“Which, of course, you didn’t really read,” Thor said.
Clara stiffened but forced a pleasant smile. “Actually, I did read what I was signing. The problem is that you sign for the parent company, which meant they could use us in their silly Gotcha show, as well. I didn’t realize it at the time—hindsight is wonderful. Have you never thought that, Agent Erikson?”
“I don’t think there’s anything more that Clara can give you right now,” Jackson Crow said quietly. “Give her some time. If there is something, she’ll think of it. And she will help in any way she can.”
Erikson inclined his head.
“I need to speak with everyone involved,” Thor said. He looked at Clara. “So, your entire cast was on the Destiny with another serial killer.”
“Not the entire cast, no,” Clara said. We have one new member we haven’t worked with yet—she’s not on the island, though.
She really hated the third degree she was getting. She might have been brutally victimized here—and the man behaved as if he was suspicious of a group of actors escaping the horror of what had happened.
“For your information, Special Agent, Simon was nearly killed himself while trying to save a friend of ours from the Archangel. He’s still healing from a broken leg he received from a brush with the killer. He is certainly something of a hero. You have no right to treat us as if we’re involved in this horror in any way. Ask Jackson—he sailed on the Destiny.” Clara hoped her righteous indignation was cool and mature.
“Miss Avery,” Erikson said, “I’m sorry for what you endured—in the past, and today. The Archangel is dead. Whoever is responsible for this butchery might have just gotten started. I’m doing my best to see that the killer is caught before someone else is murdered. If that offends your sensibilities, I do apologize. But it doesn’t change the fact that you all are on an island where a woman has been cut in half. So, I will ask you all, bear with me.”
How the hell could she be so right and this man still be able to make her feel like a plaintive schoolgirl?
She thanked God for her theatrical training and didn’t react in the least.
“Shall I send someone else in?” she asked.
He nodded at her. “Yes, please.” He looked at her keenly, and she had the odd feeling that he was inwardly shaking his head at her behavior—despite the fact that Jackson Crow had spoken so well for her.
Well, you’re a jerk! she thought. Tackling me into the snow—twice!
“I will seriously try to help in any way that I can,” she said evenly.
“There’s always hope,” he said. “Miss Avery, you do realize there’s a key word in what I’m telling you,” Erikson said.
She remained still.
“Island,” he said. “Either the killer knows Alaska like the back of his hand, such that he knew how to get here, kill and leave—or he is still here, perhaps among you and your friends.”
3
A deeper chill settled over Clara. That was it—of course. They were all suspects.
No, no, no. These men couldn’t possibly believe that she—or Ralph, Simon or Larry!—could have had anything to do with these horrendous murders.
Jackson would quickly set him straight on that!
But what about the film crew? She couldn’t believe they had anything to do with the murders. They’d all been too shocked, stunned and horrified when they’d been told that it was not a prank any longer, that people were dead.
But it was an island. And the only people here were her cast mates and the crew working for the film company.
And, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Crowley. The caretakers for the estate.
Had they been interviewed? Clara hadn’t even seen them yet, though she knew that Larry had gone to find them and that they had been at the Alaska Hut.
But, no. Impossible. She’d met the couple. They were in their late sixties or early seventies. Mrs. Crowley was an attractive, slim, gray-haired woman who was, admittedly, a little odd. She was coldly—but perfectly—courteous while making sure people, even Natalie Fontaine, understood that even though she was there to oversee and facilitate, they needed to help themselves and be self-sufficient if they needed something.
Mr. Crowley matched his wife; he was still fit as a fiddle.
And strong.
Strong enough to wield whatever weapon it took to cut a woman in half?
No, Mr. Crowley was a little weird, but to her, at least, he had been as nice and cheerful as a department-store Santa.
She shook her head and let out a long breath.
Maybe she could be helpful—state some simple facts.
“It is an island, Agent. It’s also heavily forested and has a ragged coastline with caves beneath ice and snow. It has little peaks and valleys. I believe there are survival caches left in various places around the island. Someone could be hiding out in the trees. Someone in a small boat could make it from the mainland in about fifteen minutes—that’s about how long it took to get here when the captain the company hired brought me out. He left me at the dock, but there are a lot of shallows and little beachy areas around the southern and western sides. A person—or persons—could easily come and go from a zillion little hidden coves.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Someone could be hiding. But we have had the state police out looking and they’ll continue to look. The thing is...”
He paused and glanced toward Jackson.
“The thing is it might well be someone sitting among you like your best friend,” Jackson Crow told her. “So, be careful.”
“Exactly,” Thor Erikson said quickly.
“Jackson,” she said, “you know Ralph, Simon and Larry!”
“Yes.”
“I trust them with my life!” she said.
“Thank you for your help, Miss Avery,” Erikson told her. His ice-colored eyes fell on her and she realized that his tone had been somewhat gruff. Maybe, despite his calling in life, he’d been just as thrown as she by the girl they’d found dead in the snow. “Send Simon Green in, if you will.”
“Certainly.”
She turned to leave the room, but paused, looking at Jackson. She impulsively hugged him again and said, “Jackson, thank God you’re here!”
And thankfully, he hugged her back.
“We’ll catch this man, too, Clara, or die trying,” he promised her softly.
She gave him a nod and a weak smile.
She didn’t look back at Agent Viking, but left the room, ready to tell Simon that he was next in line.
* * *
Down to the last. Thor, with Jackson now in the room with him, just had two more interviews to go.
He was grateful for Mike—an amazing partner with whom he worked really well.
But he was even more grateful that Jackson Crow had arrived. Thor couldn’t help his feelings and his hunches, and he couldn’t help but believe that these murders were somehow personal.
And had to do with him and Jackson—and the Fairy Tale Killer.
The day had been ungodly long. While he and Jackson continued to speak with the others, Mike worked with the state police.
No one knew why the phones were down. The techs believed a phone line had been cut somewhere, but it would take a very long time to find out how and where. Of course, phones and electricity went out on the island often enough without help from a criminal mind.
The radios had just been gone. Taken. How or when, no one knew.
The television worked via satellite, but the internet system on the island had been through the phone company and was thus down, as well.
The island had been, for all intents and purposes, cut off.
Thor was good at reading people. At seeing ticks and nuances, the fall of someone’s lids over their eyes, th
e way they sat—many little things that gave away a liar.
But it seemed—so far—that everyone was telling the truth. Becca Marle, a woman in her early thirties, was athletic and he had the feeling she was usually competent and capable of handling her mic and sound system on her own. She had short dark hair and a muscular, almost square shape, which made him, naturally, wonder about her strength. But, she was still stunned when they spoke; she broke into tears every few seconds, as well.
Tommy Marchant was the oldest in the group, maybe forty-five or fifty, tall with a slightly protruding middle, graying hair and a sun-wrinkled face.
He’d spent most of the interview shaking his head. “Natalie. I’ve worked with her—on one project or another—for nearly twenty years,” he’d repeat now and then. He’d wince, and shake his head again. “Can’t believe it—can’t believe it.”
Nate Mahoney had been the most interesting of the film crew in his initial interview. He couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around the fact that the deaths had been real. He talked about being a fabricator. He could make almost anything appear to be something else. “But, these days...well, there are unions and all, but I hang around to fix fabrications, of course, but also to deal with props and help out. Film...and TV! So fickle these days. The blood and guts were all my inventions. Great, huh. Oh, God, how terrible now. The fake has become the real. I mean, I’m good at what I do, but...wow. I don’t know much about self-defense. I’m scared. Should we be scared?”
Thor had told him that he needed to be vigilant, alert and wary—and, of course, to report anything at all to him or Mike immediately.
He thought about Becca Marle again. She had spent most of the interview crying. She was so distraught she hadn’t even thought to be afraid for herself, but, he imagined, soon enough, she would. Of the seven main members of the Wickedly Weird Productions team, she and Misty Blaine were the two surviving women.
The Annabelle Lee cast had been talkative—maybe because they all knew Jackson Crow already. Jackson’s appearance was a good thing. While Thor felt that talking with Clara Avery had been somewhat of a challenge, it had been easy, thanks to Jackson, to gain trust and a comfortable rapport with the three men.
Now...
Mr. and Mrs. Crowley.
“Their name just had to be Crowley,” Mike murmured, bringing the pair in. Neither Jackson nor Thor responded and Mike added, “Crowley. You know—like Aleister Crowley. The satanist.”
“Yeah, we know about Aleister Crowley,” Thor told him, managing a grim smile. “But, hey, it’s still a pretty common last name.”
“Just don’t think we needed it here!” Mike said. He hesitated and added, “And they’re weird! Remind me of that painting—American Gothic, I think it’s called. Or those movies you see where the old folks are raising a tribe of cannibals who feed off travelers.”
“Mike, there aren’t that many travelers out here—a family of cannibals would starve pretty quickly,” Thor told him.
“They’re still weird!” Mike said.
He’d been to the toolshed and around the Alaska Hut with the couple while Thor had interviewed the others.
Although the police and forensic crews had been scouring the island, the how of the crime here remained a mystery. No weapon could be found; no hiding place. Of course, with not much blood at the site of the body, Thor hadn’t needed the medical examiner to tell him that Amelia Carson had been killed elsewhere, and brought to be left in the snow for discovery. But how had the killer gotten her there—and gotten away—without being seen?
Unless he was among those in the house.
Ralph Martini, Larry Hepburn and Simon Green vouched for one another; they had come to the island together.
Thor had found Clara Avery running through the snow himself.
That left the film crew—unless the three actors had gone crazy and started chopping people up together, a scenario that seemed unlikely.
And then there were... Mr. and Mrs. Crowley.
According to Ralph, Larry and Simon, the first people they had seen were the film crew, when they had—screaming bloody murder over what they had discovered at the Mansion—run into the Alaska Hut. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Crowley had been in on what was going on.
Of course. The film crew had signed saying that they would make sure every last piece of fake blood was cleaned up, every bit of fabrication was taken away and the Mansion was left as it had been.
But the members of the film crew had arrived at the Alaska Hut at different times. And no one had seen Mr. or Mrs. Crowley until they’d been there at least twenty minutes or so.
Now Mrs. Magda Crowley sat across from him. She looked stiff and dignified, wiry and fit in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and still—as Mike had commented—somewhat reminiscent of American Gothic.
“Mrs. Crowley, you’re aware of the dead woman found in the snow, of course.”
“Of course,” she said humorlessly. “My husband and I are older—we’re not deaf or stupid.”
Touché.
“Where have you been all morning? You’re not deaf or stupid so you must know that since you live here, you definitely fall into the suspect range,” Thor said flatly.
Jackson cleared his throat.
But Magda Crowley seemed to like his tone.
“Working, Agent Erikson. Preparing meals. Justin and I live up at the main house, but we came out here early—about five forty-five this morning. We were to leave the house—my pleasure, with the way those film people rigged it up yesterday!—so that it was prepared for the people to come in and see all that fake blood and gory stuff. Justin and I have been in this house since that early hour. We made sure this place was fitting for more filming, for meals. We freshened the bedrooms, we cleaned and prepared. Period. That’s it. Those film people showed up one by one, and then they laughed their asses off waiting for those actor boys to come screaming through the snow. Got to admit, they were kind of anxious when Miss Fontaine and the hostess didn’t come over with the boys. After they all laughed at scaring the actors so badly, they started to argue about whether or not to head over to the Mansion, but someone said something about waiting for Clara to show up and that’s where everything was when I started to hear the commotion going on. You’d showed up with that Clara girl and that was the first I knew that anything whatsoever had gone wrong.”
“You and Mr. Crowley were together all the time?” Jackson asked.
“What? Joined at the hip? No. I was making biscuits. He was making beds,” Magda Crowley said, looking from Jackson to Thor. “Good cop, bad cop?” she asked.
“We’re not cops,” Jackson said.
“That’s right...you’re federal men. Well, you know, this is Alaska,” she said.
“I do. I’m from Alaska, Mrs. Crowley,” Thor told her.
“You ought to be out there finding out what happened to that poor woman, not in here, hammering at hardworking folks!” Magda told him. She wagged a finger at Thor. “I could see something like this coming. I could. All this reality! People sitting in front of the boob tube watching other people behave badly. It’s horrible—just horrible. I’m darned sorry that people were killed, but am I surprised? Hell, no! It was a matter of time.”
“You didn’t see or hear anything unusual?” Thor asked.
“What the hell would you call unusual? If I’d walked by that poor girl I’d have just kept on going—you saw what they did to the Mansion, right?”
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Crowley. If you think of anything...if you see anything suspicious or can help us in any way—”
“It will help a hell of a lot if everyone just gets off the island!” she said. She stood up and started out. “I guess you want my husband now?”
“We do,” Thor said.
She sniffed and left. Mike poked his head back
in. “She’s something, huh?” he whispered. “I’ll get the husband. They should both be watched—hell, who knows this island better than those two?” Mike stepped out.
Thor looked at Jackson. Jackson was grinning. “Cranky.”
“Cranky, yes. She doesn’t look much like a conspirator in any kind of demonic cult,” Thor said.
“And we both know looks can be deceiving,” Jackson reminded him.
Justin Crowley walked in then.
It was, Thor knew, a mistake to go by looks or any preconceived notion. The man, however, seemed like the most likely suspect. He was like a weathered rock—strong against whatever might come. He also had a hard, rather sour expression—he might have a heck of a lot more bulk than the farmer pictured in the painting American Gothic, but he looked just as grim.
“You couldn’t just talk to me and the wife at the same time?” he asked. “And how the hell long are you going to keep all these people here? Now you got all the cops and whoever traipsing in and out all day, too—hell of a thing to get these floors picked up now and everyone wanting coffee and more.”
“Perhaps you won’t begrudge people coffee, when they’re trying to find out who killed a young woman who won’t have the opportunity to work again ever,” Jackson said.
“I don’t begrudge them coffee—they can have all the damned coffee they want. Ain’t my coffee. Film people paid for all that’s in here. They just need to start taking care of themselves a little. Where’s this, where’s that? You don’t have any of this kind or that fake sugar? This is a quiet place, most of the time. People rent it out and come and go, but there’s a time limit on it, you know?”
“No time limit on finding a murderer,” Thor said. “So, did you see anything unusual—besides the setup by the film folks,” he put in quickly. “Did you hear anything, did you see anyone else on the island anywhere?”
Justin Crowley waved a hand in the air. “It’s a private island. We know when people are due out on the ferry. Hell, just ’cause it’s Alaska, doesn’t mean we’re not like the rest of the world! Sometimes, yeah, kids like to come out here from the mainland to the ‘rich people’s island,’ and bring girls and beer or cheap wine, but they don’t stay. We got grizzly bears in the forest and they are mean—especially the momma bears when they got cubs. If kids come, they hang out in the water, hug to the coves. In winter, you can get iced in, so no one comes then. We got generators, the missus and me, because it can freeze like a mother here and the electric can go. Did I see anyone else today—no, I did not. Did I hear anything—no, I did not. I didn’t know one damned thing about the girl in the snow or the woman killed back in Seward until you all came out here today. And that’s a fact—and there’s nothing I can say or do to help you. I wasn’t looking out for anyone to be on the island. I wasn’t paying much attention. We were just getting ready for the film people, sprucing this place up. Hadn’t been rented out in a while. It wasn’t dirty, but it’s like anything else. You don’t use it, somehow you still have to clean it anyway.” He leaned forward suddenly. “Don’t you think we’d like to help you? We live here—survive here. Thinking some maniac who likes to cut people in half might be running around isn’t a good thought, not for my wife and me. We’re a little old to be hitting an overcrowded job market!”