Devil's Night Read online

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  To Sarah

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  24 Hours Earlier

  1 a.m.

  2 a.m.

  3 a.m.

  4 a.m.

  5 a.m.

  6 a.m.

  7 a.m.

  8 a.m.

  9 a.m.

  10 a.m.

  11 a.m.

  12 p.m.

  1 p.m.

  2 p.m.

  3 p.m.

  4 p.m.

  5 p.m.

  6 p.m.

  7 p.m.

  8 p.m.

  9 p.m.

  10 p.m.

  11 p.m.

  Midnight

  1 a.m.

  2 a.m.

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Todd Ritter

  About the Author

  Copyright

  It was dark.

  Too dark for Kat’s liking.

  Windows were few and far between, and those she did pass were so small they offered nothing more than narrow slips of moonlight. Rather than lighting the way, they only made it harder for her eyes to adjust to the blackness pushing at her from all directions.

  Kat had a flashlight, but she didn’t dare use it. The beam might reveal her presence. And the element of surprise was more important than visibility. Other than her gun, it was the only weapon she had.

  Her trusty Glock was clenched in her right hand. Her left hand was just below it, supporting her outstretched arm at the wrist. Walking that way slowed her down, which was good. She couldn’t risk moving too fast. Like the flashlight, sudden movement would give her away. Kat couldn’t have that happen. Her life likely depended on it.

  So she skulked through the darkness, trying to fight the exhaustion that clouded her mind. Thoughts came slowly, taking twice as long as normal to piece information together. For instance, she should have known that she was nearing the stairs, but her brain was too sleep-addled to realize it. Instead, she ran right into them, slamming her big toe against the bottom step. The pain was so sudden and jolting it almost made her yelp. She caught the sound halfway up her throat and gulped it back down.

  Swallowing hard again, Kat began her fumbling, cautious ascent. She paused at each step, resisting the urge to sprint up them two at a time. Despite her utter exhaustion, part of her wanted to just get to the top and see what awaited her. But another part of her already knew, and it terrified her.

  Pausing halfway up the stairs, she leaned against the railing and listened for sounds from above. She heard nothing. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was wrong. About her destination. About what was being planned there. But everything she had learned in the past day pointed to this place. This moment. This hour.

  Kat’s thoughts suddenly slipped away from her. It was happening with alarming frequency now. Her train of thought would derail and she’d suddenly find herself blank and aimless, wondering where the hell she was and what she was doing. Severe sleep deprivation did that to you.

  She couldn’t bring herself back with a slap. Although it had worked earlier that night, it would be too noisy in that echo chamber of a stairwell. Instead, she pinched herself. Hard. Right on the back of her upper arm, where it hurt the most.

  It did the trick.

  Alert again, she pushed on. Up the stairs. Heart pounding. Trigger finger flexing at her Glock.

  Soon she was at the top of the stairs and rising into the room. There were more windows there, massive ones that let in enough light to see by.

  Taking in the room, Kat realized she would have preferred darkness.

  The first thing she saw was a body on the floor. It was a man, slumped on his side and facing the far wall. Blood matted his hair and oozed from beneath his head in a circular pool that crept across the floorboards.

  Even without seeing his face, Kat could identify him. She rushed to his side and, despite already knowing that he was dead and gone, checked his wrist for a pulse. When she didn’t feel one, a heaviness flooded her heart. Yet another casualty in a day that was full of them.

  “Who did this to you?” she whispered. “And why—”

  She stopped speaking as her gaze flicked to the dark corner nearest the body. Something was there, shrouded in the shadows.

  A propane tank.

  It was small, just like the one hooked up to the gas grill in her backyard. The cap had been removed, replaced with a grease-smeared handkerchief that soaked up the liquid inside. The gas that leaked out was a noxious vapor that made Kat dizzy.

  She glanced in the opposite corner. It also contained a propane tank. As did the room’s other two corners. Each tank was the same. Caps off. Stuffed with rags. Waiting to be ignited.

  A mere spark on one of the rags could make an entire tank explode. That would set off a chain reaction. Explosion after explosion after explosion.

  The whole room had been turned into a bomb.

  And Kat was now standing right in the heart of it.

  24 HOURS EARLIER

  1 A.M.

  Kat was dreaming about Henry when she heard the sirens. She had no idea why. It’s not as if she dwelled on him so much during her waking hours that it invaded her subconscious at night. In fact, it had been weeks since she thought about Henry, months since she had heard from him, and a full year since she last saw him.

  Yet there he was, front and center in her dream. They were in a nondescript room so dim and vast that Kat wasn’t sure if it was a room at all. Dreams were like that. Ceilings not supported by walls. Floors as malleable as wet sand. The only thing concrete about their surroundings was the table in front of them—white Formica as bright as a smile in a toothpaste commercial.

  On the table were two large sheets of paper, thin and translucent. Henry, staring at his swath of paper, frowned.

  “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “It’s easy,” Kat said. “I’ll show you.”

  She lifted a corner of her sheet to the center, cementing the fold with a crease. Henry followed suit. They did it again, this time simultaneously, with an upper fold.

  “See,” she said. “I told you it was easy.”

  Then the sirens started, so distant and muffled that Kat at first thought they were just another part of the dream. But they continued, even after Henry, the table, and the paper all vanished. That’s when she knew they were real.

  Kat listened without opening her eyes. Although they were far away, she could tell the sirens belonged to the fire department and not her police force. The ones on the fire trucks were louder and deeper—the baritones to her patrol cars’ tenor.

  Sliding out of bed, she went to the window and saw the reason for the sirens—a fire, glowing orange and eerie in the distance. She couldn’t tell how large it was or pinpoint its exact location. All she knew was that she needed to be there, no matter how much she wanted to crawl back into bed. Pausing only long enough to yawn, she started to put on her uniform a mere hour and a half after taking it off.

  She was mostly dressed by the time her phone rang. As expected, it was Carl Bauersox, her deputy, sounding much more energetic than she did. On the night shift, he was used to being alert at this hour. Kat was not.

  “We’ve got a fire, Chief.”

  “I know,” Kat said. “I hear the sirens. What’s burning?”

  “The museum.”

&n
bsp; He was referring to the Perry Hollow Historical Society and Exhibition Hall, a collection of documents, artifacts, and photographs that dated back to the town’s founding and beyond. Because of its unwieldy name, and because most of the town’s history resided within its walls, people simply called it the museum.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Looks like it,” Carl said. “It’s a big draw, too. We’re going to have a crowd control problem on our hands in a minute.”

  This didn’t surprise Kat. Fires weren’t common in Perry Hollow, and she was sure a good portion of the town would come out to gawk. They certainly couldn’t sleep. Not with all those sirens echoing down the streets.

  “Hold them off as best you can. I’ll be there soon.”

  When she was finally on the road, her own sirens blaring, Kat noticed that the fire was visible from all over town. Even from six blocks away, she could see the licks of flame flashing over the rooftops of neighboring buildings. A thick column of black smoke, rising straight up into the night sky, punctuated the blaze like an exclamation point.

  Crossing Main Street, she noticed plenty of residents staggering along the sidewalk in tossed-on sweatpants, sneakers, and robes. All of them were headed in the same direction she was, drawn mothlike to the flames. Crowd control problem, indeed.

  She brought her Crown Vic to a stop a block away from the museum, parking sideways in the middle of the street. It wasn’t much of a roadblock, but it would be enough to keep any cars from trying to come through. Plus, it was easy to move out of the way to let in fire trucks from neighboring towns, if it came to that.

  Kat hoped it wouldn’t.

  Leaving her patrol car, she hurried down the street, finally getting a good look at the blaze. It wasn’t as big as she first thought, but still bad by Perry Hollow standards. It looked to be contained to the front of the building, a three-story Queen Anne with all the frilly trimmings. Fire ate away at the steeply pitched roof and munched swiftly toward the ornate turret in its center. Flames leaped from the front windows and curled in the crisp autumn air, making Kat think of Satan’s fingers beckoning a group of sinners to Hell.

  Filling the street in front of the museum were two of the Perry Hollow Fire Department’s three fire trucks. A ladder truck and a standard pumper, they formed a wide V on the lawn. In the center, members of the volunteer squad—all five of them—had already unfurled their hoses and were now blasting away at the blaze. The jets of water rose high into the air, arching over the front lawn before diving into the flames.

  The squad’s third truck, trusty Engine 13, was a 1973 Ford used for brush fires. Despite its age, it was the truck that saw the most action. Brush fires were the norm in Perry Hollow. House fires were not—a fact made noticeable by the sheer amount of onlookers standing on the other side of the street. While Kat had overestimated the force of the blaze, she had underestimated the size of the crowd. Half the town, it seemed, was there, huddling together and gazing at the flames.

  Carl tried his best to keep them at bay, but they were an unruly lot. The young men and teenage boys in the crowd were especially eager to get closer to the fire. Kat intercepted two boys, the same age as her son, who had slipped past Carl and made it halfway across the street.

  “Where you headed, boys?”

  One of them—a freckle-faced kid with a snide smile—answered. “To see if the firemen need our help.”

  “They don’t need anything but for you two to keep at a safe distance.”

  Kat ushered them back to the curb, yelling to get the attention of the rest of the crowd. “Everyone take a step back and stay there. This isn’t a basketball game, people. Courtside seats are not available.”

  She sidled up to Carl, who was visibly relieved to have reinforcements.

  “Just in time,” he said, wiping sweat from his perpetually clean-shaven face. “They were starting to overrun me.”

  “They’re just excited. There hasn’t been a fire in town since—”

  She cut herself off. Not that it mattered. Carl knew what she was going to say anyway. The last major fire in Perry Hollow was at the sawmill the town had been built around. Abandoned for more than a decade, it had gone up in flames a year earlier, with Kat and two others still inside. One of them had been Henry Goll, the unexpected costar of her dream. He and Kat almost died in the blaze. The person with them perished, although that wasn’t such a bad thing, considering that he had been trying to kill them.

  Feeling the heat of the current fire on the back of her neck, Kat realized that it was the one-year anniversary of the mill blaze. No wonder Henry had been in her dream. Her brain was trying to remind her that it was now October 31. Exactly a full year since the great Halloween fire that destroyed a piece of Perry Hollow history.

  Kat faced the burning museum. Although she hadn’t been inside it since grade school, seeing yet another part of the town’s past go up in flames saddened her. At least she wasn’t trapped inside this time. If there was a silver lining to be found, that would be it.

  Another bright spot was the fact that the blaze already seemed to be under control. The fire on the roof had receded, leaving the museum’s grand turret untouched. The flames at the windows, those devilish fingers, had retreated indoors, allowing the firefighters to march closer and focus on the hot spots.

  But as the fire got smaller, the crowd on the other side of the street grew larger. There must have been fifty people there, with still more on the way. They stood in a tight pack, eyes on the fire, murmuring to each other with a combination of concern and excitement that always seemed to occur at scenes of public chaos. Kat spotted a lot of familiar faces in the crowd and nodded or waved. She saw Burt Hammond, Perry Hollow’s mayor, sporting a black suit and a face so pale it made him resemble a wax statue. Standing with him was Father Ron, who had been the priest at All Saints Parish for as long as Kat could remember. Nearby were Jasper Foxx and Adrienne Wellington, both of whom owned stores on nearby Main Street. Dave Freeman, whose lawn bore the brunt of the onlookers, passed out Styrofoam cups to the crowd. His wife, Betty, followed, filling the cups with coffee she poured from a thermos.

  Pushing past them was a tiny woman with a big perm, a parka thrown over her pink nightgown. Kat recognized the parka—not to mention the hair—as belonging to Emma Pulsifer, vice president of the Perry Hollow Historical Society. Seeing Kat, Emma rushed forward with a manic energy that verged on hysteria.

  “Chief Campbell, have you seen Connie?”

  Kat knew of at least four Connies who lived in town. “Could you be more specific?”

  Emma sighed with impatience. “Connie Bishop.”

  “Constance?”

  “Yes,” Emma huffed. “I’ve been looking for her everywhere.”

  Constance Bishop, a prim but eminently friendly woman, knew everything there was to know about Perry Hollow. Accordingly, she served as president of the historical society. Kat wasn’t sure what that entailed, but she assumed the museum fire was something that would concern her.

  “I haven’t seen her,” she said. “Have you tried calling her?”

  Emma held up her cell phone. “Four times. No answer.”

  She looked up and down the block, head bobbing wildly. With her puffy hair and unfortunately pointy nose, she brought to mind an exotic bird, like something from South America you’d see on the Discovery Channel. The resemblance was only heightened by the way she flapped her arms helplessly.

  “I don’t know what to do. I thought Connie would be here and have a game plan.”

  “For what?”

  “Saving the artifacts, of course,” Emma said. “There are priceless items in that building. We can’t just watch them burn.”

  Kat told her they didn’t have much choice in the matter. As long as there were still flames inside the museum, no one but members of the fire department would be going inside. That didn’t sit well with Vice President Pulsifer.

  “But the deed for the land Perry Mill was built on is in th
ere,” she said. “Signed in 1760 by Irwin Perry himself. And rare photographs of the town. And maps. We have items dating back to before the mill. Before the town was even called Perry Hollow. If we don’t do something right now, all of it could be destroyed.”

  Kat looked to the museum again. Two firefighters had used the ladder truck to climb onto the roof, which they sprayed down with foam. Two others were in the process of knocking down the front door. When it gave way, they had to jump back to escape the flames rolling out of it. But they recovered quickly and ventured inside, hose blasting. Next to her, Emma Pulsifer cringed, no doubt imagining all that water damage.

  “There’s a back door,” Emma said with noticeable desperation. “I know the fire’s not out, but the town’s entire history is in there. If we go through the back, we can try to salvage something.”

  “This is a tragedy,” Kat told her. “It truly is. But I can’t let you in there until the fire is completely out. I’m sorry. It’s too dangerous.”

  Emma replied with a short, sad nod, the distant firelight reflecting in the tears that formed at the corners of her eyes. Quietly, she dialed her cell phone, pressed it to her ear, and turned away from Kat.

  “Connie? It’s Emma. Where are you? Call me back immediately.”

  Kat looked over Emma’s shoulder, checking to see if the crowd was still behaving. They were, although one man near the back was on the move. He towered over the rest of the crowd, showing less interest in the fire than in getting past those who were watching it. Kat only caught a brief glimpse of his face—as pale as a full moon—but it was all she needed. She’d recognize those scars anywhere.

  “Henry?”

  The man didn’t hear her. He continued working his way through the crowd, carrying what looked to be a small suitcase. Kat tried to follow him, practically shouting his name.

  “Henry Goll? Is that you?”

  She was in the thick of the crowd now, surrounded by people far taller than her five-foot frame. Kat cursed her shortness while squeezing between the two boys she had forced back onto the curb earlier that night.