“Tell me more about the man.”

Her eyes opened. They were enormous and green, with a dazed light in them. She earnestly told him, “It was the Axeman, exactly as the stories about him go. He was big, his hat was big and low, and he was dressed in a long trench coat of some kind. His face...was dark, as if shadowed, but the hat was so low... I thought I saw his eyes. They were red, and they blazed, and when he heard me talking...heard the emergency operator...he took off. He was just gone.”

“He ran back down the stairs?”

“I—I don’t know. He was gone.”

A big man. Tall and sturdy, and delighting in the fact he was taking on the persona of a long-dead killer. He’d had others do his killing before, but here...now...in New Orleans, he was embracing the legend himself.

Dan thanked her and tried to assure her that she and her family would be okay.

He didn’t want to be a liar. He had no idea if her brother and sister-in-law would make it.

But there, in the ambulance, encouragement seemed the best. The EMT nodded at him.

When they reached the hospital, Dan leaped out and called Axel immediately to tell him what he had learned. “Did you find anything?” Dan asked.

“Well, maybe,” Axel said.

She was a civilian. Katie understood that perfectly. Dan had gone off in the ambulance. Axel and Andre and Ryder were in the house with the crime-scene investigators.

She leaned against one of the patrol cars surveying the CSI, police, and federal vehicles drawn in on the lawn. Crime-scene tape had been set up around the house.

Officers were canvasing the crowd that had gathered and going door-to-door.

It was daytime. Someone had to have seen something.

She was restless. Everyone was busy, doing something.

No one thought she should be alone now; they thought she needed to be protected at all times. That wasn’t a bad thing.

In the middle of the crowd, she saw a woman.

No one else seemed to see her, though a few started as she went by, as if they’d felt a bug or something brush their skin.

It was Mabel. She was watching the scene, too.

Then she saw Katie.

With a grim expression, she made her way to the back of the patrol car where Katie was leaning.

“I know you can’t respond or talk to me with all these people around,” Mabel told her. “But I’ve been going through this crowd, listening. And there’s a little girl out there who saw him. She saw the man running out of the house. She said he looked like a giant Darkwing Duck. All in black, and he dropped something as he exited the house.”

Katie lowered her head and spoke softly. “The axe he used. They found it by the front steps.”