T. Laine initiated a background check on witches in the Merriweather family history and, according to all publicly listed (and some private) witch bloodline sites, there was nothing. As she put it, on paper Luther was a plain old vanilla human and so was his wife, Cadence.
JoJo worked like a fiend while we geared up and found proof that Hugo had been part of the commune, though not part of thepoly marriage. And Hugo’s mom was a single mother. He took her last name. The Ames family had produced a line of witch blood, until the 1850s when it died out. Had it come back in some strange manner in Hugo?
When I was as ready as I could be, I stopped by the conference room and Jo handed me a burner cell. “Turn on your church-speak, country hick chick, call Merry Promotions, and ask to speak to Hugo. See if you can find where he is today.”
I turned the small flip phone over in my hands and thought how I would handle this call. Why did it have to be in church-speak? Was church-speak becoming a crutch for me? Would Margot or Goode use a crutch when there might be another way? I had been undercover once for a few minutes. I was more than a churchwoman.
JoJo slid a scrap of paper across the conference desk to me. On it was a phone number and the wordsMerry Promotions.
I dialed the number. A woman answered with the words, “Merry Promotions, how can I help you?”
I remembered how the lawyer Goode had spoken and took a slow breath, lowered my voice, and said, “This is Maggie Jones, Loretta Hopkins’ business manager. Put Hugo on.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Ames isn’t in today,” the woman on the other end said cautiously.
“What? Where’s Hugo?” I demanded. “He was supposed to meet me an hour ago. He isn’t answering his cell, texts, or e-mail. I don’t have time to keep sitting around waiting on him. Does Merry Promotions want the swag contract on Loretta’s next three tours or not?”
“Loretta Hopkins... Oh my God. He was supposed to meet you?”
“Hewas,” I said stiffly. “Where is he?”
“We don’t... I’m sorry. We don’t know. He left early yesterday, not feeling well. We can’t get in touch with him either.”
“Oh.” I hesitated and let my voice fall into worried tones. “Have you called the police? The local hospitals?”
“No, I—”
“Never mind.” I hung up.
“Who are you and how did you get into Nell’s head?” JoJo asked, her eyebrows trying to meet in the middle and a fist on her hip.
I grinned, my shoulders back, my head held high. “That was fun. He isn’t at the shop. Went home sick yesterday.”
Occam was standing at the door, his eyes on me, warm and full of approval. “That was amazing, Nell, sugar. Come on. We’re raiding Hugo Ames’ home and business at the same time. Rick and Margot are leading a team on Merry Promotions. We’ll be at his house with T. Laine. We need to hit the road first because we have an RVAC to launch and look over the house. FireWind will be staged at the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department, halfway between the two locations, running the show with local LEOs.”
I handed the small cell back to JoJo, picked up my gear, weapon, and the potted cabbage at my cubby. As I followed Occam down the stairs, I called Esther to let her know I’d be late. Everything I could control was in place and managed, and I could turn my attention to the coming raid, which was in Crossville, on the I-40 corridor between Knoxville and Cookeville. All the crime scenes seemed to be along the interstate, no outlying towns. That made Merry Promotions close enough to deliver, but not expensive to ship to Stella’s studio. Merry Promotions could easily have delivered a late box of tour T-shirts, though who then set up the trigger was still an unknown.
According to the sat photos and files Jo had sent to everyone’s tablets, Crossville was in Cumberland County, which meant integrating into this case even more people we hadn’t worked with before, but at least it wasn’t so far away.
Like a lot of homes in the area, Ames’ rental house was isolated, at the end of a quarter-mile-long, two-rut gravel drive. We planned to approach from the north, along the next street over, from an overgrown lot with a vacant trailer, but when we arrived, we found the front half of the lot had been cleared and planted with a garden. The lack of rain hadn’t done the garden much good, and the plants looked stressed and ragged. The trailer home looked worse as we pulled around behind it. It had to be sixty years old, the metal a faded blue, windows busted. Household furniture was in a pile out back and critters were using it as a home. When I opened my door, the air stank of garbage and dead animals, but with the cars behind the trailer, we couldn’t be seen from the road, giving us privacy to work.
A sheriff’s deputy car pulled in behind us, but the deputydidn’t get out, leaving his engine running, which contributed to the miasma of stinks, so I ignored him.
We had done this sort of prep work for a raid often and there was little need for instructions or chitchat between us. FireWind, however, was full of suggestions to both teams and was in communication with the locals too. While we worked, I turned off the main comms channel and concentrated on the para freq, the frequency used by PsyLED.
Occam got the remote-viewing aircraft checked out in record time and the deputy assigned to us finally got out of his vehicle. He joined us at the laptop to view the aerial footage. Deputy Robb was male, about my height, slender, muscular, didn’t talk much, and asked no questions about the equipment or the proceedings. I went back to the general frequency when the RVAC took off, its multiple little rotors spinning too fast to see. The laptop screen showed the trees and nearby houses as it gained altitude. Occam adjusted its direction, his hands maneuvering the small craft with multiple trackballs and levers on a handheld device. “Okay,” Occam said softly. “Let’s see what’s happening at Hugo Ames’ place.”
Less than five hundred feet away, the view of Hugo’s home wasn’t what we had been hoping for. The RVAC camera sent back a steady camera footage of dead trees, dead bushes, dead grass, and a dog lying in the backyard. Occam guided the RVAC closer to see that the dog was dead and oozing green goo. The deputy swore softly, leaning in to get a better vantage.
T. Laine said, “Increase altitude. We don’t know how high thedeath and decayreaches. You don’t want to damage the RVAC.”
Occam maneuvered the RVAC higher and circled the house from a good hundred feet up.
Over our earbuds, FireWind, who was viewing the video in real time too, said, “Bring the RVAC home. Move to the Ames’ house. Dress out in P3Es. Approach the house. Read it on the psy-meter 2.0. We’ll adjust our strategy after we know more. We are moving in now on Merry Promotions. Hold.” We heard a click, a silence that lasted for ten seconds or so, and another click as Occam guided the RVAC back to us. “The portable null is on the way from UTMC with two paramedics, but it is a goodhour behind you if traffic is good. Turn on vest cams. Stay alert.”
We drove to Ames’ house, easing down his bumpy, potholed gravel drive until the house came into sight. I pulled in behind Occam and T. Laine, all of us parking far from the house, in an area still green and alive. When I got out, there was no noise, no birdsong, no dogs barking in the distance. Occam’s nose wrinkled at the faint stink of death hanging on the still air. The house might have been pretty once, cedar siding, painted shutters, cedar shake roof; now it was falling apart, the siding brittle gray, shakes falling off, paint curling from the trim. The trees and shrubs all around the house were dead. Three dead male cardinals lay in the front yard, their bright red plumage the only spots of color. Even without reading the property with the psy-meter, it was clear that we had founddeath and decayin an advanced state. The deputy’s car backed away and disappeared. I didn’t blame him.
“Levels?” FireWind asked over the para freq.
