“Is he wearing a costume?” Carla Krug asked.
Before anyone could respond—although the answer almost certainly had to be yes—the image flickered and the man faded out.
No, Sam corrected himself mentally. The image didn’t flicker. Just the guy flickered within the image. The parking lot and the wall stayed on the screen, but the man was gone.
Then he was back, but farther from the camera. Almost to the edge of the frame. Then gone again.
He didn’t return. The guard at the keyboard brought up a couple of different cameras, showing varying views of the lot, but the guy in the old soldier’s outfit was nowhere.
“What the hell…?” the guard asked.
“If there’s something wrong with this system, we need to know about it right now,” Carla said. “And we need to get it fixed.”
“I don’t think it was the system,” the female guard said. “The cameras are working fine. I’ve never heard of a camera losing just part of an image and keeping the rest of it.”
“Like you said, Lynnette, anything that can happen will happen here.”
“I know, but I didn’t mean things that are physically impossible.” She returned to her desk, grabbed a microphone and thumbed its button. “Anyone in the northwest section of the parking lot, or with a visual of it?”
“I can be there in a minute,” a voice came back, staticky but distinct.
“Go, then,” Lynnette said. “You’re looking for a guy in some kind of military costume. Like a Civil War soldier or something.”
More like the Indian Wars, Sam thought, but he kept his mouth shut.
“On the way,” the voice said.
“I guess you guys didn’t anticipate something like this happening while you were here,” Carla said to Sam and Dean while they waited for the guard’s report.
“You never know,” Dean said. “We see some pretty strange things.”
The radio speakers crackled. “I’m here. Don’t see anybody in a uniform, though.”
The guard sitting at the console brought up a view that showed the guard Sam and Dean had met in the parking lot striking out across the lot, toward the fringe of forest surrounding it. All the screen showed was his form against a background of black pavement marked with white lines.
But as Sam watched, the image flickered again. One moment the guard was alone in the lot, and the next the soldier had appeared behind him.
And he was drawing his saber from its scabbard.
“Johnny!” Lynnette shrieked into the radio. “Johnny, he’s right behind you! Do you see him?”
Johnny started to turn, his face as blank as it had been earlier. He tucked his chin toward his chest, and Sam understood that he was talking into a microphone mounted at his collar. “I don’t see—oh!”
“Johnny, be careful!” Lynnette cried.
Johnny said something else, but they couldn’t hear him now, only see his mouth moving, in miniature, on the monitor in the dark, silent room where the smell of overheated coffee filled the air. The old soldier still flickered a little, as if he couldn’t come entirely into view. The sword in his right hand looked long and deadly.
“Oh, God,” Carla said softly. “This can’t be happening.”
You’d be amazed at what can happen, Sam thought. He slapped Dean’s back. “Let’s get out there.”
“Right behind you,” Dean said.
“Everyone report to the northwest parking lot!” Lynnette called into her radio. “Now! Suspect is armed and extremely dangerous!”
Sam and Dean burst through the security office door and out into the mall. Once they got there, Sam realized they still didn’t know their way around well enough to pick the fastest route to the back parking area. They held back a moment and let the two male guards who had been watching the monitors go first, just long enough to lead them to a door that opened onto that lot.
Once they spotted the door, the Winchesters poured on the speed, passing the guards easily. They wanted to be first on the scene.
Not that it would help Johnny.
The last thing Sam had seen on the monitor, before racing out of the office, was the old soldier thrusting his sword through Johnny’s gut, and the security guard—his eyes wide with fright, as he had at last seen his attacker—falling to his knees on the pavement.
Sheriff Jim Beckett wore the same sheepskin coat and white hat he had at the McCaig death scene. The paramedics arrived in what might have been the same van, roof lights flashing bright against low, leaden clouds. As far as Sam could tell, the only new player was the mayor of Cedar Wells, Donald Milner. He had a knee-length black coat on over a plaid blazer in maroon, white, and black, for which he might have mugged a real estate agent. His pants were sharply creased khakis and his loafers had tassels on them.
They all stood around a bloody patch of blacktop, from which the paramedics had removed the body of the guard named Johnny. By the time Sam and Dean had reached him, the soldier was long gone—or simply invisible again. Out of sight, in any case.
“You boys aren’t going to say anything about this before the opening, are you?” Mayor Milner asked, fixing Dean and Sam with an anxious glare. “I mean, you’re not with the local press, right?”
“We have a long lead time,” Dean said. “Don’t worry about us.”
“There isn’t anyone else here from the media, is there, Jim?”
The sheriff glanced around. “Don’t appear to be.”
“If I were you, though,” Sam said, “I’d give serious thought to delaying the opening.”
Carla Krug blanched. Mayor Milner scowled and bunched his right hand into a fist, like he might start throwing punches. “We’re not delaying the damn opening!” he declared. “This mall opens tomorrow no matter what. There’s too much at stake not to. Not to mention all the advertising that’s already been done.”
“But if this, and the killing last night, are part of the forty-year murder cycle,” Sam objected, “then it’s not—”
The mayor cut him off angrily. “There is no forty-year murder cycle! That’s nothing but an urban legend. Preposterous claptrap!”
Sam glanced about them. Except for the mall, nothing but deep woods in any direction. About as far from “urban” as one could get.
Dean turned toward Sam. “Great,” he muttered. “Instead of Dawn of the Dead, we wind up in Jaws.”
“Shark?” Sam replied. “I don’t see any shark.”
“Cedar Wells is perfectly safe,” Milner went on. “Isn’t it, Jim? You’ve got an APB or whatever out on that maniac, right?”
Beckett rubbed the side of his substantial nose. “My people are out there combing the woods. We’re keeping an eye on the roads too. If there’s some nut in a military uniform around, we’ll pick him up, don’t you worry about that.” Sam was more worried about the fact that they were all standing around on the crime scene, which had been photographed from a couple of angles but hadn’t been given the precise search that might have led to the discovery of an actual clue or two.
“What if he’s changed clothes?” Dean challenged.
“We’ll find him, son,” Beckett said. “Somewhere in these parts there’s a lunatic with a bloody sword. Can’t be that hard to track him down. You fellows are lucky you have the best alibi there is, because with two deaths since you came to town, you’d be my number one suspect. Numbers one and two, I guess.”
“So you don’t think the killer’s a local?”
“Lynnette knows just about everyone in town, and she didn’t recognize him.”
“He’s not from around here,” Lynnette added. “I know that for a fact.”
“So you’ve got someone who traveled here, presumably in a car, with an antique military uniform and a cavalry saber,” Sam said. “Have you checked the motels?”
“You don’t need to worry about how we do our jobs,” Beckett said. “We may look like ignorant hicks to you, but we’re professionals.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t,” Sam said.
“Sammy really likes cops,” Dean said. “If he didn’t have any talents he might have become one.”
Sheriff Beckett shot Sam a curious look, like he wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Sam knew that his brother had a habit of getting on the wrong side of the law, although it wasn’t always his fault.
Beckett apparently decided to let it slide. “Anyhow, we’re on the case, Mayor.”
“There you go,” Milner said. “This mall opens on schedule, and there won’t be any more discussion of that.” His tone indicated that he meant it, that the matter was settled once and for all.
Maybe he was right.
Then again, if history was any guide, the murders were just beginning…