Krewe of Hunters 8 The Uninvited Read Online Free PDF

throat.
    Julian Mitchell had returned to the
Tarleton-Dandridge House.

2
    T yler Montague’s first impression of
Allison Leigh was not a good one.
    But then, the woman had apparently been at the house where a
friend had died—either accidentally or through a very bizarre form of murder—for
hours before coming down to the police station to deal with more paperwork.
    She hadn’t been accused of murder,
not yet. Probably because the police and the pathologists couldn’t quite figure
out how a woman her size could have managed it. Julian Mitchell had been big,
tall, well-muscled. For her to have dealt with the weapon and the man would have been a nearly impossible feat.
    She had dark hair, so sleek and deep a brown, it appeared
black. He assumed she’d started the evening with her hair neatly tied back but
now it was tumbling down around her shoulders beneath an
eighteenth-century-style mobcap. Allison was dressed in the daily wear of an
upscale Revolutionary-era citizen—a robe à l’Anglaise, he believed they called
the gown—and looked exhausted. She was seated at a table in one of the
interrogation rooms, a cup of coffee in front of her, and when he arrived, she
had her head down on one arm.
    “Ms. Leigh knows you’re coming to talk to her,” a quiet voice
said at his side.
    Tyler turned to look at Adam Harrison. Adam had to be close to
eighty, but he walked with the ease of a much younger man and stood straight as
a poker. His eyes were a very gentle blue, showing signs of a smoky color that
might have come from his age. He had snow-white hair, and his suit was casual
and in impeccable taste. He’d arranged for Tyler’s Krewe to be called in because
of Ethan Oxford, an old friend of Adam’s with whom he’d served on many
philanthropic boards over the years.
    Adam Harrison was the reason Tyler had left a career with the
Texas Rangers to join this extremely unusual unit of the FBI.
    Tyler didn’t know everything about
Adam Harrison; he didn’t think anyone did. But Adam seemed to have friends
everywhere. A call from him and a rough road could be easily traveled. But then,
years before Tyler and his Krewe had ever met the man, Adam Harrison had been
putting the right people in the right circumstances. And while other government
agencies might consider the Krewe units as something completely separate and
even an embarrassment at times, they were respected for their prowess. They had
yet to fail when it came to finding the truth in any of their
investigations.
    “And she knows who I am?” Tyler asked.
    Harrison shrugged. “She knows you’re FBI.”
    “She must be ready to crawl the walls. It took me a little over
three hours to drive in from northern Virginia, and we didn’t receive your call
until an hour or so after the body was discovered.” He checked his watch. “It’s
after midnight.”
    Harrison sighed, shuffling his feet slightly. “The police were
left with no recourse, really. There was the dead man. There was the woman who
called it in. Tour groups had been at the house all evening, along with a couple
of other docents, and when Ms. Leigh dialed 9-1-1, she was the only one on the
premises. She was shaken when they got there. With a death of this nature, you
have to be suspicious of anyone in her situation. The sad thing is that I
believe she’s entirely innocent. And she’s just lost
a colleague.”
    Tyler saw that Harrison’s empathy for the young woman was
strong.
    “Did she suggest a ghost killed him?” Tyler asked
skeptically.
    Harrison didn’t look at him; he continued to look through the
one-way glass at the young woman. “No. Ms. Leigh—technically Dr. Leigh—is a
professor, historian and scholar. She teaches history at the university, except
that she’s off for the summer. She also writes papers. Even when she’s teaching,
she gives tours at the house, but the point is—she does not believe in ghosts.”
He spoke with a grimace. Her feelings on that might change in the