Haunted Destiny

4

Jude managed to sit, to put aside his own past, his emotions, his disbelief and worse...

The fact that he could see the dead—

And speak with a ghost.

The essence, soul or whatever remained of Byron Grant perched next to Alexi on the bed, while Jude took the chair at the dressing table. And he listened as Byron Grant told his story.

“I loved Elizabeth. I’d loved her...since high school. We’d been together ever since then,” he said. “We were a good couple, a great couple. We would’ve been married this Christmas.” He paused, obviously pained. “She had her wedding dress picked out.”

“I’m so sorry you lost her,” Alexi said in a whisper. “And I’m sorry about what happened to you.”

“I will be with her again. I know I will. I...” He paused and gazed at Alexi in obvious distress. “I don’t know why I’m here, and she’s not. But I have to believe...”

“You will be with her,” Alexi assured him. “Soon.”

“You’re here right now to help us,” Jude said.

Oh, God, that had to be the truth. Otherwise he’d completely lost his mind and entered into some grand delusion with this young woman. “You brought Jackson Crow and me onto this ship,” Jude continued.

Damn it! He should have recognized the man immediately. He’d seen pictures of all the victims. And he finally put the facts together.

Byron Grant had been an actor. He’d had stage makeup on when he was killed. Jude berated himself— why hadn’t he figured it out, put the facts together more quickly?

“Yes, I knew he’d be on this ship.” Byron hesitated once more. “I didn’t know he’d kill again before the ship sailed.”

“You were playing Cyrano!” Jude said. “My God, I’m an idiot. That was in the police reports. I just didn’t connect it with the makeup...or realize that the man I was chasing was really one of the victims.”

Byron Grant studied him, head at a slight angle. “Yes, I was playing Cyrano de Bergerac.” He paused. “I had a hard time getting that makeup off. As a ghost, I mean,” he added glumly.

Alexi Cromwell was silent as she watched the exchange.

But Jude could tell she wasn’t afraid. She was, if anything, glad that she’d finally managed to get Jude to admit there was a ghost—and the ghost to realize he needed to speak with Jude.

“I suppose,” Jude said. I wouldn’t know. I don’t really know anything about ghosts.

“Okay,” he went on, “you’ve got the two of us here—and you have Jackson Crow and me aboard the ship. Now we need your help. You must remember something, or you couldn’t have known that the Archangel would be on the Destiny. You’re certain of this?”

Byron Grant nodded. He was, minus the stage makeup, a handsome, fit young man who—other than being dead!—seemed somber and sincere. Blue eyes, sandy-blond hair. The boy next door. The kind of guy who’d marry his high school sweetheart.

“I never really saw the killer,” Byron admitted. “He took me pretty quickly.”

“What made you so sure he’d be on the ship?” Jude demanded. “Tell me what happened, step by step.”

Alexi gave Byron an encouraging smile and he smiled back at her. Then he turned to Jude.

“I was doing the play. Anyway, it ended at around 10 p.m. I usually stayed to take off my makeup at the theater, but I got a call from Elizabeth at around ten twenty. She said the lights were off at the house and thought she’d left them on. I told her to wait for me, said I’d leave right away. I got out of my costume, but didn’t bother with the makeup, just grabbed my hoodie and I was out the door.” He frowned as he described what had happened that night. “I phoned her back after I left the theater. She didn’t answer. I probably should’ve called the police right away but I drove home as fast as I could. Her car was in the driveway, and the lights were on in the house. I was a little pissed at her, figuring she’d decided to go in but hadn’t bothered to call me. I walked up to the door, which was unlocked, and threw it open. I got as far as the entry.”

He bit down on his lip and shook his head.

“I saw her. I saw her on the floor,” he said. “I ran over to her, but I was just thinking she’d fallen. Then I saw the blood.”

Alexi lifted a hand as if she’d reach out to comfort him.

She lowered her hand to her lap, her eyes filled with sympathy.

“I hurried to her, bent down...and then he was behind me,” Byron said. “He had a knife at my throat, ripping, even as I tried to turn to see his face. I flailed out at him—got him in the jaw. The knife sliced through my arm when I did that. Defensive wound, I guess they call it. But...I was bleeding out. And I only saw one thing.”

“What?” Jude asked, determined not to let his question sound impatient.

“A ticket. It stuck out from his pocket. He was wearing some kind of suit jacket, pocket on the right. The ticket was for the Destiny—out of NOLA. And this sailing date was on it, so I knew. I knew he’d be on this ship.”

“I see,” Jude murmured. “And then?”

“And then I was dead. I didn’t realize it—or have any awareness of it or anything else—until I seemed to rise over my body where the bastard had stuffed it inside a Dumpster in an alley.”

They were all quiet for a minute.

Jude suddenly blurted, “But you—you were hovering around the crime scene in NOLA. You jumped on a bar. A drunk girl tried to give you money.”

Byron shrugged. “Some people see me. I don’t always know who sees me, though. I tried hitchhiking and eventually found someone who saw me and drove me to NOLA. It’s only a couple of hours, and I don’t think he ever knew I wasn’t...alive. And then...hey, if I hurt that dude who got me to the ship, man, I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just... I just want to stop more people from being killed.”

Jude let out a long breath, still unable to grasp that he was sitting in Alexi Cromwell’s tiny cabin on the Destiny discussing the case with a ghost—a victim of the killer.

And feeling disturbed by the fact that he did believe he was talking to a ghost.

“We have a list of people who might’ve been in the areas where the women were killed,” he said. “May I show you the pictures, see if any of them seem familiar?”

Byron Grant nodded. “Of course.”

Alexi rose, leaving her perch for Jude. Drawing his phone from his pocket, he slipped by her to sit next to the ghost.

He brushed against her and was startled to feel sparks racing through his system. She was a very attractive woman, and he was feeling a strong physical pull toward her. And that made things more complicated... He held his thoughts in check and carefully displayed the photos Angela Hawkins had emailed him and Jackson; one by one he went through them all.

“I wish I knew,” Byron said. He hesitated. “This guy...”

“This one? David Beach? He’s head of security on the ship.”

“Right. No, you can eliminate him. I’ve seen him. He’s huge. The guy who got me was probably about six feet tall.”

“Good. That helps,” Jude said. He rose and paced the few steps to the cabin door. “Can you think of anything else? A scent—was he wearing aftershave or cologne? Did he smoke? Anything odd about his hands? Did you see his hands?”

He turned back to look at Byron Grant.

But the ghost was gone.

And for a moment he felt absolutely ridiculous, as if he was the butt of a massive joke. He was standing there, talking away, carrying on a conversation with...no one.

An illusion.

Alexi Cromwell was still there, leaning against the wardrobe, eyes enormous.

“He was really here,” she said softly. “Sometimes...well, I think it takes a tremendous amount of energy to appear so...completely and to talk and... He’ll be back.”

He didn’t say anything.

He should have thanked her. He didn’t.

Nodding curtly, he turned and left her room.

There were a few things, unusual things, in his past—like the dead appearing to him—and he was going to have to deal with it all, the then and the now.

* * *

Cruise ships tended to be happy places.

The cruise line did everything possible to ensure that guests were happy; music played constantly, most of it live. Frenetic tour directors carried on bingo parties, pool parties, disco parties and more.

And in the Caribbean, the sun shone down on sparkling water most of the time, shimmering as if the sea were scattered with diamonds. On the Destiny, people seemed to be complying with the cruise “regulation” that they have fun.

Jude needed to go talk to Jackson.

But for a few minutes, he had to be alone, hoping the sweet-salt breeze would wash away the heavy fog of darkness that had settled over his mind.

He left the crew’s quarters, mounting the richly carpeted steps from floor to floor until he reached the top deck and walked aft, leaned against the rail and let the sun soak into him while the breeze swept around him. Neither had any effect on the chill that seemed to have crept into his bones.

Once, in the military, he’d believed that he was experiencing PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Later in his life he’d used the very situation that sometimes made him think he was crazy to become a crack field officer with the bureau. Only he called it “intuition.” Or talked about “hunches” and “gut feelings” to explain his success at solving crimes.

The Caribbean still rippled with that diamond effect, but Jude stared into a haze of dusty darkness. Time seemed to collapse, and he saw himself seven years earlier, moving with his company in the small village where insurgents had taken hold. Felt the way his heart had thundered that day, the way he’d known he couldn’t see everything, couldn’t see into every home, around every corner.

Some of the soldiers with him had served too long; they shot when something moved—a child, a chicken, a dog, a goat or a pig.

Some still had illusions of morality; they took greater care.

And some, in their desperation to believe in the sanctity of life, died—not firing when they should have.

Corporal Al Bellingham had been one of those men. Hand-to-hand combat, a tiny village, insurgents who lived only to kill...and dozens of mothers, children, the aged.

Every corner could mean death, and Jude had turned one of those corners to see Al on the ground, writhing. He’d looked around, then hunkered down by his comrade and friend, the man with whom he’d played cards, baseball, music, enduring the hours in the hostile desert. He’d taken Al by the shoulders and dragged him back behind the small and desolate house that had been his own shield, lying low against the ricochet of stray bullets as he did.

He spoke into his radio, calling the medics, who would do their best. Automatic rifle fire beat a rat-tat-tat just beyond the little enclave where Jude had dragged the wounded man.

Al opened his eyes and gazed up at Jude. He didn’t address him as “Lieutenant” the way he usually did, even when the men were doing nothing but whiling away the hours, waiting for their call to action.

He addressed him as “fool.”

“Your head was out there, fool,” Al said. “Head down at all times!”

“The medics are coming. Don’t try to talk. Save your breath,” Jude said.

But Al had clutched his arm and looked desperately into his eyes. He rattled off a series of numbers. “Got that? Please, Jude, tell me you got that.”

“Al, medics are coming! You have to fight to live.”

Al’s grip tightened. “Please, Jude. I have a wife. Mellora. Remember? And a baby daughter. You give Mellora that number. Got it?”

He wouldn’t be able to keep him alive long enough for the medics to come.

Jude repeated the numbers.

Then suddenly, Al shouted, “Behind you, man, behind you!”

Jude whipped around fast enough to fire first at an insurgent bearing down on him.

He could still picture that moment as if it had been yesterday. The littered courtyard between desert-dusted homes. Al bleeding on the ground; his enemy dead by the corner of the house.

And him—alive—because of Al.

The rat-tat-tat of firepower growing more distant and then fading away, the medics rushing in...

Not until they were back at base had he learned from their company physician that he couldn’t have spoken with Al Bellingham. Bullets had severed his spinal column and pounded through his skull; the man had died almost instantly.

Somehow Jude had kept it together long enough to get through his tour of duty.

He’d imagined it, he’d told himself. He’d imagined the entire encounter.

And yet he’d felt compelled to speak with Al’s wife. He’d called and told her that he’d been with her husband at the end. He told her how much Al had loved her—and what a brave man he’d been, saving others, refusing to let war make him less of a man.

And he’d given her the set of numbers.

A year later, when he was back in the States, Mellora Bellingham had called to thank him. The numbers had been for an insurance policy Al had purchased only days before his death.

She might never have found it without the numbers he’d given her.

It wasn’t until he’d applied at the academy that he’d been advised to go into therapy. And he’d gone. He’d thought he understood. PTSD. Sure. Made sense. He’d lived in a world where it was often a case of kill or be killed. Back in North America, he was entering a world where danger often lurked below the surface and the monsters were hidden.

But he wanted that world. Nothing on earth was perfect; he’d seen the good, the bad and the hideous and learned about imperfection. He found he loved his country with an even greater passion, and out of the war zone, he wanted to fight the monsters who lived beneath the civilized veneer.

He had tried to consign Al to the far reaches of memory, although the man had continued to haunt his soul. Especially when they’d lost Lily, and he’d sat with her lifeless body for hours, praying that he would hear her whisper a single word.

The truth was that he’d spoken with a ghost before. He’d spoken with Al.

He was so lost in his thoughts that at first he didn’t hear the buzz of his cell phone. He snapped out of his trance and answered.

Good agents did not become lost in the fog of the past, he reminded himself.

It was Jackson Crow, of course.

“I’ve met with Beach and his men,” Jackson told him. “They’re on high alert, although it would be nice if they really believed me about a killer being on board. What about Alexi Cromwell?”

“I’ve talked to her,” Jude said. “And Byron Grant.”

“Byron Grant?” Jackson Crow’s voice was controlled and even. “Byron Grant was the second-last victim of the Archangel—that we know about, at any rate.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Jude said.

Krewe of Hunters, huh?

“Meet me back at her cabin. With any luck, she’s still in,” Jackson said, not skipping a beat.

* * *

When the ship was first built, tiny peepholes had been set in each cabin door, including those in the crew quarters. No unwary cabin girl or waitress would be taken by surprise on the Destiny.

Alexi had never been more grateful for that—even as she realized she’d seldom used it before.

She’d half expected Clara, since she knew how nervous her friend was feeling.

But it was Jude McCoy. He was back, this time with his partner.

She opened the door for them and waited. This man—Jackson Crow—might believe that she was more illusionist or charlatan than pianist and entertainer. She was afraid he’d come to confront her.

He hadn’t. He smiled and merely asked if she minded talking to them again. She agreed.

Her cabin seemed entirely too cramped. Jackson Crow sat at the dressing table; Jude McCoy was next to her on the bunk. For a few minutes she found it hard to breathe and wondered if she was having a panic attack. It was impossible not to be aware of the man sitting beside her, of his intensity, which seemed to burn around her—almost as if it held her in a strange grip. She tried to concentrate on Crow, but she was acutely conscious of Jude McCoy. He sat so close to her they were almost touching.

“You’ve met this man Byron Grant?” Crow asked her. He smiled; he had an intriguing face, his smile both gentle and enigmatic.

She looked at Jude, whose face was impassive. He studied her in return, but she saw no mockery in his eyes. Not anymore.

Because he’d stood there just an hour ago, talking to the ghost himself.