The Forbidden Read online

  But her friendship had won out. Kevin had wanted this role so badly, and had been so enthusiastic that she be on the project, too.

  “The mansion!” she said in reply to his question. “I’m seeing shades of all kinds of things. Think Hitchcock, or the spookiest horror house you’ve ever been in. I heard poor old Mr. Christy was a loner to the end. He didn’t want people in his house. No nurse—and certainly no assisted living—for him. They found him, dead, just sitting in his chair, staring at the hearth.”

  “Who found him? Not the family, right?”

  “From what I’ve read? It was someone with the wildlife commission who had come out to ask about testing on the island. I think Cara and Gary Holstein are upstate—the Monroe area. Julian Bennett lives in Baton Rouge and Kenneth Richard is from Texas. Beaumont, I believe.”

  Avalon shivered. She was saddened to think of the old gentleman dying alone in his chair.

  With no one knowing. He’d been such a strange recluse.

  He’d probably just been a lonely old man. But she was afraid of seeing his spirit.

  “So sad,” Kevin muttered.

  “And creepy. But you’re right. Sad. Still, he lived as he wanted. I wonder if he left the property to all three of his closest—distant—heirs, hoping one might buy the others out.”

  “They all seem fun. Cara is a pretty little thing, isn’t she? Skinny and kind of like a tiny terrier, but nice enough. And Julian’s a good-looking dude with that dark red hair and his amber eyes.”

  Avalon raised her eyebrows, amused. “And Kenneth Richard?”

  “Okay, a little cuddly and round, balding, but he has been friendly and enthusiastic, too.”

  “They have made it nice to be here,” Avalon said. Smiling at him, she added, “And working with old friends is pretty cool, too, though we have managed to do that a lot.”

  “Hmm, all our old friends? Are you thinking of taking off with the detective instead of the vampire?” Kevin teased. “That would give Boris a fluttering heart—he so loves his script!”

  She grinned. Their friend Leo Gonzales, playing the detective, was a prime example of what people usually referred to as tall, dark and handsome. He was also just a nice guy. He had never been a prima donna, and she knew, even if his star rose sky-high, he never would be. He preferred theater to film, but never minded working wherever, or doing whatever, in order to make a living at his craft.

  “Hey, taking off with the detective would be preferable to being killed by him,” Avalon said lightly.

  “Have you read the whole script?”

  “I have. I’m a goner.”

  “Well, I can ask Boris if—”

  “No! Thanks. There are tons of local projects now. I’ve got a callback for that new TV series that’s due to film soon. I love the character. She’s kick-ass. Way tougher than I am, but, apparently, I have the look they want.”

  He smiled and nodded. “You look great,” he said. “Considering we were all out on Bourbon Street last night.”

  “I left after that drink we all had together. My favorite music is often on Magazine Street or Frenchman Street—not that they don’t have great bands on Bourbon. But I was tired. I knew it would be a long day today.”

  “I didn’t even say good-night.”

  “That’s because you were chatting with that cute guy from New Jersey at Pat O’Brien’s!”

  “Okay, so, yeah.” He frowned. “I just don’t see it, though.”

  “Don’t see what?”

  “Cindy not showing up. No matter how late she was out. She is usually so professional.”

  “She probably overslept.”

  “She’d still be up by now.”

  “I’m sure she’s got a reason—and she’ll make it up to Boris. She’ll have an explanation. I’ll admit I’m happy Lauren worked today.”

  “Well, anyway,” Kevin said, pausing to sweep his arm around to indicate all of the cemetery, “I’ve brought you to my office here for a reason.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just wanted to thank you, thank you, thank you!” Kevin said excitedly. “This part is going to mean so much for me.”

  “You’re perfect for it. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Boris wanted you, too,” Kevin told her. “I’m pretty sure we were a package deal.”

  They had wandered more deeply into the old place. It really was so hauntingly pretty. Angels wept. Obelisks rose to the sky. Elegant tombs crouched in the lingering sunlight.

  Looking ahead, Avalon paused. There was someone else in the cemetery. Playing a joke, or perhaps trying to surprise Boris, or something.

  She looked back. She could see Boris, Terry, Leo and Brad were looking at a monitor, reviewing some of the camerawork. “Are they filming a backup scene of what we just shot?” she asked Kevin.

  “No way. They got dozens of angles on everything. Why?”

  “Then...who is that? What’s going on?”

  Ahead of them, slightly to the left of one of the grand family tombs, was a sarcophagus tomb, just like the one she had been lying on.

  She blinked. Was it a ghost, playing a trick? Enjoying the moviemaking, and being dramatic?

  No...not a ghost. Flesh and blood.

  An actress was there, stretched out upon the tomb just as Avalon had been on the other.

  Long white gown, dark hair...the palest flesh.

  Curious, drawn, but feeling a sense of dread, Avalon moved toward the tomb. A thought weighed in her mind: had Lauren Carlson outdone herself again?

  The woman on the tomb was stunning and terrifying.

  No, Lauren had left.

  Avalon began to run.

  She reached the tomb, and the woman lying there upon it.

  Flesh and blood...

  Pinpricks in the skin at the throat.

  The woman wasn’t just as pale as alabaster death...she was dead.

  Cindy West had an excuse for not being on set that morning.

  She was dead.

  Avalon began to scream.

  * * *

  They just had to be filming a movie.

  The corpse could have so easily been a part of it—she was laid out beautifully.

  Finley Stirling stood a slight distance away, watching as the medical examiner did his preliminary work, shaking his head as he looked at the corpse, then looking up at Finley next to Detective Ryder Stapleton.

  Christy Island had no police force of its own. It was privately owned, and while other mainland facilities were closer, there had never been any crimes committed on the little island—so many years before, it had been put under the jurisprudence of the Orleans Parish Police Department.

  The commissioner had called Ryder, who was with the NOPD. Ryder had called Adam Harrison at the FBI; he knew Adam had team members in the vicinity and the case was strange enough for Adam’s Krewe of Hunters unit. Fin figured Ryder had asked specifically for one of his agents because the crime was macabre.

  When Fin had received the assignment from Adam Harrison that morning, he’d learned Ryder thought his being called in on a murder an hour to the south and west of NOLA made no sense, either. But he’d been made lead in the investigation of the murder on the island, and that was that.

  Fin knew Detective Stapleton by reputation: he’d worked alongside the Krewe on the recent “Axeman’s Protégé” case. Ryder was a good guy—the kind of person who became a cop to help people and not for any kind of power trip. That he cared about his work showed; he was in his midthirties, just a bit older than Fin, but today he looked tired.

  A murder in a cemetery. A corpse lain out like the bride of Frankenstein—or, in this case, the bride of Dracula.

  The sun was falling when they arrived. And since the medical examiner had made it just ahead of them, they’d headed straight to th
e victim.

  The Christy heirs and the actors and crew of the movie—The Two Faces of the Vampire—were rounded up in the grand foyer and great room of the Christy mansion, a house that looked like something out of a B horror movie without the help of a set designer.

  Fin had known of the place, though he’d never been out to the island. Every school kid in Southern Louisiana knew about the pirate, Jean Lafitte, and his base on Barataria Island.

  Christy Island wasn’t far from Barataria Island, and Fin had often traveled the bayous and waterways around the area, having grown up in Houma, an hour’s drive from the city of New Orleans. Kids told stories about it, especially because the last Christy had been considered a strange bird, a hermit who preferred his own company to any other and hadn’t even met the heirs to whom he was leaving his estate.

  Authorities hadn’t been called until the afternoon and while they’d gotten here in record time, the day was fading. The sky was spectacular, as shades of red, mauve, pink and gold shot across the sky, casting down strange rays of light that seemed to add a gilding to the scene.

  Dr. Conrad Houseman had been bending over the corpse; he stood, looked around and shook his head. He was around fifty, Fin thought, experienced and serious.

  He turned to look at Fin and Ryder.

  “Sad,” he muttered.

  “Extremely,” Fin agreed. He knew the young woman had been part of the crew, and well-liked by the cast and her coworkers.

  “This is preliminary,” Houseman said, “but I believe she died sometime between two and four this morning. She wasn’t killed here, but she was brought here almost immediately.” He sighed. “See the puncture wounds? The killer managed to get those perfectly arranged on the jugular, bled her out...and then cleaned her up.”

  “You mean...she’s missing all her blood?” Ryder asked.

  Houseman shrugged. “Most of it, I’m going to warrant. She has only slight lividity, suggesting she doesn’t have much blood in her. That color isn’t makeup—that’s her color...without much blood. What lividity there is suggests she was laid out on this tomb soon after death.” He hesitated, appearing confused, and shrugged again. “They’re making a movie here. I thought that directors shot at all hours. No one saw her until this afternoon?”

  “Two of the actors were just walking through the cemetery,” Ryder told him. “And they came upon her. The earliest call time for this morning was 7:00 a.m. and the owners aren’t living here—they rented it all out to the movie company.”

  “Ah. So no one is on the island through the night?” Houseman asked.

  “We haven’t questioned the cast and crew yet,” Ryder told him. “But the heirs hate the place—they’re making all the legal arrangements to sell it and split the profits.”

  “Right, of course. Sorry. I just... I worked in New York City for twenty-plus years before coming down here and...still, I’ve never seen anything like this. Worse, I guess, but...”

  “But not like this,” Ryder said, finishing for him.

  “I’ll take her in now. This is as far as I can go here,” Houseman said. “Go figure—they make a vampire movie, so someone has to get carried away. Well, it’s an island. Maybe that will help you boys find her killer, though the good Lord knows, you have enough people with easy access to this place.”

  He walked away from the corpse, leaving Fin and Ryder.

  Ryder shook his head. “The Axeman, and now this. I realize your team usually works serial killers or those crossing state lines—”

  “We come when we’re asked for help,” Fin assured him.

  “Yeah. And thank you for that. I’ve worked with Agents Tiger and Broussard before, but I appreciate any help I can get. This is...” He broke off, looking back at the corpse. “Not someone angry, killing someone for something they did. Not for greed, not for jealousy. Not in my opinion.”

  “Someone organized. This was planned out,” Fin said. He was relatively new to the FBI, and to the Krewe, but he’d done his courses on profiling at the Academy, and he knew when to trust his gut.

  “So it’s got to be someone involved with the film.”

  “Yes, we’re looking at them, the heirs to the estate, and caterers or anyone else they’ve had out here lately. Then again, I was in these waters in our little pirogue often enough when I was a kid—most people living in the area know about the island. Mr. Christy never asked anyone out here—I think he saw reps from the electronic company once fifteen years ago. But we’re near Barataria Island, so it’s a traveled area. People know about the cemetery and the house. They love to tell stories about old man Christy, and most kids are convinced the place is haunted. But the thing is...it had to be someone who could get close to Christy Island.”

  “They mentioned in their 911 call they’d all been out on Bourbon Street last night,” Ryder said.

  “She could have gotten involved with someone on Bourbon Street, but the chances of her running into a homicidal stranger who knew her and the island are slim.”

  Ryder nodded. He was still standing by the victim, as if someone needed to watch over her until she was gone.

  She did look, even in death, sweet and innocent and so vulnerable.

  Dr. Houseman returned with his assistants and nodded to the two of them, as if he understood why they remained.

  “Let’s get to the house,” Fin said.

  “Right.”

  They walked through a field of tombs, all of them either single small tombs above the ground, or larger mausoleum structures that housed many dead.

  The cemetery, though overgrown, was beautiful. The tombs weren’t in rows as they were at the St. Louis cemeteries or even Lafayette Cemetery. They were scattered. There were benches among them, foliage here and there, including small trees.

  There were statues—typical angels, cherubs and more. Some were of human beings, some were of pets.

  Menacing gargoyles stared down from the roofs of a few tombs. Others bore heralds atop them, and still others were ornately designed with carved lettering that broadcast a family name.

  “How are so many people—sorry, dead people—here on a private island?” Ryder said as they walked.

  Fin shrugged. “I believe the family first claimed the property right when the Spanish took control of the area—that was 1762. I don’t know exact dates, but I know the original Christy and his heirs into the 1850s owned numerous plantations and had many slaves and then servants. The family never segregated in their cemetery, so you have anyone and everyone of every color and just about every religion intermingled here. They also allowed friends from the mainland to erect family mausoleums, which is why you see so many.”

  “Weird,” Ryder said.

  You don’t know the half of it, Fin thought.

  But he kept silent. Ryder wouldn’t understand that some of the dead in the cemetery had lingered—and that they just might be able to help.

  The mansion stood before them at last, right out of a Gothic tale. While built sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century, it was now a strange combination of architectural features.

  Steps led to a grand porch—now decaying with chipped and grimed paint—and then to a front door with a Gothic arch. A small mudroom opened to a foyer, and the foyer opened to a massive parlor or entry, complete with a giant hearth. A fraying Persian rug lay before the hearth, and around it were numerous chairs and settees, easily changed about for small or large groups. The walls were covered with paintings of illustrious Christy family patriarchs from days long gone.

  And the place was filled with officers, and cast and crew members.

  “Where do we begin?” Ryder said.

  “With the two who found her,” Fin said.

  “Over there—pick your poison. Beautiful actor or beautiful actress?” Ryder nodded toward the group at the hearth; two people were seated together on one of
the settees, surrounded by the others.

  Many in the group had tearstained faces and seemed to be asking their own questions of the seated pair and one another.

  Before Fin could say it didn’t matter, they were approached by the uniformed officer who appeared to be in charge. He nodded to Ryder and introduced himself to Fin as Sergeant Tim Ferrer. He was a solid man, early fifties, with a perpetually grim expression. He tilted his head toward the crowd of film crew.

  “The two who came upon the body—Avalon Morgan and Kevin Dunlevy—are right there. He plays the lead vampire, and she plays his bride.” The sergeant didn’t look impressed. “The director is over there—Boris Koslov. The dead woman is Cindy West. She was head or lead or whatever on the makeup team. The others are...well, as you can see, a few are still in costume and makeup. Camera personnel seems to have gathered but a lot of extras and today’s key girl on makeup were gone before we could get here.”

  “That’s okay—we’ll just need a list of everyone involved,” Fin told him.

  “I made them all stay until you two came.”

  “And we’ll let them all go as quickly as possible,” Ryder assured him.

  “We did interview everyone,” Ferrer said. “I divided up the group between four officers, so we’ll have our notes.”

  “That’s great,” Fin acknowledged. As he spoke, he saw the lead actress was looking at him.

  She was dressed like the corpse. She even had little red puncture marks at her throat. Makeup, he assumed. The killer hadn’t just slain a woman and left her displayed, he had done his best to mimic a scene from the movie—a scene filmed that day, just before the discovery.

  She started to rise, awkward and shaky, and yet stunning and ethereal in her costume and makeup, hair as dark as the coming night, and her eyes so blue he could see their color from his distance away from her.

  She was looking at him as if...

  Almost as if she knew him.

  He didn’t know her.

  He would have never forgotten her. “I’ll take Miss Morgan,” he told Ryder, and he nodded his thanks to Sergeant Ferrer as he stepped toward the woman. At her side, the man rose, as well, quickly steadying her.