Death Warmed Over

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Then a set of metal file drawers rattled open, one after another, and manila case folders scattered out as if they were spring-loaded. Papers flew in the air. With a swirling blur, the ghost of Uncle Stan appeared before us. He stretched his lips in what was intended to be a fearsome grimace. His eyes bugged out. He swirled and did somersaults in the air, dove down into the file cabinets, and unleashed another eruption of papers. He appeared more inebriated than he had during his previous manifestation.

  Sheyenne was outraged. “You stop that!” She tumbled into him, poltergeist against poltergeist, knocking Uncle Stan for a loop. They both slammed into the wall, passed through, and reappeared, still tussling.

  When Sheyenne released him, Uncle Stan was astonished that anyone would stand up to him. “You’re ruining everything!” His lower lip trembled, and I thought he was going to start blubbering. “Stop trying to turn my own family against me!”

  With a final blast of poltergeist power, he scattered the papers of the Dorset file around the office, then vanished into thin air.

  I said, “Never a dull moment.”

  CHAPTER 32

  I helped Sheyenne retrieve the scattered papers and folders in the ghost’s aftermath, but I let her do the organizing (since she understands our filing system better than anyone). Robin retreated into her office to start drafting the contract between Ramen Ho-Tep and the museum.

  And I finally told Sheyenne my idea of having her do a little fieldwork on the Jekyll case. “You never know what we might find,” I said. I didn’t even have to twist her arm, metaphorically speaking.

  “I’ve been a med student, exotic dancer, cocktail waitress, nightclub singer, paralegal, and administrative assistant, but I’m happy to add a few more titles to my résumé. Besides, Harvey Jekyll or one of his henchmen could have been the shooter last night.”

  Miranda had provided a detailed description of the Jekyll mansion’s layout, so we knew where her husband kept his secret materials. Since she would never deign to make a sketch, that afternoon Miranda brought over a pristine copy of the house’s construction blueprints, obtained from the county records office.

  With a magnanimous swish of her hand, she unrolled the drawings onto Sheyenne’s desk. “Here you are, sweethearts. Legally speaking, I can’t imagine why you might be interested in the design and arrangement of my home, especially not the location of Harvey’s secure and private study right here.” With a sly smirk, she pointed to the appropriate spot on the blueprints. “I’ll just assume you’re remodeling your offices and wish to study prime architectural examples.”

  I began to speak, but Miranda raised one scarlet fingernail. “Not a word! As I said, I don’t want to hear it . . . at least not until you have something.” She flounced out of our offices, leaving Sheyenne and me to study the blueprints.

  Robin was uneasy. “I don’t like the precedent, Dan. By law, any evidence you obtain in this manner is tainted and inadmissible.”

  I don’t generally keep secrets from my partner, but Robin still didn’t know precisely how I’d gathered the documents that proved JLPN’s involvement in the vampire shampoo scandal. “Think of it this way,” I said. “Miranda Jekyll is still the legal co-owner of that home, and until the divorce case is settled, she’s entitled to fifty percent of the contents. Unless her husband succeeds in nullifying the prenuptial agreement, aren’t we within Miranda’s legal rights, if she asks us to enter on her behalf? And borrow an item that is fifty percent hers?”

  Sheyenne added, “It’s not technically breaking and entering if I just walk through a wall or a window, is it?”

  Robin remained skeptical. “We’re on very shaky legal ground here. It could jeopardize our case—and get me disbarred, not to mention thrown in jail.”

  “On the other hand, unless we secure this evidence, we don’t have a case to jeopardize,” I pointed out.

  Not willing either to admit defeat or give us her implicit permission, Robin took a stack of files into her office. “I’m going to prepare a brief. I’ll be unavailable for most of the night.” She closed the door. “And don’t you dare get shot.”

  Sheyenne and I glanced at each other and decided it was time to go.

  I was no longer limber or athletic enough for the cat-burglar acrobatics I would need to break into Jekyll’s mansion. I’d always solved my own problems and done my own legwork, so it was frustrating to be on the sidelines. Sheyenne had to take part of the risk without me.

  As soon as full night fell, I parked the car under a thick overhanging willow two blocks away from Jekyll’s tree-lined mansion, which was surrounded by a red brick wall topped with wrought-iron spikes. During my initial round of surveillance months ago, I had managed to snap a few photos of a man with little social life occupying himself with uninteresting activities at home. It hadn’t been worth the risk.

  Now, however, Sheyenne knew where to look, and she was our very best chance for getting what we needed.

  Since this was her first covert mission, I needed to see what Sheyenne saw. We settled on a tiny video camera, the kind of thing that would have awed a 1960s-era James Bond, but was now everyday technology. Sheyenne’s spectral presence made the grainy image fade in and out when I received it on my smartphone stream.

  The sound from the speaker was fuzzed with static, but I could hear her voice. “Check. Beaux, can you hear me? Check.”

  “Loud and clear, but let’s be a little less loud, please.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Fidgeting, I waited under the willow, well out of sight of Jekyll’s security guards who patrolled the grounds, while I watched the images on my smartphone. Sheyenne could make herself mostly transparent and could pass through solid walls; however, the camera, while admittedly small, could not pass through walls and might catch the eye of an alert observer as it drifted through the air. She needed to be very careful.

  She crossed the grounds and pointed the camera to show me a couple of business-suited Secret Service types standing at strategic points. Two Dobermans trotted the perimeter like angular shadows.

  “Stay clear of the dogs,” I whispered. “If they start barking, everyone’ll be on alert.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve never had trouble with dogs.”

  Some ghosts drive dogs into a frenzy of growling and barking; other ghosts, like Sheyenne, could have worked at the animal shelter without causing any particular distress. Even so, I didn’t want the Dobermans to chase the small floating camera as if it were a chew toy.

  Sheyenne drifted to the east wing of the home, then levitated to a set of windows on the second floor that marked Harvey’s private study. “I can just pop inside and take a look.”

  “Bring the camera,” I told her.

  “In a minute. I need to make sure the window doesn’t have alarm wires before I open it and bring the object through.”

  She set the small camera on the outer windowsill, leaving me with an extreme close-up image of the English ivy that Jekyll’s landscapers had planted along the brick walls. I endured five minutes of nerve-wracking silence, punctuated only by a woolly caterpillar munching its way through a leaf. Finally, the study window swung outward just enough for Sheyenne to slip the camera through and carry it into the study.

  “He did have an alarm system,” Sheyenne said into the microphone. “I went to the control box and tickled it, made all the lights go haywire.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Do you hear any alarms? Don’t worry, I’m inside. Let me get to work.”

  She panned the camera for me, and I got my first view of Harvey Jekyll’s study. It looked like a perfectly normal home office with a large desk, cherrywood file cabinets, comfortable executive chair in oxblood leather, Italian designer lighting, and a high-end stereo system beside a marble shelf filled with old CD jewel cases.

  It was too much to hope that she would find secret Nazi flags, embarrassing transvestite outfits, or even some of the vampire pedophilia that Gomez Ricketts
had been selling out of his storage unit. Sheyenne panned the camera across the CD spines: The Best of Hall and Oates, the Bee Gees, England Dan and John Ford Coley, the Little River Band, and more Barry Manilow.

  Yes, this was Harvey Jekyll’s study, all right.

  Then I saw one of the bullhorn-on-toaster gadgets he had kept in his corporate office. A portable ectoplasmic defibrillator. “Be careful around that device,” I said. “Jekyll designed it to protect against ghosts.”

  “I’m not touching any controls, just having a look around.”

  A folded newspaper with a half-finished crossword puzzle lay on the desk next to a calculator and a day planner. Sheyenne flipped through the planner, looking for anything suspicious. He had marked a tiny asterisk on the day when I’d spotted him and Brondon Morris going to their secret club meeting; several other dates also bore asterisks. Other than that, Jekyll had jotted down only a few dinner parties, a dentist’s appointment, and a note to pick up dry cleaning.

  “He wouldn’t leave anything incriminating out in the open,” I said. “Can you find the locked drawer that Miranda told us about?”

  She pointed the camera down at a heavy secured lock. “It’s pretty obvious. Let me do my poltergeist thing and see if I can jiggle the tumblers.”

  “Be careful,” I warned.

  “Don’t be a worrywart.” She worked for a few minutes, and finally the bolt popped down so she could slide open the drawer. Inside, she found a floppy purple head covering, like a dunce cap, and a foot-long golden measuring stick, some kind of ceremonial object.

  Sheyenne figured out the significance. “It’s a straight edge, Beaux.”

  From the bottom of the drawer she took a small velvet case that opened to reveal a thick silver ring. “Well, look at what I found.” Sheyenne pointed the camera close. A straight line had been scribed across the silver surface on the face of the ring, surrounded by the words Grand Wizard.

  I felt cold as the realization sank in. Harvey Jekyll wasn’t just dabbling with the Straight Edgers. According to this ring, he was their leader.

  “Now, that’s certainly something Harvey wouldn’t want made public,” I said.

  Suddenly the camera jerked, and the sound pickup transmitted the door banging open, voices shouting. I heard a man say, “The desk alarm was triggered—somebody must be in here!”

  The view from the camera swung wildly back and forth. I glimpsed Harvey Jekyll looking like a gnome in a fur-lined smoking jacket, flanked by two burly security goons. They charged into the room.

  “Spooky, get out of there!” I yelled.

  The crossword puzzle newspaper and day planner flew up into the air, twirling around as Sheyenne unleashed her inner poltergeist. The desk lamp flicked on and off. File drawers opened and closed, clattering as folders sprayed a geyser of loose documents. The guards shouted, to little effect.

  Jekyll, though, staggered into the spectral whirlwind and dove for the credenza. He grabbed the ectoplasmic defibrillator and turned the end of the bullhorn toward Sheyenne.

  The image from the camera shot forward as if I were riding a bullet, heading straight toward the widening eyes of Harvey Jekyll. Then the screen went blank, filled with static. The camera feed was gone.

  “Spooky!” I called, but got no answer.

  Even from two blocks away I could hear the commotion behind the brick walls. I needed to go there and help Sheyenne somehow, but I knew I’d never get past the alerted guards. Bright beams stabbed into the dark as security lights blazed around the mansion perimeter. The Dobermans howled.

  Suddenly, with a gusting cold breeze, Sheyenne was there in front of me. “Better get in the car and head out of here, Beaux. They’re bound to do a sweep in just a few seconds.”

  “What happened? The camera went dark. I thought . . .”

  “I had to distract them, so I threw it in Jekyll’s face. I didn’t want to forget this.” In her ghostly hand she held up the Grand Wizard ring.

  “I wish I could kiss you right now,” I said. I settled for giving her a heartfelt wink.

  “Ditto,” Sheyenne replied. “But use your imagination and figure out how to thank me later. Let’s get back to the office.”

  I started the rusty Pro Bono Mobile with a roar and a sputter, and we raced away.

  CHAPTER 33

  Though Robin couldn’t fault our results when we gave her the full report, she was less than enthusiastic to learn about the commotion we had caused.

  “You couldn’t have been more subtle?” she asked. “Sabotaging his home alarm system, opening a second-story window, tampering with the lock on the desk drawer, stealing private property!” She sounded very discouraged. “Jekyll is going to guess we were involved.”

  “I didn’t leave any fingerprints,” Sheyenne objected.

  “More importantly, it’ll never go to court,” I said. “If he thinks we’ve got his Grand Wizard ring, I very much doubt he’ll risk us making it public.”

  “Maybe he can’t prove we were the ones who broke in,” Robin said, “but we can’t prove the ring belongs to him either. We have a Straight Edge ring—so what? He’ll deny it.”

  “We have the running video of me taking the ring from the study,” Sheyenne said.

  Robin did not look happy. “And that video proves you broke in. We need to delete it. Besides, just because you found the ring in a drawer doesn’t mean it’s Jekyll’s or what he was doing with it. He might say Miranda planted it there.”

  “Even so, we’d better set up a meeting with Mrs. Jekyll—preferably tonight—to discuss how best to leverage this.” I suspected that for once, Miranda might make time for a scheduled appointment. “In the meantime we’d better keep the ring in the safe, locked tight.”

  An hour before midnight, I joined McGoo in the Goblin Tavern for a quick beer. It felt good to get back to anything that passed for normal. Sheyenne had managed to set up a meeting with Miranda Jekyll at Basilisk—a public place, for safety, and late enough to accommodate her busy social schedule.

  In the meantime, I informed McGoo that Sheldon Fennerman was now under a protection spell, but more importantly I let him know what we’d (unofficially) discovered in Harvey Jekyll’s mansion. The Grand Wizard’s ring was safely locked away, but I wanted McGoo aware of the situation, just in case. No telling what Jekyll or his goons might try to pull, and I had no intention of being gunned down a third time.

  To prevent Robin from having legal heartburn, I chose my words carefully. “This is hypothetical, McGoo. I’m not actually saying that Sheyenne did slip into somebody’s private study, or that she did obtain a very interesting and incriminating object.”

  “I get it, Shamble. We’re just talking in general terms.” He slurped his beer. “But—also in general terms—you need to be damned careful. You’re playing with fire here.” He looked up. “Say, are zombies afraid of fire, like in Night of the Living Dead?”

  “I’m no more afraid of fire than a lot of other things,” I said. “Clowns, though, they give me the creeps.”

  “You know what kind of streets zombies like best, Shamble?”

  “What?” He had suckered me into another stupid joke.

  “Dead ends.”

  “That’s not even remotely funny.”

  Before we could finish our first beers, the radio crackled at McGoo’s shoulder, and he acknowledged, listening to the squelch of code words. He looked at me. “Another disturbance at the Hope and Salvation Mission. Mrs. Saldana says it’s an emergency.”

  I swung off the bar stool and moved as quickly as I could. “The monster’s back?”

  “No, this is something else.” He headed off at a jog, and I kept up with him, glad for the hours I put in on the treadmill at All-Day/All-Nite Fitness.

  In front of Mrs. Saldana’s mission, by the light of the street lamps, I saw glass shattered on the sidewalk, lots of it, enough for two large windowpanes. The old woman huddled against the brick wall in her ubiquitous flower-print dress, her f
ace filled with revulsion. She pressed her hands together as if praying while she stared at a puddle of red and tan goo that looked like rejected by-products from a cat-food factory. Off to the side, a black silk top hat lay where it had fallen to the ground, next to a frock coat and checkered waistcoat.

  From behind her, in the yawning gaps where the windows hadn’t yet been replaced, I saw the equally frightened Jerry, her gaunt right-hand zombie. He shuddered in the shadows, afraid to come outside.

  We hurried up to Mrs. Saldana, making sure she was in no danger.

  “It’s horrible, horrible! Right before my eyes, he just . . . melted!” The old woman’s teeth chattered together. Through the open window, Jerry handed her one of the worn Bibles, and she clutched it to her chest, rocking back and forth.

  “Who melted? What happened?” McGoo pulled out his notebook. “Shamble, can you ID the vic?”

  I glanced down at the shapeless goo. Broken window glass. Black top hat. Among the reek of soupy flesh and bone, I smelled the distinctive scent of Zom-Be-Fresh. “My guess is that it’s Franklin Galworthy. He was here replacing glass for Mrs. Saldana.” I nudged the hat with the toe of my shoe. “And he liked to wear a lot of cologne.”

  The old woman finally found her voice. “Yes, Mr. Galworthy was here working late installing the new window. He’s been so busy lately with all those smashed windows around town. I had just stepped out to bring him some lemonade.” She glanced down, and I saw a paper cup in a little puddle. “I dropped it. I’m sorry for the mess, Officer.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Saldana.”

  Her voice hitched as she relived the nightmare. “Poor Mr. Galworthy! He groaned in pain, then squirmed, and dropped the glass pane he was carrying. Shattered all over the sidewalk. I thought he was hurt, and then . . . this happened. The poor man!”

  “Nobody came by and doused him with acid?” I asked. “You didn’t see a warlock cast some kind of dissolving spell?”