“Shall we go in? It’s getting late,” Adam said.
Katie didn’t say a word. She turned and led the way.
She went straight to the front door, allowing the others to follow. Inside, she moved through the narrow entry hall to the parlor at the left of the house and into the dining area, where she took a seat. She sat stoically with her hands folded before her.
The others joined her at the table.
“Well, all right, I’ll begin,” Adam said. “Axel and I are here at the request of the local police. Because of the nature of the crime, they know they’ll be dealing with rumors, truth and myth. I became involved with this on a personal level when Katie did.” He stared at Dan Oliver. “I know how hard you fought to bring a killer to justice. Whether you had the right man or not, we don’t know.”
“It wasn’t George,” Katie said flatly. She gave Dan what he construed as an extremely hostile glance.
“Maybe not,” Adam agreed. “And Axel is willing to start back from scratch, but he’ll consider all the accumulated knowledge of the crimes that have occurred.”
“What about you?” Katie demanded, her stare on Dan.
Dan nodded. “I am willing to go back over everything I know and to investigate these murders to the best of my ability.”
Axel gave him a nudge with his foot beneath the table.
Dan gritted his teeth but added, “With an open mind to the fact I might have been wrong.”
“Really?” Katie said doubtfully.
He met her gaze; she was so sure. As sure as he had been the man had been guilty.
“With an open mind,” he said, and suddenly he meant it.
Hell, just this morning, he’d believed there were no such things as ghosts. And while the couple on the Delaney boat that long-ago day had seemed to be specters, they might well have been real.
Real killers.
“There will be many in law enforcement who believe the killings are copycats of one another, and here in New Orleans, copycats of the killer who struck in 1918 and 1919 and perhaps before that as well.”
“About that,” Axel interjected. “Dan has a...contact who might be able to help us with the historical murders.”
“And who might that be?” Adam looked at Dan with curiosity.
Dan hesitated. Was Axel really expecting him to talk about this in front of Adam right now? In front of Katie Delaney? He glanced at Adam, still trying to grasp everything Axel had told him about the man—and his Krewe of Hunters. Adam nodded encouragingly. Dan let out a sigh. “Her name was...is Mabel Greely, and she was best friends with one of the Axeman’s victims,” he said.
To his surprise, no one mocked him.
Not even Katie Delaney.
“She was a friend of a victim—not a victim herself?” Adam inquired.
Dan nodded. After the different ways Katie had looked at him—most of them hostile—she was now looking at him without doubt.
She seemed thoughtful.
“Did she know who did it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, but she believes—as do many people who have studied this—it might have been a man named Momfre.”
Katie leaned back in her chair. “First to die, as accepted by most people as the victims of the Axeman, were Joseph and Catherine Maggio. Then Louis Besumer and his mistress, Harriet Lowe, were attacked, but they didn’t die. The police arrested a man who had worked at their store, but there was no evidence against him, and he was released. Besumer himself wound up being arrested for the attacks. Harriet Lowe began accusing him of being a German spy, claimed he’d attacked her before... It was all kind of confused, and police officers wound up being demoted over it all. Harriett Lowe later died after a surgery that was supposed to relieve the injuries she had received.”
“You just know all this?” Dan asked, frowning.
She shrugged. “I’m a tour guide.”
“Then, go on—though, obviously, whoever it was isn’t the person doing it now,” Dan said.
“But our axe murderer is playing on it,” Adam said.
“I think so, too,” Dan said. “And I think he’s going to copy a lot of what happened. He had nothing like this back in Florida—no New Orleans legend to call up—but this might be... I don’t know...his main play?” He looked at Katie who was staring back at him.
She didn’t seem quite as hostile as she had before.
“George Calabria has no ties to New Orleans,” she told him.
“I said I’m coming into this now with an open mind. Please go on. I just bought a handful of books on the subject, but you seem to have it down pat. What then?” Dan asked.
He noted that, for the most part, Adam and Axel were sitting back, listening.
Katie glanced around at the three of them. “Okay, next, the Axeman attacked a pregnant woman. She survived and so did the child. It was a bit different. Police believed she’d been attacked with a bedside lamp, and they didn’t associate it with the Axeman right away. All she could remember was a dark figure standing over her. They arrested a man that time, too, but once again couldn’t prove it. The fellow ran when police came after him. There was just no kind of evidence that suggested he did it, but he had a criminal record, and the police were desperate. Because of the nature of the attack—a brutal surprise—they began to think it was the Axeman.”
“What was her name?” Dan asked.
“Anna Schneider,” Katie told him.
He shook his head. “Not my ghost’s friend.”
Katie arched a brow in his direction. He shrugged. “I was approached at the cemetery.”
“Approached?”
Axel explained, since they’d had a longer conversation with Mabel as they’d walked out of the Garden District. “There’s a young woman who was friends with a victim—she wasn’t a victim herself. She died of tuberculosis while still young, though. In life, the Axeman murders haunted her, and I believe she’s remained because she is still seeking
