The Evil Inside (Krewe of Hunters) Read online

  “You were never anywhere near him,” Sam mused.

  “Had you ever threatened David Yates?” Jamie asked gently.

  Malachi looked at Jamie with such confusion that Jamie might have been the one considered to be mad. “Me? Threaten him? Never. Dr. Jamie, sir, look at me. And look at David Yates. He could rip me to shreds in a minute. And it’s not like I don’t know how to take a beating, and I know, God help me, that you turn the other cheek, but…no. No. I never threatened David Yates.”

  “Was he acting?” Sam asked. The boys would have all been young teenagers at the time, all about fourteen. Still very impressionable. If they heard talk around town about Malachi’s family, they might believe what they heard.

  “No, sir. I don’t believe he was acting. He almost broke his own nose. And he was bawling. Tough guys like David aren’t supposed to cry, I don’t think,” Malachi said. He paused, looking at the guitar again, forgetting Sam and Jamie for a minute. “I cried. I cried so hard it hurt. But crying doesn’t ease the pain when you lose somebody. It’s just something that happens, and you can’t really stop it.”

  “It’s okay, Malachi,” Jamie said. “President Lincoln was known to cry. He couldn’t show tears to the country, but he cried when he lost his children, and he cried when he knew how many men were dying in the war. Men do cry.”

  Malachi nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said softly.

  Sam knew that he had to find out more about David Yates, but he had been threatened, and though he wasn’t afraid of threats, he wasn’t going to lose a case over his own mistakes.

  Jenna.

  He thought grimly that he was really going to have to depend on her.

  He looked at Jamie. It was time that they headed back.

  They rose. Jamie gave Malachi a warm hug, promising him that they’d return.

  Malachi shook Sam’s hand.

  They could hear him playing the guitar even as the door closed behind them.

  “Well?” Jamie asked.

  “Let’s get back to Salem,” Sam told him. “Have you talked to Jenna?”

  “No. Do you want me to call her?”

  Sam hesitated, surprised that he was afraid of sounding eager. “We’re headed back. We can see if she wants to meet us somewhere for dinner.”

  Jamie pulled out his cell and dialed. Sam waited.

  “She’s not answering,” he said.

  “Oh, well, we can call again on the way,” Sam said. He didn’t know why, but the missed call made him anxious.

  And he didn’t know that he was driving far too fast until Jamie said, “Salem has been there hundreds of years—I think it will wait for us. And Massachusetts, as you should know, can be fierce on speeding tickets.”

  “Try Jenna again,” Sam said, easing off on the gas pedal.

  He thought that, when she didn’t answer a second time, even Jamie looked concerned.

  He decided to screw the thought of a speeding ticket.

  Hitting the pedestrian area again, Jenna met insanity.

  A group was coming from the wine bar, having imbibed quite a bit, and they were in a good mood as they tried to entice her to join them. Since one was in a clown outfit, she tried to escape by being equally jocular while assuring them she had to meet someone.

  Escaping, she hurried around and up the hill toward the cemetery.

  She looked at her phone and realized she had missed a call. Jamie. He’d call back; they were probably heading home.

  Dusk was starting to fall. Tourists were leaving and the gate was due to be locked. She passed the graves, and tried not to note the air of history that hung there, that whisper of darkness that seemed to carry the shadows of the deceased. It wouldn’t be long before they came to close the gates, but she wandered into the cemetery and walked along the graves, aware of those around her, and respecting them with her silence. She noted the graves of little children, and she felt the pain of long-gone parents, laying their tiny babes to rest.

  She walked along the stone wall to the rear of the cemetery and was startled to see a man in Puritan apparel in front of her, his features grim.

  “The devil! The horned devil—he is real, and he is coming for you!” he warned her.

  She blinked, not sure if she was seeing the past or the present, the image had become so very real and solid.

  And then she turned.

  In the place where a huge oak had grown right through the stones of the deceased, she saw something. Shadow.

  Not shadow. It was far darker than the hazy figures of the dead.

  It was real.

  A lithe figure in a cape and cowl, wearing the mask of the horned god, stood in the cemetery.

  It saw her as she saw it.

  Like the grim reaper, it wielded a scythe.

  And it started striding swiftly across the graves and the dead to reach her.

  Jenna looked around—it was just dusk, for God’s sake! There were still people about.

  They just weren’t in the graveyard.

  She could hear laughter from the street below. There were still plenty of people around; she didn’t think that they had closed the doors to the wax museum, or the museum or shops across from it—there would be people leaving those businesses, people casually walking the streets.

  This was insane. The creature coming toward her with a scythe couldn’t be serious. It had to be someone she knew, trying to give her a scare, or a college kid….

  But it wasn’t. And she knew it. This was the same figure she had seen walking in the pedestrian mall, the same figure that in her visions brutally murdered Peter Andres and then Earnest Covington.

  As it came toward her, it suddenly began to swing the scythe, backward and forward, low along the ground, just as if it were mowing down long grass or stalks of corn.

  The scythe made a whipping sound through the air, louder and louder the closer it came.

  8

  When they neared Jamie’s house, Sam had Jamie put a call through to Jenna again. Still no answer.

  Jamie swore, an unusual and colorful event. “By all the damnable banshees of the night! Why isn’t that girl answering her phone?”

  “I’ll let you out. I’ll keep looking,” Sam said. “Call me if she’s in the house.”

  Jamie got out of the car. “Aye, and if she’s not, I’ll start around the common and the blocks around the Hawthorne.”

  Sam let Jamie out and tried cruising around on Church Street. There was no sign of her, but Essex Street was blocked off to everything but pedestrian traffic. As he tried to maneuver the streets, the going got difficult. Horrific murders might have recently taken place in Salem, but to the tourists flocking the area, the situation was in hand. The killer had been caught.

  And, of course, they were tourists. They wouldn’t be likely targets of a maniac who’d only killed locals in his own realm thus far. Just as the mob had never really threatened the average Joe on the streets of Chicago or New York, visitors could allow themselves to feel safe.

  Indians, pirates, crones, vampires and princesses walked into the streets against the lights, and he had to drive slowly and carefully.

  His phone rang: Jamie.

  “She’s not at the house.”

  “All right. I’m parking. I can crawl faster than I can move in the car.”

  “She wouldn’t have left the historic area.”

  “Is she armed?” Sam asked Jamie.

  “I…don’t know,” Jamie said.

  “All right. We’ll keep up.”

  He swore to himself—far less colorfully than Jamie. He parked at the next opening. A tow-away zone. Screw the car.

  He exited and headed for Essex Street, wishing he’d made her give him an agenda, his heart pumping harder with every passing second.

  Jenna figured she couldn’t jump over the wall—at the rear of the cemetery it was a huge drop down to the street below.

  It occurred to her that she could confront her attacker. But the light from the streets flashin
g off the honed blade convinced her that she didn’t have what was needed for such a thing.

  She should have carried her gun. After the team had been made official—proving themselves in New Orleans and learning that they could be a viable force together—they’d gone through the regular route of Federal training. She was good with a gun. She’d been careful here, not carrying it, because she didn’t want the police complaining to her superiors. Plus she wasn’t entirely used to having it on her yet.

  Not such a good plan, despite the finest of intentions….

  The creature kept coming.

  Keeping her eye on it, Jenna began a snakelike movement toward her right and the back of the museum that bordered the graveyard, using the cemetery’s overgrown trees as a protection against the creature.

  True panic gripped her when she heard the scythe being swung through the air, high this time. She felt it whizz by her, and then she heard a strange, hollow sound as it smacked against a headstone.

  Riddled with relief, she paused.

  Plastic. The damned thing was plastic!

  She turned and stood her ground, staring at the horned god for a minute. The figure was close, and she could now see that she was taller than the creature by a good two or three inches.

  She smiled.

  It looked at her, and turned to run.

  Jenna wasn’t about to let this fool go. She sprinted after it, glad for the training she’d been compelled to complete, it having taught her how to run well over uneven surfaces like the jagged line of standing and broken gravestones within the cemetery.

  The masked figure turned back once and saw that she was almost upon it.

  Jenna heard a yelp of panic.

  They were nearly back to the middle of the cemetery when she made a dive and tackled the creature.

  “Ouch! Stop it! You’re hurting me!”

  Jenna eased off and pulled the horned god mask off over his head. She looked down in the hazy light, and saw the least likely of assailants.

  It was a kid. She estimated the boy to be thirteen or fourteen, a young teenager. He had a freckled face, and sandy red hair, a spattering of acne and a look of sheer terror in his brown eyes.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Jenna demanded.

  “Aw, come on, I was playing with you. A little scare for Halloween!”

  Jenna stood and reached down a hand. The kid stood, and looked quickly to the side as if he was ready to bolt again.

  “Oh, no, no, no! Who are you, what are you doing and who set you up to do this?” she demanded.

  He made the slightest turn; she gripped his wrist in an iron vise.

  “Ow!” the kid wailed.

  “You’re not going anywhere. I’m getting the police.”

  A look of petrified alarm came to his face. “No, please! Please—please, please don’t do that.”

  “Then you’d better start talking.”

  She fumbled in her pocket for her phone. It wasn’t there. Cursing, she tried not to let on that it was going to be difficult to carry out her threat.

  The graveyard was empty now except for the two of them—and the hazy shadows that gathered around, anxious for excitement in their endless days and nights. Jenna kept her attention focused on the boy.

  “You know who I am, don’t you?” she asked.

  He looked away.

  “Don’t you?” she demanded, her fingers tightening again around his wrist.

  “Yeah,” he said dully. “You’re that whacked-out FBI lady who talks to ghosts—and who wants to let a crazy killer out on the streets!”

  She gritted her teeth. “No one is going to let a crazy killer out on the streets. But you, young man, are an idiot. You’re right. I am FBI. What if I’d been armed? I might have taken a shot at you!”

  “It’s plastic!” he protested.

  “You meant to scare me. If you’d scared me enough, plastic or no, I wouldn’t have known, and I might have shot you. It’s a damned good imitation of the real thing.”

  He was silent, his cheeks red. “Look, I’m sorry!” he pleaded.

  “Who are you?” She’d thought at first that it might be the bitter David Yates, or his comrade in accusation, Joshua Abbott. But this kid was too young to be either. Those two had to be seventeen now.

  “My mom will probably kill me,” he murmured.

  “Your name and your mom’s name, or I call the police. And I want to know why you’re doing this.”

  “Marty—Martin Keller. And…I just did it because I hear them talking. All the adults in town are talking about you and that Mr. Hall. They’re all angry. They say the cops have a killer and Mr. Hall is such a hotshot attorney he wants to prove that a crazy kid is innocent just because he can. He doesn’t care if they let Malachi out on the streets, because he lives in Boston. And the rest of us will all be hacked up in our beds.”

  Jenna took a deep breath. “What made you choose this costume?” she asked, somewhat calmer.

  He lowered his head. “We had it at the school for years. Every year, they do a play—about the witchcraft trials, you know? And about the city now, and how we all have to learn to like each other, whether we’re Jewish or witches or whatever. Nobody uses it after the first of the year. Nobody cares about it. I was going to put it back, honest, just as soon as Halloween is over.”

  “And that’s it? The costume was convenient?”

  “It is a scary costume. Please—scary, huh?”

  “What else?” Jenna asked.

  He looked away again.

  She shook his arm. “I can and will call the police!” she warned. Well, she would—when she found her phone.

  He let out a long sigh of surrender and aggravation. “Okay, I wanted to be a big shot. I wanted to tell the kids at school that I’d made you pass out or something.”

  “How long have you been chasing me?”

  He looked puzzled. “What do you mean—how long?”

  “How many days?”

  His frown of confusion deepened. “Just…just now. I saw when you left that shop—I followed you after that, and barely no one was in the cemetery, and…I just meant to scare you and disappear, that’s it, I swear it!”

  “How long have you had the costume?”

  He shook his head. “I just slipped it out of the drama room today, honest. I told the kids what I was going to do. You can ask—they just finished their like once-a-year cleanup thing yesterday. I wouldn’t have taken it before then. I’da been caught.”

  She stared at him long and hard. He was starting to shake.

  She was glad that he was afraid of her. He might be a couple of inches shorter, but she wondered how she’d make out in a brawl with him. He was an adolescent starting to gain broad shoulders and a frame.

  “Are you on the football team?” she asked him.

  “Uh, yeah—junior varsity.”

  “So you were trying to impress the seniors, huh?” He squirmed.

  “Like David Yates and Joshua Abbott.”

  “Hey, that kid hurt David Yates. He really hurt him!” Marty protested.

  “And you’d be big man on the field if you scared the FBI agent, huh?”

  He lowered his head. “Please don’t get me in trouble. Please.”

  “You are in trouble. Give me the costume. Get out of it.”

  “Here? In the cemetery?”

  “You bet. Now. It’s not getting out of my sight. It’s a cape and cowl, kid. You’ve got to have something on beneath it.”

  “Boxers and a T-shirt.”

  “Then you’re going home in boxers and a T-shirt.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.

  “Find out if what you’re telling me is the truth. And I’m going to have this costume inspected.”

  “For what?”

  “For blood, Marty, for blood,” she said.

  “But—”

  “If it’s clean, I’ll see that it gets back where it’s supposed to be
without anyone knowing. And if I find out that you’ve told me the truth, then this whole event will be our little secret.

  “But, Marty, if this was ever used to hurt anyone, there won’t be anything I can do about telling the truth.”

  “I didn’t hurt anyone!” he protested, sliding out of the cape and handing it to her. At least, he was wearing decent boxers. On a beach, he might have looked ready for a swim.

  “Jenna!”

  She whirled around at the sound of her name. Sam’s voice. And there was a hint of panic in it, of relief—and of anger.

  Marty was going to use it as a chance to bolt. With her free hand, she caught his wrist again.

  Sam leaped the little fence from the street side of the cemetery and came striding in.

  “What the hell…?”

  He looked as if he wanted to pull her into his arms.

  And shake her.

  He eyed her hold on Marty, the costume in her hands.

  “Marty wanted to scare me,” she said.

  Sam seemed to tower over the boy. His shoulders were far broader, and he just had that look of Sam—authoritative and something like a well-tailored and groomed bulldozer. “I’m sorry!”

  She thought that Marty would cry any minute.

  “We’ll call the police,” Sam said, reaching for his phone.

  “No,” Jenna said softly. “We’ve already been through this. Marty and I have an agreement. I’m going to get this costume to our lab, and find out if there is anything on it. Marty has apologized to me. He just borrowed the costume from the drama department today because he’s heard how much we’re loathed for what we’re doing, Sam. Seems that most people believe that Malachi is guilty, and they want us to stop doing what we’re doing.”

  Sam stared at Marty. “Why this costume?”