“Yes, but you and Rollo can locate the one we need.” He paused. “How did you find Richard Highsmith’s head the day we met?”
“I had a piece of Richard’s clothing and I let Rollo get his scent.”
Aidan didn’t want to sound ridiculous, but asked his next question, anyway.
“Did you get a feel for Richard then—or see him?” Mo looked out the front window of the car. He hadn’t started the engine yet.
“Let’s go back to the Haunted Mausoleum first,” she said. “I may get a sense of where to go from there—and we can find one of Sondra’s sweaters or something she wore for Rollo.”
As he drove, he glanced over at Mo. She’d been up all night again.
So had he.
But he’d had more experience with nights like this.
Today, the announcement that another murder had taken place, at a haunted attraction, would mean the events would be closed again. Mo wouldn’t be expected at work tonight.
“Are you all right?” he murmured. “Tired?”
She turned to him. “I’ll survive.”
When they reached the Haunted Mausoleum, the police and crime scene experts were still busy. While Mo went to retrieve something of the dead woman’s from her office, Aidan took the time to check in with Gina Mason, who was supervising her crew. She stood with Detective Lee Van Camp out in the graveyard.
“Anything here?” he asked the two of them.
“Anything?” Gina repeated. “This place was full of people last night. The people in costume who were at work—and the hundreds walking through. There are cigarette butts everywhere, even though smoking’s not permitted in the graveyard. Kids will sneak off. There are footprints all over the place, not to mention fibers and hair.”
“What about the body?” Aidan asked. “Any results from that? Any witnesses?” he added.
Van Camp answered him. “We can hope, but we don’t know yet. The M.E. came for the body, and his people will examine it. But as far as witnesses go, this is almost like a magic trick. You know, it’s all about distraction. An event was going on here, and the problem is, everyone was looking at that and screaming. They’re supposed to get scared and scream. The killer could’ve carried that body in front of dozens of people—and they’d all have thought it was part of the show.”
“We’re going to have to speak to every one of the employees. Somebody must’ve seen something,” Aidan insisted.
“I’ve got police messengers heading to every address,” Van Camp said wearily. “We’ll get to all of them.”
“So we believe she was in her office when she was taken—right here, right on the property. We can assume she was knocked out with chloroform first, but there’s not a drop of blood in the mortuary itself. Or have you found something?” Aidan said.
“Nothing that remotely resembles a trail,” Gina Mason told him. “And, I swear, Agent Mahoney, my people are good.”
“I don’t doubt it. But we found the killer’s lair at the old cemetery, which would’ve been too far for him in this time frame. However, it’s where we found his tools for cutting off the heads.”
“A hatchet and knife, available in any hardware store in the nation,” Gina told him.
“Okay, she was knocked out in her office, carried out by the killer masquerading as an actor and then...then beheaded somewhere else, maybe at his previous lair, and brought back here to the graveyard,” Aidan said.
“That’s what we’ve got so far,” Van Camp agreed.
He heard a ruckus from somewhere in the building. Turning, he saw that Rollo seemed to be leading Mo out. One of the techs yelled, “Hey, what the hell? Get that monster away from my crime scene.”
Van Camp moved forward quickly. “Hey, that’s Rollo. Leave him be!”
Mo tugged on the dog’s leash and got control of him, then skirted around the scene, but Rollo was barking furiously.
“Let him go,” Aidan said.
She did.
Rollo raced straight to the mausoleum, the one Mo had walked around all evening as the Woman in White.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what he’s after. That mausoleum hasn’t been touched, other than by an outside cleaning or painting crew, in well over a hundred years.”
Aidan walked to the front of the mausoleum. As Mo had implied, it was tightly closed. The iron gate was locked, and beyond that was a seal. He pushed and shoved and prodded at the seal, it appeared to be, as she’d said, untouched for a very long time.
Aidan stepped back and spoke to Van Camp. “The dog wants us to go in.”
“I’ll get the sledgehammers and crowbars,” Van Camp said.
Aidan stood next to Mo. He wanted to put an arm around her shoulders, but right here and now that would be entirely inappropriate.
“Did Rollo find the head?” he asked her. “Is that what he’s signaling?”
“I don’t think that’s where the head is,” she replied. “How could anyone possibly even get in there? How do you hack up a body without being heard?”