by Chaz McGee
I was part of them. I was one of them. I was connected still, I told myself, or I would not be here. I still had a right to play my part.
The box moved. It slid over the edge of the counter and tumbled to the floor. Neatly sealed bags of evidence spilled onto the tile. And, instantly, I was overcome with a wave of pain so acute that I cannot describe it. Every fiber of my being throbbed with an agony so intense that it brought me to my knees.
I had violated the boundaries of my world. And I would pay the price.
I leaned my head against the counter, enduring the pain, telling myself that it would be worth it, as the two women dropped to their knees, frantic to preserve the evidence.
“What the ever-loving hell was that?” Maggie asked as she scooped up the bags and placed them back in the box. “Nothing broke, thank god.”
“I don’t know.” Peggy was old, but her fingers were nimble as she plucked bags from the floor. “I didn’t touch it. Did you?”
“I wasn’t even close to it . . .” Maggie’s voice trailed off. She leaned back on her heels and held up the small plastic bag of granules, examining the label. A bolt of exultation ran through me. Yes. “Did you get to this yet?”
Peggy shook her head. “Let me see.” She held the bag up to the light and scrutinized its contents. “Sand?”
“That’s your call, not mine. But I did think it was out of place. I found it near her right foot. I think it came out of a shoe, a shoe the killer probably took with him when he left. Maybe she was killed on a golf course?”
Peggy examined the bag more intently. “I see purple and black granules. This isn’t sand, but it sure is something.”
Think, I willed Peggy. Think back to the Alissa Hayes case. You’ve seen this before, you must remember.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Peggy the way she had been when she had testified at the trial. Had she held the bag of evidence in her hand? Had she been asked about the granules? I searched my imperfect memory for guidance, willing Peggy to remember, too.
“What is it?” Maggie asked, hearing something in Peggy’s voice that was going unsaid and noticing the stillness of her posture.
“I don’t know exactly.” Peggy struggled to her feet and slid back onto her stool, removing the slide that was under her scope and labeling its contents for further study. “I think I’ve seen this stuff before.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember. But I will. It was another case. I just need some time to remember.”
I leaned against the wall, eyes closed, still throbbing with a pain that threatened the equilibrium I had grown accustomed to over the last six months. But pain could not kill me. I was already dead. And if I had done something to help, anything at all, it would be worth it in the end.
I willed Alissa Hayes to appear in my memory, trying to send the image to Peggy’s mind. If I could not cross the boundaries of the physical world, I would use what power I had to affect her thoughts and guide her emotions.
A cool draft brushed my cheek. I opened my eyes. Alissa Hayes stood next to me, looking at me solemnly. I smiled at her and her mouth twitched, just a little, as if she wanted to smile back, but could not.
There was something different about her face. I tried to piece it together. Then I had it: the horrible bruises that had bloomed beneath her eyes and across her cheekbones were gone. Her skin was smooth.
Somehow, her existence in the plane we shared had been altered.
I think I was the one who had done it.
Chapter 7
It was a long time before I could move again. It took at least an hour to recover. Alissa had disappeared and Maggie had returned to her desk by the time the pain receded. I felt heavy and listless, unable to leave my spot against the lab wall. I had no choice but to wait, praying my energy would return and wondering if I had somehow lost my ability to move about forever—then wondering what “forever” meant in my present state.
As I waited, I watched Peggy scrutinize the granules under her microscope. To pursue knowledge now seemed like a gift that I had too seldom indulged when I’d had the chance. But Peggy was a master at it. By the time I felt able to make my way down the hall, she had turned to her computer and was researching the composition of chemical compounds as intently as if they were runes and she a druid priestess determined to bring their magic to life.
I found Maggie on her hands and knees, oblivious to everything but my old unsolved case files spread before her on the floor. I didn’t know where she had stored my photo or if it meant anything to her at all. She was reading the case files with a concentration that rivaled Peggy’s. It fascinated me. All else around her felt frozen in time, nothing existed for her but the pages before her and the thoughts churning in her brain. Her eyes darted from line to line, her need to find an answer obliterating all else. This, I realized, was what set us apart from the creatures we so poorly shared the earth with: the realm of the mind.
I sat in my old chair, watching, waiting, wondering when I would have the strength to alter the physical world again—and if it was wise to attempt it at all. Was there anything I could do? I knew the files Maggie pored over would only waste her time. They were my old unsolved cases, an em barrassingly high stack of them, but, of course, the Alissa Hayes case was not among them. Her case had been filed as solved. Maggie would never think to look in the solved archives. Not without my help.
But Peggy Calhoun—in all of her cat-eye glasses and orange-haired beauty—saved me. And though she owed me nothing, had received nothing but contempt from me when I was alive, she set the wheels in motion.
“I remembered,” she announced from the doorway. The bag of granules dangled from her fingertips.
“And?” Maggie asked, rocking back on her heels.
Peggy held the bag aloft. “Silicon carbide, with trace amounts of aluminum oxide and chromium.”
“In English?”
“Substances used in lapidary. That’s gem cutting.”
“There was an abandoned quarry near the dump site.”
“Think smaller. We’re talking much smaller rocks.”
“How is it significant?” Maggie asked.
“I’ve seen this same combination before. I know I have.”
“When?” I could feel the determination sparking off Maggie like flames.
“I can’t remember,” Peggy said. “I’ve been trying.”
“An unsolved case?” Maggie suggested, gesturing toward the scattered files. “One of Danny’s?”
Peggy shook her head. “Maybe not an unsolved case.”
I could have leapt from my hiding place and kissed her, smeared lipstick and all.
“What do you mean?”
“They had a suspect in one of their cases, a geology student or something like that. We got the guy based on traces of grains exactly like this. I didn’t testify. That was before Horace retired and I was still an assistant. He testified. But I think they got the kid. He’d still be doing time.”
Maggie frowned. “If he’s still in, how’d he kill our girl a few days ago?”
Peggy shrugged. “It may mean nothing. I can check to see how common the elements are.”
“It means something.” Maggie stroked a file as she spoke. “Everything means something. We just have to find out what.” She looked up. “Can you do a computer search of the records?”
“I tried. Computerized files only go back three years. I didn’t find anything.”
“Can you call Horace and ask him?”
Peggy looked sad. “Not anymore. He passed last year.”
He had? I had missed that, too; yet another milestone in another’s life that I had failed to notice. But, hey, I’d look on the bright side: maybe Horace was roaming around with me somewhere and I would stumble across him. I’d always liked the old geezer. He’d loved expensive cigars—and shared them freely.
“Okay, then,” Maggie said firmly. “I’ll start looking through solved cases, starting four years ago.
That narrows it down a little.”
“They didn’t solve all that many cases over the last eight or so years,” Peggy reminded her. “You can easily look through them in a day.”
That stung.
“They were that bad?” Maggie sounded puzzled. She could not comprehend anyone willingly doing such a bad job.
“The bottle got them both. It happens to a lot of the guys.”
“But not the women?”
“No,” Peggy agreed. “Not the women. Women are stronger.” She smiled at Maggie and I could feel the bond between them. Born of what? I wondered. Both being women? Or was that bond a choice, something I could have had with anyone—had I only chosen to acknowledge and feed it?
“Do you think I’m being obsessive?” Maggie asked. “Am I making too big a deal out of this?”
“You got anything else to go on?” Peggy asked.
“Not really.”
“There’s your answer.” Peggy turned to go.
Maggie went to work. I found myself rooting for her the way I used to root for the New York Mets: half because I had nothing else to do, and half because I wanted to belong to something again, no matter how trivial.
Thank god Danny and I had simply thrown our case folders in increasingly chaotic file cabinets. I don’t think we’d transferred anything to Archives in the last ten years. Maggie stared at the mess, starting with four years ago, a year when an upswing in drug traffic had bloated our workload. There were stacks of drug murders we had actually solved—after figuring out that the dealers in our town were killing one another. In the end, only one suspect remained, the others eliminated by bullets. Regardless of which of his rivals the surviving dealer had actually killed, he’d gone down for them all and would never see the light of day a free man again. I could not feel bad about that one. That conviction had been our last run at glory.
Maggie was smart. She separated out the cases involving male victims right away and set them aside. She’d look through the ones involving female victims first. After that, it took her a good twenty minutes to flip through each file, trying to decipher our notes. But she did not skip a page. At last, she reached the month when we’d caught the Alissa Hayes case.
She was inches from it, just a few files away, when Danny returned from his trip to the community college and interrupted. I could have killed him. I felt a hatred toward my old partner well in me and it surprised me. I had brought bad feelings with me to this side.
“What the hell are you doing, Gunn?” Danny asked gruffly, staring at the files stacked on the floor between their desks.
“Peggy identified a substance from the scene, elements used in gem cutting. She says it came up before. I’m looking for the connection.”
“But those are solved case files,” Danny pointed out, and I could hear something ugly growing in his voice. Don’t go there, I thought, please don’t go there, partner. “You think me and Fahey made some sort of mistake?” Rage engulfed him in an instant and I realized that anger was one of his few remaining emotions. His gentler feelings had long since surrendered, having lacked the power to survive against the alcohol and the self-loathing.
“I don’t think anything yet,” Maggie said calmly. “I’m just looking for a connection.”
“Me and Fahey were thorough. You saying we put the wrong person behind bars?” His belligerence was familiar. He had stopped off at a bar before he had returned to the station.
Maggie closed the file she was reviewing. I wanted to shake Danny and scream that it didn’t matter whether we had been wrong or right, that our egos were the least of it, that we didn’t matter in fact, not a whit, that the only thing that mattered was for the real killer of Alissa Hayes to be caught so that no one else would die like the young girl who’d been murdered yesterday. What made Danny think our reputations were more important than that, that something as dubious as my memory could possibly matter more than bringing justice to the young girl who lay dead and unnamed in the morgue?
“Fine,” Maggie said calmly, putting the file back on her desk. She let his hostility wash over her like a wave. When his anger found no resistance, it had no choice but to recede, leaving Danny unchallenged and helpless. “What did you find out?” she asked him, all business.
“Missing Persons was a bust. We had the usual number of girls reported missing from the New York area, but they were papering everything within a couple hundred miles and none had anything to indicate they might have ended up here. But the college registrar had something. The kids have these computer cards now to scan in their attendance at classes. We found nine girls who were total no-shows at their classes over the last two days. Five were in the infirmary with some flu going around. One took off for California with her boyfriend, according to the roommate. That leaves three who might be our girl.”
“What did the roommates say? Did you show them the photo?”
Danny shrugged. I knew that shrug well. It meant he’d get to it when he got to it. “My bet is all three are shacking up for a couple of days with their boyfriends. Thought I’d get some lunch first then track down the roommates.”
“One of them is our girl.” Maggie stood abruptly and smoothed her skirt down over her knees, dismissing Danny with the gesture. “You can get a burger on the way back to the college. I’ll drive.”
“You think I need help with something as simple as that?” His tone was blatantly combative.
Maggie ignored his anger once again, robbing it of all power. “I’m going back to walk the approach to the scene. Maybe there’s something we missed in the dark. May as well carpool, right?” When she smiled, Danny stared back at her suspiciously. He could handle anger thrown at him and his fists were as ready as anyone’s to back up his words. But kindness and a backing down of ego? That was new to him. He didn’t know what to make of it. At all.
I realized how utterly sad it was that his world was so devoid of goodwill he could not recognize it when it appeared. Had I been like that, too, so ready to fight, so cut off from all but the darkest of emotions?
“Okay,” Danny agreed. “But you’re buying lunch.”
“Just don’t make it a triple burger,” she countered, but she was smiling.
For just a moment, I felt something good rise in Danny, something still alive in my old partner that responded to laughter and kindness. Then it was gone.
Chapter 8
I had watched people eat since I died, of course, and longed for that lost pleasure, but seeing Danny eat was a whole other ball game. He wolfed, he chomped, he licked, crunched, and dripped. Watching him, it was impossible not to miss the pleasure of filling one’s gut. But I think I might have been the only one who got any satisfaction from it. Danny shoveled his food in without seeming to get any joy from it at all, as if he feared someone might snatch it from him if he didn’t hurry. My guess was that he was at the point in the day where he felt as if the alcohol had eaten a hole in his stomach and he had to fill it as soon as he could. I had been there myself and remembered the sensation: a weakened body, fighting back against the poison.
If Maggie noticed, she said nothing. Indeed, she never even looked at Danny at all. She drove in silence, ignoring his frantic chewing and slurping. It wasn’t that she had given up on Danny, I realized. She had never considered counting on him in the first place, never weighed it for an instant. I felt ashamed at the possibility that I had once been worthy of such treatment myself. Had Danny gotten worse, or had we unknowingly shared in this sort of dismissal before? I’d had no perspective while alive, no awareness of what others thought of me, or maybe it was more like no interest in what others thought of me. In many ways, I had been dead even back then.
But there was something more to Maggie’s ability to shut out Danny and, indeed, the rest of the world with preternatural concentration. She had trained herself to reject all unbidden thoughts, I decided, perhaps as protection against a painful memory. A failed marriage, perhaps. A professional failure of her own? I could feel
nothing from her that might guide me toward an answer. She kept all but the present de terminedly at bay.
When they reached the center of campus where the student dorms were located, Maggie dropped Danny off without comment. He had a mustard spot on his left shoulder as he climbed from the car and he smelled like he’d been ga toring on a barroom floor. Great. Law enforcement was about to make another good impression on young people. But what could I do?
I stayed with Maggie.
I had never seen a person act with so much single-minded purpose before. And whether it was brilliance or self-preservation, it enthralled me. I could not stay away. She radiated a brightness that drew me to her and paled all else.
She started at the parking area far down the hill, searching the sidewalks and grass in a grid pattern, her eyes never wavering as she sought evidence that might lead her closer to the identity of the girl’s killer. It was almost an hour before she left the busy lower area and started up the path that led to the top of the hill. The hillside was rimmed with occasional stands of trees that slowed her even further. She took out a flashlight and scrutinized the base of each tree she passed, examined the underside of each bush, seeking a primary site for the murder but finding nothing. An hour later, she was far above the campus, in sight of the officer guarding the crime scene above. I was her shadow, searching the ground with her, mimicking a meticulousness I had rejected when alive.
We reached the crime scene, but Maggie did not stop; she had covered every inch of it already. She waved at the guard as she passed and he saluted her in return, a sign of his respect for her dedication. She followed the path upward into the forest above the field where the young woman’s body had been found. As Maggie investigated a patch of trampled bushes just off the main path several hundred yards from the hilltop, our peace was abruptly shattered. I was flooded with a sense of doom so acute it felt as if the world had inverted and the very earth had moved through me in doing so. I was left with a choking, cold, all-consuming sensation that both smothered me and stripped me bare. I was stunned into inaction, frozen by an unseen source of pure evil.