Deadly Fate (Krewe of Hunters #19)(19)

“I spoke with Brennan this morning, too,” Jackson said. “Director Enfield put us together. He’s the man who made arrangements to get me out here as quickly as possible. Seems like a really good cop—solid and quick. Enfield likes him.”

“He is a good cop. We’ve worked with him before,” Thor said.

“Anyway,” Mike continued, “Detective Brennan has been interviewing everyone he can find at the hotel. There’s a desk clerk who was on the night shift, Arnold Haskell, who says that he saw Amelia Carson up and heading out before it was really light.”

“Sunrise was just about 5:00 a.m.,” Jackson said.

Thor murmured, “That would have meant that morning twilight began at about 3:00 or 3:30 a.m.” In Alaska, summer days were long. Because of Alaska’s position near the North Pole, it was really only truly dark from about midnight until three or three thirty at this time of year. Some people couldn’t stand the continuous light in summer and the equally continuous darkness in winter. It didn’t bother Thor at all, but he knew that visitors often found themselves wide-awake far too much of the day.

“Did she leave the hotel?” he asked.

“He wasn’t sure. She stopped to demand to know why there was no coffee in the lobby yet—he told her that coffee didn’t go out in the lobby until six thirty and that there were little pots in the room. She was not nice to him.” He hesitated, looking at Jackson and Thor and grimacing. “Apparently, after speaking with other employees at the hotel, Detective Brennan came to the conclusion that while Natalie Fontaine was all right—not someone you gush over, but all right—Amelia Carson was not liked by many people. She was all smiles in front of a camera, and self-centered and entitled off camera. Brennan told me that a maid at the hotel said Amelia treated her as if she was little better than a cockroach.”

“Are there cockroaches in Alaska?” Jackson wondered aloud.

“There are cockroaches everywhere,” Mike assured him.

“In every way,” Thor murmured. “So what did Haskell say? She did or she didn’t go out?”

“Haskell didn’t know—she bitched at him and he did his best to be polite and explain hotel policy and she walked off. He didn’t wait to see if she went up the elevator or out the door—he had paperwork and he went back to it. He did say that she had been on her cell phone, bitching at someone on the other end, even while she was bitching at him about there being no coffee for an hour or so.”

“People don’t usually kill people and cut them in half just because they’re not nice people,” Thor said.

“May depend on who they’re not nice to,” Jackson said.

“True,” Thor agreed. “So, by this time frame—if everyone was right about time—it seems that Miss Fontaine was killed first in her hotel room. The killer apparently kept it down, though he was heard, which brought security up. Somehow he killed her, left that room as it was and got out of the hotel with whatever he used to sever her head, and went on to meet up with Amelia Carson, catch her, kill her, slice her in half and deposit her on the snow.”

“And no one saw him,” Jackson said.

Thor met his eyes. “I doubt that,” he said softly.

“The body was behind that snowbank or rise,” Mike said. “If Miss Avery had run about fifty feet parallel from where she was, she might not have seen it.”

That was true.

“Hey, I work with you daily, Thor, and you’re confusing me,” Mike said. “You think that there is someone on the island, and you also think that someone saw something?”

“This is all too clean—too neat,” Thor said. “And here’s another thought. What if there are two killers? One who decapitated Natalie Fontaine, and one who chopped Amelia Carson in half?”

“Two killers?” Jackson asked. “God, I sure as hell hate to think that there might be two such demented people in the area.”

“There really are a lot of people who hate reality TV,” Mike said. He was serious, Thor realized.

“You just change the channel,” Jackson said. He was looking at Thor, and he knew that they were both thinking the same thing. Tate Morley—the Fairy Tale Killer—was out. These killings had not been carried out in any way like the murders he’d committed before. But he had been locked away for over a decade. He might have changed.

Then again, Thor and Jackson might have such traumatic memories of the man’s previous victims that they were ready to pin anything on him.

Realistically, there were new sociopathic and psychotic killers cropping up constantly.

“Our director doesn’t believe that the Fairy Tale Killer, Tate Morley, could have anything to do with this,” Thor said to Jackson.

“He basically believes that the display of the bodies is too different,” Mike added.

“Well, what do you think about the people we’ve interviewed?” Jackson asked. “They all appear to be horrified, devastated and so on—except for Mr. and Mrs. Crowley, who didn’t seem to feel one way or the other about the dead. But I’ve seen cold-blooded killers pass lie-detector tests without blinking.”

“We do have a cast of actors here,” Mike pointed out.

“Three men who left their hotel together and arrived together. And Miss Avery,” Thor said.