He pulled a small flannel bag from under his shirt collar. It hung from his neck on a leather thong and smelled of herbs.
“It’s a mojo bag,” he answered her unspoken question.
“But you’re not a witch.” She shook her head. “I would have known.”
“So arrogant,” he sneered. “Just like your father.”
Her head dropped again; it was getting heavier as the drug took effect.
“I may not have the kind of power you and your parents were born with, but I did have a grandmother who taught me a lot. This was her cabin. She came here from Louisiana. I was fair skinned like my father, but I was raised to know her secrets.”
“Hoodoo?” Olivia whispered. “She was a hoodoo woman?”
“She was drawn to the power of this place like so many before her. It was here she met my grandfather and took the name Walcott, but she never forgot her roots or the bayou she came from.”
He wandered over to the window and glanced out, lost in thought.
“We used to come here every summer, Jimmy and me, Charlie too, and Isabel. My grandmother was long gone, but we would bed down here on the floor in our sleeping bags. We’d swim in the lake and have cookouts under the stars,” he murmured. “It felt like it would last forever.”
She tried to cast her mind back. It was fuzzy and slow, but she recalled the picture she had seen on the mantel in Mrs. Talbot’s house, a picture taken by her mother of the three men standing happily, arms around each other, outside this very cabin in front of the lake.
“Hurting me won’t bring him back,” she answered slowly. Speech was becoming harder.
“What the hell do you think you know?” he growled, stalking back to her, and grabbing her face roughly, his fingers pinching so tightly they left marks on the skin of her jaw.
“I know you loved him... Jimmy.”
“You don’t get to speak his name,” he shouted in her face, his eyes wild. “You don’t ever get to speak his name. I know what you did to him. They found his body today.”
“Today?” She struggled to understand through the fog in her mind. “James died over twenty years ago. I was only eight years old.”
He gripped her face tighter, making her wince. He was obviously confused. If the body they found today was the fourth victim and it followed the same pattern as the original murders, it meant that whoever the victim was, he would have been killed in the same manner as James, as he’d been the fourth victim from the original murders.
Shit, this was obviously what pushed Walcott out of any sense of reality. After spending two decades mourning a man he couldn’t openly love and believing that the man he had called brother was the killer, the discovery of this last body had pushed him over the edge. He was even more dangerous now.
“What are you planning to do?” she whispered. “Why did you bring me here?”
She heard the metallic click of a gun being cocked, and her gut clenched. She felt the cold metal press against her cheek.
“You do know your father has been watching you, don’t you?” he breathed against the side of her face, his voice low. “By now, he’ll know I have you. Jimmy and Isabel are dead, and he’s the only other person besides me who knows about this place. It won’t take him long to figure it out. He always was the clever one.”
“This is about my dad?” She blinked, trying to clear her thoughts, but it was like trying to wade through syrup. “I’m bait?”
“It’s about both of you paying for what you have done,” he hissed. “I can’t trust the system to work, so I have to take matters into my own hands. Once your father gets here, I am going to kill him and then…” She felt the barrel press against the back of her skull. “Then I am going to put a bullet in your head.”
“Where the hell is she?” Theo growled as he paced the floor in frustration.
“Mr. Beckett.” Mac held up his hands. “If you’ll just calm down.”
“No, he won’t calm down.” Jake had been kneeling in front of Erica, holding an ice pack to her knee, but now he stood. “He has every right to be mad.” He turned toward Mac. “With all due respect, if the mayor had been doing her job and reined that madman in sooner, Walcott wouldn’t have had the chance to take her. Now they could be anywhere. You said it yourself, he took Carl’s weapon. For all we know, she could already be dead, and he’s dumped her body somewhere.”
Theo roared in fury and punched the nearest file cabinet, leaving a deep dent in the metal.
Mac raised his brows in surprise, turning to Jake.
“Don’t look at me,” Jake replied coolly. “I’m not going to stop him. If that was me, I’d already be choking the life out of that moron Carl for uncuffing that bastard in the first place.”
Mac held his hands up, trying to pacify Theo. “Look, he took your woman, I get it. Under the circumstances, I’d feel the same way too, but just think for a second. If he wanted her dead, he’d have simply killed her in the parking garage and left her body there. He took her because he needs her for some reason, which means there’s a good chance she’s still alive.”
