“Someone was after something,” Gina said. “Every desk drawer has been dumped. It’s the same in her bedroom. Clothing all over the floor. I just gather up the evidence and I’m no rocket scientist, but I’d say, yeah—whoever came through here was looking for something. And if it’s the same person—or persons—we’ve been dealing with on the murders, they’re smart. I guarantee you we won’t find a fingerprint. The best I’m going to come up with is some answers from the tire print out front. Someone did burn rubber. We’ll know what kind of tire it was pretty quickly,” she promised him.
Aidan paused. A framed picture had fallen over.
He picked it up.
The photo was of Wendy Appleby as she’d appeared in life, with her son, J.J. He studied the picture, and a sort of epiphany came over him. It was often hard to tell with kids, but...
He’d been friends with Richard when they were both J.J.’s age.
And there was something about J.J. that reminded him of Richard. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before—but, of course, he hadn’t been looking for it or expecting it.
The picture had been taken at one of the cemeteries. As he narrowed his eyes to study the shot, he saw the mausoleum with the name Bakker engraved in the stone.
They were both smiling for the camera. There were other children in the background and a woman who seemed to be trying to herd them.
A school trip?
Wendy and J.J. looked happy. As if they’d been having a great day. Maybe Wendy had volunteered to chaperone the outing.
He decided to take the picture out of the frame. When he did, he was startled when he turned it around to study the back.
There were two words written there: Lizzie grave.
There it was again. Puzzle pieces would somehow fit together if he could just maneuver them properly.
He stared at the picture, wishing, hoping, that it could give him more.
Then his phone rang.
He saw that it was Mo. She should’ve gotten out of the Haunted Mausoleum a few minutes ago. She was probably heading out with her friends for their late-late dinner or very early breakfast.
“Mo?”
Her voice was controlled, but he could still hear the terror in it. “There’s another one, Aidan. There’s another. A body here. A real one, I mean. We think it’s Sondra...but it—the body—has no head!”
*
Mo was pretty sure she’d acted as quickly and competently as possible under the circumstances.
Having discovered that they definitely had a dead body on their hands, she’d called Aidan immediately.
She’d told the others not to touch the body.
“Touch it? Are you crazy?” Phil demanded.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Grace said. “Whoever did this... Oh, my God! The actors have barely left. Someone was in here while we were...while we were scaring people! Oh, my God, they did this after Joshua Kirbin left. That means it was just a few minutes ago. That means—”
“Grace, they’ve done what they came to do. They’re gone,” Mo said. She was trying for courage; Aidan was on the way.
She’d found corpses before. But she’d been with cops—and Rollo. Or Heidi. She’d never been with just a few terrified friends in the middle of a cemetery.
“Let’s go out front. Let’s get the hell out of here!” Ron shouted.
“We can’t just go. We have to watch this scene until the cops show up,” Mo said.
“Watch it? For what? Are we worried about what can happen to this...this woman?”
“You’re sure it’s a woman?” Grace asked.
“That—or a man with boobs!” Ron said. “Oh, my God. It’s Sondra. It has to be Sondra. That looks like of her little scoop neck tops. This is why we haven’t been able to find her.”
“Where’s her head?” Phil asked.
They were all silent for a moment.
“I don’t want to know!” Ron said softly.
They stood there, silent again. The weird lights and the fog machine had been turned off, but it felt as if they were very alone in a vast sea where the floodlight seemed useless against the darkness of the night.
“We gotta get out of here,” Phil said. “We—”
“Wait!” Mo broke in. “I hear a siren.”
They all paused. It was distant at first, but then the sound became stronger.
“I have to go let them in. I locked the front gates,” Ron said.
He left, and the remaining three stood there as if frozen, waiting.
Then Mo saw Aidan. He was leading the way. Van Camp was right behind him, along with several men in uniform. Relief flooded through her and she abandoned her post by the coffin and raced to him. She didn’t throw herself into his arms.
She plummeted into them.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right!” he told her softly. “Well, it’s not all right, but we’re here. Your hands are frozen.” He rubbed them for a moment before extricating himself from her hold. Walking over to the others, he moved past them to get to the coffin. Van Camp joined him; everyone else stepped back as the agent and the detective studied the body.
“Could we go in where it’s warm?” Grace asked, shaking.
“Yes, yes,” Aidan said, turning to them. “Go into the parlor and sit. We’ll be there shortly. Officer Calloway, will you take them in, please?”
A young man in uniform escorted their group into the parlor of the mortuary. And now they sat among fake spiderwebs, by the piano with a bony hand atop the keys, red velvet draping and black all around them as well as a chandelier that seemed to hold centuries of dust.