Final Fantasy VI - The Haunting of Vector Hall [2/3]
Title: The Haunting of Vector Hall.
Author: Shaded Mazoku.
Email: shadedmazoku@gmail.com
Part: 2/3.
Disclaimer: The characters and large parts of the setting belong to Square Enix. I earn nothing from this except the satisfaction of getting to tell the story.
Warnings: Character death, some gore and violence.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Retired soldier Leo Christophe rents the secluded Vector Hall for a year, trying to sort himself out after leaving the army. Before long, he comes to learn that a horrible murder once happened in the house, but even after hearing the same story over and over, he can't help but feel that there is something more to what happened. As he digs deeper into the grisly story, Leo discovers a web of lies and deception, a truth worse than the story he had been told, and a plot that might claim his life as well.
And then, there are the ghosts. The ghosts who laugh maniacally in the dead of night to keep him awake, who delight in finding just the right way to bring his worst memories to the surface, and who are his best bet in unravelling a mystery that goes much deeper than just the murder.
He came to Vector Hall to find peace and quiet. Instead, he has found a mystery that threatens to destroy him as it has destroyed so many others, and the best chance he has is a ghost who only wants to see everything torn apart.
Pairing(s): Kefka/Leo.
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI.
Words: 9675.
Notes: It's done! This fic has eaten my soul. Or maybe that was just Kefka. Anyway, it's done now! I hoped to have it done for Hallowe'en, but that didn't happen. I've been wanting to write this fic for two years now, so thanks to Mega Flare for giving me a reason to just write it already.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
When he woke from yet another nightmare the next morning, Leo wasn't even surprised. He just sighed and looked up at the ceiling, counting the boards until his breathing calmed down, then dragged himself into the shower for a quick wash. There had been a time when he'd enjoyed getting out of bed, but then, there had also been a time where he'd been able to sleep without having nightmares.
One somewhat hurried breakfast later, Leo got in the car and drove to a spot just outside Albrook. It was still too early for shopping, but the sun was up, so he parked the car there and went for the long walk he'd promised himself he'd take. He spent hours walking, trying to disconnect his brain as he did so. There was a nice little lake a good distance away, and he took a break there, just enjoying the peace and quiet. If he was going to make these walks a habit, he should start bringing a Thermos of something warm to drink with him. It was only going to get colder from now on, after all.
He wasn't back in the town until it was a little past noon, feeling a lot better than he had the night before. He'd always enjoyed walking. Back when he'd been freshly recruited, he'd probably been the only one in the squad who'd enjoyed the long marches. Walking never failed to clear his mind, though, so he walked a lot, especially when under stress.
Albrook had a small hardware store, a couple of buildings over from the grocery store. The man running it was happy to help Leo find what he needed to fix the broken staircase, and some extra material so he could replace the remaining steps before those, too, broke. He didn't feel like falling into the basement more than once. It was a wonder he hadn't broken something, considering just how steep the stairs were.
He tossed the supplies in the back and drove back to Vector Hall. There was a large lantern hanging on the wall outside, and he brought that inside, putting a candle into it. The light in the basement was terrible, and every extra light source helped.
Once he'd carefully climbed down into the basement and had gotten his supplies down, Leo began removing the step that had broken, but paused as he noticed something. Though the wood was old, it was solid, showing no sign of rot or damage. It had simply snapped clean in half, seemingly for no real reason. Tapping it with a hammer produced the same results. The wood was solid all the way through. He frowned.
It was possible, of course, that he had hit just the right point to cause it to shatter, but he somehow doubted that.
Whatever the reason was, it was easier to fix the broken step than to try figuring out just why it had broken in the first place.
That seemed to be much the theme of Vector Hall, really.
If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn the place was haunted.
By the time evening came around, Leo still hadn't gotten a response from Vector. Not that a day was that long to wait, but Vector had always been quick to respond to his previous mails. Of course, the subject probably made the latest mail a lot more difficult to reply to. Leo did feel a little bad about dredging up old memories, but he needed to know why he hadn't been told about the murder. He certainly understood why the man might have chosen to say nothing. A murder, especially one with a story like the one this house had seen, was not a good selling point when trying to rent out a house, but there were a lot of ways not sharing such information could backfire. A more delicate, or more cynical, person might even have tried to sue for emotional distress. It wasn't the strangest thing he'd ever heard of someone suing for.
Leo had no plans to sue anyone, but if he'd known about the murder in advance, he wouldn't have chosen to rent the place. He was supposed to take a year's sabbatical and relax, to recover from what the specialists had diagnosed as everything from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder and as everything from a minor inconvenience to a severe psychological disability. Being isolated in a house with only the ghost for a murder for company, making him obsess over a long-since solved case was not a good thing in any way. He'd always been prone to getting very caught up in things that fascinated him, approaching them with the single-minded purpose that had made him such a good strategist.
The whole story around the murder was a puzzle where they'd just solved the framework and left the middle bit unsolved, and it was calling to him on so many levels. He'd always enjoyed puzzles, and he was usually very good at them, too, but this had him somewhat stumped. On one hand, as far as the authorities were concerned, the case was solved and over with. It was a tragedy, but the killer was as dead as the victim and there was nothing more to be done. On the other hand, Leo had only been aware of the case for a few days, and he was no trained investigator, but he was already finding several things that just didn't add up at all. It was almost as the case had been closed as soon as possible because everyone had wanted to believe that Palazzo was the killer. That, or someone had gone out of their way to get it closed quickly.
It was almost enough to make Leo wish he knew how to hack into databases. He'd have liked to see the autopsy reports on both Terra and Palazzo, because he had a very strong feeling that one of the most important pieces he was missing in his puzzle lay there.
As he crawled into bed, he decided he'd have to make some phone calls in the morning.
*
He wasn't even surprised when he woke from yet another nightmare. Once again, it was fuelled by his memories, but they were slowly changing, subtly becoming something else. He'd reached for an injured woman in the burning town, who he knew had been Iraqi in reality, but as she turned towards him, terrified, it had been Terra Branford's face he'd seen.
The house was getting to him, he reflected, and went downstairs for breakfast, not bothering to get dressed. He had the house to himself; if he wanted to wander the halls without wearing more than sweatpants, that was his choice.
He fried up some eggs and bacon for breakfast, eating it with toast as he went through his address book, looking for a number. When he found it, he pulled out his phone and made a call to an old friend of his. The man had been a code breaker for the army, but had gotten dishonourably discharged after getting caught hacking into places he shouldn't have been. Only the fact that none of the information he'd gotten could be used for personal or financial gain had kept him from getting a court-martial. That, charm and luck. Lack of decent morals aside, Locke Cole was very good with computers, especially when it came to gathering information he wasn't supposed to have, and he was Leo's best hope of learning more about the case. A quick conversation later, Cole had promised to find him copies of the autopsy reports, as well as the current address of Dr. Cid del Norte Marguez, if there was a current address.
It was, if nothing else, a small hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery before it drove him crazy. Since he'd come there to avoid going crazy, Leo certainly hoped his friend could find something he could use.
He doubted he'd be getting much peace until he could convince himself that the case was closed.
Sighing, he carried the dishes from breakfast into the kitchen, dumping them into the sink until later. He was still carrying his phone, as there was another call he wanted to try making, though he had no idea what he was going to say. He didn't think calling anyone up and asking them if, by any chance, they'd covered up a murder three years ago and retreated from public to avoid further scrutiny.
Leaning on the counter, he found Vector's number in the phone's address book and hit the call button.
The phone rang seven times before someone picked it up.
"Mr. Gestahl Vector's residence. May I help you?" It was a female voice, tinny and sounding bored.
Leo shifted a little. He didn't really know what to say, but retreating now was not an option. "This is Leo Christophe," he identified himself, reminding himself that he didn't have a title any more. "I'm renting Vector Hall, and I'd like to talk to Mr. Vector about something, if possible."
The woman didn't sound too interested. "I'll go see if he's taking any calls. Please stay on the line." There was a dull sound as she presumably put the phone down on a desk.
It took a long while before she picked it back up. "He will talk to you. Please hold."
"I will," Leo began, just as the phone shattered in his hand, sharp bits embedding themselves in his skin.
Staring at his hand in complete disbelief, he almost didn't notice the drawers and cupboards all beginning rattling ominously, like a train was driving straight past the house with no clearance to the house at all. Only when the drawers seemed to vibrate their way out of their enclosures did he realise something was seriously wrong. As the kitchen erupted in a shower of cutlery, shards of porcelain and splintered wood, his instincts kicked in and he dove for the door, managing somehow to avoid most of the projectiles. He got a few cuts and splinters, but the most severe damage he'd sustained was from the broken phone. The inside of his hand was raw from the multitude of cuts he'd gotten.
Covering his head with his arm, Leo stayed down, covered by the door, until the kitchen seemed to have calmed down. He waited for a while after that to be on the safe side, before slowly getting too his feet, surveying the ruined kitchen. The once so cosy kitchen had been reduced to a heap of splinters and broken tableware, a few knives and forks wobbling precariously on top of the mess before dropping down like discarded toys.
He was a man of reason. His craft had been entirely wrought from logical, calculated thinking and from surveillance over long periods of time. There was no room in his world for anything he didn't have empirical evidence for, yet he was standing in what had been a perfectly serviceable room only moments before, wreckage all around him. The kitchen looked like a hurricane had hit it, yet the rest of the house was entirely untouched. Vaguely, he remembered hearing theories that ball lightening could cause similar effects, but there were no burning wood or scorched areas, the way he'd expected to see if there had been lightening involved.
The shiver that ran down his back wasn't at all related to the lack of central heating.
Leo didn't believe in the supernatural. Like most people, he knew of the stories. He remembered seeing Poltergeist as a child, his friends and he had sneaked the film from a friend's brother and watched it without permission. As a result, he'd been terrified of televisions and his closet for months. It was hard not to draw parallels between ghost stories and what had just happened in the kitchen, but there was no way he could believe that there were ghosts in the house.
They did say that the people who became ghosts were the people who'd died unhappy, which would give Vector Hall a good reason to have ghosts, but he was sure there was a better explanation for what had just happened. He just didn't have any ideas as to what that could be. In the past, he'd experienced bombs going off, earthquakes, sandstorms and he had watched hurricanes from a safe distance, but none of them came anywhere close to behaving like that. The closest thing he'd seen was actually a home-made nail bomb, which did tend to go off in a shower of shrapnel, but he'd never seen one using an entire kitchen's worth of tableware and cutlery as a nail-substitute before. It was, of course, entirely possible for someone to rig a room to explode provided the right supplies and expertise, but he should have noticed anything like that when he'd cleaned the kitchen.
Though if he had overlooked it, it was possible it was a sort of booby-trap left behind from whatever events had happened in the house those three years ago. If he was going to go for the theory that Palazzo was the murderer, the man had apparently been insane, but also seemingly quite intelligent, and it wasn't at all unlikely that he could have managed to build some sort of explosive device that would go off at a later point in time, a sort of landmine as a last legacy. If he was going to go with his gut feeling and assume that maybe someone else had been involved, they might have created a trap to keep people from staying around and investigating. The old adage about two keeping a secret if one of them was dead came to mind.
Of course, if there was a trap in the kitchen, that meant there could be traps anywhere.
Leaving the ruined kitchen behind, Leo went and found the first aid kit he'd brought with him, getting pincers, antiseptic wipes and gauze to fix up his hand and his other cuts. Once that was done, he began looking through the other rooms for anything at all suspicious. He didn't find anything, which only made him more unsettled. For all he knew, his bedroom could be rigged to explode. They could all be.
In the end, he ended up bringing all his important belongings up into the attic. From what little he knew of Palazzo, he didn't seem the kind who'd booby trap his own private area. At least not the room itself. Maybe the door, to keep people out, but from what he had read in his journal, the man had been very proud of all his creations, and pretty much everything in Palazzo's room seemed to be custom-made. If it had been someone else who'd rigged the kitchen, they wouldn't have been able to get up here, or so Leo assumed, since the door had apparently been locked since the day of the murder. Either way, the attic room seemed like the safest bet right then.
He should call the police. He knew that. There was something entirely wrong about the whole situation, and the best thing he could do was to hand it over to someone who actually knew what they were doing. However, he also strongly suspected the local police of having been involved in whatever cover-up had happened after the murder, and he didn't have enough proof of anything to call in higher authorities.
When it all came down to the basics, Leo simply didn't know who to trust, but he did know that neither Vector nor the local police were even on the list. For now, he decided to wait to do anything else until he'd heard from Cole, and read up a little more on the case.
He brought his duster and the vacuum cleaner and cleared most of the dust from the room, discovering strange symbols painted all over the floor in a sort of circular pattern. He'd never seen the pattern before, but he assumed it was something Palazzo had designed. The man's designs had a general asymmetrical and spiralling style to it that was quite pleasant to the eye, in a kind of Tim Burton-esque way. The patterns crept off of the floor and wound their way up the walls, becoming tree branches and elaborate designs. Leo ran a hand along one of the branches, careful not to do anything to damage the paint. It was beautiful, in that eerie and not quite right way that he was learning had seemingly been Palazzo's trademark.
There was a flicker of gold and red in the corner of his eyes, followed by an almost inaudible thud.
Leo turned away from the painted scene to see nothing at all, except a book lying in the middle of the floor. He walked up to it and picked it up, almost willing to swear it hadn't been there a moment ago. There were shelves all over the room, even spread across the ceiling. The book must have fallen from one of those, he guessed. It was a large book, an old hard-cover book that was almost as thick as it was long, and so heavy the cover had to have real wood as a core. It was probably one of the better books to have fall off of something; the entire thing seemed so solid it could probably have been used to beat someone to death without taking any real damage itself. Finding an empty spot on a shelf where it wasn't likely to drop on him, he placed it carefully next to what seemed to be a series of Italian cook books, and wondered if it was too early to go to bed.
It was, technically speaking. It still wasn't much past noon, but Leo felt exhausted, like something was draining his energy. Explosions tended to have that effect on him. At the moment of action, his body pumped a really large dose of adrenaline through his system, and when he came off of that, he always felt drained. It might have been a little early for him to actually go to bed for the evening, but he decided a short nap wouldn't hurt. Since it was just a nap, he didn't bother getting undressed, just retrieved his alarm clock and set it to ring in a little over two hours, before curling up on Palazzo's massive cherry wood bed, the red surrounding him like a cocoon as he fell asleep.
When he woke again, it was immediately clear that he'd overslept. The sky outside the window was dark, as was the room, and his alarm had apparently fallen over and knocked its batteries out. He sat up, very aware that it was the first time in a very long time he'd woken up without having had a nightmare. Instead, he'd dreamt about Terra, walking with him on the forest paths outside Albrook, watching him with big, sad eyes every time he'd turned. He'd have expected to see her frightened, considering what he knew of her history, but she hadn't seemed afraid. Just sad and worried.
Checking his wrist watch, he decided it was pointless to try going back to sleep. The sun would be up in another hour and a half, and he'd slept for over twelve hours. He doubted he'd be able to go back to sleep, even if he'd wanted to.
He didn't quite feel like getting out of bed just yet, though, so he laid back down, staring up at the ceiling. Like everything else in the room, it had patterns painted on it, a labyrinthine city-scape that put Escher to shame when it came to impossible architecture. He had to wonder what Palazzo had been like in life. All accounts seemed to paint him as a raving mad killer, but the impressions he got from the journal was that, at least up until the day of the murder, he'd been a highly intelligent man. Eccentric, yes, and probably a little mad by most people's standards, but certainly not a rambling lunatic. They'd probably have hated each other had they met, Leo guessed. Their personalities seemed widely different in pretty much every way. Still, it took a special kind of mind to come up with the almost vaguely familiar yet very alien landscape that covered most of the bedroom's walls. Like the phoenix in the bathroom, there were still spots that were clearly unfinished, and Leo wished he'd had the skill to finish them up. It didn't seem right that they should go abandoned, no matter what else had happened there.
Eventually, he dragged himself out of bed and got his laptop, carefully cleaning off a spot on the desk to put it on. He was very grateful that Vector Hall had wireless internet right then. It meant he didn't have to go downstairs until he needed to brave the kitchen to see what was left of his food supplies. The pantry was partially separated from the kitchen proper, so presumably, there was a decent chance he still had his dry food stuffs.
There was a mail from his hacker friend waiting for him in his mailbox. Apparently, Cole had tried calling, but after what had happened to Leo's phone, he wasn't able to get hold of anyone.
Making a note to buy a new phone, relieved that he'd managed to keep a hold of the sim card through the whole mess with the kitchen, Leo leaned forwards and began reading the autopsy reports.
Terra had died from acute poisoning after having been forcibly fed a mixture of alcohol and a cocktail of various medication. It was a horrible way for anyone to die, and Terra's young age just made it worse, but bizarrely, the knowledge did actually reassure Leo a little. As the pictures he'd found had shown, and the autopsy reports confirmed it, Terra was actually marginally taller than Palazzo, taller and heavier. It wouldn't have been possible for Palazzo to overtake her without a struggle. The pictures in the report were disturbing, but they showed something he thought he'd noticed in the pictures on the mantel. Palazzo had kept his nails unusually long and sharp. If Terra has struggled, which most people would in a situation like that, she should have had scratches, or at least bruises, but there wasn't a mark on her body. The police report clearly stated that she'd been held down and force-fed the poison that had killed her.
Palazzo's autopsy showed that he'd had a lot of the same drugs in his blood at the time of death, though without the alcohol. Even without mixing the medication with alcohol, though, the presence of seven different drugs in his system, all in alarmingly high dosages, would at least slow him down and make him sluggish. Too sluggish to easily force drugs down Terra's throat. His official cause of death was a slit throat, which, as far as Leo knew, was actually a very difficult thing to do to oneself. At least with a lethal result. He'd seen people with their throats cut, and the depth needed to kill was pretty amazing, in an utterly morbid way.
According to the police report, no weapon had been found near Palazzo's body, either, and unlikely as it was that he had managed to cut his own throat while drugged, it was even more unlikely that he cut his throat, then hid the weapon so well it was never found. The report also had a copy of all the drug prescriptions Palazzo had been given at the time, and those only accounted for three of the seven drugs found in their bodies.
Leo's suspicions that someone had covered up something else and used Palazzo's insanity as a scapegoat. The police report confirmed that Palazzo was, in fact, diagnosed with schizophrenia, but that up until that fateful day, he'd been functioning well as long as he took his medication. The case had been closed suddenly, the report said, as "all evidence pointed to a murder-suicide". Leo had to disagree with that statement.
The woman in the store had said that Palazzo died in his room, after having tried painting it with his blood, but though there were few places in Palazzo's room that weren't painted, there had been no sign of blood or anything like that, and the key had been hidden, presumably by Palazzo himself. Leo supposed there might be another key, and that Vector had locked the room afterwards, but it still seemed very strange.
Something more than just a horrible tragedy had happened in this house, and though it was entirely possibly Palazzo had been involved somehow, Leo didn't believe for a moment that the explanation that he went psychotic and killed Terra and then himself was all there was to the case.
His friend's other piece of information might help him shed some light on the situation.
Dr. Marguez and his granddaughter lived in a town two hours' drive away, under assumed names. Leo needed to talk to them. Apart from Vector, they were the only ones that had even the faintest clue about what had happened here, and he didn't trust Vector not to be somehow involved. The man had enough money and power to cover up just about anything. He could definitely have gotten away with murder, had he been so inclined.
*
After a brief stop to buy a new phone to replace the one he'd broken, Leo carefully navigated his way through the town's streets to the apartment building the address he had for the good doctor and his granddaughter belonged to. It was a very different feel there than in Vector Hall, a busy building with people all around and little privacy. It wasn't unlike the building Leo's own apartment was in, in fact, filled with small apartments and thin walls that didn't hold onto heat or sound.
He found the door he was looking for and knocked, putting his hands in his pockets as he waited. The building was draughtier than Vector Hall was.
A tall young woman opened the door, looking at him expectantly. The latest picture of Celes Chere had been taken four years ago, but she was still instantly recognizable. Time hadn't changed her much, except maybe hardened her edges a little, a grown woman's features on someone who was still, after all, a teenager. She looked him over, from head to toe and back up, and Leo could almost feel her assessing him silently.
"Can I help you?" She finally asked, folding her arms across her chest impatiently. Everything in her stance seemed to speak volumes about how unimpressed she was.
Leo found that he instinctively liked her. She had an attitude he'd last seen on one of his fellow army officers. "I'm looking for Dr. Mark," he told her, using the false name Marguez was currently using. "Just doing some research and I thought maybe he could help me."
Often, partial truths got him much further than lies did.
This seemed to be one of those times, as Celes stepped aside to let him inside. She led him to a small living room, where a man was sitting on the couch, a blanket around him. He didn't look well, pale and haggard in comparison to the picture, but it was definitely Marguez.
Celes brought them a pot of coffee and some cups and left them to their own devices, with a warning to Leo not to tax her grandfather too much.
"She takes good care of you," Leo observed, pouring coffee for them both.
Marguez nodded and took the cup Leo offered him. "She's a sweet girl like that," he agreed. "Works herself half to death to afford my medication." He sipped his coffee and leaned back. "But I don't think you're here to talk about my granddaughter."
Leo shook his head. "No, I'm not," he confirmed. "I came to ask you about what really happened at Vector Hall."
If possible, Marguez got even paler, his hands beginning to shake. Carefully, he put his cup down on the table. "You're asking me a lot, then," he said. "If you knew even half the things that happened at that place..." He trailed off.
"I know enough to know I need to know more," Leo said. "I've rented the place from Mr. Vector, but he neglected to tell me about the history of the house."
"You live there?" Marguez sounded entirely too shocked for there not to be a long story behind it all. "How long have you been there?"
A bit surprised at the urgency in the man's voice, Leo actually had to think for a moment. It hadn't even been a week yet, but it felt like it'd been years. "Almost a week," he finally answered.
Looking up at Leo, Marguez's eyes held a strange emotion as he spoke. "Then Gestahl is still trying to use our research," he said, sounding sad and resigned. "I had hoped he'd learned, but his greed has far surpassed his sense of right and wrong."
As he was about to continue, Marguez collapsed into a violent coughing fit. He reached for a bottle on the table, but knocked it over. Leo caught it before it fell to the floor and handed it to the older man, who uncorked it and took a deep sip. Slowly, his cough died down.
"Thank you," Marguez said, leaning back again. "What do you know already? The story is a lot more convoluted than it seems, at first."
Pulling his chair a bit closer to the table, Leo took a deep breath, and began talking. He told Marguez everything he could think of; how he didn't think that the murder had happened the way the police reports claimed, and that he wasn't even convinced of the murderer's identity, that there was something odd still happening at the house, and that he knew about the tension between Vector and Palazzo. It felt good to get it all out into the open.
"Kefka," Marguez said, closing his eyes as he spoke, "Was never a nice person. I don't doubt he'd be capable of murder. He was cruel and vicious to people for no reason. However, in his own way, I think he did care about Terra, though I suspect it was occasionally more a case of a man caring about his favourite pet than any sense of family he might have had towards her."
From what Leo had read in Palazzo's journal, he could easily believe that. Everything there was written with a sense of uttermost cynicism to it. Palazzo hadn't seemed to like anyone much, honestly.
"We did horrible things to Kefka and Terra both," Marguez continued. "I was a genetic engineer, once. That was why Gestahl hired me. He'd read some theories about what you could do with the right kind of gene therapy, and had such grand plans, but he needed someone to help him make those plans into reality, and he needed test subjects. I was easily bought. Funding for research was so hard to come by, and Gestahl promised me all the money I could need. The test subjects were harder to find, at least the first one, but then, one day, Gestahl brought this strange young man home with him, claiming he'd volunteered. I never did get to know what he'd promised Kefka to get him to sell his soul like that, but it probably wasn't money."
He took a pause to sip his coffee and take a deep breath before going on.
"The tests didn't go so well. Kefka was too old, really, for such gene therapy not to be damaging to him. The body is far less pliable once you've reached adulthood. I guess I'll never know whether his schizophrenia was latent in him, and the tests merely brought it out, or if what we did to him caused it. Whatever it was, I tried to explain to Gestahl, only to have him leave and come back a few weeks later with a pair of young orphan girls. He probably bought them off of whoever should have been caring for them." He sighed. "I'm sad to say that I didn't hesitate much to use children as lab rats. I had different plans for what we were doing. Gestahl wanted to use the experiment for more power. I just wanted to see if I could do it."
Leo nodded. He didn't really understand, but he saw no point in arguing with an obviously sick man.
Marguez pulled his blankets closer around himself. "The girls grew up in Vector Hall, and when they got older, the townspeople took notice, so we needed a legal reason to have them. I adopted Celes as my granddaughter. It seemed more right than to make her my daughter, for some reason. Originally, Gestahl was going to do the same with Terra, but he had people who watched him at the time, and who'd get suspicious about her origins, so eventually, we had Kefka appointed her legal custodian. He was old enough to be her father, if just barely, but he thought custodian sounded better, and nobody felt like arguing. Despite everything, though, I think the girls were happy enough as children."
"Kefka scared me," Celes stated, as she came into the room and sat down next to her grandfather. "He was cruel, and had a way of looking at you like he was seeing right through you and nothing was hidden. Terra was sort of scared of him, too, but not like I was. And he was never truly cruel to her, just very strict. He loved dressing her up like a doll, and praised her for her obedience."
She shivered a little, but clearly tried hard to suppress it. "There was a boy in our school who loved to pick on Terra, because she was so quiet and pensive. It got really bad, and then, one week, Terra refused to leave her room. She'd curled up with her cat and just cried. After three days of that, Kefka sought the boy out and told him something. I have no idea what it was, but he never came anywhere near Terra again. His father tried asking what Kefka had done to his son, but Kefka just stared at him until he went away. He was fiercely protective of Terra."
"Neither of you think he killed her?" Leo asked. Even if he hadn't already been suspecting that Palazzo had been framed somehow, their stories would have made him consider it.
"I don't doubt he'd be capable of murder," Celes said, patting her grandfather's trembling hand soothingly. "But no, I don't think he killed Terra."
Leo sighed. "That is the impression I've gotten, too." Both that Palazzo had been capable of murder and that he probably hadn't killed Terra.
Nothing about this case seemed to line up. He almost understood why the police had been so willing to close the case even with as many contrasting pieces of evidence as there were. If someone with a bit of money and power had thrown his weight around, the police would probably have been happy to give up the case. It just didn't seem to have a clear solution at all.
"Have you any idea what really happened, then?" He asked, looking at Marguez. The man was looking even worse now, and Leo didn't want to bother him much longer. As much as he didn't agree with what Marguez and Gestahl had been doing, he didn't really think there was any point in antagonizing Marguez for it. He doubted the man had that much longer to live, even with his granddaughter's care.
Marguez shook his head. "I don't, no. Sorry."
He hadn't really expected anything else, but Leo still thanked the doctor for his time. He might not be any closer to getting the truth about what happened, but he was at least getting better at separating the facts from the lies. Thanking Marguez and Celes both for their time, he got to his feet.
As Leo was on his way out, Marguez grabbed his hand. His grip was terribly weak, but it was strong enough to get his attention.
"Vector Hall has many skeletons in its closets, Mr. Christophe," he said. "Some of which, I suspect, are literally so. Did you know that Gestahl had Kefka buried in the gardens there? He had no family, and Terra was his next of kin, but Gestahl called in some favours and obtained a permit to hold a private funeral, since the property is so far away from any neighbours." He chuckled weakly, but it quickly evolved into a cough. "So many secrets are buried there; in the house and the grounds around it. You might want to go digging for truths."
*
Once back in Vector Hall, Leo began the long task of cleaning the kitchen back up, thinking through what he'd learned as he went along. He was relieved to find that the damage to the room looked far worse than it was. Some of the cupboard doors had been pulled off its handles, and drawers had flown everywhere, but it was relatively easy to put it all back in order. It was a lot of work to be done, certainly, but it was mostly clean-up, and not nearly as much repair as he'd expected. Once he was done, the kitchen was once again usable, though he'd need to repaint a lot of the surfaces and patch up where the flying cutlery had left holes and marks.
Some of the marks looked almost like scratches, made by a human hand.
Clearly, the house was really starting to get to him.
Still, there was nothing in the kitchen that could quite explain where the red streaks in the scratches came from.
Putting the kettle on to boil, Leo found himself staring out of the window and out into the garden. That side of the garden was full of old, gnarled rose bushes. They were probably pretty enough in spring and summer, when they were in bloom, but at this point, with all the leaves gone, they looked more eerie than anything else, their branches curling up fingers desperately grasping at the sky.
Halloween was coming up. Something told him he wouldn't have to work hard to make Vector Hall look spooky.
Recalling one of the things Marguez had said, Leo made his coffee in a travel mug and brought it outside with him, letting the warm metal cup help keep his fingers heated in the cold air.
He hadn't been much outside since he'd arrived at the house, which was really a bit of a shame, considering what an expansive garden the place had. The garden had once been one of those artfully wild ones, with bushes and trees allowed to grow fairly freely, and there were stone paths going pretty much everywhere. They were in need of repair, and the stone was slick with wet leaves, but it was still easy to follow the path until he was standing in front of a large slab of stone.
As grave markers went, it was largely unremarkable. It only had Palazzo's name and years of birth and death on it, nothing else, a forgettable last remnant of an unforgettable person. The name was almost obscured by moss, which didn't seem right, so Leo hunched down and removed as much of it as he could, until the inscription was clearly visible against the rough surface. If he could find the right kind of paint, he might try to improve on the inscription so it was actually readable. It did have another of those weird statuettes, this one of an angelic-looking woman with her hands raised in front of her, half in prayer, half imploring.
It was a strange feeling to sit there at the grave of the man he'd heard so much about. Suddenly, the story of his death seemed as real as the stories of his life.
"I wish you could tell me what happened," Leo murmured silently and got back up, following another path back up to the house.
Something glittered in the last few remnants of light, catching his eye and drawing it to the patch of dirt beneath a particularly menacing-looking rose bush. He bent down and picked it up, brushing it clean.
In his hands, he held a man's wedding ring, large and heavy. It was solid gold, somewhat tarnished by its exposure to the elements. To my Charlie, the inscription on the inside said. Leo pocketed the ring, wondering if he'd finally found a clue, when Marguez's parting words echoed through his mind. Dig for the truth, he'd said. Leo hadn't taken it as literal advice, but maybe he should have had.
He dropped to his knees and began digging into the flower bed, thankful that frost hadn't quite set in, yet.
*
The soil was wet and freezing under his hands, and Leo briefly considered going inside to hunt for a pair of gloves, but the wet dirt would only soak any gloves until they were no use at all. At least the soil was loose, and easy to dig through.
It would rain again soon, the heavy clouds above his head promised. He could almost feel it in the air, and it drove him to dig faster, carelessly shoving the soil aside in a heap. It was cold and dark enough out there without it raining, and the water would only make it harder to dig, the dirt getting heavy with water. Besides, he wasn't dressed for rain. His coat was thick, and the wool would probably hold some rain at bay, but it wasn't enough to keep him from getting sick.
His fingers brushed against something hard there, deep in the ground, and he dug through the dirt around it to loosen it, before pulling it up and into what little light he had.
In his hands, the dirt-stained femur seemed far heavier than it could possibly be.
There was no doubt it was a human femur. It was too large to be anything else, and not large enough to belong to a larger animal. Digging deeper, he pulled up more bones. This time, he did go inside to fetch his gloves and a shovel, and a basket to put the bones in.
Two hours later, he'd dug up most of the flower beds. All of them had human bones, enough to belong to at least three people. One tibia had been dragged up a tree, presumably by some kind of animal, and he hadn't even noticed it if it hadn't been for a gust of wind, rattling the leaves so hard it had caught his attention. Despite all his digging, though, he still hadn't found a single skull.
It made sense, though. Skulls were the easiest part of the body to identify, as far as he knew. Without dental records and such, identifying the skeletons wouldn't be easy. Leo was willing to bet that they were all male, though, judging by the general length and size of the bones. Two of them seemed to have had hands around his size, which weren't likely in a woman. The ring, a heavy weight in his pocket, had probably belonged to one of them. He wondered who Charlie had been, how he'd ended up here, and who was missing him, somewhere.
He'd find out, somehow.
Gathering up all the bones he'd found so far, he carried the basket to the shed and locked it in. His first instinct had been to call the police, but the more he thought about it, the less he thought it was a good idea. Obviously, someone had paid the police around here to look away. Not just with the murders, but from the beginning. Nobody had apparently questioned where a household of men only had come up with two baby girls, nor had they questioned why a man with a serious mental illness had been allowed to be the legal guardian of one of the girls in question.
He knew from his research into things before he rented Vector Hall that Gestahl had a lot of money. Marguez had confirmed as much. If he'd paid all the right instances to look away once, he could easily have done so again.
Running experiments on a willing test subject was still kind of illegal, not to mention morally wrong. Doing the same to a pair of defenceless orphan children was probably enough to warrant life in prison unless they had one really skilled lawyer.
Leo sighed, pulling his outerwear off and dropping into a nearby chair. He needed to talk to his hacker friend again. For all that Cole had little to no concept of morality and privacy, he was Leo's best chance of learning more.
Formulating a quick request for any information Cole might be able to find about Gestahl, no matter how deep he'd have to dig, Leo typed it into a mail, then paused. At the end of the mail, he warned Cole to be careful, just in case. He was fairly sure the hacker was good enough not to be caught, but he didn't want to risk getting someone else in trouble if he could at all avoid it.
Then, he made supper before taking a long, hot shower. Digging in the garden all day had chilled him to the bone, and he couldn't quite seem to get warmth back into the body. He stayed in the shower until the water began running colder, then went upstairs to curl up in Palazzo's massive bed again. It wasn't that late, but he was feeling sort of exhausted. Not so much physically, hard work wasn't new to him, but both mentally and emotionally, he felt drained.
Besides, and that was a little worrisome, there was something comforting about being curled up in Palazzo's bed, which still smelled faintly of rich spices and orange peel, even after three years. It certainly took no time at all before Leo was sound asleep, the days' worries fading for a while.
*
He wasn't even surprised when he woke from a dream where he'd been the one trapped inside a burning house, not his soldiers, haunted by a faint but insistent sound of laughter.
Instead of dwelling on it, he dragged himself out of bed, went downstairs for breakfast, and then got dressed and went for a run to clear his mind.
It seemed like for every bit of the puzzle he managed to solve, two more puzzles appeared before him. It was frustrating as hell. Every step he took was one step forwards and two steps back, and no matter what he did, it didn't seem to get him anywhere.
His main problem was that there was only two people who definitely knew what had happened, and both of them were dead. That limited how much answers he could get from them. Leo did believe Gestahl knew a lot more than he let on, but he also didn't think the man was likely to share the story with him. Especially since Leo was starting to suspect that Gestahl himself might have been behind the murders. From the pictures he'd seen, Gestahl seemed healthy enough for his age, and though he wasn't as big as Leo, he was still a decently tall and trained man. Certainly, he seemed a more likely candidate for overpowering someone physically than Palazzo. Especially since Palazzo had been so full of medication at the time of death that him fighting anyone seemed unlikely. Unlikely both in the sense of overpowering someone like Terra and in the sense of fighting of a theoretical attacker.
Even the fact that he had been on so many drugs at the same time seemed suspicious. Mixing medication was never a good thing, and he wasn't convinced any doctor would ever prescribe a patient five different anti-psychotics at the same time. Definitely not along with a sleeping aid and a strong pain killer, the last two drugs that had been found in Palazzo's body. Granted, he knew mental patients could build up a tolerance for certain drugs over time, but the mix still bothered him. Tylenol 4 was a prescription-only drug, and every time Leo had needed strong painkillers, the doctors had always made sure he wasn't on any other medication at the time.
However, a person with enough money and the right contacts could almost certainly have bought those drugs off of the black market.
If only he could figure out a motif for the murders, he'd have come a long way. When he'd assumed Palazzo had in fact killed Terra and then himself, it had been easy for Leo to imagine a motif. Palazzo was certifiable. Nobody knew what he was up to. But Gestahl wasn't insane, and there was nothing for him to gain in any way. He'd apparently fought a lot with Palazzo towards the end, but if anger was the motif, then killing Terra made little sense.
There was always a chance they'd threatened to expose his experiments, but nobody would have believed a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Terra hadn't been old enough to get much done on her own.
The holes in the story were large enough to drive a semi-truck through.
By the time Leo returned to the house, his mind wasn't exactly clearer, but his train of thoughts had shifted into a more productive track, which was the best he could hope for.
There was a mail from Cole waiting in his inbox.
Along with the text, there was a lot of attached PDFs and images. According to what Cole had learned, Leo wasn't the first person to rent Vector Hall since the murders had happened. Cole had found contracts between Gestahl and five other men, all of which had disappeared shortly after leaving for the house. He wouldn't be entirely surprised if they hadn't lived long enough to even let the people of Albrook know someone was up here, which would keep them from getting too curious.
The third man to rent the place had been one Charles Dunham, recently widowed, who'd come up there to escape from the loss of his wife. Gestahl had been careful to chose men who didn't have anyone to miss them, with no immediate family and few friends. Men like Leo himself. Looking down at the tarnished wedding band, he silently promised that he'd get to the bottom of the case before anyone else got hurt. He had years of military experience, unlike the five men whose bones probably still littered the gardens. He wasn't an easy target.
If twelve years deployed to war zones couldn't kill him, he'd be damned if a booby-trapped house and someone who thought money could buy him freedom would.
Somewhere, there had to be proof of what had happened here. Gestahl had supposedly not left his house in three years, but that didn't mean he couldn't have had the five men killed. All it meant was that he'd have to pay someone else to do it.
It was odd, though. There were reasons why Gestahl might have had Terra and Palazzo killed. They might have threatened to expose him, or just tried to leave, like Marguez and Celes had, forcing him to protect his investment. It could even be an act out of spite, considering the tension between Gestahl and Palazzo. However, there wasn't any logical reason why he'd want to lure men there only to kill them. Leo supposed it was entirely possible that Palazzo hadn't been the only one to have a mental illness, but while Gestahl's actions seemed harsh and cruel, they didn't seem psychotic. There was something Leo was missing, he was sure of it.
At least it might explain the exploding kitchen. A trapped house might just be a very effective murder weapon.
If only he could figure out why the murders were happening in the first place.
It had occurred to him that it might have been related to the medical research Marguez had been working on, but on the other hand, it seemed like he was intended to be the latest victim, and he'd never heard about the research before he'd talked to Marguez.
Picking up his new phone, he dialled Marguez's number. The man had know about the dead bodies, but he'd said he hadn't been back to Vector Hall since before the murders.
Nobody picked up the phone. Leo was only marginally surprised. The two of them had tried hard to evade detection, and had probably fled their current lodgings as soon as Leo had left, to try disappearing again. He wished them luck. He might not agree with what Marguez had done, but he clearly knew it was wrong, and he also clearly cared for his granddaughter.
Nobody picked up when he tried calling Vector's office, either. He left a voice message and sent a mail, both a vague request to talk to him about "difficulties" with the house. He didn't think he'd hear anything, but he was going to try anyway.
He sent another mail to Cole, as well, thanking him for his help as well as typing up everything he knew about the case into a letter for Cole to send to the police should Leo mysteriously go missing like the others. He had the feeling one of Vector's main reasons for avoiding him was that he had no idea why he was still alive.
Once that was done, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands. He'd originally planned on doing repairs to the house, but now that he knew more about the story behind the building, he had to admit that he found himself less than tempted to work too hard. He was coming to resent Vector too much to want to do anything that would benefit him.
However, that left him with very little to do.
In the end, he ended up borrowing an empty notebook from Palazzo's impressive stock of stationery to write down his thoughts in, trying to piece things together. There was something about having it all written down, even if there was large gaps in the story at several points. It was easier to compare things, too, when he had it all side by side. He wished he'd been a better artist, so he could have illustrated things, but he'd never had much of a talent for art. As he'd been told a few times, his size made him ideal for holding weapons, which wasn't anything like art supplies. Palazzo had owned glass styluses, a few of them still littering his desk upstairs. Leo was fairly sure he'd break one of them if he tried writing with it.
*
The rest of the week passed without anything particularly out of the ordinary happening. Leo took to going for longer walks each day to keep his mind occupied, often walking into Albrook just to buy some hot coffee before walking on further. He heard nothing new from Vector or Marguez, just as he'd expected. From Cole, he'd gotten a confirmation that he'd keep the files in case of emergency, which he appreciated. Cole didn't really owe him anything, even if Leo had helped him out, and it was nice to know that at least someone else knew about the case, now.
Vector Hall had seemed almost alive when he'd arrived, but now, it seemed dead, or at least abandoned, no draft breezing through to ruffle the curtains and drapes, and no strange sounds like footsteps or laughter. Leo was starting to suspect that those had been nothing but a combination of his stressed mind and the knowledge that someone had died in the house. Human imagination was very capable of playing tricks on people.
Still, it was almost as though the house was giving him the silent treatment.
While the house behaved, his dreams were just getting worse. They weren't as much dreams any more as they were memories, but even though he had many good memories to draw upon, every one that was dredged up in his sleep was a memory of something he was trying hard to forget. Not just from wars, which would have made sense, but also from before he joined the army; memories he'd thought he'd long since suppressed.
The one thing they all had in common was that Terra was always there, taking on one of the roles, looking sad and worried beyond her young age. And somewhere, just out of the line of sight, something flickered red and gold, and there was laughter that still rang in his ears when he woke.
Cole sent him the occasional mail to check that he hadn't disappeared yet, or at least that was what he wrote. He asked if Leo wanted him to track down Marguez again, or if he'd learned something new, and, on one occasion, asked why Leo hadn't just up and left already.
He couldn't answer that. There wasn't really anything holding him in the house. He could just go out and get in the car to drive away, never needing to see Vector Hall again, nor need to dwell on the fates of Terra and Palazzo. However, it didn't seem right. He'd spent long enough steeped in the mystery to have gotten tangled up himself, especially with the knowledge that Vector had probably intended for him to die like the others.
Truth to be told, he didn't think he could leave until he had an answer, both for his own sake and for the sakes of all the people who'd died in this building. If not an answer, then something he could use to make sure the murderer faced justice.
Until he had anything like that, he was trapped there as much as anything else.
Author: Shaded Mazoku.
Email: shadedmazoku@gmail.com
Part: 2/3.
Disclaimer: The characters and large parts of the setting belong to Square Enix. I earn nothing from this except the satisfaction of getting to tell the story.
Warnings: Character death, some gore and violence.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Retired soldier Leo Christophe rents the secluded Vector Hall for a year, trying to sort himself out after leaving the army. Before long, he comes to learn that a horrible murder once happened in the house, but even after hearing the same story over and over, he can't help but feel that there is something more to what happened. As he digs deeper into the grisly story, Leo discovers a web of lies and deception, a truth worse than the story he had been told, and a plot that might claim his life as well.
And then, there are the ghosts. The ghosts who laugh maniacally in the dead of night to keep him awake, who delight in finding just the right way to bring his worst memories to the surface, and who are his best bet in unravelling a mystery that goes much deeper than just the murder.
He came to Vector Hall to find peace and quiet. Instead, he has found a mystery that threatens to destroy him as it has destroyed so many others, and the best chance he has is a ghost who only wants to see everything torn apart.
Pairing(s): Kefka/Leo.
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI.
Words: 9675.
Notes: It's done! This fic has eaten my soul. Or maybe that was just Kefka. Anyway, it's done now! I hoped to have it done for Hallowe'en, but that didn't happen. I've been wanting to write this fic for two years now, so thanks to Mega Flare for giving me a reason to just write it already.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
When he woke from yet another nightmare the next morning, Leo wasn't even surprised. He just sighed and looked up at the ceiling, counting the boards until his breathing calmed down, then dragged himself into the shower for a quick wash. There had been a time when he'd enjoyed getting out of bed, but then, there had also been a time where he'd been able to sleep without having nightmares.
One somewhat hurried breakfast later, Leo got in the car and drove to a spot just outside Albrook. It was still too early for shopping, but the sun was up, so he parked the car there and went for the long walk he'd promised himself he'd take. He spent hours walking, trying to disconnect his brain as he did so. There was a nice little lake a good distance away, and he took a break there, just enjoying the peace and quiet. If he was going to make these walks a habit, he should start bringing a Thermos of something warm to drink with him. It was only going to get colder from now on, after all.
He wasn't back in the town until it was a little past noon, feeling a lot better than he had the night before. He'd always enjoyed walking. Back when he'd been freshly recruited, he'd probably been the only one in the squad who'd enjoyed the long marches. Walking never failed to clear his mind, though, so he walked a lot, especially when under stress.
Albrook had a small hardware store, a couple of buildings over from the grocery store. The man running it was happy to help Leo find what he needed to fix the broken staircase, and some extra material so he could replace the remaining steps before those, too, broke. He didn't feel like falling into the basement more than once. It was a wonder he hadn't broken something, considering just how steep the stairs were.
He tossed the supplies in the back and drove back to Vector Hall. There was a large lantern hanging on the wall outside, and he brought that inside, putting a candle into it. The light in the basement was terrible, and every extra light source helped.
Once he'd carefully climbed down into the basement and had gotten his supplies down, Leo began removing the step that had broken, but paused as he noticed something. Though the wood was old, it was solid, showing no sign of rot or damage. It had simply snapped clean in half, seemingly for no real reason. Tapping it with a hammer produced the same results. The wood was solid all the way through. He frowned.
It was possible, of course, that he had hit just the right point to cause it to shatter, but he somehow doubted that.
Whatever the reason was, it was easier to fix the broken step than to try figuring out just why it had broken in the first place.
That seemed to be much the theme of Vector Hall, really.
If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn the place was haunted.
By the time evening came around, Leo still hadn't gotten a response from Vector. Not that a day was that long to wait, but Vector had always been quick to respond to his previous mails. Of course, the subject probably made the latest mail a lot more difficult to reply to. Leo did feel a little bad about dredging up old memories, but he needed to know why he hadn't been told about the murder. He certainly understood why the man might have chosen to say nothing. A murder, especially one with a story like the one this house had seen, was not a good selling point when trying to rent out a house, but there were a lot of ways not sharing such information could backfire. A more delicate, or more cynical, person might even have tried to sue for emotional distress. It wasn't the strangest thing he'd ever heard of someone suing for.
Leo had no plans to sue anyone, but if he'd known about the murder in advance, he wouldn't have chosen to rent the place. He was supposed to take a year's sabbatical and relax, to recover from what the specialists had diagnosed as everything from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder and as everything from a minor inconvenience to a severe psychological disability. Being isolated in a house with only the ghost for a murder for company, making him obsess over a long-since solved case was not a good thing in any way. He'd always been prone to getting very caught up in things that fascinated him, approaching them with the single-minded purpose that had made him such a good strategist.
The whole story around the murder was a puzzle where they'd just solved the framework and left the middle bit unsolved, and it was calling to him on so many levels. He'd always enjoyed puzzles, and he was usually very good at them, too, but this had him somewhat stumped. On one hand, as far as the authorities were concerned, the case was solved and over with. It was a tragedy, but the killer was as dead as the victim and there was nothing more to be done. On the other hand, Leo had only been aware of the case for a few days, and he was no trained investigator, but he was already finding several things that just didn't add up at all. It was almost as the case had been closed as soon as possible because everyone had wanted to believe that Palazzo was the killer. That, or someone had gone out of their way to get it closed quickly.
It was almost enough to make Leo wish he knew how to hack into databases. He'd have liked to see the autopsy reports on both Terra and Palazzo, because he had a very strong feeling that one of the most important pieces he was missing in his puzzle lay there.
As he crawled into bed, he decided he'd have to make some phone calls in the morning.
*
He wasn't even surprised when he woke from yet another nightmare. Once again, it was fuelled by his memories, but they were slowly changing, subtly becoming something else. He'd reached for an injured woman in the burning town, who he knew had been Iraqi in reality, but as she turned towards him, terrified, it had been Terra Branford's face he'd seen.
The house was getting to him, he reflected, and went downstairs for breakfast, not bothering to get dressed. He had the house to himself; if he wanted to wander the halls without wearing more than sweatpants, that was his choice.
He fried up some eggs and bacon for breakfast, eating it with toast as he went through his address book, looking for a number. When he found it, he pulled out his phone and made a call to an old friend of his. The man had been a code breaker for the army, but had gotten dishonourably discharged after getting caught hacking into places he shouldn't have been. Only the fact that none of the information he'd gotten could be used for personal or financial gain had kept him from getting a court-martial. That, charm and luck. Lack of decent morals aside, Locke Cole was very good with computers, especially when it came to gathering information he wasn't supposed to have, and he was Leo's best hope of learning more about the case. A quick conversation later, Cole had promised to find him copies of the autopsy reports, as well as the current address of Dr. Cid del Norte Marguez, if there was a current address.
It was, if nothing else, a small hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery before it drove him crazy. Since he'd come there to avoid going crazy, Leo certainly hoped his friend could find something he could use.
He doubted he'd be getting much peace until he could convince himself that the case was closed.
Sighing, he carried the dishes from breakfast into the kitchen, dumping them into the sink until later. He was still carrying his phone, as there was another call he wanted to try making, though he had no idea what he was going to say. He didn't think calling anyone up and asking them if, by any chance, they'd covered up a murder three years ago and retreated from public to avoid further scrutiny.
Leaning on the counter, he found Vector's number in the phone's address book and hit the call button.
The phone rang seven times before someone picked it up.
"Mr. Gestahl Vector's residence. May I help you?" It was a female voice, tinny and sounding bored.
Leo shifted a little. He didn't really know what to say, but retreating now was not an option. "This is Leo Christophe," he identified himself, reminding himself that he didn't have a title any more. "I'm renting Vector Hall, and I'd like to talk to Mr. Vector about something, if possible."
The woman didn't sound too interested. "I'll go see if he's taking any calls. Please stay on the line." There was a dull sound as she presumably put the phone down on a desk.
It took a long while before she picked it back up. "He will talk to you. Please hold."
"I will," Leo began, just as the phone shattered in his hand, sharp bits embedding themselves in his skin.
Staring at his hand in complete disbelief, he almost didn't notice the drawers and cupboards all beginning rattling ominously, like a train was driving straight past the house with no clearance to the house at all. Only when the drawers seemed to vibrate their way out of their enclosures did he realise something was seriously wrong. As the kitchen erupted in a shower of cutlery, shards of porcelain and splintered wood, his instincts kicked in and he dove for the door, managing somehow to avoid most of the projectiles. He got a few cuts and splinters, but the most severe damage he'd sustained was from the broken phone. The inside of his hand was raw from the multitude of cuts he'd gotten.
Covering his head with his arm, Leo stayed down, covered by the door, until the kitchen seemed to have calmed down. He waited for a while after that to be on the safe side, before slowly getting too his feet, surveying the ruined kitchen. The once so cosy kitchen had been reduced to a heap of splinters and broken tableware, a few knives and forks wobbling precariously on top of the mess before dropping down like discarded toys.
He was a man of reason. His craft had been entirely wrought from logical, calculated thinking and from surveillance over long periods of time. There was no room in his world for anything he didn't have empirical evidence for, yet he was standing in what had been a perfectly serviceable room only moments before, wreckage all around him. The kitchen looked like a hurricane had hit it, yet the rest of the house was entirely untouched. Vaguely, he remembered hearing theories that ball lightening could cause similar effects, but there were no burning wood or scorched areas, the way he'd expected to see if there had been lightening involved.
The shiver that ran down his back wasn't at all related to the lack of central heating.
Leo didn't believe in the supernatural. Like most people, he knew of the stories. He remembered seeing Poltergeist as a child, his friends and he had sneaked the film from a friend's brother and watched it without permission. As a result, he'd been terrified of televisions and his closet for months. It was hard not to draw parallels between ghost stories and what had just happened in the kitchen, but there was no way he could believe that there were ghosts in the house.
They did say that the people who became ghosts were the people who'd died unhappy, which would give Vector Hall a good reason to have ghosts, but he was sure there was a better explanation for what had just happened. He just didn't have any ideas as to what that could be. In the past, he'd experienced bombs going off, earthquakes, sandstorms and he had watched hurricanes from a safe distance, but none of them came anywhere close to behaving like that. The closest thing he'd seen was actually a home-made nail bomb, which did tend to go off in a shower of shrapnel, but he'd never seen one using an entire kitchen's worth of tableware and cutlery as a nail-substitute before. It was, of course, entirely possible for someone to rig a room to explode provided the right supplies and expertise, but he should have noticed anything like that when he'd cleaned the kitchen.
Though if he had overlooked it, it was possible it was a sort of booby-trap left behind from whatever events had happened in the house those three years ago. If he was going to go for the theory that Palazzo was the murderer, the man had apparently been insane, but also seemingly quite intelligent, and it wasn't at all unlikely that he could have managed to build some sort of explosive device that would go off at a later point in time, a sort of landmine as a last legacy. If he was going to go with his gut feeling and assume that maybe someone else had been involved, they might have created a trap to keep people from staying around and investigating. The old adage about two keeping a secret if one of them was dead came to mind.
Of course, if there was a trap in the kitchen, that meant there could be traps anywhere.
Leaving the ruined kitchen behind, Leo went and found the first aid kit he'd brought with him, getting pincers, antiseptic wipes and gauze to fix up his hand and his other cuts. Once that was done, he began looking through the other rooms for anything at all suspicious. He didn't find anything, which only made him more unsettled. For all he knew, his bedroom could be rigged to explode. They could all be.
In the end, he ended up bringing all his important belongings up into the attic. From what little he knew of Palazzo, he didn't seem the kind who'd booby trap his own private area. At least not the room itself. Maybe the door, to keep people out, but from what he had read in his journal, the man had been very proud of all his creations, and pretty much everything in Palazzo's room seemed to be custom-made. If it had been someone else who'd rigged the kitchen, they wouldn't have been able to get up here, or so Leo assumed, since the door had apparently been locked since the day of the murder. Either way, the attic room seemed like the safest bet right then.
He should call the police. He knew that. There was something entirely wrong about the whole situation, and the best thing he could do was to hand it over to someone who actually knew what they were doing. However, he also strongly suspected the local police of having been involved in whatever cover-up had happened after the murder, and he didn't have enough proof of anything to call in higher authorities.
When it all came down to the basics, Leo simply didn't know who to trust, but he did know that neither Vector nor the local police were even on the list. For now, he decided to wait to do anything else until he'd heard from Cole, and read up a little more on the case.
He brought his duster and the vacuum cleaner and cleared most of the dust from the room, discovering strange symbols painted all over the floor in a sort of circular pattern. He'd never seen the pattern before, but he assumed it was something Palazzo had designed. The man's designs had a general asymmetrical and spiralling style to it that was quite pleasant to the eye, in a kind of Tim Burton-esque way. The patterns crept off of the floor and wound their way up the walls, becoming tree branches and elaborate designs. Leo ran a hand along one of the branches, careful not to do anything to damage the paint. It was beautiful, in that eerie and not quite right way that he was learning had seemingly been Palazzo's trademark.
There was a flicker of gold and red in the corner of his eyes, followed by an almost inaudible thud.
Leo turned away from the painted scene to see nothing at all, except a book lying in the middle of the floor. He walked up to it and picked it up, almost willing to swear it hadn't been there a moment ago. There were shelves all over the room, even spread across the ceiling. The book must have fallen from one of those, he guessed. It was a large book, an old hard-cover book that was almost as thick as it was long, and so heavy the cover had to have real wood as a core. It was probably one of the better books to have fall off of something; the entire thing seemed so solid it could probably have been used to beat someone to death without taking any real damage itself. Finding an empty spot on a shelf where it wasn't likely to drop on him, he placed it carefully next to what seemed to be a series of Italian cook books, and wondered if it was too early to go to bed.
It was, technically speaking. It still wasn't much past noon, but Leo felt exhausted, like something was draining his energy. Explosions tended to have that effect on him. At the moment of action, his body pumped a really large dose of adrenaline through his system, and when he came off of that, he always felt drained. It might have been a little early for him to actually go to bed for the evening, but he decided a short nap wouldn't hurt. Since it was just a nap, he didn't bother getting undressed, just retrieved his alarm clock and set it to ring in a little over two hours, before curling up on Palazzo's massive cherry wood bed, the red surrounding him like a cocoon as he fell asleep.
When he woke again, it was immediately clear that he'd overslept. The sky outside the window was dark, as was the room, and his alarm had apparently fallen over and knocked its batteries out. He sat up, very aware that it was the first time in a very long time he'd woken up without having had a nightmare. Instead, he'd dreamt about Terra, walking with him on the forest paths outside Albrook, watching him with big, sad eyes every time he'd turned. He'd have expected to see her frightened, considering what he knew of her history, but she hadn't seemed afraid. Just sad and worried.
Checking his wrist watch, he decided it was pointless to try going back to sleep. The sun would be up in another hour and a half, and he'd slept for over twelve hours. He doubted he'd be able to go back to sleep, even if he'd wanted to.
He didn't quite feel like getting out of bed just yet, though, so he laid back down, staring up at the ceiling. Like everything else in the room, it had patterns painted on it, a labyrinthine city-scape that put Escher to shame when it came to impossible architecture. He had to wonder what Palazzo had been like in life. All accounts seemed to paint him as a raving mad killer, but the impressions he got from the journal was that, at least up until the day of the murder, he'd been a highly intelligent man. Eccentric, yes, and probably a little mad by most people's standards, but certainly not a rambling lunatic. They'd probably have hated each other had they met, Leo guessed. Their personalities seemed widely different in pretty much every way. Still, it took a special kind of mind to come up with the almost vaguely familiar yet very alien landscape that covered most of the bedroom's walls. Like the phoenix in the bathroom, there were still spots that were clearly unfinished, and Leo wished he'd had the skill to finish them up. It didn't seem right that they should go abandoned, no matter what else had happened there.
Eventually, he dragged himself out of bed and got his laptop, carefully cleaning off a spot on the desk to put it on. He was very grateful that Vector Hall had wireless internet right then. It meant he didn't have to go downstairs until he needed to brave the kitchen to see what was left of his food supplies. The pantry was partially separated from the kitchen proper, so presumably, there was a decent chance he still had his dry food stuffs.
There was a mail from his hacker friend waiting for him in his mailbox. Apparently, Cole had tried calling, but after what had happened to Leo's phone, he wasn't able to get hold of anyone.
Making a note to buy a new phone, relieved that he'd managed to keep a hold of the sim card through the whole mess with the kitchen, Leo leaned forwards and began reading the autopsy reports.
Terra had died from acute poisoning after having been forcibly fed a mixture of alcohol and a cocktail of various medication. It was a horrible way for anyone to die, and Terra's young age just made it worse, but bizarrely, the knowledge did actually reassure Leo a little. As the pictures he'd found had shown, and the autopsy reports confirmed it, Terra was actually marginally taller than Palazzo, taller and heavier. It wouldn't have been possible for Palazzo to overtake her without a struggle. The pictures in the report were disturbing, but they showed something he thought he'd noticed in the pictures on the mantel. Palazzo had kept his nails unusually long and sharp. If Terra has struggled, which most people would in a situation like that, she should have had scratches, or at least bruises, but there wasn't a mark on her body. The police report clearly stated that she'd been held down and force-fed the poison that had killed her.
Palazzo's autopsy showed that he'd had a lot of the same drugs in his blood at the time of death, though without the alcohol. Even without mixing the medication with alcohol, though, the presence of seven different drugs in his system, all in alarmingly high dosages, would at least slow him down and make him sluggish. Too sluggish to easily force drugs down Terra's throat. His official cause of death was a slit throat, which, as far as Leo knew, was actually a very difficult thing to do to oneself. At least with a lethal result. He'd seen people with their throats cut, and the depth needed to kill was pretty amazing, in an utterly morbid way.
According to the police report, no weapon had been found near Palazzo's body, either, and unlikely as it was that he had managed to cut his own throat while drugged, it was even more unlikely that he cut his throat, then hid the weapon so well it was never found. The report also had a copy of all the drug prescriptions Palazzo had been given at the time, and those only accounted for three of the seven drugs found in their bodies.
Leo's suspicions that someone had covered up something else and used Palazzo's insanity as a scapegoat. The police report confirmed that Palazzo was, in fact, diagnosed with schizophrenia, but that up until that fateful day, he'd been functioning well as long as he took his medication. The case had been closed suddenly, the report said, as "all evidence pointed to a murder-suicide". Leo had to disagree with that statement.
The woman in the store had said that Palazzo died in his room, after having tried painting it with his blood, but though there were few places in Palazzo's room that weren't painted, there had been no sign of blood or anything like that, and the key had been hidden, presumably by Palazzo himself. Leo supposed there might be another key, and that Vector had locked the room afterwards, but it still seemed very strange.
Something more than just a horrible tragedy had happened in this house, and though it was entirely possibly Palazzo had been involved somehow, Leo didn't believe for a moment that the explanation that he went psychotic and killed Terra and then himself was all there was to the case.
His friend's other piece of information might help him shed some light on the situation.
Dr. Marguez and his granddaughter lived in a town two hours' drive away, under assumed names. Leo needed to talk to them. Apart from Vector, they were the only ones that had even the faintest clue about what had happened here, and he didn't trust Vector not to be somehow involved. The man had enough money and power to cover up just about anything. He could definitely have gotten away with murder, had he been so inclined.
*
After a brief stop to buy a new phone to replace the one he'd broken, Leo carefully navigated his way through the town's streets to the apartment building the address he had for the good doctor and his granddaughter belonged to. It was a very different feel there than in Vector Hall, a busy building with people all around and little privacy. It wasn't unlike the building Leo's own apartment was in, in fact, filled with small apartments and thin walls that didn't hold onto heat or sound.
He found the door he was looking for and knocked, putting his hands in his pockets as he waited. The building was draughtier than Vector Hall was.
A tall young woman opened the door, looking at him expectantly. The latest picture of Celes Chere had been taken four years ago, but she was still instantly recognizable. Time hadn't changed her much, except maybe hardened her edges a little, a grown woman's features on someone who was still, after all, a teenager. She looked him over, from head to toe and back up, and Leo could almost feel her assessing him silently.
"Can I help you?" She finally asked, folding her arms across her chest impatiently. Everything in her stance seemed to speak volumes about how unimpressed she was.
Leo found that he instinctively liked her. She had an attitude he'd last seen on one of his fellow army officers. "I'm looking for Dr. Mark," he told her, using the false name Marguez was currently using. "Just doing some research and I thought maybe he could help me."
Often, partial truths got him much further than lies did.
This seemed to be one of those times, as Celes stepped aside to let him inside. She led him to a small living room, where a man was sitting on the couch, a blanket around him. He didn't look well, pale and haggard in comparison to the picture, but it was definitely Marguez.
Celes brought them a pot of coffee and some cups and left them to their own devices, with a warning to Leo not to tax her grandfather too much.
"She takes good care of you," Leo observed, pouring coffee for them both.
Marguez nodded and took the cup Leo offered him. "She's a sweet girl like that," he agreed. "Works herself half to death to afford my medication." He sipped his coffee and leaned back. "But I don't think you're here to talk about my granddaughter."
Leo shook his head. "No, I'm not," he confirmed. "I came to ask you about what really happened at Vector Hall."
If possible, Marguez got even paler, his hands beginning to shake. Carefully, he put his cup down on the table. "You're asking me a lot, then," he said. "If you knew even half the things that happened at that place..." He trailed off.
"I know enough to know I need to know more," Leo said. "I've rented the place from Mr. Vector, but he neglected to tell me about the history of the house."
"You live there?" Marguez sounded entirely too shocked for there not to be a long story behind it all. "How long have you been there?"
A bit surprised at the urgency in the man's voice, Leo actually had to think for a moment. It hadn't even been a week yet, but it felt like it'd been years. "Almost a week," he finally answered.
Looking up at Leo, Marguez's eyes held a strange emotion as he spoke. "Then Gestahl is still trying to use our research," he said, sounding sad and resigned. "I had hoped he'd learned, but his greed has far surpassed his sense of right and wrong."
As he was about to continue, Marguez collapsed into a violent coughing fit. He reached for a bottle on the table, but knocked it over. Leo caught it before it fell to the floor and handed it to the older man, who uncorked it and took a deep sip. Slowly, his cough died down.
"Thank you," Marguez said, leaning back again. "What do you know already? The story is a lot more convoluted than it seems, at first."
Pulling his chair a bit closer to the table, Leo took a deep breath, and began talking. He told Marguez everything he could think of; how he didn't think that the murder had happened the way the police reports claimed, and that he wasn't even convinced of the murderer's identity, that there was something odd still happening at the house, and that he knew about the tension between Vector and Palazzo. It felt good to get it all out into the open.
"Kefka," Marguez said, closing his eyes as he spoke, "Was never a nice person. I don't doubt he'd be capable of murder. He was cruel and vicious to people for no reason. However, in his own way, I think he did care about Terra, though I suspect it was occasionally more a case of a man caring about his favourite pet than any sense of family he might have had towards her."
From what Leo had read in Palazzo's journal, he could easily believe that. Everything there was written with a sense of uttermost cynicism to it. Palazzo hadn't seemed to like anyone much, honestly.
"We did horrible things to Kefka and Terra both," Marguez continued. "I was a genetic engineer, once. That was why Gestahl hired me. He'd read some theories about what you could do with the right kind of gene therapy, and had such grand plans, but he needed someone to help him make those plans into reality, and he needed test subjects. I was easily bought. Funding for research was so hard to come by, and Gestahl promised me all the money I could need. The test subjects were harder to find, at least the first one, but then, one day, Gestahl brought this strange young man home with him, claiming he'd volunteered. I never did get to know what he'd promised Kefka to get him to sell his soul like that, but it probably wasn't money."
He took a pause to sip his coffee and take a deep breath before going on.
"The tests didn't go so well. Kefka was too old, really, for such gene therapy not to be damaging to him. The body is far less pliable once you've reached adulthood. I guess I'll never know whether his schizophrenia was latent in him, and the tests merely brought it out, or if what we did to him caused it. Whatever it was, I tried to explain to Gestahl, only to have him leave and come back a few weeks later with a pair of young orphan girls. He probably bought them off of whoever should have been caring for them." He sighed. "I'm sad to say that I didn't hesitate much to use children as lab rats. I had different plans for what we were doing. Gestahl wanted to use the experiment for more power. I just wanted to see if I could do it."
Leo nodded. He didn't really understand, but he saw no point in arguing with an obviously sick man.
Marguez pulled his blankets closer around himself. "The girls grew up in Vector Hall, and when they got older, the townspeople took notice, so we needed a legal reason to have them. I adopted Celes as my granddaughter. It seemed more right than to make her my daughter, for some reason. Originally, Gestahl was going to do the same with Terra, but he had people who watched him at the time, and who'd get suspicious about her origins, so eventually, we had Kefka appointed her legal custodian. He was old enough to be her father, if just barely, but he thought custodian sounded better, and nobody felt like arguing. Despite everything, though, I think the girls were happy enough as children."
"Kefka scared me," Celes stated, as she came into the room and sat down next to her grandfather. "He was cruel, and had a way of looking at you like he was seeing right through you and nothing was hidden. Terra was sort of scared of him, too, but not like I was. And he was never truly cruel to her, just very strict. He loved dressing her up like a doll, and praised her for her obedience."
She shivered a little, but clearly tried hard to suppress it. "There was a boy in our school who loved to pick on Terra, because she was so quiet and pensive. It got really bad, and then, one week, Terra refused to leave her room. She'd curled up with her cat and just cried. After three days of that, Kefka sought the boy out and told him something. I have no idea what it was, but he never came anywhere near Terra again. His father tried asking what Kefka had done to his son, but Kefka just stared at him until he went away. He was fiercely protective of Terra."
"Neither of you think he killed her?" Leo asked. Even if he hadn't already been suspecting that Palazzo had been framed somehow, their stories would have made him consider it.
"I don't doubt he'd be capable of murder," Celes said, patting her grandfather's trembling hand soothingly. "But no, I don't think he killed Terra."
Leo sighed. "That is the impression I've gotten, too." Both that Palazzo had been capable of murder and that he probably hadn't killed Terra.
Nothing about this case seemed to line up. He almost understood why the police had been so willing to close the case even with as many contrasting pieces of evidence as there were. If someone with a bit of money and power had thrown his weight around, the police would probably have been happy to give up the case. It just didn't seem to have a clear solution at all.
"Have you any idea what really happened, then?" He asked, looking at Marguez. The man was looking even worse now, and Leo didn't want to bother him much longer. As much as he didn't agree with what Marguez and Gestahl had been doing, he didn't really think there was any point in antagonizing Marguez for it. He doubted the man had that much longer to live, even with his granddaughter's care.
Marguez shook his head. "I don't, no. Sorry."
He hadn't really expected anything else, but Leo still thanked the doctor for his time. He might not be any closer to getting the truth about what happened, but he was at least getting better at separating the facts from the lies. Thanking Marguez and Celes both for their time, he got to his feet.
As Leo was on his way out, Marguez grabbed his hand. His grip was terribly weak, but it was strong enough to get his attention.
"Vector Hall has many skeletons in its closets, Mr. Christophe," he said. "Some of which, I suspect, are literally so. Did you know that Gestahl had Kefka buried in the gardens there? He had no family, and Terra was his next of kin, but Gestahl called in some favours and obtained a permit to hold a private funeral, since the property is so far away from any neighbours." He chuckled weakly, but it quickly evolved into a cough. "So many secrets are buried there; in the house and the grounds around it. You might want to go digging for truths."
*
Once back in Vector Hall, Leo began the long task of cleaning the kitchen back up, thinking through what he'd learned as he went along. He was relieved to find that the damage to the room looked far worse than it was. Some of the cupboard doors had been pulled off its handles, and drawers had flown everywhere, but it was relatively easy to put it all back in order. It was a lot of work to be done, certainly, but it was mostly clean-up, and not nearly as much repair as he'd expected. Once he was done, the kitchen was once again usable, though he'd need to repaint a lot of the surfaces and patch up where the flying cutlery had left holes and marks.
Some of the marks looked almost like scratches, made by a human hand.
Clearly, the house was really starting to get to him.
Still, there was nothing in the kitchen that could quite explain where the red streaks in the scratches came from.
Putting the kettle on to boil, Leo found himself staring out of the window and out into the garden. That side of the garden was full of old, gnarled rose bushes. They were probably pretty enough in spring and summer, when they were in bloom, but at this point, with all the leaves gone, they looked more eerie than anything else, their branches curling up fingers desperately grasping at the sky.
Halloween was coming up. Something told him he wouldn't have to work hard to make Vector Hall look spooky.
Recalling one of the things Marguez had said, Leo made his coffee in a travel mug and brought it outside with him, letting the warm metal cup help keep his fingers heated in the cold air.
He hadn't been much outside since he'd arrived at the house, which was really a bit of a shame, considering what an expansive garden the place had. The garden had once been one of those artfully wild ones, with bushes and trees allowed to grow fairly freely, and there were stone paths going pretty much everywhere. They were in need of repair, and the stone was slick with wet leaves, but it was still easy to follow the path until he was standing in front of a large slab of stone.
As grave markers went, it was largely unremarkable. It only had Palazzo's name and years of birth and death on it, nothing else, a forgettable last remnant of an unforgettable person. The name was almost obscured by moss, which didn't seem right, so Leo hunched down and removed as much of it as he could, until the inscription was clearly visible against the rough surface. If he could find the right kind of paint, he might try to improve on the inscription so it was actually readable. It did have another of those weird statuettes, this one of an angelic-looking woman with her hands raised in front of her, half in prayer, half imploring.
It was a strange feeling to sit there at the grave of the man he'd heard so much about. Suddenly, the story of his death seemed as real as the stories of his life.
"I wish you could tell me what happened," Leo murmured silently and got back up, following another path back up to the house.
Something glittered in the last few remnants of light, catching his eye and drawing it to the patch of dirt beneath a particularly menacing-looking rose bush. He bent down and picked it up, brushing it clean.
In his hands, he held a man's wedding ring, large and heavy. It was solid gold, somewhat tarnished by its exposure to the elements. To my Charlie, the inscription on the inside said. Leo pocketed the ring, wondering if he'd finally found a clue, when Marguez's parting words echoed through his mind. Dig for the truth, he'd said. Leo hadn't taken it as literal advice, but maybe he should have had.
He dropped to his knees and began digging into the flower bed, thankful that frost hadn't quite set in, yet.
*
The soil was wet and freezing under his hands, and Leo briefly considered going inside to hunt for a pair of gloves, but the wet dirt would only soak any gloves until they were no use at all. At least the soil was loose, and easy to dig through.
It would rain again soon, the heavy clouds above his head promised. He could almost feel it in the air, and it drove him to dig faster, carelessly shoving the soil aside in a heap. It was cold and dark enough out there without it raining, and the water would only make it harder to dig, the dirt getting heavy with water. Besides, he wasn't dressed for rain. His coat was thick, and the wool would probably hold some rain at bay, but it wasn't enough to keep him from getting sick.
His fingers brushed against something hard there, deep in the ground, and he dug through the dirt around it to loosen it, before pulling it up and into what little light he had.
In his hands, the dirt-stained femur seemed far heavier than it could possibly be.
There was no doubt it was a human femur. It was too large to be anything else, and not large enough to belong to a larger animal. Digging deeper, he pulled up more bones. This time, he did go inside to fetch his gloves and a shovel, and a basket to put the bones in.
Two hours later, he'd dug up most of the flower beds. All of them had human bones, enough to belong to at least three people. One tibia had been dragged up a tree, presumably by some kind of animal, and he hadn't even noticed it if it hadn't been for a gust of wind, rattling the leaves so hard it had caught his attention. Despite all his digging, though, he still hadn't found a single skull.
It made sense, though. Skulls were the easiest part of the body to identify, as far as he knew. Without dental records and such, identifying the skeletons wouldn't be easy. Leo was willing to bet that they were all male, though, judging by the general length and size of the bones. Two of them seemed to have had hands around his size, which weren't likely in a woman. The ring, a heavy weight in his pocket, had probably belonged to one of them. He wondered who Charlie had been, how he'd ended up here, and who was missing him, somewhere.
He'd find out, somehow.
Gathering up all the bones he'd found so far, he carried the basket to the shed and locked it in. His first instinct had been to call the police, but the more he thought about it, the less he thought it was a good idea. Obviously, someone had paid the police around here to look away. Not just with the murders, but from the beginning. Nobody had apparently questioned where a household of men only had come up with two baby girls, nor had they questioned why a man with a serious mental illness had been allowed to be the legal guardian of one of the girls in question.
He knew from his research into things before he rented Vector Hall that Gestahl had a lot of money. Marguez had confirmed as much. If he'd paid all the right instances to look away once, he could easily have done so again.
Running experiments on a willing test subject was still kind of illegal, not to mention morally wrong. Doing the same to a pair of defenceless orphan children was probably enough to warrant life in prison unless they had one really skilled lawyer.
Leo sighed, pulling his outerwear off and dropping into a nearby chair. He needed to talk to his hacker friend again. For all that Cole had little to no concept of morality and privacy, he was Leo's best chance of learning more.
Formulating a quick request for any information Cole might be able to find about Gestahl, no matter how deep he'd have to dig, Leo typed it into a mail, then paused. At the end of the mail, he warned Cole to be careful, just in case. He was fairly sure the hacker was good enough not to be caught, but he didn't want to risk getting someone else in trouble if he could at all avoid it.
Then, he made supper before taking a long, hot shower. Digging in the garden all day had chilled him to the bone, and he couldn't quite seem to get warmth back into the body. He stayed in the shower until the water began running colder, then went upstairs to curl up in Palazzo's massive bed again. It wasn't that late, but he was feeling sort of exhausted. Not so much physically, hard work wasn't new to him, but both mentally and emotionally, he felt drained.
Besides, and that was a little worrisome, there was something comforting about being curled up in Palazzo's bed, which still smelled faintly of rich spices and orange peel, even after three years. It certainly took no time at all before Leo was sound asleep, the days' worries fading for a while.
*
He wasn't even surprised when he woke from a dream where he'd been the one trapped inside a burning house, not his soldiers, haunted by a faint but insistent sound of laughter.
Instead of dwelling on it, he dragged himself out of bed, went downstairs for breakfast, and then got dressed and went for a run to clear his mind.
It seemed like for every bit of the puzzle he managed to solve, two more puzzles appeared before him. It was frustrating as hell. Every step he took was one step forwards and two steps back, and no matter what he did, it didn't seem to get him anywhere.
His main problem was that there was only two people who definitely knew what had happened, and both of them were dead. That limited how much answers he could get from them. Leo did believe Gestahl knew a lot more than he let on, but he also didn't think the man was likely to share the story with him. Especially since Leo was starting to suspect that Gestahl himself might have been behind the murders. From the pictures he'd seen, Gestahl seemed healthy enough for his age, and though he wasn't as big as Leo, he was still a decently tall and trained man. Certainly, he seemed a more likely candidate for overpowering someone physically than Palazzo. Especially since Palazzo had been so full of medication at the time of death that him fighting anyone seemed unlikely. Unlikely both in the sense of overpowering someone like Terra and in the sense of fighting of a theoretical attacker.
Even the fact that he had been on so many drugs at the same time seemed suspicious. Mixing medication was never a good thing, and he wasn't convinced any doctor would ever prescribe a patient five different anti-psychotics at the same time. Definitely not along with a sleeping aid and a strong pain killer, the last two drugs that had been found in Palazzo's body. Granted, he knew mental patients could build up a tolerance for certain drugs over time, but the mix still bothered him. Tylenol 4 was a prescription-only drug, and every time Leo had needed strong painkillers, the doctors had always made sure he wasn't on any other medication at the time.
However, a person with enough money and the right contacts could almost certainly have bought those drugs off of the black market.
If only he could figure out a motif for the murders, he'd have come a long way. When he'd assumed Palazzo had in fact killed Terra and then himself, it had been easy for Leo to imagine a motif. Palazzo was certifiable. Nobody knew what he was up to. But Gestahl wasn't insane, and there was nothing for him to gain in any way. He'd apparently fought a lot with Palazzo towards the end, but if anger was the motif, then killing Terra made little sense.
There was always a chance they'd threatened to expose his experiments, but nobody would have believed a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Terra hadn't been old enough to get much done on her own.
The holes in the story were large enough to drive a semi-truck through.
By the time Leo returned to the house, his mind wasn't exactly clearer, but his train of thoughts had shifted into a more productive track, which was the best he could hope for.
There was a mail from Cole waiting in his inbox.
Along with the text, there was a lot of attached PDFs and images. According to what Cole had learned, Leo wasn't the first person to rent Vector Hall since the murders had happened. Cole had found contracts between Gestahl and five other men, all of which had disappeared shortly after leaving for the house. He wouldn't be entirely surprised if they hadn't lived long enough to even let the people of Albrook know someone was up here, which would keep them from getting too curious.
The third man to rent the place had been one Charles Dunham, recently widowed, who'd come up there to escape from the loss of his wife. Gestahl had been careful to chose men who didn't have anyone to miss them, with no immediate family and few friends. Men like Leo himself. Looking down at the tarnished wedding band, he silently promised that he'd get to the bottom of the case before anyone else got hurt. He had years of military experience, unlike the five men whose bones probably still littered the gardens. He wasn't an easy target.
If twelve years deployed to war zones couldn't kill him, he'd be damned if a booby-trapped house and someone who thought money could buy him freedom would.
Somewhere, there had to be proof of what had happened here. Gestahl had supposedly not left his house in three years, but that didn't mean he couldn't have had the five men killed. All it meant was that he'd have to pay someone else to do it.
It was odd, though. There were reasons why Gestahl might have had Terra and Palazzo killed. They might have threatened to expose him, or just tried to leave, like Marguez and Celes had, forcing him to protect his investment. It could even be an act out of spite, considering the tension between Gestahl and Palazzo. However, there wasn't any logical reason why he'd want to lure men there only to kill them. Leo supposed it was entirely possible that Palazzo hadn't been the only one to have a mental illness, but while Gestahl's actions seemed harsh and cruel, they didn't seem psychotic. There was something Leo was missing, he was sure of it.
At least it might explain the exploding kitchen. A trapped house might just be a very effective murder weapon.
If only he could figure out why the murders were happening in the first place.
It had occurred to him that it might have been related to the medical research Marguez had been working on, but on the other hand, it seemed like he was intended to be the latest victim, and he'd never heard about the research before he'd talked to Marguez.
Picking up his new phone, he dialled Marguez's number. The man had know about the dead bodies, but he'd said he hadn't been back to Vector Hall since before the murders.
Nobody picked up the phone. Leo was only marginally surprised. The two of them had tried hard to evade detection, and had probably fled their current lodgings as soon as Leo had left, to try disappearing again. He wished them luck. He might not agree with what Marguez had done, but he clearly knew it was wrong, and he also clearly cared for his granddaughter.
Nobody picked up when he tried calling Vector's office, either. He left a voice message and sent a mail, both a vague request to talk to him about "difficulties" with the house. He didn't think he'd hear anything, but he was going to try anyway.
He sent another mail to Cole, as well, thanking him for his help as well as typing up everything he knew about the case into a letter for Cole to send to the police should Leo mysteriously go missing like the others. He had the feeling one of Vector's main reasons for avoiding him was that he had no idea why he was still alive.
Once that was done, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands. He'd originally planned on doing repairs to the house, but now that he knew more about the story behind the building, he had to admit that he found himself less than tempted to work too hard. He was coming to resent Vector too much to want to do anything that would benefit him.
However, that left him with very little to do.
In the end, he ended up borrowing an empty notebook from Palazzo's impressive stock of stationery to write down his thoughts in, trying to piece things together. There was something about having it all written down, even if there was large gaps in the story at several points. It was easier to compare things, too, when he had it all side by side. He wished he'd been a better artist, so he could have illustrated things, but he'd never had much of a talent for art. As he'd been told a few times, his size made him ideal for holding weapons, which wasn't anything like art supplies. Palazzo had owned glass styluses, a few of them still littering his desk upstairs. Leo was fairly sure he'd break one of them if he tried writing with it.
*
The rest of the week passed without anything particularly out of the ordinary happening. Leo took to going for longer walks each day to keep his mind occupied, often walking into Albrook just to buy some hot coffee before walking on further. He heard nothing new from Vector or Marguez, just as he'd expected. From Cole, he'd gotten a confirmation that he'd keep the files in case of emergency, which he appreciated. Cole didn't really owe him anything, even if Leo had helped him out, and it was nice to know that at least someone else knew about the case, now.
Vector Hall had seemed almost alive when he'd arrived, but now, it seemed dead, or at least abandoned, no draft breezing through to ruffle the curtains and drapes, and no strange sounds like footsteps or laughter. Leo was starting to suspect that those had been nothing but a combination of his stressed mind and the knowledge that someone had died in the house. Human imagination was very capable of playing tricks on people.
Still, it was almost as though the house was giving him the silent treatment.
While the house behaved, his dreams were just getting worse. They weren't as much dreams any more as they were memories, but even though he had many good memories to draw upon, every one that was dredged up in his sleep was a memory of something he was trying hard to forget. Not just from wars, which would have made sense, but also from before he joined the army; memories he'd thought he'd long since suppressed.
The one thing they all had in common was that Terra was always there, taking on one of the roles, looking sad and worried beyond her young age. And somewhere, just out of the line of sight, something flickered red and gold, and there was laughter that still rang in his ears when he woke.
Cole sent him the occasional mail to check that he hadn't disappeared yet, or at least that was what he wrote. He asked if Leo wanted him to track down Marguez again, or if he'd learned something new, and, on one occasion, asked why Leo hadn't just up and left already.
He couldn't answer that. There wasn't really anything holding him in the house. He could just go out and get in the car to drive away, never needing to see Vector Hall again, nor need to dwell on the fates of Terra and Palazzo. However, it didn't seem right. He'd spent long enough steeped in the mystery to have gotten tangled up himself, especially with the knowledge that Vector had probably intended for him to die like the others.
Truth to be told, he didn't think he could leave until he had an answer, both for his own sake and for the sakes of all the people who'd died in this building. If not an answer, then something he could use to make sure the murderer faced justice.
Until he had anything like that, he was trapped there as much as anything else.