“I say we bag ’em and tag ’em,” he suggested. “None of us has touched them, and at some point we may need to look at them for prints or trace evidence. If our prankster gets more serious.”
Aidan wasn’t sure this was just a prank, but he agreed with his brother in principle. And he refused to believe Kendall had had anything to do with this, even if Jeremy was right and these were the same dolls she carried in her store.
After all, he knew exactly where she had been all night.
They bagged the dolls. Then Zachary told Aidan, “I have some interesting information for you.”
“Oh?”
“I did a little hacking. Come on and I’ll show you.”
Zachary had his laptop computer set up in the only place where there were no workmen: Amelia’s bedroom.
This room, at least, had been kept up. It sported a huge sleigh bed in dark mahogany, with a dressing table, wardrobe and side tables to match. French doors led out to the balcony, and in front of them, in contrast to the dark wood, sat a freshly painted beige wicker table with chairs upholstered to match the drapes and comforter. The hardwood floors had been cleaned and buffed, and an Oriental rug with a floral motif covered the floor. There was nothing musty about the room, nothing that hinted of age or decay, or even that the longtime owner had died here.
Zachary had set up his computer on the dressing table.
Aidan and Jeremy pulled up the wicker chairs and sat on either side of Zach to see the screen. “I cross-referenced all kinds of things to come up with this list. It actually goes back about ten years, and then—with an interruption of pure confusion after Katrina—it looks as if it continues, and it’s escalating.”
Aidan read the chart his brother had pulled together. There were ten intriguing and never-solved missing persons cases in the area. The first went back a decade. The second, seven years. Then five years. Then there were two from the year before the storm. Then, since the storm, there had been five more, including Jenny Trent.
Each of the women who had come to the area never to be seen again had been between the ages of twenty and thirty. Each had been starting out on a long vacation. They were all single. And in every case, the disappearance hadn’t been reported until they’d been gone for several weeks, because they didn’t live with anyone who would be concerned immediately. In two of the cases, they hadn’t been reported missing until they had been gone several months.
“How the hell could that have been?” Aidan wondered aloud.
“Joan Crandall disappeared ten years ago. She left Chicago for Houston, and was supposedly driving to New Orleans from there. She had worked at a fast-food restaurant, and, I suppose, lots of people just walked off the job, so her boss just figured she’d decided to stay down here. The other was Kristin Ford. She disappeared five years ago, and she was driving here from Memphis, but she hadn’t been there very long. She was working on again, off again as a stripper. She was only reported as missing when the neighbors noticed a terrible odor from her house. Apparently, a neighborhood cat had gotten in and died, and it was only when the authorities were called that she was reported missing at all. Her credit card was last used at a gas station just outside the Quarter. Her car was never found, she never wrote another check, and the trail just ended. In most of these cases, the investigators just reached a dead end, and since there was no one to push for action, they all ended up filed as cold cases.”
“If these are all connected—and I think they are—then the killer’s definitely escalating,” Aidan said with a sinking feeling.
“Want me to get on this, contact the local authorities that took the missing persons reports?” Zach asked.
Aidan nodded, then looked at Jeremy. “Let’s go see your guitar-playing buddy.”
As they left, Aidan looked back at the house. A workman was replastering a column. A painter’s van drew up and parked by the front steps.
The old place wasn’t really such a white elephant after all. He could already envision how nice it was going to look with a coat of paint.
Jeremy caught him looking at the house. “Halloween party, you wait and see,” he said.
“Maybe,” Aidan agreed.
There was still something that seemed off about the house. It wasn’t rot; it wasn’t decay.
It was something else.
A hunch.
Damn, he hated hunches.
Vinnie was expecting them.
He lived in a large house down toward Rampart on Dauphine. It looked as if it needed paint even more than the plantation did, but inside, it was well-kept. He greeted them at the door, shirtless and holding a cup of coffee, and he invited them in politely enough.
“If you had called, I’d have been ready,” he told Aidan with a slight scowl.
“Had a late night, huh?” Aidan asked.
Vinnie shrugged. “You were out just as late.”