Chapter 13
To my surprise, I did not get a visit from either Jack or Todd that evening.
Nor any other agents for that matter. And even more surprising, was that I was still in possession of Jack’s wallet.
For an FBI agent, he carried quite a bit of cash.
From all the petty bets he made with Todd if I were to hazard a guess.
What I did get, however, were two texts from Fawzy: Okay, that was impressive. And: Also, the chilli. Ten out of ten.
Again, no mention of the wallet. Jack probably kept that fact to himself. Wasn’t a good look for the person in charge to have their wallet stolen in plain sight.
I smiled.
So far, there was only upside to my troublemaking. It had also done a good job of using up my excess energy. Pickpocketing the FBI agents was like a sugar high. I hit a plateau before taking a nose dive.
Exhaustion soon took root. From there it didn’t take long before I shut the drapes, enjoyed a luxurious hotel bath, and headed to bed. Early. Like asleep before seven, early.
Not only was I up late the night before, but I needed to wake up to get to Spring Grove Cemetery before the sun rose. And in the middle of summer the sunrise was… I did a quick search on my phone… around six-thirty.
Not as bad as if I had been further east. In New York, it would have been at least an hour earlier.
Still, I went to bed, setting my alarm to wake under the cover of darkness.
Which came too soon.
Way too soon. I smacked off the alarm and rolled out of bed into my clothes before sneaking out of the hotel. Though it hardly felt like sneaking when I walked out into a brightly lit corridor and rode down to the lobby in a mirrored elevator playing some peppy instrumental background music.
Spring Grove was only a thirty-or-so minute walk away, then it was another fifteen-to-twenty minutes to make my way through the cemetery grounds to where the victims’ bodies were found.
My pre-dawn meddling would be a good exercise to see how effective the cemetery’s security was at keeping trespassers, like myself, out after hours.
Which was just one of the reasons I had resorted to sneaking.
The other had to do with a suspicion I couldn’t quite place. Something very much vampiric and tied to ritual, but couldn’t put into words. Not until I could get myself on the scene. Feel it out for myself. Make the hunch more than a feeling.
Passing through the hotel parking lot on my way to the main road, I neared Jack’s rental car with his pair of furry dice—that I half considered hot-wiring just for the hell of it—when I noticed two shadows leaning on the hood.
What the hell?
Jack and Todd were waiting, arms crossed across their broad chests, watching me. Smug looks on both their faces.
“Is this an intervention?” I asked, knowing the only reason they could be so smug was if they had something up their sleeve.
“We are just proving a point.” Jack and Todd shared a look.
“Which is?”
“You’re just as predictable as we are.”
Todd checked the time. “You owe me five dollars.”
“I’d be happy to oblige,” Jack patted his pockets, then aimed a pointed look at me, “but I don’t seem to have my wallet.”
Not daring to leave Jack’s wallet unattended in my hotel room—especially when I had the habit of being surrounded by people, like Mads, who had a penchant for breaking and entering—I’d brought it with me.
Pulling the wallet out of my back pocket, I handed it to him with a flourish.
Jack kept his eyes on me as he transferred Todd his winnings.
“Not going to count it?” I jabbed.
“Do we need to have a talk about manners?”
Oh god, he sounded so much like a parent it made my insides swell. Ignoring the heat flushing my cheeks, I shrugged. “Todd told me to be good.”
Todd huffed, raking a hand over his face, smug smile still in place. “I knew that was a mistake.”
“So really, it’s your fault.”
“Yes, blame the guy who told you not to cause trouble.”
See that was the problem. If I was as predictable as the agents said I was, then when Todd went out of his way to tell me to be good, he knew exactly what he was doing. But that explanation was far too many words to speak aloud this early in the morning.
“Heard all about your… troublemaking.” Todd ceased leaning on the car and stood to his full height.
“Impressed?”
Todd gave me the “so-so” gesture. But even in the dim light, I could tell the corners of his mouth were still ticked upwards. Yeah, he was impressed.
I elbowed him gently, meeting the solid resistance of his abdomen. I probably shouldn’t have paid as much attention to the feel of his body against mine, but I did, and I was.
“You two are going to be the death of me.” Chuckling, Jack shook his head. “You can play fight later, but we’ll need to get a move on if we want to get to the cemetery before the sun rises.”
?
Being driven by the agents was convenient. We were at the cemetery in less than ten minutes, and with Jack and Todd’s ability to flash their badges to gain us entry, accessing the space went a lot smoother than if I had to sneak my way in.
While I wasn’t able to test out how lax security was after hours, there were some advantages to working with the FBI, even if they had some boundary issues.
Like the agents having access to the contents of my phone and whereabouts at any time.
I wasn’t fooling myself. The only way Jack would have known I had planned on leaving before the Cincinnati sunrise was if he had seen my recent search history.
Once again, I thanked my lucky stars my more…
revealing search history was on Botan’s phone, and not on my FBI ‘gifted’ devices.
Though I’d noted neither agent had said anything about my hidden photo album, or the pictures of Mads and the mirror messages he’d left me, which made me think that Jack’s foray into checking my device activity was a result of yesterday’s pickpocketing demonstration, rather than a regular occurrence.
But better to be safe than sorry.
“Soooo, should I always expect you two to check out my search history?” I paced the cemetery lawn, the dark sky beginning to lighten, but not enough to get a good look at my surroundings.
“When you act out, so do we.” I didn’t miss the humor in Jack’s voice. “Care to tell us what you’re looking for?”
“Not sure.” I pressed my toes into the ground.
The dew from the grass seeped through my shoes.
Despite the moisture collected on the grass, the ground was hard, compacted, clay.
Not the tacky soft loam I’d expected. This ground resisted.
Which was likely why neither the police nor the agents had found footprints, drag marks, or whatever other forensic evidence the authorities were in the habit of collecting from the scene of the crime.
While no motion or movement or tracks were found by police, there was a large gothic chapel less than a hundred feet away. A reasonable dragging distance.
“Is that chapel open to the public?”
“What, that? That’s the Dexter mausoleum.” Jack continued, “Chapel on top. Crypt on the bottom. Family only. Local PD checked it out. There were no signs of forced entry. No signs of foul play there either.”
“Exterior only, or inside too?”
“The mausoleum was cleared.” There was a pause, the result of an exchanged look between Jack and Todd.
“Listed as irrelevant... But come to think of it, the police reports didn’t mention any attempts to obtain a search warrant.
No affidavit. Nothing in the reports about executing the search warrant either. ”
Well, didn’t that seem like a glaring hole worth looking into.
“Good.” I stomped over to the mausoleum, Todd at my side, Jack a few paces behind.
“Good? What’s good?”
“There’s one more place to look.” That and Zhou wouldn’t have liked the fact that I had uncovered something she and the other agents neglected to find. If the local police were at fault at least there was a buffer.
Hoisting myself up, I climbed over the padlocked fence blocking the sandstone steps up to the main entrance. Before Jack could question my actions, Todd pulled himself over the fence to join me. Two against one.
For what felt like the tenth time this morning, Jack shook his head, before grabbing onto the metal bars. “You both are going to get me into a lot of trouble.”
?
The pink light of dawn did little to illuminate the covered entryway.
Though I could just make out the once ornate carvings surrounding the door, I couldn’t help but notice the large pieces of fallen stone—from the collapsing exposed buttresses—on either side of the balcony wrapping around the mausoleum.
Given the state of the building, well-worn and eroded by time, there was no doubt the mausoleum was a safety hazard.
And the gates we climbed over were meant for our protection. Not the other way round.
On instinct, I ran my hands down the columns on either side of the door. There was a gap about the size of my little finger between it and the wall. I felt into the crevices, ignoring any and all thoughts about spiders and centipedes.
Todd followed suit, and took to feeling down the outer columns.
Keeping an eye on our surroundings, Jack shone the light from his phone into the spaces Todd and I searched.
“Hopping the fence is one thing,” Jack warned. “But barring an exigent circumstance, we’d need permission to enter the mausoleum. Or a warrant.”
Exigent circumstance.
I concealed my smile at the familiar term. All the reading I’d done in prison was finally coming in handy. I took Jack’s use of the term as inspiration, rather than a warning.
A loophole, if you will.
“Ugh,” I huffed, my fingers coated in a tacky grime. The first two columns were clean. Dirty, but clean. Nothing hidden behind them beyond a few cobwebs and decaying leaves from last fall.
I turned to Todd, who shook his head. He hadn’t found anything either.
Patting the grit off my knees, I did another scan of the entryway. There were neat piles of rubble in each corner. Pieces of the collapsed buttresses and crumbled ceiling.