Medium Dead

by Chris Dolley

  “Why aren’t you out looking for Walt and Rita? We had a deal.”

  “I’m in the middle of a case–”

  “My case!”

  Brenda couldn’t see Sacrifice. Cynthia was in the way and far from transparent. Brenda leaned to her left and tried to peer around.

  “Sacrifice, it’s all right.”

  Cynthia glanced behind her. “Beat it, kid. I was here first.”

  “No!” said Brenda. “She was here first. I’ve been working with her since Sunday.”

  “Then it’s my turn now. Go on, kid, beat it before I scare the pants off you.”

  “No! Sacrifice, don’t listen to her. Listen to me.”

  The girl was fading. “No! Sacrifice. Come back!”

  “She’s gone,” said Cynthia. “Now, about Walt–”

  Brenda was incandescent. She turned on Cynthia.

  “Screw Walt! I was ready to give him zits. Now, because of you, I’m going to get Brian over there to give him a makeover and shapeshift his body back to that of a firm twenty year-old. Rita too. And it’s all because of you.”

  “Oh, yeah? You do that and I’ll haunt you for the rest of your days. How many murder victims are you going to find with me shouting at them to get the hell out the moment they materialize?”

  “You couldn’t stay materialized long enough.”

  “Try me.”

  They stood eyeball to ethereal eyeball.

  A minute passed without a single flicker. If anything Cynthia was looking stronger. And the temperature around her was dropping. But Brenda was determined she wasn’t going to be the one who backed down first. If she could summon ghosts, she could cast them out as well. Or did you have to be a priest? Brenda’s brain raced through all the Exorcist movies – even the really bad prequel – skipping over all the revolving heads and projectile vomiting. Could you use salt to repel a ghost, or was that for slugs?

  She was about to ask Brian to put in a call to the local vicar when she heard footsteps behind her.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ said Brian. ‘Let’s see if she can follow us when we teleport.’

  One second her vision was filled with the ghastly Cynthia, the next it was as though a giant hand had pushed a pin into Cynthia’s hat and kept on pushing until a spectral funnel appeared and – whoosh – Brenda was flying down it at speed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Here,” said Brian. They materialized in a room. A bedroom by the look of it. There was a double bed against the far wall, a purple shag pile carpet under her feet and an appalling floral wallpaper assaulting her eyes.

  “Can you see her?” Brian asked.

  Brenda was still coming to terms with the wallpaper. It looked like a close cousin of her radioactive dress. But there wasn’t – she looked around to be sure – any sign of Cynthia.

  “Good. She can’t follow us then. Grab hold.”

  Another funnel formed – this time in the wallpaper. She tumbled towards it, falling through and beyond.

  “Where are we going now? Back home?”

  “A bit further than that. How would you like to go shopping at Bergmans?”

  It took longer than Brian’s usual journeys as he kept stopping to send his inner eye flying on ahead. He had trouble finding a street map of Syracuse, and even more trouble finding an unobserved spot near the store. Which left the pair of them hanging in the air, a ghostly funnel descending from their feet like a motionless tornado.

  Brenda peered past her shoes at the sidewalk below. It had to be more than twenty feet away. She could see the tops of people’s heads. What if someone looked up?

  “Can anyone see us in here?” she asked.

  “No. If someone looks closely they might see a slight shimmer – a bit like heat haze – but no one’ll think twice.”

  “And we can’t fall out?”

  “Only if you ask too many questions.”

  Soon they were moving again. Brian had found a place by a loading bay at the back of the mall. They hovered above the gap between a truck and a red brick wall before descending at speed. Brenda bent her knees, her brain expecting her kneecaps to be driven up into her chin with the force of the drop. But once again she found herself devoid of momentum.

  “Do we have a plan?” she asked, looking around, expecting five burly security guards to descend upon them any second.

  He handed her an FBI badge. “We’ll canvass the staff and see if anyone recognizes Daddy’s picture.”

  Brenda flipped open her badge. Who would she be this time? Xena the Agent Princess?

  Neither. It was Agent V. I. Warshawski. Crap. Knowing Vic’s luck, Brenda could see herself being beaten to a pulp and left for dead in aisle three.

  “Who are you this time?” she asked, peering over at Brian’s badge.

  He showed her. Special Agent Maigret, complete with pipe-smoking photograph.

  She shook her head. “One of these days, Brian....”

  “But not today, Brenda. Here.” He handed her a picture. “That’s your copy of Daddy’s picture. We’ll split up once we get inside. Start with the kids clothing department, then move out from there.”

  Bergmans was on the ground floor of the mall, a typical department store selling clothes, shoes, jewelry and handbags. Brian and Brenda navigated their way through the maze of special offers and displays until they found the girls’ section. No Spiderman T-shirts, but plenty of Hannah Montana and Glee.

  Brenda decided to stand back and watch Brian do the first interview – to make sure they kept to the same story. He walked up to the nearest sales assistant and flashed his badge.

  “Excuse me, I’m an FBI agent. Do you recognize this man?”

  The woman’s eyes went from badge to picture and back again. She looked slightly flustered. Which, Brenda supposed, wasn’t that surprising. One second you’re folding T-shirts, the next you’re being questioned by Inspector Maigret.

  “No, sorry,” she said. “What’s it about?”

  “We’re investigating a series of child abduction cases. Could you take another look? This might be an old picture. It’s possible this man has been in here buying children’s’ clothes. Do you remember stocking a Spiderman T-shirt?”

  The woman took a closer look. “He doesn’t look familiar. And we haven’t carried any Spiderman shirts for years.”

  Brenda left Brian and branched out on her own. What else would Daddy buy here? Menswear? Would a shapeshifter need clothes? That let in a disconcerting thought – what if he’d only said he’d bought the T-shirt from Bergmans? What if he’d shapeshifted it from an old rag?

  Doubt again. This case was full of it. Even Daddy’s picture – what use was that, if the man was a shapeshifter? He could have one face for the girls and one for the rest of the world.

  Brenda’s walk around the store descended into a trudge. The store canvass would be a waste of time. No one would recognize Daddy, and there were another twenty-one Bergman stores to canvass.

  But she carried out her allotted task, tracking down sales assistants and putting on a positive face. After all, so many real-life crimes were solved by chance during routine investigations.

  Twenty minutes later, and without one positive identification, Brenda emerged from the store.

  ‘Brian? Where are you?’ She flashed the thought around the concourse. He said they’d meet outside.

  ‘Over here. I’m outside the electrical store next door, looking in the window.’

  She walked up to him. He was staring at a bank of TVs.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “Definitely. I think I’ve found a way to locate Daddy.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Are you crazy?”

  Brenda still couldn’t believe it. “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s the quickest way.”

  “It’s the most reckless way. You’d be sabotaging a murder enquiry.”

  “I’d be solving an even bigger murder enquiry. How
many girls has Daddy killed? Dozens? This one only has two victims, and I can get back to it and sort it out later.”

  That was so typical of Brian. It was either tunnel vision, or fly off at the first tangent. There was no middle ground with the man.

  “What’s the alternative?” asked Brian. “We canvass all twenty-two Bergman stores? That’ll take a day, and even then we won’t reach everyone. We’d miss the sales assistants on holiday, or off sick, or who’ve changed jobs in the last twelve years. We might miss that one person who can recognize him.”

  “What about security cameras? Can’t we–” Brenda paused, looking around, suddenly aware how loudly they were talking. She toned her voice down to just above a whisper and led Brian away towards a quieter part of the mall. “Can’t we hack into Bergmans’ security system?”

  “And sift through thousands of hours of footage from twenty-two stores? This isn’t a TV show. I can’t magic up a facial recognition program, and even if I could how long do you think Bergmans keep their tapes for? A week? Two? Certainly not seven years, which was when the first Spiderman movie came out.”

  “Couldn’t we put an ad in the papers? Concoct a story about a missing man who....” She was thinking hard. What kind of story would generate maximum interest? “I know. A missing man who’s just come into a fortune, but no one’s seen him for ten years.”

  Brian shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. For the story to make the impact we want, the press are going to need more. They’d want to interview the solicitors handling the will. Old friends and family. They’d want to make it a human-interest story, and we’d spend the next week shapeshifting ourselves into solicitors and family friends, and tying ourselves in knots. Far easier to take an existing high profile case and hijack it. That way we have a million eyes all looking for Daddy, and every one of them invested in his apprehension.”

  That was Brian’s plan. The local papers and TV stations were full of the Kayla Anderssen murder. A pregnant woman and her three year-old daughter had been gunned down in their apartment a few miles east of Syracuse. Nobody had heard the shots, and there’d been no signs of a break-in or robbery. The motive was a mystery. Kayla had no enemies and the police had no suspects. Her husband had been out of town, and friends and family were adamant that their marriage was one of the happiest they’d ever seen. And, to cap it all, Kayla, a former Miss Sacramento, was as photogenic as her curly blonde-haired three year-old daughter. A mixture which added up to blanket media coverage.

  Which Brian was about to hijack by coming forward as a witness with a photograph of Kayla and – you guessed it – Daddy.

  He’d already started on the photograph, taking Daddy’s head and shoulder shot and expanding it, giving him a body, putting a gun in his right hand. And adding a worried looking Kayla.

  But the picture didn’t look right. Both Daddy and Kayla were standing square to the camera and looking directly at it. The whole scene looked posed – photo-shopped even.

  “You need to make it look more natural,” said Brenda.

  Brian gave it another look before reluctantly agreeing. He’d change it another way. Swap Kayla out and use her daughter instead. Make it look as though Daddy was posing for a photograph to frighten Kayla. A picture of him holding her daughter with a gun to her head.

  “That way we can let the police discover the photograph,” said Brian. “No need for me to go to them as a witness. And when we eventually capture Daddy we can explain away the photograph by suggesting Chelsea was going to be his next victim. Kayla’s murderer just beat him to it.”

  Brenda could see countless holes in Brian’s plan. “What if Kayla’s murderer is never caught because the police stop looking for anyone else once they’ve got Daddy?”

  “We give Daddy an alibi. Manufacture evidence. Whatever it takes. Don’t worry. We’ll sort everything out. Do you want to summon Kayla now and find out who killed her? We could put him in the photograph, too.”

  “No! You can’t keep tampering with everything.”

  Especially when so many lawyers made careers out of casting doubt on prosecution evidence. Brian was about to hand them a stack of ‘Get out jail free’ cards – credible alternative suspects, photographs that wouldn’t stand up to forensic analysis.

  “What gun have you put in the picture?” she asked.

  Brian shrugged. “A big one?”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “Yes, but does it exist? Is it a real make, or some gun-like design you plucked out of your head? They’re going to have experts blow up that picture and analyze the hell out of it. They’ll be looking for clues as to where it was taken, when, what time of day, what film was used. If you stick in a non-existent gun, or put Chelsea in the wrong clothes, or put non-existent buildings in the background, they’ll spot it’s a fake.”

  “Again, this isn’t TV. Have you seen these news reports?” He showed her the front page of a newspaper he’d bought. “The cops haven’t got a clue what happened. They’re desperate. The media and city hall are clamoring for results, and when they see this picture they are going to love it. It’ll be their only clue. A real live picture they can give to the media and say – help us find this man. The press’ll love it. The police’ll love it. Everyone’ll be happy.”

  “Until it all falls apart.”

  “Nothing will fall apart because we’ll be on hand to magic it all back together again.”

  Brenda sighed. Sometimes there was no arguing with the man.

  “Where are you going to put the picture?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet. The police will have searched her apartment, so I can’t really put it there. I suppose I could post it to the lead detective.”

  “That’ll add a day to the investigation – assuming the lead detective has time to open his mail. His desk might be swamped with letters from the public.”

  “Okay, so I dress it up a little. Send it by messenger and make it look like it was sent by the killer.”

  Brenda shook her head in disbelief.

  “Brian, killers don’t send pictures of themselves to the police.”

  “Not even insane ones? Ones with a really heightened narcissism complex?”

  If the mall hadn’t been full of shoppers she’d have hit him. “Are you taking this seriously?”

  He held his hands up. “I’m brainstorming. Okay, so how about I send the picture to the media?”

  “No! If you want maximum impact you can’t send the picture anywhere. It’s a question of provenance. Imagine you’re the detective in charge. If you find the picture yourself, it’s an important lead. If it’s posted to the press by an anonymous source, you want to know who sent it and why. And are you being conned? It deflects attention away from Daddy and onto the bona fides of the picture.”

  He gave her a long and slightly disconcerting look – halfway between surprise and a leer.

  “You’re getting good at this,” he said. “And you’re right. The police have to find the picture, and we have to lead them to it.”

  “Which brings us back to square one.”

  “Not me. I see exactly what we’ve got to do.”

  Brenda narrowed her eyes. She had a strong feeling she wasn’t going to like the answer, but she had to ask the question. “What?”

  “Follow me.”

  Brenda followed Brian out of the mall. Every time she asked where they were going, or what his plan entailed, she was met with silence, a knowing smile, or a wink. Often all three. He was infuriating. And probably about to lead her into danger. Or acute embarrassment.

  They crossed the parking lot at the rear of the mall.

  “Are we going to teleport somewhere?” Brenda asked, her brain already making a list. Where would it be – Kayla’s apartment, the police station, an evidence locker? And were they going to need a disguise? She wouldn’t mind her nose being changed again, but everything below the shoulders was out of bounds.

  “You don’t fancy being taller?” he asked.

 
That got Brenda thinking. What would it be like to be a leggy six-foot tall? The inner Brenda spluttered into life. You can’t trust him. He’ll stretch your legs seven inches and make you look completely out of proportion. You’ll be a little squat body teetering on a pair of giant legs! And he’ll put you in a micro mini with mile-high stilettos to make it even worse.

  “As if,” said Brian, looking hurt. “Of course I could always give you a floor length dress if you’d prefer. I’ve got plenty of that mutant dress material left.”

  Brenda gave him a look – a half-second burst of the Medusa. ‘Just try it, Brian.’

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “Now, take my arm and lead me towards the gap between that lorry and mall wall over there. I’m about to send my inner eye off on a search so I’ll be blind for the next minute or two.”

  Brenda considered leading him shin first into the nearest parked car unless he told her where they were going, but thought better of it. For now.

  “Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

  “Because there are two places we might be going. As soon as I know which, I’ll tell you.”

  o0o

  “The morgue!”

  “You’re lucky Kayla’s still here. If she hadn’t, we’d have been materializing in a rather confined space, six feet under.”

  Brenda’s imagination exploded into overdrive. Where were they? It was dark. Confined. They were scrunched together. And Brian had just informed her they were in a morgue.

  Aaaaaarrrgghhh! She tried not to scream out loud.

  “We’re not in a cold storage locker, are we?”

  It didn’t feel cold. She wanted to push her hands out and feel her surroundings, but she was terrified what she might touch.

  “We’re in a cupboard,” whispered Brian. “The clue being that bodies aren’t usually stored vertically.”

  Brenda’s heart rate dropped below two hundred per minute. “What are we doing here?” she hissed.

  “Adding value to our photo. You’re right about all the tests the police will do, so let’s get Kayla’s prints on it. That’s the first thing they’re going to test for. And once it comes back a match, they’re not going to care so much about what Chelsea’s wearing. They’ll be too busy celebrating. And once they fail to find Daddy in the NCIC database they’ll have to go to the media with the picture. Help us find this man.”