The Witch is Dead (26 page)

“In here,” I said, tugging her toward Silas’s office.

A desk sat in the middle of the room, its top covered with papers. Wow, I thought, worse than mine at the library.

Bookcases and filing cabinets lined the walls. They, too, were stacked full of “stuff.” A bird’s nest balanced precariously on a stack of old newspapers. An old-fashioned pop bottle lay on its side at the corner of the desk. An orange hunting cap that had seen better days perched on top of a pile of magazines. Shiny shell casings littered Silas’s desk.

Between the desk, bookcases, and filing cabinets, there was a path around the piles and piles of junk.

I was amazed.

Darci gave a soft sigh. “Gosh, Silas is quite a collector, isn’t he?”

“Humph,” I snorted, “more of a scavenger, I’d say. He must comb the woods around here and pick up whatever crap he finds.” I shone my light around the room in disgust. “We’re going to be lucky to find anything in this mess.”

Darci motioned with her flashlight to one of the overflow
ing file cabinets. “You start there, and I’ll look through this one,” she said, pointing at another cabinet.

Holding my flashlight under my chin, I riffled through the files. Dust tickled my nose, and I sneezed, almost dropping my flashlight.

“Hey, I think I’ve found something,” Darci said in a loud whisper. She pulled a folder out of the cabinet. “It’s death certificates…and what looks like family consent forms.”

She had my attention. “Really?” I joined her at the desk and took half of the forms from her, quickly skimming the pages. “I don’t know any of these people, do you?”

“Hmm, I know this lady,” she said, holding a certificate to the light. “My mother used to visit her in the nursing home. Gee, I’m surprised she wanted to be cremated.” She shrugged. “She didn’t have a family—I suppose that’s why.”

She picked up another. “I know this one, too. Myrtle Benson. She was a regular at the library until she became bedridden and her daughter had to take care of her.” She paused as she read the paper. “That’s funny. This has her age at time of death listed as sixty-nine—she had to be at least ninety when she died.”

“Let me see that.” I took the death certificate from Darci’s hand.

Sure enough. Sixty-nine when she died on the second of May, 2005. I held the certificate close to the beam of my flashlight. “They whited out the age and wrote over it.”

She didn’t answer.

“Here’s another one,” Darci said. “Allen Tilton. Says here he was forty-eight. Well, that would be about right.” The faint light revealed her frown. “But it has the cause of death listed as ‘pneumonia.’ He didn’t die of pneumonia, he died of hepatitis. He’d picked it up years ago in the military. At the time, everyone was talking about his death.”

I had a thought. “Hand me the death certificate of the woman your mother visited.” I flipped the page over and found a family consent form granting the harvesting of the woman’s tissues. “I thought you said she didn’t have a family?”

“She didn’t.”

“This says she did,” I said, waving the papers in front of Darci’s face. “The consent form was signed by her ‘daughter.’”

“But—”

She stopped, interrupted by the sound of metal doors rolling open from deep inside the building.

“Crap, someone’s here,” I said. “They’re coming in through the bay doors.” I shut off my flashlight as Darci did the same.

“Come on.” She clutched my arm and pulled me toward the office door. “We can go out through the waiting room.”

The sound of another door opening and shutting stopped us.

I heard footsteps coming down the hallway.

“This way.” Not letting go of my arm, she tugged me over to the window located on the opposite side of the room.

I stumbled over a pile of old papers in my haste.

Darci released me and cranked the window open. Throwing one leg over the sill, she held out a hand to me. “Hurry up.”

Grasping my hand, she shinnied out, pulling me closer to the window.

I followed suit, and had almost cleared the window when the seat of my pants caught on something protruding from the frame.

“Hurry up,” she hissed from outside the building.

“My pants are snagged,” I whispered back.

Darci clutched both my shoulders and yanked hard. I felt the fabric give way and tumble to the ground just as the office door opened.

“Run!” Darci exclaimed, hauling me to my feet.

We darted into the woods as a voice called out from the open window.

“Hey, get back here!”

Twenty-Seven

I woke up to a silent house. Abby and Aunt Dot were still asleep in the guest room. After almost getting caught going through Silas Green’s files, sleep hadn’t come easy. At least now we knew Silas was illegally providing Christopher Mason’s biomedical company with tissue. The question was, did Christopher know? And how did the illegal scam play into Tink’s disappearance?

I needed to clear my brain. Slipping on a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, I wrote a note for Abby and quietly left the house. Too early for my neighbors to be up on a Sunday morning, I took off at a brisk pace down the silent streets of Summerset.

My shoes slapped the sidewalk while blue jays chattered at me from the trees. Squirrels scampered in the dewy grass, searching for nuts to bury. In front of me, the sun hung over the eastern horizon like a big orange ball. I wiped the perspiration from my brow. Already the day promised to be hot and sticky.

I pumped my arms, increasing my speed, and soon felt the familiar burn in my thigh muscles. I concentrated on pulling fresh air into my lungs, hoping the influx of oxygen would still my troubled mind.

What did I do now? Talk to Bill, of course. It might be a slight problem when it came to explaining how I acquired my information about Silas Green, but I’d worry about that later. Cornering Christopher Mason might be a good idea, too. Maybe another trip to Aiken to question Kevin was in order? He’d seemed very willing to talk about his former employer the night he joined us for dinner at Abby’s house.

I slowed my steps. Bill wouldn’t approve of these plans racing through my head, but I didn’t care. Somebody had to find Tink, and soon.

A horn beeping caught my attention. I stopped, and turning my head, saw a car slowly pulling up to the curb next to me. The driver’s window came down and Ethan motioned me over to his car.

“You’re up early,” he commented as I approached the driver’s side.

“So are you. What are you doing?”

“Just driving around, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

“Yeah, me, too. That’s why I went for a walk,” I said, leaning down.

He jerked his head to the passenger’s side. “Why don’t you get in and we can work on it together.”

“Okay.” I walked around the car and slid into the passenger’s side.

“Does Bill have any leads on Tink?” I asked as Ethan eased away from the curb.

“No, I’m sorry, Ophelia, he doesn’t.” He shook his head. “The sheriff’s office hasn’t even received one single call.”

I traced a line on the seat next to me. “That’s not good, is it?”

“No, usually in cases like this, they at least get crank
calls.” His eyes slid my way in a quick glance. “What have you turned up?”

I folded my hands primly in my lap. “Me? What do you mean?”

He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Come on, Ophelia, I’ve seen you in action before, remember? When you suspected me of threatening Tink, you came after me with your baseball bat. I can’t imagine what you’re prepared to do to whoever snatched her.”

“Okay.” I sighed loudly. “So maybe I have checked out a few things.”

“What things?”

I unfolded my hands and turned to face him. “I’d planned on calling Bill later anyway. Silas Green is harvesting tissue from cadavers illegally and selling them to Dr. Christopher Mason’s biomedical supply company.”

“And you know this how?”

“We kind of went through his files—”

“‘Kind of?’” He raised an eyebrow. “And who’s ‘we’?”

“Darci and me. Last night, at Green’s Crematorium—”

He held up a hand, stopping me. “No, I don’t want to know.”

“You asked,” I replied indignantly.

“Even though I’m on my own time, I’m still an officer of the court and bound to report a break-in.”

“For the record, we didn’t break anything.”

“Trespassing, then.”

He had me there.

“Look, I’m going to tell Bill about Silas. Once he gets a search warrant, he’ll learn the truth.”

“No, he won’t.”

My forehead puckered in a frown. “Of course he will.”

“Not without probable cause.”

I turned away from him. “I’m giving him probable cause.”

“No, you’re not. Unless you tell him the whole story, you’re only relaying a ‘hunch,’ a ‘rumor.’ That’s not enough for a warrant.”

“What will he do, then?”

“Pull Silas in for questioning—”

“Silas will lie,” I said. “Then go right back to his office and get rid of the files.”

“Yup, that’d be my guess. Without a confession from you, he’s got nothing on Silas.”

“So you’re telling me if we uncovered illegal activities because we were hypothetically trespassing and told Bill, I’d be the one in trouble.”

“Right—”

“Yet Silas, who’s violating the dead, would skate?”

He nodded.

“That sucks,” I huffed. “Can’t you guys sweat a confession out of him?”

A smirk played at the corner of his mouth. “You mean with bright lights and billy clubs?”

“Yeah.” I bobbed my head righteously.

“It’s called ‘police brutality’ and the courts frown on it.”

I slapped the seat. “How do we prove what Silas is doing?”

“Slowly, carefully, building the case, one piece of evidence at a time.”

“My daughter’s missing!” I cried. “I don’t have the luxury of moving slowly and carefully. The longer she’s gone, the less chance we have of finding her. She—”

Ethan stretched out a hand, silencing me. “Ophelia, if we don’t build an airtight case, the guilty walk free.”

I shoved my body against the seat in frustration. “What do you suggest I do?”

“Let me ask you a question…Why are you so interested in Silas Green?”

“All the dreams, all the visions, seem to lead back to him. I can’t help but believe he’s the key.” I took a deep breath. “Tink’s dreams began the night before we ran into Buchanan at the airport…”

I quickly explained the dreams, the rumors, meeting Silas for the first time in the woods, finding the skull.

“You suspect Silas had a falling out with Buchanan, killed him, and based on town gossip, got the idea Tink knew something, so he kidnapped her?”

“Yeah.”

“But based on what you saw when you tried to reach her psychically, she was safe?”

“Yeah.”

“Ahh…” he began slowly. “I’m a cop, and unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of murders.” He paused, uncertain how to continue.

“Just spit it out, Ethan.”

“Most killers don’t leave loose ends,” he finished bluntly.

I felt the blood rush from my face. “If Silas took Tink, you think he’d have killed her by now.”

Gripping the door handle until my knuckles turned white, a voice in my head screamed,No!

“I can’t accept that,” I mumbled. “I’d feel it if Tink had crossed over.”

I couldn’t make myself say the word “died.”

Ethan sympathetically patted my bare knee. “That wasn’t my point. You said she was unharmed—are your visions ever wrong?”

“No one, not even Abby, is always a hundred percent correct. There’s always the chance that you’ve interpreted a sign
wrong.” I shook my head. “Since all three of us sensed she was safe, I believe it’s true.”

“So if Tink’s unharmed, and if what you suspect about Silas is true—that he did kill Buchanan—I doubt Silas was the one who took her.”

“But that can’t be—who else would want to take her?”

“I don’t know.”

I considered Ethan’s argument. If he was correct, it meant I’d been following the wrong lead. No, that idea didn’t feel right. The vision had shown Silas with Tink’s bracelet.

Ethan broke into my thoughts. “Did all three of you see Tink in the same way?”

“No, I was with her in the woods, Aunt Dot saw her in the bedroom she described to you and Bill, and Abby saw Tink separated from me by a wide gulf.”

I rubbed my forehead trying to recall exactly what Abby had said. A man standing in the shadows, a hawk and an eagle circling overhead.

Stealing a glance at Ethan, I remembered the one and only time I tried to read him. It was when I’d threatened him with my Louisville Slugger and had a bad case of the boils. The image I’d seen when I touched him was that of an eagle protecting him. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but I later learned an eagle was on his DEA badge.