Unholy Ground Read online

  He loved her for that, loved that she was thinking of others even as the two of them were caught in their own private nightmare. And she was right — the information about the Underhill trustees was interesting, but it still wasn’t of much use if he and Audrey couldn’t use it to track down the demon behind all of this. While they were waiting on Fred, they could use that time to do this favor for Emma Weston.

  As Michael nodded and opened his mouth to reply, his phone rang again. This time, he looked down at the screen, saw that the call was from Detective Mendoza. “Michael here.”

  “This is Detective Mendoza. I just spoke with Emma Weston, Colin Turner’s sister.”

  “Yes, we talked a few minutes ago.”

  “She’s authorized you to take receipt of Mr. Turner’s remains. Unless you have any objections, we’ll release him to Forest Lawn Mortuary. They’ll handle the cremation, and you can go pick up the ashes. They can also package them for international shipping.”

  This comment made Michael feel inexplicably relieved. He’d been worried about receiving Colin’s remains, making sure they were packaged correctly so they would reach England without incident. Probably better to let the experts handle it.

  “They know where to send them?”

  “Yes,” Mendoza said. “Ms. Weston gave me her address. I’ll forward that to Forest Lawn along with the rest of the necessary information.”

  “Thank you, detective. That will help us out a lot.”

  “Not a problem.” His tone was brisk, as if he handled this sort of thing every day. Maybe he did. A homicide detective must be used to all the logistics involved in an unexpected death. “I’ll get in touch with the morgue. They need to make the call to Forest Lawn, and then the staff there will make contact when Mr. Turner’s remains are ready to be collected.”

  “Any idea how long that will take?”

  “Depends on their workload. They can explain it in more detail.” A pause, and Mendoza went on, “We’ve cleared the crime scene and locked up the house. Emma Weston said we could release the keys to you, since you’re acting as her agent.”

  “Yes, we’ll have to get the place cleared out, get in contact with the landlord.” Michael glanced over at Audrey; she’d stopped rubbing his shoulders as soon as he took the call and now stood a few paces away, listening quietly. “Can we come by today and get the keys?”

  “Sure. I’ll leave them in an envelope with the desk sergeant.”

  “Thank you, detective. We’ll be over in about an hour or so.”

  “Northeast Division, 3353 San Fernando Road.”

  “Got it.”

  They ended the call there, and Audrey sent him a glance that was half resigned, half speculative. “We’re going to Colin’s house?”

  Michael stood up, slipping the phone into his jacket pocket. “Eventually. But first, we have to go to the police station.”

  At least the Northeast Division’s station was shiny and new-looking, a contrast to the more modest commercial and industrial buildings that surrounded it. Audrey had driven through this part of L.A. before but wasn’t familiar with it. Were they in Atwater Village? Glassell Park?

  It probably didn’t matter all that much.

  The desk sergeant, a pretty black woman in her late thirties or early forties, was obviously expecting them, because as soon as Michael gave his name and showed her his driver’s license, she handed them a bulky dark manila envelope. “House keys and garage remote,” she said. “If you could sign this form.”

  She pushed a clipboard toward them, and Michael briefly scanned the paperwork on it before taking the attached pen and signing his name. “Is Detective Mendoza here?”

  “No,” she replied. “He’s out on a call. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “If I have any questions, I’ll give him a call.”

  A nod, and she took the clipboard back, glanced briefly at Michael’s signature, then said, “That’s all I needed. Have a good day.”

  Since there wasn’t anything else to do, they headed back to Audrey’s rental car. They got in, and Michael handed her the envelope. “Colin’s house is only about ten minutes from here, and hopefully, this won’t take very long.”

  Audrey took the manila envelope, then set it down on the floor next to her purse before fastening her seatbelt. The thought of going back to Colin’s house made her more nervous than she wanted to admit. Of course, the team who’d searched the house should have cleaned up any evidence — or she assumed somebody must have, even if it wasn’t the same team but someone else hired to handle the gruesome task — but what if they hadn’t? What if there were still blood spatters and gore? The room where they’d found Colin’s body had been very dim, and so she honestly didn’t even know whether much blood had actually been spilled.

  But still….

  Now she was regretting not being a fan of all those crime scene shows. At least that way she’d have some idea of what she was getting into. But after the way she’d lost her parents, watching TV shows that involved gruesome murders on a weekly basis hadn’t seemed very appealing.

  Correctly reading her silence, Michael said, “It wasn’t a messy death, and a team came in and scrubbed the room after all the evidence had been collected. It’s going to be okay.”

  His words reassured her a little. Even so, it wasn’t fun to think of going into a place where someone had met a violent death. She knew Colin’s ghost didn’t linger there — or at least, she hadn’t sensed anything in the house the night of his death — and yet she thought she wouldn’t want to be the next tenant to move in. Whoever did so should probably invest in a lot of smudge sticks.

  She nodded but didn’t say anything, and they drove in silence the rest of the way to the house. It was good that the day was still bright and sunny around them, because she knew she wouldn’t have wanted to walk in there after the sun had gone down.

  Michael pulled up into the driveway and parked. For some reason, Audrey had been halfway expecting to see yellow police tape still barring the front door, but she realized that of course they would have taken it down once the investigation was over and the house had been scrubbed.

  “Can I have the envelope?” he asked, and she handed it over to him, watching as he shook a set of keys and a square black remote control device into one hand. “I assume Colin’s SUV is in the garage, but I don’t think we’ll need to check on it right away. I think he said it was leased, so at some point we’ll need to get in contact with the dealership and have them take it back, but first things first.”

  “All right.” So many loose ends left hanging when someone was torn from this life, so many pieces that other people needed to pick up…. Not for the first time, Audrey thought of all the small details her aunt had had to manage when Audrey’s parents were killed. There were probably a lot of things she’d never known about, things she should have thanked Deb for and never had.

  They got out of the Charger and headed for the front door. Almost as soon as Michael opened it, Audrey was hit by a strong smell of chemicals, probably from the cleaning crew.

  “We can open a few windows,” he said while she blinked, her eyes already watering.

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  They cracked open the windows in the living room and dining room, and then headed down the hallway to the secondary bedroom Colin had used as his office. The odor was even stronger in here, and Michael went at once to the window, opening it wide so the fresh air and sunlight could stream in.

  The crew had done a good job. There really wasn’t any sign of the crime that had occurred here, not even any blotches on the polished wood floor. Then again, Colin’s office chair sat on one of those plastic floor protectors, and maybe that had shielded the wood from any possible stains.

  Audrey had thought Michael might go to the computer again — his search for the Project Demon Hunters files on the night of Colin’s murder had been hurried and brief — but instead he turned
toward the tall black file cabinet that stood against the opposite wall. As he began to flip through the hanging file folders it contained, she asked, “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  “Several things, I guess. Paperwork for the lease on the house and on the car, just to get in touch with the interested parties so they can handle things from there.”

  That made sense. “Anything else?”

  He paused, a small sigh escaping his lips. “I’m really not sure. I guess anything that jumps out at me. In the back of my mind, I was kind of hoping that Colin might have a storage unit somewhere, a separate place where he might have hidden another set of his computer files. I know he wouldn’t have stored the files in the cloud because he always talked about how he didn’t trust that sort of thing.”

  “Did he ever mention something like a storage unit to you?”

  Michael offered her a brief, rueful smile before he returned to flipping through the file folders. “No. But he could be a bit paranoid, and it seems like something he might do.” He stopped, extracted a sheaf of papers, and rifled through them for a moment. “Well, here’s the lease. Can you get the landlord’s contact info from this so we can get in touch with them?”

  “Sure.” Audrey came over and took the paperwork from him, then set it down on the desk and got a pen and paper out of her purse. The home was leased by a management company, and apparently had come furnished. That would make things easier. If she and Michael found anything truly personal in the house, like photos or notebooks or what-have-you, they could box it up and send it to Colin’s sister in England. But at least they didn’t have to worry about disposing of the furniture and all the other million and one items it seemed you needed to keep a house going.

  She wrote down the information for the property management company on the little notepad she carried with her everywhere. It seemed strange to her to think of living in a house where nothing was really your own except your clothes and computer and personal-care items, and maybe a few pieces of art, but it would make moving around easier. And in a town like Los Angeles, where people were coming and going all the time to shoot movies and television shows, there probably was a fairly thriving business in offering fully furnished rental houses.

  Meanwhile, Michael appeared to be done going through the files in the top drawer of the cabinet and had moved on to the one immediately below it. Brows drawing together, he pulled out a file bulging with printouts that looked as if they’d come from various websites, then put it down on the desk next to the lease they’d found.

  “What’s that?” Audrey asked as he began shuffling through the papers.

  “It looks like a file Colin put together for ideas for possible shows. A lot of haunted houses…cryptozoology — ”

  “Like Bigfoot and chupacabras, that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly.” Despite their somewhat grim errand, Michael couldn’t help smiling a little. “I told Colin that was getting a little off topic for me, but he still was interested in pursuing the subject after we were done with Project Demon Hunters.”

  Audrey could see that. Michael seemed very focused on demons and the havoc they created in this world. She couldn’t really imagine him wandering around in a forest, hunting for Bigfoot, or heading to Pennsylvania to investigate the latest Mothman sighting. But people ate that stuff up, which probably was why Colin had been urging him to branch out once they were done demon hunting.

  One of the pictures Michael set aside caught her eye, however. She wasn’t even sure why it attracted her attention, since it showed only a chilly winter forest, the trees all bare, the lighting gray and shadowed. For some reason, though, she couldn’t stop staring at it, as though she somehow recognized the scene, when she knew for a fact that she’d never been anywhere like that, a place where the ground was thick with fallen leaves, and mist clung to the skeletal trees like a dismal funeral garment.

  Then she remembered — the dream she’d had when they were in Tucson at the Thunderbird bed-and-breakfast, after Michael and Rosemary had rescued her from the Whitcomb-demon’s mansion in Colorado. A strange dream, one with no real action in it, only a memory of barren trees and a cold gray sky and a meager little stream that wandered through a dead-looking wood.

  She reached for the picture. Her hand felt cold as she touched the paper, as if something of the gloom depicted in the image had traveled from the laser-printed surface and moved up through her fingertips. “Michael, what is this place?”

  He stopped rifling through the papers in the folder and looked over at the piece of paper she held. “That? I think it’s a picture from a place in Connecticut called Dudleytown. It was one of the locations we were considering for the last episode of Project Demon Hunters, although Colin shelved it because he could never get hold of anyone who operated the trust that owns the land so we could get permission to shoot there.” He stopped suddenly, his shocked gaze meeting hers as if he’d just realized the import of what he’d said.

  “‘The trust,’” Audrey echoed. “Do you think…?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “And yet…Fred said he might have a lead on something in Connecticut, although he didn’t have any more information to give me right then. But that along with the fact that you dreamed about this place has to mean something.”

  “It was just a dream.”

  “A dream…or a vision?”

  She honestly didn’t know. At the time, they’d had much bigger things to worry about, and she’d pushed the memory of the dream aside, thinking it an odd little vignette and not anything more. “You’re saying I had a vision of this place because I knew it was where we were supposed to end up? That seems a little far-fetched.”

  Michael turned toward her, then took the piece of paper with its image of the dead woods from her fingers and put it down on the desk. Before she could speak, he’d taken both her hands in his, held them tightly. “Once you’ve acknowledged that you’re dealing with demons, is anything all that far-fetched? We know you’re psychic, Audrey. That could have been a flash of the future, or you simply picking up vibrations with your unconscious mind, ripples from a place of dark power.”

  “Is it?” she asked. Right then, she was glad of the way he held her hands, wrapped his fingers around hers, because she suddenly felt cold despite the bright sunlight shining in through the open window. “A place of dark power, I mean?”

  “I think so,” he replied, his tone now quiet, intense. “I’ve never been there, because the trust that controls those lands is very protective of its property and very aggressive toward trespassers, but even over in Massachusetts we heard stories of haunted Dudleytown.”

  That comment made her look up at him, curiosity sharpened. “Is that where you’re from? Massachusetts? You don’t sound like it.”

  Now he chuckled, and pulled her toward him so he could give her a quick kiss on the cheek. The touch of his lips on her skin was immensely reassuring, although she understood why he didn’t push things any further than that. A man had died in this room not so long ago.

  Still looking amused, Michael said, “I trained the New England out of my voice, mostly because I didn’t want anyone to guess where I’d come from. But I grew up in Brookline, and both my parents worked at Harvard.”

  “Really?” Audrey asked, impressed despite herself by that particular piece of information. “They were college professors?”

  “No.” His smile faded a little, and he added, “My father was a facilities supervisor — basically, a glorified HVAC engineer — and my mother was an executive assistant to the dean in the math department. But they did okay.”

  From the way he stopped there and didn’t seem willing to offer any additional information, Audrey guessed he really didn’t want to go into more detail than that. Still, she thought she could read between the lines. Because her aunt was a professor at a private college — if not one quite as prestigious as Harvard — she knew that high-up staff positions at those institutions paid quite well, and
offered very good benefits. Clearly, Michael’s family had been doing well for themselves…until his brother snapped and went on a rampage.

  Or was possessed by a demon. Either way, his family had been shattered just as irrevocably as hers had.

  Because she could tell Michael wanted to change the subject, Audrey said, “What’s so haunted about Dudleytown?”

  “It has a strange history. A lot of people who went insane for no apparent reason…suicides…people disappearing and never being seen or heard from again. Taken separately, it might not seem like so much, but when you add them all together, those incidents paint a pretty grim picture.” Michael let go of her hands and picked up the printout again, studying the bleak image it portrayed. “All in all, it sounds like exactly the sort of place a demon might go to ground. I guess I need to get in contact with Detective Mendoza.”

  “What for?” Audrey inquired, a little confused by the apparent non sequitur.

  Michael smiled then, although there was still something very grim about his expression. “Because I figure it’s probably best to let him know we’re about to leave the state.”

  A chill traced its way down her back. Like it or not, it sounded as though they were headed to Dudleytown, Connecticut.

  Chapter 14

  They actually flew out two days later, mostly because Audrey pointed out that it wouldn’t look very good to skip town while they were waiting to take care of Colin’s ashes so they could be safely shipped to his sister. Forest Lawn had everything ready the day after Michael and Audrey had made their discovery about Dudleytown, and so at least they were able to mail the ashes and let Emma know they were on their way.

  Since Michael was no longer a suspect, Detective Mendoza had been somewhat nonplussed by being contacted and informed that Michael and Audrey were headed to the East Coast. However, since Michael explained the precipitous trip by saying that it had actually been on his schedule all along and it had completely slipped his mind, thanks to what had happened to Colin, the detective only told him to fly safe and left it at that.