Deadly Fate (Krewe of Hunters #19)(47)

But, she set the glass down in front of Connie Shaw and said, “Thor, can I see you in the kitchen for a minute? Just want to—check with you on the bottle. Connie, if you want to wait—”

Too late for that. Connie had swallowed the shot.

“Oh, God, no! You don’t think it was poisoned or anything, do you?” she asked, holding the glass away and staring at it. “They weren’t poisoned...they were strangled. The women from Wickedly Weird. And then cut up. But they weren’t poisoned.”

“No, no, Connie, I just want Thor to make sure I remember right what the label says—so that we can replace it,” Clara said. “Thor?”

He followed her into the kitchen. She was, to her credit, dead calm and not even shaking—despite the fact that she was white as snow—as she pointed to the trash can.

“I didn’t touch it,” she said softly.

He opened the trash can with his foot and looked down. There was only one item inside.

A book page offering a historic photo.

It was laid out at the bottom of the can, carefully placed on the white plastic liner.

It was a photo of an old crime scene.

A woman lay dead in it.

She was barely recognizable as a woman. Even in black and white, it was an image of unspeakable carnage.

Thor closed his eyes for a moment.

He knew the photo; he’d seen a copy in one of the Bureau’s criminology classes—seen it as a PowerPoint image on a large screen.

They’d been studying Jack the Ripper.

The photo laid out in the trash can was that of the body of Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s fifth and last victim, according to most criminologists and Ripperologists.

Mary Kelly had been killed indoors, where the killer had spent time tearing into her, enjoying himself at his leisure.

And the whole of the surface of her abdomen and thighs had been ripped away; her insides had been torn out; her breasts had been removed...

This was just an image, a page taken from a book, he thought. Not ripped out, but carefully cut out. Not crumpled, but smooth and clearly visible.

But someone had put the image in the trash. Someone had been in the house.

Someone had intended, he was certain, for Connie Shaw to die...

And to take the form of Mary Kelly, infamous victim of Jack the Ripper.

Mutilated...

And about whom many a movie had been made.





9

Clara couldn’t help it; she engaged in a heated argument with Thor just beyond Connie Shaw’s realm of hearing—right after she learned that he was grouping her with Connie and the others, determined that she be apart from everything that happened from that point on.

Jackson had kept silent.

According to Thor, she should be on the ship. She should be on the Fate with Connie, and both women should be assigned full-time guards in addition to the ship’s security.

“That makes absolutely no sense!” Clara said. “After all, I’m the one with the connection—Amelia keeps coming to me. She’s looking for something that she never had in life.”

“And what’s that?” Thor demanded.

“Friendship. All she had was ambition. Now that life is gone...I think she knows what she missed. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have something going in the communication arena. You need me. I can help you! Hey! I’m the one who seems to have her finger on the pulse of what lies below the surface. You can’t just dismiss me!”

“I don’t want you to get yourself killed!” Thor exploded in turn. “We don’t need you enough to risk that. You know Jackson—you know about him. He’s frigging ghost central! We don’t want you to die—and become a ghost trying to communicate.”

Jackson listened to both sides, and then told Thor, “There’s no way out of it—she is in on this. And, in that vein, I prefer that Clara be with us—we can depend on one another and Mike as we can no one else. Not to mention that the island is also still crawling with police, should we choose to go out there again. In truth—I’m not so sure that Connie Shaw has been targeted. I think she was convenient. And I think the Mary Kelly image in the trash was a message to one of us. If we hadn’t come when we did, Connie might well have died. But I think she would have died as a matter of convenience. Because the killer found out about her—and that she intended to be alone out here.”

Thor lowered his head, shaking it slightly in hard anger. “You mean that Connie would have been ripped to shreds, and he would have left that picture for us to discover just in case we missed the connection? Because, otherwise, the killer had no idea we would look in the trash.”

“I do believe we interrupted him,” Jackson said. He smiled at Clara. “And that’s a good day,” he told her. He turned to Thor. “You called this in?”

Thor nodded. “Detective Brennan and a forensic crew are on the way out—they’ll look for anything they can find. But hell, this is Alaska. This guy is wearing gloves. And who notices anyone buying gloves in Alaska? If they were even purchased here.” He shook his head in frustration again. “There’s something out on that island—but whether it was actually now or sometime before, the killer was here.”

“We’re both thinking Tate Morley,” Jackson said.

“But how the hell the man could have spent years in prison, gotten here, killed here, gotten a boat and gotten out to the island, then back here...” Thor broke off, looking at Jackson.