by H. P. Bayne
As loathe as he’d been to invite Forbes over to his bachelor suite, it had seemed the best option given the nature of the conversation awaiting them. Dez had made up the pullout, and he ignored the dig, settling an arm over the sofa’s backrest. “I like to think so. Home sweet home.”
Forbes snorted, taking the empty chair. His gaze travelled next to Sully, seated beside Dez and scratching Pax’s ear. The dog was no happier to see Forbes than either of them. To Dez, that was nothing but further proof of canine intelligence.
“You look better than the last time I saw you,” Forbes said to Sully.
“I’d almost died in a fire.”
“Fair enough. So let’s cut to the chase. What are the two of you after?”
Dez took the lead. “You know about Sully, right?”
“About the fact he’s supposedly dead, or the fact he says he can commune with the dead?”
“The last one.”
Forbes grunted.
“The thing is, Carter appeared to him.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t see them unless they’re the victim of a homicide.”
Forbes was quiet a moment, perhaps thinking it through, but more likely looking for the most obnoxious comment he could find. When he next spoke, Dez smirked at the fact the detective had apparently been unsuccessful on both fronts.
“That’s stupid.”
Dez looked at Sully, asked the question the biggest part of him didn’t want to. “He have anyone with him?”
“A lot of police officers do,” Sully said. He turned to speak directly to Forbes. “Victims of homicide will often attach themselves to people they think can help. It might not be twenty-four-seven, but I’d imagine you sometimes get the feeling someone’s watching you, like someone’s around.”
Forbes sat stock still, but Dez could see it there, the desire to squirm. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“There’s a young boy, probably around five or six. He’s blond and thin, and he’s wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with Kermit the Frog on the front. Oh, and he’s barefoot. I don’t see any obvious injuries, but the fact I can see him tells me he’s been the victim of a homicide. He’s not wet, so not a drowning. His eyes are a little red, though, so possibly suffocation.”
A huge part of Dez hated these moments when Sully drew back the curtain between life and death; he hated it even more when it occurred within the sanctity of his own home. But a silver lining existed this time, coming in the form of the jolted expression on Forbes’s face: muscles drawn taught, mouth popped open, eyebrows lifted enough to pull his eyes wider.
“Wh-wha…?” Forbes stopped before the stuttered question progressed any further, taking a moment to recompose himself. “You can’t know about him.”
“He’s standing right beside you. I know how it sounds. But I’ve been seeing the dead for as far back as I remember. I might be able to help you with him if you give us a hand with Carter. Sometimes they’ll show me things that provide answers about what happened to them.”
“You think you can help me find him. That’s what you’re trying to tell me.”
“I think I just did.”
That gave Forbes food for thought, and he took a moment to chew on it, his eyes remaining fixed on Sully. Sizing him up. Probing for the lie, for the trick.
“They say those stadium psychics have ways of making it seem like they’re reading the crowd, when in reality, it’s all just one big set-up.”
“Do you want my help, or don’t you?”
Dez added his own question to his brother’s. “We’re looking into the Devereaux death, with or without your help. If you get on board, you come out with accolades when it turns out the initial investigation missed something. You don’t, you just end up the chump who bungled it four years ago. Sully only sees them when there’s been a homicide. That means the investigation didn’t just miss something, it missed something huge. You really want to go down with that on your hands?”
Forbes trained a heated glare on Dez, but no words went with it. What Dez had said held truth, and they all knew it.
The sergeant’s next comment proved as much. “If that’s the case, I need to reopen the investigation. But there’s no way I can go to my boss and tell him I’m basing it on the word of some guy who claims he can see the dead.”
Sully’s response proved almost as unsettling as his earlier statements about the ghosts currently in Dez’s living room. “So give us a hand, off the clock.”
Dez tried to step in. “Sully—”
“Or give us a chance to run with it ourselves. We’ll bring what we find to you. Once you think you’ve got what you need to reopen, then you’ll go ahead.”
Dez infinitely preferred option two, and he expected Forbes would too. The thought of the cop and the ex-cop working together in a ghost-hunting, crime-solving capacity was one step below laughable—if there’d actually been anything to laugh at.
As it stood, the whole thing was more tragedy than comedy. Not only was Dez back in on one of Sully’s ghost tours, it looked like they might have Forbes Raynor along for the ride. And he’d never been the kind of passenger to simply sit down, shut up and enjoy the view.
“You’ll bring me what you find?” Forbes asked.
“Of course,” Sully said. “We’ll need somewhere to take it, a way to see charges are laid once we get there. And we can’t keep going to Eva. Eventually, someone’s going to put two and two together with her, and figure out it’s me. No one can know I’m alive. Not yet.”
“Yeah, you made that pretty clear. All right, go ahead. Check into it. But I’m going to need some sort of evidence. Obviously, physical proof is best. If someone actually killed the kid and, for whatever weird reason, lets something slip verbally to either of you, I’m going to have to bring you in to get a witness statement. Faked death or not.”
Dez realized what Forbes was getting at. “You can’t—”
Sully talked over him again. “We get it. We’ll figure something out.”
With that devil’s deal worked out, Forbes surprised Dez by reaching inside his jacket pocket and producing a thumb drive. “The interviews are on there. When you’re done with it, destroy it. I could take some major heat giving that to you.”
Dez took the drive from him. “So why are you?”
“If there’s something else to this, I’d rather be on the right side of things when the dust settles. You just keep your end of the bargain. I want to be kept in the loop. I’ll treat you both as confidential sources on this, at least for the time being. We’ll figure things out from there if you actually turn something up.”
For Dez, the assurance wasn’t nearly enough, and yet it would have to be. Without Flynn to run high-end interference at the KRPD, they’d have to take what they could get when it came to Sully’s hauntings.
They didn’t shake on it. There really wasn’t any point. Each stood to lose too much if any of them broke from the pact—today’s or the one made when they’d let Forbes take charge of his deranged, murderous wife in exchange for assurances of his silence about Sully’s continued existence.
Hopefully the agreement was solid enough to hold up under pressure. When it came to the two of them and Forbes Raynor, nothing was carved in stone.
The brothers spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon camped out on the couch, Pax at their feet and Dez’s laptop balanced between them as they watched the recorded interviews.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t Lars’s statement that proved particularly interesting, being virtually identical to what he’d told Dez in his downtown apartment last night.
It was Evan’s.
The then-seventeen-year-old provided much of his statement, given a day after the cave-in, through a voice deadened with shock. Dez recognized it immediately, the tone dragging him back two years to those first couple of days after he thought he’d lost Sully.
The initial panic—the feel of the ground collapsing beneath him, straight down i
nto the place where he’d just been speaking with his brother—had eventually receded, replaced by a seesaw of indescribable pain, denial and shock. He’d entertained notions at first that maybe his brother had escaped the collapse. But as hours turned to days and days to weeks, he’d given in to the grief. And there’d been the shock, that dead feeling he recognized now in on-screen Evan. He’d been there himself—with his brother Aiden, with his dad, with Sully. He’d heard somewhere shock was the brain’s way of saving itself, sheltering it from the overwhelming tidal wave of heart-shattering agony. But it had its downside, too, one that arrived each morning he awoke to the dawning realization his family was being cut away from him, piece by piece.
A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped.
Sometimes he slipped so deeply into the past, he temporarily forgot where he was. Shock and grief had a way of doing that, of making him feel he was somewhere else.
“Dez? You okay?”
He nodded, smiled, looked down to his lap. Time like this, he resurfaced to happiness rather than loss. Sully was here, alive, and there was no way he could speak until the lump in his throat allowed it. Tears stung his eyes as Sully’s hand shifted to his back.
Sully saw through him, the way he’d always been able to. His particular psychic skill wasn’t to mind-read, but he still managed to ace it every time when it came to Dez.
“I’m sorry, D. I’m so sorry. I can go through this myself, all right?”
Dez shook his head, managed a croak around the lump. “No. I’m fine.”
“You’re not, though. I know what it’s doing to you. What I did. And I’m sorry.”
There was pain in Sully’s voice, the sound of profound regret. Dez sought to erase some of it, grasping Sully’s knee and giving it a gentle shake.
“I’m good. I really am.” He returned his eyes to Sully’s, offering a wider grin this time, one intended to pull a responding one onto his brother’s face. “You’re here. That makes me okay.”
He got the smile he’d sought, albeit a smaller and less convincing version of his own. For now, it would have to do. Dez gave Sully’s leg a final, solid pat and returned his eyes to the screen.
“Did I miss much?”
“Probably,” Sully said. “Did you hear the part where he talks about Roanna?”
“Who’s that?”
“Roanna Quick. She’s the girl who was with Evan yesterday in the park.”
“Evan’s girlfriend, you mean?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Sully said. “Before she was Evan’s girlfriend, she was Carter’s.”
13
Their next stop would have to be a visit to Evan or Roanna. Given the young woman’s timidity when Sully had first met her, Evan seemed the logical choice.
Lachlan’s borrowed four-year-old file had an address on it, but it had been Evan’s parents’ house.
“What are the chances he’s still there?” Dez asked aloud as he drove the two of them and Pax back to the Jasmine Park neighbourhood.
Sully stared out the window at the passing houses. So many “for sale” signs as people looked to move up in the world. Yet many of these properties weren’t moving.
“You know how crazy house and rental prices are these days,” he said. “You’d have better luck finding a twenty-one-year-old living in his parents’ basement than managing a place on his own.”
“You did it.”
Sully didn’t answer. He’d only managed it because of his foster uncle Lowell Braddock, and the fact the man needed someone dumb or desperate enough to act as bartender-slash-round-the-clock caretaker at his Riverview-area pub—a business that had been broken into often enough Sully had joked he could have set up a booth most nights and tried to charge admission. It hadn’t been a great job, and the apartment where he’d stayed upstairs had been even worse. But it had meant a job and a roof over his head at a time when both were hard to come by for a guy fresh out of high school with few skills or major life plans.
That the world at large believed he’d owed Lowell Braddock was a given. It was far less likely the world would ever know the other truth.
That Lowell had tried to kill him. That he had murdered his own brother. That years earlier, he’d killed his brother’s youngest son.
The way things stood, there was a solid chance Sully would bear Lowell’s dark and dirty secrets to the grave. Not for Lowell, but for Dez. They hadn’t discussed Lowell much since Sully’s return, but he suspected by the way his brother said the man’s name that Dez had little to do with his uncle anymore.
Dez was a good man, one of the best Sully had ever known, but his tides rose and fell with the pull of emotion. Sully didn’t think his brother capable of killing in cold blood; but with Lowell—a man who’d hurt those who meant the most to Dez—there would be some powerful inducement. And as little as it would pain Sully to see Lowell gone forever, he didn’t want his brother to be the cause of it.
Besides, a murdered Lowell would quite possibly turn into Sully’s next ghost, and that was one spectre he couldn’t bear to have hanging around.
If Dez had sensed the turn of Sully’s thoughts, he didn’t say so. The brothers continued on in silence.
At least until they got to the house.
“You sure you should be doing this?” Dez asked. “Going in there, I mean.”
Sully held onto the sigh, turned to Dez and lifted an eyebrow. “We’re not having this argument again, are we?”
Dez held up his hands in a show of surrender and led the way from the SUV, leaving a window partway down for Pax.
Sully turned to the dog, rubbing a spot on the bridge of his long nose. “Be back in a few minutes, buddy.”
Pax gave one long growl that ended in a woof, but was otherwise quiet. Sully had never figured out if that was the dog’s version of “see you soon” or “take me along, jerk.” Either way, it was unlikely most people would be too fond of a large, hairy black hound making himself at home in their living room. It was bad enough they already had to put up with a stranger’s revelations about a loved one’s ghostly incarnation.
Sully’s read of the economic situation was on the money; Evan did still live at his parents’ home. Taking the young men on her step as friends of her son, Evan’s mother told them he was at university for the day but would be back in the late afternoon.
“I’m probably going to have to bail by late afternoon,” Dez warned as he and Sully made their way back to the vehicle. “That’s when Tessa Montague is off work and goes to the gym and shopping or whatever. One of these days, maybe I’ll get lucky and catch her and Lars canoodling on a restaurant patio while they share a plate of spaghetti.”
“I’ll hope for the best, for your sake,” Sully said. “So I guess that means we should head to the university right now, see if we can track Evan down.”
“It’s a big campus.”
“His mom said he’s at his sociology class early this afternoon, and that he scheduled a meeting with his professor for the break period he usually has before his next class. I know where to look for him.”
“That’s part of my point,” Dez said. “First of all, when I said ‘big campus,’ I meant there are a hell of a lot of people you’ll be seen by.”
“I barely know anyone on campus. Just one guy.”
“Point two: that one guy is Marc Echoles, and he’s in the same department as Evan’s professor. What if you run into Marc? How are you going to deal with that?”
“Maybe it’s okay if he knows about me.”
“It’s okay for Marc, but not Mom?” Dez’s tone was unguarded annoyance.
It demanded an answer, and a better one than Sully had so far provided. “I’ll think about it, okay?”
Dez let it go with a grunt, which at least beat another argument.
They dropped Pax off with Emily Crichton, no way a busy campus and a dog prone to growling at strangers were going to mix well.
Given the time of year, Sully guess
ed summer session was nearing an end, meaning students were more likely to be using the library to study or complete essays, or heading to classes to ensure they had what they needed to pass finals. Others, like Evan apparently, were making time with their profs for last-minute help.
Sully contemplated leaving his hood up while walking through campus, but Dez squelched that plan. Campus shootings had been occurring in other cities over the past few years, and he reasoned people would be more likely to notice a guy in a dark hood than some random dude making his way through campus. Sully went one better, pulling his hair into a knot at the base of his head. Dez ribbed him about his new “lumbersexual” look, but it seemed, glancing around the Kimotan Rapids University, he wasn’t the only one working it. One lesson life had taught Sully was that blending in was as good as being invisible.
As Dez had suspected, they made it to the arts tower with no problems, the only attention they’d attracted coming from a few smitten female students.
The arts tower was another story. Sully had spent a fair bit of time here over the time he’d known Marc, and he’d been on nodding or even chatting terms with a few other professors in the sociology department.
“Pull out your phone and pretend you’re web surfing or something,” Dez suggested as Sully pulled up his hood. “And keep both hands visible. People are less likely to get edgy if they’re one hundred per cent sure you’re not holding an AR-15.”
Sully thought Dez was being a little paranoid; he’d seen other young guys wearing hoods without resembling the next lead item on the six o’clock news. But, as a former cop, Dez had come by over-caution honestly, so Sully did as told.
Using his view of Dez’s booted feet as a guide, Sully trailed his brother through the building and up the elevator to the seventh floor where the sociology department was housed.
“I don’t see any profs, just a lot of students,” Dez said once they’d stepped out of the elevator. “I don’t know what Evan looks like. Do you see him?”
Sully risked a glance. There were indeed a lot of students, but he finally found the one he was looking for.