Ghost Dance by Mark T. Sullivan Read Free Book Online

hunting clothes. Then a built-in, eight-slot, glass-faced gun cabinet filled with three scoped high-powered rifles, a .22 rifle, a synthetic-stocked muzzle-loader with a stainless-steel barrel, a double-barreled shotgun, and two pump-action shotguns, one wood-stocked with a blued barrel, one synthetic-stocked and camouflaged. A single steel cable about a quarter of an inch thick ran the length of the case through the trigger guards of all the guns. Below the glass case were pine drawers and cabinets lined with cedar wood. Beyond the case was a boot rack and pegs on which hung various hunting calls, a set of hip waders and a pair of Gortex chest waders. At the far end of the closet was a low pine cabinet.
    ‘Did he have more than one turkey gun?’ Nightingale asked.
    ‘No,’ Paula said. ‘Why?’
    ‘Because he never got the gun from the cabinet,’ she replied.
    ‘Then he met his killer before getting here,’ Paula said. She began to cry again.
    Nightingale held her until she settled down, then asked, ‘Besides the locks being open, does anything else seem out of place?’
    Paula blinked, blew her nose and studied the room. ‘No, it looks like it always does. Except—’
    She gestured toward the pine credenza. ‘The bottom cabinet door is open. Hank kept his ammunition in there. Locked. He was always preaching gun safety with the boys.’ She paused, her chin quivering. ‘Did you hear that? I’m already talking about him in the past tense! Andie … I’ve got to go find my son. He needs me.’
    ‘I’m being tough on you,’ Nightingale soothed. ‘I apologize again. Go.’
    When Paula had left, Nightingale went over to the credenza and slid it open. Inside were four heavy-duty, black, padlocked ammunition boxes. On one the lock was loose. She drew that lock from the hinge, eased open the box, which was filled with boxes of shotgun shells, then let her eyes drift toward the inside of the lid.
    Taped to the inside of the box was a piece of plain white sketch paper. On it was drawn an intricate illustration of a creature rowing a boat across a river.
    The creature had the physical structure of a man, except that he possessed the nose of a vulture, pointed animal ears and snakes growing on his head instead of hair. His eyes were solid black voids. His mouth was sewn shut with string. The creature and the boat had been etched in precise, delicate black lines. That part of the illustration had the quality of a drawing in an ancient book.
    The water below the boat and the creature, however, was rust-red and crudely depicted with the blunt stroke of a child’s finger painting. Puzzled, Nightingale tugged at the gold stud in her left ear. Why would Potter put this macabre drawing in an ammunition box? Was he the artist? If there were other drawings here, she’d have to reconsider the psychological dimensions of the dentist and refigure the path of her investigation.
    Something about the medium of the drawing bothered her as well. Nightingale reached in and tugged out the box. She set it on top of the credenza, then adjusted the overhead light to better examine the illustration. She peered closer at the river.
    Her head felt suddenly leaden and pressurized. Icy sweat bubbled to the skin at the nape of her neck and dribbled down her back.
    The river had been finger-painted with blood.

CHAPTER SIX
    A SECOND VIOLENT STORM swept in over the Green Mountains just after dark, snapping branches off the birch trees and rattling the blown-glass windows of Gallagher’s cabin. The feeble structure creaked and moaned with every gust. Dank brown leaves swirled and settled in the tracks left by the police cruisers, the ambulances and the medical examiner’s van that had carried Hank Potter’s body from the river.
    Over the years Gallagher had taught himself to lock those sorts of horrors away in the mental equivalent of a vault. But the memory of Potter surfacing from the depths of the Bluekill refused entombment. It followed him