Tomorrow, hopefully, Derek, the other XI agent, would be able to come down and help them out. Because if anyone had endured a bad death here, Derek Monahan would know it. He’d see it, would be able to watch the victim reenacting his or her own murder, again and again, at the very spot where it had occurred. Not a ghost, really, merely the imprint—the photocopy—that had been made on the world through an act of explosive violence.
Aidan didn’t doubt there would be something to see. This place, so coldly beautiful, but as wicked and corrupt as a prettily decorated chamber of hell, had definitely enjoyed its share of violence. Aidan knew that. He’d heard it and had felt its malevolence.
Funny, how all their abilities would be so important here. Mick could touch something and know it had been used in a killing. Aidan could hear death. Derek could see it, Olivia could feel it. And Julia interacted with it on a daily basis.
Every single one of those abilities would come into play. He’d found a place where each member of the eXtreme Investigations team would do what he or she did best.
Now he just had to get them all here.
Saturday, 7:35 p.m.
The area where they’d left Aidan’s colleagues shortly before dusk wasn’t far from the old house they’d found. Not in mileage, anyway. But as Lexie and Aidan drove down the hidden lane toward the main road, the tree limbs scraping the roof of his SUV like a dead man’s fingernails out of some campfire horror story, she found herself wishing they had farther to go. A lot farther.
She didn’t want to go back there. She definitely didn’t want to go inside that house.
She had never once thought of herself as being any more perceptive than the average person. Smarter than some, yeah, though not as smart as others. But in terms of instinctively knowing something was bad just because of a sensation in her bones or a crawling on the back of her neck, no. At least, not until tonight.
“Somebody should have torn it down decades ago,” she whispered, watching in the passenger’s-side mirror as they rounded a bend and the house finally disappeared behind them.
He said nothing, merely reaching for her hand in the darkness, confirming what she already knew. Whatever he’d seen, or sensed about that place, it had been beyond awful.
“Is Vonnie in there?” she had to ask, her throat as thick and tight with emotion as it was because of the pain and bruises. “Are we going back to find her body?”
And the bodies of all those other girls?
“No, Lex, she’s not there, though I’m certain she was. At least a couple of years ago, I believe.” A muscle in his jaw flexed, and she saw the anger that had seemed about to overwhelm him a few minutes ago when he’d been in that strange, frightening trance.
“The killer brought her here?”
He shook his head.
“The club,” she said, at last understanding.
“Yeah.”
“You know what it is?”
“I know.” He sneered. “They call themselves the Hellfire Club. Good name for the bastards since I have no doubt they’ll burn in hell.”
He only hoped its flames were as painfully hot as they’d felt during those scant seconds when he’d felt them licking at his own feet.
“How do the girls come into it?” she asked, though she suspected she already knew.
“These club members are sexual deviants, or sadists, all with a taste for teenage girls. It looks as though they bring three, maybe four of them out here at a time every month or so. A dozen or more grown men spend the night sharing them, doing things to them that no decent person would ever do to another one.” His profile, stark in the moonlight, appeared as hard and immoveable as a marble statue. “It’s . . . depraved.”
For a second, she thought she would vomit. Reaching for the controls, she pushed a button to send the window gliding down, needing a rush of cool evening air on her face.
He had one more piece of information to share. “I can’t say nobody has ever died in that house, but I didn’t get any sense that murder is part of these men’s repertoire. For them, it’s all about rough, degrading sex with underage girls.”
Lexie put her head back against the headrest, letting the ugly ramifications sink in.
She’d known more than ten teenagers had gone missing, had probably been killed. And she’d believed there was a killer at large. Now, though, the scope had just grown exponentially.
A dozen men. Three or four girls at a time. Every month. For years.
They could be talking about hundreds of rape or molestation victims here.
She pounded the side of one fist against her door, so overcome with anger and disgust, she just needed to hit something. “Oh, no, nothing bad could ever happen here in perfect little Granville,” she snarled, mimicking the locals who’d been so angry about her articles. “I fucking hate small towns.”
“Savannah’s seeming more and more like heaven the longer I live here,” he admitted.
“Or New York. You don’t see people there throwing blankets over their heads, ignoring murder and abuse, pretending they live in a place that’s much too nice for anything bad to ever take place.”
Maybe she’d leave. Maybe when this was over, she’d say to hell with it and get outta Dodge. Her house was rented, so there was no property to worry about. She had only a few friends. And, other than getting to work with Walter, she couldn’t say she loved anything about her job anymore. Picking up and taking off sounded better all the time.
It took a while in the darkness, but after a couple of minutes, they reached the end of the dusty private driveway. “Maybe I should pull the log back into position,” he said, hesitating before pulling out onto the main road. “I should have done it before, just didn’t think of it since I wasn’t sure this would be the place.”
“We’re less than a mile from Julia and the others. You really think somebody’s going to notice in the next five minutes that it’s not where it’s supposed to be?”
He hesitated, then shrugged in apology. “Sorry, I don’t like to take chances.” Pulling the vehicle out, and then onto the shoulder, he said, “Wait here.”
Aidan exited and jogged back to the log, which looked massive and heavy but, he said, was easily moved. Shoving it across the lane, he was back in his seat within a minute. He’d just buckled up as a pair of headlights came into view, heading toward them, away from town.
“Close,” he said. A few seconds earlier and those headlights would have spotlighted him shoving at a downed tree in the middle of nowhere.
Shifting the SUV into drive, he pulled out onto the road just as the oncoming vehicle, a large passenger van, blew past them going well above the speed limit.
“Hope Julia, Mick, and Olivia have been staying well off the road,” Lexie said, frowning as she turned and watched the van’s taillights disappear. “Even with their flashlights, some idiot going seventy on a country road might not spot them.”
Glancing over, she realized Aidan wasn’t listening. A dark, forbidding frown tugging at his brow, he appeared in the grip of another of those strange trances he’d been in a few minutes ago at the house.
“Aidan,” she snapped. Realizing they were drifting into the oncoming lane, and another pair of headlights was heading for them, she raised her voice. “Pull over!”
He shook his head, hard, his hands jerking a little on the steering wheel, swerving the SUV back into their lane. “Damn,” he muttered, sounding out of breath and shocked.
“Did it happen again?”
He nodded once. “I started hearing those voices all over again. I didn’t go looking for them. I’d never do that while driving.” He thrust a shaking hand through his hair. “I’m so sorry, Lex. I can usually control this. Guess touching the log again put me more in tune with the voices I’d heard, of the men who’d touched it before.”
“It’s okay. We’re both fine.”
He swallowed visibly, admitting in a low voice, “That house shook me up. It has some seriously bad karma.”
“I know.” Unable to help it, she had to admit, “I hate the thought of going inside.”
“So maybe we shouldn’t,” he told her. As she started to protest, he held up a hand. “Not tonight, I mean. It’s going to be pitch-black inside and even if there is a generator, as I suspect, we won’t be able to fire it up and turn on any lights without potentially letting somebody know we’re in there snooping around.”
“What about flashlights?”
He hesitated, as if trying to figure out how to put what he was thinking into words.
“What we do, what everyone on the team does, is very precise,” he finally said. “We all open ourselves up to some pretty intense situations every single day. Doing it in the dark, in a place like
that
, when we can’t entirely control what we’re touching, or what we might stumble over that could trigger a response . . . well, there are risks involved. Look at what happened just now, even after I thought I had shut it out.”
She thought about that, the way the evil aura of the place had actually reached out and gripped him again, even when he was driving away from it. They could have been in an accident, and another trip to the local ER was not on her to-do list. Neither was getting killed.
“There they are,” he said, nodding toward Julia, Mick, and Olivia, whose flashlights were visible just up ahead. “Let me run this by them and we’ll decide as a group, okay?”
Fair enough. If Aidan had thought there was any chance Vonnie was in that house, or that going into it tonight might help them find her, she had no doubt he’d insist on doing it. That he didn’t was both disappointing and a bit of a relief. Disappointing, because she had been hoping deep inside that they might actually find the missing girl at the whispered-about clubhouse.
Relieved because, as little as she wanted to go in that place at any time, doing it at night was something she just didn’t want to contemplate. Not now, not after the day she’d had.
Within another few minutes, Aidan’s three friends were back in the car. Insisting that Lexie remain where she was, Mick took a seat beside Julia in the back.
Aidan didn’t turn the vehicle around, but he didn’t head toward town right away, either. Instead, parked on the shoulder, he told them all that they’d discovered, and what he thought they should do about it.
Julia immediately agreed. “There’s nobody alive in that house,” she said, as if she’d already gotten an inside tip. “We’d go in looking for clues, not a missing person, and it’s too easy to miss something in the dark.”
“He’s sure?” Aidan asked, obviously realizing Julia had been talking to her ghost.
The dark-haired woman nodded.
Lexie, who’d been wondering about something, had to ask, “If your, um, friend can find houses and know who is or isn’t in them, why can’t he just go find Vonnie?” She wasn’t being snide, or disbelieving, she genuinely wanted to know.
“Like anyone else, Morgan needs a starting place, something to go on,” Julia explained, earnest and serious. She hadn’t taken offense at the question. “He found that house because he knew you were looking for one in this vicinity. Just like he found you because he knew roughly where you were. If we had a couple of possibilities where Vonnie might be, he could certainly check them out. But a whole town? Impossible.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling a little better about leaving without going deep into the creepy clubhouse for monsters tonight.
After hearing Julia’s information, and everything Aidan had to share about the house—and how it had affected him—they all agreed to head back to town. Julia and the others would go back to Savannah and return in the morning, hopefully with someone named Derek.
“It’s just as well we’re waiting until the morning. It really wouldn’t be a good thing for me to go stumbling around in the dark, touching things I don’t need to touch,” said Mick as they got underway. “I could get caught up in the history of an old broken teapot and get completely distracted from what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Lexie turned in her seat, looking back at the three psychic detectives. Aidan had told her nothing about what they did, or how they did it, and Mick’s words were her first clue about his ability. “You can touch something and know how it’s been used?” she asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
Mick nodded. “And who used it, when, and where.”
“That’s pretty interesting.”
“It’s a good party trick,” the man said with a grin. “Used to be a big hit on the carnival sideshow circuit.” Closing his eyes, he lifted his hand, placing the back of it on his forehead. In a chanty, fortune-teller’s voice, he added, “I see that this matchbook was used to light a cigarette for a woman in black. A woman you had dinner with when your wife thought you were at a business meeting.” Dropping his hand, he added, “Unfortunately, I didn’t get much repeat business.”
She had to chuckle, surprised she was even capable of it after today, but incredibly relieved at how good it felt, even if her throat hurt a little every time she swallowed.
The others were smiling, too, including Aidan, who said, “Don’t even try to tell us you didn’t find some way to use your act to pick up women.”
“Not at first,” Mick replied with an innocent shrug, “considering I was only six.”
Lexie took a second to be shocked by that, the knowledge that this man had been put in some kind of sideshow act as a child. Nobody else seemed fazed, so they’d already known.
“But once I hit high school age?” the man added. “Hell, yeah, groups of giggly girls would come in and I’d do everything I could to get their attention.”
Julia smirked. “How many of them threw their underwear onstage so you could see where it had been?”
Mick’s smile broadened, which caused Olivia, Julia, and Lexie to make, “Ew!” sounds.
“Only time I was ever able to touch something and see the future,” Mick said, winking. “
My
future.”
More groans from the women, though Aidan laughed, looking completely relaxed and at ease. If she hadn’t already liked these friends of his, she would have just for that. She’d seen glimpses of the real man beneath the gruff, all-black-wearing exterior. That real man was especially in evidence when he let his guard down, as he did around these people. And, she had to admit, even around her. It was like they were all unified on some team, and she felt more a part of this group than she had with any other during the six years she’d lived in Granville.