Finally, he returned to the living room area of her cottage, where he had set up his laptop. The Lodge being a highly service-oriented place, it provided high-speed Internet access — and an obliging staff more than willing to fetch his computer from his own suite and deliver it to him here.
Nate had also been obliging enough to grant him the authority he needed to search various databases, and for the first time Quentin was going back much farther than twenty-five years.
"They created The Lodge."
What Diana had said down in the caves gave him a starting point he'd never had before, and Quentin intended to take advantage of the information. He needed to find all the information available on the men who built The Lodge, and the murderer they may have brought to their own version of implacable justice.
For Diana as much as for himself, he had to find the truth.
He had to understand.
"So there really was a killer?" Diana set her cup on the coffee table, frowning. After a hot shower, a hot meal, and plenty of hot coffee, she was finally feeling herself again.
Or, rather, she was feeling stronger and oddly focused, which wasn't like her usual self but was certainly better.
Quentin gestured toward the legal pad he'd filled with notes, and said, "From the info Nate's people provided and what I was able to find in newspaper morgues and other historical databases available, the disappearances began in this area in the late 1880s. Maybe three or four a year, on average. Considering how rough the terrain was — and is — and the sheer difficulty of travel in those days, it wasn't perceived as anything out of the ordinary. People got lost in these mountains. Got hurt and died before anybody could find them. It happened."
Diana nodded.
"The town of Leisure was barely in existence, and didn't have a police force to speak of," Quentin continued. "They didn't think they needed one; the people who settled around here tended to be hardy and self-sufficient, and handled their problems without, usually, involving anyone else. It's a mind-set that doesn't lend itself to calling the cops, but rather picking up the family shotgun and..."
"Taking care of the problem themselves," Diana finished. "Which is what the men who built The Lodge did?"
Quentin nodded. "It's not entirely clear from what little I was able to find, but I gather that during construction a couple more people vanished — but this time bodies were found. Obviously murdered. The common belief was that robbery was the motive, especially since what we later called stranger killings and then serial killings were virtually unheard-of at the time. Then a child disappeared."
"And who would steal a child?" Diana said slowly.
"Exactly. There was enough fear and outrage that the men who were heavily invested in this land and in The Lodge decided to hire a Pinkerton detective to try to get to the bottom of things before their workers began walking off the job."
"I didn't know Pinkertons looked for killers."
"It was generally outside their area of expertise, but apparently the man assigned was what they called a good tracker. Now, the public record on all this is virtually nil, but I did find a couple of letters in the state historical databases written by people who were here when all this was going down. One of the construction workers, especially, wrote about the hunt for this killer in detail in a letter to his sister. It's pretty clear his conscience was troubled."
"Because there was no trial?" Diana guessed.
"No trial, no arrest, nothing official at all. The Pinkerton found enough evidence to trace the killer, he believed, to a shack up in the mountains." Quentin paused, frowning. "It's still there, I think, an old stone building; I saw it five years ago."
Diana didn't question him on that point. "So the Pinkerton found the killer there. And—"
"And he, along with a small group of trusted workers that included the project manager, went up there and grabbed the guy. Whose name, by the way, was Samuel Barton. They'd already decided that hanging him would draw too much attention, and the consensus was that shooting was too good for him."
"So they dropped him down that shaft?"
"Pretty much. The shaft had been discovered when excavation was going on for the stables, and the ladder put in place because somebody had the notion they might be able to use the caves for storage. But the tunnel was so long and narrow that transporting anything down there turned out to be too much trouble. It made a dandy prison cell, though."
Diana frowned. "Did they intend for him to die down there?"
"I don't know what they intended, but they must have known he would die. The men were so angry that in catching him they had pretty much beaten him to a pulp. Dropped him down the shaft and bolted that trap door shut. He must have known nobody within hearing distance was going to help him. Maybe he just followed the tunnel hoping there'd be another way out."
"But there wasn't one."
"Moot point. According to the man who wrote the letter, Barton only got as far as that big cavern we found. The man felt guilty enough that he went down there himself a week or so later, secretly, at night. Found the body in the cavern. And left it there."
Diana drew a breath and finished the likely story. "The Pinkerton and the project manager reassured the others that the... problem... had been taken care of. The killings stopped. And The Lodge was completed."
Quentin nodded. "That's pretty much it. Except that the killings didn't really stop, except for a while. At least that's what I think. Because people kept disappearing in these mountains. Not many, a few every year. Travelers, people passing through. Transient workers. People who wouldn't be missed, for the most part. The difference was, they didn't find any more bodies."
"Until Missy?"
He nodded again.
"Quentin...you're not saying it's been the same killer all these years. Are you?"
"You said it," he reminded her. "Down in the caves."
She remembered. Scary though it was, she remembered it all. But... "Whatever Missy knows, I only know what I said. I mean, I don't understand how it could be the same killer. How a dead man could still be killing more than a hundred years after his own death. And I don't understand why, if it is somehow true, his — its — behavior changed with Missy. Anything hunting and killing that long, successfully, wouldn't change. Would it?"
"Not likely." Quentin was too good a profiler not to have thought of that, and offered a possibility. "Unless something external forced the change."
"Something like what?"
"Diana, spiritual energy has its own plane of existence. It can only exist in our world temporarily, and only then if a doorway is provided, or if the energy itself is strong enough to force its way through."
"So you're saying the spirit of this killer was strong enough to cross over, strong enough to kill?" She was dimly surprised that she didn't sound more incredulous.
"My guess is that it killed by — for want of a better term — possessing a person. Most likely someone who was vulnerable to that kind of attack. Mentally or emotionally unstable, or physically weakened in some way. The killer took them over and... used their bodies for a while. Enjoyed their terror and confusion. Maybe even forced them to kill someone else."
"Quentin—"
"That would help explain the time between these disappearances and deaths. There would have to be an interlude of rest after expending so much of its strength, but the interludes wouldn't be consistent because the amount of energy necessary would depend on whether it was merely possessing someone or using them to physically kill."
"Merely?" was all she could manage.
"It's possible, Diana. It's possible that the spiritual energy left behind when Samuel Barton was virtually buried alive held enough rage, enough evil, to go on killing, and hiding his crimes, all these years. At least until he killed Missy. Until he killed someone capable of somehow preventing him from hiding her body the way he'd hidden or buried all the others."