“Aunt Tessa, I have to go,” I said, as I snatched up my cell phone and took off for the door. This was almost worse than not knowing. I knew who the Symbol Man was now, but I had no idea how to find him.
I had my cell-phone headset jammed into my ear even before I got the car started. I punched Ryan’s number in as I backed out of my aunt’s driveway. “Come, on, Ryan. Pick up!” I muttered.
“Good morning, Kara,” Ryan said as he answered.
“Ryan! I know who the Symbol Man is,” I said in a rush. “It’s Greg Cerise’s dad, Peter Cerise, who was supposedly killed in a summoning, but I think he wasn’t killed after all. And now he wants revenge on Rhyzkahl and everyone else for letting his wife die, even though it was his own damn fault to begin with!”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down. Okay, it’s Greg’s dad. So where is he now?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know what he looks like or what he’s doing.”
I heard him mutter a curse. “All right. Well, it’s a start, at least. I can go back and do some legwork and see if he had any prints on file or anything like that.”
“I bet Greg had photos of his dad.”
“Mr. Greg Cerise is quite dead, and the search warrant on that residence is no longer valid.”
“Details, details!” I retorted. “I’ll find you a damn photo.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
The search warrantwas expired, but at this point I really didn’t give a shit. I called dispatch and got the number for the owner of the house, Greg’s erstwhile landlady, a Ms. Dana Sebastian. I dialed as I drove to the house.
A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hello, this is Detective Gillian with the Beaulac Police Department. Is this Dana Sebastian?”
“Yes … yes, it is. Is this about the murder?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m the lead investigator on the Symbol Man murders. Look, I know the search warrant has expired, but I really need to get back into your rental house and look for something.”
“Oh, damn, I’ve already had a crew come through to fix the door and scrub the place down, and I packed all of Greg’s stuff up. It’s all still there in boxes, though. I really don’t know what to do with any of it, to be honest. I don’t know if he has any family.”
“I can’t help you there,” I said. The only next of kin I knew of wasn’t likely to step forward just to claim some boxes of junk. “Is there any way you can come by to let me in and let me look through the stuff?”
“I’m at work and can’t get away until late this afternoon, but if you want you can let yourself in. The key’s under the frog statue on the back porch.”
“I really appreciate this,” I said fervently.
“Sure thing. I hope it helps you out. I still can’t believe this happened. Greg was a supernice guy and a good tenant.”
“I met him only once, but he seemed pretty cool,” I said. “Of course, the neighbor across the street was convinced he was up to no good.”
“Oh, my God, that racist bitch? I swear, I wanted to rent the place out to a black Jewish gay couple just to piss her off, but then I figured it wouldn’t be fair to the black Jewish gay couple.”
I smiled wryly. “Makes me glad I live way out in the country with no neighbors.”
“Lucky you! Look, if you need anything else, just let me know.”
“You got it. Thanks again.”
The Blood Had been cleaned up in the kitchen and the tile scrubbed and bleached. The cleaning crew had done a good job; there was no visible sign at all that a gruesome murder had taken place here. But it was still going to be hard for her to rent or sell the place.
The house had been stripped down to the walls, and I found about a dozen boxes piled in a back bedroom. I began looking through them and made the delightful discovery that Dana had labeled each box with a short description of its contents. Oh, I do so love this woman!
But even with the labels, it still took me well over an hour to find which boxes held pictures and then an hour more to find what I was looking for.
I sat down on the floor, holding the picture of a man in a suit standing stiffly next to a grinning teenager, arm draped awkwardly over the boy’s shoulders. The kid was definitely Greg. Even thirty years later, the grin had remained constant. And this picture had likely been taken not long before the summoning-gone-wrong—a couple of years at most. So this must be Dad. I peered at the picture. Slightly above-average height. Light-blue eyes. Brown hair. Nondescript features. Medium build. He’d be in his mid to late sixties now, I figured. I made a note to find out his date of birth when I got back to the office.
I pushed my hair back from my face, frustrated. I still didn’t have much to go on. But this has to be who the killer is. Peter Cerise. It fit perfectly. So, who the hell was he now?
I pulled my cell phone out again and called Ryan.
“Kristoff here.”
“Hiya, Agent-with-the-high-tech-resources-that-I-don’t-have. Can your peeps do an age progression on a photograph?”
“I can get it to someone who can,” he said. “Whatcha got?”
“Picture of Greg’s dad. But it’s about thirty years old. I can’t figure out who he is.”
Ryan gave a low whistle. “That’s terrific. Get it to me and I’ll send it off.”
“You got it. Where y’at now?”
“I’m out and about, but if you email it to me, I’ll forward it to my ‘peeps,’ as you put it.”
“I’m not near a computer. But I’m ten minutes away from the office.”
“I’ll be looking for it in eleven.”
I shut the phone and stuffed it into my pocket, then let myself out the same way I’d come in, tucking the key back under the statue.
As I walked back out to my car, Ms. Dailey was standing at the end of the driveway, dressed this time in a bright fuchsia velour sweat suit. I wondered briefly if her entire wardrobe consisted of velour sweat suits of varying obnoxious hues.
“Young lady,” she said with a stern expression on her face. “May I ask just what you were doing in there?” Her tone was accusatory, as if she thought I was looting the place for valuables.
What, now the woman was concerned about her neighbor? I closed the distance to Ms. Dailey, getting close enough that she was forced to take a step back.
“It’s Detective Gillian,” I said through bared teeth, yanking my badge off my belt and thrusting it into the woman’s face. “I am here on official police business for the purposes of investigating a series of murders. But for you, Ms. Dailey, I have just one thing to advise.”
Ms. Dailey’s eyes widened.
“From now on, why don’t you try minding your own fucking business?”
I turned and marched back to my car, leaving the woman behind me gaping and speechless. And, for the first time, I felt like the warrior woman in that picture.
CHAPTER 24
My good mood didn’t last long. My pager shrilled before I could make it back to the station, and I had to read it twice before the meaning of the message got through to me. It wasn’t another body. It was six of them.
A local man who’d taken a sick day to go fishing found the bodies piled in an ugly heap about fifty feet from the shore in a rarely traveled or fished area of the lake. Trouble with the engine on his flatboat had caused him to drift into a small cove, where he discovered, to his delight, where all the fish had been hiding from him for the past twenty years. He’d reached his limit after an hour of fishing and then decided to investigate the source of the odor that had drifted to him when the wind shifted.
I had a feeling his sick day was justified now.
It might have been fairly simple to get to the scene by boat, but going by car was another matter entirely—several miles of rutted dirt roads, followed by a ten-minute hike on foot down a narrow deer trail. Fortunately, by the time I made it to where all the other vehicles were parked, some of the good ol’ boys had busted out their ATVs and were shuttling people back and forth through the woods.