Page 18
Diana Jewell had always divided her life into Before and After. Before the Ferryman case and After. Before retirement and After. Before divorce and After.
Now there would be a new dividing line: Before Frank’s murder and After.
Sarah Webb’s voice rang in her ears. She’d hung up the call minutes ago, but the phrase was still playing on repeat in her skull: ‘Frank’s dead, Diana. Someone put stones in his eyes. Just like Jennifer Marlowe.’
Frank Sullivan. Dead. The word itself felt refused to attach itself to the cantankerous image of the man she’d known – sometimes tolerated, sometimes actively avoided – for the better part of ten years.
Frank wasn’t the type to just die . He was the type to hang on out of sheer stubbornness, probably arguing with gravity itself if it tried to pull him under early.
Murdered. That was the part that twisted Diana’s insides. Not a heart attack fishing off his stupid little dock, not a stroke arguing with the television, but murdered.
And stones for eyes, just like the case that haunted him so.
Marlowe. 1976. Frank’s personal, fifty-year albatross.
Diana found herself standing in her living room, though she had no memory of walking there.
How long had she been here, rooted to the spot like one of the ancient cypress trees out back?
Minutes, surely. Time had decoupled itself from the steady tick of the grandfather clock in the hall.
Her rational brain, the part shaped by thirty years on the streets, scrambled to impose order on this sudden chaos.
Okay. Analyze. Frank Sullivan. Victim .
But a tsunami of considerations overwhelmed her, and Diana found herself struggling to see this in any clear light.
Frank wasn’t just a victim; he was Frank.
Cranky, obsessive, tunnel-visioned Frank, who could recall the exact weather conditions on the day Jennifer Marlowe’s body was found in 1976 but probably couldn’t remember what he’d eaten for breakfast.
Why would someone hurt him? He lived like a hermit crab.
He scuttled between his house, his back garden and the occasional reluctant meeting of their cold case klatch.
Enemies? Yes, every cop has them, but Frank’s active enemies, the ones with lingering grudges, were probably underground themselves by now.
He hadn’t been on the job in decades. Old scores settled this late felt unlikely.
Unless it wasn’t about Frank the retired Fed.
What if it was about Frank, the keeper of the Marlowe flame?
Whatever it was, it worked. Because Diana Jewell, who’d spent her career catching drug dealers and murderers, who’d stared down the barrel of countless guns and lived to file the paperwork, was scared.
The admission triggered an immediate defensive response. No. She didn’t do scared, yet her feet swept her to every door in her house. Front door: locked, deadbolted, security chain engaged. Back door: same. Sliding glass doors to the lanai: locked with the bar in place.
Diana paused at the sliding door to her garden.
The rain that pelted the glass was not the civilized Florida rain that sometimes drifted down like an afterthought, but the vindictive kind that seemed to be punishing the earth for some unknowable transgression.
Outside, her koi pond had transformed into a battlefield of colliding circles.
Locked. Secure. The drumming rain should have been a white noise blanket, but instead it seemed to amplify the house’s internal sounds. The groan of old timbers settling, the low hum of the ancient refrigerator she needed to replace.
Then, through the percussive roar of the storm, another sound.
Faint, but definitely not the rain.
The basement.
Diana froze. Every nerve ending went taut. She strained her ears, held her breath, tried to filter out the rain’s assault. Had she imagined it?
Thump-thump.
Louder this time. Something metallic hitting the concrete floor? A loose tool falling off a shelf?
Shit. The bulkhead door.
Her blood ran cold. She hadn’t checked it. That door was barely hanging on by a thread, which is why she’d had to move the White Whale meetings up to ground level. Frank and Sarah always complained about the draft down there.
Which meant someone might know that my basement door is breachable.
Panic surged. No more rationalization. No more pretending she wasn’t scared. Someone could be down there. Had the noise been them getting in ? This was one of the few houses in Palm Harbor that actually had a basement – and any potential intruder would jump at that advantage.
Forget procedure. Forget assessment. Get the equalizer.
Diana rushed to the living room and found her Glock 26 in the drawer. Six bullets in the chamber. More than enough. She hadn’t shot in a while, couldn’t remember the last time she had, but it was like driving. Once you learned, you never forgot.
She made sure her cell was still in her pocket too, then she edged towards the basement door with her gun held high. Don’t rush. Rushing gets you ambushed. Rushing gets you dead. When she reached it, she pressed an ear to the wood.
There were no obvious sounds from down below. All Diana could hear was the rain outside.
Slowly, she turned the old brass knob. It resisted for a fraction, then gave with a soft groan. The door swung inward onto absolute blackness. A wave of cool, musty air flowed out.
Her hand felt along the wall inside the frame until her fingers found the cold plastic toggle of the light switch. She flicked it up.
A row of bare bulbs stuttered to life along the basement roof. It wasn’t much, but it did the job. Diana ducked beneath the door and descended gun-first.
She took each step one by one. Her eyes swept left to right. The hulking pizza oven in the corner that she’d never used. A treadmill. Boxes of Christmas decorations. They were all irrelevant now. What mattered were the spaces between things, the gaps where someone could hide.
But no. Nothing was out of place. Nothing disturbed.
The only movement was the bulkhead door, flapping in the wind. A puddle of water had formed just over the threshold.
‘God dammit.’
Diana breathed a sigh of relief, then edged closer to the mess.
There was no immediate sign of forced entry beyond the obvious vulnerability.
No broken glass from the small, high window.
No footprints in the dust except her own.
Up close, the door looked even more pathetic.
Years of Florida’s salt-laden air had clearly taken its toll, and this flash storm had been the killing blow.
With her free hand, she pushed the door shut and tried to deadbolt it, but the part of the frame that held the lock had disintegrated.
Diana scanned the basement and spotted a metal folding chair propped against the wall.
She wedged it under the door handle, angling it so any inward pressure would drive the chair legs harder against the concrete floor.
Done. Breach secured, however crudely.
Diana let out a long, shaky breath. The tension in her shoulders eased slightly. Just the storm. Just a rotten door frame finally giving up the ghost. Embarrassing lapse in home maintenance, but not fatal.
She lowered the Glock slightly, though her finger remained near the trigger guard. Old habits. The immediate threat seemed to have receded, now replaced by the mundane annoyance of the puddle spreading across the dusty concrete floor.
Her sneakers were soaked. Wonderful. Wet feet were almost worse than potential intruders.
She nudged at the spreading water with the toe of her shoe and tried to vaguely to disperse it towards a floor drain she dimly recalled being somewhere near the pizza oven.
It was a useless gesture; the water just sloshed back, indifferent.
As it spread, her eye caught something glinting in the dim light.
It was a gray, metallic flash against the concrete. The object sat innocently in a shallow groove where the floor met the wall.
Diana frowned. Sure, she’d forgotten exactly what she’d dumped down here over the years, and the White Whale group had been down here thirty, forty times over the years.
She leaned closer and picked it up. Square, approximately half an inch thick. Silver, possibly sterling, based on the patina forming at the edges.
A cufflink.
The basement air turned Arctic, because this wasn’t just any cufflink. Diana discarded the possibilities as quickly as they hit her brain, because this cufflink didn’t belong to her or her ex-husband or anyone who’d been invited into her home recently.
Someone knew. Someone knew about their group, about their obsessions, about the details only the investigators and the killers themselves would recognize.
The gun trembled in Diana’s hands as the horrible symmetry revealed itself. Both cases - their respective obsessions. Frank had died trapped in his own nightmare. And now –
Diana’s breath accelerated as her training battled with elemental fear. She needed to get out of here, out into the open.
The basement door? Out into the backyard?
No. The garden was too enclosed. There was no gate out into civilization.
Front door.
Diana dropped the cufflink and backed towards the stairs. Her mind locked solely on the idea of escape.
Then something vibrated against her leg. It detonated against her thigh with such unexpected force that, for a moment, she interpreted the sensation as an attack. She was a few millimeters from unloading six bullets into the shadows.
Three pulses.
Four. Five.
The rational part of her brain finally caught up.
Phone call. Safety. Alert. Answer.
Diana fished the phone out of her pocket as she reached the base of the staircase. The screen flashed a cell number she didn’t have saved.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. Answer it? Ignore it? Which choice led to survival?
A lifetime of law enforcement had imbued her with the inevitable compulsion to answer.
‘Hello?’
‘Diana Jewell?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’ Diana began her slow ascent, gun still trained on the basement below.
‘Special Agent Dark with the FBI. We need to speak with you about-’
‘Get here,’ Diana interrupted frantically. ‘My place. Now.’
There was no hesitation on the speaker’s part. ‘We’re coming. Are you safe?’
Diana reached the last step. The threshold. Freedom. She gently turned the door knob and stepped into her hallway.
‘Just get here as quickly-’
But her hallway transformed into something fundamentally different.
Diana struggled with the incongruity. The familiar suddenly unfamiliar. The safe space made dangerous. It was like looking at a photo negative of her own home. Everything was recognizable yet impossibly altered.
And in that negative space stood a figure.
In the splinter of time before conscious thought caught up with visual input, a peculiar calm descended.
Diana Jewell had spent the past 23 years wondering what the Ferryman looked like. Had he worn a mask to decapitate those women? What kind of weapon had he used? Exactly how did he get into those victims’ houses?
She didn’t have to wonder anymore.
Diana raised her gun, but the figure was too fast, too instant.
Her white whale had surfaced, and when Diana’s scream tore free, it was the sound of years of unanswered questions.
Table of Contents
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- Page 18 (Reading here)
- Page 19
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