“Thank God!” he said. “I need a breather.”
“Will, I’m sorry. How long have you been sitting there?” Whitney asked.
“About fifteen minutes,” Jenna announced, coming into the hallway from the kitchen. “Don’t let him give you a hard time… We’ve all taken turns at the computers since we’ve been back at the house.”
“Fascinating,” Jude said, walking to the bank of screens. “What’s causing the shadows?” he asked.
Whitney came to stand by him.
The feed from the two cameras set in the main sector of the foundation next door seemed to show some kind of motion. Dark shadows appeared close to the ground, almost as if a dusty fog had settled close to the floor, fog that undulated and breathed.
Jude looked at Whitney. “What is going on over there?”
“We’ll know in a minute,” Will said. He pointed at the screens. “There they are now—Jackson and Jake.”
Whitney saw that her teammates had returned to the foundation; the motion-sensing cameras had turned toward them when they entered. Will spoke into the remote microphone. “Well? Anything?” he asked.
Jackson and Jake were wearing clip-on receivers and transmitters. “Nothing,” Jackson said. “There’s nothing here at all.”
“Do you see anything that would explain the darkness we notice moving around on the screens?” Whitney called to them.
Jude’s gaze was set on the screens. His features betrayed no emotion other than curiosity. Whitney had to wonder if he was skeptical, thinking that they were setting up some kind of a show.
“Nothing. We’re going to walk around here for a minute, going from section to section. Let us know what you’re seeing—that darkness persists, right?” Jake asked.
“It’s that area, that area right there, in the main section of the flooring.”
To Whitney’s surprise, Jude walked to the screen. “Look,” he said, touching it. “There are the boundaries of that darkened area. Look at the floor. It’s got strange discoloration,” he said.
“That’s not surprising,” Will said, sitting down and watching the screen. “There was a structure there that was demolished, and then another that was demolished as well. You can see the structural walls, but there might have been nonstructural walls that were broken through over time. Both buildings might have had different layouts.”
“No, but look,” Jude said, his finger moving in a pattern over the screen. “Something was drawn on the floor with some kind of paint or dye at some time.”
“He’s right,” Whitney said.
“What is it, do you think?” Will asked.
Whitney narrowed her eyes, watching Jude’s finger move.
“A pentagram,” she said. “A downward-pointing pentagram.”
Jude straightened. “I’m taking a walk over there,” he told her.
Whitney wanted to go with him, but she thought that she shouldn’t. Whatever he did or didn’t experience, she thought it would be best if he did so on his own, or with Jackson and Jake being the only members of their team present.
He left them; Whitney joined Will in one of the rolling chairs in front of the bank of screens. She spoke with Jackson as Jude walked from Blair House to the property next door. “Jackson, Jude just pointed it out. The discoloration on the floor isn’t random aging. An upside-down pentagram was drawn in there.”
“That’s not much of a shock,” Jackson called back to her. “Not if the so-called House of Spiritualism began as a haven for Satanists.”
“I suppose not.” She hesitated, but Jude couldn’t have gotten in there yet. “Jackson, that black miasma seems to emanate from it.”
Jake was standing not far from Jackson, still, and listening. “There’s someone out on the street,” he told Jackson.
“It’s Jude—he’s on his way over,” Whitney informed them.
A minute later, she saw Jude coming down the steps. He had made quick time, but she had learned that his strides were long and that he walked fast.
“It is a pentagram,” Jude said, looking at Jackson and Jake before beginning to follow the broken markings on the floor. “It looks like it was drawn with some kind of chalky brick substance or dye. There might have been some kind of flooring placed over it at one time.”
“The people here when it was called the House of Spiritualism might have kept a false floor over it, something that they could easily roll out if the police came—not that having it would have been illegal. Freedom of religion applies to Satanists as well,” Jake said.
“But I doubt they wanted it known that they were welcoming Satanists,” Jude said. “Or that, perhaps, the ‘spiritualism’ in the name was their own euphemism for Satanism. To the best of my knowledge, it can often mean many different beliefs and practices, but in Lower Manhattan at the end of the eighteen hundreds, most of the population was Christian, and worshipping Satan would have meant, to them, sinful orgies, all manner of debauchery—and blood sacrifices. Many killers throughout the years, such as Gilles de Rais, as far back as the fourteen hundreds, committed hundreds of brutal murders with some excuse that a demon or the devil had demanded the blood sacrifice. And, of course, as the years pass, new groups make idols of such men as Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper and other killers.”
Will looked at Whitney, startled by Jude’s speech. Whitney shrugged. “His father has a huge crime library,” she told Will.
“Hey, it’s good to understand history, as we all know,” he said.
“So they had a pentagram on the floor. They seemed to worship evil. I wonder what else was down here, and if someone today knew exactly what was here, and what was going on. Do you see any signs that anyone has been…down there lately?” Whitney asked.
All three faces stared at the camera, as if they could see her and didn’t understand such an obvious question.
“I mean…does it look as if someone has been down there practicing any kind of Satanic rituals? Is there any sign of blood?” she asked.
“Not visibly or obviously,” Jackson said.
“We can get a forensics team down here,” Jude said. “Check it out.”
The forensics team isn’t going to tell us why it seems that there’s a black fog that lies low to the ground on film, Whitney thought.
But she wondered if bad things had gone on down there—recently—as well as in the past, and she knew that they were all wondering if Sarah, Jane Doe wet, had been killed in the night in the darkness of the abyss before her body had wound up in the river.
“Well, we’re coming up,” Jackson said. “It’s late. We’ll look at everything with rested minds in the morning.”
Jude returned with Jackson and Jake to Blair House, then bid them good-night, reminding them to lock themselves in and be wary.
Jackson didn’t reply that he was an armed federal agent, to Whitney’s surprise. As such, he knew that it was never amiss to remember to be careful.
Whitney wanted to walk to the door to tell him good-night; she didn’t allow herself to do so. Actually, she didn’t want him to leave.
Or, if he was leaving again, she wanted to go with him.
But that was ridiculous, of course. They had barely met; they were both part of a task force. They hadn’t met at a social function, or a bar—or even dating online.
Even so, she felt that she knew him. If she didn’t know him, she knew him well enough to know that she wanted to know him better. The sexual attraction she was feeling was almost overwhelming, and since that was the case, it was a good thing that she didn’t walk to the door.
“We’ll all hope it’s a quiet night,” Jackson said, bidding Jude good-night. When the door was locked, Jake looked at Whitney, giving her an odd smile.
“Go ahead, kid, and get some rest. I’ll watch the screens tonight.”
“I should do some of the staring at the screens,” she said. “Film is my forte. I really should—”
“Get some rest,” Jake finished for her. “You’ve been on this a day longer than the rest of us, and these are long days.”
She smiled back at him. She loved Jake—he was like a brother. But she looked at Jackson, ever their quietly strong leader, who was watching her.
Jackson just nodded gravely. “Get some rest. You’ve been on all this too intently for way too many hours. We’ve got this covered.”
Jude felt odd as he left Blair House—almost as if he’d left something behind.
It wasn’t a something.
It was a someone. Whitney.
It was amazing to think how quickly things could change; he had thought of her as young, and he had thought of her as annoying at first. Not only had they saddled him with a federal team, but they’d given him one comprised of inexperienced children.
Now…
Now, she had somehow become an important part of the investigation. Now, he wished that he’d met her anywhere except on the job, and that he knew how to take a break and let the rest of the task force run while they went out for a drink. He wondered if he needed to stop working with her, if the light scent of her perfume hadn’t somehow permeated his senses and therefore his mind, so that now he was thinking about her when he wasn’t even with her, longing to stroke the exotic golden-amber color of her skin, test the softness of her lips…
Killer. Serial killer on the loose, he forced himself to remember.
And he could demand that his mind return to the case, because they were following only leads and people so far, and they had nothing tangible, nothing on which they could begin to pin a case.
The movie, it all came back to the movie. Or maybe it didn’t, but it did seem a viable direction.
They could all still be way off base. Not on the fact that someone had studied the case of Jack the Ripper and took it to heart. New York was a massive city. Lots of people knew all about the filming, and some of them presumably knew about Blair House, or the House of Spiritualism.
