“Think we’re gonna need to talk to him,” Gabe murmured.
“Uh-huh.” Ty frowned, any evidence of earlier humor having evaporated with the knowledge that they were dealing with the murder of a child, the worst-case scenario for any cop, as far as Gabe was concerned. Though he’d worn the uniform for a few years in Florida, Ty’s detective badge was pretty new, so this could very well be his first case involving a kid. Sucked to be him today. And even though he’d been on the job long enough to have seen a few cases he’d rather never have known about, frankly, it sucked to be Gabe today, too.
Since her own murder, at the age of fifteen, Olivia Wainwright had experienced more deaths than she could ever remember. Not that she tried to remember. Why would anyone choose to? Bad enough that she did what she did, that her own brush with death seemed to have opened some portal into a darkness she had never fully understood, even if she had finally accepted it.
But some experiences never left. Some sensations seemed to have been forever imprinted onto her cerebral cortex. Sense memories clawed at her brain even in her sleep, often causing her to wake up in terror, sure she was being shot or choked or beaten—murdered.
Because she had been. Not once, but many times.
She’d felt the agony of a bullet tearing into flesh, the pressure of hands wrapped around her throat, the thud of fists battering her body. Then there were the accidental deaths—sometimes those had to be investigated, too. So she knew the crushing sensation of a human form being twisted around the steering column of a small car, and sometimes still tasted the vile black smoke inhaled by a man trapped in a burning building.
Not once, but many times.
Although the horrific deaths she experienced now weren’t her own, it never got any easier. In fact, each time was just a little worse than the last, each connection just a hint more terrifying to make. Because she’d been brought back. Saved. Those other victims hadn’t.
It always took a while to move past one of her shared-death experiences and required a great deal of determination and mental will. Until she did move past it, she never got much peace or rest.
Lying alone in her bed just after dawn on Monday, Olivia tried to even her breathing and still her racing heart. She had jerked out of sleep, the overwhelming sensation of falling making her reach out and grab for something—anything—to prevent her from splattering on the hard ground. Dreams of falling weren’t uncommon for anyone. But they probably didn’t hold the clarity that Olivia’s night terror just had. It had been so real, so incredibly real.
“Because of Bernie Ratzinger,” she whispered, hearing the quaver in her own voice.
Beside her, Poindexter, her cat, lifted his head and opened one sleepy green eye. She reached for him, sinking her fingers into his fur, stroking him back to sleep, though she knew slumber would elude her until she rid herself of the sad final minutes of Bernie Ratzinger’s life.
Bernie had been a banker with a serious gambling habit who’d been playing a risky game with his employer’s money. When that game had ended with a Go-Directly-to-Jail card, he’d taken another way out—off the top of a fifteen-story high-rise on Bryan Street.
His wife hadn’t believed it was suicide. She’d been sure Bernie had been murdered by someone who’d been even more deeply involved in the embezzling scandal. She’d come to eXtreme Investigations—the paranormal detective agency Olivia worked for—and asked them to prove it.
Olivia’s boss, Julia, knew the widow personally and had wanted to help her out. The husband’s life insurance policy wouldn’t pay off in the case of suicide. If Olivia had been able to find any evidence that Ratzinger had been pushed off that building, evidence that could be corroborated by the rest of the team, the widow and her children would be much better off. So Olivia had agreed to do it.
She’d known the moment she touched his corpse that it had, indeed, been suicide.
Olivia had connected with him, almost become him, during the final two minutes and ten seconds of his life. And, like always, once that connection had been made, she couldn’t break it until the very end. So she’d been with Bernie for every one of those awful final seconds.
She’d looked down at feet pacing that roof as if they were her own. Had heard his words as he talked to himself, working up his nerve to jump. No one else had been there. Not another person’s voice, not a footstep, not a hand in the dark—neither a helpful nor a murderous one. Just Bernie and his rantings about his fear of prison and his anger at being so stupid and his sadness at what he’d done to his family.
She hadn’t been inside his head. That never happened, so she couldn’t read anybody’s last thoughts. She could only experience what they experienced through their own sensory input: what they saw, heard, tasted, smelled. And felt—physically, not emotionally.
Honestly, she wouldn’t have needed to share his thoughts to understand what Bernie was feeling and thinking during those final minutes. Nor did she really have to hear his words. The man’s condition had been made clear by the sick clenching in his stomach, the tightness of every muscle, the sobs, the sting of tears in his eyes. The way his arms shook and his hands trembled as he prepared to hoist himself out onto the ledge.
Shivering lightly, she let the rest of the memories in, little by little. Though the temperature in her bedroom was comfortable, she easily recalled the sensation of hot night air stabbing at her face as she hurtled off the roof. The trip down had been an incredibly fast one, the ground looming ever larger with each foot she and Bernie fell out of the sky. His long scream of remorse as the human survival instinct kicked in suggested that in the last seconds of his life, he had wished he could turn back the clock so he could take it back, not make that fearful leap.
He had died almost instantly, so there had been very little pain. Just that fear, that awful, bone-deep terror during the short but still interminably long descent.
Not his terror. Hers. He’d been her first jumper. That was the problem. It wasn’t as easy to get past this one because she was dealing with something new.
“Time to let it go, Liv,” she reminded herself.
Breathing deeply, she utilized a few relaxation techniques she’d acquired over the years. Aidan McConnell, a psychic she worked with at eXtreme Investigations, had once told her he tried to visualize building an enormous cement block wall to serve as a barrier between him and any invasion into his psyche. Olivia didn’t require a barrier, however. She didn’t have to keep anything from coming in. She just needed a way to get it out.
Relaxed, she visualized gently falling rain, a slow, soft shower. Only when she could almost feel it against her skin did she allow herself to fully acknowledge the fear, remember the pain. She let it take her for a second. When she’d fully embraced it, come to terms with the horror, Olivia let the rain pour in, let it flow over her, seep into her pores to carry away all that was dark, grimy and awful. She focused on being washed clean, on the reality that she was fine and safe and not at all frightened. Slowly, each of those dark feelings began to float away with the water, long rivulets escaping her subconscious to evaporate in the daylight of reality.
Eventually, she began to feel back in control, normal—or her version of it, anyway.
“Oh, great,” she said with a weary sigh, glancing at the gleaming green numbers on her bedside clock. She wondered if there was any point in even trying to go back to sleep for the fifteen minutes she had left before the alarm went off.
Outside, a motor suddenly whirred and whined. The landscaping guy who cut almost every lawn in the neighborhood was starting super early these days to beat the heat, noise ordinances be damned. And oh, what a noise it was. Now she knew there was no point trying to go back to sleep.
Slipping out of bed, she beelined for the shower. A real one was now just as necessary as her mental one had been. Her memories had been washed clean; it was time to finish the job with real water on the rest of her body.
Water. Funny that it was her coping mechanism
now, considering it was also her number one terror. Not warm showers, of course, but cold, black, fathomless pools. Once upon a time, when she had been young and normal, it had been the swipe of a sharp blade across her skin that had instilled the most terror in her. Now, it was water.
“Not gonna think about that,” she mumbled as she turned on the shower, then got right in, not even waiting for it to get hot. It was going to be another scorcher outside, and being pelted with cool liquid seemed the wisest way to start the day.
Afterward, while she got ready for work, Olivia turned on the radio, wanting to catch the weather forecast. It was masochistic, she knew, but hey, a high of 97 beat one of 102 any day. And, despite the fact that a lot of people probably considered her a ghoul, she was an optimist—or at least a realist with optimistic leanings.
“And now for the local news, here’s an update on our top story: an overnight fire at a bar near the Laurel Grove Cemetery.”
Olivia stiffened, dropping the towel she’d been using on her hair. Her mouth went dry; her pulse sped up. The visceral reactions were familiar, occurring whenever she heard anything to do with Laurel Grove. The very name conjured up a litany of dark images, unearthing memories she would much prefer to keep buried.
Black night, creaking, rusty gates, tiny bugs and creatures skittering across her bare, ragged feet. Struggling to breathe—trying to remind her body how it was done—with air so humid it was like inhaling through a blanket made of wool and soaked in syrup. The uneven ground, the twisted trees and tangled Spanish moss sending strange shadows in every direction.
The graves. Oh, God, the graves. Every one seemed to bear her name; each crypt had invited her to enter and lie down there with the cold dead, since that was where she rightfully belonged. And so she’d. . . .
She shook her head hard, struggling to focus on the bright and sunny now, not the dark and bleak then. Escaping the mental effects of that horrific night had taken a lot of time and effort, not to mention therapy. While her friends in high school had been staying after school for cheerleading practice, she’d been heading to a shrink’s couch. It had taken sacrifice and grit, but she’d survived. So she refused to give those memories any power over her now.
Yet the dark thoughts persisted.
“As reported earlier, fire crews responded at about three a.m. to this two-alarm fire which destroyed a popular hangout on North Ogeechee Road. We’re now hearing that human remains have been found on the site.”
Fire—smoke inhalation. What an awful way to die. Olivia knew that better than most.
“But an inside source tells us that the remains apparently were hidden at the site several years ago. A small skeleton was found walled up inside the burned-out structure.”
Shock made her slowly lower herself to the bed, and she barely heard the voice on the radio as it continued. She was too focused on what the deejay had already said: A skeleton. Walled up for years. Twelve years, perhaps? Was it even possible?
“There’s no way,” she told herself. “How many people die in Savannah every year?”
A lot. God knows, in her line of work, she knew a lot about death and murder. So the idea that this particular victim could possibly be connected to him was incredibly slight.
A small skeleton. There for years.
Olivia shook her head, angry at herself for thinking those thoughts. It had been over for twelve years; she needed to leave the past in the past. She turned off the radio, no longer worrying about the weather. Hot was hot, and she would dress appropriately.
Forty-five minutes later, she left her Victorian District house to head to work. But somehow, instead of skirting Forsyth Park to Abercorn so she could head north to downtown, she found herself going south. She didn’t even think about it, didn’t recall making a conscious decision to do it, right up until she hit West Thirty-first and turned right.
“What are you doing?” she mumbled, not sure what had compelled her to come this way.
Then she saw the sign for Ogeechee and realized where her subconscious was taking her.
Go there, Olivia. You have to see for yourself.
Why she had to see, she didn’t know. Nor was she entirely sure whose voice that whisper in her brain had sounded like. Not really hers, it was as if she were being directed by someone else altogether. Someone who wanted her to find out what was happening at the scene of that fire and whose skeletal remains had been found there. His?
As she drew closer, she saw the news vans parked at the corner. Onlookers who had gathered on the sidewalk across the street from what had once been Fast Eddie’s were staring avidly at the police and fire investigation officials who filled the scene.
“Make a U-turn and go back,” she told herself, knowing she wouldn’t want to turn right and drive past Laurel Grove, which she always took great pains to avoid.
But she didn’t turn around, and she didn’t turn right. Instead, she pulled over and parked behind a WJCL van, with its antennas up and a cameraman and reporter standing nearby.
She sat in the car for a minute, her hands clenching the steering wheel. Something had drawn her here, something compelling and insistent. Rationally, she knew that made no sense, but how long had it been since anything about her life made a whole lot of sense?
Whatever instinct had brought her here, she wasn’t content to watch from the car. She cut the engine, then stepped out into the hot, bright morning and walked up the sidewalk. She saw the onlookers blocking the path. Saw the vehicles and the twirling lights and the reporters. But her mind didn’t really register any of that other than as obstacles to move around. So she moved around them, silently, almost as if in a trance. Then farther, stepping down off the curb, drawn irrevocably closer to that burned-out shell across the street.
You have to see, have to make sure. You must find out what happened to him.
“Hey, lady, what the hell are you doing?!” a voice yelled. “Watch out!” The shout was quickly followed up by the blast of a horn and the loud squeal of tires on pavement.
As if she’d been slapped out of a daze, Olivia blinked and swung her head around just in time to see a car barreling down on her, so close she could see the driver’s huge eyes and his screaming mouth. Shocked into near immobility, all she could do was throw her hands up in a self-protective gesture, even as her brain screamed at her to move.
Waiting for the crunch of steel on her body, knowing this time the pain would be hers, she gasped when someone tackled her around the waist, hauling her out of the way. Her rescuer stumbled several feet, carrying her along with him. He held her close, his back to the street, shielding her, as if determined to provide one final barrier between her and the vehicle—the vehicle that skidded to a stop right where she’d been standing.
It had all happened in less than ten seconds.
“Jesus, that was close,” a man’s voice said, low and thick, close to her ear. She felt his breath on her cheek and his big, hard form pressed against every inch of her.
“No kidding,” she whispered, feeling as though she’d suddenly awakened from a dream, like this morning’s, when she’d been falling through the air. Only this had been no dream—she could have been killed.
Swallowing hard, she peered around him, seeing a car angled across the opposite lane, its driver shaking a fist at her. The crowd on the corner was abuzz, and the cameraman had swung his equipment around, all bearing witness to what could have been her death.
Good Lord. She’d walked right into the middle of the road, into oncoming traffic.
“Are you okay?” her rescuer asked.
The powerful arms that had hauled her out from in front of the oncoming car released her, and she dropped onto her toes. Olivia hauled in a deep breath, then nodded once, still too shaken to even look at him fully. “Yes.” She lifted a hand and pushed her hair back off her face, feeling the cold sweat on her forehead. “Thanks to you.”
“You stupid bitch, what the hell were you thinking?” someone screamed.
Her savior, who was still so close she could feel the brush of his pants against her bare legs, swung around and pointed at the man. “Get back in your car, sir.”
“She walked right out in front of me!”
The man reached for his belt, pulled off a leather wallet and flipped it open to display a badge. “I said, get in your car and move along. You’re blocking traffic.”
The driver ignored the order. “Are you gonna charge her with something?”
The stranger took one step toward the vehicle, his powerful body rigid, his shoulders bunching against his brown suit jacket. “If you say one more word, I’ll ticket you. You were driving like a maniac through a crime scene, and if you’d been paying attention to the road rather than what was going on across the street, you would have seen this pedestrian in plenty of time.”
The man’s eyes widened, and his face flamed, confirming what the officer had said. Still, Olivia knew she’d been responsible for the near miss. She’d walked right into the path of the car, focused solely on whatever force seemed to be tugging her toward the burned-out ruin.
She stepped toward the officer. “It was entirely my fault.”
That seemed to mollify the driver, as did the subsequent apology she offered him. He gave her a single, harsh nod, then got back into his car and drove away. Slowly.
Once he was gone, the cop turned back toward her. For the first time, she was able to look at him, face-to-face, and for a second, her breath caught in her throat. Her legs, which had been firmly planted on the ground once he’d set her down, wobbled just a bit, and both her X chromosomes went on alert, reacting to his mighty Y one.
The man wasn’t so much handsome as incredibly good-looking, rugged and utterly masculine. His face was strong and determined, his nose a little crooked like he’d taken a few hits in his day. That was a nice change from the more plastic, perfect male faces she’d seen. She’d grown up around rich lawyers and politicians; a nose job was generally a prerequisite before the launch of any political career.
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