Trace (TraceWorld Book 1)

by Letitia L. Moffitt

  “Dead-on again,” Jeb said. “The wife usually knows.”

  “And,” Nola continued eagerly, “this wife seems especially like someone who wants to keep things under control—you know, the kind of person who chooses to ignore unpleasant realities? She was awfully calm for someone whose husband of nine years might be dead.”

  Matt and Jeb exchanged a look. “OK, Nancy Drew,” Matt said, his smile visible to Nola from the back of the car. “You trying to take our jobs from us?”

  If it had been anyone other than Mutt and Jeff in the car, the Nancy Drew crack would have riled Nola, but she and they had a comfortable enough rapport that she could take the jibe. At the same time, it was pointed enough to remind her that her role in the investigation was a tiny one, and really she was lucky to be included at all. After she chuckled with the guys, she sat back, subdued, and remained quiet until they reached Vincent Kirke’s building.

  Culver Bryant’s business partner was as unforthcoming with details as his wife had been. Vincent (Nola could see he was clearly not a Vince) had just come back from jogging when he answered the door; he offered them French-press coffee and led them to a sitting room with a lot of buttery-soft leather furniture and a coffee table of thick Italian marble. Clearly, owning French and Italian things was important to him, yet there was nothing obnoxious about his home or his demeanor. He was a smooth talker, certainly, but that rather made sense given his work with Bryant. Bryant, Nola guessed, was a thinker and a doer but not a talker. Kirke would be the talker, someone who could add that one right phrase to win over investors who might be impressed with Bryant’s forward-thinking ideas and can-do attitude but still lingered on the fence. If that was true, she reflected, it meant that Kirke needed Bryant more than Bryant needed Kirke. She filed that thought away and went back to her secretarial persona.

  At first Nola wasn’t sure why she’d been asked to come along for this particular interrogation. While there was logic to supposing Bryant might have been killed in his own home, it seemed very unlikely that Kirke would have murdered Bryant—if Bryant had been murdered at all—at his home. Sure enough, there was no trace at Kirke’s downtown loft condo, which strongly suggested “midlife divorced male” and not much else.

  Jeb had just gotten to the “unusual behavior” part of his line of questioning, to which Vincent Kirke gave some thought before answering. “I got the sense that something was on his mind the last couple of weeks. He seemed anxious, secretive. Not in a way that was obvious, but I know the guy well, and he’s not normally either of those things. I had the impression there was something eating at him that he didn’t want to talk about, something that made him feel . . .” He hesitated, frowning slightly. “I hate to use the word guilty, but it did seem like something weighed on his conscience, if you will. But now, listen, that said,” he added quickly, “I can’t for the life of me imagine what that could be.” It was an odd thing for him to say given his knowledge of Bryant’s infidelity. Matt and Jeb waited, but the man clearly had nothing more to say.

  Kirke’s interview was the shortest of the four. As with Maureen Bryant, his reticence didn’t seem suspicious so much as simply part of his nature. These were not flamboyant people.

  Lynette Veesy, on the other hand, was another matter altogether. Her hair was copper, her make-up glittery, and she wore a sheer black blouse over a magenta lace bustier and patent leather spike-heel boots—all this on her day off from tending bar. Apparently this was her around-the-house attire.

  Her appearance wasn’t nearly as surprising as her first words once they were in her apartment. “What is she doing here?” Lynette demanded. She didn’t look at Nola, the only other “she” in the room, but it struck Nola as a suddenly wary avoidance rather than a contemptuous one.

  “Ms. Lantri—” Jeb began.

  “I know what her name is. You told me that. She’s that psychic, isn’t she? She finds dead bodies.” Her voice had suddenly gone shrill. “Get her out of here!”

  A stunned silence followed. Nola had already noted that this place was a “no” in terms of trace, making Lynette’s reaction all the more bizarre. She hadn’t asked anyone else to leave except Nola, and only did that when she realized why Nola was there. But how could she have known? Nola had been introduced as a clerk, and nobody had ever questioned that before. No one had ever recognized her before either. Something was off, and Matt and Jeb knew exactly what to do about it: nothing. Let the suspect—now that she seemed to be one if she hadn’t been before—dig her own hole.

  Lynette seemed to realize that her reaction had been extreme. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” Her mouth hung open, her eyes darting around the cluttered but chicly furnished room (the bills sent to Culver Bryant, no doubt). Nola saw that her hands were twitching. Finally, she seemed to calm down. “It’s just that I don’t like to think that he’s . . .” She began to tremble again.

  Theatrical, Nola thought. She knew that was an uncharitable judgment—of course Lynette wouldn’t want to think of Culver Bryant as being dead—but something about the woman’s behavior still seemed wrong. Not fake but off-kilter somehow. Regardless, it was clear they weren’t going to get anywhere if Nola stayed, so as disappointing as it was to miss out on whatever else Lynette was going to say, Nola nodded to the detectives that she understood the situation and went outside to the car to wait for them.

  “Did I miss anything good?” she asked jokily when the guys returned. They smiled but said nothing, which was a further disappointment, since she could hardly press the matter further.

  “Last up is the brother. Half-brother, actually. Same father,” Matt said, flipping through his file folder. “Dr. Grayson Bryant. He was out of town yesterday, got back in late last night. Asked if we could come midday, give him time to catch up on his sleep. He’s a sports doctor, said he’d just returned from some big sports-medicine conference in Chicago.”

  Jeb glanced at his watch. “He’s at North Cumberland. If we hit that Starbucks drive-through on Garfield before heading over there, the timing should be right.” He shook his head. “These interviews are going fast.”

  Nola knew he meant too fast. They weren’t discovering anything new. Nola wasn’t discovering anything at all, and they only had one stop left.

  It was a simple brick house in a nice neighborhood of classic older homes on a street lined with tall trees. They flaunted spectacular fall colors, and while getting out of the car Nola took in the blazing reds and yellows around them. She found them breathtaking until she remembered that the colors meant leaf death. It always came back to that, she thought grimly. Thank goodness she could get only human trace or she might have stopped functioning long ago. She wondered sometimes if there were people who sensed all trace off everything dying and if these people had been diagnosed as catatonic, schizophrenic, or psychotic, sent to therapy, prescribed meds, institutionalized, all because they couldn’t stop being shaken by death everywhere they went. She also wondered if everyone had the ability to sense trace but simply shut that part of their mind off, denying what was unpleasant, unfathomable, in order to carry on under the illusion that it did not exist. Watching a burned-looking leaf flutter to the grass, Nola almost smacked into Matt’s back. Focus, she scolded herself sternly. The door was opening.

  Nola gave no more than a fleeting glance to Grayson Bryant, a tall man in his mid-thirties, who stepped back to let them in. The moment she entered the house and stood next to him, she felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. All the air left her lungs. Something heavy, cold, and wet pressed down on her, blotting out all light and warmth.

  She felt—there was no other way to describe it—like she had fallen into a grave.

  It lasted only a few seconds. Somehow she found herself standing on the other side of the room from Grayson Bryant—she must have kept walking even while her mind had nearly blacked out—and as she retreated even farther into a corner, the initial gut-punch feeling faded. She saw Grayson eyeing her curiously, so she go
t out a pad of paper and a pencil and pretended to be taking notes, in reality drawing seismographic squiggles and meaningless glyphs while the detectives began their catechism-like routine. When did you last . . . Did he seem . . . Were you aware of any . . . She tuned out the detectives’ words and tried to focus on her surroundings. The room they were in featured the usual sofa-love seat-armchair configuration in a neutral color, and in terms of décor it was the kind of room Nola liked because it was free of clutter, but despite the lack of distractions she was having a hard time clearing her thoughts. Trace usually felt no stronger than a slight breeze, and it was steady, not growing and fading like that, whatever that had been. She waited to see what, if anything, would happen next.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  ___________

  “It didn’t happen there.”

  Nola exhaled deeply and silently. She hated having to give her report to so many people, and it was only the second time she’d ever had to do this, but Dalton had deemed this a high-priority case just as he had Amy Siegel’s, and so Mutt and Jeff and she herself had to give reports.

  The half-dozen detectives before her shifted in their chairs, in a way that suggested a certain degree of annoyance with the anticlimax—all that buildup for nothing. Nola breathed in and out once more before she spoke again. “There is no trace in that house. But . . .”

  Heads lifted. Eyes met hers uncertainly. She tried to take another long slow breath, but the air seemed to shiver in her lungs.

  She had to do something she had never done before. She had to step outside the rules she carefully maintained in order to succeed in the face of near-universal contempt for her work. She hadn’t wanted this melodramatic pause—she loathed theatrics—but she couldn’t help but hesitate before she spoke again.

  “Grayson Bryant is involved in murder.”

  If she had expected her statement to create a sensation, she would have been disappointed. Fortunately, she never expected much of anything from the detectives, didn’t care whether they believed her, responded to them only when they were too rude to let slide, which was often, but not so often that it made any kind of dent in her steely exterior. There were frowns, there were glances exchanged, there were the usual skeptical lip-curlings and nostril-flarings, even a couple of eye-rollings. Only Dalton, Matt, and Jeb showed any signs of concern. Nola had never talked about a person before, only places. One thing was no different this time from all the others, though: she sounded absolutely certain of the truth of her words.

  And yet in truth, she wasn’t certain at all.

  “Care to elaborate?” Of course Marshall Schultz was the first to respond, and of course he made sure to use the snarky tone he usually took with her.

  “I . . . can’t. I don’t know what it means, whether he’s witnessed it or covered for it or done it—or wants to do it. Or something else entirely. I’m not sure. I just know . . .” There were suddenly so many unblinking eyes on her that she could only finish with, “That’s all I have to say.” She nodded awkwardly to Jack Dalton and dashed out of the room, out of the building, to the parking lot, where she got into her car, drove three blocks to a grocery store, and parked again. She hadn’t wanted any of the detectives to see her sitting in her car, but she was too wound up to keep driving.

  Something different had happened in that house that morning, something she didn’t understand.

  She had heard voices.

  As soon as she admitted this to herself, she wanted to laugh hysterically. Voices! Three years it had taken her to build up the PD’s grudging belief that she wasn’t a kook or a charlatan, in large part because she made it clear that what she did was based in science and not psychosis. She was an objective observer who recorded data. That was all. Until now. Now she was hearing voices.

  “A trace can’t talk,” she muttered. “A trace has no consciousness. It’s particles, energy. It isn’t a ghost.” She caught herself before she could say, “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” which would have been just too ridiculously B-grade horror movie.

  But there was no escaping what she had heard: Help me. Over and over, a desperate cry to be saved. It wasn’t coming from any trace attached to the house. The cries were mobile, moving through space, following the man who had been standing next to her when she first entered the room.

  2

  The first time she’d experienced trace was upon the death of her maternal grandfather. She hadn’t been close to him at all, had only met him once, in fact, before seeing him on his deathbed, and she’d been so young at that first meeting that she could recall nothing about it. She’d been eight when her mother took her to the hospice center. “Daddy’s dying,” her mother said in the car. Nola figured out quickly that this was about her grandfather; her mother never called Nola’s own father anything but Steven, and Nola had just seen him two weeks ago, alive and healthy in his condo on the other side of town.

  Emma Lantri always gave the impression of speaking more to herself than to anyone else present, always sounding distant, looking momentarily startled at any response her words evoked. Nola didn’t bother responding most of the time, and this time was no exception. She loved her mother but sincerely hoped they didn’t have to spend too much time together doing whatever it was they had to do that morning; it got very tiresome listening to someone have a one-sided conversation.

  The moment they entered the room, Nola knew: he was dead. Something seemed to brush against her skin, wispy, feather-light. It lasted no more than a few seconds, but there was no question in her mind what it had been, even if she couldn’t put a name to it right then.

  “His soul was there,” she said to her mother later in the car. “Wasn’t it?”

  Her mother had misunderstood this, of course, in a way so typical of her. “Thank you, Nola, that’s sweet of you to say.” As if Nola had been trying to say he wasn’t really dead but still with them, or some other consoling cliché. When Nola’s father arrived the next morning to pick her up for the weekend, she repeated her statement to him: “Grandpa’s soul was there.”

  “Grandpa doesn’t have a soul,” he said. He grinned at his ex-wife, who shook her head and sighed, though it seemed far more likely that she was displeased with his new haircut than his remark. “No one has a soul,” he continued. “That’s just another bullshit story made up to get you to join the cult. ‘Wooooo!’” he moaned comically. “‘Join us! Confess your sins or your soul will burn in hell!’”

  “Steven,” Nola’s mother said calmly, “the muffler is dragging again.”

  This was the kind of Emma Lantri statement that made most people blink and scratch their heads, wondering if she was a spy speaking in code. Nola and her father were used to it by now. “Ooh, the muffler is dragging!” Steven Lantri shrieked. “Eternal damnation shall be mine!” He started to laugh and then stopped. Perhaps he’d gotten tired of the joke, or perhaps he realized he’d gone too far; his ex-wife’s father had just died and his young daughter had been there. “Nola, can you go get me the duct tape? Bottom drawer under the microwave, I think, unless you’ve moved it.” He said this last part to his ex-wife, and the two of them stood there in the driveway looking at each other in a way Nola was too young to understand then and still, when she thought about it now, didn’t get. She supposed she wasn’t meant to get it. It was solely for the two of them, and maybe even they didn’t understand it.

  It was easier when you were a kid and didn’t understand things, though. You were used to not knowing. That first trace experience hadn’t frightened her, but neither had it filled her with some kind of reverential awe. It just happened, that was all, and she understood it instinctively without being able to explain it or even feeling the need to have it explained. It was the same way the next time it happened, and the time after that. In fact, since then, detecting trace hadn’t played much of a part in her everyday existence at all. Life went on in its usual way, often frustrating, sometimes exhilarating, frequently dreary. After halfhear
tedly earning a B.A. in psychology two towns over at the nearest state college, she’d discovered that her typing speed was far more useful than her degree in terms of obtaining gainful employment. She ended up getting work as a court transcriptionist. The job was mind-numbing, but it paid the bills, and she considered it a plus that she didn’t have to interact with many people. The solitude she’d experienced as the only child of a shut-off single mother was something she continued to seek as an adult.

  It was at the courthouse that she got her “big break” as a tracist. On a lunch break one morning, she overheard someone standing nearby—Jack Dalton, as it turned out—talking to a man from the DA’s office about how another county had taken to using psychics to help them with missing-persons cases. The DA man said something sarcastic she didn’t catch, but she did hear Dalton’s reply: “Psychics, not a chance, but tracists are the real thing.”

  It was as if he’d suddenly called her name. He knew what a tracist was. He knew that it was tracist and not tracer. She hated when people said that; maybe they thought the proper term sounded too much like racist, but it was still correct nonetheless. “Problem is,” Dalton continued, “they’re damn hard to find.” If she had been given to drama, she would have stood up and exclaimed, “You found me.” Instead she finished her coffee and her chicken sandwich, went back to work, and called the Police Department the next day.

  Three years later, she sat in the Giant Supermarket parking lot, heart beating hard. What had happened that morning in the plain brick house?

  She realized that she could be back at that house in a couple of minutes—it couldn’t have been more than a couple of miles away, and she remembered the address. She knew this was about the worst thing she could ever do—unprofessional, for starters, and weird and stalkerish as well. No good could possibly come of it, which, of course, was no deterrent to her wanting to do it all the same.