Krewe of Hunters 1 Phantom Evil (24 page)

“Well, you know me. I don't last that long,” he teased.

They made it through the doorway into his chosen room before they started taking one another's clothing off, with little concern for subtlety. Jackson kissed Angela's lips while they were half in and half out of their shirts, and then pressed his lips against her collarbone.

She pressed her mouth against his shoulder. “Oh, ick!”

“Ick!” he protested.

“Spiderweb. I think I ate it.”

“Oh, come on, a little web won't kill you,” he murmured in return, sliding his feet out of his shoes. He wrenched his way out of his tailored shirt, finding her mouth and heading in toward the bathroom as he did so. His dirty shirt fell to the floor along with hers. Their lips were still locked as he angled her toward the bathroom door, and into the handsomely restored room. He opened the large shower-stall door while she wiggled out of her sandals and sent her shirt and jeans down to the tile, grabbed him by the waistband and slid her fingers beneath his belt line, rubbing her fingertips along his abdomen as she worked his belt buckle. He shoved off his jeans, drew her to him and kissed her again, feeling the length of her body naked against him, and relishing the feeling while his sex rose swiftly to the arousal of her touch. The water steamed down, and they drew one another in and beneath it. The hot thunder of the pulsing water was deliciously sweet, and he just held her beneath it, his erection growing against her lower belly. They both reached for the soap. It fell to the floor, and they laughed breathlessly as they both reached to retrieve it, only to rise in one body locked once again. He came up the master, and stood her still while he lathered her, her skin becoming flush
and slick beneath his ministrations. He pressed his lips to her breast, followed with the soap down her torso, and carefully knelt beneath the rampant spray, soaping her midriff, abdomen, navel, and down to her sex and between her legs, following the trail of the soap with his lips and the caress of his tongue. She gripped hard onto his shoulders, saying words incoherently against the force of the spray and nearly collapsing against him.

He rose slowly against her then, and her arms cradled his neck, and she tried to retrieve the soap from him. Her fingers slick and filled with friction, she began to bathe him in return, capturing his erection in her hands, and caressing it hard with the satiny fluid of the suds to create an urgently sensual tug and pull, meeting his mouth as she did so, then falling low against him as well and taking him into her mouth. Hunger shot through him like elemental electricity and he drew her up to him; they staggered together in the water for a moment, and he hiked her up against him, nearly slamming her against the tile wall, and as the heat and beat continued to rain down upon them, he raised her hips high around his and eased her down onto his sex, and the world seemed to take on the rampant beat of the water, swirling around them and into them like liquid fire. They moved swiftly together, and the need arising between them was equally urgent, and in a matter of minutes they were both clinging to one another as they climaxed violently, staggering against the tile then, and then laughing again as they tried to balance. Dirt and spiderwebs were gone, they rinsed off the sheen of the soap, and Jackson reached for the spray to stop it at last, and pull her into his arms for one last kiss with her body full against his, and still as hot as the spray of the water.

“We should get out before we trip and kill ourselves,” she said.

“True. Very true. It won't be a good thing if the headlines read, Ghost-busting Team Heads Die in Tragic Sex Accident in Haunted House,” he agreed.

They emerged, reaching for towels, and finding that they drew together again then, enveloped in the towels, drying one another.

“Wow. You were right, we could have had the pizza in ten minutes,” he said, holding her close.

“Well, speed does seem of the essence when you are facing death by slippery shower,” Angela said.

She laughed at her own remark, and left her towel to fall behind as she headed out of the bathroom and toward the bed. She turned around to look at him, and she was natural, fluid in her movement, and so sensually easy with him. “Want to risk death by four-poster?” she teased.

“I've always lived an at-risk life,” he said, and followed her out, catching her up at the end of the bed and crashing down on it with her, swiftly stoking her arousal once more.

Later, he nudged her. “Pizza in five.”

“In five!” she exclaimed, bolting out of bed. “It can't have gotten that late…”

“Hey,” he protested, rising with her. “I had a lot to prove after those cracks you made about me last night!”

She shook her head at him, and raced through to the bathroom for a quick rinse-off, slipping by him before they could touch again.

 

The pizzas had arrived when Angela reached the kitchen with Jackson following behind her. Bottles of soda and a pitcher
of iced tea were on the table, along with glasses, flatware, napkins, paper plates and a bowl of salad. They all slid into their seats.

“We really need to figure this out,” Whitney said, dishing salad into paper bowls and passing them down. “I've been rerunning film from the basement. From the time we were down there, digging.”

“What's on the film?” Angela asked.

“Well, us, of course.
And
the shadow. It seems to lurk by the far side of the twist in the ell—leading to your rooms above, and somewhere here, in the kitchen area,” Whitney said.

“We'll take a look when we're finished here,” Jackson said.

“I think that Angela has to be right. Someone must have brought the body back here to bury in the house,” Jake said.

“We don't know that,” Jenna said.

“But it makes sense,” Angela said quietly. “One totally psychotic killer's body missing, and something in this house that just won't go away.”

“Who would have brought him back here?” Jackson asked. “The answers might be in your book, Angela. At least, the answers to the past.”

“I've read the book now, over and over. It's really just gory imaginings about the murders,” Angela said. “I still have a log-on for Tulane, though. I can start looking back into some of the newspaper accounts from the day, and I can go back to the museum and go through their archives. Jake, hand me a piece with all the peppers and veggies on it, please.”

Jake did so. For a few minutes, food traveled around the table, and was consumed, and they all commented on the fact
that either the pizzas were really good, or they were really hungry.

When they finished, they quickly disposed of the boxes and paper plates, and headed down to the grand ballroom where Whitney reran the film. She sped through some, as they had been in the basement for a long time. But then she slowed the film. “Here,” she said.

It did appear that there was something dark rising in the room. Shadows formed along the baseboards, rising in jerking motion here and there around them, but falling again as someone spoke, raising a pick or a shovel, or moved back to one another.

“He was really a coward,” Jackson said quietly. “In life, he was a coward. He had to isolate and control his victims. With an entire family, he had to separate the children from the parents, and he had to tie up the parents one by one because he couldn't control more than one person at a time.”

He looked at them. “That's often the case with a serial killer. He gets his sense of power from disabling his victims. He makes sure that they're drugged or unconscious or securely tied up or shackled, and then he has the power. Life or death, except, of course, the end will bring death. That's why we saw the shadows rising over Angela when she was alone—and we see them rising and falling now.”

“Does that mean that he might have terrified Regina Holloway, and that we might be wrong about a killer in the house with her?” Jenna asked.

Frowning, Jackson shook his head. “I don't think so. I don't think that the force needed to send her over could have possibly happened because of a ghost—or even fear of a ghost. We're
still looking at two different situations. What we have to do is discover the link.” He rose. “I've got to get some sleep.”

“We'll take turn manning the camera overnight again,” Will told him.

“Two and two,” Jackson said firmly.

“Okay, Whitney, how about you and me on the first shift. Jenna and Will can take over at first light, and then we get to sleep until noon?” Jake suggested.

“Reverse it,” Jackson said. “I'm going to need you on the computer tomorrow morning,” Jackson told Jake.

“You got it, boss,” Whitney said.

“Wait, I should be taking a turn at this,” Angela said.

But Jake came to her and set an arm around her. “Oh, no. You old folks need your rest. We're fine on this detail. Go to sleep. You're our divining rod, Angela, remember? And Jackson is our mighty leader. Go on. Get some sleep. We can handle this.”

“All right, then, kiddies, good night,” she said.

Jackson bid them good-night as well, and they headed back up the stairs together.

“They know we're sleeping together,” Angela said.

“Probably. I like to think that Adam didn't bring stupid people into our fold,” he said, grinning.

She looked at him and smiled, and wondered how life could change so entirely and so quickly. But it had changed. And she knew that what she was sharing with Jackson was far more than the sexual attraction that was so strong, and seemed to be so natural and so easy. Maybe they were just a bit broken inside by the blows life had dealt them, and maybe that was just right. Maybe they were destined to heal together.

But that night, her sleep was disrupted by dreams. Scattered dreams and nightmares.

She saw herself walking down a long hall. There were doorways along the hall, and though she didn't want to open them, she had to.

The first doorway led to Regina Holloway's room. She saw the children, playing with their jacks on the floor.

Young Percy looked up at her.
“I wanted to help the nice lady. Honestly. I wanted to help the nice lady. I knew what they did with the one before her. I saw what they did.”

The door slammed shut, and she was impelled to keep walking.

She saw her hand as she turned the knob to the next room. When she opened that door, she saw Madden C. Newton. He looked at her; looked her straight in the eyes. He smiled slowly, knowing that she knew he saw her. “Evil begets evil,” he told her.

He turned. There was an ax in his hand. Blood dripped from the blade to the floor. “Come closer, Angela. Come see what I've done.”

She closed the door; she didn't want to see.

As she walked down the hallway, knowing that she would have to open another door, she heard Will's voice repeating the words he had said when they were at Café du Monde.

“Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors.”

She opened the next door.

She saw Madden C. Newton again, the ax in his hand. This time, the mutilated corpses of the children lay at his feet.

“You bastard, you're dead,” she told him.

And he started to laugh, a gleeful laugh. “Evil never dies,”
he told her. “They say that it's love, but I tell you, it's evil that never dies. It follows me, and I live while the evil lives.”

“Evil can die, and it will,” she told him, but she was in the hallway, and he was in the room, and somehow, she could speak bravely because he was captured in the room. It wasn't the bedroom. It wasn't the basement. It was somewhere in-between.

But even as she spoke, fear slipped into her. She had been a cop; she
was
an agent.

But you couldn't shoot and kill a ghost.

She froze within her dream; a scream caught in her throat. There
was
someone behind her. She turned quickly, thinking there was no escape from the being in the hallway because she couldn't go into the room.

But when she turned, it was the girl. The girl she had seen in the mirror.

“He lets it live,” she said. “He lets it live, and the evil is alive. Help me. God help us all.”

Angela jackknifed to a sitting position, forcing herself to wake, forcing the dream to fade away.

Jackson's arm swept around her instantly, pulling her to him.

“What? What is it?” he asked her.

She was shivering, and she couldn't stop. “He's here. He's in this house, and we have to find him, we have to stop him before—”

“Before?”

“Before he stops us.”

 

Jackson sat with Jake in the kitchen, following various sites regarding missing young women, and cross-referencing
them with inquiries that had come into the NOLA police stations.

“What about this one?” Jake asked, pointing to one of the pages he had just brought up. “Susanne Crimshaw, twenty-one. Last seen three months ago at her home in Grand Biloxi. She had a fight with her mom, and took off to meet up with friends in New Orleans, but the friends claim they never saw her. She withdrew a thousand dollars from her bank the day she left. There's no credit card trail on her after that, and her mother didn't report her missing until she'd been gone a week, since they'd argued, and Susanne left for her trip. Since she was twenty-one, and not speaking to her mom, the mother didn't realize she was missing until she didn't come home—and the friends reported that they hadn't seen her, and figured that she'd decided just not to come.”

Jackson jotted down the case number, and they went back to work.

A Lettie Hughes had been reported missing the week before Susanne Crimshaw, but a follow-up report stated that she'd been found living with a junkie in Slidell. Shelley Dumont had disappeared, but her body had been discovered near the south side of Lake Pontchartrain; she had been shot in the back of the head, and her boyfriend had admitted they'd been involved in a drug deal gone bad.