MORENO, CALIFORNIA
As dawn broke over the Inland Empire, there was more activity in Moreno, except for the bizarre traffic deaths the night before, than there had been since the first part of November 1962. Bob and Linda, with very little sleep under their belts from the night before, stood at what they now referred to as the haunted window at the front of the radio station / record store. They each had a large mug of coffee as they watched the activity outside. Every few seconds one or the other of them would allow their eyes to drift toward the broken neon sign in the window. Thus far, there had not been a flicker, and they were both silently happy for that. They saw Harvey Leach step through the glass doors of Newberry’s. He still wore a bathrobe and pajama bottoms as he too sipped his coffee and watched the few remaining residents of Moreno leave for good.
The last four families, two of them with husbands and fathers that drove long-distance big rigs, had been up most of the night packing so they could get out in front of the traffic the next morning. The last of these families left as the sun crested the ruins of the Grenada Theater.
“This couldn’t have been spurred on by the accident last night,” Linda said as she finally turned away from the sad sight of the last of their friends and neighbors leaving them. “Do you think they have heard and seen the things that we have the past few weeks?” she asked as she refilled her coffee and started for the back rooms where she would get dressed.
With a deep breath, Bob turned from the window and faced his retreating wife’s ample behind. “I wouldn’t bet against it. Too much strange crap for just us and Harvey to have seen it. Half the families lived only a block or two from the church.”
“Oh, you mean the church that was burned down and hasn’t had a bell to ring in four decades, but it rings anyway for the past week—that church?” she said as she slammed the door to their modest bedroom.
“Yeah, that one,” he mumbled to himself as he tasted the coffee, made a face, and then placed the mug on the counter as the first real rays of light burst through the glass. He watched Harvey across the street shake his head and then sadly turn for the doors of Newberry’s. The last of his regular customers were skipping town.
It seemed Moreno was dying for the second time. This one was a slower coup de grâce compared to the sudden death in 1962.
* * *
Deep in the darkness of the basement of the Grenada, the filthy standing water began vibrating. The rats had long fled the basement for the upper reaches of their once richly appointed accommodations. The expended energy from the night before had sapped the power of the morning’s awakening. It was learning fast what it needed to know from the nocturnal visits in the east. Now its strength was ebbing at low tide. It found new and entertaining information in that its enemy was gathering resources to help combat that which went unseen. This was a development that the entity had not foreseen. It was still weak and depended on the active vault inside the old winery for power.
Soon, together, both trapped entities would be powerful enough to break free of their confinement for good. The voice from the basement whispered its desire.
* * *
One mile away and up the hill unofficially known as Drunk Monk’s Road, in the old winery ruins next to the Santa Maria Delarosa mission, the whispering of many could be heard in answer to the call from the theater not far away. There were no rats running in fear here, for they had abandoned the ruins more than fifty years before.
The ten-ton vault lurched in its floor mountings as the crescendo of voices spoke at once as the whispering from far below inside the town continued. The entity heard the young voice and heard her desires.
Then all at once, the movement and the whispering stopped as suddenly as it had started.
VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE
The house had become silent as the breakfast hour passed without further incident. The group of people that had arrived late the night before had remained in the bedroom after their unsettling incident in the early morning hours. The security personnel were already weary of the newcomers and stayed as far away from them as they could.
Gabriel looked at his watch and then the cold cup of coffee in his hand. He placed the cup down, stood, and stretched. He went over to the far corner, and after excusing himself to the black-clad FBI security man, he leaned over and tapped John on the shoulder. The large man looked up and then eased Jennifer’s sleeping head from his shoulder and stood, softly placing her head on the arm of the small love seat where she had finally dozed off. As John moved away with Kennedy, they were joined by both Julie Reilly and Kelly Delaphoy. George had excused himself some time before eight that morning to see if he could find the liquor cabinet and, with a warning look from Gabe, went to find it.
“How is she doing?” Gabriel asked John as they stood by the bathroom door.
With a look at Julie, John nodded. The move was overexaggerated, and Kennedy noticed it.
“She’s—”
“She’s been exhibiting signs for months now,” Julie said, cutting John’s overly enthusiastic answer off at the knees.
“That right, John?” Gabriel asked.
He nodded silently as his eyes went over to a sleeping Jenny. “Yeah, she stares at herself in the mirror more than she should. She hums and sings songs when she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.”
“You have to have more than that,” Kennedy said, growing frustrated at having to dig answers out of Lonetree.
“Hell, I don’t think Bobby Lee ever left her. He’s just been lying low, and the stress of being on the run has made it nearly impossible for her to hide the fact anymore.”
“Is that what you think?” Gabe asked Julie, who nodded.
“She also talks in her sleep when she thinks John’s out. I heard her more than once. It’s nothing threatening. Bobby just comes out and talks. It seems like she enjoys it, if you ask me.”
“Well, we differ on that point. I want the bastard out of her.”
Kennedy walked over and looked down on Jenny as she slept. “Does she sleep well?” he asked.
“You mean does Bobby Lee drive her to insomnia?” John said, shaking his head. “No. It’s not like before; he doesn’t force her to sing or lie awake at night with his incessant complaining about how unfair his life and death had been.”
Gabriel turned away and nodded at both John and Julie. “I’ll talk to her later. The only reason I’m concerned is the fact she refused to tell me about the reoccurrence. And she obviously didn’t feel confident enough to inform you of the truth.”
“Maybe we should—” Julie began to say, but the deep male voice stopped her cold.
The voice was so different that the FBI hostage rescue team man took a sideways step when he realized the man’s voice was once more springing from the small woman lying on the love seat.
“Maybe you should leave her the hell alone, Dr. Schweitzer,” said the voice from the perfect face of Jenny, whose eyes were moving at a rapid rate underneath her eyelids.
Gabriel turned and went back to the love seat where Jennifer lay with her small feet and legs curled up like a sleeping child.
“Bobby Lee, I thought we had a deal,” Gabriel said as he stood over the diminutive anthropologist.
“You had a deal, man, not me.”
The four hostage rescue team men exchanged looks as the deep male voice came from the small woman lying there. The heavily armed men took another step away.
“Bobby Lee, we may be into something here that could cause Jenny trouble. We need her alert and awake.”
“You have more of a problem than that daddy-oh on that bed. I think that nutjob has an enemy you don’t want to meet, that’s what I think. I think my Jenny girl will need me. No offense, Chief Red Cloud.”
John angrily shook his head. He and the old rock-and-roller had more than just a casual dislike for each other; it was almost as if they were romantic rivals of a sort. Gabriel turned and shook his head at Lonetree, that now was not the time to get into an argument with a tormented spirit.
“Why do you say ‘enemy’?”
“I’m sayin’ enemy because that’s what this dude is facing, whoever this nutjob is. And I’m not sayin’ that this McCarthy-type asshole doesn’t deserve it.” On the love seat, Jenny’s brow furrowed. It looked as if, at least to Gabriel, she was trying to follow along with what tormentor was saying. “I don’t know who’s the bad guy here, man. It’s not like your last adventure in that house of horrors you sissies called Summer Place.” Jenny’s arm raised from her prone position and pointed, first at one of the Nomex-clad security men, who moved farther away, and then at the bed and its occupant. “I get the vibe that this bastard is worse than even the men that killed me. You want to talk about ghosts, that dude has ghosts.” The arm flopped down until the movement made Jennifer’s eyes flutter open. She quickly sat up and looked at President Hadley as his chest rose and fell in a calm sleep. She blinked and looked at the four people standing over her.
John went to her and sat down. “How you doing?” he asked, taking her much smaller hand in his own. She shook out of it and stood and went to the bed. The doctor and the two nurses came out of their stupors of the early morning and stood from their chairs as she approached. When they saw she wasn’t a threat, they backed away.
Jennifer stared down at the president, and then she turned to face the others. “Bobby Lee doesn’t like him very much.”
“How long, Jenny?” Gabriel asked as he joined her bedside.
“He never left, Gabe. I didn’t want to tell you, or you,” she said as she faced Lonetree. “I wasn’t sure at first, but then I knew, either in dreams or while doing research. He was always there. Hell,” she said as she ran a hand through her short hair, “maybe I even wanted him there. When I thought he had left that night in Summer Place, I felt I would be fine with it. I felt I wasn’t whole any longer.”
John closed his eyes, and then Jenny saw it and went to him. He smiled, a false gesture.
“Easy, John. Bobby Lee has no romantic interest in this haunted vessel you call your girlfriend; he’s always been interested in others,” she said as she turned and faced both Julie Reilly and Kelly Delaphoy. They exchanged horrified looks.
“We need to know what drove this man to the point it opened him up to this attack,” Gabriel said to change the sore subject, at least for John’s sake. He couldn’t help but give a teasing smile to both Kelly and Julie over Bobby Lee’s choice of romantic possibilities.
“Leonard should have a starting point for us by now.” Kennedy faced Jenny. “Is Bobby Lee going to be a hindrance, or is he going to help us?”
“Who in the hell knows? Remember the last time the little bastard skipped out right when the going got tough?” Lonetree said as he held Jenny’s hand.
Jennifer’s eyes flared bright momentarily, but then they settled as she squeezed his hand.
Kennedy gestured that they should leave.
As they started for the door, Gabriel noticed that Kelly Delaphoy stayed behind as she slipped on her sweater. He saw that it was intentional. She smiled, lost it, and then attempted it again.
“What is it?” he asked as he waited by the door.
With a wary glance at the others in the room, she took a step closer to Kennedy. “I’m so sorry for letting you down and getting the rest of them caught.”
“You said it wasn’t intentional; we can all live with that.”
“Still, I wasn’t as tough as I, or you, thought I was. I’m out of my league here. At least Julie has a track record of research and reporting. What am I? I’m a television producer who has screwed up everything I have ever touched in my life.”
Kennedy understood that Kelly felt she wasn’t much help to the team. He had found that her insight into how to sham a television audience had become invaluable in their work. Without her expertise, they would have been hard put to disprove any of the hauntings they had declared as hoaxes.
“You let me worry about who is valuable and who isn’t. What do you want me to do, replace you with Bobby Lee McKinnon?”
Kelly smiled as she hugged Gabriel and then patted his belly. “You go ahead; I think I’ll stay and keep an eye on our Mr. Wonderful for a while. One of us should be with him at all times.”
Kennedy smiled and then adjusted his glasses. “Okay, I’ll have someone relieve you in a while. I sent Damian on an errand, and he should be back by tomorrow morning. We’ll have more eyes to help then.”
Kelly watched as Gabe left, and then she looked over at the man in the bed. The hostage rescue team members were watching her as well as the two nurses and one doctor. She went over to the love seat that had been previously occupied by Jennifer and sat down. She again adjusted the sweater to the morning chill and then watched and listened to the heart monitor as it gave out its steady beeping.
* * *
Leonard wasn’t tired. He went from one computer to the next and then read what was there. When he got what he needed, he would hit the Print button, and the copier set up in the corner would come to life. The computer genius was in his element, and he was determined to get as much information as he could. Kennedy always pushed him for more, and acting as though the request had always been too much, Leonard always smiled and dove into his work. If there were any people out there who thought they could hide information from him, they usually found out the hard way that they were wrong. He had only been disturbed once, and that was by Catherine Hadley as she stepped in to see what Leonard was up to. He eased the woman out of the study and then closed the door behind her. She was Gabe’s problem and one he didn’t have time for. He barely glanced up from his work when the others entered the room. George Cordero entered from the opposite door with a croissant in his hand as Gabriel pulled the sliding doors closed.
“Sorry, but I was starving. Did I miss anything?” he asked, finishing off the last of the croissant and then going to the coffeemaker in the far corner. John and Gabriel took a seat at the long table as Leonard continued to piece together his first report. “Do you know those people are eating steak and eggs out there? And you wonder why our budget deficit is so out of control.”
“I’m sure that the supercarriers and out-of-control costs on fighter planes, coupled with overpaid members of Congress, have nothing to with it,” Lonetree said as his animosity for federal spending came to the forefront.
“Reserve your opinion until you see the size of those steaks,” George said as he too sat down with his coffee.
“Maybe with the situation you could say they are eating well for the simple reason it could be their last meal,” Jennifer said not too jokingly as she and Julie Reilly sat down. “How many deaths are attributable to this event now—eight?”
George stared at the small woman and nodded to indicate that, indeed, he had not thought of that.
Finally, Leonard looked up and noticed everyone. He shook his head and then went to the coffee station and poured himself a cup. This was strange because the small computer man never drank anything but Mountain Dew. They saw three large binders sitting in front of Leonard as he sipped the bitter coffee. He made a face and then dumped at least half a dispenser of sugar into the black liquid.
“What do you want first—possible motive or the fact that everything we’ve been told about our illustrious leader is a lie? With the exception of his military and college records, everything has been falsified and done so in the most ingenious ways.”
Leonard looked up and saw that his announcement was met with shock and a bit of skepticism. He picked up the first paper bundle that had been bound with plastic covers. He slid the report down to Gabriel, who made no move to open it. His eyes went instead to the rear doors of the study, and then he fixed Leonard with a look. He slid the first report back. Sickles caught his meaning with the look at the back doors of the room.
“Ah, our lovely Mrs. Hadley.”
“Let’s find out first if we have roadblocks to the truth before we delve into the whys, hows, and whats of it.”
“Well, the president, as you know, has to place his personal holdings, which are vast, into a blind trust before he takes the oath of office. His net worth three years ago was staggering. Fifty-two point seven billion dollars.”
“That’s with a B?” John asked as he stole Jenny’s cup of coffee and sipped, ignoring her glare at his blatant theft.
“From what sources do these riches come?” Gabriel asked.
“Inheritance, mostly. It seems Hadley’s father was the real entrepreneur here, not the son.” Leonard sipped the horrid coffee again and then made a face but continued. “Although a lot of the accumulation of wealth came after the sixties and early seventies, it was from a diversified and well-guarded portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real-time companies that are nearly impossible to trace back to the Hadley family. Look at the bottom line on some of these companies and you’ll find names like Lockheed Martin, HP, and others just as impressive. Dig deeper underneath those bottom lines, you get the name Hadley buried deeper than any name. Hadley Sr.’s start was the manufacture of specialty gauges, meters, and temperature readers for the federal government, and it expanded from there into other areas of manufacturing.”
“Did Dean have a direct working relationship with his father?” Julie asked, beginning her methodic note taking as was her habit.
“Not at all beyond cashing checks, at least until the old man passed away in 1978. Then he took a cursory interest in the company, but no more than that. He liked being the fat cat but didn’t like working for it. After Vietnam, not many people who knew him would blame him for not caring.”
“What do you mean?” George asked.
Leonard reached behind him and came away with a folder and opened it. He held it for a moment as if he were about to show them a surprise. “That man up there in that bed was a stone-cold killer.” He opened the folder and slid an eight-by-ten glossy to the middle of the long table. Everyone stood to get a good look. It was Hadley in his far younger years. He stood with four other men who were similarly dressed in green battle fatigues. Hadley was shirtless, and though the other three men smiled somewhat, he did not. The green beret on his head was tilted at a jaunty angle as he stared into the camera’s lens. It was a trick of shadow, of course, but the eyes on Hadley the younger looked blank, dark, and distant.
“Fifth Special Forces Group. He was on detached service in 1968 and 1969 to the Ninth Infantry Division.”
“What was his duty?” Gabriel asked as he studied the young face in the photo.
Leonard opened another file and then read from his report. “The army is going to come knocking at any time, by the way”—he held up the flimsy sheet of papers—“because all of this was buried so deep in the St. Louis record archives division they thought it was safe.”
“Classified, I take it.” John said as a statement rather than a question.
“Labeled by the army and the Ninth Infantry Division’s S-1, he had the highest clearance. It seems our boy was on detached service to the Ninth because of his specific set of skills. This cat was good at infiltration and killing people our government thought were unworthy to keep breathing—behind enemy lines and also on the friendly side south of the DMZ.”
“An assassin?” Julie asked as her pen stopped moving on her notepad.
“Our boy was far more than that. His debrief in Washington and recovered hospital records both noted the fact that the man never even had a rise in heartbeat when he killed. In other words, he enjoyed it.”
“How did all of this not come out when his party vetted him when he declared to run for office?” Lonetree asked.
“How could they know or find out? Along with his military duties, his records before college were all falsified.”
“By who?” Gabe asked.
“As far as I can see, it started with the father, Robert Hadley, and the old man’s influence was such that he had his golden boy’s exploits in Vietnam hushed up.”
“It sounds as if—” Julie began.
“His exploits would have been in the way of an eventual goal.”
“Are you suggesting, Leonard, that his father was grooming him for his eventual higher office pursuit even at that age?”
“Suggest, no. Prove? Yes.” Leonard opened the second folder. “Here is a list of high school classmates.” He slid this over to Julie Reilly and Kelly Delaphoy, the team’s best researchers outside of Leonard himself. He also slid a copy of a newspaper report over. “That is from the small newspaper in Ontario, California, the same town where Hadley went to high school. When Hadley began his bid for the California Senate seat that eventually led to the presidency, this newspaper could find no one in the Chaffey High School graduating class of 1963 that could remember Hadley. You would think that someone with that much money and clout would have been remembered, but not one classmate does. For the times, it was one damn big high school, but come on, no one?”
“Yearbooks?” Jenny asked as she retook the coffee from John’s hand.
“Got them all online. Every year from 1959 to 1963; it lists Dean Hadley as absent the day of class pictures. It says it in the captions of every yearbook. But get this—only online versions of the yearbooks; the actual hard copies have no mention of him at all, including being absent for picture day. No pictures of activities but lists everything he accomplished. Then I started checking area high schools, because you always choose somewhere close to where you really lived for ease of memory if asked. I went through all the local high schools. Claremont, Upland, Pomona, then I hit on Chino High School in Chino, California. I broke into the Chino Valley Unified School District records office, and guess what?”
“They have a full record of Hadley being in school during those years,” Gabriel said for him.
“Bingo, Prof, bingo.” Leonard looked pleased with himself. “The one mistake in the whole chain was the small high school who didn’t get the cover-up memo.”
“This couldn’t be another case of a changeling, you know, like Summer Place?” George asked, not looking too comfortable about the current subject at all. “Maybe he’s not really Dean Hadley.”
“Possible, I guess. But his blood type and his DNA were matched to that of Robert Hadley. This was done by the FBI after the attacks started just to cover all bases. Now they could also have been falsified, but I doubt it,” Sickles said as he opened another binder. “Now the fortune as it stands. I eased my way into the IRS database, which you’ll also hear about, I’m sure. Since the family fortune was placed in a blind trust, only the trustee has access to the data and money. That trustee is dead. Died two years ago, and then it went to the next man in line at the law firm involved.” Again, Leonard slid the paperwork down the table and Gabe picked it up.
“Barnes, Johnson, and Avery?”
“The law firm. The last name there ought to be cause for concern, one that every investigative pencil pusher in Washington missed.”
“Avery?” Kennedy asked as he tilted his head in thought. He quickly shuffled through his own pockets and came up with a sheet of paper that was given to him on the plane on the most recent attack before the one that had occurred the night before. He quickly found the name. “Is this accurate?”
“Already confirmed it. Herbert Avery was the son of the trustee and holder of the Hadley family fortune.”
“And now he’s dead,” Gabriel said more to himself than to anyone else.
“The president’s chief of staff?” Lonetree asked.
“The one and only.”
“Money is the motive?” Julie asked as her reporter’s hackles rose. “If it is, I don’t see how anything like this could be pulled off.”
“That’s why we’ll play those cards close to the vest for the time being.”
“It seems we need to know about his earlier years and why the need to cover up the fact of his military duties and high school location. Also, Julie and Jenny can maybe get some information from the White House staff if they ask nicely enough. They may be more forthcoming than they were with the FBI or the Secret Service about the goings-on in the White House. Particularly the behind-closed-doors kind.”
“That’s a big leap of faith to think there may have been hanky-panky going on in the Lincoln Bedroom,” George said.
“It’s no big secret that the president and the First Lady were not at all close. Every wagging tongue in that cesspool of a city knew that Hadley only married that woman for political gain—well, maybe her looks also, but mostly because it helped his career to be married and settled. And to suggest that there may have been a scandalous relationship between the president’s chief of staff and his wife? I say we’d better be careful with that one,” Jennifer said. John looked at her and smiled, as she seemed to be her old self again.
“As I said, we’ll send our two intrepid sleuths to find out,” Gabriel said. “In the meantime, stay clear of the First Lady; she may already suspect that we suspect. And to tell you the truth, that woman doesn’t sit right with me,” Kennedy said as he slapped Leonard on the back. “Now all you have to do is come up with the missing time from school to war and where our friend Dean Hadley was in those years.”
“On it, Professor Gabe.”
“Since—”
The large house shook on its foundation, enough so that Kennedy almost lost his footing. The gunfire erupted upstairs but only lasted as long as it took for Gabriel and the others to reach the sliding doors to the study.
They, along with a second team of FBI hostage rescue team members, bounded up the stairs. They were held back as they saw men trying in vain to open the bedroom door. John Lonetree, the largest man on the second floor, pushed past several stunned Secret Service men and threw his weight behind the effort. The door, as it had the night before, opened and then suddenly closed as it was pulled away. They could hear bumping, screaming, and one or two more gunshots. None of them had noticed that there was no power to the entire house. The sunlight illuminated the battle for the bedroom door.
“God, Gabe, Kelly’s in there!” shouted Jenny, who was twisting her shirt into a ball as she watched John and the others struggle with the door.
The hall lights came on, and the men at the door managed push it all the way open. Most of the men stood in shock at the scene. Gabriel angrily pushed by them and entered the room. His eyes went to Hadley, who lay in bed, peacefully sleeping. The lone doctor was nowhere to be seen. The two nurses were there. One was clearly dead, her neck twisted in a cruel and unforgiving angle. She lay at the foot of the bed. The four hostage rescue team men were there also. One was screaming in the corner as he grasped his shattered arm. The other three lay in disjointed positions on the floor. One of these men sat up and looked at his weapon, a smaller version of the Israeli assault weapon, the Uzi. It was twisted and bent to an extreme that a machine would have been hard put to produce. The other men lay dead beside him. The hostage rescue team man tossed the useless weapon aside as he rolled over. He was helped to his feet by Lonetree, who pushed him toward the open door of the bedroom. Gabriel was there looking for Kelly.
She was nowhere to be found. Kennedy looked through the broken panes of glass of the window. He saw the fourth member of the hostage rescue team on the grass far below. His neck was also twisted into a grotesquerie. Gabriel came back inside, and John held him. He shook him, and then his eyes went to the bed and the two small feet sticking out from under it. He saw the blood and felt his heart freeze. Others were trying to push their way inside the bedroom but were held back as John and Gabriel leaned down and, as gently as they could, pulled Kelly out from under the bed. Gabe felt his bile rise from his stomach. John had to look away. There was no need to check for a pulse. There would be none, they could clearly see. Gabriel placed his elbows on his knees as he took in Kelly Delaphoy. She lay faceup, and the teeth marks were plain to see. She was covered in hundreds of them—enough so that her sweater and blouse were punctured. Gabriel could see the small imprints.
Gabriel lowered his head. He had now lost the first member of his team since the original night inside Summer Place with the loss of Warren, his student who had been eaten by the summer retreat. He considered Kelly’s lifeless blue eyes, and then he stood up and pulled the blanket off a slumbering Dean, not caring about the man in the least. He put the blanket over Kelly and then turned for the door to allow the doctors inside. He grabbed the first one he could catch.
“I need the autopsy as soon as possible. I want measurements taken of those bite marks. I want the number of them and the size of the person or persons making them. Got that?” he said angrily as the doctor pried Gabriel’s hand off his white coat and collar.
“Come on, Gabe. Let them have this for now.”
As he pushed Kennedy through the door, he turned and looked at a peaceful Hadley as he lay on the bed with just a sheet covering him.
“Why not you, you son of a bitch?”
As John left the room, he knew deep down inside what he had to do, and he didn’t care for the thought one bit. It would mean he might have to get inside the head of the man in the bed, and that scared him to no end.
The Supernaturals, only a few hours after agreeing to help, had lost their first member to the unseen assault.
* * *
Four hours later, Gabriel stood before a door in the manor house and looked from person to person. His people were in shock at how suddenly events had turned. During their many excursions together after Summer Place, they had become complacent to the danger still prevalent with unknowns. In this case, they had become so emboldened by those many hoaxes they had uncovered, they—or at least Gabriel—had forgotten the consequences of a closed mind. That point had now been driven home by the loss of Kelly.
“Before we head down there, I know how you’re feeling. Kelly’s loss is a rough pill to swallow; she was good at what she did. I am to blame for allowing the failures of our group to color my judgment. Kelly should not have been left in that room without one of us being with her.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.” John stepped up to Gabriel and faced the others. He looked from George to Leonard and then to Julie and Jennifer. Everyone had red and swollen eyes from shedding tears over Kelly. “We all became complacent. We began doubting the power these people were describing. This is no haunting. This is a possession. By what? We don’t know. But whatever it is, it directed its attack against Kelly. The attack was on all of us.”
“A warning?” Julie asked as she stood a little closer to Gabriel.
“Maybe not a warning, because I don’t think this thing has any natural fear of us or anyone. It’s playing with us. The writing on the wall, the scratches and cuts on the president. The music lyrics. It wants us to learn. It wants us to know why. Whatever that man up there did, this thing hates him for it. The deaths of Kelly and the others are just a way of informing us that nothing will be able to stop it.”
“Why would it want us to know? Just to get our attention?” George asked.
“It surely got mine,” Gabriel said as he finally turned around and opened the door. He stopped before stepping onto the steel stairs heading down in the cold confines of the manor house basement. He faced everyone one more time. “You don’t have to do this. Leonard, you most of all.”
“Kelly was a lot of things, at least at first, but she proved to be a good friend for the past seven years. I owe it to her to go.”
One by one, they nodded in agreement. They went down into the makeshift morgue that had become crowded after the last few days.
They were met at the bottom of the stairs by two plainclothes security men who checked the IDs around their necks. They passed through a curtained-off area and found themselves in a small room with a large window facing a cement floor that had three tables on it. They could see the bodies underneath the sheets. Several men and women were in scrubs but wore no masks. The taller of the five people turned and faced the glass.
“Professor Kennedy, stop me if something isn’t clear enough for you, and we’ll try another tack.”
Gabriel nodded as the pathologist and one female assistant pulled back the sheet on the first of the three bodies. It was the torn remains of one of the hostage rescue team men.
“We only have three to view since the others are so dismembered the explanation as to their trauma would be superficial at best.” The pathologist nodded at a far corner and the bodies there on tables.
The door hissed open behind them, and they were all shocked to see Catherine Hadley standing behind them. She had her female assistant beside her, and they stood and watched. The former First Lady nodded at Gabriel and then approached.
“Professor, I understand one of your own people was hurt this morning. I am—”
“Yeah, she was kind of hurt to death!” Leonard said, forgetting who he was talking to. The Secret Service agents outside started to open the door, but the woman waved them away through the clear glass.
“I understand that, Mr. Sickles, and I am truly sorry. Now you see how serious this is.” She turned to face Gabriel. “This is why you need to recommend an induced coma, for safety’s sake, or this will happen again. I have twenty professionals from all walks of psychology ready to declare Dean dangerous to not only himself but to others. I believe I’m quoting your own work, Professor, about the power of the mind when you said that the human brain is more than equipped to manifest everything that has happened here. Am I correct on this?” Her right brow rose in challenge.
“I believe I said that, yes, but your quote is from a much larger statement about how the research has to be carried out until all avenues have been exhausted. This research, I assure you, ma’am, has yet to even start. I lost a close friend here this morning, and we will find out why.” He leaned down a little closer to Catherine Hadley. “Trust me, we’ll learn all there is to know about your husband.”
The First Lady looked from the glass to her assistant, and then they left the room.
“I really don’t care for that woman,” Jenny said as she and Julie exchanged looks.
“She does have a particular charm about her,” Gabriel said in agreement.
The lead pathologist said, “As you can see, the spine was severed through blunt-force trauma at the sixth vertebra. The skin covering the neck was stretched to its elastic limit, and the separation of tissue occurred here. Whatever force was applied to this man was enough to completely remove the head from the torso.”
“Why doesn’t he just say his head was ripped from his body and save us all a lot of time?”
They all turned and looked at Leonard. Only George was agreeing by nodding. Gabriel turned away after a warning shake of his head at his young computer whiz. The pathologist allowed two of his assistants to roll the second body forward.
“The second victim, a white male of thirty-one, had the exact same damage as the first. The same with the nurse, Beth Sauer. The only difference being that Ms. Sauer’s head remained attached.” Finally, the third body was rolled forward. “This is the casualty I believe you are most interested in, as were we because of the unique trauma it sustained.”
“Her name was … is Kelly,” Julie said.
“I am sorry. Kelly.” He looked at a chart on the gurney and then looked up. “Ms. Delaphoy sustained massive blood loss. I am sorry to say that she has possibly suffered the most painful of all the deaths thus far.” The tall pathologist pulled the sheet back. Kelly was there without any clothing or covering. Gabriel closed his eyes, and Leonard turned and left the small viewing room. Jenny squeezed John’s arm until he flinched. Julie allowed herself to start crying again. George attempted to steady himself by leaning on a temporary wall that gave a little, but he didn’t care. They all should have listened to Gabe and not ventured down to the basement.
“How many bite marks?” Gabriel asked, stopping the pathologist as he was describing her general health before the attack.
“Over three hundred. We have taken impressions of the wounds.”
An assistant wheeled over a stainless steel table and removed a green surgical cloth.
“We called in a forensic maxillofacial surgeon, and these were the clearest sets of imprints and plates we could recover.”
There were four sets of teeth, uppers and lowers. To the untrained eye, they all looked too small. Gabriel leaned in closer to the glass.
“Are those children’s teeth?” he asked as loudly as he could through the separation of rooms.
“Yes, our surgeon suggests one is of a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and the other two in their teens, give or take a year on all. The others are not viable enough to get accurate age estimates.”
“How many different marks, regardless of age?” Kennedy asked.
“Best guess, and that is all that we have at this point, is seventeen different bite patterns.” The doctor placed rubber gloves on, and with the help of a female assistant, he turned Kelly’s body onto her side so that her back could be seen. “The most unique pattern here was done by those smaller plates. We have never seen anything like this before. President Hadley had been raked by something sharp, possibly fingernails; we still haven’t found out for sure. But these we know were made by teeth.”
As hard as the group tried, they could not see what the doctor was describing.
“The bite marks are so plentiful and overlapping that we almost missed it until we took a skin scan of the traumatized areas.” The doctor nodded, and to everyone’s relief, Kelly was once more covered with a blue sheet. He then took the large x-ray folder and opened it. It was a black-and-white scan that showed the bite marks close up. He then produced a second scan. “We were clearly shocked when layer by layer we removed many of the superficial ones and then went with the deepest bite impressions. There was a section here that contained the older teeth marks, five differing sets.” He showed them the last scan. Julie gasped when she read the words that had been bitten deeply into Kelly’s backside all the way down the back of her leg.
“My God, what in the hell are we dealing with here?” George said as he stepped forward to make sure he was reading the message right.
Regards from the Crypt Kicker Five.
* * *
Julie and Jennifer spent several minutes in the bathroom next to the study as the others gathered to discuss the autopsy of their friend. It sickened them that Kelly had been used as merely a message board by something that found this amusing. They all watched as the two women came back inside and looked far fresher than they had going into the bathroom. They sat and all were silent as they absorbed what they had seen.
“What in the hell did that mean?” Julie asked as she tried to focus on the faces around the table.
Except for Leonard tapping away at a computer keyboard, no one said anything. It was George who walked to the small wet bar and poured himself a stiff shot of bourbon before he spoke.
“We all know where we heard that before, so everyone just admit it. It’s from that stupid song.”
“I must have missed that one,” Julie countered.
The others knew exactly what Cordero meant.
“‘Monster Mash,’ released in 1962,” Leonard said as he continued tapping away. “The only hit for a singer called Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett. The song premiered in time for Halloween in 1962 and was a huge hit with the bebop crowd.”
Understanding finally dawned on Julie’s face. “That silly Halloween song?” She stood and then paced to the window and the cloudy day outside. “Kelly once played that song for us when developing the Halloween special for Summer Place.”
“Everything related to us through whatever this thing is stems from the early sixties,” Gabriel said as he stood and went to the bar for a bottle of water. “Leonard, it’s imperative that we delve deeper into Hadley’s past. Why were his high school records forged? Why the blast-from-the-past music? And what could have turned this boy into a cold-blooded killer who has no remorse for the duty he performed? Most men of that ilk either commit suicide or—”
“Or run for president?” George said as a joke that fell completely flat. He quickly recovered from his failure. “This thing actually wants us to find out. So why doesn’t this evil fuck just spell it out? Why screw around like this?”
“I don’t know, George,” Gabe said as he again sat down.
“I know a way we can cut down the research time on this,” John said as he intentionally looked away from Jennifer.
“No. You promised—no more. Summer Place almost killed you,” Jenny said as she tried to get Lonetree to look her way. He held steady.
“There I bucked up against the entity itself. Hadley here is the vessel, not the force behind all of this.” He looked at Gabriel. “I think I can get in and back out again without the entity becoming aware that I am inside Hadley’s head.”
“No. Not yet anyway. We’ll wait and see what Leonard comes up with.”
“In the meantime, we lose more innocents? This thing isn’t going to stop, Gabe. You know it and I know it. In some ways, this entity is more powerful than the evil spirit that haunted Summer Place. It’s like this thing has been waiting and somehow it has awakened and it wants Hadley back. I can find out in a fraction of the time it would take Wonder Boy there to put a page of his research together,” Lonetree said with a nod toward the computers.
“Wonder Boy? What the fuck?” Leonard protested.
“I’ll think it over,” Gabriel took a long pull of the water bottle. “If whatever this thing is finds out you’re trespassing, I don’t think it would be very forgiving.”
“It’s inviting us to come in. I want to accept the invitation. It just may let me find out what we need to do for it to get what it wants most—and that is the return of Hadley—to God knows where.”
“George, do you think you can contact physically with our former First Lady and get a feeling for her motivation in all of this?”
“Just get me in the same room with her. Her mantra puts out enough vibe I could read her in ancient Chinese. Yeah, I can see what she’s up to.”
“And while he’s doing that,” Leonard said as he hit the Print key and the copier started up in the corner, “I do have a lead on a portfolio of investments that never went over to the family funds in general. It will take awhile, but I think I can get into their systems.” He pulled a piece of paper from the printer, read it, and then handed it over to Gabriel.
“What is this?” he asked when he read the page.
“A list of former holdings by the Hadley Corporation. Sold off years ago.”
“So?” Kennedy asked as he passed the page to John and the others.
“The properties were never relinquished. Hadley’s father sold the assets to himself under an assumed name and corporation—three businesses that I have yet to track down. I have one, I think,” Leonard said as he returned to his computer screen. He tapped the glass. “Right here. A small security company that is listed as privately owned, but if you read the small print”—he turned and smiled at the others around the table—“which I always do, you’ll see a firm called Sacramento Security, and the name on the bottom line is that of D. Hadley. It’s based in Pomona, California. I can start there and see if anything correlates with the Hadley Group of companies and why their sale was a farce.”
Gabriel nodded, pleased that Leonard had given them a fighting chance without risking John’s life in a dreamwalk with Hadley. He looked at his old college roommate.
“Sorry, John, but I’m not risking you just to get a lead. We’ll go with Leonard for the time being.”
Jennifer closed her eyes as she silently thanked Gabriel for deciding against John’s idea.
That decision didn’t sit well with Lonetree. John wanted to meet the true members of the Crypt Kicker Five.