But there was nobody even around, that she could see. Myrtle lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and there was only one other house on her street. The Busseys were out of town on vacation and Myrtle had most likely gone inside to sulk some more over her roses.
With a sigh, she started the car and headed back to town. “I’m losing my mind.”
“She’s a good cop.”
Michael closed his eyes as Lucas wavered into view.
“Leave her alone, Lucas,” he said tiredly. It was a waste of time. Lucas was feeling the need to investigate, which meant he was going to do everything but leave her alone.
Not good.
He sensed something about Daisy Crandall that made his skin itch. She had believed him all too easily. Cops didn’t do that. And it didn’t matter that her badge said County Sheriff. Still a cop.
She should have been a lot more skeptical.
The only reason that made sence as to why she didn’t scoff at him…she knew he wasn’t lying.
Some people had that knowledge, the ability to look at somebody and know whether that person was telling them lies—or truth. She had known. Plain and simple. And if she could sense truth, she could possibly sense other things. He’d rather she not know about the ghost that followed him.
“I like her.”
Now Michael frowned. Staring at Lucas, he cocked a brow, waiting. Lucas hadn’t ever said that about anybody before. He wouldn’t like somebody he couldn’t trust. He’d been very cautious in life about who he cared for—death had only enhanced that.
Lucas shrugged as he met his brother’s stare. It was an odd gesture, one that made his mostly solid image ripple for a moment and Michael saw the outline of the dresser behind Lucas for the briefest second. “She’s…solid,” Lucas finally said. “And sad. There’s something broken inside her.”
Michael felt his heart clench at Lucas’ words. Yes, he had sensed the grief inside the pretty, sloe-eyed woman. It had left an urge inside him, to go to her and cuddle her against him, stroke away the bleak look in her pretty brown eyes. “Nothing I can do about that,” he murmured. He wished he had just moved on. There were complications here that he didn’t need—complications that went beyond the ghost of a murdered woman and a missing runaway.
But she pulled at him…not just the ghost.
The sheriff.
Too often, the only people that could hold his interest were the dead. They whispered to him at night, surrounded him during the day. But the living, they rarely held any interest for him.
He felt her determination to find the murderer, a deep, steady intent that all but colored the air around her. Solid. Yes…true blue. Loyal, determined, steady, through and through.
Michael couldn’t walk away until he knew there would be no more ghosts behind him when he left. Which meant stopping the killer.
Running his tongue along his teeth, he studied the articles in front of him, sifting through to find the earliest one. Six dead women. Going back a year and half. The last two had both been killed within the past four months. The killer was escalating. They developed a taste for it, a need. Time passed and they had to kill more often, more frequently.
More violently.
Were there only the four? Or had he hidden some of the victims?
Areas like this were thick with woods and valleys, easy places to hide bodies. These four had been local. But Michael knew there was one out there that wasn’t from around here. A runaway…somebody barely more than a child. If he had taken one runaway, he’d likely taken others.
So possibly more murders than they knew about.
Rubbing his thumb across his chin, he contemplated the grainy picture in the paper. Pretty. Young…in her twenties. But the second one was in her early forties. And then a college coed who’d been home on summer break. The fourth one, the nurse, the ghost he had met earlier—28, married, mom with kids. Only thing they really had in common…they were female and white.
No pattern. That made it harder to pin things down.
There was something else that had to link them.
“What’s the damned link?” he muttered, shoving a hand through his hair.
“You know, some people just like to kill.”
“Yeah, but they usually have a preferred sort of victim,” Mike said absently.
“You’ve become too much like a cop.”
Mike smiled. “I don’t know what else there is left for me to be, Lucas.”
A cool breeze drifted through the room.
Feeling the heavy weight of emotion that seemed to roll from Lucas, he looked up. “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “And this isn’t a bad rap, you know.”
“You wade through the shittiest type of scum known to man, Mikey. You’ve put yourself inside the heads of monsters—I see how sick it makes you. I know how angry it makes you. I know it hurts. And you want me to buy that it’s not a bad rap.” Lucas shook his head. His eyes were so full of grief, it hurt to even look at his brother, but Mike wouldn’t look away.
“Yeah. I want you to believe it.” Scrubbing his hands over his face, he sighed. Pushing back from the small desk, Mike started to pace the tight confines of the hotel room. “Yeah. I’ve had to deal with shit. But you and me…we’ve been doing that all our lives. It’s not like I don’t know how to handle it.”
“I should have tried harder. We should have left sooner.”
“Neither of us could have known how low she would have stooped. Or what kind of messes she had gotten involved in,” Mike said quietly.
Lucas spun away. The force of rage flooding him had made his image wavery and Mike could barely see him. “I should have. I knew her—I knew what kind of scum she was involved in, knew better than you what she was capable of. I was supposed to protect you, Mikey. I failed. I shouldn’t have let this happen to you.”
“It happened to you,” Mike said.
“It happened to us both.”
That stopped him in mid-stride. He turned around, looking across the room at his brother. “Guess it did. And it happened for a reason. If it hadn’t…” Grisly images, things he’d rather forget, rolled through his mind. No, he didn’t want to remember many things that he’d seen in the past ten or fifteen years of his life. But lives had been saved because of it, killers had been stopped. “There’s a man sitting in jail right now because of what happened to me. His last victim didn’t die. We got to him before he could hurt her. You know what? I couldn’t have stopped him if I was your everyday average Jones, Lucas. It may not be the easiest thing to live with, but I’d rather have some bad nights and know that bastard will never kill anybody again, then to change it.”
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough, Mike?”
Focusing on the papers in front of him, he blew out a breath. “No. There’s a girl out there, Lucas. A kid. He has a kid. And I’m not going to stop until I’ve stopped him.”
“And then there will be another. And another…and another. When will it ever be enough?”
“That’s the way it works.”
As Lucas’ presence faded away, Mike focused again on the information in front of him.
You hurt that girl, you son of a bitch, and you’re going to die.
Tanya felt it in her heart when the girl died.
The blackness that surrounded the cabin expanded and she wanted to flee, but at the same time, her own anger kept her chained. She had hoped…had prayed…the man, she’d thought he would help. He hadn’t, though.
Tanya waited and waited but he never came and now it was too late.
Terror welled inside. Only one thing caused that. Him—the killer. The killer was coming. Her killer. “My killer,” she whispered.
Her throat felt tight. It was weird. She could still feel things. When Michael had touched her earlier, she had felt it. His arms had felt bizarrely hot, like he’d had a fever. It had been get a shock, all over her body and it left her skin buzzing and burning, in a very, very painful way.
; Did she feel cold to him?
She wanted to run. But the only place she could go was the field. She already knew that. And that was just as bad as here. Every time she ended up there, she kept remembering what she had seen. She’d run there the first time. Because he had come here. To clean up after he had killed her. She ran, and she found herself. She saw what he did to her. Seeing it was just as bad as feeling it, in a different way.
Tanya had watched as two childhood friends led the police to her body. She was stuck there, watching as Daisy and her deputies searched for clues that would lead to him. Deep inside, Tanya knew that she knew who he was. But it was like she’d closed the door on his memory, on his face. She couldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t.
The terror inside grew so thick it was choking her, flooding her. She couldn’t keep doing that. Needed to see him. Had to. So she could tell Michael. Michael was there to help. He could tell Daisy. God…Daisy. Tears squeezed out of her eyes and Tanya had to bite back the scream that was building in her throat. They had been planning to go into town and watch a movie. Get a few drinks…just have a girl day.
They wouldn’t do that now. There would never be another girl day. She’d never take her daughter shopping for that dress. Amy’s first big dance was next month and Tanya wasn’t ever going to see her, wouldn’t be able to take pictures… She’d lost out on all of it.
Rage started to edge back the terror even though the blackness moved closer. He was moving closer. Turning, Tanya stared at the still body of the girl lying tied to the cot. “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” she whispered.
The girl just lay there.
Her body was still covered. She hadn’t been battered…beaten…cut, or raped. Not yet. Tanya couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. “You got off easy, baby. I wish I’d died before he touched me.”
He felt the voice. At first, he was convinced it was his own imagination, but then, as it continued to echo inside his mind, he had to wonder.
And there was a stranger in town—one who had been seen talking to the sheriff. One who had been seen out where Tanya’s body had been found. He was a big, mean looking bastard with sharp eyes.
He hadn’t heard that voice, either, not until that man had shown up. Now it was like he wouldn’t shut up. This was not good. Not at all. As the echo of the words ran through the man’s mind, repeating themselves over and over, he started to worry.
Let her go… Let her go now, and maybe I won’t kill you when I find you.
Shaken, he jogged out of the house and leaped into his truck, whipping it around and speeding for the cabin where the girl was kept. She lay there, sweet, innocuous…and dead.
He bellowed with rage, launching himself to the cot and grabbing one wrist. A pulse…there would be a pulse. She wasn’t dead, she was playacting to try and get free. Stupid little bitch. She was going to pay for this. Damn it, nobody cheated him. Nobody.
But the skin was cool—she had a pasty, grayish blue cast to her skin and her eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. There was a weird little curl to her lips, almost a smile. Mocking him.
She’d been dead a while.
He shot to his feet, pacing back and forth, dragging his hands through his hair and gnawing worriedly at his lower lip. What in the hell had happened? The ethyl chloride he’d used on her was harmless. And she’d woken up since then. What in the hell…
Spying her purse, he grabbed it and dumped it out. Hairspray, a comb, a cell phone with a dead battery, loose coins, two prescription bottles and a thick wad of cash. Something hit the floor with a musical clink and he knelt, eyeing the stainless steel bracelet with dread. The red caduceus winked up at him mockingly as he lifted it.
The medical terms didn’t make much sense to him, the V2 and the medical jargon was all but foreign to him. Except the words cardiac murmur—those words, he understood all too well.
Turning, he studied her face with disbelieving eyes.
She’d gone and had a fucking heart attack on him.
“You little bitch!” he screamed. “Bitch. Fucking bitch!”
He stood up and lashed out with his boot, kicking the cot. In a fit of fury, he stormed across the cabin, cussing furiously, completely unaware that he was being watched.
Tanya hovered in the corner. Her own fear was slowly dissipating, washing away as the sense of irony settled in. She stared at the two bottles of pills and at the bracelet, moving closer. He cut her off and she shied away automatically, but he still came close. He stilled though and she watched as he shivered. Smiling, she moved over to the spilled pile of drugs by the girl’s purse.
“Poor thing,” she whispered. Died of a heart attack.
He came to an abrupt halt, staring around with wild eyes. “Who’s there? Who the hell is that?”
Looking up, Tanya studied him. It was the first time she had consciously looked at him. His features came into focus… Recoiling in horror, she shied away, letting her mind blur his features again. No…not ready…part of her whispered. She wasn’t ready to look at him. Wasn’t ready to remember what he had done. How he had laughed when she screamed and cried.
But the other part of her thought logically. Realistically.
He heard her.
“You can hear me,” she said flatly.
“Who in the fuck is here?” he demanded. His eyes kept wheeling around in his head as he searched the room for her.
Slowly, Tanya stood, a smile curving her lips as she moved closer. Reaching out, she touched his cheek. “Take a guess.”
A cold touch drifted down his spine, bringing Michael out of his restless sleep. It wasn’t the first time he had been woken up like this and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. A restless spirit hovered around him and he swallowed back the furious shout that threatened to escape him. Too late. Bitter knowledge burned inside him but he clamped a tight lid on it.
The poor girl didn’t need his anger.
“Hi,” he said quietly, wondering if she would be stuck here, or if she was just a little lost.
There weren’t any words from her. Just a sense of confusion.
“It’s okay—takes a little time to move on sometimes,” he said softly.
She sighed. He felt it like a breeze moving through the air. She was afraid, worried. She knew what had happened—she was angry, and she wanted her mother. Finally, images of her mom made her hurt enough, made her angry enough that she was able to speak. “Why did I leave…what’s going to happen to my mom? She’ll never know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What do I do? Am I stuck here?”
At least this much, he could help with. “No…no, you’re not stuck. You can move on any time you’re ready to let go.”
“I can’t go until I know Mom will be okay.”
Michael promised, “I’ll make sure your mom knows that you’ve moved on. That’s what I do.”
There was the beauty of youth, though. Sometimes, they did still accept what you told them. It took a while to coax her to move along, but eventually she did. She started to see the white light—one thing that the movies had gotten right. She moved toward it and there was one less ghost in his life.
But that meant somewhere out there, a young woman lay dead.
“You couldn’t have just left.”
“Neither could you.”
Lucas stood by the window, materializing out of thin air, his form more ghostly than normal. “You make me seem a lot more altruistic than I am. I cared about two things when I was alive, Mike. Me. You. That was it.”
Walking past the window, Michael didn’t spare his brother a glance as he said, “Don’t give me that line. If you knew innocent girls were being killed, would you just walk away? This last one was just a girl. Younger than you were.” Mike was quiet for a minute and then he looked back at Lucas. “People knew what she was doing to us, man. They knew what she tried to do to me. How many times did you have to save me from it, Lucas? Were there times that I didn’t even know about?”
&nb
sp; Lucas’ silence was answer enough. Mike had always suspected it but now he knew. His mother had been willing to sacrifice Mike for Lucas’ sake, but now he knew the truth. She would have sacrificed him to score some coke. Mike wanted to be angry but he realized he just didn’t care.
“People knew. They walked away. Time after time. If somebody had done something, we might have made it out of there.”
“You did make it out of there. Hell, so did I. Just not quite the way I planned.”
Nausea churned in Michael’s gut. “That’s not funny, Lucas.”
Lucas laughed bitterly. “I wasn’t trying to be funny, pal. But I did get out. You think I wanted to hang around there waiting until it was the right time to get away from her? Every second we hung around, you were in danger. And that last night, I could have killed her. What if they’d found you? We did get out. I’m just sorry it was hell on you for as long as it was.”
Hell—Dear God, that didn’t even cover it. How many nights had he lain awake wondering if dawn would ever come, and the monsters would fade with the light, if the voices that whispered to him were demonic dreams manifested by his own mind or if they were real?
It had taken him years to come to grips with the fact that they were real. Even longer to not wake up terrified when that ghostly touch came on him at night.
He saw ghosts. They touched him, spoke to him, whispered to him—and begged him for help in finding their killers. He never saw those who passed peacefully at the sunset of their lives. Only those whose lives were ended far too early.
With a weary sigh, he flicked on the switch in the bathroom, squinting at the overly bright light . Turning on the water, he bent over and splashed it on his face until the rest of the cobwebs faded. With his hands braced on the tiled edges of the sink, he stared at his reflection. He was starting to look old. It wasn’t lines on his face, though, or gray in his hair. His hair was still a deep, dark brown and the only lines on his face were the little ones fanning out from his eyes.
It was the eyes that made him look old.
Talking with the Dead Page 5