Ghosts & Echoes si-2

by Lyn Benedict

  Sylvie tried to think back, to attach shapes to those barely glimpsed figures from last night. Had Zoe been among them?

  Alex shook her head. “She’s still MIA.”

  “Was Zoe the jailbait masquerading as a fashion plate?” Wright asked.

  “Is Zoe my baby sister, you mean?” Sylvie said. Her tone warned him off the topic.

  He took a step back, held his hands up. “No offense meant.”

  Hands landed on her shoulders, and Alex banged her head gently against her back, her gel-spiked hair stiff against Sylvie’s nape. “Sylvie . . . curb the instincts. Take a breath. Tell me about the trash can. Your sister’s an alley cat. Deal with it. She’ll come back after she’s gotten bored with her new boyfriend.”

  Sylvie sighed. If they’d been alone, she might have told Alex everything; Bella, the burglaries, the Hand, her fears for Zoe, and Demalion’s return. But Wright was listening. Typical, she thought. When she hadn’t wanted to talk, she and Alex had been alone, and now that the words burned to be loosed, she had to swallow them.

  “I need to find Zoe, and soon,” she said. Stripping Zoe of her cell phone may have been good as punishment, but not practical. No. Reach out and smack someone held an undeniable appeal right now. What the hell was Zoe thinking?

  “Give me a list of names, and I’ll canvass her friends.”

  Sylvie said, “Start with Ariel Goldbach.”

  Wright slouched into the kitchenette, peered into the cupboards, beat-up sneakers squeaking on the terrazzo. “I don’t see the deal here. She’s what? Sixteen? Seventeen? She a druggie? That why you’re so hot to find her?”

  “She’s my responsibility,” Sylvie said, flatly. “Like you.”

  He frowned; his fidgety body went still as his mind went active. Calculating, putting random pieces together in a way that shouldn’t mean anything. “Don’t suppose she’s a rich kid?” He glanced back at the trash can.

  Goddamn cops with goddamned intuitive leaps.

  “No,” she said. It was the truth, in a narrow, tunnel-vision manner. Clients had the privilege of lying to her; if she lied to them, it was bad for business. “Anything going on here, Alex?”

  “Conrad wants to hear your progress.”

  Sylvie rolled her eyes. “Client discretion?”

  Alex sighed. “You don’t like her anyway.”

  “Not the point,” Sylvie said.

  “You could give her the burglar’s name,” Wright said. “She might like that.”

  “You found out already?” Alex grinned, wide and white, flashing as brightly as her diamante nose stud. “See, I told you it was a cake case.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Sylvie said.

  Wright said, “It could be.”

  “Doing things my way, remember?”

  Wright sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re the boss. But I don’t see what you’re gonna do. You took their toy away. What else can you do to them? It’s time for us to do our thing. Arrest the bad guys.”

  Sylvie said, “They won’t be able to keep them. And, no, I don’t have a plan yet. But I’ll think of something.”

  The bell rang on and on in the silence that fell between them, Wright struggling hard to not confront, not contradict. Finally, he just shook his head, and said, “There should be some type of law. Someone who knows and can do something about it. Someone with government backing.”

  “There’s the ISI,” Alex said.

  “Then why aren’t—”

  “Because they’re dicks,” Sylvie said. “Short answer. If all else fails, I’ll drop them a note.”

  She yanked off her Windbreaker, dropped it over the alarm bell, still shivering in its marble bowl; she wished she could move it to the closet for the time being, but it had been bonded to the desk. Some spells seemed to be more math than magic. Val Cassavetes, her witchy friend, had spent hours figuring the angles to make sure the warning bell covered the office door to door, floor to ceiling, then she’d pragmatically laid down a tube’s worth of super glue once she had it to her specifics.

  The front door opened; Wright yielded the way to Lisse Conrad. With her came one of the people Sylvie wanted to see least. Detective Adelio Suarez. Sylvie bit back a frustrated sigh. Plans, so easy to make, so easy to disrupt. She should have locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, but generally her office wasn’t client central.

  “I saw you come in,” Conrad said. “Your truck is . . . noticeable.” A faint sneer on her lips. Sylvie wondered if the expression would grow more dismissive or less if the woman knew what had caused the rents in the metal.

  “Easy to find at the airport,” Sylvie agreed. She veiled her aggravation behind a toothy smile and watched Conrad turn away.

  The woman swept past her on a wave of floral perfume, and Adelio Suarez followed as if he were a hound on scent. He paused to say, “Did you enjoy your joke? Sending us to harass nice families about a burglary charge?”

  “’Cause nice families never have secrets,” Sylvie said. “The list was legit.”

  Zoe might be part of that list, she thought with a sudden pang, and didn’t so much backtrack as sidle around the point. “But there’s a lot of information that goes nowhere in this biz. You know that.”

  Suarez studied her, and said, “Someday, we’re going to have a talk, Shadows, about exactly what your biz consists of. Someday soon.”

  “I love to talk, though I’m picky who I do it with.” She swept her gaze around the office; it hadn’t reached crowded, but it was getting there. Lisse Conrad perched on the arm of the couch, attempting to avoid dog fur. Wright was playing least in sight, standing in the shadow of the kitchenette, watching them all with speculative eyes. Suarez was . . . way too close into her personal space. She took a giant step back, nearly tripped over Alex, and rebounded off the edge of the desk.

  This was ridiculous. For a moment, she wished she were in Chicago again, hunting an impossible-to-find foe, with nothing and no one to distract her.

  No one but Demalion.

  She blindly reached across the desk, collected a thick handful of small bills from the cash box, and said, “Wright! You wanted breakfast? How ’bout lunch. There’s a shrimp stand down the way—follow the gulls. Get three orders to go.”

  Inelegant and obvious, but it worked. Wright took the money, even if he did so only to come close enough to whisper, “You should tell them.” His breath brushed her neck; his hand tightened about hers and the money. She flashed back to his lips on hers, on her throat, and jerked away.

  “I’m not fond of shoulds,” she said. She didn’t bother to lower her voice. He backed away, hands up, the human form of showing the belly.

  “Do you think your . . . secretary could do something about that noise?” Conrad asked. She leaned her cheek into her hand, rubbed her temple, wincing as the bell continued to chime.

  “Defective cell phone,” Sylvie said. “Nothing to do but wait for the battery to die.” She relented. “Why don’t you go up to my private office. I’ll be up in a moment, as soon as I see Adelio out.”

  The detective barked laughter. “I’ll go. I can take a hint. But I will catch up with you.” The door shut behind him, leaving Alex and Sylvie alone in the office.

  Sylvie lowered her voice. “Alex, I need to talk to you. Let me get rid of Conrad. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Conrad’s your client,” Alex reminded her. “Try not to turf her out like you did Suarez, huh? She’s paying us.”

  “So’s Wright,” Sylvie said.

  Alex’s brows raised. “I knew you were hiding something. You didn’t want the case last night, and this morning you’re all grabby, dog in the manger. What’s going on?”

  Sylvie shot a quick glance up the stairs, a quick one toward the door, and pulled Alex closer. “Just watch Wright when he comes back. Tell me if you see it. You knew him, too.”

  “Knew who? His ghost?”

  Sylvie nodded, feeling sick and giddy at once,
as if this secret, held for such a short time, had festered. Even hinting at the truth made her think of lancing poisons from a wound, that squeamish combination of horror and relief.

  Alex’s eyes went wide as she proved that she knew far too much about the way Sylvie’s mind worked. “You think it’s—”

  “Not think,” Sylvie said. “Know. It’s Demalion.” Even at a whisper, the name exploded into the room like a bomb. Alex collapsed back onto the couch as if her knees had been cut out from under her.

  She looked up at Sylvie, her eyes all shocked pupil, her voice very gentle. “Sylvie. Grief can really fuck you up. Guilt and grief together can get downright Shakespearean. All blood and delusions . . . Demalion coming back? It’s not possible.”

  Sylvie laughed. “Alex. Look at my life and tell me what is and isn’t possible. I’ve dealt with werewolves, witches, gods, and immortal, amoral ancestors who wanted to storm heaven. What’s one ghost finding his way back compared to all of that?”

  8

  Something Blue

  ANYTHING ALEX WOULD HAVE SAID IN RESPONSE WAS DERAILED AS, upstairs, the door to Sylvie’s office opened and closed with a bang, a clear sign that Lisse Conrad was getting impatient. Sylvie growled. “That woman’s such a—”

  “Client,” Alex said, jumping onto the escape hatch of the conversation without her usual subtlety. “She’s our client. Go deal with her.” She rose from the couch, filled with a manic energy.

  Sylvie imagined if she didn’t go upstairs, Alex would try to shove her up the treads. “Fine, but don’t think you’re being subtle.”

  “Go, go!”

  Less irritated than she let on, she took to the stairs. Alex didn’t want to think about it, fine. Alex wanted to think Sylvie was crazy. Not fine, but Sylvie could disabuse her of that easily enough the moment Demalion showed up again.

  Sylvie let herself into her private office with her game face on: a little irritated, easy to shade toward neutral or to critical judgment. Her private office was usually off-limits to the clients, so she hadn’t bothered with any attempt at décor. She’d scrounged the filing cabinets, the desk, the standing fans from UM’s redecorating sales, and it showed. Her office looked like a particularly shabby dorm room, right down to the ratty futon behind the door.

  The single window didn’t let in much light, being an alley view of the bar wall next door, and what sunlight came in was fractured, dancing prismatically along the linoleum, split by chips in the glass from the time Sylvie had found herself body-slammed into it by a pissed-off sorcerer.

  Lisse Conrad sat in Sylvie’s desk chair, pushed back from the desk, her spine straight and her hands crossed neatly on her lap. In her shoes, Sylvie would have taken the opportunity to snoop. File drawers beckoned; the computer was right there—locked, of course, and coded besides, but right there.

  Normally, Sylvie would make a point of removing the woman from her seat—she was in control here, not Conrad, no matter which way the money ran—but she wanted to be done with this. “I have a lead. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Suarez. I’ve found one of the burglars, but I’m holding out for the rest. I’d like to wrap this up all neat and tight before we go to the police.”

  “The longer it takes, the less likely we are to regain our belongings,” Conrad said. “For the chain stores, that doesn’t mean much. It’s just money. For businesses like mine, like the people I represent, it means a lot more.”

  “They’re not selling them,” Sylvie said. “Nothing’s shown up on the market. It’s being kept, so your chances of getting your belongings back are better than usual. But not if we let the police blunder in too soon. These aren’t your usual burglars.”

  “What—they’re . . . magical?” Conrad said. Her expression was guarded. “You think I didn’t want you here because you were an investigator? I didn’t want you here because you have a strange reputation, Ms. Lightner, and rumor has it, you believe some strange things.”

  Sylvie said, “I’ve investigated people who thought they could do magic.” Another truth—the false-alarm file existed for a reason—but the bigger truth left unsaid. “It’s Miami. When you live in an exotic city, your rumors have to be more exotic still. Did you hear the one that said I killed vampires? That one’s my favorite. Me and Buffy, saving the world.”

  The woman shook her head, pale hair barely moving. No patience at all. “You have a plan?”

  “Why keep a single minnow when you can use it as baitfish? I know one of the players; I’ll link her to others and net them all at once.” Sounded good to her, and by the relaxing of Conrad’s shoulders, good to her also.

  “Time frame?”

  “Soon,” Sylvie said. “Best for all concerned. Oh, and ask your jeweler friend what his policy is on rewards.”

  “We’re paying you already—”

  “His art deco greyhound got picked up by a bystander. She said she got rid of it. I’m not so sure. We can probably get her to cough it up with a little bit of cash. She doesn’t know the actual value.”

  “It’s stolen property. The police can retrieve it.”

  “The police get involved, she’ll claim total ignorance, and he might lose the brooch forever, piss off the customer waiting for it. Just have him call me.”

  A few back-and-forth comments later, Sylvie ushered Conrad down the stairs and out the door. She handed Alex another check with a smile. “For expenses. Cash it.”

  “And Wright’s check? I haven’t cashed it yet. I could send it and him on to someone else. I still think Val—” Alex said it all on one long breath, half-apologetic, half-challenging.

  “Last time I tell you,” Sylvie said. “My case. I’ll help him.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Wright said, closing the front door behind him. “So’s the ghost.” She jerked in surprise. She hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t expected him back so soon. Noon at the shrimp shack was a madhouse, which was exactly why she had sent him there. To get breathing space.

  He handed her a white paper bag, hot and grease-spotted, and said, “The one place had lines down to the beach.” He smiled with the smug awareness that he had confounded her plan. “I got us conch fritters instead. I don’t know what a conch fritter is, but it’s fried, and people looked happy to be buying them.”

  “Good choice,” Alex said, when the silence threatened to linger. Her smile, a little tight, flashed and faded. She pushed Wright gently toward the kitchenette, her fingertips on his shoulder, and said, “You’ll love ’em. You like spice? There’s habañero sauce in the fridglet.”

  And that was Alex in full protective mode, Sylvie thought. Still scared of Wright’s ghost, but she’d put herself between him and the woman with the gun. Not sensible. The kind of thing that could get her killed, and definitely a sign that Alex was going to be . . . difficult about accepting Demalion’s return.

  Wright cast a worried glance at Sylvie, cop enough to distrust Alex’s change of heart and man enough to want to believe her earlier chilliness was just a mood.

  Fumbling for something, anything, to ease the tension in the office, Sylvie noticed that the bell was quieter than it had been before, a mute reproach instead of a warning wail. Sylvie said, “What’d you do with the trash can, Alex?”

  “Coat closet,” she said. “Under all those old ’Canes sweat-shirts of yours. It’s all right.”

  “You’re assuming it is,” Sylvie said.

  “I’m not the only one with assumptions,” Alex said.

  “Later for that,” Sylvie said. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to explain Demalion to him, the possibility that Wright had been hijacked just to get Demalion to Sylvie. Here Wright was thinking she was the answer to his problems when she was likely the cause of them. No, she and Alex couldn’t get into that debate now, not with Wright as an audience.

  Sylvie applied herself to lunch, evicting Alex from her desk. Wright took the couch, Sylvie the hot sauce, and Alex shuttled between them both, chatting with her mouth fu
ll, ramping up on a capsaicin high, asking Wright increasingly pointed questions about his ghost. “So you don’t have a name, or anything tangible. What do you have? Something he remembers?”

  Wright set down his sandwich remnants, scrubbed his hands on his jeans, and lowered his gaze. Sylvie tensed. She’d begun to learn Wright’s tells, and focusing on his jeans meant something unhappy and hurting.

  “The sky rained blood,” he said.

  Alex swallowed and shut up. Sylvie shivered, her mouth dry. Before Alex could get her nerve back, Sylvie sent Wright for sodas, ignoring his protest of not being her caterer as utterly insincere: Even as he made it, he was rising, ready to escape Alex’s interrogation.

  The moment he was out the door, Sylvie turned on Alex, raced her into speech. “If you can’t control yourself, I will send you away for the duration of this case.”

  “Control myself?”

  “Not talking about this now. Wright’ll be back, and I need to talk to you about the burglaries.”

  “You sent him away, again, for that?”

  “Are you listening?” Sylvie said. When she got an irritated huff, and Alex frowning in silence, she filled her in on Bella’s bad dreams, on the Hand of Glory. Attention diverted, and after a disgusted glance at the closed closet door, the Hand behind it, Alex said, “You think she’s been dreaming about the crime?”

  “Looks like.”

  “You want me to see if I can find out where the Hand came from? Maybe knowing where will give us some idea of who, if this is something out-of-state, or local?”

  “It’s a waste of . . .” Sylvie started to say, but then paused. Usually, Hands of Glory were old, but Bella’s dream was modern. A woman poolside, with a scoop net. “No, tell you what. Go ahead. An old woman who drowned a toddler.” Modern media would be all over that story. Infant murders were popular with the press.