“No comment,” he said.
“Is this the same guy who killed those girls fifteen years ago?” That question came from a man. Joe heard a faint whir and realized that the TV camera was pointed at his face.
“No comment.”
Thankfully, by this time he had reached his car. Pressing the button on his key ring, he unlocked the door.
“Is it fair to say that there is definitely a serial killer stalking Pawleys Island?”
“No comment,” Joe repeated for the third time, wrenched open the door, and slid inside. They were still shouting questions as he peeled rubber out the back side of the lot, and he had a feeling that he should be thankful they had all apparently parked out front, on the street.
Vince was going to love this, Joe thought dryly as he drove home and picked up his phone to alert the mayor before he, too, could be ambushed.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Vince groaned. “This is all the fault of that damned show. I knew I should have stopped them filming that first night, but no-o-o, you wouldn’t let me. Now look what’s come of it. It’s a goddamned disaster. Do something!”
Then he slammed down the phone.
Joe made it home unmolested, parked out front, and went inside, losing his coat and tie as soon as he got in the door. Just to make sure nobody was going to be taking pictures through the windows, he drew the curtains before he turned on the lights. Then he went into the kitchen, grabbed a Bud Light from the fridge, and settled down at the table to make some calls.
The first one, to the friend who was tracing the Lazarus508 e-mail for him, drew a blank. He left a message saying that he would be forwarding a second e-mail for the same treatment, and hung up.
The second call, to another old friend, fared better.
“I need you to enhance an audiotape for me,” Joe said. “ASAP. It’s not long—less than a minute. A few garbled words I need to be able to understand.”
“You got it,” his friend said. “Send it along.”
“Will do.”
Joe disconnected and started to place call number three. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Brian saunter into the kitchen. Everything—from the sound of his boots on the vinyl floor to the texture of the blue jeans the guy was wearing to the too-long dark blond hair that kept falling over his forehead—looked real. Nothing blurry, nothing ethereal. No woo-woo at all. Real.
Joe paused in the act of punching in the number. “Get the fuck out of my life,” he said, and meant it.
Brian stopped walking and grinned at him.
“Ah-ah. That’s not very nice,” he said, and waggled an admonishing forefinger at him.
That was so much like something the son-of-a-bitch would do that Joe felt his heartbeat speed up. Either he was talking to a ghost, who was talking back, or he was having the mother of all hallucinations. Neither possibility boded well for his long-term sanity.
“I’m nuts,” Joe muttered, his eyes still locked on Brian. “I’m fucking nuts.”
“I could’ve told you that,” Brian said cheerfully, and resumed his amble toward the back door. “But you’re making progress. At least we’re speaking again.”
“You’re dead,” Joe said, knowing even as he did it that he was going to hate himself later for violating the ignore-it-and-it-will-eventually-go-away strategy he’d been operating under for the past eighteen months or so. Blame it on Nicky and her ghost-happy family. Apparently, she was managing to get under his skin in more ways than one.
“So?”
“What do you mean, ‘so’? You’re dead. Go to heaven. Or hell. Or wherever. I don’t give a shit. Just go.”
“Careful. You’re going to hurt my feelings.”
Joe stared at him. Brian was looking wistfully at Joe’s beer. Watching him, Joe picked up the bottle, put it to his lips, and took a long chug.
“Asshole,” Brian said without malice as Joe swiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“Asshole”—God, how many times had he heard Brian call him that? In just exactly that tone, too.
“If you’re really there,” Joe said in a voice gone slightly hoarse all of a sudden, “then make yourself useful for once and tell me who the hell is killing these women.”
“What, do I look like I have ESP? How the hell should I know?”
“So, what are you doing here?”
“Ah. I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that.” Brian gave him one of his patented wide, shit-eating grins.
“I’m your guardian angel, pal.”
Joe’s mind boggled. Brian as his guardian angel? The universe couldn’t be that messed up.
“Bullshit.” He clapped his hands down flat against the tabletop and rose from his seat so abruptly that the chair fell over with a crash behind him. “This is all a bunch of bullshit. I’ve got some kind of weird brain damage. There’s nobody here. I am all alone in this damned kitchen.”
A knock sounded at the back door. Joe, silenced mid-rant, looked past Brian to see Dave with his face pressed practically up against the glass, peering in through the window at him. Beyond Dave, it was full night now, which made Joe wonder with some alarm just how long he’d been ranting and raving in his kitchen. Maybe he’d suffered some kind of seizure or something.
Now there was a thought: Brian was the result of a periodic brain spasm.
“Hey, Joe.” Dave waved at him. He was looking slightly worried, and Joe guessed that Dave must have heard him yelling and maybe even seen him slam his hands down on the tabletop, too.
God, Joe hoped Dave hadn’t seen or heard any more than that. Watching his boss have a one-sided conversation with an unseen presence wasn’t going to do anything for Dave’s morale—to say nothing of the rest of the force’s—if word of this got out.
Joe crossed to the door and pulled it open.
“I was on the phone,” he began, feeling a little awkward as he attempted to explain away whatever Dave might have witnessed. A snuffling sound caused him to break off and look down in the general vicinity of Dave’s knees. Cleo looked back at him, her velvety snout quivering, her round, black eyes shining in the reflected light from the kitchen.
He might be in the middle of having some kind of mental breakdown, but that didn’t make him stupid.
“No,” he said before Dave could say anything. “Like I said before, I don’t do pigs.”
“It’s not just Cleo,” Dave said forlornly. “It’s me. Amy’s kicked us both out. I need a place to stay the night, too.”
A beat passed.
Let’s see, Joe thought as his gaze moved from one refugee to the other, the last twenty-four hours had included a hot romantic interlude, a grisly murder, a whole lot of crap from a whole lot of people, a buttload of work, an ambush by a pack of reporters, a ghost or a mental breakdown (take your pick), and now a prospective new roomie who came complete with his own pig. In other words, just one more happening day in paradise.
“ ‘Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives,’ ” Brian said in his ear. The bastard was standing right behind him, and Joe didn’t have to glance around to know that he was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Clearly, Dave wasn’t seeing or hearing a thing.
“Shit,” Joe said in resignation, opening the door wider. “Come on in. Not you, pig.”
17
JOE PICKED UP THE CHAIR, Dave raided the refrigerator, and they were just sitting down at the table with two cold ones and a couple bologna sandwiches when Joe noticed the pig up on its hind legs, looking through the window at them. He alerted Dave, who went out and fed it the rest of the brand-new package of bologna from Joe’s refrigerator that Dave had just opened to make the sandwiches. It was beef bologna, so it was all right for the pig to eat it, at least in a karmic sense, but as Joe had had other plans for the lunch meat, he was feeling slightly disgruntled when Dave came back into the kitchen.
“You owe me a package of bologna,” Joe said, looking up from the Marsha Browning file, which was one of several he’d brought home w
ith him. On the plus side, at least the pig was no longer looking at him through the window.
“I’ll stop by the store tomorrow,” Dave promised. “You want me to pick anything else up while I’m there? Milk? Eggs? What do we need?”
That “we,” coupled with the idea of Dave doing the grocery shopping for the both of them, had sort of a cozy sound to it—way too cozy for Joe. They were fifteen minutes into the whole roomie thing, and already it wasn’t working for him.
That being the case, the thing to do was get his new roomie back home where he belonged without delay.
“Forget about the bologna,” he said. “Tell me what happened with Amy.”
That was all the encouragement Dave needed. He sat down with his beer and started giving Joe a play-by-play that soon fell under the category of Too Much Information. By the time Dave finished his tale of woe, Joe, who by then was listening with half an ear, had finished his beer and his sandwich and was halfway through his cross-check of the Karen Wise and Marsha Browning files. The reason he was able to listen and go over evidence at the same time was simple: There had been almost no doubt in his mind right from the beginning that those two murders had been committed by the same perp. Comparing either of them with Tara Mitchell required more concentration: There were many more areas of dissimilarity, enough so that he was almost ready to conclude with some certainty that the same perp was not involved. Of course, the Mitchell file was fifteen years old and compiled on somebody else’s watch. It was always possible that it wasn’t entirely accurate, or that things had been lost or left out.
Hell, that was always possible on his watch, too.
“I mean, I understand Amy’s position,” Dave concluded forlornly. “But Cleo was just hungry. That’s all it was.”
Joe looked up from his vital, potentially case-solving work to meet his Number Two’s hangdog gaze. Under the circumstances, staying out of this had ceased to be an option. Just call him Dr. Phil.
“So, Amy brought home a pizza and the pig knocked it out of her hands and ate it.” Joe summed up in a sentence the story it had taken Dave a good fifteen minutes to relate.
“Amy says Cleo attacked her again. Cleo didn’t attack her. She’s not that kind of pig. Amy just won’t listen.” Dave picked up his bottle of beer but set it back down before it even touched his lips. Apparently, this latest contretemps had upset him to the point where even beer had lost its appeal. “Anyway, it was my fault. Cleo is used to getting table scraps in the morning and at night. What with, you know, the murder and all, I’ve been working for pretty much the last twenty-four hours straight. I didn’t get a chance to get home to give Cleo her treats. All she had was the food in her dispenser, and she doesn’t much like that.”
Joe considered various diplomatic approaches to what he had to say.
“You know, I may be missing the big picture here. But it seems to me that you were a lot happier before Amy moved in with you than you have been since.”
Dave frowned. “So, what are you saying?”
“All I’m saying is that maybe Amy’s not the woman for you.”
“In what way?”
Joe sighed. Diplomacy clearly wasn’t his thing. At any rate, Dave didn’t seem to be getting the drift.
“You like pigs; she doesn’t. Maybe you should give up on her and start looking for somebody you’d be more compatible with.”
“Amy and I are compatible.” Dave gave Joe a wounded look. Then his mouth twisted and he slumped a little. “Well, sort of. Except for her griping when I have to work overtime and weekends. And then when I am home, she works late. And there’s always something going on with her ex-husband and the kids. And, um, then there’s Cleo.”
To hell with it, Joe thought. He was too tired for this. Let Dr. Phil be Dr. Phil.
“There you go, then. You two are clearly soul mates.” Sick of the whole subject, he went back to work. “Did you get those phone records checked?”
“About a third. It’s pretty time-consuming. Both those women spent a lot of time yakking on the phone. Then, when I call to verify what was said, a lot of time I get away messages. And some of the unknown-caller types take a while to track down.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “I—”
A sudden explosion of sound in the living room made both him and Dave jump.
“What the hell?” Joe said, as the noise resolved itself into the TV, which was now blaring at top volume.
He and Dave were already on their way into the living room when it occurred to Joe that the set had been turned off the last time he’d looked. But it was definitely on now, he saw as he reached the living room. The volume was so loud that it made him wince as he hurried to grab the remote from the end table and turn it down.
“How’d that happen?” Dave said when they could make themselves heard again. He was frowning as he stared at the TV. “That was weird.”
But Joe’s attention was riveted on the screen. Once he saw what was on, the situation became all too clear. Brian again, or some kind of weird energy from a brain spasm that he hadn’t even felt. Or something.
Whatever, he was looking at Nicky.
“Good evening. This is Twenty-four Hours Investigates , and I’m Nicole Sullivan,” Nicky said into the camera. Her face filled the screen, and Joe missed a beat or two of what she was saying as he absorbed just how truly gorgeous she was. Shining red hair; big brown eyes; porcelain skin; full, pouty lips—watching her, he had a tantalizing flashback to how she had felt in his arms. He now knew that those lips were as soft and hot as they looked. . . .
“We found a bloody footprint in Marsha Browning’s house that matched one at the site of Karen Wise’s murder?” Dave asked, frowning. “I didn’t know that.”
Clearly he’d missed something, Joe realized. He mentally tuned back in to the program just in time to watch as a shot of Marsha Browning’s body being rolled down her lawn to the coroner’s van filled the screen. Then Nicky was back, saying, “Both times the Lazarus Killer called this reporter from the victim’s own phone. In Marsha Browning’s case, the call was placed from a landline in her house before the body was found. Police used that call to locate the victim. Afterwards, in the wee hours of this morning, the Lazarus Killer sent me another cryptic e-mail. This is what it said.” A printout of the e-mail filled the screen. “Dogs howling in the dark of night . . .”
“Shit,” Joe said, and sat down abruptly on the couch to watch with growing horror as every significant detail the investigation had turned up so far was aired on national TV.
“YOU LOOK GOOD ON TV,” Elaine Ferrell said as she walked Nicky to her front door. “Maybe you might want to think about adding a little poof to your hair. If you do, just let me know, I can work you right in. Anyway, tell your mom I said hi.”
“I will,” Nicky promised as she stepped outside into the star-studded night. “And thanks.”
Mrs. Ferrell waved and closed the door, which meant that Nicky was now alone, standing on the small front stoop with the dim glow of the porch light illuminating her for all to see. The idea creeped her out. With a long look around to make sure nothing lurked behind the well-trimmed bushes that hugged the front of the house, she moved off the stoop and headed quickly down the lawn. She’d been inside, talking to the bleached-blonde, sixty-year-old Mrs. Ferrell for almost an hour. It was a little after ten p.m., and except for the glimmers of lights spilling from the windows of the houses lining the street, the night was dark as a cave. The breeze was no more than a warm breath against her skin, but she felt chilly in her black T-shirt and white jeans. She could hear things—the whir of insects, the faint bass beat of a distant stereo, the muffled clang of metal against metal. She could feel things—like unseen eyes watching her through the darkness. The thought was fanciful, but it still made her shiver. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Lieutenant Randy Brown, her police escort, now standing patiently beside his cruiser, which was parked at the curb a mere fifty feet away, she would have been as nervous a
s a turtle on the freeway as she hurried toward her car, which was parked in front of the cruiser. As it was, she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was keeping pace with her just beyond her field of vision, scuttling along through the dark. She could almost feel the whisper of evil breathing down her neck.
It was, she was almost sure, her imagination, fueled by the horrific events of the past week. The memories her mother had unleashed last night seemed to have left her sensitized to atmosphere, and the disturbing dreams that had followed hadn’t helped. Karen and Tara Mitchell had appeared, separately and together, whispering to her in voices so low that she couldn’t quite understand what they were saying, no matter how hard she had strained to hear.
But she had formed the impression that they were trying to warn her.
They were only dreams, of course, and no wonder she was having them. Anyone would, under the circumstances. And Tara Mitchell’s ghost had appeared to many people. It didn’t mean—none of it meant—that she had some long-buried, slowly awakening psychic ability.
Did it?
Every time Nicky allowed herself to entertain it, the possibility made her shiver, which was why she needed to put it out of her mind, she told herself firmly. It would do no one any good to succumb to the eerie, unshakable sensation that no matter what she did or where she went, she was marking time until something terrible happened.
The key to keeping rooted in the here and now was to stay focused on her job, and that was what she intended to do. Her segment of Twenty-four Hours Investigates had looked and sounded great. She’d logged a number of congratulatory phone calls, most notably one from Sid Levin saying that he was now sure he’d made the right choice in sending her instead of Carl.
And then Mrs. Ferrell, who also had watched Twenty-four Hours Investigates, had phoned Leonora with some news to be passed along to Nicky. Mrs. Ferrell was Leonora’s longtime hairdresser. She was also the island’s biggest busybody, forever peeping out her windows and prying into other people’s affairs. The pertinent thing about this was, Mrs. Ferrell lived across the street and two houses down from Marsha Browning.
Superstition Page 31