Sacred Evil

Page 31

“Herbal tea? Or a bit of caffeine so I can better lie awake?” Whitney asked with a laugh.
“Decaf with a shot of whiskey,” Angela told her, handing her the mug and curling up at the foot of the bed. “I thought I’d help you get to a REM sleep where maybe your subconscious will let you sort out some of the things running around in your mind.”
“Or open it up to voices from the past?” Whitney asked her.
Angela nodded.
“But you’re our great communicator,” Whitney told her. “And, of course, Jenna is wonderful.”
“Ah, but I think that you’re the one these ghosts may talk to,” Angela told her. “I ran through the footage from the site next door. There was a shadow when you bent down. You saw the dog again, didn’t you?” Whitney nodded.
“Dogs are our greatest companions, you know. Take Greyfriars Bobby, the little terrier who sat on his master’s grave daily until he himself died. Anyway, I’m going to bed, too, so scream like a banshee if you need any of us or even if you’re frightened…it’s just us, and not one of us will think a thing of it if you see a ghost.”
Angela stood and left her and Whitney started to sip the tea.
She picked up the book that Andrew Crosby had loaned her, the Honeywell book about the House of Spiritualism. She found herself looking in the index for the word dog, but didn’t find it. But she found several pages listed under the name Annie Doherty. Curious, she began flipping through the pages. Annie Doherty had come from a stable home in Westchester, New York; her father had been a preacher. But Annie had fallen in love with a seafarer. She had run away from her father’s strict dominance to follow her lover, a man named Leland Robinson, and come to the tip of Manhattan, where he had promised her he would be staying, near the docks. By the time she reached Manhattan, Leland Robinson had left on a ship. With the few funds she had, Annie found lodging at Blair House. While most of the theaters had moved north up Broadway, a small playhouse, the Travertine, had still been open just north of Wall Street, and Annie had tried to make a living selling oranges in front of the building. She had longed to become an actress and would sing in the streets as well for whatever pennies those coming and going from the theater would throw. She lived there almost a month before she disappeared, leaving behind her large shepherd-mix dog. The then owner had been furious since he’d been left a sizable bill, and he’d reported her for skipping out. But Annie hadn’t gone home, and she hadn’t taken her meager belongings. Nor had she taken her dog, a pet she had seemed to love deeply. The police assumed she fell into mishap, but nothing was ever discovered on the whereabouts of the young woman.
Whitney set the book down. She knew that many murder victims, caught up in the overcrowded tenements, had disappeared or died—their decomposed bodies eventually found—with little or nothing done for them. Police reports had sometimes been written up, but more often their sad lives had simply been forgotten. In the cases where the bodies had been discovered, they had usually wound up in paupers’ graves.
Whitney marveled that so little had been done to find the mysteriously vanished young woman. Honeywell, the cop, seemed disgusted by the situation as well. But he did excuse the department at the time, writing, “Immigration was massive; half the immigrants were in the country illegally. Handling one of the about-to-be-demolished tenements was like going to war each day.”
But Annie Doherty hadn’t disappeared from a tenement; she had been living at Blair House. She’d left her clothing and her beloved pet behind.
She set the book down. “Annie?” she said softly. The owners of Blair House had supposedly been decent people, running a very decent boardinghouse. Could Annie have died here?
The dog she was seeing had to be Annie’s, which would mean that the woman who appeared with the dog had to be Annie.
She picked the book back up and rifled through the pages again.
Annie Doherty had disappeared in April 1891, the same month in which Carrie Brown had been murdered.
She took a long swallow of her tea, the questions in her mind driving her crazy. Why would these alleged Jack the Ripper victims simply disappear, or be discovered as refuse, decomposed corpses, which the police would not recognize as victims, when he left his London victims so blatantly exposed? Had there been a copycat killer, not getting it quite right, at the House of Spiritualism at the time, and had that person been Jonathan Black?
Could such a man possibly have been organized and intelligent enough to switch his modus operandi, and dabble in Satanism, or pretend, at least, to be a great leader in the psychic realm to gain power at the House of Spiritualism?
And, if so, she asked herself wearily, did the past actually have anything to do with the current killer’s blood spree?
Yes, quite possibly. If it had been some kind of sacred venue for Satanists, with symbols…maybe more, icons there that had been worshipped. Yes, someone knowing all that history could well warp it into a new murder spree.
At last, despite the frenzy in her mind, the tea and simple exhaustion began to weigh on her and she began to doze.
That’s when she felt the wet nose on her fingers and heard the dog’s soft whine.
“Hello,” she said quietly, and sat up. His head rested easily on the bed. He looked at her with huge, mournful brown eyes.
She stroked his head, and his fur felt soft and real. “What is it, boy? What are you trying to tell me?”
She looked beyond the dog. Her bedside light was still on, but the corners of the room were in shadow. She searched to see if the woman—Annie Doherty?—had appeared with the dog. But she didn’t see anyone, and she forced herself not to be afraid of the fact that a real dog seemed to be imploring her for help.
“What is it? Help me—I want to help you,” she told him.
He ran toward the door, barked softly and wagged his tail.
“Okay, you want to go out?” Whitney asked.
The dog ran back to her, and then back to the door again.
“Okay.”
She got out of bed, grabbed her terry housecoat and slid her feet into her slippers, and walked to the door. The dog pawed it, continuing to wag his tail.
Whitney opened the door, and the dog ran out into the hallway, and then down the stairs.
Jake was seated in front of the computer screens; he started when she ran down the stairs. “What?” he demanded, blinking, jumping up.
“It’s the dog,” she said.
“Where? Where’s the dog?”
“There!”
She pointed to the door. The dog had now raced to the front door, where he looked back at Whitney and wagged his tail. Then he pawed the door.
She saw Jake’s frown. He might not see the animal, but he’d heard the sound of the door moving slightly in its frame.
“He wants to go out. Jake, he’s leading me somewhere.”
Whitney started to rush for the door. Jake grabbed her arm. “Wait!” he told her.
He had his cell out and he dialed a number. She could hear Jackson’s sleepy voice come through the phone. “Whitney wants to follow a ghost dog.”
Jake listened and snapped the phone closed. “He’s coming.”
Jackson, with Angela behind him, came hurrying down the stairs. Jackson had thrown on jeans and a shirt, and he wore his agency-issued Glock in a shoulder holster. He carried a wide-beam flashlight. Angela had merely thrown on her robe.
Jackson told them curtly, “Angela will lock behind us. Jake, you and I will go with Whitney. And the—dog,” he said, pausing to frown. Jackson clearly didn’t see the dog. “Angela, keep watch on the screens and warn us if anything shows up.”
Angela stared at Whitney, nodding.
“Do you see it?” Whitney asked her.
“I see…something,” Angela said.
“He’s there. I swear it!” Whitney told them.
“Go, go on!” Angela said.
Whitney was glad that Jake had stopped her; she wasn’t going to take the time to dress or arm herself, but she’d be safe with Jackson and Jake.
She unlocked the bolts on the front door. The dog raced out. Whitney followed him; the others followed her.
The dog took them where she knew it would—the construction site.
The ghostly animal that had felt so real slipped through chain-link fence as if he were mist.
Jackson opened the padlock and they went in.
The dog raced to the old foundations, and disappeared down the stairs.
Whitney ran after him, mindful of the rubble-strewn ground, and came to the great gaping chasm and the stairs that led down to it.
Jackson arrived with his wide-beam flashlight, and Whitney started down the steps. She came to the central room, where, despite her training, she felt chills snake along her spine and a sense of fear tremble in her limbs.
Instinct! she thought.
The dog stood in the middle of the pentagram, looking at her expectantly. He turned and raced around the supporting wall, and disappeared into the dark.
Whitney ran after him, and, with each step, she felt a greater sense of choking fear. She knew. She knew that beneath the ground and remnants of flooring, they would find the body of Annie Doherty.
10
Jude woke as suddenly as if had he been slapped in the face.
He reached for the Smith & Wesson that he kept on his bedside table at night and jerked to a sitting position, trying to ascertain what had awoken him. There was nothing in his room; there was nothing at all that hinted of an intruder or any kind of danger. He silently walked through his apartment, barefoot and in boxers, but there was nothing amiss.
He returned to his room and quickly stumbled into his jeans and a pair of loafers, shirt, holster and jacket. Still, there was nothing, no unusual sounds in his apartment, or coming from the streets. It was a quiet time in Hell’s Kitchen, but New York never really slept.
Dressed, his gun in hand, he walked through the living room, looked in his computer room and carefully and silently opened the door to his dad’s apartment. Andrew was in his room, snoring softly. Nothing seemed to be amiss.