell it. The family had lived on the bay side, a couple of miles south and west of town. The property had been easy to find. She had followed the emergency vehicles that she knew would be racing up and down the highways and byways for the next twenty-four hours. A case like this took time to process.

She could see only the rooftop of the family’s farmhouse from the road. And the red and blue flashing lights of the emergency vehicles…

In the end, she decided to tuck her press badge into the pocket of her jean jacket. There were TV and radio news vans parked on the road, but she doubted they were being permitted to actually gain access. The police never let the news hounds too close to a scene this grim. There was too great a chance some fool looking for a viewer-ratings increase would run a clip no one should have to see.

Macy left her keys in the ignition, her backpack with her wallet on the floor of the car. There was no ID in it. Nothing to steal. No credit cards and little money. She kept her credit cards and various IDs locked in the trunk in the wheel well. Mostly she operated in cash, but sometimes prepaid credit cards that could now be purchased in mini-marts. She did take the new cell phone she’d pried out of its package while stopped at a gas station. She didn’t know yet if she would call Fia. She wouldn’t know what she was going to do until she reached the farmhouse down the hill.

Macy followed the driveway, passing several state and local cops. She kept her head down and strode purposely, as if she belonged there. She had been amazed, over the years, as to how well the tactic worked for her.

The pebbles under the soles of her shoes were rough. Bumpy. The early evening air was warm, and even above the sound of the rocks crunching underfoot, she could hear frogs croaking. Insects chirping. The air smelled of the Chesapeake Bay, and of the faintest scent of honeysuckle, which grew along the woods line to the north of the property. As she walked around the bend in the driveway, her feet feeling leaden, the farmhouse came into view. It was white clapboard, two story, typical for the turn of the century in the area. She’d done a piece on a similar house in Maryland the year before. The lawn had recently been mowed and clusters of bright orange flowers bloomed at the posts of the split rail fence that encircled the yard. Daylilies.

A serene setting for a mass murder.

“T
his might take a little finagling,” Fia warned Arlan. They approached a strip of crime scene tape stretched between two peach trees and the three Virginia State Police troopers guarding it. “I’m not authorized to be here.”

“Never stopped you before,” Arlan pointed out under his breath.

“You either,” she murmured. Her hand brushed his sleeve. “Be careful.”

It wasn’t necessary for either of them to telepath the other. Fia knew what he was going to do. At times like this, their relationship seemed to go deeper even than those they held with their friends and relatives in the sept. Which was
precisely
why Arlan thought they were perfect for each other.

He walked away from her, hands in his jean pockets. It wasn’t hard to blend in among so many people: uniformed police, detectives in suits, emergency medical technicians, media personnel, neighbors, relatives, probably extended family members.

The parking area next to the white farmhouse was utter chaos. The Buried Alive Killer, as the news media was calling him, had struck again. Everyone was talking. There were tears. Sobs of disbelief. The emergency responders were taking care to keep their voices low and unemotional, but not always accomplishing their goal. A young male EMT stood on the far side of the yellow tape, hands pressed to his knees, head hanging, as an older woman in an identical uniform leaned over him, talking quietly. Coaxing him.

News teams with cameras and microphones had set up camp in the driveway between a red minivan and a Chevy pickup. A police officer was trying to move them away from the vehicles, which Arlan guessed might have belonged to the family. Who knew what kind of evidence could have been left behind?

Arlan’s gaze strayed to the soccer ball decal in the rear of the van window. It read “Go Shore Cats.” A kids’ local soccer team.

He walked away, a lump rising in his throat. He could hear Fia talking to one of the state troopers, although he couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. FBI agents out of Baltimore would be here soon, if they weren’t already on the scene. This was really out of Fia’s jurisdiction and it wasn’t her case, but unlike in TV dramas, in real life, officers of the law often found common ground, overlooking the rules at times like these.

Arlan heard a soft mew and looked up at the back porch. A tabby cat wearing a blue collar with a bell hanging from it sat on the edge, observing the commotion of the backyard. A living witness to the murders?

Arlan walked over and sat down on the top step of the stairs leading to the porch. Someone had recently added a new coat of white paint. He could smell its freshness.

Arlan reached out to the cat and it curled under his hand. He stroked its back. Scratched its ears.
Can you tell me what happened here, little buddy?
Arlan crooned telepathically.
You know anything about this mess?

The cat looked up with big green eyes. Blinked. He seemed to know Arlan was trying to communicate with him, but the message was coming through scrambled. It was difficult for Arlan to telepath to animals from a human state.

See anything?
Arlan pressed.
Anything you want to tell me?

Arlan sensed a heavy sadness.

“Poor boy,” Arlan soothed, stroking the cat’s back.

The cat arched beneath his hand, tail stiff in the air, and then leaped from the porch and took off across the grass. He went through a flower bed of purple impatiens, around a kid’s red plastic wheelbarrow, and past a peach tree. He flew unhindered under the line of yellow tape. On the far side of the tape, he stopped and turned back.

Arlan glanced around. No one was paying attention to the cat, of course. Not the police, not the blonde with the microphone from WBOC, not even Fia.

The cat waited.

Arlan knew an invitation when he saw one.

He glanced in the direction of the crowd being herded to the end of the driveway away from the family vehicles, then at Fia and the state troopers still in dialogue. He doubted anyone would notice him disappear around the rear of the house. Even less attention was given to the second cat that appeared a moment later.

Arlan walked lightly over the freshly mowed grass, lifting his kitty paws high. He preferred big cat morphs over the common house cat variety, but a panther would have appeared out of place here, even in this uproar.

Helicopter blades cut through the air as Arlan ran, tail in the air like a flagpole, under the police tape barricade. One of Fia’s newfound friends backed into an open area in the grass and waved away the helicopter.

Arlan glanced ahead. The tabby was waiting for him, keeping one eye suspiciously on the helicopter. He didn’t seem as surprised by Arlan’s morph as he was by the news cam in the sky. The cat took off and Arlan trotted after him.

The tabby was barely more than a teenager. Arlan sensed that he was scared. The cat didn’t know what was going on, but he knew it was bad. The bell on his collar tinkled as he ran through the grass.

They circumnavigated two ambulances and a white van marked “COUNTY CORONER” in big block letters. The tabby couldn’t read, didn’t know what the van was, but Arlan did. Seeing those vehicles always bothered him. He couldn’t imagine how a person could do that job day in day out—investigating deaths, performing autopsies.

Of course, the coroner probably wouldn’t have understood Arlan’s job any better. Vampires righting the wrongs of the world by selective execution were highly misunderstood. Pretty weird in its own way.

Where are we going?
Arlan conveyed to the cat as they ran through the legs of several uniformed police officers.

Bad,
the tabby said.
Bad.

They raced across a patch of grass toward a huddle of men and women under a picturesque silver maple tree that was so perfectly shaped that it appeared as if it had been drawn by a kid’s crayon.

Arlan noticed at once that the humans standing under the tree, speaking in hushed voices, were all wearing latex gloves. He felt the hair rise along his spine. His tail bristled. The air was suddenly thick with the smell of dead flesh.

Human flesh.

A part of Arlan wanted to turn around and run back to the freshly painted white porch. That part of him wanted to sniff around the outbuildings behind the farmhouse and look for a tasty mole or mouse. He wanted to morph into an ostrich and stick his head in the sand…metaphorically speaking. He didn’t do ostriches.

But Fia needed his opinion. Fia needed
him
and he could never tell her no. Not ever. So he followed his tabby friend, who had slowed to a trot. They went around the men and women in gloves talking in hushed tones.

Fia had tried to warn him to prepare himself before seeing the victims. Ambulances had arrived to take the bodies away, but the dead had not yet been moved. Photos and evidence were still being taken by the crime scene investigative team.

Arlan thought he was prepared as he walked under the tree, a step behind his feline friend. He had seen plenty of dead people before. Made quite a few of his own.

He was not prepared.

For a moment, Arlan just stood there, blinking his slanted kitty eyes. The scene that stretched out before him under the pictorial tree appeared to be something out of a bad slasher movie. It didn’t seem real. Their faces were waxen. Their open eyes gelatinous. Their arms artificially limblike.

The tabby gave a strangled meow and Arlan took a stumbling. Not in fear. He wasn’t afraid of dead people. He was far more afraid of the living ones. But he was so shocked, so taken aback with surprise. He thought he had seen the worst of mankind.

He apparently had not.

Five heads.

Five sets of arms stretched over the heads.

Dead humans.

All buried to their chins.

Buried alive, Fia had warned. Then suffocated, one by one.

The closer Macy drew to the farmhouse, the worse she felt. He wasn’t here, but he had
been
here. She could sense the remnants of his presence. She could almost smell him on the warm, early evening air. He was taunting her.

Macy thought she would be scared to come here today. She always was. She always went to the crime scenes, sometimes hours later, or days or weeks, but she always went as if pulled by an invisible thread. And she was always scared. Something was different tonight.

The closer she moved to the congested crowd of TV crews, cops, medical personnel, and everyday rubbernecks, the more tied in knots she became. But there was something about this feeling that was different than before. Different than all the other times she had approached one of his gruesome vistas, in their aftermath. As she walked, contemplating her state, Macy found herself surprised to realize this wasn’t fear that balled in the pit of her stomach and threatened to constrict her airway. It wasn’t terror that made her mouth go dry and her ears hum. It was anger, pure and simple.

Anger at him. At herself.

As she met the edge of the mingling crowd, and felt their fear, she became conscious of the idea that she was tired of being fearful. She was tired of running. Tired of hiding. Tired of renting cottages, buying disposable cell phone minutes, and tired of living out of the trunk of her car. She was angry with him for doing this to her and even angrier with herself for letting him.

The emotion that washed over her was so overwhelming that she halted for a moment to catch her breath. No one seemed to notice her. It was as if she was invisible.

She stared up at the helicopter that circled high above the farmhouse and then sped north, as if to escape the horror Macy knew waited somewhere beyond the lines of yellow crime scene tape.

How had she let her life become this? How had she let him do this to her? She’d have been better off letting him kill her years ago.

Was that the point? Was he letting her live to torture her this way?

Macy skirted the crowd, avoiding the cameras and microphones. She didn’t like pictures taken of herself; you never knew where they might pop up later.

Macy didn’t know what she was looking for here. She certainly didn’t want to see the dead family. She guessed it wasn’t
what
she was looking for here, but whom.

She spotted her, on the far side of the yellow tape strung between peach trees, walking between two guys in suits. Macy only caught her profile, but she knew it was her.

Special Agent Fia Kahill was prettier in person than she had been on TV and in the news magazines and newspaper photos. She was hauntingly beautiful, with dark red hair that fell silky over her shoulders, lily pale skin, and dark, luminous eyes. And she was tall. At least six inches taller than Macy. She had to be six feet. An Amazon.

Why hadn’t the camera angles reflected that?

Macy, like most of America, had been glued to the TV news programs when the beheadings began to take place in the sleepy little seashore town on the Delaware coast. But after the first murder, the story had seemed to take a back burner to other news: the fighting in the Middle East, a passenger train wreck in Spokane, an earthquake in South America. Then suddenly, at summer’s end, the story broke again. All at once, Special Agent Fia Kahill’s face was everywhere. She was making statements and doing interviews on
Larry King Live.
She was a celebrity. She solved the mystery of the beheading murders, and two young men were currently serving multiple consecutive life sentences for their crimes. Agent Kahill was a hero.

Macy had read the news articles. She had listened to Fia’s statement on
Fox News Live
. It wasn’t the beheadings that had fascinated Macy, or the fact that the clever female agent had been able to solve the mystery. It was something much more basic about Fia that had intrigued Macy. There was something about the agent that set her apart from others. Something that made her different. Macy had seen it reflected in her dark, incandescent eyes.

Macy slipped her hand into her coat pocket and wandered away from the crowd. There was a quaint back porch that smelled as if it had been recently painted. She sat down on the steps leading up to the porch and dialed the phone number.

She watched as Fia responded to the vibration in her pocket. Special Agent Kahill was too professional to leave her phone on ring at a crime scene.

From across the lawn, through the branches and leaves of the peach trees, Macy saw Fia glance at her phone in her palm, note the incoming call number, then speak to one of the FBI agents in suits. She stopped, letting the men continue walking. Fia couldn’t have known the number because the cell was new, but Macy knew Fia knew it was her.

“Special Agent Kahill.”

Macy continued to watch her. “Hey,” she said, suddenly feeling almost shy. What was she doing calling her, right here where he had been? “It’s me.”

“Hey, me.” Fia spoke lightly. “You thought about what I said?”

“Thinking about it.” Macy watched her turn and look in the direction of the two agents walking away. They had to be going to the actual burial site, beyond the lean-to barn.