The Hidden

The officer nodded, studying them. “Don’t go past the tape,” he told him. “Not unless I get an official okay from my boss.”


He got back into his car and Diego figured he was calling headquarters, alerting them that the FBI was interested in their crime scene.

Diego turned to Ben as they all started walking up the slope. “Tell us what happened, how you discovered the bodies.”

“I had been at the stables—I’m a horse guy, spend as much time as I can there—and was walking toward the house when I saw lumps up by the trees, lumps that shouldn’t have been there. It was too dark for me to tell what they were, so I walked over and...”

He paused and drew a shaky breath.

“He was a bloody mess. She was just...bloody. It looked as if he had been...cut up before he was shot. I was shaking so badly I dropped my phone. I had to pick it up from the dirt to dial 911. I turned my back to them and just stared down at the house until the cops arrived. I think I was in shock when they finally got there. I couldn’t help thinking the scene was just like the pictures Scarlet had shown me, and I said so to the cops, and I am still so damned sorry I did.”

Diego looked at Scarlet. “Tell us about those pictures.”

“I don’t know how they got on my camera,” she said, and there was a mix of frustration and fear in her voice. “I ran into Ben and wanted to show him the shots I’d gotten of an elk. And they were just there. Pictures of dead people.”

“The same dead people you saw?” Diego asked Ben.

Ben frowned and then nodded gravely. “If it wasn’t them, it was just like them. One showed the guy hung up in a tree, but the other one... It was both of them, same position, same huge amount of blood. I handed the camera back to Scarlet, asked her what the hell was going on. She saw the pictures and she was stunned. And then they were gone. Just gone. And the elk was back where he was supposed to be.”

“I didn’t take those the pictures,” Scarlet said firmly. “And I didn’t erase them.”

“The police took the camera,” Ben said. “They didn’t find any sign of those shots, and they let Scarlet go.”

Scarlet looked at Ben and then at the agents. “The thing is...well, it’s strange, even stranger than it seemed at the time. I was thinking about it while I was cooking breakfast, and those pictures were like the story of this place. It was built by one of Ben’s ancestors, Nathan Kendall. He was attacked one night. Whoever did it dragged him up the mountain and tortured him with a knife, then shot him. And when his wife heard him screaming and went to help him, she was shot, too. They never did catch who did it. There were several theories, but no one was ever arrested, much less convicted.”

She paused, shivering slightly as she looked straight at Diego. “It’s as if history repeated itself. He was tortured, then shot...she was shot but at least not tortured. They died the same way and in the same place as Nathan and Jillian Kendall died nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.”





4

Scarlet was extremely grateful—and still a little incredulous—that Diego had not only come to help her, but that he had also come so quickly and with a contingent of fellow agents.

She knew Brett, of course. He and Diego had worked together for years—she’d often felt that Brett knew her husband better than she did. Of course, in their line of work learning to think almost in tandem was imperative.

She still thought the world of Brett. He had been a good friend to both of them during the divorce, even helping her pack up when it had been time to leave.

But she’d never heard of the other agents or this “special” unit Diego and Brett had joined. She still didn’t know anything, if it came to that.