Jack Daniels and Associates: Devil Baby and the House That Kills (Kindle Worlds Short Story) (Boone Childress Mysteries Book 7) Read online

  "Surprisingly," the husband said, "he was contrite. Even offered to work for free if I gave him a second chance. I turned him down."

  "That was the last you saw him?"

  The Faulks exchanged a look.

  "No," he said, "we saw him a couple weeks ago when the alarm system went off."

  "For the third time in a month," she added.

  "Explain," I said.

  "Before our budget was shot," he said, "we installed a state-of-the-art security system. Motion detectors, all that. The last time the alarm went off, I found Adam on the back porch."

  "Did you call the police?"

  "Ha!" The wife slurped her coffee. "Ha!"

  "No, Adam explained that he had left some tools behind and was back to reclaim them."

  "You believed him?"

  "Of course." He leaned against the pristine countertop. "The tools were in his hand."

  I wrote it all down. "Out of curiosity, Mr. and Mrs. Faulk, what made you choose this particular house?"

  "He inherited it," she said. "From his insane hoarder grandfather."

  The husband cleared his throat. "Humes House has been in my family for generations. When I inherited it, I decided to use my retirement to return it to glory."

  "You should've seen this place," she said. "Crammed from floor to ceiling with junk."

  "My grandfather was a bit mad about collecting."

  "Hoarding," she said.

  "What happened to all of the stuff?" I asked.

  "Some of it was donated, but most of it was dumped," he said. "We never found anything worth keeping, despite the persistent rumors that my grandfather had socked away millions in the attic."

  "No treasure, huh?"

  "Just a few coins in an old coffee can," the wife said. "None of them worth a Starbucks latte."

  I closed my notepad. "Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Faulk. I think I've heard enough."

  "What's next, Lieutenant?" he asked. "We'd like to settle this ASAP."

  "Next," I said, "I'm going to watch a little TV."

  * * *

  Like my partner had said earlier, the TV people were cooling their heels. Herb led me to the production van, where I asked the sleepy crew, "Which of you is Skipper?"

  A pudgy thirty-something with a mop of curly brown hair raised his hand. He covered a yawn. "Me."

  "I'm Lieutenant Daniels." I flashed my badge. "I need to see tonight's show."

  "It's in the other van," he said. "Follow me."

  A few minutes later, I was seated in front of a monitor. The raw footage was displayed in an editing program. The screen was split into two feeds, one outside the house and one in the attic.

  "We started filming at a quarter before midnight," Skipper said. "The crowd had at least two hundred people."

  "Why a crowd?" I asked.

  "That's the way the show works. Our fans watch the action on a Jumbotron, and we film them watching the filming. Weldon calls it meta-TV."

  "Weldon?"

  "The producer." He queued up the footage. "That's him on the screen."

  In the clip, Weldon's face popped up on the Jumbotron, and he explained the rules of the event. "If our contestant can last the night in the locked room, he will receive one thousand dollars in cash. Can he survive the onslaught of the unholy Devil Baby? Will he be victor or victim? Only the spirits can decide!"

  The crowd chanted. "Victim! Victim! Victim!"

  The logo faded. The screen filled with the image of the attic room. It was sparsely furnished with only the bed and a bottle of drinking water. That's when I noticed that the shadows on the walls didn't look kosher.

  "Pause here," I told Skipper. To the right of the bed, the wallpaper pattern was slightly off-center. Childress had been knocking on the same wall when I arrived on the scene. "Okay, let it play."

  On the screen, the feed cut to a handheld view of Stahlke being led up to the attic by Weldon. In the room, Stahlke went to the window and gave a nervous wave to the crowd.

  "Ready?" Weldon asked.

  Stahlke cracked his neck. He shook out his hands. "Ready as I'll ever be."

  "No one," Weldon said and closed the door, "is ever as ready as they think."

  A split screen showed Adam in the room. The other showed Mr. and Mrs. Faulk pressing a coin into the wax. The cameraman did a close-up on the seal.

  "Lights!" the producer yelled.

  The lights in the room went out. The crowd went quiet as Stahlke began to beat on the door. "I changed my mind! Let me out! Let me out!" The knob rattled. "The Devil Baby's going to get me!"

  The producer's face filled the screen. "Beg, plead, fall to your knees, Adam. You're locked in for the night. See you at dawn…if you survive."

  "Stop here and back it up," I told Skipper. "To the part before the lights go off."

  As the clip rewound, I watched the wall above the bed. It was marked with a black smudge the size and shape of a hand. Then in a blink, the smudge disappeared.

  Skipper rewound the clip twice more.

  Both times, the smudge disappeared.

  "Did anybody else watch this?" I asked.

  "Just you."

  "And this is the raw footage from the show tonight?"

  "Once hundred percent unedited."

  I turned to face Skipper. "You're lying to me. You swapped out the tape."

  "It wasn't my idea." He tried to swallow. "If you give me the chance, I can explain."

  "I'm listening," I said, "but if you lie to me again, you'll be in cuffs so fast, your head's going to spin faster than Linda Blair's."

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, I knocked on the producer's trailer. A frazzled-looking Weldon opened the door. I showed him my badge and invited myself in.

  "I just had a nice conversation with Skipper," I said, opening a laptop borrowed from Skipper. "There's something I want you to see."

  For a man with such a big personality on screen, Weldon was very quiet. Having a publicity stunt blow up in your face will do that.

  "What's this?" Weldon finally asked.

  "Just watch."

  The clip began playing. In feed number one, a figure appeared in the window. In feed two, Adam was sitting on the bed. Then, the power in the house surged and the lights died.

  When the lights came back on, Adam was dead.

  "I saw this already," Weldon said. "I was there."

  "But you didn't see this." I hit a button, and a third feed came up. It was from a camera aimed at the attic stairs. The wax seals were still intact, and the door hadn't been opened. An instant later, someone ran up the stairs.

  Childress.

  He was just ahead of the producer, who tackled him as they reached the locked room.

  "Stop!" Weldon yelled. "You'll ruin everything!"

  Childress easily broke free. "Give me the key! Don't make me kick it in!"

  "Good luck with that." The producer laughed. "It's solid oak."

  Childress drew back a size fifteen boot.

  "No!" Weldon said. "You can't do that!"

  "Watch me." One hard kick on the lock sent the door flying open. Inside, the cadaver lay on the bed, the knife sticking out of its back. "Well hell," the kid said, "that's sure not what I expected."

  "How dare you!" The producer pulled him out of the room. "Adam Stahlke has just been murdered on live TV, and you act like it's no big deal? Just who do you think you are?"

  "I'm Boone Childress," he said matter-of-factly. "And that is not Adam Stahlke."

  Childress had cojones, that's for sure. He also had a good eye for detail, but I spotted something he'd missed.

  I closed the laptop. "You tried very hard to stop that kid, Weldon."

  "He was going to ruin my show!"

  "The dead man inside didn't ruin it?" I said. "Or were you counting on the opposite result?"

  Weldon scratched his bedhead. It didn't help his look. "I don't follow you."

  "There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?" I said. "According
to Skipper, your show's ratings were slipping. Maybe you needed a publicity stunt to raise them. What better way than having The House That Kills actually kill somebody?"

  "I-I still don't—"

  "You're a terrible liar," I said. "You're also too stupid to thaw a cadaver before sticking a prop knife in its back."

  "You knew?"

  "As if I couldn't spot a frozen cadaver right away." I pulled out my cuffs. "You're under arrest."

  "Wait," he said. "I admit to staging the cadaver, but I didn't steal it. I bought it off some guy."

  "This guy have a name?"

  The producer shook his head. "He was a friend of a friend's cousin."

  "Doesn't matter," I said. "I've got you for possession of stolen property. Want to make it murder one?"

  "It was a stiff! Who do you think was murdered?"

  "Adam Stahlke."

  Weldon laughed. "Adam Stahlke walked out of the house right under your nose."

  He explained that he and Skipper had smuggled the body inside a false bottom under the mattress. When the lights cut out, Stahlke pulled the mattress off the top of the bed, revealing the cadaver.

  "What was the signal?" I asked him.

  "There was a special effects power line we dropped down the chimney. It was hooked to the main breaker. Adam gave it a tug, and it shorted the house's lights."

  "Sounds dangerous."

  "Not as long as you're careful."

  Not careful enough to get away with it. "What happened to Adam after he planted the cadaver?"

  "He hid in a false wall the prop guy made," Weldon said. "It was built like an accordion screen, easy to open and close. He was supposed to wait till the room was clear, then come out."

  "Pretty clever," I said. "Would've been brilliant if it had worked. Where's Adam now?"

  The producer shook his head. "In the confusion, I lost track of him. Haven't seen the bastard since."

  * * *

  Minutes later, I escorted Weldon to a squad car, where Herb read his rights. He would be riding to HQ for booking on a variety of charges, most of them minor. I didn't know if the DA's office would bother to prosecute, but it wasn't my decision to make.

  When I turned around, Childress was leaning on the car, arms crossed.

  "Catch the bad guy, Lieutenant?"

  "Maybe," I said.

  "You watched the tape?"

  "Three times. That's how I spotted the handprint."

  "How about the false wall?"

  "That, too."

  "And the wax seals? They were still intact when I opened the door, which means Stahlke never left the room."

  "Mrs. Faulk used a coin to seal the wax," I said, nodding. "It was an Indian head nickel. My grandfather used to collect those. They're valuable, but the real money is in—"

  The lights in the house flickered, then suddenly glowed brighter.

  The whole house went black.

  I grabbed Boone by the elbow. "Come on, kid. It's the moment you've been waiting for."

  The house lights came back to life as we ran to the attic. At the top of the landing, I paused to pull my .38 out of the holster, then slammed into the room.

  "Hands up, Stahlke!" I yelled.

  On his knees beside the hearth, Adam Stahlke held a long wooden box covered in soot, black powder speckling his hands and clothes. The box was attached to a length of elastic. The other end of the elastic disappeared inside the chimney. Dangling beside the elastic was the electric line that the TV crew had rigged up. Stahlke had obviously bumped it when retrieving the box, causing the lights to go out.

  "Nice job shorting the power," I told Stahlke. "It led us right to you."

  Stahlke wiped his face with a sooty hand, smearing it black.

  "That explains the smudged handprint," Childress said. "And the frayed hem on the bed sheets. You ripped the elastic out."

  "It also explains why you were so interested in the legend of Humes House," I told Stahlke. "You didn't really care about the Baby Devil."

  "Devil Baby," Stahlke and Childress said simultaneously.

  "Really, it doesn't matter," I said. "It's not real."

  "Let me guess," Childress said to Stahlke. "You heard the stories about old man Humes storing his coin collection in the attic. When the new owners wanted some construction work done, you took the job cheap so you'd have a chance to search the place."

  "But they fired you before you could find the treasure," I said. "You tried to break in three more times, but the alarm kept going off."

  "Freaking alarm," Stahlke muttered.

  "When you heard about The House That Kills filming, you paid off your old buddy Skipper to rig the voting, offering him part of the money when you found the goods," I said. "Then Weldon complicated things with the cadaver, so you knew you had to work fast. The two of you came in the night before to shoot extra footage, which Skipper inserted into the video feed tonight."

  "While the audience was watching the fake footage, you were searching for old man Humes' coin collection," Boone said. "You finally found it in the fireplace. Only you had just minutes to spare before you knew the big reveal was coming. You stripped the elastic out of the sheet, tied one end inside the chimney, and another to the box. You let go of the box and voila."

  "It hid itself nicely out of the way so you could retrieve it," I said. "Which you planned to do, until Mr. Childress reappeared, and you couldn't chance grabbing it."

  "That's a nice story," Adam said as he stood. "That's all it is, a story. You got nothing on me. This box is my property. I left it here when I hung the wallpaper, and I came back to get it."

  "Your property?" Childress said. "What's inside?"

  "Tools."

  "Drop the box," I said and lifted my .38. "Don't make me say it twice."

  Sighing because he had no other option, Stahlke let the box slip onto the hearth. It landed with a crack. The lock broke open, and the contents spilled out.

  Dozens of coins rolled across the floor, scattering in all directions.

  Stahlke hung his head.

  "Nice tools," I said.

  A coin bumped into Childress's boot. He picked it up. "A Liberty Head V nickel. 1913," he said. "That's a nice coin."

  "Nice is an understatement," I said. That one coin alone was worth millions. "The owners won't be going bankrupt any time soon."

  "Hey, Jack," Herb said, gasping for breath as he hauled himself up the final steps. "What did I miss?"

  "Only the best part." I cuffed Stahlke as Childress gathered up the other coins. "You know, kid, it would've saved a lot of time if you had just spilled the beans in the beginning."

  "If I had, you wouldn't have believed me," he said. "Besides, what's the fun in that?"

  THE END