The Unseen

Law enforcement agencies were not known for their cooperation—rather sad, really, since they were all working toward the same goal. That was one of the reasons she’d loved working in Key West; they had plenty to deal with, but they were smaller, and thus got along fairly well. Drugs were constantly out on the waterways. The Coast Guard was overworked, ditto the state police and the county police. The cops in Key West loved the Marshals. It had all been pretty good. State police, Monroe County police, the Coast Guard and the U.S. Marshal’s Office, all getting along, most of them meeting for a beer here and there on Duval Street or some off-the-tourist track location. In her case, it had probably helped that she’d gone to the University of Miami and done an internship with the U.S. Marshal’s Office. She’d zeroed in on her chosen profession early. And she’d expected to stay in south Florida.

To contemplate a life here, in Texas, was just…strange.

Nothing wrong with Texas, of course.

But she had it all figured out. It was the water. In San Antonio, there was no coast. There was the river, though.

She glanced at her watch. Two hours until her meeting.

When she looked out the window again, she nearly jumped. In those few seconds, a massive crow had landed on the outer sill. The damned thing seemed to be staring at her. She waved a hand at it.

The bird didn’t fly away. It continued to stare.

Then it pecked the window.

She almost stepped back, then didn’t. She scowled at the bird. “I’m a United States Marshal, and I will not be intimated by a bird!” she said aloud.

“What’s that?”

Kelsey swung around. Sandy Holly had come breezing into the kitchen.

“You have really big, aggressive birds around here,” Kelsey said.

“We do?”

“Yeah, look!”

When she turned to the window again, the crow was gone. It bothered Kelsey to realize that the bird disturbed her. Ah, well, she had discovered earlier that one of the men she’d be meeting was Agent Crow. Maybe that knowledge had made the bird’s appearance seem like something more—like some kind of omen, for good or…

Sandy smiled, raising her eyebrows. “Anyone would think you were trying not to like Texas,” she said.

“No, no, I love Texas. Texas is great,” Kelsey told her.

“Maybe you’re just a little nervous. This is the big day, right?”

“This is it,” Kelsey agreed. Sandy Holly was proving to be a true friend. Kelsey had gotten to know her almost twenty years ago, when they’d been a pair of awkward eight-year-olds at the West Texas dude ranch Kelsey’s parents had been sure she’d want to attend. But she’d been terrified of horses, while Sandy was terrified of being alone. Sandy had ridden before, even at five, because…because she was a Texan from San Antonio. Texans rode horses and wore big hats. So, at eight, Kelsey had toughened up enough to tell Sandy she didn’t need to be homesick, and Sandy had promised Kelsey she’d learn to love horses. She did, Kelsey mused. Thanks to Sandy, she’d become an excellent rider. And, thanks to Sandy, she’d known where she wanted to stay when she came to San Antonio. The Longhorn Inn and Saloon.

It wasn’t as if they’d seen each other frequently. After a few years, they had skipped camps of any kind. But they’d met with other friends in Vegas to celebrate their respective twenty-first birthdays and kept up with each other through Facebook and email. When she’d first talked about applying to be a U.S. Marshal, Sandy had encouraged her.

Kelsey was particularly glad to be here because Sandy wasn’t in great shape at the moment—taking over the old inn had proven to be a monumental task, and there were problems Sandy had hinted about that Kelsey didn’t entirely understand. They hadn’t really had a chance to sit down and talk, since Sandy was running a business, which meant her time was limited. It was even more limited because she’d lost a manager the week before—the young man simply hadn’t shown up for work—and while Sandy had a great housekeeping staff of three, the organizational and hostessing duties had all fallen to her. Of course, as Kelsey well knew, Sandy could be high-strung, and she wondered if working for her friend wasn’t a little stressful. On the plus side, Sandy did like to hire college guys who needed a break on a résumé. None of them seemed to last too long, however.

Sandy walked over to some controls on the kitchen wall and squinted as she looked at them. “Hmm. I’m going to hope this turns on the music and doesn’t open the storm windows,” she said, twisting the dial.

Country rock filled the air.

“I think you got it,” Kelsey told her.

“How about some coffee?”

“You can actually sit for a few minutes?” Kelsey asked. “And tell me what’s up?”

Sandy poured coffee into cups and set them on the table, shrugging. “There’s nothing really wrong. The past few days around here have been tense, that’s all. People are so ridiculous!”

“Okay, explain, will you?”

Sandy let out a long sigh. “It’s just this haunted thing about the inn. I sometimes wonder if I was crazy or what to get involved with it, even though I like a ghost story as much as anyone. Well, you know I’ve wanted this place for years. I’ve always been fascinated by the history—especially what happened to Rose Langley.”

“The poor girl who was killed right before the fall of the Alamo?” Kelsey asked.

Sandy nodded. “Rose was killed by her lover—or pimp, depending on how you want to look at it—in Room 207. It’s a sad story about a good girl gone wrong. She took off from her parents’ home because she was madly in love with Taylor Grant, and when they were in Galveston, she ended up being more or less kidnapped by a notorious bad guy named Matt Meyer, who wounded Grant. She might have fought Meyer and gained time for help, but she seems to have been afraid he’d finish Grant off if she didn’t go with him. So, the revolution was about to begin, and Meyer wanted to fight for Texas. They came here, and apparently, Rose and Matt Meyer got into a terrible fight, and he murdered her. He’d been known to kill, so it wasn’t a surprise. We wouldn’t just consider him a criminal today, we’d consider him to be as sick and perverted as the most heinous killer out there. Oh—and, of course, he took off before the battle of the Alamo, or before anything resembling the law could catch up with him. But…”

“But?”

“I don’t know how much of this you remember from my emails,” Sandy said. “I had just bought the place—money down, no way out—when all of a sudden there were problems. I was already in here, deciding what to do about renovating a week or so before the closing, when a girl named Sierra Monte disappeared.”

“Of course I remember. But remind me what she was doing here, when the inn was in the middle of changing owners,” Kelsey said.

“Peter Ghent, the last owner, still had the place until closing. That’s how it works. I’d gotten a deal because there was no return on the down payment if anything went wrong. Anything. Ghent had some of the rooms rented, but he was like an absentee landlord. Sierra came here, apparently, because she wanted Room 207. Go figure. The rooms were super-cheap, even though it was a historic property, because Ghent wasn’t running it well. The bar sucked! It was all falling apart and I’d just started to renovate. But Sierra Monte insisted on staying. Anyway, she disappeared. A maid found blood everywhere and then the cops came in—but there was no body. And, of course, she disappeared from Room 207, so the legend continued to grow. I closed down for a bit when I took over to get the renovations finished. And then I didn’t rent out the room at all afterward but the mystery of the place encourages people to come in. You know how that goes. Now people are clamoring for 207. I’m careful who I give it to, though, because I’m afraid of some idiot freaking out in the middle of the night and jumping out the window or something! It’s hard to read people over the phone or through the internet, but, like I said, I’m careful. It’s rented out now—only because I have a big ol’ rodeo cowboy staying in it.”

Kelsey winced. “I know what you’re saying. At the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida, people vie for the room where Anna Nicole Smith died. And people book way ahead for the ‘murder room’ at the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts.”

“Exactly!” Sandy said. “But now, the stories about Room 207 are scaring people away from the inn, not bringing them in!”

As if to confirm Sandy’s words, a high-pitched scream pierced the hum of easy-listening music. Kelsey had just picked up her mug, but the earsplitting cry of terror startled her so badly that coffee sloshed over the brim. She leaped to her feet, staring at Sandy.

Sandy stared back at her, stricken, shaking her head. Kelsey set her mug on the table and went flying out to the inn’s grand salon—now its lobby—looking around for the source of the scream.

It came again, stretching long and loud, and Kelsey raced toward it.

* * *

When he reached the riverfront area and parked, Logan was still mulling over the strange behavior of the birds. He knew that the Native American half of the family—no matter how “modern” or forward-thinking they might be—would see omens in the situation. He couldn’t help wondering about it himself.

But he had to put it out of his mind.

Logan had been told by his captain that this meeting was important. In that case, he wasn’t quite sure why he was meeting an FBI agent beneath a brightly colored umbrella on the Riverwalk. It wasn’t that he had anything against the Riverwalk; it just didn’t seem like the place for an important meeting. Tourists thronged the area, along with locals. The shopping included both high-end boutiques and Texas souvenir shops, and the restaurants were varied as well as plentiful. He loved the river; watching water always seemed to improve anything. Still, this was unusual.

He wasn’t surprised that he was noticed—and hailed—by many people. He’d spent his life in San Antonio, and he’d been called on during many a “situation” at the riverfront, so he knew a number of bartenders, shopkeepers and restaurant owners. Of course, the tourists and visitors were something else entirely. One teenage boy called out, “Look! It’s Chuck Norris! Hey, Walker, Texas Ranger!”

He tipped his hat to the kid. No need to make their visitors think Texans weren’t hospitable and friendly.

He was dressed in standard departmental wear—boots, white hat and gun belt. He was carrying a Colt .45, his weapon of choice, and a popular gun among Rangers. He guessed that, in a way, he did look like Chuck Norris—or the character he’d played on a long-running TV show. Except, of course, that Norris was blond and light-skinned and he had dead-black hair and hazel eyes. People did stare. There weren’t even two hundred Rangers in the whole state, so he supposed that made his appearance especially interesting for tourists.

Another reason not to carry out an important meeting in a public place.

He did, however, recognize the man he was supposed to see, despite never having previously met him. Agent Jackson Crow was seated at one of the tables lining an iron fence that arced right out over the water, a cup of coffee in front of him. He was dressed in a black suit that seemed to scream FBI, to Logan’s mind at least. He wore dark glasses and seemed perfectly comfortable, sitting at ease while he waited for the meeting. Whatever people thought of him, he obviously didn’t give a damn.

Logan walked straight to the table. Crow was aware of him; he stood.

“Raintree, I presume,” he said, smiling as he offered his hand.

Logan shook hands, studying Crow. Yep, Indian blood. He assumed Crow was staring back at him, thinking the same thing. “Yes. I’m Logan Raintree.”

“Comanche?” Crow asked.

“All-American mutt in every way,” Logan told him. “One ancestor was Comanche, one was Apache—and two were European. Norwegian and English. You?”

“Cheyenne and all-American mutt, as well,” Crow said. “I like the concept of that. Sit, please. Thank you for meeting with me.”

“You’re welcome, but I wasn’t really given a choice—I was given an order.”

Crow didn’t respond to that. “Coffee?”

“Coffee sounds good,” Logan said, pulling out a chair. He noted that the table had been set for three. “Someone’s joining us?” he asked.

“Yes—a U.S. Marshal,” Crow said. “We’ll eat when she gets here.”

Logan slowly arched his brows. “All right, what kind of felon, madman or serial killer do we have running around San Antonio?”

“We don’t know much about him as yet. That’s where you come in,” Crow explained. “And I’m meeting with you first. Marshal O’Brien isn’t due for another half hour or so.”

“Doesn’t that mean you have to go through all of this twice?”

Crow gave him a grim half smile and shrugged. Logan had the feeling that there was always method to his madness, though at the moment, he sure couldn’t tell what it was.

A leather briefcase lay on the table. Crow reached into it and produced a sheaf of papers—photos, Logan saw.

He didn’t immediately recognize what he was looking at. At first glance it appeared to be a trash pile, but then, peering closer, he saw human bones beneath the branches, boxes and other refuse.

He looked back at Jackson Crow. “I wish I could say that a dead body was something unusual,” he said.

“It’s the circumstances that are unusual,” Jackson murmured. “Here’s another.”

The next picture was of a half-decayed body on a gurney in an autopsy room. This was a far more gruesome sight, resembling a creature imagined by a special-effects wizard; the flesh was ripped from most of the jaw and the cadaver seemed to be grinning in a macabre manner.

“Where was this body discovered? He? She?” Logan asked.

“She. Both sets of remains belong to women. Both disappeared from the San Antonio area, one a year and a half ago, one about a year ago. Both had made it to San Antonio and were never seen again. Or not alive, anyway,” he added.

“I’m assuming traces were done on their credit cards, and the usual procedures carried out.”

Jackson nodded. “Neither actually checked into a hotel. The bones in the first picture belonged to a young woman named Chelsea Martin—schoolteacher, part-time gemologist. The cadaver on the gurney was once a dancer named Tara Grissom. She worked out of New Orleans.”

“Dancer? As in stripper?” Logan asked.

Jackson shook his head. “She was with a modern dance company. The show she was in closed down and they weren’t due to cast the next show for a few months. She headed out to Texas. According to friends, she was fascinated with the Alamo. She flew from New Orleans to Houston and on to San Antonio, and she was never heard from again after she waved goodbye to the fellow who’d been sitting next to her on the plane.”

“What about the other girl?”

“Similar story. She was a new teacher, and when budget cuts came down, she lost her job. Chelsea Martin left New York City for San Antonio, took a cab straight to the Alamo and wasn’t seen again.”

Logan frowned. “I should’ve heard about this by now.”

“You probably did. Think about all the missing-persons reports,” Crow said with a shrug. “There are hundreds of them—thousands. Some people go missing on purpose. You have to remember that. Thing is, until you really start digging, you don’t always know if someone’s disappeared on purpose or not.” He pulled out more sets of pictures. They were all of bodies in various stages of decay. Female bodies.

Logan frowned at Jackson Crow. “All these corpses—they’re from here?”

Crow nodded. “Most of these women have yet to be identified. A number of them might have been prostitutes or women living on the edge. When someone doesn’t have family or close friends, there’s no one to hold law enforcement to task once the case has gone cold. We wouldn’t have known about this if an enterprising young officer hadn’t stumbled on the first body in a trash pile—just a block from the Alamo. Don’t look so appalled. No unit of Texas law enforcement has been neglectful in this case. First off, we still don’t know if the cases are related, although studying the way the killer disposed of the bodies, it seems likely.” He grimaced. “There may be a few who were killed by someone else—someone who happened upon a body-disposal system that has eluded the law—but I believe most of these women met the same killer. They all just disappeared. And of all the corpses and skeletal remains we’ve discovered so far, we’ve only been able to match two of the women to missing-persons reports.”

“Are you putting together a task force?” Logan asked him.

“More or less. I’m putting together a team.”

Logan began to feel uneasy. He’d looked up Jackson Crow. He had a reputation for being a crack behavioral profiler; he also had a reputation for running a crew of—for lack of a better term—ghost hunters. Hired by a somewhat reclusive government bigwig, Adam Harrison, he investigated the unusual. To the man’s credit, it seemed that his team generally found real human beings who’d perpetrated the crimes and brought them to justice.

Still…

Somehow, he felt Crow knew something about him. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

“And you want me to be on this team?” Logan asked.

“We have one special unit working now—a team of six, and six seems to be the optimal number. I’m starting a second team. I don’t just want you to be on the team—I want you to head the team.”

“Why?”

“You’ve had incredible success finding missing people,” Jackson said smoothly.

Logan didn’t blink. “Logic,” he told Crow. And a little luck…

“Logic is the most important tool we have,” Crow agreed. “I’m a man of logic myself.”

Logan winced, then said flatly, “You look for ghosts.”

“I look for killers,” Crow said, correcting him. He indicated the briefcase. “I have a lot of info on you, too, of course. I know you’re exceptionally talented.” Crow hesitated, thoughtful for a minute. When he spoke again, it was with both respect and empathy. “And I know that your wife was kidnapped by the brother of a drug runner you put in jail. I know you found her—buried in a pine box. The killer had been playing a game with you, but he screwed up. He didn’t provide enough oxygen. You were able to find her, although no one ever really knew how. You just found her too late.”

Logan felt tension seep into his bones. Alana had been gone nearly three years, yet he still couldn’t think about her without a sense of loss and rage burning in his gut. She’d died because he was who he was. She’d been a shimmering spirit of laughter and giving, and she had died because of him. His exceptional talents had been useless.

Her death had sent him into the hills on a long leave; only a return to the land far from the city had somehow kept him halfway sane.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t been aware of what had gone on with these missing women. And maybe everyone had overlooked the real and horrendous danger for the reason Jackson Crow had just given him. Sad, but true. Those on the fringes of life were often simply not missed.

“You have what we need,” Crow told him.

No, I don’t, Logan thought. I failed the woman I loved.

“I’m a Texas Ranger,” Logan said, startled by the sound of his own voice, which was almost a growl.

“Yes. You returned to being a Ranger,” Crow said. “Because you can’t help yourself. You have to work in law enforcement. But, even as a Ranger, you have limitations. I can provide unlimited resources for you.”

“Thanks. I like being a Ranger. I’m not so sure about being a fed.”

“It’s a matter of choice. Texas pride aside, there are a few things you might want to keep in mind, such as the fact that federal services have jurisdiction everywhere. In our case, of course, we work where we’re invited in, except when we’re talking about criminals and situations that cross state lines. That’s always our jurisdiction. Crossing state lines is something killers do often enough. It’s as if they know they can throw law enforcement into confusion and break chains of evidence when they do, and that’s one reason the FBI is so important. Of course, your superiors know about this offer, and although they’d be sorry to lose you, they understand the unique possibilities of the position I’m offering you.”

Logan shook his head. “Thank you. No. You’ve got a serial killer on your hands. Or—since one way or another, I’ll get involved—we’ve got a serial killer on our hands. We’ll dig in, too, work with the FBI. But I think I’ll stay right where I am. I don’t see any reason to change.”

Crow nodded. “As I’ve been saying, it is your choice. But there’s something different about this case that does require an extra ability to see.”

“See what?”

“Beneath the obvious.”

“And what’s that?”

“Chelsea Martin called a friend just before she disappeared,” Jackson Crow said.

“From the Alamo?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“She said she saw a ghost. She thought it had to be the ghost of a Texas hero. He was trying to urge her to get away.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“She phoned Nancy McCall, a friend in New York, when she reached the Alamo. At first, according to Nancy, she was laughing, telling her that a reenactor was playing a game with her. Then she was concerned, saying that the ‘performer’ was getting very dramatic, insisting she leave the Alamo, go and hide somewhere. At the end of the conversation, Chelsea seemed to believe she’d seen a ghost. She sounded frightened, and said this ghost or whatever he was had just disappeared.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. The line went dead. Her phone was never used again, and it was never found—and I’ve shown you what was left of Chelsea Martin.”

Chapter Two

The Longhorn had been built at a time when men were men and…men were men. The saloon had a long curving bar, a piano and a large space for gaming tables. Near the front entry, which came complete with swinging doors, a staircase led to the balcony above and to the rooms on the second floor. When Kelsey sped into the main saloon area from the kitchen, she was stunned to see a man running down the stairs as if he were being chased by every demon in hell.

A big, tough-looking man. Leanly muscled, he stood a good six foot two—and he was wearing an expression of sheer horror.

He had to be the “big ol’ rodeo cowboy” Sandy had told her about.

As Kelsey ran to the foot of the stairs to discover the cause of his terror, he nearly knocked her over in his haste to reach the door.

“Sir! What is it? What’s happened?”

Luckily, it seemed that the few other guests currently checked in to the Longhorn were already out or still asleep, and that the staff was either busy or not at work yet. No one else had appeared at the sound of the screams.

“Let me out of here! Let me out of here now!” he yelled. He seemed like a decent man. Even in his near hysteria, he wasn’t going to mow her down or pick her up bodily to toss her out of the way.

She hadn’t realized that Sandy had come behind her until she heard her speak. “Mr. Simmons, what’s wrong?” she asked.

Simmons was perhaps thirty; he had the ruggedly handsome look of a modern-day cowboy, and Kelsey assumed he was in town for the upcoming rodeo trials. The man might have been ready to brave the meanest bronco, but he pointed up the stairs with a trembling hand. “Blood…blood…blood. Oh, God, blood everywhere, all over the room!” he said. “Let me out. For the love of God, let me out of here!”

Kelsey arched a brow at Sandy and placed a hand on Simmons’s shoulder. “Sir, it’s all right. Sandy will help you,” she said.

Sandy looked back at Kelsey, her eyes filled with a silent plea. See? I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s happening again, and it’s getting worse and worse. Do something!