“You really think a schoolteacher—”
“I think she might have sold them to a store that sold them to the killer.”
“Thirteen years ago, she was still teaching.”
He nodded. “Yes, she was—right here in the area.”
Devin sat back, frustrated. “You do realize that Boston is only twenty miles away.”
“This is local,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because something about it is personal. What happened in the past, what’s happening now...there’s a personal dimension to both of them.”
His phone rang just as he and Devin were finishing their lunch. It was Sam, telling him the rest of them were five minutes from the site. They all met up by the hill, and he helped Sam drag the equipment out of their SUV, then explained how to use everything. Then they paired up―Sam and Jenna, Jane and Angela, and he and Devin―and began the search.
“Shall we try over there?” he asked Devin, pointing toward the crevice.
“No,” she said softly. “If we find someone there...well, we might prove that this is Gallows Hill, but for now we’re looking for Margaret’s grave. For some reason I think it’s over that way, beyond the trees.”
She led them to the area she had in mind, and they created a primitive grid and then worked in silence for about an hour.
Suddenly Angela cried out, “Over here! We’ve got something.”
Everyone ran over to look at the radar screen. He could see the shapes of bones—badly disarticulated but unmistakable―with something else in the center.
Human bones.
Devin had been right.
He looked up and realized she wasn’t with them. He turned back and saw that she was standing in the center of a group of trees with a field of last year’s fallen leaves beneath them.
“I’ll get shovels,” Sam said.
Angela pointed at the screen. “It’s amazing. Rocky—there, that looks like the skull. And the bones...some are missing, I think, but those look like ribs.”
“How sad,” Jane murmured.
“Devin?” Rocky called, turning back toward her again.
She hadn’t moved.
She didn’t seem to hear him.
He remembered her earlier entranced state and, worried, hurried over to her.
She spoke at last, just before he reached her.
“Slow down,” she told him.
He did, moving carefully. “Devin,” he asked, “what is it?”
She turned to him. Her blue eyes seemed enormous, her expression one of incredible sadness.
“I’ve found someone else,” she said.
And she had.
The woman was laid out like the others, with arms and legs outstretched, her head forming the top of the star. Bracken and fallen leaves still hid most of her, and she hadn’t yet begun to decay, so they hadn’t detected the scent of death.
She had been young, with dark hair. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and she looked almost as if she’d lain down to make angels in the leaves.
But the thread of blood around her neck gave the lie to that story.
As did the pentagram lying on her chest, glinting through the leaves.
11
Devin was certain that Jack Grail was looking at her with suspicion, even though Rocky had explained to Jack that they had been searching for a long-dead woman, not another recent victim.
The day had become filled with crime scene technicians, the Boston M.E. and his crew and a multitude of police—state and local—along with representatives from the museum to assist in the investigation of the bones and, of course, the FBI team. Officers from a number of the small area towns kept crowd control running smoothly.
Rocky and the rest of the Krewe had focused on the latest murder victim until Jack and his men had arrived to join them.
Now, though Jack was being polite and hadn’t even suggested that he intended to take her down to the station for questioning, much less arrest her, he seemed to be asking the same questions over and over again.
“Devin, I still don’t understand—why this sudden interest in quite literally digging up a woman who’s been all but lost to history? And what made you think someone would kill her and bury her here, where, if you’re right, they were hanging the condemned witches? And, you, Rocky! What the hell were you doing focusing a full FBI team on a woman who died hundreds of years ago just because Devin got caught up in some historical wild-goose chase, when we have our own murders to solve?”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Rocky demanded, his tone irritated. “It’s not like we’ve been getting anywhere with the current case, and the whole witchcraft-Wiccan connection seems to tie the present to the past, don’t you think? And the fact that we found another victim here on what may very well be the real Gallows Hill seems like a pretty strong indication I’m right.”