J Duncan - Deadworld

“Laur?” Jackie said skeptically. “This would make Nick Anderson, like…”

“One hundred seventy-six years old,” Hauser replied.

“There has to be some other reason for this.” Jackie’s mind could not wrap around the implications. There were none that fit her view of the world. It just didn’t work.

Hauser laughed. “Told you it was creepy. The guy should be dead.”

She looked over at Laurel and remembered what she had said about holding his hand. The guy had felt like he was dead. Laurel was still studying the photos, looking back and forth between them. “What about her?” She pointed at the image of what looked like Shelby Fontaine.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t run her. You want me to?”

Laurel nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Laur?” Jackie said again. “What are you thinking here?” She was going to have to put some trust in her opinion on this because she could make no sense of it.

After a few seconds, Laurel finally stood up straight. “Not sure yet. I think I need to go talk with someone about this.”

“Someone?”

“A witch friend of mine,” she said with a faint smile.

“Cool,” Hauser said.

Jackie frowned at him. Witches. This case was going in completely the wrong direction. “Wish we could just arrest the prick.”

They both snickered at her. Hauser turned back and pulled up the information he had been working on. “You’re such a ballbuster, Jack. Glad I’m not married to you.”

Laurel slapped him on top of the head. “Be nice.”

“Anything else, Hauser?” Jackie snapped back.

“Yeah. Another couple news articles during that same year as the Princeton pic. Seems our crotchety old man was involved in another serial murder case. Five people killed, and he could never be tied to it, but was a person of interest apparently.”

Now that was interesting. “And the first one?”

“No murder case, but his career came to an end a few months after that photo was taken. Big shoot-out with some local outlaw. His family was killed, and he quit.”

“Interesting,” Jackie said. “There are five family members in the photo here.”

Hauser shrugged, smiling. “Very interesting.”

Five. They were all fives. “All these things are thirty-six years apart?”

“Freaky, isn’t it? Like some bizarre repeating murder spree.”

Laurel tugged absently at her ponytail. “I wonder what significance the thirty-six years has?”

“Oh,” Hauser answered, “that might be a simple one. Anderson was thirty-six years old when his family was killed.”

“How old were the family members?” Jackie wondered.

“Um, give me a sec and I’ll see if I can find out.” He began clicking through screens with his mouse faster than Jackie could read what he was pulling up.

“You don’t suppose,” Laurel said, finger twirling at her ponytail, “that Anderson or someone related to him is repeating the death of his family?”

The thought had just occurred to Jackie as well. “It’s awfully suspicious, if you ask me.”

“Here we go,” Hauser cut in. “Boys were twelve and fifteen, girl was eight, wife thirty-one, and Anderson’s grandmother seventy-five.”

“Twelve,” Jackie and Laurel said together.

Jackie poked Hauser in the shoulder. “Run the other cases. I want as many of the vic’s ages that you can find.”

She felt her mind beginning to spin in helpless futility. The scenario they were considering was insanity. “Okay, this is more than I can digest. I want to get a tail on Anderson and Fontaine. Hauser, can we prove these are all the same guy? A judge would laugh this out of court.”

“Haven’t turned up any kind of paper trail yet to prove anything. We’ll keep digging. This stuff has been easy to find so far. He’s not going far out of his way to hide his past, just altering things a bit so nobody makes any obvious connections.”

“Well, who would believe that shit?” Jackie shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

He laughed. “I know. It’s like he’s cloning himself, or… or he’s a fucking vampire! That would be so cool.”

Jackie shook her head. “Shut up, Hauser. This is about as far from cool as it gets. Laur, we need to get Gamble on organizing tails, see if Belgerman will okay a phone tap. There has to be some way to get Anderson to implicate himself or whomever it is he knows is doing this.”

“Why not just ask him?” Laurel offered. “Show him what we have? Maybe he’ll see the game is up and cave in.”

“He’s too cool for that. If it’s someone else, he doesn’t want us to know, for some reason. We need something to entice or threaten him with. He needs to want to talk.”

“Most killers want to talk,” Laurel said.

“Did you get the impression he wanted to? Or that he was baiting us to find out what a genius he is?”

“No, which is why I’m leaning toward some other killer he doesn’t want to talk about.”

“Exactly. So how do we sucker him into blabbing or leading us to the real culprit?”

Laurel shrugged. “We have a stolen penny, and we have information about his past.”

“The penny.” Jackie walked to the doorway. “Hauser, send everything you’ve found by five today. I want to go over everything we’ve got tonight.” She motioned to Laurel. “Come on. I’m so hungry I can’t think, and we need a plan.”

The afternoon skies bore down on Nick like a gloomy gray stone. A steady, windswept drizzle coated the city in a glossy sheen. Not that bright blue skies would have made the task any easier. Drake had been frustratingly hard to pinpoint. The tingling sense of awareness of the other side would pop up but then fade a few minutes later. It was something Nick could not understand. The feeling should have been more constant, even if Cornelius was driving around. The fleetingness of it made no sense, and Nick found himself growing more irritated as the day wore on. They were being played with, and there was little they could do except keep playing the game.

Drake would be taking his next victim soon. After the first it had been days between victims, but now, knowing full well how quickly law enforcement could work, Nick figured he would be lucky if it was more than a day or two. Drake would want him to get a good whiff, too-offer up a little extra inspiration and maybe do something to link him even more closely to the murders. Jackie Rutledge would be all over him then. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get arrested-but then, that would ruin the game. Cornelius would not want that, so he was counting on Nick’s ability to avoid incarceration. Nick had entertained the thought of turning himself in just to break things up, to see what Drake would do, but who was to say he would not just march right into the jail and slaughter everyone, including himself for not playing by the rules. If anything, the man had proven he did not like his life to be interfered with.

He found himself thinking more about what might happen to Jackie Rutledge if she got too close to things. Technology made it so difficult now to circumvent investigations. The odds were growing stronger by the hour that he would be brought in on suspicion. If they found reason to get a warrant to search his house, shit would really hit the fan. The woman was close to the point of pulling him in just for breathing funny.

Nick crept along, barely holding the speed limit while he let his mind wander, catching the occasional whiff of a ghost, potent enough to still be lingering in the world of the living, but missing that peculiar, bittersweet stench of the other side. Shelby was right, of course. The FBI could make this search easier. Whatever Drake had up his sleeve, it was confounding their senses. They were no closer to him now than earlier. Of course, a little blood would go a long way toward evening the odds. No matter how much the thought lingered though, Nick could not bring himself to call Drake’s bluff on that account. Promises had been made, ones that would damn him to hell regardless if he broke them.