Free Witch's Canyon by Jeff Mariotte

place?”
    “Some over there, across the street. Good one right outside one of their windows, like someone raising up on tiptoes to look in.”
    “Figure that’s our geezer?”
    “That’s my guess.”
    “I had a call on my way over,” Beckett said. “Another sighting of the old man, less than a block away from here. I drove around for a couple minutes,
    didn’t see anything, and I don’t have enough bodies available for a full-on search.”
    “You think he’s looking for another victim?”
    “At this point, I don’t necessarily like him for the murder at all. Like you said, he’s got a gun. This lady wasn’t shot. I don’t know what opened her up, but that’s no bullet hole.”
    Trace fell silent. That was okay with Beckett. He didn’t want to have to think, but sometimes there was just no avoiding it. Mayor Milner didn’t want anything getting in the way of the mall opening, and he understood Milner’s position.
    But a man didn’t live for a long time in Cedar Wells without hearing whispers of a murder cycle, 74 SUPERNATURAL
    as that young reporter had called it. Especially when he made his living in law enforcement. People talked about it after a few drinks over at the Plugged Bucket, or at backyard barbecues in the summer when the beer came out of ice-filled coolers and the smoke was thick and nobody listened to anyone else’s conversation. And sometimes a sheriff could just be walking down the street and one of the town’s oldsters would call him over, summon him with that imperious attitude the truly ancient sometimes assumed when dealing with whippersnappers who were merely in their forties or fifties, and whisper to him that it was this year, wasn’t it? Come summer, or spring, or whenever they got it in their head the fortieth an-niversary was, people would start to die again. That, finally, was what had convinced him that it was all a local legend—the fact that none of the people who had been adults here forty years before seemed to agree on when it was supposed to happen.
    If he was wrong, though—if it was real, and the forty years was up, and it was all beginning again—
    then he would be in for a bad week or two, however long it would last. And opening a mall during that time would be a heroically bad idea. Bad enough when there were a few victims spread around the area. How much worse might it be if there were several thousand inside the mall, and whoever or whatever was behind the murder spree decided to try some kind of terrorist stunt? A bomb, a small plane flown into the mall, something like that. The death Witch’s
    Can
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    count could easily rise into the hundreds in a matter of minutes.
    The thing was, could he convince the mayor and the mall management to call it off?
    Not without more evidence than he had so far.
    He had to find that old man. Or the soldier from the mall parking lot. Or whatever had torn up Ralph McCaig. Ideally, they were all the same guy. Jailing one man was a lot easier than jailing a figment or a legend.

    NINE
    Mrs. Frankel, the silver-coiffed librarian, wore perfume just musky enough to make Dean wonder if she had a secret life. He and Sam had returned to the library after their mall visit, with a different goal in mind than last time. Before, they had been in search of information about the previous episodes of unexplained murders, in 1926 and 1966. This time they wanted to find out if the old soldier was the spirit of someone who bore a grudge against the town.
    The fact that neither of them were familiar enough with military uniforms to know precisely when the soldier might have lived would, they realized, make the quest somewhat diffi cult. Hence the up-close-and-personal conversation with Mrs. Frankel.
    “I’m surprised the Geographic is so interested in the minutiae of our history,” she said when Dean explained what they needed.
    “Our readers are an inquisitive bunch,” Sam said.
    Witch’s
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    “The more interesting