by Angie Fox
He seemed a little scared of me now that he’d given me his butcher blade.
“Did you see a man and a woman passing this way?” I asked. If anything prompted him to speak, perhaps it would be strangers in his domain. “They would have come down the same stairs as I did,” I added, in case he’d been stalking me for a while.
He moved his head, but I couldn’t tell if it meant yes or no.
“We think they may have hurt a lady down in the boiler room. Killed her, actually. Did you see anything?”
Charlie tilted his head and looked at me.
“I’m trying to get back to my friend in the morgue,” I said, gesturing with my knife hand, immediately regretting it.
But he didn’t snatch my prize away. He didn’t attack me either. He merely turned and glided away.
“Um, Charlie,” I said, keeping up with him, but giving him a bit of distance at the same time. “Do you want me to follow you? Does that mean you know where Ellis is?”
Or had Charlie had enough of me?
He didn’t pause, didn’t turn. He simply glided down the darkened hallway. A dark substance matted the hair at the base of his skull. Blood?
It didn’t matter.
Charlie seemed like a decent guy so far, and I really didn’t want to be alone. “I’m just going to come with you anyway,” I said. It seemed polite to give him a heads-up.
He continued on as if he hadn’t heard me.
So I followed. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go. One direction was as good as the next, and at least Charlie seemed to have a plan.
“I won’t tell the institution staff I saw you if you’d prefer it. I can keep a secret.”
He’d obviously been hiding down here for a long time.
Up ahead, another hallway intersected ours. I had no clue where any of it led. Charlie turned left without hesitation.
Okay, so he knew where we were going. Or at least where he was going.
“In fact, you don’t have to hide,” I added. “There are plenty of nice places you could haunt. Lots of ghosts prefer neat old hotels or restaurants, or hey…”
He sped up his pace and I jogged to keep up.
“Funny,” I said, stepping lightly, avoiding the puddles, not above making awkward conversation. “All those stories about Crazy Charlie chasing people around with a meat cleaver, and here I’m the one following you down the dark haunted hallway with a big scary knife.” My stomach pinched. What a dumb thing to say. I tried to correct myself. “Not that you always chase people with your knife, because obviously, you didn’t do that to me.”
I needed to learn to keep my mouth shut.
“Why aren’t you talking?” I asked, immediately regretting that as well.
Charlie glided on. He’d be right to leave me behind. It was like I had this superpower ability to talk to people, but if they didn’t engage right away, it backfired on me and made my brain spew.
“I’m going to shut up now,” I muttered as Charlie made a sharp right down another hallway, and I stepped into a deep, mucky puddle. “Ew,” I said, wiping my foot on a patch of gravel. The knife had mostly disappeared in my hand, so I let it go and watched it disintegrate the rest of the way. I wouldn’t miss the cold, wet feeling. “Hey, thanks for slowing down for me,” I said to the ghost. Then I saw it. Dead ahead. “It’s the circular staircase!”
Well, a circular staircase.
Charlie grinned at me like he’d known it all along, which he probably had. If he’d been mortal, I’d have given him a victorious tap on the shoulder as I dashed past him. “Is this the one that comes down from the lobby?”
If so, I knew where we were.
“I think it is!” I bypassed the circular stairs and took a left down the hallway. “I think I love you!”
The ghost treated me to a wavering smile as I rushed past a mucky old storage room and, next, the door marked Delivery.
And beyond it, “The morgue!” I said, excited enough to hug somebody.
I heard sounds from inside the morgue, which was just lovely. Then Ellis swung open the door. “Verity!” he said, shining his flashlight in my face, but I didn’t even care. I rushed him and hugged him hard, steadying him as he stumbled back. “Whoops!” I smiled up at him. “I’m just so glad to see you.”
“What the hell happened?” he asked, with equal amounts of joy and frustration as he pulled me toward the autopsy table and closed the door behind us.
I drew him down for a quick kiss. Then a longer one. God, it felt good to be back. Ellis was so solid, so real. It felt right to be back with him, where I belonged.
Frankie let out a cry from somewhere near the ceiling. “Look out! It’s Crazy Charlie!”
Oh, sure. Now my gangster cared.
I pulled away and gave Ellis one more kiss, a sweet one this time. “Don’t worry,” I said, running a finger down his T-shirt, enjoying the solid feel of him. “I took Charlie’s knife.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ellis said, and I reveled in it. It was hard to surprise Ellis.
Frankie, however, was not amused. “This is why I don’t like going adventuring with you,” the gangster muttered from a spot in the tippy-top corner of the room, above the body lockers.
“Did you learn anything from the Burowskis?” I asked him.
“I learned Tom is a jerk and Joan is a flake,” Frankie grumbled. “Then they went into the creepiest examination room I’ve ever seen, and I left them to it.”
“Agent 007 you are not,” I told him.
“Sit down and tell me where you’ve been,” Ellis said.
“Deal,” I told him. “You too, Frankie,” I added to the ghost, who didn’t appear at all ready to come down off the ceiling.
Charlie stood in the doorway, looking at Frankie like the gangster would rush down and bite him. “Don’t worry. Frankie is mostly friendly,” I assured Charlie.
The thin, quiet ghost didn’t appear convinced, and I couldn’t blame him.
So we left it at that, the two ghosts sizing each other up while I told Ellis everything that had happened since I’d gone up the body elevator. I told the story down to the smallest detail, knowing Ellis might put together clues I hadn’t, and when I finished, we both sat back and thought for a moment.
Ellis rubbed a hand over his chin. “What if the ghosts are the key?” He paused to think. “They have to know more than they’re letting on.”
Perhaps. Still, I found myself playing devil’s advocate. “Juliet was helpful in showing me the haunted stairs,” I conceded, “and Charlie got me here. Other than that, though, none of them witnessed anything more than Tom and Joan taking a staircase that would have eventually led them to the basement.”
It wasn’t a strong case for murder, not at all.
“It would help if we found fingerprints,” Ellis pointed out.
“I didn’t touch anything,” I assured him.
“Does anyone care that we’re completely neglecting Bruno Scalieri?” Frankie drawled from the ceiling.
Not really. “I never agreed to help him escape,” I reminded my ghost. “Besides, the place is on lockdown. You can’t even get yourself out now.”
“It’s like you enjoy taunting me,” the ghost muttered.
“Meanwhile, you left Tom and Joan.”
Frankie had the courtesy to look guilty for a moment. “I had to. Tom was way too interested in gross things in jars.”
Charlie glided through the wall that separated the morgue from the boiler room and disappeared.
I glanced up at Frankie. “Where do you think he’s going?”
Ellis perked up.
“Who cares, as long as he’s leaving,” Frankie said, coming down off the wall.
“Charlie doesn’t deserve that kind of attitude,” I said, in case the other ghost was listening. I thought for a moment, then sat up straighter. “Maybe he wants to show us something in the boiler room. While he was helping me find my way back, I asked him about Barbara’s murder.�
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Ellis considered it. “Nobody has come down to tamper with the body. And there’s not much I can determine without forensics.”
“We can check my phone,” I suggested.
“Also follow up with this Charlie guy to see if he can point out anything that’s unusual. I mean, he lives down here, right?”
“We’re on it,” I said, hopping down from the table.
“Oh, and look what I found while I was trying to get you back down in the body elevator,” Ellis said, handing me the car keys that I’d dropped down the chute.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping them into my pocket, ten kinds of relieved. “Maybe things are starting to go our way,” I added, heading to the boiler room.
“We can only hope,” Ellis cautioned as I used Barbara’s keys to open the door I’d locked, and we braced ourselves to walk back in on the murder scene.
16
Ellis directed his light inside. Barbara’s body lay still and silent where I’d left it. The pool of dark red blood on the earthen floor had seeped onto the bottom of nearby boxes, soaking them.
I held back while Ellis inspected the body. “It appears Barbara died of blunt force trauma to the head.”
“I figured,” I told him, “although I didn’t look closely.” The fact that she didn’t have a pulse had been enough for me.
Rather than think too hard on that, I made my way to the box of plumbing supplies where I’d hidden my cell phone. It was still there, braced up against the cardboard, underneath a bag of rubber gaskets.
“It’s still recording,” I said, relieved to have my phone back. And that my plan had worked.
“Can I see?” Ellis asked.
“You’re the police,” I said as he took my phone and set the recording back to the beginning. We heard the muffled sounds of me hiding the device in the cardboard box.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” my voice echoed from the recording. Then the sound of jangling keys as I locked Barbara’s body into the boiler room.
Then nothing. Just dead space.
Ellis fast-forwarded through the parts of the recording with no sound while Frankie glided over to inspect the body. He whistled low under his breath and glanced up at me. “This isn’t a simple murder,” he said, the warning clear in his eyes. “This is rage.”
“How can you tell?” I asked, joining him.
“Easy.”
I hated the fact he’d lived with such wrath and violence he would know immediately what murderous rage looked like. I wanted to comfort him somehow, which was ridiculous because the gangster saw nothing wrong with his life. He’d endured the worst of it long before I’d ever been born.
“Take another look,” the gangster prompted.
I did. “Silver and white soul traces are normal, aren’t they?” I’d seen them on every fresh body I’d encountered, as long as the person still lay where they died. Soul traces, as they’d been explained to me, were remnants of the spirit leaving for a better place.
“Forget the soul traces. Look at her head,” Frankie said as if giving me the paint-by-numbers version. “You don’t need to use that much force to kill somebody. This wasn’t a simple hit. There was a lot of rage behind this one. I’m betting it didn’t show up on her soul traces because she was dead before she knew it.”
“That’s terrible.” Although I supposed it was a blessing. Sort of.
“I think I found something,” Ellis said from near the box where I’d left my phone.
He turned the volume up. Heavy static took over my cell phone recording, and a muffled voice spoke a single word.
“Sllllow.”
“That was a ghost,” I said quickly. It was an EVP like Brett and Cash had been after. The voice had a rusty, ethereal quality to it.
Besides that, I’d locked the door and there had been no jangle of keys on the recording, no sound of locks being picked and a door squeaking open. No footsteps entering.
“How far in is the recording?” I asked.
“An hour,” Ellis replied warily. “I was on guard at that point.”
“Rewind,” Frankie ordered, but Ellis was already doing it. He played it again.
“Dooon’t.”
“It said go,” Frankie stated, excited.
“I heard don’t,” I told them.
“Sounds like slow,” Ellis said at the same time.
“Frankie said go,” I translated.
Ellis flipped on his ghost-hunter phone app. “Go,” it chirped.
“Well, would you look at that.” He held up his phone, amused.
Frankie huffed. “I ain’t a circus act.”
“Play the recording for the app,” I suggested.
We did. Several times. The app didn’t care.
“Told you it was a piece of junk,” Frankie said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Why don’t you turn the app off for now?” I suggested to Ellis. It wasn’t telling us anything useful, and we needed Frankie to stay focused. “It could have been ‘don’t,’ ‘slow’ or ‘go.’ Or even something else,” I told them both.
We played it again. And again. The sound was muffled, the word short. It didn’t help that the ghost seemed to have kicked up tons of static.
Ellis held up the phone. “This is an actual ghost recording,” he said, like a kid at Christmas.
“You have an actual ghost right here,” Frankie said dryly.
“We can isolate this in the crime lab,” Ellis continued, “see if there’s anything subtle in the background we’ve missed. Perhaps something from a live person.”
“Maybe there’s more,” I said.
We let the recording play. The static cut abruptly, and silence overtook the room once more. Ellis drew his finger across the screen, searching for any more sound on the recording.
Ellis hitched himself up on his crutch as we scrolled and scrolled and listened to…nothing. His leg had to be hurting. I looked around and didn’t see Charlie anywhere.
There was no use standing around with the body. “Let’s get you back to the autopsy table,” I said, hoping he’d accept that comfort.
“There isn’t much else we can do in here,” Ellis said, “for now, at least.”
I locked up the murder scene once more and then joined Ellis and Frankie back in the morgue. Ellis was playing the recording back again as I closed the door.
“Flooow.”
Ellis frowned. “Maybe it’s saying no.”
No doubt, if we listened to it again, we’d hear even more possibilities. “I have a better idea than waiting to get this to a crime lab,” I said, knowing Ellis wouldn’t like what I was about to suggest. “I can play it for the ghosts. Or even the ghost hunters. They might have some kind of special equipment.” The packs on their backs were big enough.
Ellis gave me a sharp look. “We just got you back,” he warned. “I don’t want you running all over, looking for those ghost hunters.”
But he had to admit it was a smart move. “They know more about EVPs than we do,” I pointed out. “They are our best shot at learning what the recording really says,” I added, going for wild optimism. “This could be the clue that gets us out of here.”
Ellis appeared less than impressed. “As long as you’re not handing our evidence to the killers,” he drawled.
He had to point that out.
“I really don’t think Brett or Cash did it,” I said, sounding lame even to my own ears. I’d been wrong about murderers before.
“Will you bet our lives on that?” Ellis challenged.
Sometimes I really didn’t like his logical brain.
“I get you,” I said. I really did. “But in this case, we need more than pure calculation. We need a lucky break.” And that would only come if we took a calculated risk. We couldn’t afford to dismiss Brett and Cash or the help they could provide. “We need to work together if we want to get out of here.”
“Verity…” Ellis shook his head.
“I think Charlie l
ed us to the boiler room because he was trying to help,” I insisted. “That ghost on the recording said something that could be a clue.” We couldn’t ignore that. “You guys haven’t seen what I have upstairs. Dr. Anderson seems to have a good enough heart, but he doesn’t think like we do. We can’t just sit back and let him keep us here. This is a very bad place.”
“Oh, I get it.” Frankie stopped and turned to face me. “You’re gonna get everyone out except poor Bruno Scalieri, who did nothing to you.”
“He threatened to kill me,” I pointed out.
“But did he do it?” Frankie challenged. “He did not.”
“Because his leg was chained to the table,” I corrected. “Bruno Scalieri is not getting out. But the rest of these ghosts deserve a choice.”
“We’ll do our best to make that happen,” Ellis promised while Frankie groaned.
“You’re not even a ghost hunter.” Frankie threw up his hands at Ellis.
“You’re not even a ghost hunter,” I said, giving Ellis a kiss on the cheek.
Ellis laced his pinkie finger with mine. “I’m a cop.” He shrugged. “We work every day to make a difference. This is the same.”
I was so lucky to have him.
“I’m surrounded by a bunch of crazy do-gooders,” Frankie fumed.
He was the one who’d gotten us into this mess.
“Circus,” chimed the ghost-hunter app.
“Yeah, and I’m living in the big tent,” Frankie groused.
“Whoops.” Ellis checked his phone. “I must not have turned it off properly.” He messed with his screen.
“Give me a half hour to find Brett and Cash,” I said. “I heard them on the second floor when I was coming down the stairwell. They might still be there.”
“Take a look, and if they’re not there, come on back,” Ellis urged.
“I will,” I promised. We’d be smart. Ellis would know exactly where I was.
“And take Frankie,” he added.
Frankie crossed his arms over his chest as if daring me to make him. “I am not her servant. I’ll go if I want to.”
I rested a hand on my hip. “So do you want to?”