Free Krewe of Hunters 3 Sacred Evil by Heather Graham Page A

to tell you, I think it’s almost my fault.”
    “You killed Miss Rockford?” Jude asked.
    “No! No, of course not!” Avery protested. “No, no—I should have stayed away from that location. I should have shot anywhere else in Manhattan—or Brooklyn, the Bronx, New Jersey or Hollywood, for that matter. It’s that damn location. It’s haunted—and it’s cursed. And God knows—the creature haunting the place might just be Jack the Ripper—the real Jack the Ripper!”
    He leaned forward. “Don’t you understand? Jack the Ripper left London and came to the United States. And when he did, that’s where he lived!”

4
     
    F ilm people.
    Great. He couldn’t help it, he glanced at Whitney.
    She smiled. “Surely, Mr. Angus, you don’t believe that Jack the Ripper has lived all these years and that he’s just starting out to murder women again? At age one hundred plus.”
    “I knew all about the history of the location. I just doubted all that mumbo-jumbo ghost stuff, just the way you do.”
    “I heard something about the location this morning, but I don’t really know much about it,” Whitney said. She smiled at him. “I went to the film school at NYU, Mr. Angus. I loved living and working up here, but somehow, I never learned about the location you were using for the film shoot yesterday.”
    “Well, let me tell you about it,” Avery said, leaning toward Whitney.
    Maybe the young woman would turn out to be an odd asset, Jude decided. Angus Avery seemed to like her. She was encouraging him to talk. He did believe—gut feeling—that the movie had something to do with it all. Maybe her background was going to be a good thing.
    “The building they just tore down had no history. The Darby Building. It was an ugly old thing—built in the 1920s. No character, no class whatsoever. It should have been torn down. But what was on the site before—that’s where all the trouble comes from.”
    “And what was there before?” Whitney asked. “A friend of mine told me that it had been some kind of spiritualist church.”
    “An offshoot group of some whacked-out folks—now, I suppose it would be some kind of nondenominational thing—started out building a church. Plain church. Simple pews, no statues, no stained-glass windows. They began in the 1840s, but it was too close to St. Paul’s and Trinity to make the powers that be happy. Anyway, it became a ‘home.’ But it was a home for believers. I think it spent about twenty years becoming an old-fashioned halfway house for the homeless, immigrants, addicts, you name it. But by the end of the last decades of the nineteenth century, spiritualism was coming heavily to the fore, and along with spiritualism, you had devil worshippers, pagan cults and all that rot. So, imagine, you’ve got the House of Spiritualism here, and the Five Points area just blocks away. Slums and a cesspool. So. They start to clean up the Five Points area, and where do you think the real crackpots are going to come? Why, right over to the House of Spiritualism.”
    Angus Avery sat back, looking pleased with himself, as if he’d solved everything.
    “And the so-called American victim of Jack the Ripper was killed in the Bowery, and again, we’re talking about a matter of blocks,” Whitney said.
    Jude spoke up. “Carrie Brown was killed in an old hotel.”
    They both looked at him, as if surprised that he was in on their conversation.
    “Yes, she was killed in a hotel room. But Jack the Ripper killed Mary Kelly in her apartment. He was better—in his own mind, I’m sure—at his task of ‘ripping’ when he had time and privacy on his side. Well, here’s the thing—and, Detective Crosby, I believe you’ll find this in old police records or in memoirs of the officers of the time—they believed that the Jack the Ripper mimic or Jack the Ripper himself found lodging at the House of Spiritualism.”
    “So you believe that by renting the location for your film shoot you awakened