In the Air Tonight

by Lori Handeland

  “Her?”

  “I can tell the difference between him and her.”

  “You were close enough.”

  “I was in the yard. She happened by. We startled each other. I spoke calmly and quietly.” I’d been a kindergarten teacher for years and I’d learned straight off that with wild beasts … sometimes it helps. “You came. She left. End of story.”

  He stared at me a while. “I doubt that’s the end of the story.”

  Unfortunately, so did I.

  Chapter 10

  Raye was lying about the wolf. But why?

  “Why did you come out here?” she asked.

  Bobby wasn’t sure. After talking to Sullivan, he should have gone to bed. But he’d been restless. Unable to sit, let alone lie down.

  “I had to move and my room isn’t exactly huge. Not to mention that your father’s is right below mine and pacing probably wasn’t any better of an idea than—” He broke off. Probably best not to mention other ideas. He was the one who’d walked away from them.

  This house, this town, those trees made him twitchy. He’d thought because everything here was so different from home. But, really, a lot of things were the same. For instance, that constant feeling that he wasn’t alone, even when he was, remained.

  “Listen, Raye…” he began, moving closer, meaning to share at least a little of his past. Perhaps it was too soon, but she deserved to know how very fucked up he was before he lost his mind and kissed her again.

  She held up a hand—to stop him from talking, or keep him from touching—he didn’t know, then scooted by him and disappeared inside.

  Bobby stayed on the porch for a few moments longer, staring into the darkness, fingers on his gun. He doubted the wolf would come back. Until Raye had said she’d seen it too, he’d doubted the thing had been there in the first place. When he realized it had, that she’d been talking to it and not herself, he was both concerned and intrigued. But there was little about Raye Larsen that didn’t intrigue him.

  She was different from anyone he’d ever known—both sweet and sexy, funny and serious, down to earth and a little mysterious. He was captivated as he hadn’t been since …

  He rubbed a hand over his face.

  Since he’d arrested Audrey. His first mistake in a litany of them.

  The instant he’d felt that ridiculous pull he should have uncuffed Audrey Larue and let her go. Instead, he’d followed his cock and wound up sorry for it. What man didn’t?

  Back then he’d still been on patrol. Audrey had been selling jewelry in Jackson Square. He’d arrested her for carrying concealed. In Louisiana, one could carry openly without a permit. However, as Audrey had pointed out—

  “Tourists get hinky if they see a gun.”

  When he’d asked why, then, she had one, her reply made sense too. “Too many hinky tourists.”

  He’d had to take her in; there’d been a complaint. But the charge wasn’t serious. In a city like New Orleans where most crimes were, a concealed weapon on a street vendor just wasn’t. He advised her to get that permit. They got talking about how and the next thing he knew, he was driving her home.

  Audrey had been stunning. Tall and built, with long red hair and ridiculously green eyes. Not a freckle on her face, but elsewhere … there’d been a lot of them. He’d found out just how many the very first night. He moved in a week later. Moved out a year after that.

  The problem with Audrey was she lied. She was selling a lot more than jewelry in her stall. And what she was selling, she also smoked, shot, snorted, and swallowed.

  Because of her, he’d developed a sixth sense for untruths. Sometimes he thought he could almost smell them, like a distant, raging fire. That sense had helped him become a detective. But it hadn’t helped him become a better father.

  Because of him, his daughter had died.

  Bobby went inside, fell on his bed, and watched the spindly shadows of tree branches play across the ceiling. He dozed on and off; however, thoughts of Audrey and their little girl had never made a good bedtime story. He finally gave up trying to sleep as dawn seeped into the sky. He checked his e-mail and found one from Dr. Christiansen asking both him and the chief to meet in his office first thing.

  As Bobby had learned, first thing in New Bergin meant Oh God thirty, so he showered, shaved, and left before either of the Larsens stirred.

  His breath streamed out as white as the frost sprinkling the grass. An October dawn in northern Wisconsin was freaking cold. Luckily his rental car had a fabulous invention called heated seats, something he’d never had a need for at home and therefore had not known existed. With a toasty backside, his shivering stopped before he reached the main road back to town.

  He bought coffee at the Perk-o-Latte, three doors from the funeral home, and walked in the front door as the chief came in from the station. A nod was all they exchanged as they descended to the doctor’s lair.

  “Whaddya got, Doc?” the chief asked.

  The maniac lay on the table, all of the holes Bobby had put in him, as well as the ones Christiansen had, sewn or plugged. Bobby did not want to know with what.

  The dead man was big enough that he could have doubled for Frankenstein’s monster. The jagged scars and the Cro Magnon brow only added to the image. Even lying there dead, he gave Bobby the creepies.

  “Cause of death, bullet to the heart.” Christiansen glanced at Bobby. “Nice shot.”

  “I do my best.” He’d learned long ago that if he needed to shoot, he’d better make it count or not bother at all. “Tell me something good.”

  “I think you’re gonna like this. Anne McKenna’s blood is on the blade.”

  No big surprise there. Two meat-cleaver maniacs in one small town would be something out of a horror novel. Though lately Bobby had started to wonder if he’d stepped into one. To get out, he needed answers.

  “Any idea who he is?”

  “No ID.” The chief took over. “But most murderers avoid carrying their wallets. However, it’s difficult to walk around without their fingerprints.”

  Bobby perked up. “He’s got a record?”

  “He hauls hazardous waste.” The chief shrugged. “A lot of jobs require fingerprints now and that’s one of them.”

  “What does hazardous waste have to do with anything?”

  “No idea.” The chief removed a small notebook from his pocket, flipped it open. “Karl Wellsprung, from Ohio. As far as I know he’s never been to Wisconsin, though we don’t check folks at the border. The feds are interviewing his wife. Maybe they’ll uncover something, but right now it appears as though he slipped a gear and went on a killing spree.”

  “Randomly choosing New Bergin by pinning the tail on the donkey map?” Bobby asked.

  “You got a better explanation?”

  “The ring brought me here, linked this murder to others.” He glanced at the doctor. “I don’t suppose you got anything off that.”

  “The FBI wanted it.” Bobby cursed, and Christiansen lifted his hands in surrender. “I took a gander at it before I sent it to them. Seemed to me like the guy had cleaned it pretty well. Smelled like bleach. Feds will have a better chance of getting something off it than I would.”

  “No connection between this guy and the marshal’s sister?”

  “None.” The chief shut his notebook.

  “Any idea what she was doing here?”

  “Visiting her aunt.”

  Bobby rubbed his head. This whole thing smelled more random by the minute.

  He fucking hated random.

  “Look at it this way,” the chief continued. “If the murders stop, then you got your guy.”

  “They already stopped for a year, then they started again here.”

  Johnson scowled. “Are you sure?”

  “What do you mean, am I sure?”

  “From what you told me, the murders are only connected by that ring, by the brand. But this guy tried to burn the body.”

  “So did our guy. But b
urning a body isn’t as easy as they make it seem on TV.”

  “Damn right,” Christiansen muttered. “Why do they think I have a huge oven?” He gestured in the oven’s direction. The thing did take up a lot of space. “It isn’t like they’re setting fire to kindling.”

  “If there were other murders in other places where the body was burned, that would make the brand…” The chief searched for a word, shrugged and went with, “Invisible, then—”

  “The year of inactivity wasn’t inactive. We were looking for the wrong MO,” Bobby finished. “I should talk to the FBI.”

  “They’re on it,” the chief said. “Questioning the widow, requesting his travel schedule from his employer. Checking the airlines.”

  If Bobby was lucky, the maniac—Karl, Bobby amended—had flown to New Orleans the day before every one of the other murders, then flown home afterward. Or perhaps he’d driven a load of hazardous waste there, as well as to towns across the country where people had died then been burned.

  Although, if the man had hazardous waste, why burn a body? Why not just dump it wherever they dumped such waste these days? Then again, nothing about this perpetrator had made any sense from the beginning.

  Most likely the man had driven not flown on his own time, paying cash at dive motels or sleeping in his serial-killer white panel van. A hazardous waste truck would be as conspicuous as a credit card with his name on it.

  Just because he was a maniac that didn’t make him stupid.

  *

  When my alarm went off, I groaned. Saturdays should be about sleeping in, doing nothing, and they usually were. However, today was the New Bergin Elementary School Carnival.

  Torture at its finest.

  Bobby’s door was open, the room empty. I panicked for a minute, until I saw that all his stuff was still there.

  “You’re an idiot.” I headed for the bathroom. I cared too much, too soon. Bobby wasn’t going to stay now that he’d killed the maniac. He had places to go, other people to arrest. When he left so would Genevieve. And while one less ghost in my life would be fan-fricking-tastic, a heartbroken Stafford would not be.

  I turned on the shower, stepped beneath the stream. Henry had said the Venatores Mali were back. Plural. That meant there were more out there like the maniac. Would they come here? How did they know I was a witch when I hadn’t even known it myself? And how would I tell Bobby about them without appearing to be a lunatic?

  “Aargh!” I scrubbed my scalp, wishing I could wash all these crazy thoughts out of my head. I needed to talk to Henry.

  Would I be able to summon him? I’d never tried. I wasn’t going to try now. I shut off the water. At least until I put on some clothes and got out of sight and hearing range of anyone with a pulse.

  A half hour later, dried, dressed, and waiting outside for Jenn—she’d been due here five minutes ago, which meant I had about fifteen minutes to spare—I whispered, “Henry?”

  Nothing.

  “Henry!” I said a little louder. “I have some questions. I’m alone.” As if he couldn’t see that.

  “Pruuuu-dence!” I called, and received the same result. Although what I would have done with a wolf, I had no idea. While she’d seemed to understand us, she certainly hadn’t been able to talk. At least to me.

  “Ghosts. Never around when you need ’em.” Always right there when you didn’t.

  I called a few more times. Closed my eyes and thought of Henry’s face. I’d seen it enough. I conjured nothing but a slight headache. Which was just what I needed for a day with elementary school children on a sugar high, playing with sticks and balls and water.

  Jenn’s tires kicked up gravel as she fishtailed out of the trees and into the yard. I glanced at my phone. Ten minutes late. Which, for Jenn, was pretty damn early.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, turning the car in a circle so fast, I nearly tumbled out the door right after I’d gotten in.

  “If you wouldn’t drive this thing like a go-cart, I might be.” I fastened my seat belt with a sharp click.

  She glanced at me, then back at the road. “I meant after last night.”

  “Last night,” I repeated, images tumbling through my mind. Bobby’s kiss. Genevieve’s tears. Henry. Prudence.

  Jenn huffed, exasperated. “Someone tried to kill you.”

  Ah, that.

  “I’m fine. Not a scratch.”

  “You thought someone was in your house the other night too.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “It seems odd that you thought there was, and then a few days later … there was.”

  It was worse than odd, but I didn’t say so, and when I didn’t, Jenn moved on. One of the things I liked about her—she didn’t dwell.

  “I heard Detective Hot Stuff shot the guy. Bang, bang, straight through the heart.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  Dumb question. There’d been more people at the scene than emergency services. Pretty much anyone in town who could come out to watch, had. They’d have heard things; they’d have shared them.

  “What was it like?” Jenn asked.

  I remembered the fear, the shots, the huge knife just missing my head.

  “Huh.” Had Henry done that or had I?

  “All you can say is huh? This is the most exciting stuff to happen in this town in years.”

  “I’d rather our excitement didn’t involve murder.”

  “Attempted murder.”

  “Tell it to Anne McKenna.”

  “Dead lady in the alley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard she was the witch’s niece.”

  I’d been reaching over to change the radio station, which was yammering some advertisement for a hayride and pumpkin festival, but let my hand fall to my lap. My fingers suddenly felt as cold as the ones Anne McKenna’s ghost had wrapped around my wrist. Had that only been yesterday? I still had the bruises.

  “What witch?”

  “Oh, that’s just what me and my brothers called Mrs. Noita.”

  Jenn had two brothers—big bruisers, who’d played offensive line for New Bergin High, then gone on to Wisconsin, where they’d cracked heads for the Badgers and been paid with a full ride. A lot of people believed that football players were stupid—and I had to say that some who got hit in the head a few too many times—Brett Favre—did stupid things.

  However, attending the University of Wisconsin Madison in any form meant you weren’t an idiot. The academic requirements were extremely high. To stay in school, and keep up the ridiculous schedule that went along with a Big Ten sport, meant that the athletes didn’t just excel on the field. Jenn’s older brother was an electrical engineer and the younger one had just been admitted to law school.

  “Your parents’ neighbor is the dead woman’s aunt?”

  “That’s the word on the street.”

  “And she’s a witch.” Why hadn’t I heard of it?

  “She was nasty. To be fair, when we were little we probably drove her nuts. Baseballs smacking against her house. Footballs in her herb garden. Tom once threw my favorite Barbie on her roof, then threw Ken, as well as the back porch of the Barbie Dream House, up there too. When she’d come screaming out the front door her hair seemed to stand on end. My mom called her a witch after the Barbie incident, and it stuck.”

  “You never told me this.”

  “It was a family joke, not a community-wide opinion. Although she did keep to herself and everyone thought she was strange. Didn’t you?”

  To be honest, I’d never thought of the woman at all. I could count on two hands the times I’d seen her in my lifetime. Which was odd right there.

  Jenn turned into the parking lot, already half full with teachers’ cars. “I asked her for help once.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Remember The Sixth Sense?”

  As I was still living it …

  “How could I forget?”


  We’d been too young to see it at the theater, but there’d been one rainy Friday evening in high school when we’d indulged in the DVD.

  “I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone in the night after that.” Jenn shuddered. “Kept seeing my breath. Was afraid to turn around. Didn’t it bother you?”

  I shrugged. I was always afraid to turn around. You got used to it. “Why did you ask Mrs. Noita for help?”

  “If she was a witch I figured she knew a way to get rid of the ghosts or at least keep them at a distance.”

  “Since when are witches and ghosts in any way related?”

  Since last night? my mind whispered. When you met a ghostly witch?

  “I figured weird calls to weird,” she said. “It wasn’t as if I had anyone else to ask.”

  “What about the Internet?”

  “Because I was going to buy something funky off the Internet? And give out my address to the nut who was selling it? That’s how kids disappear.”

  “Well, at least you had the sense to know that.” I was kind of annoyed she hadn’t confided in me. Though what would I have done? Confessed that I saw ghosts too?

  She cast me a narrow glare. “Don’t you understand? I was scared shitless.”

  I did understand. More than I could, or would, ever say.

  “Did she help?”

  “She did.”

  I straightened, intrigued. I’d read every book, searched every Web site, tried a lot of things. None of them helped.

  “How?”

  “She gave me some rosemary and slammed the door in my face.”

  Something as simple as rosemary was something I hadn’t tried. “And that worked?”

  She cast me a wry glance. “We’re talking ghosts, Raye. They weren’t real in the first place, so it worked pretty damn good.”

  It had never occurred to me to go to a witch and ask for a way to ward off ghosts. Probably because it hadn’t occurred to me that we had a witch in town. Until last night, witches had never entered my head at all.

  My head had been too full of ghosts.

  Chapter 11

  The three men went across the street for breakfast, where they mulled the case and the autopsy results in between visits from the locals, who liked to shoot the breeze with both the doctor and the chief, as well as take the opportunity to meet the stranger in town.