The Cursed (4 page)

“I didn’t know him well. I just know that he was one of the good guys,” Dallas said. At least Dirk had done Rodriguez the mercy of closing his eyes.

Dallas set his fingers lightly on the dead man’s shoulders as he studied him. For a moment he felt the fierce grip of pain and sorrow.

This scene was too familiar. Not that long ago they’d lost another agent. Not that long ago he’d come upon a dead woman—that same agent—in the same position, lying in the street on her back. He had been close to what was going on...close to finding the truth, to rounding up a bunch of greedy bastards who didn’t care who they killed in their quest to amass more and more wealth.

They had made arrests. But he had suspected then, and he suspected now, that the real killer—the man giving the orders—had eluded him.

Jose Rodriguez had died on his back. His left hand was still curved and slightly twisted. His right hand lay in a puddle of blood.

Frowning, Dallas studied the puddle.

Jose had been trying to write something in his own blood.

Dallas took a moment to envision the scene and figure out how Rodriguez had managed to write something while lying on his back. Only one scenario made sense.

Jose had fallen forward, dying. He’d started to write something, but the killer had come up behind him before he finished, and wrenched him around so that he had landed on his back—his hand still in the pool of blood he had been using as ink.

Dallas looked over at Liam. “Can you make that out?”

“Make what out? It’s a pool of blood—oh! I see what you’re saying.”

They both bent closer, trying to read the dead man’s message. “That first letter’s a
C,
” Liam murmured.

“Yeah. I think you’re right. Then...a
U?
” Dallas asked.

“Yeah,
C-U-R,
” Liam agreed. “Cur? Like a dog?”

“I don’t think so. Can you get one of the photographers over here?” Dallas asked.

Liam rose and motioned for a crime scene tech. The man hurried over, took pictures as Dallas indicated, and then moved back to the fence where he’d been working.

“Whoever he was,” Dallas told the dead man quietly, “we’ll find him.”

Two of Dirk’s assistants came for the body, and another tech walked up to Liam. “Sir? Anything specific you want us to look for?” he asked.

“Inspect the alley and all the nearby streets, and the yard, too. Our vic was seen with a knife—a big knife, like a bowie knife. Try to find it. Search everywhere our victim could have been.”

“Do we need a permit for the yard?” the tech asked.

“Hannah is a friend. We have her blessing for anything that’s necessary. Do your jobs, but don’t be careless. Try not to leave the place looking like a war zone,” Liam said.

The tech nodded and moved away.

Dallas shook his head, looking from the yard to the house. “How the hell could anyone think that a dying man was a ghost?” he demanded.

“The power of suggestion, probably,” Liam said. “People love ghost tours. They go on them all the time. They want to be scared. They don’t want real danger, but they want to be scared. Hell, Dallas, nothing’s changed since we were kids. This place survives on tourism. Tourists like stories. We’re full of them.”

“But this guy was stumbling around your friend’s yard and she didn’t wake up until some tourist screamed, and then she was all, ‘Wow, you saw a bloody ghost in my yard? Okay.’”

“Hannah is a good kid, Dallas. Lay off. She was dealing with screaming tourists who told her they saw a ghost, not a man.”

Dallas nodded. “Yeah, all right.”

“Come in and talk to her. Talk. Don’t yell.”

“I was never yelling.”

“You basically accused her of causing his death.”

“The hell I did. I merely suggested that an intelligent and rational human being might have thought from the get-go that there was something more than a ghost in her yard.”

Liam lowered his head, a slight grin on his face. “I’m going in for coffee. If you can be nice for a few minutes, you’re invited, too.” He looked up at Dallas, and his smile faded. “You heard the doc. He couldn’t have been saved unless he’d been in an emergency room when it happened. It’s not Hannah’s fault your man is dead.”

“I know. I just...I just feel like something is escaping me and that I should be able to grasp it, and I can’t. I’ll be pleasant. I promise.”

“No sarcasm?”

“No sarcasm.”

They took the path from the gate past the pool, where the techs were busy stringing tape to try to salvage what they could of the victim’s route from the yard to his death.

There were no blood trails to the yard, which seemed impossible, but unless the techs could find something with their equipment that neither Liam nor Dallas had seen, Jose Rodriguez might as well have appeared in the yard like the ghost those kids had thought he was, because there was no sign of where he had been before he showed up by the pool.

How could that be? He must have been bleeding steadily by that point.

There was a crime scene marker at every spot where Hannah O’Brien had seen blood as she’d followed the trail through her yard to the alley.

Dallas couldn’t help himself. He paused, looking at the lawn chairs beside the pool. He imagined the couple lying there....

Opening their eyes.

Seeing Rodriguez bleeding, holding a knife, then screaming in terror at what they thought was a ghost.

They had still been out there freaking out when Hannah came out to see what was going on, so why hadn’t Rodriguez stayed there with them and asked for help?

The pool was surrounded by attractive tile work, which gave way to lawn. It appeared that Rodriguez had stumbled past the chairs, then across the grass, past the bushes edging the yard and through the gate into the alley. It hadn’t rained recently, so the foliage was dry and brittle. He had to assume there would be evidence if Rodriguez had gone through it. Since there wasn’t, he had to assume Rodriguez had taken almost a straight line out to the alley.

Had the gate already been open?

He closed his eyes and tried to picture what had happened.

Sliced, bleeding, dying...but he hadn’t headed to the house?

Why?

There could be only one reason.

Rodriguez had come from the alley, trying to escape through the yard, and the killer had been behind him. But he’d seen the kids by the pool and hadn’t wanted anyone else to die, so he’d sacrificed his own life and turned around, back toward danger.

So where was the killer now?

And where was the knife the couple had seen Rodriguez waving?

The answer was obvious.

The killer had followed him until he had fallen, then wrested the knife—which might well have been dripping with the killer’s blood—from Rodriguez’s dying grasp.

2

H
annah had hurried past the pool area and inside without looking back. Once there, she leaned against the door, just breathing.

She still felt as though, even if she were pinched, she wouldn’t feel anything.

He’d been real. The “ghost” in her yard had not been a ghost at all. At least, he hadn’t been a ghost when her guests had seen him. He had been real—he’d been flesh and blood and...

Alive.

But according to the medical examiner, nothing could have saved him at that point.

And still, in her mind, she kept replaying everything about finding his corpse as clearly as if it were happening all over again. First the blood...

And then the body.

She’d rushed to his side, fallen to her knees while fumbling to get her phone from her pocket. She’d touched him, ready to do whatever necessary to help him.

And then she’d seen his eyes.

Dead eyes.

Every corpse she’d ever seen had been laid out tenderly in a casket at a wake or a viewing.

The dead never look right, never, no matter how good the mortician is,
Melody had told her once.

But they didn’t look like the dead man in the alley. Lying there as if he’d known death was coming, as if...

As if he had tried to speak, tried to say something before succumbing to the darkness.

If only she’d gotten there sooner.

No. She couldn’t have gotten there sooner; she hadn’t had any idea of what was going on when Shelly and Stuart had started screaming, and it had seemed so cut-and-dried. Shelly, already on edge after the ghost tour, had thought she’d seen a ghost and Stuart had gotten carried away on the wave of her hysteria. And then she’d had to deal with all the other guests shrieking and shouting and just generally going nuts.

There was nothing she could have done. Even if she’d run right out to look for a bleeding man with a huge knife in his hand, it would have been too late. He’d already been dying.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she muttered drily to herself. She realized she felt incredibly guilty, which was ridiculous, because she hadn’t done anything wrong.

But the man had been alive....

And now he was dead.

She pushed away from the door. She didn’t just feel guilty about the dead man, she realized. She felt guilty for suspecting her resident ghosts of being up to no good, which had been entirely stupid of her. They always looked exactly the same. Melody was always beautiful in her Victorian gown, and Hagen always looked like a handsome swashbuckler in his fawn breeches, boots and muslin poet’s shirt. They didn’t change clothing—and they didn’t run around with weapons, much less bleeding.

She needed to do something, get busy. She couldn’t just stand there all day feeling guilty. But she’d already stripped all the beds in a fury and cleaned the house, powered by the adrenalin that had raced through her after the scare and the effort of getting all her guests settled elsewhere. By the time the sun came up, the Siren was ready for business. Too bad she didn’t have that much energy every day.

In the kitchen she poured herself another cup of coffee and took out her scheduling book. Stuart and Shelly and their friends had been due to stay another three days. There were prospective guests who had wanted to come, but she’d had to turn them away. Several had left their numbers, though. Maybe she could call them and...

And tell them that a dying man had walked through her yard before his death and scared everyone else away?

The pages seemed to swim before her eyes.

She thought she heard someone knocking at the back door. She rose and went to check.

No one.

She moved back through the house, looking out the windows as she went. There were people walking along the sidewalk out front, but no one was at her door or trying to get her attention.

She headed back to the kitchen, but once she got there she felt a strange sensation creep along her spine as if she wasn’t alone.

“Melody? Hagen?” she said. Her words were soft—and hopeful.

But neither of her resident ghosts replied. They were angry—they had a right to be.

But, despite their silence, were they here, watching her? Watching everything that was going on?

“Guys, please, I’m really, really sorry,” she said.

No one answered her. She decided she must be feeling off because of the bad night she’d had and all the people crawling around her yard, not to mention that she’d stumbled on a body this morning. She let out a soft sigh and tried to imagine her bank accounts in her mind’s eye, then decided on a course of action. She asked herself again whether she should call the potential guests who’d left their numbers or not. Maybe it was too soon.

Too soon after discovering a dead man.

Hannah drummed her fingers on the table. She was glad that Liam had come when her emergency call had gone through; he had been her friend for as long as she could remember. As for the FBI agent...

She didn’t have anything against FBI agents. Her cousin Kelsey was an FBI agent. She wished fiercely at that moment that Kelsey was still in Key West, but she was in the D.C. area, part of a special unit. Hannah hadn’t gotten to see a lot of Kelsey since she’d moved.

Hannah missed her.

Missed her now more than ever.

She pulled her phone from her pocket, suddenly overcome by the urge to speak with her cousin.

She stopped herself before opening speed dial. She would call Kelsey soon and spill everything that had happened. Kelsey was tough but compassionate. She would put everything in perspective.

Hannah just wasn’t going to call her now, while she was in a panic. She would wait until she was calm, when she wouldn’t sound as hysterical as Shelly had sounded that morning.

Her best course of action right now was to try to come to grips with what had happened. She winced.

She hadn’t even known the man.

But she had held him in death.

She gave herself a mental shake. She needed to be busy so she could take her mind off things.

Hard to do, of course, when her guests had fled.

So she would sit down, breathe, check out her bank accounts and assure herself that she could weather this storm. Yes, a man had died and that was tragic. But she hadn’t known him, and she had done what she could. She had to move forward now.

* * *

Liam was obviously good friends with Hannah O’Brien, Dallas thought when his friend went straight to the back door, opened it without knocking and walked right in.

The house was old—probably one of the island’s oldest. Tongue-and-groove paneling was evident in a rear room that had been set up as a social area, with a large flat-screen television surrounded by old bookshelves that also held a stereo system. The furniture seemed to be what was locally called Victorian Keys—rattan and wicker decorated with cushions covered in period-design fabrics. The drapes back here were sheer and floated through large open windows that looked out over the patio and pool.

“Hannah?” Liam called.

“In the kitchen!” came the reply.

“You should lock your door,” Liam told her.

“I usually do,” she replied. “Honestly.”

By then they were walking through the formal dining room. If it had been 1839, Dallas thought, the room wouldn’t have looked any different. The table was large enough to seat at least twelve and was highly polished. Intricately carved legs each ended in a dragon’s head. Lace doilies, along with a handsome silver service, covered the tabletop. Liam didn’t pause but walked on through to the kitchen. Dallas followed him.

There was another table in the kitchen—this one smaller and far more casually set. It sat six, tops. The kitchen itself was large and in keeping with the rest of the house. The sink had reproduction faucets that resembled old pumps, the counters were butcher block, with marble tops by the stove and sink. Copper pots and pans hung from the rafters, and there was a huge fireplace with a large kettle hanging over carefully stacked wood. Dallas was pretty sure it was just for show.

Hannah was seated at the table. She had changed into a sundress and was no longer covered in blood. Her hair was wet; she had apparently washed it. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes were wide. She was, he thought, very much a beauty, like a classical statue in her near perfection.

She was sipping from a mug as she studied a record book in front of her.

“I’m debating whether to call the people I had to turn away,” she told Liam drily. “My bottom line could certainly use the help.”

“Don’t know how to help you there, I’m afraid,” Liam told her as he pulled out the chair to her right and helped himself to coffee.

“There’s quiche and croissants if you’d like,” she said. “Obviously I’m not serving a dozen guests this morning.”

“How sad. Your guests are gone,” Dallas snapped before he could stop himself.

She stared at him, obviously stung by his tone. “I
found
that poor man. I saw his face. It was...” She shuddered. “Anyway, think whatever you want of me, but we’re still here and so is the food, so help yourself if you’re hungry.”

He
was
hungry; the call from Liam had dragged him out of bed early in the morning, and he hadn’t had a break since. But he felt like an ass. No way in hell could he accept her food after he’d just been so rude to her.

“I’m pretty sure you both know I didn’t kill that man,” she said quietly. “But the clothes I was wearing are in that paper bag if you need them for anything.”

“The lab might want them,” Liam said.

“Interesting,” Dallas said. “That’s a good call, but it’s interesting that you thought ahead like that.”

She gave him a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. “The techs outside asked me to bag up the clothing I was wearing in case they could find trace evidence from the killer on it.”

Dallas kept his mouth shut and took a drink of the coffee Liam had already poured for him, but inside he was thinking,
You ass
all over again.

“Hannah, by any chance did your guests tell you what direction the ‘ghost’ came from?” Liam asked her.

She shook her head. “I wish I could tell you more, Liam, but no, they didn’t say anything. I assume you’ll want to talk to them yourself, though. I arranged for them to stay at the Westin. None of the B and Bs would have had room, even if I’d been able to reach someone at that hour of the morning.”

“I’m assuming you have cell numbers for them so we can track them down if they’re out?” Dallas asked.

She nodded and reached for the guest register on the table. “Of course.”

Liam rose, pulling out a small pad and a pen. “What are their names?”

“Stuart Bell and Shelly Nicholson saw him and thought he was a ghost,” Hannah said, and gave him their numbers. “Their friends are Pete and Judy Atkinson, and Mark Riordan and Yerby Catalano. And then there were the Hardwickes. They’re regulars, and much too elderly to be your murderer, if that’s what you’re thinking. They woke up with all the screaming and came rushing down, just like I did. They were just as confused and disoriented as I was. Everyone but the Hardwickes was on my ghost tour earlier. I start off here, and I always end at the Hard Rock—part of their ticket price gets them a drink. I left them there, came home and went to sleep. I didn’t hear them come in. I didn’t hear anything until the screaming started. Just call over to the hotel. I’m sure you’ll reach them there.”

“Thanks,” Liam told her, then got up and walked away from the table as he started making his calls.

“They really thought a dying man was a ghost?” Dallas asked, shaking his head.

“I guess you don’t really understand this island,” Hannah said.

He smiled grimly. “Oh, I think I do.”

“You’re new here, right?”

“I haven’t been assigned here long, no. But I know the island. I was born here, Miss O’Brien.”

“Ah,” she said, studying him. “Really? I’m going to guess that you’ve been away awhile. Because you should know that people like to come here and steep themselves in ghost stories, then party at the bars on Duval Street.”

“They were drunk?” he asked.

That seemed to give her pause. She shook her head. “No, actually, I don’t think they were.”

“There’s a big difference between a supposed ghost and a dying man,” Dallas said. He took another drink of his coffee. It was good. Strong. Exactly what he liked and needed.

“I might remind you, Mr. Samson, that I’m not the one who saw him. My guests told me that they’d seen a ghost, and since they were clearly terrified I did what I thought was the right thing—I gave them their money back and sent them where they’d feel safe.”

He leaned forward, looking at her. “It’s Agent Samson, Ms. O’Brien. And while you were busy doing the right thing, weren’t you afraid yourself?”

“Of a ghost? A
supposed
ghost? No.”

He leaned closer to her. “What about the knife?”

She shrugged. “They said he had a knife—and no, I don’t know why they thought a ghost was able to carry a real knife—and that he was about to do them in.
I
never saw the knife.”

Liam returned to the table and told them, “They’re still at the hotel. I spoke to a friend at the desk. She’s slipping a note beneath the door, because they have their phones off—probably trying to get some sleep. We can stop on by when we leave here or wait to speak to them when they wake up. Hannah, the crime scene techs will probably be around for a few more hours. There’s a lot of foliage around the property, and they’re trying to find any clues—blood, broken branches, a scrap of fabric...whatever. Trying to figure out where he came from before he wound up in your yard and where the killer might have hidden.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “We’re just a block off Duval,” she said. “I imagine...well, the backstreets here are pretty quiet once the bars close.”

Liam nodded. “I’m going to take you up on breakfast before we go.”

“Please do,” she said, rising. “Let me nuke it for you.” She turned to look at Dallas. “Agent Samson?”

What the hell. He was hungry.

“Sure,” he said. “Thank you.”