Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  “You haven’t told me anything.”

  “We told you what we could.”

  “Wasn’t enough,” Sylvie said. “ ’Sides, kids, the more eyes on you, the safer you’ll be.”

  Sylvie had already dialed. A benefit to her deal with Suarez: a cop on speed dial. He answered, cranky, and not too thrilled to hear from her. “What?”

  “Want to arrest some burglars?” Sylvie asked. She pointed at the painting, and said, “You kids can lawyer up if you want, but the cops are coming.”

  “What?” Lio was waking up fast. “Shadows, where are you? What are you doing? Don’t fuck this up for us.”

  “I’m a private citizen,” she said. “And the housekeeper let me in. I think I’m good.”

  “You threaten anyone?” Furious rustling and muffled words suggested he was dressing at speed.

  “Maybe,” Sylvie allowed. “Just get here soon. I’ve got things to do, but if I take off, all your evidence is going to disappear.”

  “Just . . . just don’t get out of hand.”

  “It’s already too late for that,” she said. He slammed the phone down and disconnected.

  She plunked herself down on the edge of the futon; they scooted away from her. She smiled, and said, “If you decide to drag Zoe into this, that’s your lookout. Only . . . think about this. All the stolen stuff is here. In your rooms. I saw you all at Bayside. There were only four of you. Zoe hasn’t been playing on the team. The cops can look all they want at her. There’s nothing to find.”

  “You can’t keep us here,” Jasmyn said.

  “Nope,” Sylvie agreed. “But that won’t stop the cops from tracking you down. Just think how embarrassing it’ll be if you’re hanging out with friends, and the cops crash the party to arrest you three. All because you overspent your allowances.”

  Jasmyn blanched. Sylvie hid a grin. These brats were too easy. Wright’s grim expression made her amusement fade. These brats were too easily led. Look how they’d fallen for Odalys’s scam.

  She was glad when the cops came; uniforms swarmed the room, cuffing the teens, taking pictures, tagging and bagging the stolen goods. Sylvie sidled toward the door, toward Wright, who had slipped out already and was sitting quietly on a poolside bench, the Hands a casual, towel-covered lump beside him.

  Adelio Suarez stopped her by stepping before her. She blinked. He’d snuck up on her by the simple expedient of being out of his suits. In jeans and a T-shirt, he had slid past her radar. “Going somewhere?”

  “Things to do,” she said.

  He cast a glance out toward Wright. “What’s he taken from the scene?”

  “You don’t want them,” Sylvie said. “You can’t deal with them. Bella died because she owned one. I don’t think your badge would make you any more immune.”

  He strode past her, whipped the towel aside—Wright moving too slowly, stunned by sun and worry—and grimaced. Lio’s throat worked. “What the devil—”

  Sylvie came up behind him, dropped the drape of terry cloth over them again. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t look at them. Don’t think about them. You’ll like it better that way. I’m going to take care of them. You take care of the thieves, and everything will be fine.”

  He licked his lips, turned toward her, uneasy and exhausted—an off-duty cop who cared enough to come back on shift. “Shadows . . .”

  She shook her head. She was going about this wrong, implying she was waiting for his permission. “We’re leaving. We’re taking the Hands. Try not to screw up and lose the teens, huh?”

  Wright rose hastily, towel bundled tight enough, the cloth thick enough to disguise the shape. Suarez stepped out of their way.

  “You got that pendant still?” Sylvie asked. Wright nodded, handed it to her. She hurled it into the depths of the pool as they passed. It made a satisfying plop. If only the rest of her problems could be disposed of so easily.

  The downturn to his mouth echoed her anger. She was done playing pawn to Odalys’s queen. In the core of her being, the little dark voice roused to excitement, filled her senses with the taste and smell of gunpowder, of blood.

  SHE DRAGGED THE HANDS, HERSELF, AND WRIGHT BACK TO THE office, her nerves roiling in frustration. Her internal voice, balked of immediate prey, turned itself on Sylvie and what it saw as Sylvie’s unaccountable reluctance to confront Odalys immediately. But it just wasn’t that easy. Odalys had a shop, yes, and they’d been there. Found it empty and warded, a cold end to a trail that they’d just set foot on. Without a last name, even the phone book was an impossible barrier.

  “Tell me you got something on Odalys,” Sylvie said over the ringing of the warning bell.

  “Are those more Hands?” Alex said. “You think you got them all?”

  “I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “How many murderers do you think die in Miami in a given year? Did you get anything for me?”

  “Odalys Hargrove,” Alex said. “At least, that’s the name on the property-tax forms for Invocat. She has a condo in North Miami Beach, overlooking the ocean drive.”

  “Expensive area,” Sylvie said. Wright took the towel from her, the Hands sticking out at weird angles as if they were attempting to peel back their winding cloths, and said, “Upstairs?”

  “For now,” Sylvie said. “We’ll give Wales a call. He’ll have to do a house call and pick these up.”

  Wright tucked them tighter into the towel and headed up the stairs. The bell’s chiming grew mournful, softer, as its rotation in the stone bowl slowed. Sylvie looked after him, her thoughts about Odalys temporarily derailed.

  “He’s adapting fast,” Alex said.

  “He’s had to,” Sylvie said. “Plus, Demalion’s coaching him now.”

  “You don’t sound happy about that.”

  The bell chimed twice while Sylvie thought. She wasn’t happy; she knew that much. But isolating why was as impossible a task as sifting through broken donax shells to match piece to piece.

  Sylvie sighed. “It’s sort of like walking into a room where two people suddenly stop talking. I keep catching him looking at me, and I don’t always know which one it is. He’s switching back and forth pretty freely now.”

  “Adapting,” Alex said. “Maybe they’ll share—”

  “Some things don’t share,” Sylvie said. “Toothbrushes, underwear. Bodies. Did you get anything on Patrice Caudwell to link her with Odalys?”

  Alex nodded, pulling the computer closer on the desk as if she wanted to hug it to her, proud as a mother with a talented child. “Oh yeah. You can thank family greed for it, too. Before she died, Patrice Caudwell, our dead toddler pusher, was worth about fourteen million dollars in actual money. After her death? One million. She made thirteen million dollars vanish in her last week alive, all without leaving her house, wired it to multiple other accounts. Beyond that? She’s tied up her entire estate. Her grandchildren can’t get hold of any of it.”

  “She left it to Odalys?”

  “That’d be too simple,” Alex said. “Honestly, I can’t even begin to follow all the ins and outs right now. It’s iffy enough just digging deeper through what’s a matter of public record. I get enough to know that there’s some really weird clause involved, turning the accounts into something like a scavenger hunt, something like waiting for lost royalty to show up and flash that crown birthmark. The good thing about that is since the majority of her money is tied up in this crazy-ass legacy, the family’s searching aggressively for the cash transfers.

  “Interesting thing is,” Alex said, “Odalys got a big, and I mean big, infusion of cash in her accounts. No way of my telling where it came from, but it’s there. Five million dollars there.”

  “Caudwell paid Odalys.”

  “That’s my assumption,” Alex said.

  “For what? Blackmail? Odalys had to have known she killed the toddler, or she wouldn’t have grabbed her hand for her spell . . . but.”

  “But it doesn’t really make sense,” Alex said. “Caudwell was dying
. And the death was ruled accidental.”

  “So what was Caudwell paying Odalys for?” Sylvie frowned.

  “She had household help, right?” Wright asked, clunking down the last few stairs with enough noise that Sylvie realized he had been deliberately stealthy for the first set. But then, she’d been discussing him and Demalion, reason enough for him to play eavesdropper, even if Demalion wasn’t a sneaky son of a bitch by nature.

  “She did,” Alex said.

  “So you show them Odalys’s picture? Ask ’em for a description of anybody that visited in the last week or so? Maybe they met Odalys, knew why she was there. And hey, Patrice Caudwell was older, became an adult in the fifties. She had money. But I bet you she didn’t know enough about computers to do the transfers herself. Bet she had a money manager. Did you talk to them?”

  Alex slunk down into her seat. “No.”

  “There’s something to be said for legwork,” Wright said. “Sometimes you gotta walk the beat.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “But sometimes your boss won’t let you.”

  Wright turned a surprised glance at Sylvie, and she said, “Don’t give me that look. We’re dealing with black magic and murder. Alex stays behind the screen. Demalion can tell you what happens when she doesn’t.”

  “You just don’t want to pay me danger fees,” Alex muttered. “The snake thing was once, Sylvie. Once.”

  “Once is enough,” she said. “A god intervened to save your life. How often do you think that happens? Still, Wright’s got a point, and most of his questions can be asked and answered on the phone line. Try to track anything down.”

  Alex nodded. “I did look into other deaths. I think I found yours.” She tabbed over on the screen, turned it about so Sylvie could have a better look. An obituary in the Herald, a smiling craggy face under a cloud of white hair. Sylvie pictured those thin lips squared and open around a gaping black hole of a mouth, her eyes glittering with malevolence, her bones made stark beneath ghostly skin. “That your crazy lady ghost?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sylvie said.

  “Who was she?” Wright asked.

  “A helping hand,” Alex said. “A pillar of society. Margaret Strange, charity woman, and in her last year, senior volunteer at Baptist Hospital. She quit after one of her elderly charges died on her shift.”

  “Alone with him when it happened?” Sylvie said. It wasn’t really a question. She recalled the smothering sensation of tightly stretched cotton pressed against her flesh, cold and clammy with ghostly intent.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Apparently, it really upset her.” She shot a glance at Wright that was half challenge, half apology. “I did talk to the hospital staff. I got to know some of them pretty well while I was in. Jenny, the volunteer coordinator, said she quit right after. She wasn’t really surprised. They lose a lot of volunteers after a death. Strange died not that long after in her own home. Suicide, I think.”

  “By hanging?” Sylvie asked.

  Alex cocked her head. “Don’t know. I was mostly reading between the lines. Does it make a difference? We know Caudwell died naturally.”

  “Don’t know,” Sylvie repeated it back to her. “What about money. Strange have any?”

  “She should have,” Alex said, “but she didn’t have any. It was embezzled, and recently.”

  “So no payments to Odalys . . .” Wright stood, paced a tight circle.

  “Hard to tell,” Alex said. “If some money went missing before the rest, I can’t tell. It’s under active investigation and my . . . sources can only do so much. But I did figure out the most likely place for Zoe to have gotten her filthy lucre.”

  “Yeah?” Sylvie asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Alex looked a little too determinedly calm about it.

  “Moneylender down near the dog track. His place was turned over and his safe emptied. No sign of who or how it was done. Pretty smart of her, really.”

  Wright said, “Yeah, except now she’s got a heavy looking for his money.”

  “No,” Alex said, then bit her lip. Oh, this was the part she didn’t want Sylvie to hear, the part she’d been hiding underneath her pragmatism.

  “He’s dead?” Sylvie asked. “Died in his office, didn’t he. Unknown causes?”

  Alex nodded. “She probably doesn’t even know. Didn’t mean to—”

  “So manslaughter instead of murder?” Sylvie shook her head. “I guess that’s better. But not by much.” She slipped away from Alex’s outstretched hand, leaned up against the desk, pushing the fine traceries of sand across the floor with her sneaker toe, focusing on that small detail. She watched the grains move, listened to Wright interrogating Alex about homicides in hospitals and why they were harder to commit than she might have thought, listened to Alex shut him up by simply pointing out that Margaret Strange’s left hand had become a Hand of Glory, thus a murderer. If not the man at the hospital, then who?

  “Good question,” Sylvie said. “We need to remember, these women aren’t victims. In their last years, they each made a choice to kill someone. Why?”

  “What about the Hands we collected today?” Wright said. “They murderers also?”

  “Alex—” Sylvie said.

  “I can pull up all recent deaths, comb through their pasts for hints of murder, but hell, this is Miami.”

  “Rich people,” Sylvie said. “The two Hands we’ve identified are both rich, or should have been, and in the twilight of their lives. I’d start there.”

  “And you’ll be—”

  “Taking a look-see at Odalys’s condo, though I don’t expect it to pan out. Condos aren’t really necromancy-friendly. The neighbors tend to complain about the smell. Defective or not, these Hands have been cured.”

  Wright’s lips curled up in distaste and understanding. “Once,” he said, “we rousted a guy who’d killed his girlfriend but couldn’t figure out where to stash the body. He bled her out in his bathtub and hung her up to dry. It was a cold winter, but . . . yeah, you can’t hide that smell.”

  Alex made the “ew” face, so vivid on a girl with a tongue stud and bright lipstick. “Speaking of . . . take those Hands with you. The bell will drive me crazy otherwise.”

  SYLVIE HUNG BACK WHEN THEY REACHED THE CONDO; WRIGHT AND Demalion had spent the ride double-teaming her, seamlessly working together, arguing about police procedure, about stealth, about catching flies with honey, until her head spun listening to the cadences of their voices flip back and forth, watching Wright’s wiry body lock up as if its nerves couldn’t keep up with the conflicting impulses the two minds sent it. Wright’s hand, resting on his thigh, twitched and trembled as if it were attached to a live wire.

  All of that effort just for a discussion about which of them should approach the doorman.

  “Stop talking about it and do it,” Sylvie snapped, reaching across and jerking the passenger’s-side door open. She brushed against him, recoiled at the fever heat roiling off his skin. He looked over at her, face immobilized by that same strange nervous-system lockdown; she wasn’t sure which of them was listening, if either. “Go, but first decide who’s doing the talking, or the doorman’s likely to call the cops. Maybe an ambulance. And Christ, give it a rest. I mean, I’m glad you’re making nice and all, glad you found some way to communicate, but Wright’s body looks about one step from a heart attack; and then where would you be?”

  Wright’s body jerked, one of them wresting command enough to get out from under the spate of her aggravation. She was betting on Demalion; he’d been on the rough side of her tongue more often than he appreciated. She leaned out to shout something after him, but her phone rang, and she snatched it up without even looking at the number.

  “Shadows, what the hell is going on?”

  “Lio? Everything go all right with the evidence recovery?” Sylvie said.

  “Forget that,” he gritted out. “Isabella Martinez just walked out of the hospital morgue. What’s going on!”

  “She’s not dead
?” Sylvie said. “But she was dead. You said so.”

  “The goddamned doctors said so, too, but what do they know, because Bella went home this afternoon, walking on her own two feet.”

  Sylvie’s brain blanked utterly. Suarez continued to harangue her, but she was made of sterner stuff than Demalion or just more wrapped up in her thoughts. Bella had been dead.

  You didn’t see it, her voice suggested. Always best to verify the facts yourself.

  But she had seen the girl clammy, desperately ill, corpse-pale, one step from death. Wales had said the Hands were defective, dangerous; the one, at least, had tried to devour Sylvie whole.

  “Are you even listening? Tell me what’s going on, or I will bring you down to the station, and I will keep you there for as long as I can throw charges at you.” The fury in his voice was a thin thing, a veneer laid over fear, reminding her that he was new to this type of blatant magic.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I really don’t know what’s happening. I know what killed Bella, how Jaz and her boys were robbing the stores, and I know who started them on that path. But I don’t know about Bella’s death and resurrection. People just don’t come back from the dead.” This even while she watched Wright/Demalion speaking with the doorman in her peripheral vision, sweet-talking his way through.

  Without wanting to, she remembered Wales’s comment that no good ever came of mingling life with death. While she wanted to be thrilled that Bella had recovered, it only raised sick dread in her stomach. “She taking visitors?”

  “Ask her lawyers,” Suarez said. “She’s sure not talking to me. It seems to be a common thing these days. Me asking questions and getting shut out.”

  “You can’t unknow things,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes aphorisms are right. Ignorance is bliss.”

  “My son died. His killers have vanished. You tell me they transformed, which means nothing to me. And all the help I get from the bosses is a warning to drop it. I’ve got teenage cat burglars from high-class families waltzing through walls and alarms, dropping dead and coming back to life. Tell me, Shadows, how is this bliss?”