Dead to the Max (Max Starr Series, Book 1, a paranormal romance/mystery)

by Jasmine Haynes

  As easily as that, Cameron let it go, as if his death was as painful for him as it was for her. “You didn’t want that job anyway,” he snorted, a ghostly resonance absorbed into the vinyl liner above her. “You hate working for a temp agency, and you hate accounting.”

  “I love working for Sunny. She’s wonderful, and the temp jobs are great.”

  “You’re lying to yourself.”

  “Accounting pays the bills.” And had been well on the way to giving her an ulcer before the age of thirty. Now, at thirty-two, Max had learned you did some things for the money and turned the rest off when the clock hit five.

  “I can pay the bills if you let me,” Cameron whispered somewhere near her left ear, the sound whooshing away as if it came from outside the car. “Use my life insurance money.”

  She bit down on the inside of her cheek. So he wasn’t letting the subject drop, just coming at it from another direction. “Blood money. You didn’t die so I could pay the rent.”

  She belatedly realized she’d said the dreaded word, and her teeth clamped together.

  “It’s been in precious metals for two years. Use the income.”

  She’d somehow escaped the devastation of the economic downturn. “In-bred blood money. I still won’t touch it.”

  Because touching it made his death final. Something she’d avoided for two years simply by closing her eyes, listening to his voice, and seeking his ghostly touch, as if he were beside her, flesh and bone.

  “So what do you plan to do if we find a body?” She preferred any subject, even murder, to talking about the blood money.

  Thankfully, this time Cameron let her steer the conversation away. “I think we ought to figure out who killed her, don’t you?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve had that little strategy up your sleeve the whole time.”

  “Max, Max, Max. I don’t have sleeves. I’m heavenly.”

  Life with Cameron had been heavenly. Sunday afternoons spent scouring used book stores for old mysteries. Long motorcycle rides in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sex in a secluded mountain meadow, once without even removing helmets or leather jackets. There’d been something erotic about it, definitely kinky with an element of risk that had made it all the more exciting.

  She’d sold the Ducati a month after Cameron’s funeral.

  Max took the turn for the long-term airport parking, the subtle scent of Cameron’s cigarette drifting by, muted by time and fading memory.

  “If we keep this under eight minutes, I won’t have to pay,” she said, punching the button and pulling out a ticket.

  “You need to call to check that flight 452 from Boise actually existed.” He referred to the number their unknown lady had written on the green note. “If you got yourself a new computer, you could just do it right there on the Internet.”

  Her old laptop had blown its motherboard or something, and she’d never replaced it. She didn’t need e-mail or the Internet. She didn’t need to be connected.

  “Calling will work just fine.” She’d told Cameron the whole dream sequence, from the woman’s arrival at the airport, her anticipation, the fear her lover evoked because she hadn’t stuck to the plan, then to the parking lot, and finally, to the dying. But some things were missing. Whole chunks. Exactly whose hands had been at her throat? Why had the woman welcomed Death, as if she deserved it? Max’s dream psyche seemed to have done a big fast forward, leaving the answers behind in that missing footage.

  The parking lot was packed, empty spots scarce, cars circling the aisles. “Which way?” Cameron prodded.

  Without thought, Max turned to the right and headed slowly out to the south end of the lot, bits of last night’s dream sifting through her head. “Something just came to me.”

  “A name perhaps?”

  “That paper, the one with the flight number on it. She threw it away in the airport before she went back to her car.”

  “Maybe it was a different note.”

  “It wasn’t.” She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “Someone put it back in her car. Even she knew it was out of place—or something.” Exactly what had the woman been feeling about that paper being there? Shame. That was all Max could remember.

  Cameron interrupted her thought. “Someone?”

  “It had to have been her killer.” The windows were up, the morning warm, but Max shivered as if a cool breeze had passed over her. She hadn’t phrased it as a question. “She was followed.” Stalked. Hunted.

  The feelings went a long way in suggesting that the man who’d made love to her wasn’t the one who’d killed her.

  “Does it?”

  “He couldn’t have known where she threw out the note or even that she’d written down the information.”

  “Maybe she retrieved the piece of paper.”

  “No. I don’t think so. And there’s the condom. They—she and her airport lover—didn’t use one because they were in such a big hurry.” Her clitoris tingled with palpable memory, the heat, the need, the rush. “But there was an opened wrapper on the floor of the car. Someone else must have been there.”

  “Maybe they did it again, and that time they used one.”

  “No. I’d remember.”

  “Just like you remember whose hands were at her throat?”

  He had a point. There were so many pieces missing. But... “It’s a feeling. Just like your feeling that we had to come here this morning, couldn’t wait, had to be now.” Cameron’s urgency had thrummed through her. “What is it you know?”

  “Feelings can’t be explained, Max, they’re just there. Like visions. You go with the flow, do what they tell you. Mine told me to be here. Yours told you which way to turn in the lot, where to go.”

  Max cruised the last aisle. The light post ahead sported a dulled, gray section sign. She’d seen that identifying section letter, too, out of the rear car window. Surrounding the pole, yellow barrier tape flapped in the wind.

  Oh Jesus. There really was a car.

  A silver Maxima. New. Dealer’s plates still on it, black smudges by the door handles, the windows. A black and white had parked on the opposite side as if on guard, the officer in the front seat blowing steam off a cup of coffee. When had they found the woman? Couldn’t have been too long or the car itself would have been gone.

  “Drive slowly.”

  “That cop’ll get suspicious.” Still, fascinated, she pulled closer to the line of parked vehicles and took her foot off the accelerator until the car slowed to a crawl.

  “What do you feel?”

  “I can’t believe this is real. And I don’t feel anything.”

  “Way too quick, Maxi.”

  “You know I don’t like it when you call me that, Cameron.” He’d always goaded her with the nickname, using it to push her to do what he wanted.

  He ignored the comment. “What do you sense?”

  Once she let them in, feelings swamped her. “Pain. Anger. Despair,” she whispered, then closed her eyes and put her foot on the brake. “She was incredibly alone.”

  “Guess you’ve accepted it was a vision, huh, Max?”

  Given no choice, she had. The long-term shuttle lumbered up behind her, its engine vibrating in her chest. The vehicle pulled alongside, then passed her, its windows coated with years of dirt, neglect, and black exhaust.

  She wouldn’t have seen the face at the back window if the man hadn’t raised a hand to swipe at the grime built up on the inside. She couldn’t make out his features beyond a set mouth in a long, narrow face, but his intense stare pierced her body.

  He shifted his gaze to the dead woman’s car and focused on it as if nothing else existed. One hand pressed against the dirty window as the bus pulled away.

  She punched the accelerator.

  “What do you feel?” Cameron demanded, hushed excitement animating his voice.

  It wasn’t a sight or a sound or a smell. It was something inside her. She knew that man, knew his eyes, pale yet intense eyes, dri
lling straight through to her inner organs. She could lose her sense of right and wrong in that gaze, lose herself in wanting him, needing him.

  Oh my God...the woman wasn’t dead dead. She was living inside Max’s head. All those feelings were hers, not Max’s.

  Cameron didn’t comment, asking instead, “Who is he?”

  “Her lover,” Max whispered, as much to herself as to Cameron. It wasn’t attraction she felt for the mystery man, nothing so trivial as desire or a man-woman thing. It was as if he knew her every secret, inside and out. And she knew his.

  The victim had been with him in the back seat of that Maxima. So had Max. She’d seen it in detail, lived it exactly as that woman had lived it. Everything else about the vision seemed to have gone hazy, but not this, not him. She felt him between her legs, inside her, tasted him on her tongue.

  The bus sped up in a cloud of exhaust. For a moment she lost sight of the man, and when the haze dissipated, he’d turned his head away from the dead woman’s car.

  “Follow him.” Cameron urged.

  Almost at the same moment she said, “You knew he was going to be here, didn’t you? That’s why we had to come.”

  “I told you I didn’t know what we’d find. I just knew we had to come.”

  She didn’t know whether to believe him. Sometimes...sometimes she thought he kept things from her, that he knew more and remembered more than he admitted. No time to analyze that now, though.

  Since they’d been at the far end of the lot, the shuttle was on its return to the terminal. She got snagged at the entrance with one car in front of her while the bus skated through its own gate. A tow truck entered a side entrance and turned south toward the dead woman’s car. Max’s head felt like a ping-pong ball as she flashed glances between the truck and her quarry. The bus hit the road. She inched forward, rolled down her window, held out her under-eight-minute ticket, and the attendant waved her on. Three cars were now between her and the bus on the frontage road as they headed toward the freeway.

  “Why is it getting on the freeway? I’ll lose it.” She shot through the tail end of the yellow light, the chase giving her an adrenaline rush.

  There were now five cars between her and the minibus.

  “Hot damn.” It was the only vehicle to exit onto the airport flyover. She caught up with the bus before a rush of commuters merged in from the southbound access. The Departures route was heavily packed, and the shuttle stopped at every airline while she sat in the wake of its fumes and the racket of honking horns and traffic whistles.

  “Will you recognize him?”

  “I’ll know him.” She hadn’t seen the man well at all, and the back of his head had disappeared from the window as if he’d gone forward to gather a bag or wait near the door. It didn’t matter. In the dream, she’d memorized every line on his face.

  She knew the moment had arrived before the bus even came to a complete stop and opened its doors. She gave the steering wheel a hard yank to the right and squeezed into a spot between a minivan and a shiny Lexus.

  The shuttle’s doors opened with a vacuum-packed whoosh, disgorging its occupants onto the sidewalk teaming with travelers. Max jerked her car door open and jumped out. Hot air blew up from the second roadway beneath them.

  Max saw him only five feet away as he used the rear exit. The noises, the scents, the flashing lights faded into the background. He was mid-thirties, a tall man, a good head above her five-feet-six. His sandy hair sported a short, neat cut; his dark, mirrored glasses were an early sixties style. A fine shadow covered his jaw, indicating he hadn’t shaved that day. His face was long and lean, and from the side, a slight bump marred his nose as if it had been broken. He’d dressed in worn jeans and chambray work shirt. Scuffed, tan work boots covered his feet. A small workout bag dangled negligently in one hand, and a newspaper was tucked beneath his arm. In the next moment, he pulled out the paper, gave it one last cursory glance, then threw it in a trash bin.

  He turned, looked at her, a break in his long-legged stride the only indication that he might actually have noticed her from behind those mirrored lenses.

  Her heart tripped over itself, then pounded. Her sunglasses slid down her nose. Her fingers trembled with the need to touch him, an alien need not her own. Where the hell did it come from?

  A fresh wave of passengers carried him into the terminal.

  “Don’t lose him,” Cameron pressed.

  Max started to run.

  A shrill whistle blew close to her head, punctuated by a sharp, “Hey lady, you can’t leave your car unattended.” A beefy hand on her arm jolted her to a stop.

  The traffic cop had insinuated himself between Max and the terminal door. “You aren’t leaving your car unattended, lady, and no excuses. I’ve heard ’em all, so don’t even bother.” His white shirt was too bright for the early hour, his belly too large to push past, and her checkbook too lean for a ticket.

  Behind him, the automatic doors slid shut, the interior of the building obscured by the dark glazing.

  Her quarry was gone.

  The only thing the man left behind was his folded newspaper.

  She tried to smile simperingly at the guard. “Can I get my paper? I dropped it over there.”

  She didn’t wait for the cop’s agreement, simply dashed the three steps to the trash and grabbed the newspaper off the top.

  “You’re out of breath,” Cameron whispered in her ear.

  She got back in the car. “I was running for the paper.”

  “You’re breathless for the paperboy who left it behind.”

  “I wanted to see what he’d been reading.”

  "But you lost him, Max."

  "I know that." She resisted the urge to smack her hand on the steering wheel.

  "He went out there specifically to look at her car."

  "We don’t know that."

  "Come on, you saw the look on his face. He knew that car. He knew her."

  Yes, Cameron was right. She knew without a doubt that Paperboy was the dead woman’s dream man.

  "But how would he know she was dead, Max?"

  Unless he killed her. The unspoken words hung in the air.

  No, no, no. There had to be another explanation, she just knew it, felt it inside like the double-time beat of her heart. “Maybe...” She unfolded the paper still on her lap, found the brief title of the short article on the back page.

  “Woman murdered at SFO. That’s how he knew,” she whispered.

  When was she murdered? How long ago was she found? Long enough to make the morning edition deadline. But not so long they’d had time to take her car away.

  "What’s it say?" Cameron urged.

  The words of the article shouted at her. She ignored the sharp whistle of the airport cop, the slap of his hand on her car hood. Her vision blurred around the edges of the name printed in the article, the sight somehow as bad as if she’d seen her own name there in black and white. The woman wasn’t anonymous anymore. She wasn’t just a vision. She was real. And she was dead. It had taken someone twenty-four hours to notice her. She’d been murdered the night before last—the night before Max had a vision of her last few hours alive.

  No, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible.

  She gasped. “Cameron, what’s happening to me?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “It’s like I’m feeling all her emotions, like she’s inside me. Taking over.”

  “Max, darling, I think you might be possessed.”

  Chapter Two

  Several hours later, her job interview dispensed with, Max dropped by the Wright temp agency that employed her. One thought occupied her mind. Cameron was correct. Psychic or crazy didn’t make a difference; she was possessed by something. She had to get rid of whatever it was in any way she could. The thought of someone else’s emotions running rampant through her body was...scary.

  “I’ll take those in for you,” Max offered solicitously as she breezed past Roger, Sunny Wright’s a
dministrative assistant.

  Without a pause, Max slipped her forged pink message note between the six she’d snatched off Roger’s desk.

  On her fifth read-through of the newspaper article, Max, with a lot of help from Cameron, figured the only way to exorcise Wendy Gregory—that was the woman’s name—was to find her killer. Didn’t all those old horror movies depict that solving the murder was the way to exorcise a ghost? It sounded a little wacky, but then so did admitting she was possessed.

  But where to start her investigation? That was easy, find out everything she could about Wendy Gregory, and to do that, she had to slip into the woman’s shoes. She’d begin by taking over Wendy’s job, which was where Sunny Wright and her temp employment agency came into play.

  The reporter who’d written the story had done his job. The who, what, when, where, and how concerning Wendy Gregory’s murder had all been covered in detail. The only question he hadn’t answered was the why.

  Discovering that answer fell to Max, with a little help from her pushy ghost of a husband.

  Being too anxious about getting Wendy’s job would look suspicious, if not to Sunny, then to Remy Hackett, Wendy’s boss, the man who’d reported her missing yesterday. Wasn’t that strange? In one neat swing, Max had two suspects: the husband who hadn’t reported her missing, and the boss who had, far more quickly than any normal employer would. One work day missed doth not a murder mystery make.

  She had to take over Wendy’s job to ferret out the answers. Making her move would be tricky. If this plan back-fired...she’d think of something else. Because Max knew the woman couldn’t “go into the light” until her killer was brought to justice.

  Aside from that, Max felt an odd compunction, a need, to give Wendy justice. Perhaps because she’d experienced Wendy’s last living moments. Or maybe it was that Cameron had never gotten justice. His killers were never caught. They’d never paid for what they’d done to him. Sometimes she still prayed for vengeance.