Page 87 of Whispers at Dusk
“Mason,” she murmured.
“Yes?”
“What if we’re wrong?”
“Della, I almost hope we’re wrong. We have his image—images—out everywhere. Officers in New Orleans are angry this man might be here. We must have faith in others. Hey, we’re team players, right?”
“I just... Mason, maybe we should have played this differently. If he expects we followed him, he might—”
“That conversation, Della. The way he talked about home and books, he’s here. And if we hadn’t come out—if we hadtrolledthe bars on Bourbon Street, tried Magazine Street or Frenchman Street—we might have made him angry.”
“And he might have killed the hostages. So, we had to come out here, because he was counting on us realizing he’d known the Midnight Slasher and would come here.”
“Right.”
She smiled, but he wasn’t looking at her.
“We’re not going to need to find Gideon,” he said.
“But he might—”
“Gideon has found us,” Mason said.
Twelve
The ghost of the old pirate came toward them quickly, his expression grim and somber.
“I prayed you’d be back!” he said. “It’s happening again. It’s happening here.”
“Gideon, where is he?” Mason asked, knowing from the ghost’s opening words he knew exactly why they were there.
Gideon shook his head.
“I’ve tried—so far, I have not seen anything. I didn’t see him myself. There were a couple of fishermen out here arguing with one another. They were talking about a man bringing two women out here. The one said they were drugged and doped, and the other said it wasn’t their business. The one wanted to call the police, but then the other man pointed out the fact that they seemed to be hanging all over him, maybe they wanted to be out here, maybe they didn’t want the world knowing they had something going on.”
“Where are these fishermen?”
Gideon shook his head. “Gone. Back to their homes, wherever they may be. My friend Oscar—passed away in the ’40s, World War II—used to love to fish out here and he heard them with me. We tried to follow, but they had an airboat and we couldn’t hop on fast enough. And...even if we’d followed them, they might not have said anything else.”
“Gideon, where is Oscar now?” Della asked him.
“He’s walking through everything that is a trail, resembles a trail—and searching for every shack out here he knows to have ever been built. When he told me what he’d heard, we both thought of the Midnight Slasher, and... I was hoping you’d show up, was afraid you wouldn’t, knew you were in Europe, but...a killer has at least two girls out here.”
Mason nodded. “That’s what we believe. The state police also have people out here, Gideon. We’ll find him.”
“This killer you seem to know... Does he know you as well?” Gideon asked.
“I’m willing to bet he’s expecting us,” Mason said.
“But it sounds as if you’re getting a big team out here—”
“We can’t just rush him, Gideon,” Della said.
“Because he has the girls. But that many people... Won’t they find the girls?”
“If we know this guy, and he’s out here somewhere waiting for us—not us, Della, really—he’s set the girls up to die if anything happens to him.”
“Della is the bait?” Gideon asked.
