Deadly Harvest (34 page)

“So this is a breakdown of who was at the bar the night Dinah Green disappeared?” Zach asked, after Rowenna had gone upstairs. “Because some of these people saw her and might have information about who she left with?”

“Yeah. We cleared the guy who was drinking with her of anything to do with Mary's disappearance,” Jeremy explained. “And I'll lay you any odds you want that he didn't kill Dinah or any of the other women.” He gave his brother all his reasons for being certain the killer was local.

Zach agreed and started reading the list of names, starting with the locals. There were a lot of names Jeremy didn't recognize, but plenty he did, including Adam Llewellyn, Ginny MacElroy, Eric Rolfe and Daniel Mie.

“Hey!” Zach said, catching his attention. “Joe Brentwood was in there that night.”

“Yeah?”

Zachary squinted at the fax. “He paid for three beers at midnight. There's a note that two other cops were there with him, an Officer O'Reilly and an Officer Macnamara. Celia Preston—there's a note here, says she's seventy-one, lives alone and runs a wiccan shop. If it turns out Llewellyn didn't do it, then you've got a hell of a long list of possibles, including three cops.” Zachary shrugged. “But I have to say, Llewellyn didn't look too sane to me.”

Jeremy took the sheet. “Ginny MacElroy was on the list. That means Nick MacElroy was there, too. Ginny owns the land where we found the first corpse, and either she or the doctor owns the land where we found the remains today.”

“What about Brad?” Zach asked. “What do you want him doing tomorrow?”

Jeremy was thoughtful. “We make him act like a cop. He can call all the out-of-towners on that list, see what he can get from them. We've got to keep him busy or he'll wind up getting himself arrested for harassing the police about Adam.”

“Sounds like a plan. And he may learn something,” Zach said.

Jeremy stood, realizing that he was exhausted. “Make yourself at home. It's bed for me.”

“Yeah. I'm going to go online, see what I can find out about Brisbin's house,” Zach told him. “There's got to be a record somewhere of where it was.”

“Go for it, little brother.”

Jeremy left Zach downstairs and went upstairs to find Rowenna already asleep.

She curled into his arms when he got in bed, and that night, he just held her. And when he fell asleep, he slept like a log.

And so did Rowenna.

 

She had always liked Zach, Rowenna reflected as they drove out toward the MacElroy house. He looked a lot like Jeremy, though where Jeremy had storm-gray eyes, Zach's were more like a Caribbean lagoon, and he had more red in his hair than either of his brothers.

Like Jeremy, Zach liked to escape into music. As a sideline while he'd worked forensics for the Miami PD, he'd invested in several recording studios, so he could produce some of the local acts he found in coffeehouses and bars. He'd decided to quit the force and join his older siblings in their investigation agency when he had been called into a crack house where a father had gotten angry that his baby was crying and decided to put him in the microwave. He had always been friendly and easy to talk to, a complete contrast to Jeremy's original standoffish attitude.

Now she found herself telling him things she hadn't mentioned to Jeremy, because she'd been too afraid of him treating her dreams—and anything else that hinted at the paranormal—with disdain.

Zach listened gravely and without judgment when she told him how she had started dreaming about the cornfields—and the corpses. She even confided about being in the cemetery and her certainty that whoever was guilty had some knowledge of hypnotism or mind control.

“That may be true,” Zach pointed out, “but how could he have controlled your mind when you were in New Orleans?”

“I don't know. Maybe he couldn't have. I don't understand any of it,” she told him.

They drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she asked if he would mind going by her house first, because she wanted to check something on her bookshelf. He agreed, got her permission to use her computer to go online and followed her directions to her place.

She felt cold and sick with worry about Eve. But she wasn't sure what she could do; the police were looking for her everywhere. And Jeremy was at the station, talking to Adam, who kept repeating that he didn't know where she was. A psychiatrist had even been brought in, so she couldn't do anything that wasn't already being done.

Except go to the cemetery. Because she was convinced that the answer somehow lay in the cemetery.

When she walked into her house, she remembered how surprised she had been that the light had been out when she had first returned. Ginny was normally so careful, but apparently she was starting to slip. Then again, she reminded herself dryly, Dr. MacElroy was still on the suspect list.

She went over to her bookcase and started going through it. She owned a book on funerary art, and she wanted to grab it and ask Brad if it was the same book Mary had been reading.

It wasn't there.

She frowned. She wasn't compulsive, but she loved books, and she was careful with them. It should have been there. She went through the whole shelf, looked through the titles again, and still didn't see it. It was gone. On the heels of that realization, she felt deeply uncomfortable. She couldn't imagine that Ginny would have borrowed it.

Which meant that someone else had been in her house.

She hadn't thought about the book in a long time, she reminded herself. Maybe her memory was faulty. Maybe she had loaned the book to someone.

But she knew she hadn't…

She went to find Zach, who looked up at her excitedly. He pointed at the computer screen. “Take a look at this,” he told her. “It's a complete record of Brisbin's speech on the gallows. He claimed that he was Damien, the Devil's servant, and said he would return in the flesh to wreak vengeance on the heirs of his killers when he completed the seven and ruled the world.”

“Damien,” Rowenna breathed. “Like the fortune-teller.”

“I know,” Zach said.

“Adam was reading some pretty creepy stuff, so he could have found this and decided to take the name Damien,” she said and hesitated. “Eve did say that he left the shop for a while that day.”

“But apparently Damien's setup was pretty elaborate,” Zach said. “It would have taken time to pull it together, more time than a guy running a store with his wife would have.”

“True,” she agreed.

“Let's get over to the MacElroys',” Zach said. “I'll call Jeremy and see if anyone's been able to track down the current ownership of Brisbin's land. Something's missing in the online records, so someone's got to go through the actual paperwork. We should know by tonight.”

“Tonight.” Rowenna sighed. “And tomorrow the Harvest Festival starts.”

“Isn't this kind of early?”

“It runs till Thanksgiving. Not that I'm feeling very thankful this year.”

 

Jeremy and Joe sat talking over coffee in a café near the hospital where Adam was undergoing tests while they waited for word on his condition, and for the business card and the substance on it to be analyzed for prints and DNA. Joe sounded disgusted as he told Jeremy, “The organizers and the mayor and everyone involved with the Harvest Festival had a meeting last night, but they say we've got someone in custody and they've already paid for the kiddie rides, ponies, union electricians, yada yada yada, so they're not going to pull the plug. But we'll have every officer we can muster on duty, and all the neighboring departments have offered to send men, too. But if Adam's not our guy and the killer's the master of disguise he seems to be, I don't see how we're going to spot him.

“We're getting FBI help soon,” Joe added glumly. “They'll be sending someone out from the Boston field office as soon as they can spare a man.” Joe looked at him quizzically all of a sudden. “What were you doing way out there yesterday, anyway?”

“Lights.”

“Lights?”

“Ginny MacElroy told me she'd seen lights—like UFOs—out there.”

“Out of the mouths of…well, not exactly babes, huh?” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “I probably would have thought she was just going a little senile and seeing things. I sure as hell wouldn't have raced out there to investigate,” he admitted.

The man looked tired, Jeremy thought. No wonder. He hadn't stopped since all this had begun.

“Joe, the fax you sent me last night, the one of everyone who was in the bar the night Dinah Green disappeared—your name and two of your men's names were on it.”

“Yeah, but none of us ever noticed her.”

“But you sent me your name.”

“I sent you
every
name. Hell, so
I'm
a suspect now?”

Jeremy lowered his head, trying to hide his grin. “Well, you
are
a local.”

“Touché. You'd have disappointed me if you hadn't been honest.”

The two of them sat in gloomy silence for a few minutes, and then Jeremy asked, “So none of your men has seen any sign of Eve Llewellyn?”

“No,” Joe said. “Adam swears he never saw her, doesn't know where she is. Says he went to see Rowenna at the History Museum, then started back to the store. He doesn't remember anything else until he found himself sitting in the cemetery. That's his story. He's like a mass of jelly. Terrified that he's the killer, but he keeps swearing that he would never in a million years hurt his wife, that he doesn't believe he'd hurt anyone. But like I said, the fact that we have him in custody has the festival committee convinced that it's safe to go on.”

“You don't think its Adam, do you?” Jeremy asked him.

“Hell if I think I know anything at this point. This used to be a nice town that had gotten past its sad history and made a nice living off a bunch of modern-day wiccans who draw the tourists…. A serial killer who thinks he's the Devil…” He shook his head in what looked to Jeremy suspiciously like defeat. “That's way beyond anything we've ever had to deal with here.”

Just then his phone buzzed. When he finished the call, he turned to Jeremy and said, “Come on. The shrink had a neurologist checking Adam out. Let's go see what they found.”

“Is he insane?” Joe asked the psychiatrist the minute they got into the room where she and the neurologist were waiting to meet with them.

“Not in the least,” the woman, Dr. Detweiler, said. “He's been tormenting himself because he didn't know what was going on, but he's not suffering delusions of any kind and he doesn't show the signs of being a classic split personality, to use the layman's term. In talking to him, I felt that the man was dealing with a physical problem, so I called Dr. Lauder,” she went on, nodding toward her colleague.

“We still have tests to run,” Dr. Lauder said. “And the results on the tests I've done so far aren't all in yet, but I believe he is suffering from a rare form of epilepsy. He doesn't go into physical spasms, as in the classic form of the disease, but parts of the brain shut down, leading to so-called blackouts. There isn't a cure, but there
is
medication. You can talk to him now, if you'd like.”

Adam was under guard in the hospital. He was in restraints, and he looked like hell.

But he was clear-eyed, and he spoke rationally when he saw them.

“Any sign of my wife?” he asked miserably, as soon as they entered.

“No, I'm sorry,” Joe told him.

“I would never hurt her,” Adam whispered. “I love her. That's why I was so afraid.”

“Adam, we found a business card from your store out where we found four more bodies,” Jeremy told him.

“I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have blacked out that long. Could I?” The look in his eyes was horrified, pleading. “Oh, God, if I did do it, I want to be executed.”

“Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty,” Joe pointed out dryly.

“A card from the store?” Adam said then. “But…anyone could have one of those cards.”

“Adam, there was what looks to be gum on it,” Joe told him.

Adam frowned. “No. No, I'm being set up. By someone who figured out I was having problems. I swear, I couldn't have done this. I must be being set up.” His arms went rigid with tension as he struggled against the restraints. “I didn't do it,” he said pleadingly to Jeremy. “You have to believe me. And you have to get out there and find out who
did
do it. I've been reading up on the past myself, reading about Satanists. He's going to kill seven. And he has my wife!”

 

Ginny greeted them at the door. “Oh, my God! I heard about Adam, and it's so terrible. I never would have thought…But now that they have him, I hope they find poor Eve and she's all right. But at least he's in custody, so now we don't have to be so worried. Come on in, dear. Oh—you're not Jeremy,” she said, studying Zach as he came in behind Rowenna.