Moriah's Landing Bundle Page 6

  “You keep saying he.”

  She gave a helpless gesture with her hand. “Whoever it was.” When he didn’t say anything for a moment, Elizabeth peered up at him. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I’m sure you think you saw someone,” he said carefully.

  Her eyes widened in indignation. “I did see someone. Why would I lie about something like that?”

  “I’m not accusing you of lying.” Cullen raked his hand through his short hair, spiking it even more. His breath frosted in the cold air. “Look, you were alone inside a mortuary cooler room with a corpse. Considering everything, it’s no wonder you were scared.”

  “I never said I was scared. And considering what things?”

  “You’re young. Impressionable. And after finding the body earlier—”

  “I didn’t imagine the test tube, did I?” Elizabeth demanded, anger flushing her face. “I’m telling you, someone was in that room with me!”

  Cullen’s gaze on her hardened. “Which brings us back to my original question. What were you doing in there?”

  Elizabeth stared straight ahead, refusing to meet his gaze. “I told you earlier I wanted to have a closer look at the body.”

  “And I told you to stay out of it. I could haul you in for interfering in an official investigation. Maybe even slap an obstruction of justice charge on you.”

  She glanced at him then. “You wouldn’t.”

  He shrugged. “Not this time. But I’m warning you. I’m losing my patience. I can’t have you running around tampering with evidence. When I make an arrest in this case, I don’t want the suspect waltzing out of it on some legal technicality. You got that?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it.” With an effort, she tried to regain her calm. “Look, I know you don’t have any faith in my ability. You’ve made that perfectly clear. But I’m not just some…cop groupie here. I have a lot of training, Cullen. I could help you solve this case if you’d let me.”

  “And I told you if I need your help, I’ll ask for it. Did you hear me asking?”

  She lifted her chin but said nothing.

  “Well, did you?”

  “No,” she replied grudgingly. “But I meant what I said, too. I saw something on that body. I don’t know what. I can’t put my finger on it. But something…bothered me. And my intuition is rarely wrong.”

  “Your intuition?”

  “Yes. You know—”

  “Spare me the dictionary definition. I know what it means, I just don’t put much stock in it.”

  “You don’t have instincts? You don’t get a gut feeling about certain cases?”

  “Sometimes,” he admitted. “But my gut feelings are based on training and experience. Not on some whim.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “You just can’t admit it, can you?”

  “Admit what?”

  “That I might be your equal. In training and experience.”

  “Lecturing in a classroom is a lot different than running a criminal investigation. When you’ve put your time in on the street, then we’ll talk.” Cullen straightened. “In the meantime, I’m going to drive you home.”

  He put out a hand to help her from the car, but Elizabeth ignored it. Again she struggled with the folds of her costume, but finally managed to crawl from the back seat with a modicum of poise. “I don’t need a ride,” she said coolly. “I have my own car.”

  “You may not need a ride, but you’ve got one anyway.” He took her arm firmly and steered her toward a dark, plain sedan parked behind the squad car. “I’ll drive you myself so I can make sure you get there.”

  “What about my car?”

  “You can pick it up tomorrow.”

  Elizabeth started to protest about leaving her new car parked on the street, but considering all that she’d witnessed that night, it seemed a little petty to worry about vandalism.

  THEY’D BEEN DRIVING in silence for several minutes when Cullen finally gave her a bemused glance. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you all night. What the hell is that getup you’re wearing?”

  “This?” Elizabeth lifted one of the velvety folds of her wrap. “It’s called a cloak. It’s part of my costume.”

  “Which is?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but as she turned to face him, the words froze on her lips. In the dim light from the dash, Cullen’s features were shadowy, indistinct. Dressed all in black, he reminded her of a dark angel, a shadow hero, a complicated man with complicated motives.

  It suddenly occurred to Elizabeth that she actually knew very little about Cullen Ryan. She’d had a crush on him for years, but she didn’t really know who he was or what made him tick.

  Oh, she knew some things about him. He’d grown up down by the docks, and he’d gotten into some trouble as a teenager. His father had died after Cullen had left for Boston, and she didn’t think he had any other family in Moriah’s Landing. So what had brought him back here?

  Why return to a place that hadn’t been all that kind to him?

  The only thing Elizabeth knew for certain about Cullen was that he’d left town a juvenile delinquent and returned a cop, one with dark secrets and a troubled past. What had happened in those six years to change him?

  Or had he changed?

  Were the demons that had driven him to mischief as a boy still driving him today as a man? Was his becoming a cop an attempt to control those darker impulses?

  Elizabeth shuddered at the thought. At his nearness.

  In response, Cullen reached up and pounded the dash with his fist. “Sorry. Heater doesn’t work like it should.”

  There was plenty of heat inside that car. Or at least, the potential for it. “I’m fine,” she managed.

  “So what did you say you went as tonight?” His gaze swept over her cloak.

  “A noblewoman,” Elizabeth murmured. “Seventeenth-century.”

  “Figures,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  They were cruising down Main Street now, nearing the turn that would have taken them to the Pierce compound. The rain had stopped, and a pre-dawn mist had settled over the town, creeping like a ghost along the cobblestone walkways. A variety of businesses, some of them housed in tall, narrow buildings that were centuries-old, crowded the thoroughfare, their windows dark at this hour, their doorways steeped in shadow.

  As in Salem, some of the enterprises had capitalized on the history of Moriah’s Landing. Witches rode weathervanes mounted high on gable rooftops, while black metal cats with green marble eyes slumbered a few feet away on brick chimneys. A souvenir shop, squeezed between a dusty apothecary and an antiques store, sold everything from spell books to Tshirts emblazoned with McFarland Leary’s image—or what an artist had perceived as his likeness. Another shop offered midnight ghost tours.

  It was harmless, this exploitation of the town’s past to draw in tourists, especially in the fall during the Halloween celebrations. The locals were proud of their heritage, and even though they were a superstitious lot, they didn’t mind using the legends to make a buck. Most hadn’t even resisted when a group of nature-loving Wiccans had proclaimed Moriah’s Landing their spiritual epicenter and had camped out for weeks on end near Raven’s Cove, performing midnight rituals and dancing naked under a full moon—or so some said.

  It was all harmless….

  But Elizabeth had never quite been able to get into the spirit of the celebrations because, in spite of the town’s rich history and unique charm, she’d sensed, from an early age, a darkness lingering in murky alleys, crouching in recessed doorways. A malicious presence that hid from the light and preyed on the innocent. She stayed on in the town because of her family, and because the darkness fascinated her as much as it repelled her.

  Shivering, she averted her eyes from those doorways.

  But they were driving by the town green now, a heavily landscaped area where, according to lore, those accused of practicing witchcraft in the late 160
0s had been hung from the gnarled branches of an old oak tree. A plaque commemorated the spot, and the townspeople had come to think of the ground beneath the tree limbs as hallowed.

  Whether the legend was true or not, Elizabeth didn’t know. But of all the places in Moriah’s Landing, the town green, particularly the oak tree, still standing, seemed to elicit the strongest feelings in her, an inexplicable sensation that evil lurked nearby. That it watched her every move. That if she wasn’t very careful, she could be its next victim.

  She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes closed as they passed by the tree. In her mind’s eye, she could see a crowd milling about on the square, their clothing and expressions somber, their eyes turned skyward.

  Elizabeth’s imagination followed their stares.

  She could see feet dangling among the leaves, and as her gaze moved upward, she saw Bethany Peters’s pale face staring down at her.

  Heart pounding, she opened her eyes, dispelling the vision. Bethany Peters hadn’t really been hanging from the same tree where witches had been killed centuries ago. Elizabeth’s imagination was playing tricks on her. It was silly to be upset by a vision, especially after everything else she’d been through that night.

  Still…

  She couldn’t shake that tenacious unease that something watched her. That something waited for her.

  That whoever or whatever had killed Bethany had some kind of connection to Elizabeth.

  First Claire, then Tasha.

  And now one of Elizabeth’s students.

  You’re next, a dark voice seemed to whisper.

  Chapter Six

  As the town green receded, the tension slowly drained from Elizabeth, and she began to breathe much more easily.

  Heathrow College lay just ahead, a private institution safely ensconced behind a high stone wall broken only by an electronically-controlled gate that was monitored twenty-four hours a day by a security guard. The parents who were willing to pay the steep tuition at the exclusive school wanted more than just the finest education for their daughters. They wanted assurances that the young women would be safe, tucked away from the real world and protected by state-of-the-art security equipment.

  Some of the girls rebelled at the school’s rigid rules and outdated curfew, much as Elizabeth had once done herself at boarding school. But for some reason, she’d never found Heathrow confining—as a student or as a member of the faculty—perhaps because coming here had been her choice.

  Although it wasn’t so much a choice as a need, she realized. A need for independence. A need to become her own person. A need to get away from the disappointment that was all too apparent in her parents’ eyes every time they looked at her.

  She’d had such potential, their expressions seemed to reproach her. How had she gone so far astray?

  Elizabeth had known from an early age that she was expected to follow in her parents’ illustrious footsteps. Marion and Edward Douglas were brilliant, renowned scientists who’d made their mark in research long before they’d turned thirty—her mother in genetics, her father in the related field of molecular biology.

  They’d met at Harvard, fallen in love, married and had a baby, all in the space of a year, which had always seemed so out of character for them to Elizabeth. She found it almost impossible to imagine that her parents—so serious now, so single-minded—had once been young and in love. For as long as she could remember, their work had consumed them, and nothing, not their love affair and certainly not their daughter, had been allowed to interfere.

  They’d both eventually left their affiliation with Harvard to join a private research lab in Boston to which they commuted at least five days a week and sometimes seven. Their only concession to their parental obligations was to buy a beautiful home in Moriah’s Landing, furnish it elegantly, and hire a full-time nanny for Elizabeth until she was old enough to be shipped off to boarding school, the same prestigious institution her mother had attended.

  But Elizabeth was not at all like her mother, and she’d rebelled against the pressures and expectations placed on her because of her heritage and her IQ. She’d hated boarding school with a passion, and by the time she turned ten had run away numerous times. Finally, after a frantic call from the school director, her parents had been forced to deal with her. If they sent her back to that place, she’d told them, she would just keep running away until the school was finally obliged to expel her. If they sent her to another boarding school, she would do the same thing. And one day, she might never come back.

  At their wits’ end, her parents had finally allowed her to return to Moriah’s Landing and attend public school on two conditions: one, that she enroll in a grade well above her peer group, and, two, that she supplement her studies by simultaneously taking courses at Heathrow.

  As a result, Elizabeth had graduated from high school at the age of fifteen, and when she enrolled full-time at Heathrow, she’d already earned enough credits for undergraduate degrees in both math and biology.

  But after Claire had been abducted, Elizabeth had switched her field of study to criminology. That had been the last straw as far as her parents were concerned. They’d washed their hands of her and turned their attention in the last year or so to Elizabeth’s younger brother, Brandon, who, at four, showed signs of a genius that far outclassed Elizabeth’s. He had already been accepted to the most prestigious school in the northeast, where he would be sent when he turned six. Just two years away.

  The thought of her little brother being sent to live among strangers, his young mind and imagination molded by the same robotic teachers who’d tried to constrain hers made Elizabeth almost physically ill, made her want to take him somewhere far away where he wouldn’t be subjected to the same killing loneliness she’d known as a child.

  It was a cliché, Elizabeth knew, but her parents had never understood her, never appreciated the fact that she marched to a different drummer. They didn’t get that she had needs apart from their own, needs above and beyond the classroom and research lab. She had a fine mind, yes, but she also had a heart. She also had the same wants and desires that any twenty-year-old had. That they, themselves, had once had and lost.

  Elizabeth turned slightly, studying Cullen’s profile. Sometimes she wondered if her attraction to him was yet another rebellion against her parents. If she would wake up one day to find that she’d spent a good portion of her youth pining for a man who didn’t really exist except in her dreams. Because the real Cullen Ryan couldn’t possibly live up to her fantasies. No man could.

  He turned suddenly, capturing her with a gaze so dark, so intense, Elizabeth caught her breath. Her stomach quivered with awareness, with attraction, and she realized that whatever the reason for her fascination with Cullen, it was only growing more potent as she spent time with him.

  “What?” he asked with a scowl.

  “What what?” she managed to stammer.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because…” She fumbled for an answer. “I was just wondering…. You said you sometimes get a gut feeling about a case based on your training and experience. What do you think about this one?”

  He hesitated just a fraction too long. “I don’t like to speculate.”

  Elizabeth glanced at him. “You found something, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not going to discuss the specifics of this case with you, Elizabeth.”

  She sighed. “But don’t you find it strange there were no visible marks on her body? It was almost as if the killer went out of his way to…preserve her.”

  “You’re making a pretty big assumption there.”

  “I’m not assuming anything, I’m just thinking out loud.” Elizabeth paused. “Can you at least tell me if you think there’s a possibility that Bethany’s killer is the same one who murdered those women here twenty years ago?”

  He looked surprised. “Why do you ask that?”

  She stared out the windshield, noticing how the mist writhed
and curled in the headlights. “It’s hard to imagine a town the size of Moriah’s Landing falling prey to more than one serial killer.”

  “Whoa. Slow down.” He shot her a frowning glance. “One murder doesn’t make a serial killer. I don’t want talk like that getting out. Besides, twenty years is a long time for a predator to remain active.”

  “Not if he was incarcerated during that time. Or if he widened his hunting ground. All I’m saying is that twenty years ago, four young women were murdered in Moriah’s Landing. Five years ago, a friend of mine was abducted and tortured, and I think she would have been killed, too, if she hadn’t managed to escape. And now this. I can’t help wondering if all the crimes could be related.”

  “Those women’s bodies were dumped,” Cullen pointed out. “They weren’t hanged.”

  “I realize that, but there could be another kind of connection. Do you think it’s possible—” She broke off, biting her lip.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me what you were about to say.”

  “You’d just think I’m crazy. Or young. Or that I’m letting my imagination run away with me.” Elizabeth felt his gaze on her, and reluctantly she turned to face him.

  He glanced at the road, then back at her, his gaze deep, probing. Sensuous, even though she was quite certain he didn’t mean for it to be. Not with her.

  But the term bedroom eyes had never been more appropriate. Elizabeth couldn’t see his eyes clearly in the dash lights, but she knew they were a stony gray rimmed with darkness. His pupils were small, giving him a piercing, unearthly quality that seemed capable of penetrating a woman’s soul.

  “All right,” she said nervously. “But please promise me you won’t laugh.”

  He shrugged, refusing to commit himself one way or the other.

  She drew a breath. “Sometimes I can’t help wondering if this place, this town drives people to violence, if something from the past, something…evil resides here.”