She called Rollo, who had decided to roll in the leaves for a while. He was coated in autumn’s colors when he ran up to her.
“Rollo!” she chastised softly, dusting the leaves from his coat. “I’m going to give you a good brushing and dress you up in your best service-dog coat. You have a little boy who’s lost his mother to visit today.”
Rollo wagged his tail happily.
She looked around, feeling oddly uncomfortable. The wind had picked up, creating an eerie whistle in the trees. Mo and Rollo went inside and closed the door, then carefully locked it.
There was no danger out there; Rollo would have let her know. But she was anxious for Agent Mahoney to come and get her.
Strange, she reflected. She wasn’t afraid of being painted up as a ghost to walk around an old mausoleum all night—and yet she was unnerved in her own cottage, a place she loved.
Yes, that was it. She was nervous about everything that was going on, all the unexplained events, so she wanted to see him.
No, that wasn’t it at all.
She just wanted to see him.
* * *
The vines had been pulled away from the old vault entrance and the heavy brass and lichen-covered door had been fully opened. Rigging had been set up for lights to flood the interior of the vault.
When Aidan arrived, crime scene workers were still taking out whatever small specks or fibers could prove to be evidence.
Van Camp and Voorhaven stood in front of the tomb, watching the proceedings.
Voorhaven greeted Aidan with a friendly handshake. “Hey, glad you’re here. I sketched a diagram of what the vault looked like before they took out the hatchet and the knife, scraped off the blood and collected any hair and fiber they could find. Naturally, Van Camp and I went through first in booties to try to reconstruct what happened. I’ve also included the outside environs. Can I show you what I’ve done?”
“Of course.” As he spoke, the head of the forensics unit, introduced to Aidan as Gina Mason, stopped by to tell him and the detectives that her people had finished.
“They’ll send someone to clean up the blood. Not that anyone should be in this old place, anyway, but we don’t want to create a possible health hazard,” she told them. “But, Detectives, Agent, you’re free to try out more theories.”
“Did you get anything promising? A cigarette butt, a thread, a hair?” Aidan asked her.
“Hair. Plenty of it on the altar. Where the heads were hacked off. I believe, however, that we’ll discover that the murderer was aware of what we’d be looking for, since he wore gloves. Maybe even a snood to protect his own hair—or, hell, maybe he shaved himself bald. Not a button, a cigarette butt or even old beer cans. College kids didn’t get in here for frat night or anything—so there’s no unrelated evidence. That should make it a little easier for us. The killer left the hatchet and the knife. That’s it. I’ll report on them as soon as I can.”
Aidan nodded. “Thank you.”
“I hope we can help!” she said. “I really hope we can help.”
She waved goodbye and walked to her truck.
Van Camp turned to Aidan. “I think the kid here has done a good job with that sketch,” he said.
Voorhaven looked at Van Camp and then at Aidan. “The kid? Lee just has to refer to me as ‘the kid’? Old man, I’m thirty-three,” he said. The “old man” was said teasingly. Aidan could see that the two partners cared about each other and despite Jimmy Voorhaven’s initial hostility to the FBI’s moving in, he wanted to be a good cop.
“Hey.” Aidan grinned at Van Camp. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t mind being a kid again. And when a job’s done right, doesn’t matter how old someone is.”
Van Camp shook his head wearily. “Let’s just do this,” he said.
“All right,” Jimmy said, holding out his sketch and pointing at two parallel lines he’d drawn. “Here’s the way in. We might have gotten tire tracks if we’d found this place early enough. Not many people use this road, since it’s almost more of a trail and it goes through a line of forgotten vaults in a hill. Access is through one of the cemetery roads. But our killer knows this. He has his victims in a car—I’m thinking a van or SUV. He stops. Moves the vines and cracks open the door.”
He indicated the opening to the vault on his sketch. “We had to use crowbars to get it all the way open, the way I’ve got it here. Okay, so then he has to bring his victims in one by one, but that’s not hard if they’re knocked out. I think they might all have been alive when they got here, but maybe he didn’t want the kind of blood spatter he’d have on him if he chopped off their heads when they were alive. Okay, so—”
Voorhaven paused. “Say I’m the killer. I have one victim hoisted over my shoulder. I slip in. I probably have a light in here because I go straight to the deep end—way beneath the earth.” He stared down at his drawing. “I’m guessing these murders were personal because it takes a lot of strength to strangle an adult man or woman—a lot of adrenaline, a lot of passion. Or desperation, if you’re in a fight, but I don’t think there was any fight. So, he drops off one victim, then goes back for the next. Of course, the kid’s a different matter. Now, if our killer had balls, he did all this with the van parked out there. If he was worried, he moved it and came back.”
“Or he or she had an accomplice,” Aidan said. “We’ve been leaning that way.”
“Right,” Voorhaven agreed. “So, he slips through with one victim over his shoulder and then walks back to his van.” The young detective thrust his crumpled sketch in his jacket pocket and mimed the action he described; Aidan and Van Camp followed.
“He throws the kid down. He’s not really interested in the kid. He is interested in making it look like a psycho’s busy in town. Okay, his victims are dead. He has a chopping block on the old altar and he left his weapons there in advance. He cuts off the heads—kind of a clumsy job, according to the coroner. He’s never beheaded anyone before. But he gets the heads off. Now here’s the thing. He had to know about the mausoleums here as well as the vaults.”
“His next step would’ve been to get the bodies up to the mausoleum,” Aidan put in. “He would’ve been counting on the darkness.”
“That’s a little risky,” Jimmy said, “because—over at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery—lantern tours could be going on as late as midnight. But, then again, I’ve taken that tour and if you’re not close to the lantern light, it’s still dark as all hell. Maybe he enjoys the risk. Anyway, the bodies first. Then he’s practically across the street from the Headless Horseman restaurant. He makes sure he gets Richard Highsmith’s head where he wants it. By then, everything is closed up. Who can see anything on these streets at night and at that hour? Who’s even around to see anything? All he has to do next is move down the street about half a mile to the dry cleaner’s display. Put Ms. Appleby’s head in his little assembly of witches and spiders and ghastly things—including the headless horseman.”
Aidan nodded. “I think your theory is right.”
“Yeah?” Voorhaven asked.
“Yeah. Here’s the next puzzle, though. Richard disappeared before his speech. It was still daylight. Wendy Appleby must’ve been grabbed about the same time. You’re thinking a van or SUV as a vehicle—that sounds logical. I know most car trunks wouldn’t fit two adults and a child. So, did he bring them here and kill them and go back—or did he hide them in plain sight, knocked out in the back of a van before coming here?”
“If Jillian Durfey, Taylor Branch and that security crew of Richard’s was involved,” Van Camp said, “they couldn’t have been driving out here. They were all seen at the convention center.”
“J.J. told us how he and his mother were taken. We know there had to be two people. I’m thinking someone in that bunch is guilty—whether it’s Jillian Durfey or not—and that there was someone on the o
utside, as well. Someone who wanted Richard and Wendy Appleby dead,” Aidan said.
“We need to find out why this person wanted to kill them both,” Voorhaven said.
Van Camp nodded.
“Anything else?”
“To summarize, it sounds like hoods or pieces of cloth soaked in chloroform were thrown over their heads,” Van Camp said. “We’re agreed that suggests two attackers. You think Wendy Appleby and the boy were taken first—and then Richard?”
“Getting Richard out would be harder, so, yes, probably,” Aidan agreed. “Let me just do a walk-through,” he said.
He left them and tried to focus on the task at hand. He returned to the entry of the tomb. By day, it was stark and dreary, with broken and chipped seals on either side. It had been abandoned by family and friends for a long time, perhaps a hundred years or so.
A rat ran over Aidan’s foot. He found himself thinking about J. J. Appleby, waking in the dark, screaming until he was hoarse, crawling around, seeking a way out.
Being in the vault alone in the dark was bad enough. But shreds of clothing and bits of decaying humanity were visible through the broken seals. Maybe the kid hadn’t seen how dismal and creepy his surroundings had been. Still, he might have accidentally touched some protruding bit of cloth or bone....
The outer area of the tomb had been ignored by the killer, who’d gone straight to the back. He’d known the altar was there; he had his knife and hatchet waiting. He’d strangled his victims—and, judging by the coroner’s report, he wasn’t experienced with cutting off a human head. Whether he’d wanted it to look like the work of a psycho or he was giddy with anticipation regarding his own efforts and their identification with the headless horseman, Aidan couldn’t be sure. But the beheading part, after the murders, had been well planned.
He moved on to the back of the vault. The crime scene people had collected what they needed and moved carefully. Aidan could make out two places where it seemed that the dust of the ages had settled—and been disturbed.
That was where he’d left his victims while going about his preparations.
And it was where J. J. Appleby had been thrown. Luckily, he’d been unconscious when his mother was butchered.
“Anything?” Van Camp asked, approaching him a minute later, together with Voorhaven.
“I’m getting the same thing as the kid,” Aidan replied, grinning at Jimmy.
“See, old man?” Jimmy teased.
“Never argued with your theory,” Van Camp said. “We’ve got the how of it all. We just need a definite who and why.” He looked at Aidan. “She’s been charged, but the case was nearly dismissed,” he said. “Durfey, I mean. And she swore up and down—with and without her attorney—that she’s innocent. I guess letting her out on bail was the best the judge could do, seeing as it was circumstantial.”
“Yeah, and, if you two don’t mind, I’ll need some help tonight,” Aidan told them.
“I wasn’t expecting a night off,” Van Camp said.
“What is it?” Voorhaven asked.
“Surveillance duty.” He explained what he was after.
“I like it,” Van Camp said. “You tell us the time, and we’ll be there.”
* * *
Mo nearly jumped when Rollo started barking, she was so deeply engrossed in what she was reading.
He wagged his tail, which meant, she supposed, that Aidan had arrived.
She peered through the small window in the door and let him in. It was a cool day; he had a trench coat on over his suit. She stepped back, a little breathless. It really wasn’t the time to be thinking about how much she liked his looks.
“Thanks for waiting,” he said.
“No, I’m glad to go and see him with you,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “Most people, even hospital staff, love Rollo. We do hospital visits at Christmas and bring cards and games and— Well, never mind. But if there’s a fierce nurse on, she’ll see you and Rollo. You’re both so official-looking, I won’t have to explain that he’s more of a cure than a menace.”
He grinned. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, just let me close my computer. I’ve spent the day looking for your Lizzie.”
“And?”
“I might have found her.”
She walked him back to the computer, where she’d keyed in a “find a grave” search. “Elizabeth Hampton. I came across her in a history book about the area. The historical evidence is that Andre was in love with Peggy Shippen, who wound up marrying Benedict Arnold, instead. And, at some point, he had a broken engagement. But, as you know, he was a charming and well-liked man, and it’s not hard to imagine that there might’ve been another woman he loved—who loved him in return. There are stories that, on his moves through the area, Major Andre met Elizabeth Hampton and it was love at first sight. It’s hard to tell exactly when they managed to meet and fall so deeply in love, but apparently they did. Andre, of course, came to a sad finish at the end of a rope. But there were those who considered Elizabeth a traitor for having fallen in love with a traitor—and probably hiding him at times. No one knows how, but poor Elizabeth came to a bad end, as well. Less than a year after Andre’s hanging on October 2, 1780, at Tappan, Elizabeth was found dead. A local merchant discovered her body by the river. Her throat had been slashed, her jewelry was stolen and the authorities at the time believed they were looking for a transient murderer and thief.
“Most people suspected, however, that she was killed by local toughs, executed for betraying her patriot family and friends...and the local boy who was in love with her. Andre’s body wound up in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth’s is somewhere at the old Episcopal burying ground, not far from where we found Richard Highsmith and Wendy Appleby. But I haven’t located any references that tell us the exact spot, whether she was buried in a family tomb or vault, or if she was just placed in the ground. The next step would be to search local records.”
“Good work,” he said. “We’ll find her. I don’t know what any of this means. But we’ll find her.”
She wanted to tell him she’d seen Richard Highsmith. But she hadn’t learned anything yet. She’d wait.
She sat in her computer chair and he bent to look at the screen. She fought the urge to touch him.
Or to reach out, drag him close and bury her face against his jacket just to breathe in his scent. She stood quickly—and managed to bump into him. “I’m so sorry! But I was thinking I should get Rollo and we should go. It’s silly under the circumstances, but this is Halloween in Sleepy Hollow and I promised to help out, so I need to go be the Woman in White again.” She was babbling. She wanted to touch him, but she was afraid to.
He seemed unaware and glanced at his watch. “Yes, let’s get going.” Rollo was already dressed in his service-dog vest. Mo attached his leash and they set out.
“I listened to the news today. They talked about J.J. and the woman who’d been arrested. Has anything else happened?”
“Anything new? Anything that’s brought us closer?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a slow process. We do have some answers, thanks to forensics and J.J. We know that two people have to be involved. And Wendy Appleby wasn’t randomly killed. She was targeted. We’re questioning people, waiting for forensic reports—and we’ll follow every clue until we get to the truth.”
“He was a nice guy, wasn’t he? Richard Highsmith?” she asked.
Aidan nodded. “He was the real deal.”
“I’m sorry. And I’m sorry, too, about Wendy Appleby. She was a good mother. You could tell from the house and the way J.J. talks about her. I hope he’ll be okay. At least, he seems to love Debbie, so I hope it’ll work out for them.”
“She’s a friend of yours, right?”
“Yes. Not a really close friend, like Grace. Remem
ber, I wasn’t from here. I got to come for weekends and summer vacations. But you know Debbie. And you like her.”
“She’s sincere and very cooperative,” he said.
“You met her at the strip club.” She tried to speak casually. She and Aidan had been thrown together because of horrible events. So had Debbie Howell and Aidan. She couldn’t help thinking about Debbie, her beauty and effervescent personality, her cooperativeness with the law. Mo felt an uncomfortable surge of jealousy and tried to shake it. She was creating a whole dreamworld with a man who was just a professional associate.
“Yes, I questioned her, but she didn’t recognize the first image. Once Jane put some life into it, Debbie recognized her right away.”
Long days, long nights, not enough sleep. Mo turned away because she was suddenly grinning.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“No, really.”
Her smile deepened. What the hell. “Sorry. I know you had to visit the strip club for work—and that made me picture you going undercover as a stripper. I bet you’d be good at it.”
“Oh?” He slowly raised a brow in surprise, but she was glad to see the hint of a smile on his lips. “I’ll remember that, the next time someone needs an undercover male stripper. May I return the compliment?”
“Pardon?”
“Well, if you get tired of the greeting card business, I’m sure you’d make a bundle as a stripper, too.”
“Uh, thanks,” she said.
And luckily, that conversation went no further. They reached the hospital, and within minutes J.J.—whose face still bore witness to hours of tears—was hugging Rollo and smiling as if the sun had managed to walk into the room.
10
Patience was everything with children. So Aidan had recently learned.
He’d also discovered that he really liked J. J. Appleby. It would still have been murder and he would’ve had to give it the same dedication, no matter who the victims were, but it seemed all the worse for the fact that Richard had been one of the few men to survive politics with a soul and Wendy Appleby had obviously been a kind, giving person and a wonderful mother.