Sacred Evil (Krewe of Hunters) Read online

  She was surprised; she tried not to show it. “I can finish up here with Jake’s help,” Will said. “And I’m sure the police consider the interview far more important than our work down here with cameras—always a long shot,” he said evenly.

  “Whitney, yes, go on with Detective Crosby,” Jackson said. “We’ll finish here.”

  She nodded, and was surprised at how glad she was to leave the foundation of the old building, and the miasma that seemed to loom there.

  Or maybe she was just glad to join Jude again.

  It didn’t matter; Jackson had assigned her to go.

  Tonight, Angus Avery was simply annoyed. His two young stars, Bobby Walden and Sherry Blanco, were nervous, anxious—and bored. Missy Everett and Jane Deaver, the girls who had been prostitute extras and had last been with Virginia Rockford, were scared, huddled together on a couch. They seemed so nervous, in fact, that they didn’t even seem excited to be in the company of greatness—Angus Avery, the director, and Walden and Blanco, the two stars of the movie O’Leary’s. Which was good; they were unaware that the two spoiled celebrities seemed to think nothing of them at all. The security guard, Samuel Vintner, sat by himself, rolling his hat and looking awkward in the plush lounge of the five-star hotel that housed Avery.

  He was sure that all of them would have bolted when he was on his way over if it weren’t for the two members of Sayer’s team who had escorted them to the lounge and held sentinel at the door until Jude had arrived with Whitney.

  “Detective, I’m happy to help with this investigation, but I’m a busy man. I’m the director, you know. The producers are under the gun to come in under budget. I’m naturally horrified that young women are being murdered, but you’re a cop and I’m a filmmaker. I need to be making my film. We’re already going to go over by several days and several million dollars,” Avery complained. He looked toward the two men at the door and added in an aggravated tone, “My costume department has been ravaged, our wardrobe mistress is in tears daily and I met with you immediately to tell you what I could.”

  “I just want to get a real picture of what went on that day,” Jude said. He smiled pleasantly. “You’re quite something, Mr. Avery. Impressive, the way you look into realism.”

  Avery frowned. “Thank you.”

  “Not only did you look up information at the library—studying rare ledgers—but you brought along your lead players.”

  Sherry gasped. “How did you know that?”

  They hadn’t actually known just which document the trio had studied, but now they did.

  “You signed in, right?” Jude asked.

  “Of course,” Avery said, waving a hand in the air. “It’s important that we give the film the edge of realism. And I’m a tough taskmaster as a director. It’s not who you are all the time, it’s also what you want in a situation. And if you understand your situation, you can be passionate about it. The film is about a time in history. I wanted Bobby and Sherry to understand history.”

  “It was—great,” Sherry said.

  “Ditto. I enjoyed the library,” Bobby said.

  “The fact that we went to the library makes us suspects?” Avery inquired, frowning. “If an interest in special documents makes us suspect, then you’re going to have a lot of suspects.”

  “True,” Jude said easily. He changed his line of questioning. “Agent Tremont has worked in film. She’ll understand anything you have to say when I may not.”

  “Yes, and frankly we’re intrigued by the set, and the information you gave us previously, Mr. Avery,” Whitney said. She offered him an easy smile. He seemed somewhat mollified.

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you. The movie is a major production, you know. And we were filming that day, before breaking down to set up at the next location. I should have never chosen that location, never! It might have been the so-called Darby Building that was recently brought down, but it was once the House of Spiritualism, and I don’t like to be a superstitious man, but I honestly feel that there is something simply evil there.”

  “I didn’t feel a thing,” Bobby muttered. “Sorry, Mr. Avery, I just didn’t.”

  “I didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have been hanging around that place once it got late!” Sherry Blanco protested.

  “It was creepy,” Jane Deaver said. “I hated being there. And we tried to get Ginger to leave with us. We tried!” Huge tears formed in her eyes.

  “Did you see anyone lurking around the set? Did you feel as if you were being watched? Was anything out of the ordinary?” Jude asked.

  Missy said, “No.”

  “Yes. No. I mean, it was just creepy!” Jane said. “When night came, the lighting was so low and there were shadows everywhere, and the shadows seemed to move.”

  “Shadows move when the object casting them moves,” Bobby Walden said quietly. “There were people all around—until late.” He looked at Whitney. “You know, the wardrobe folks, the crew. Breakdown calls for a lot of workers, and the camera crews were wrapping up. Production assistants were wrapping up…and then it’s the end of the day. People get the hell out of there.”

  “Who was left at the end?” Jude asked.

  “Sammy was still there,” Missy said, pointing at the retired cop. “Sammy was with us on the sidewalk, just outside the chain-link fence, until the cab came.”

  Samuel Vintner, ex-cop, going to ruin, with gin blossoms on his cheekbones and a paunch, grew red and shook his grizzled head. “I’d have been there for Virginia Rockford, too, but she—sorry, don’t mean to speak ill of the dead—but she just bitched at me. I even offered her a ride home. She didn’t want me around her, so I went to make sure that the crew was out and that the gates were all locked again.”

  “With the cheap padlocks,” Whitney murmured.

  “Hey—that’s the city, not us!” Sammy protested. He looked at Jude. “I swear, yeah, I may have been one of the last people to see her alive, but I tried my best to make sure she was safe, and when she was on location, she was safe. I offered her a ride. She told me no, she wouldn’t drive with me if I were the last creep on earth. She was in a huff, angry about something. She left, headed straight to walk north on Broadway and when she was locked out, and I went to the guard on the other side of the block—the city fellow—and told him I was leaving. The place was empty. I’d seen to that!”

  “Where did you go from the site, Mr. Vintner?” Jude asked.

  “Home, where my wife warmed up my dinner. My sister-in-law—who hates me, by the way—was there. They’ll both tell you that I was home thirty minutes after the set closed for the day. Miss Rockford was angry—and, sorry, it’s true, she wasn’t the nicest person in the world—and she left in kind of a huff, treating me like I was a gnat in her way.”

  “I didn’t even speak with Ms. Rockford!” Sherry Blanco said. She was an attractive woman, extremely pretty, blue-eyed and blonde and slim as a reed. Her words betrayed little empathy, despite the public service announcement she had done.

  “Not once? Not once during the shoot?” Jude asked.

  “No. I wasn’t in the scene she was in. I was on set that day, but I left by three-thirty. Look, I’m sorry, truly sorry for this woman. But bad things happen in this city every day, and I can’t let them all tear me apart. I left the set early. Detective, you can’t possibly suspect me!” she said.

  He smiled, not agreeing that it would be impossible. “Ms. Blanco, we were hoping that you might have met Miss Rockford, and perhaps exchanged a few words with her. Or that you might have seen someone perhaps watching her on the set?”

  “Well, I didn’t speak with her.” She waved a hand in the air. “Detective,” she said, fluttering her lashes at him, “I’m afraid that you just don’t understand a movie set, and the logistics that go with it all. There might have been another major player in the movie that I didn’t meet. It depends on your call times and scenes, and who is in the scenes. You just don’t understand.”

  “But I do,”
Whitney said sweetly.

  Sherry Blanco stared at Whitney, irritated. “Look! I didn’t speak with her! I didn’t see anyone hanging around her. Bobby talked to her, though. She and Bobby were in a steamy scene together, one of the last filmed that day.”

  “I was nice to her,” Bobby said, startled, and edging away from his costar. “We were working together. Of course I talked to her!”

  “She was waiting for you!” Missy Everett said, suddenly bolting to her feet as if she’d erupted from the couch. “You had to know it—I knew it!”

  “What?” Bobby gasped.

  “She was waiting for you! She thought that you were going to call her to hang out with you for a while when the filming was done,” Missy said.

  “That’s right,” Jane Deaver agreed. “When we tried to get her to leave, she said that she was going to hang out with you.”

  Bobby reddened to the shade of a tomato. “I—I talked to her. I didn’t make a date with her or anything.”

  “Well, she sure thought that you did,” Jane said, staring at him accusingly.

  Jane caught her friend by the shoulders and drew her back to the sofa, whispering something.

  Bobby suddenly seemed distraught. “Look, I’m sorry if she believed that. And, I hate to say it, but if she planned on spending time with me, it’s not because she was bowled over by me—she probably thought it might get her attention from the right people.”

  “Jane, you know that’s true!” Missy said softly.

  Jude was pretty sure it was a warning that if she wanted to work again, she needed to calm down about Bobby Walden.

  Missy said, “Look, we liked Ginger, and we weren’t happy about leaving her, but she insisted. We didn’t see anyone—Sammy walked us to the street and we got into a cab together. I didn’t see anyone watching Ginger in any weird way during the day, except, of course, the actors, who were supposed to be sizing up the available prostitutes. And they all turned it on and off. Detective, you know that we really have spoken with other cops—they were all over us and everyone else who had been at the site, down to the limo drivers.”

  Jude smiled. “That’s their job, you know,” he told her. “They check and verify everything. They even know that a cabdriver named Abdel Mohammed picked you two up and dropped you at the B-Way Café up in Midtown.”

  Missy and Jane looked at each other with wide eyes. “I didn’t know his name, did you?” Missy asked Jane.

  “Well, when there are two of us, I don’t usually go getting chummy with the cabdriver!” Jane said.

  “Excuse me!” Angus Avery said. He tapped his watch. “Time. Time is money. Directors who come in way above budget don’t get hired again.”

  “Mr. Avery!” Whitney said, her eyes golden and luminescent. “I don’t think that you have to worry. We’ll be sure that the media know just how helpful you’ve been. That’s going to be tremendously important when your work is judged. You can be the man who helped the women of New York City.”

  “The whores of New York City,” Sherry Blanco muttered.

  They all turned to look at her. “I do read the papers, you know!”

  “Yeah, she reads People and US Weekly,” Bobby muttered.

  “Bobby, you’re just being cruel. And I’m not being stupid or mean, just truthful. This has been all over the news. They identified the girl from the river—in fact, I heard that one of the educational channels is going to do a sob-story thing on her called The Girl from the River! What was her name? Sarah whatever. She couldn’t get real work, so she started stripping. I saw Virginia Rockford on that set, and she may not have hung up a shingle, but she was for sale. And now that poor woman this morning…Melody Tatum. High-priced escort! Well, in truth, they were all whores. That’s who the Ripper went after, right?” She looked at Jude hopefully.

  Jude felt tension searing him like a blade; Whitney set a hand on his arm and squeezed lightly.

  “Ms. Blanco,” Jude said, “no one really knows for certain who the killer will target next, and it doesn’t matter if anyone knows those who were killed, or is like those who were killed. With this killer, he seems to be moved by his perception of the victim, and God alone knows how he might perceive anyone out there. Especially a high-profile actress.”

  Whitney jabbed him in the elbow as Sherry Blanco’s face whitened. No, he didn’t want her to walk the streets shaking; he did want her to give a damn that women were dead.

  “The point is,” he continued, “they were brutally murdered. And we need any piece of information, no matter how trivial, that anyone can offer to help us catch him.”

  Sherry leaned forward then, pale, and looking somewhat contrite. “Honest to God, Detective, I just never spoke with Virginia Rockford during the day. But that site was creepy.”

  “Really creepy when it turned dark,” Missy said. “The lights aren’t all that great down there, you know. I mean, the real lights, the streetlights, not the set lights. If anyone moved on the street, it cast giant shadows over the stage flats that were up. We had all kinds of facades going during the day, but they were mostly just painted wood, put up and pulled down for the shots.”

  “We will be using the exterior of Blair House for a number of green-screen shots we took that day,” Angus explained slowly to Jude, his tone indicating that since Jude wasn’t in the film business, he was most probably dense. “That means that we’ll edit the image of Blair House into the action shots.”

  “I think I got it,” Jude said. “We had an eyewitness down in the area when Virginia Rockford was filmed. The eyewitness saw a man in a cloak, or a coat with caped shoulders, on the street.” Inwardly he winced. “He was carrying a medical bag—and wearing a stovepipe hat, or something similar. Was there an extra on the set in that attire that day?” he asked.

  They all looked at each other. “Everyone’s in period costume. The movie is called O’Leary’s and it is about the destitution and dire situations in Lower Manhattan and how it was cleaned up at the end of the nineteenth century,” Bobby said. “But no one had any kind of medical bag, I don’t think,” he said, looking at Angus Avery.

  Avery sighed. “Detective, I just don’t think you understand the scope of what went on that day. Sets went up, and sets came down—that meant hundreds of crew members. We had gangs fighting in the streets. That meant more than a hundred extras. You must know all this—the police have lists of every single person hired that day.”

  “And a number of the extras would have worn that kind of cloak and hat,” Jude said.

  “But I don’t remember that the costumer gave anyone a medical bag—or that anyone in Wardrobe handed any of the extras any kind of medical bag,” Bobby said.

  “I’ve told you, though, that I wished I’d never chosen that location,” Angus said, shaking his head.

  “Why did you choose the location, Mr. Avery?” Whitney asked. “Feeling the way you do about it—I mean, you were the one to tell us about the structure that had been there before the recently demolished building.”

  Avery lifted both his hands and rubbed his fingers together toward the ceiling. “Money! Everything in film is money. We could set up easily, and break down easily, and the city was willing to rent it for a song. If I could only go back…”

  “But the woman found this morning wasn’t on the set and wasn’t in the movie,” Sherry said. “So, Angus, for you to be upset with yourself over the location isn’t at all necessary. You’re not to blame. The killer was out there.” She walked over to the director, and gave him a consoling hug.

  Jude knew that he wasn’t getting anywhere that evening. He stood and told them gravely, “Thank you all for meeting here and speaking with us. The station number and my cell is on my card. Please, if you think of anything that can help us, call. Day or night.”

  “Of course!” Avery said, standing. It almost seemed as if he was shaking Sherry Blanco off as he did so.

  Avery looked around the room. “We’re done here,” he said, wanting the extras, hi
s two stars and Sammy Vintner out—leaving him alone.

  There was an awkward pause as everyone stared at Jude in silence. He nodded, looked at Whitney and turned to head out of the room and to the elevators.

  “Avery wants them all out,” Whitney said.

  “Yes, I got that feeling,” Jude told her.

  “But it seems they all want to talk to one another.”

  “So, we’ll wait and watch them,” Jude said.

  “Where will that get us?”

  “I’m not sure, but let’s see who leaves first.”

  Downstairs, they went to Jude’s car parked on the street. He slid into the driver’s seat and she walked around to the passenger’s side.

  They had barely closed the doors when Samuel Vintner came out and strode in the direction of the subway.

  Not sixty seconds later, Missy and Jane came out together.

  Next, Bobby Walden. Jude picked up his cell phone and pressed a single digit. “Sayer, you’re near the hotel?”

  “Yes, in back of you about a block,” Sayer told him.

  “Bobby Walden is out.”

  “All right. I’m tailing him.”

  Whitney sat quietly at his side. “Bobby Walden?”

  He looked over at her. “His alibi had him home alone. He said his driver picked him up and brought him home, and when the task force queried the car company, the driver verified that he’d brought him straight home. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t go back out. He’s a principal in the film, and the girls said that Virginia Rockford thought she had a hot date with him. I’d just like to make sure that he does go home and stays home tonight.”