Heather Graham - Sacred Evil

His eyes were on the road ahead of him. She saw the muscles in his face twitch. He didn’t believe that energy stayed behind.

“Hell,” he said, glancing her way, “if you can solve this case with ghosts, just go right on and be my guest.”

Whitney smiled, not responding. There was something she liked about him, despite his curt manner with her. He had a good strong jawline and steady eyes. She thought he probably hit a gym now and then and she wondered if he spent time with a punching bag—he had callused knuckles.

“Angus Avery … I know the name. He’s not as big as a Spielberg, but he’s not an unknown,” Whitney said.

“That’s right—your expertise is film.”

“Yeah, I’m good with it—you wait and see,” she told him. “I worked with some excellent people—filmmakers from several of the major educational channels. I’d intended to make documentaries. Eventually, I would have found my own projects.”

“But you woke up one morning and decided you wanted to be an FBI agent?” he asked.

She looked over at him. He glanced her way, but his attention was for driving.

“I like where my life has gone,” she said. “And even you will like Jackson Crow and some of the others.”

He laughed. “Even me?”

“You’re not pleased to have me hanging around.”

To her surprise, he was quiet for a minute. “Sorry. It’s just that Monty—my partner—was like another half of me. We had a situation under control, and some idiot vigilante walked in and one man wound up dead and my partner may never walk again. You’re fine. In fact,” he said, and he grinned broadly, glancing her way again, “I think I’m happier to have you than whoever they might have assigned me. You’re a guest of the city police. You won’t be trying to second-guess me.”

“I may be.”

“Still, you’ll have to bow to my decisions—I’m lead.”

“I’m sure the task force will all bow to you,” Whitney said.

He swerved slightly, avoiding a taxi that didn’t seem to realize that there were lanes on Broadway. A few minutes later, in Soho, he pulled into a spot that had looked too small for the car.

“Diner is up there, on the corner,” he said. He took her elbow, directing her toward the end of the street. Keeping up with him meant long strides, and she took them.

They entered the touristy diner, which was decorated in red plastic and chrome with old movie posters on the walls. Looking around, Jude pointed down a row of glitter-red plastic booths.

“Is that him?” he asked Whitney.

She looked. A lone man was sitting in one of the middle booths. He was on his phone, and he’d doodled all over the napkin at his place setting. He had dark hair that was swept over his forehead in a strange way— hair transplant, gotta keep young, Whitney thought—and gold-rimmed glasses and he seemed to be thirty-five or so.

“I think so,” she said. “Directors don’t have their pictures out there all that often, and I don’t think he’s been nominated for an Academy Award yet.”

Jude edged her ahead of him and she walked toward the booth. “Mr. Avery?” she asked.

He looked up and waved a finger at her, pointing at his phone. She held still politely.

Jude did not.

He flipped out his badge, and reached for Angus Avery’s phone, snapping it shut and returning it.

“Sorry, Mr. Avery. I know that time is money in your line of work, but time could mean someone’s life in mine. I’m Detective Crosby, and this is Agent Tremont.”

Avery took the closure of his phone with little more than a frown, but he seemed perplexed by Whitney’s appearance. “Agent?”

“Agent Tremont is with a special unit of the FBI, Mr. Angus,” Jude explained, urging Whitney into the booth and taking the seat beside her. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said.

Angus Avery nodded, and then shook his head sadly. “Hey. This is horrible. But, I have to tell you, I think it’s almost my fault.”

“You killed Miss Rockford?” Jude asked.

“No! No, of course not!” Avery protested. “No, no—I should have stayed away from that location. I should have shot anywhere else in Manhattan—or Brooklyn, the Bronx, New Jersey or Hollywood, for that matter. It’s that damn location. It’s haunted—and it’s cursed. And God knows—the creature haunting the place might just be Jack the Ripper—the real Jack the Ripper!”

He leaned forward. “Don’t you understand? Jack the Ripper left London and came to the United States. And when he did, that’s where he lived!”

Film people.

Great. He couldn’t help it, he glanced at Whitney.

She smiled. “Surely, Mr. Angus, you don’t believe that Jack the Ripper has lived all these years and that he’s just starting out to murder women again? At age one hundred plus.”

“I knew all about the history of the location. I just doubted all that mumbo-jumbo ghost stuff, just the way you do.”

“I heard something about the location this morning, but I don’t really know much about it,” Whitney said. She smiled at him. “I went to the film school at NYU, Mr. Angus. I loved living and working up here, but somehow, I never learned about the location you were using for the film shoot yesterday.”

“Well, let me tell you about it,” Avery said, leaning toward Whitney.

Maybe the young woman would turn out to be an odd asset, Jude decided. Angus Avery seemed to like her. She was encouraging him to talk. He did believe—gut feeling—that the movie had something to do with it all. Maybe her background was going to be a good thing.

“The building they just tore down had no history. The Darby Building. It was an ugly old thing—built in the 1920s. No character, no class whatsoever. It should have been torn down. But what was on the site before—that’s where all the trouble comes from.”

“And what was there before?” Whitney asked. “A friend of mine told me that it had been some kind of spiritualist church.”

“An offshoot group of some whacked-out folks—now, I suppose it would be some kind of nondenominational thing—started out building a church. Plain church. Simple pews, no statues, no stained-glass windows. They began in the 1840s, but it was too close to St. Paul’s and Trinity to make the powers that be happy. Anyway, it became a ‘home.’ But it was a home for believers. I think it spent about twenty years becoming an old-fashioned halfway house for the homeless, immigrants, addicts, you name it. But by the end of the last decades of the nineteenth century, spiritualism was coming heavily to the fore, and along with spiritualism, you had devil worshippers, pagan cults and all that rot. So, imagine, you’ve got the House of Spiritualism here, and the Five Points area just blocks away. Slums and a cesspool. So. They start to clean up the Five Points area, and where do you think the real crackpots are going to come? Why, right over to the House of Spiritualism.”

Angus Avery sat back, looking pleased with himself, as if he’d solved everything.

“And the so-called American victim of Jack the Ripper was killed in the Bowery, and again, we’re talking about a matter of blocks,” Whitney said.

Jude spoke up. “Carrie Brown was killed in an old hotel.”

They both looked at him, as if surprised that he was in on their conversation.

“Yes, she was killed in a hotel room. But Jack the Ripper killed Mary Kelly in her apartment. He was better—in his own mind, I’m sure—at his task of ‘ripping’ when he had time and privacy on his side. Well, here’s the thing—and, Detective Crosby, I believe you’ll find this in old police records or in memoirs of the officers of the time—they believed that the Jack the Ripper mimic or Jack the Ripper himself found lodging at the House of Spiritualism.”