“Could be,” Laura said. “But, I doubt it.”
Sam was listening carefully.
“I’m not a forensics expert,” she said, “or a detective. The rope was taken and bagged as evidence yesterday. I saw it. From the way it was tied and the way he hanged, I can’t see how he could have slipped it around his own neck. Also, these abrasions here, on the side of the neck. They suggest he was dragged while the rope was in place, choking him.” She pointed at the body. “Marks here suggest he was digging at the rope before he died. This man was fighting and kicking. That’s what broke his neck. He died fast, much quicker than simple strangulation.”
“If he killed himself,” Martin said, “he might have been fighting to the end. Perhaps regrets?”
Laura shook her head. “I can’t say definitively death was by his own hand.”
“So you’re calling it a murder?” Martin asked.
Sam remained stoic, practicing something he learned a long time ago as a trial lawyer. Never let them know what you’re thinking.
“I can’t call this a suicide,” Laura said.
“Just great,” Martin said.
So much for an open and shut investigation.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “I’ll be doing more testing, but I suggest you start investigating this as a murder.”
“Can you give us a time of death?” Sam asked.
“No more than sixteen or seventeen hours. So I’m saying between the hours of two and four, yesterday afternoon.”
Martin left the room.
“He didn’t want a murder,” Laura said to him.
“No one ever does. Thank you for being stubborn.”
“I’m not being stubborn, Sam. You know me. I call it the way I see it.” She hesitated, nodding to her assistant, who was waiting to sew up the corpse. “It’s just science—and justice, right?”
“Absolutely.”
He stepped closer to the body. Sometimes, though not often, the dead could be reached by simple touch. But John Bradbury’s spirit was not with them in the room.
He thanked Laura again.
“I hate it when people use Salem,” she said. “When they do something like this, stringing a man up as if he was one of the victims from the old witch craze. It’s mocking at its worst. Ignore Mr. I-Want-A-Suicide out there and catch this killer.”
“Martin’s not a bad guy. He was just going with what appeared to be obvious. The word was out that John Bradbury had been having a bad time lately. An excellent candidate for suicide. But we owe it to him to find the truth.”
She nodded. “Glad you’re on this, Sam.”
He left the room. Martin had already stripped off the paper mask he’d worn inside. Sam did the same.
“Who the hell murders a guy like that?” Martin asked. “And how did you know?”
“I didn’t,” Sam said. “We’re involved only because of Jenna’s cousin, Elyssa.”
Martin shook his head. “I guess that’s your story and you’re sticking to it. You Feds gripe my tail. You just come and go as you please, sticking your noses into what should be a local matter.”
Sam tried to be diplomatic. He’d dealt with this attitude before. “We help local authorities solve a crime. That is all our jobs, right?”
“Yeah, I guess it is. You do know that I didn’t want this to be murder. It’s Halloween season. Patrol cops are going to have their hands full with corralling a ton of costumed drunks. Now there’s a murderer running loose among them.”
Sam pictured the boo-hag again from last night.
But no boo-hag had sucked the life out of John Bradbury.
No.
That poor man had been murdered.
Chapter 5
“During the afternoon, the only people here would have been me, Jeannette Mackey, John Bradbury, or Naomi Hardy,” Micah told Jenna. “There are deliveries during the day. And when we’re not open, the doors are supposed to be locked. Of course, we’re open during the day in the afternoons for tours, but only if we have tours. They’re by appointment only during October. That’s not to say that someone might not have left a door or window open.”
“No security cameras or alarm system?” Jenna asked.
“Yes, there’s an alarm.”
Whoever killed John Bradbury had done so in the afternoon before six o’clock since, by then, the actors and guides had reported and there were people coming and going from the basement. She asked Micah about who might have been at the mortuary that afternoon.
“It should have been locked. The only people there were the usual day workers. That’s myself and Jeannette Mackey. During the season, it included John Bradbury and Naomi Hardy. I’m not sure when I first saw Naomi that day, but Jeannette and I both came in around eleven. I didn’t see or hear anything. John had talked about taking a day off, so we assumed that he had. To be honest, while we like to be the “real” psychic deal and distance ourselves from Halloween hokum, it’s all a little bit fun. So we like being a part of it. Participating. Watching.” His voice drifted off. “We went through all of this with the police that night. They were dumbfounded that so many people who worked here, and then so many attendees went through, before anyone realized that our swinging corpse was real. There was always a corpse there and things are supposed to look authentic.”
“And the police have said that you can reopen tonight?” Jenna asked.
He shrugged. “It seems part of the attraction now. You can rent the room in Fall River where Lizzie Borden hacked her stepmother to death. You can rent the room at the Hardrock Hotel in Florida where Anna Nicole Smith died. And someone died, at some time, in a good percentage of the homes in New England.”
“I think it was more than two nights after before you could rent either room,” she said. “So the people who should have been here during the day were you, John, Jeannette, and Naomi. And there is a security system. So if someone broke in, you should have known it?”
He shrugged a little unhappily. “Probably. But Jeannette and I were getting ready for a meeting of the Salem Psychic Research Society. We did find a college kid walking around, just looking, not doing anything bad.”
“But with this hugely popular attraction going on, you have no cameras, no eyes on the crowd anywhere?”
“We have plenty of eyes,” he said. “Every room has what Hauntings and Hallucinations calls ‘security guides.’ Someone not in costume, but in a black uniform, carrying a flashlight, there to help out in an emergency.”
“And the police have a listing of these people? Did they interview the ‘security guide’ working last night?”
“Of course. It was William Bishop, and he was a basket case. The guides are just simple hires, like the kids who go in costume. Most of them are college aged, a few are retirees. Some are just high school students. We comply fully with all labor laws.”
“Micah, I’m not concerned with labor laws. A man is dead.”
“It’s not my fault he killed himself!”
“But the point is, no one saw him do it.”
Micah flushed. “I had no idea John was here. I was upstairs. I have some files beneath the dueling skeletons in the tarot room. Our computers and communications are still up in that room too. Jeannette was with me. Like I said, I don’t know what time Naomi got here because I just wasn’t paying attention. But she was a little distracted because she hadn’t heard from John, and assumed he was taking the night off. I told her not to worry, I’d work the ticket kiosk with her if he didn’t come in. She told me they were short a few actors, too. Sally Mansfield, a local housewife who does this every year, was sick with the flu. So Jeannette said she’d be happy to be chopped up or whatever.”
“I saw Jeannette last night.”
Micah looked at her, surprised. “She said she was going home to bed. She was really upset by what happened. We all cared about John. Poor Naomi. She has to keep this going or the monetary loss will be incredible.”
“I’ve seen businesses closed down for weeks af
ter a tragedy like this. But, I guess you’re right, the show must go on.
He hesitated and looked at her suspiciously. “Why are you trying to make a bad situation even more difficult?”
“I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Micah. This is my job.”
She preferred not to be so pretentious, but sometimes she had to be. And with Micah, it worked.
“Of course, I understand,” he said. “But it was a suicide, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Actually, you are,” she said pleasantly. “So any assistance you can give me will certainly help in eliminating you.”
“Whatever you need. But you know that John’s personal life wasn’t going well. Oh, my. There was a murderer in here with us? But how? When? I don’t see how this can be possible. Oh, my God.”
He was panicked, of no help any further. So she decided to leave. “Thanks for your help. I’ll call you if I need anything.”
She turned to head up the stairs, back to ground level, and out through the front. Micah followed.
“Someone could have come in through the back, through the delivery entrance, I suppose, and we wouldn’t have known,” he said. “You can’t hear. I mean it is a big place.”
Outside on the front porch, Jenna noted the quiet location and sad feel to the day. The ticket kiosks seemed cheaply thrown up, the Halloween decorations worn and frayed. Everything was much more magical at night. Naomi Hardy sat at the kiosk, head bowed. Jenna glanced over at the cemetery. Midmorning light was rising, sending streaks of yellow and gold down on the graves. Both the cemetery and house occupied a hill that sloped down to thick forest, the leaves a brilliant collage of orange, crimson, and gold. Past a decaying mausoleum and a weeping angel, she thought she saw something.
A strange flash of darkness and light.
Near the weeping angel and a worn tombstone stood someone in a black cape. Someone with a red face and body. The boo-hag they’d seen the other night. What would someone in costume be doing at the edge of a forlorn graveyard at this time of day, just looking up at the mortuary? She excused herself and headed down the rocky drive toward the cemetery. She leapt over a few tombstones and wove around ancient sarcophagi. But, when she reached the far side and the forest edge, the boo-hag was gone.
She drew her weapon and called out, “FBI. Get the hell out here, whoever you are.”
She hadn’t really expected a reply, not unless it might come from some holdover partier unsure of where he was from a function the previous night. She moved cautiously into the woods, alert and wary, careful of the leaves and twigs beneath her feet.
And then stopped.
No boo-hag was in sight.
Instead, a woman dangled from a tree limb.
* * * *
“Hanged by the neck until they be dead,’” Detective Gary Martin said, quoting from the death warrants handed down to those executed back in 1692.
Sam watched as a forensic photographer snapped pictures. The victim had been dressed up for display. Their male victim, John Bradbury, had also been decked out in Puritanical garb. Whether this woman often dressed in period clothing for one reason or another, they had no way of knowing. He and Gary Martin had arrived on the scene within minutes of Jenna’s call, both on the outskirts of Salem. Once again, Sam was plagued with a feeling of urgency and fear.
The boo-hag.
But Jenna hadn’t mentioned a boo-hag. She just said that she’d left the mortuary, come through the graveyard, then walked into the forest, finding a dead woman hanged from a tree. She was calm. No surprise. She was one hell of an agent. She’d touched nothing, securing the scene until forensics and a medical examiner could arrive. They’d asked if Laura Foster might be sent, explaining that they might be looking at a serial killer. He and Martin stood next to Jenna, watching while the crime scene techs did their thing.
“Think this one is a suicide too?” Jenna asked Martin sarcastically.
“Kind of hard to hang yourself from a tree,” Martin said. “Unless she climbed up there, then out on the limb, tied the rope, then jumped. Not likely.”
Jenna smiled at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a pain.”
Martin moved around the tree, trying to get a better look at the hanging victim. A large white bonnet hid most of her face and it was difficult—without disturbing the rope—to get a good look at her face.
“It’s Gloria Day,” Martin said. “She’s a big Samhain fest organizer and throws a witches’ ball on Halloween. Or it’s Samhain, to her, I guess.”
“You knew her?” Sam asked.
Martin shook his head. “Not really. I know of her. Her face is on a number of advertisements. This is really going to shake up the community.”
Sam and Jenna moved carefully around to where Martin stood to study the corpse too. As they did, the medical examiner’s van arrived through the trees. When Laura Foster stepped out, Sam was grateful. They were going to need her on this one. Jenna had not met her, so he introduced the two women and then Laura went to work. Enough photographs had been taken from every angle so the rope was cut and the corpse lowered, laid carefully on a tarp that could be formed into a body bag. A temperature check indicated that the time of death had been somewhere between five and six A.M.
Laura provided as many specifics as she could from a cursory inspection, pointing out the corpse’s coloration, the neck had not broken, and she was probably strangled to death, slow and excruciating.
“This is Gloria Day,” Laura said.
“Did you know her?” Martin asked.
“I’ve only seen her. She runs an ad on the local news about her ball every year. She also has a shop and helps promote classes run by some of her coven members. She’s kind of a big cheese around here.”
“Like John Bradbury?” Jenna asked.
“That’s right. But look at the way the rope was tied. It’s exactly the same as with Bradbury. When you look at the photographs, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t believe that either victim tied a rope that way around their own neck.” Laura shook her head. “This is going to be one wicked Halloween.”
“What about the costume?” Jenna asked.
“She could have worn that herself. She ran the ball, owned a shop, and did some tour guide stuff. I know all that from the ads you can’t help but see if you live here. I know she was thirty-eight years old, born in Peoria, Illinois, and a fairly recent transplant to Salem. She arrived in the city in a big way, though her commercial devotion was twitching away.”
“Maybe we’re looking at a rival coven, or group of covens, or even one of the other sects. Like the voodoo guys, the Haitians, or the Asian-Indians. Maybe I should throw the Catholics and Baptists in there, too,” Martin said.
“They’re not going to stop,” Jenna said.
“Why do you say that?” the detective asked.
She looked up at him. “Someone is trying to recreate the witch craze.”
“John Bradbury wasn’t a Wiccan,” Sam said.
“And neither were any of those executed long ago for signing pacts with the devil,” Jenna noted. “People like Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Goode, Susannah Martin—”
“You know their names?” Martin asked.
She nodded. “Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wilde, George Burroughs, John Willard, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., John Proctor, Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, Ann Pudeater, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Wilmott Redd, Martha Scott, and Samuel Wardell.”
“That’s impressive,” Martin said. “I can add Giles Corey—pressed to death. Had the reputation of being somewhat of a mean son-of-a-bitch, stuck to his guns. He had that famous line, ‘More weight!’” He studied Jenna. “Were you from here? You’ve got it down.”
“Boston. But I spent a lot of time here while growing up. What I’m afraid of is some kind of large-scale plot, or sick deranged thing going on. They’re both dressed. No man was hanged first dur
ing the real deal. Women got that honor. But there were men condemned and hanged as witches. From what I understand, John Bradbury had a love of local history, but he wasn’t a Wiccan. Gloria Day was a big-time Wiccan, apparently famed for her classes and her ball.”
Martin looked at Sam. “Let’s get a search grid going.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Martin let out a whistle. A number of uniformed cops hustled over from the road area, around the outskirts of the trees, keeping their distance from the actual murder site until they were given instructions.
“I’m going back to the graveyard,” Jenna said. “That’s where I came in from.”
Sam frowned at her. What had she been doing running around among the tombstones?
“No problem, whatever you need to do,” Martin told her.
“I’ll join her,” Sam said, following Jenna.
To his surprise, Martin came too, leaving his crew to grid search the crime scene.
“You know,” Martin said, “it’s a ‘graveyard’ when it’s by a church. It’s a cemetery when it’s freestanding or planned. Most of the plots have names.”
Sam was trying to catch up with Jenna, but she was moving ahead quickly.
“Jenna,” he called out.
She heard him and stopped.
He reached her. “Did the ghost of John Bradbury find you? What were you doing here? I thought you were searching the house.”
She glanced back. Martin stood close to the edge of the forest. “I think he might have whispered to me down in the basement.”
“The winged-death’s-head is the most popular art on tombstones around here,” Martin called, pausing at one of the graves. “The Puritans didn’t want anything to do with icons that might suggest Catholicism. ‘Life is uncertain, Death is for Sure, Sin is the Wound, and Christ is the Cure,’” he read to them. “Pretty succinct.”
“That’s a common epitaph in this area,” Sam called back.
He looked over at Jenna, waiting for more information.
“It was bizarre,” she told him, her green eyes intense. “I followed a costumed figure in there.”