“Of course someone has been here ahead of us. The crime scene people didn’t leave here until late today. So there would have been people around the house all day long.”
Shaw had just spent two days cleaning up the mess at Laurel Heights, and the job wasn’t over. It was tricky explaining a cause of death that had supernatural elements. He’d done what he had to do, but it hadn’t left the officer of the law part of him feeling very good.
A man had fallen to his death from the second floor balcony of Laurel Heights and landed across the front room. The trajectory hadn’t made sense. From the position of the body and the debris on the balcony, it appeared the railing had been broken before the man went over the side. The broken pieces lay scattered on the balcony floor rather than the living room floor.
There was no way to explain the man’s position except that something beyond the natural realm had pulled him off the balcony and tossed him across the room. An incredibly strong force. One that could only be explained in supernatural terms.
After what had happened in Little Rock on the Lipton case, Shaw didn’t want any hint leaked to the public of even the remote possibility that something beyond the normal realm might have been involved. Never again. In fact, he had become the state’s expert on covering up paranormal events for law enforcement. An underground network of in-the-know cops passed his name along to whoever needed a little extra help. Those incidents didn’t happen very often, but they occurred more often than he would have ever suspected.
Shaw eased the door all the way open. The kitchen appeared silent and empty, but he placed his hand on his service weapon anyway and moved a few paces into the room.
“A little paranoid, aren’t you, Bennett?” Josh’s loud, sarcastic voice made him flinch, but he managed not to show it too much. He turned around and faced Josh. The man stood in the open doorway with a smug look on his face.
“Just being cautious.” He pulled his flashlight from his pocket and flashed the beam across Josh’s face. Josh put his hand over his eyes, pushed past him, and shoved open the swinging door that led into the front room.
“There’s no one here. What you’re feeling is probably electromagnetic energy.”
Shaw grinned at Josh’s back and shook his head. The guy was being a cocky jerk.
“I don’t get the heebie jeebies like some people do.”
Josh glanced around the room before commenting again. “Gray gets them. He says he can tell when a house is haunted just by the vibe it gives off.”
Grayson and McCord had an interesting working dynamic.
“You two have known each other all your lives, haven’t you?”
Josh’s good humor vanished. “Yeah. Forever.”
“But something happened. You aren’t friends anymore.”
Josh placed his hands on his hips and turned his face away. “Yeah, well, things happen. People grow up and move on.”
Shaw smiled to himself. Some people never grew up. Josh should have known better than to mess with Gray’s wife. A tight friendship with Caroline might not have technically been adultery, but to someone that didn’t know either of them very well, it certainly might have looked like Josh and Caroline were having an affair.
“Let’s get started.” Shaw nodded toward the stairs and began climbing.
The thud of Josh’s shoes pounded the stairs behind him. Neither of them was trying too hard to be quiet and Shaw wondered if that was a mistake.
When he reached the upstairs hall, Josh walked all the way to the far bedroom and leaned his ear against the door.
“What are you doing?”
“If someone is in there, I want to know before I go in. I’ve been conked on the head one too many times.”
“The activity happened in here.” Shaw pointed toward the master bedroom across the landing from the stairs.
Josh grinned and headed up the hall toward him.
When Shaw reached Laurel’s bedroom door, he opened it slowly, and peeked inside before entering. The room appeared as if Laurel Standridge had just left it. Drawers pulled out. Bedcovers thrown back. Hangers on the floor.
Near the bed had lain a package addressed to Laurel from a cop in San Diego. The same cop who had arrested Laurel’s ex-boyfriend for murder. Shaw had requested that Dickerson enter the envelope into evidence. Nothing remained inside the parcel, but for some reason Shaw believed the package was significant.
He pointed toward the far wall. “That’s the closet.”
“So what happened that made you think it’s a vortex of activity?”
“Dickerson would leave the room and all the evidence markers he’d placed would be clumped up together next to the open closet door. He swears he shut the door every time and every time he’d come back it would be open. He had a conniption fit, claimed that someone was pranking him. I told him he better stop messing around or he’d compromise the chain of evidence.”
Josh moved closer to the closet. “Dickerson? The one that came out to Victoria House with you?”
Shaw nodded and waited for Josh to express his opinion of Matt Dickerson.
“Kind of wound up tight, isn’t he?”
“That’s one way to describe him.”
“He doesn’t believe in ghosts, does he?”
Shaw laughed. “Nope. But he might before he gets finished with these two cases.”
He recalled the irritated expression on the man’s face when Shaw picked him up on the way out of Little Rock to go out to Victoria House.
“He’s the best crime scene investigator that I’ve ever worked with, but he can be prickly.”
Josh stood in the middle of the bedroom with his hands on his hips as if bracing for whatever might come their way. “So how do you want to do this? You wanna provoke?”
“Sure. I brought a digital recorder.”
A chill ran up and down his spine. “Do you feel that? The temperature dropped.”
A loud screech shattered the unnatural quiet, and then a crash rattled the wood floor beneath their feet. Shaw’s hand automatically went for his service weapon. “What was that?”
“Sounded like it came from down the hallway.”
“Whatever it was, it rattled the whole house.”
Josh took a position on one side of the open doorway and Shaw passed through the door, gun first. Josh quickly exited the room and flattened himself against the wall on the other side of the door from Shaw. Something crashed on the first floor. A door banged shut. Shaw swung his aim toward the far end of the upstairs hall and then flashed the beam of his light toward the front stairs.
“There’s no one here.”
A loud crash and bang resounded from Laurel’s bedroom behind them.
Shaw swung around to face a potential threat. Through the still open door, Shaw could see the room was just as it had been before they left it.
“This house makes a lot of noise.” Josh’s voice seemed louder than usual. His usual baritone had raised an octave.
“From what Grayson told me, it always has. At least, as long as Laurel Standridge has lived here.”
“You don’t suppose there was damage to the house when the meth lab blew? Maybe the house is settling and causing the noise.”
“I had it checked out before I let anyone come in here. There was damage, but the structural integrity is still intact. I guess the explosion could have caused things to shift, but that doesn’t sound like settling noises to me.”
Shaw reentered Laurel’s bedroom while Josh remained in the hall. The closet door was closed just as it had been when he first went inside the room. Shaw opened it and then left. When he slid down the wall in the hallway, Josh did the same.
“How long should we wait?”
Shaw flicked the beam of light on his wristwatch. “As active as this place seems to be, only a few minutes.”
They waited for what seemed like an interminably long time before Shaw decided the wait was wasted. Nothing was going to disturb the door. He pushed off the wall a
nd rose to his feet. “I guess we’re not gonna get any cooperation tonight.”
Josh got to his feet, then placed his hands on each side of the doorframe, and stared into Laurel’s bedroom. “The door’s closed. I didn’t hear it shut. How could it close without making a sound? That is…creepy. I want to see what’s in that closet.”
Shaw chuckled. “Then what are you waiting for?”
“Last time I went into a building with this much activity, the door jammed and I couldn’t get it open. I was on the outside of the garage, and Gray was stuck on the inside.”
Oh, yeah, Grayson had told him about their experience in the garage. The garage had since collapsed, and Shaw had to wonder how much of the damage was from the explosion and how much of it was from the increased paranormal activity the day of the blast.
“How did you get the door open?”
Josh rubbed his hands down the sides of his pants. “We didn’t. I found a shovel near the garage and used it to pry some boards loose from the side of the wall. We might not have gotten him out otherwise.”
The memory of the experience must have been rough to recall because Josh shuddered once, squared his shoulders, and then entered the room. Shaw was right behind him. The room was quiet. Eerily quiet. The symphony of noise had ceased. An unnatural heaviness hung in the atmosphere.
When Josh was halfway across the bedroom, the closet door swung open. Both of them halted in their tracks as if their feet had landed in quick dry cement. Shaw’s pulse raced. Next to him, Josh’s breath came out of him in ragged bursts.
“So…are we gonna move closer?” Josh’s voice wavered.
Shaw swallowed hard. “Okay, just another step or two.”
They advanced toward the closet.
The door slammed shut.
Josh threw up his hands. “Okay, that’s it. Whoever you are, stop playing games with us. You have our attention. Do you want us to see what’s in the closet or not?”
The door flew open and banged against the wall.
Josh turned and rushed toward the hallway.
“You’re not running away, are you?” Shaw didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t want to be left alone in the room. He wasn’t about to investigate that alone.
Josh swung around and faced him, an almost maniacal glint in his eyes. “I’m going to find a hammer and a screwdriver, and I’m going to take the blasted door off its hinges before I go into that closet.” He continued his mad exit out Laurel’s bedroom door. “Doors have a way of sticking in houses that are haunted.”
Josh was almost to the top of the stairs before Shaw exited the bedroom.
“Wait, I’m going with you.”
Josh stopped and spoke over his shoulder. “If we do this, you gotta promise me you aren’t going to run away screaming like a little girl if things get dicey, because in my experience with this place, things get really dicey.”
“I can’t promise anything.”
Josh turned and studied him a moment. “Fair enough. I can’t promise that I won’t run either. Gray and I…we ran when things got crazy in the garage.”
Here they were. Two big, brave law enforcements types and they were acting like frightened kids. Shaw shook his head in disbelief. You’d think neither of them had ever investigated a haunting before.
Shaw shoved Josh’s shoulder. “Keep moving. We need to do this before whatever that is leaves.”
Gray had told Shaw his version of the garage incident, but he wanted to hear Josh’s side of the tale. He’d have to ask Josh to tell him the story later. Right now, he wanted to get this piece of his investigation over with.
Before he could catch his breath, they had located a hammer and chisel, and gone back upstairs. Shaw leaned with his back against the closet door…as if that would keep a powerful entity from shoving him out of the way. Josh was pounding on the bolts that held the door hinges together. He pulled first one and then another out. When the third one came loose, Josh fell backward onto his butt.
Josh glared at Shaw. “Don’t laugh.”
Shaw shook his head. “Wouldn’t dare.”
He turned and opened the door, and then pulled it from its hinges. The walk-in closet wasn’t huge, but it was big enough for one person to go inside and check things out.
“Uh…you wanna search the closet?”
“No, you do it. This was your idea.”
Shaw hesitated to enter the closet. “Clark told me she’d taken most of her things.”
“Clark?”
“Another investigator in my unit.”
“You’re stalling.”
To his surprise, Josh started making chicken clucking noises.
“Really? Are you gonna act like a third grader?”
Josh grinned. “Are you going in there or not?”
Shaw squared his shoulders. “All right. I’m going in.” He stepped across the threshold, and nothing happened. “Just looks like an ordinary closet to me.” He flashed light around all the corners, angled the beam toward the ceiling, and searched every cranny of the small room for anything unusual. “Maybe there’s a secret panel or something.”
“Having a Scooby-Doo moment, Shaw?”
“Shut up.”
He pounded the cedar paneling with his fist. He was about to give up when his pounding revealed a hollow place in the wall. When he pressed along the edges of the wood panel, a spring lever popped and the door of a compartment swung open. Josh sucked in a breath behind him. Shaw turned the flashlight onto the interior of the cubbyhole. Inside was a book.
“Looks like some sort of journal or diary.”
He reached for it and a sharp slap knocked the book from his hand and flung it out the closet door past Josh. A flush of fresh adrenaline coursed through Shaw. The urge to run almost got to him.
“Son of a mother… What the hell?”
Josh bent to pick up the book and fell face forward before he could even touch it. His nose hit the hardwood with a crack. The book went skidding across the floor. When he regained his feet, he pressed his fingers to his nose. He lowered his hand and stared at his blood. “It’s bad enough when I get beat up by humans…”
A cold wind rushed through the room, reducing the temperature by at least twenty degrees. Shaw began to shake. When he glanced toward Josh, his lips had turned blue. Both of them backed away from the closet, putting some distance between them and the book, staring at it lying in the middle of the bedroom floor.
Josh pushed his hands into the cold current blowing toward them and around them. “Okay, we get it. You don’t want us to read the book,” he said through chattering teeth. “Then why did you show us where to find it?”
Inspiration hit Shaw hard. “Is there someone else who can read the book for us?”
A whisper in his soul. Just a hint of a voice tapping into his nervous system. Not audible. Almost visceral.
Laurel, my baby.
Chapter Seven
The next morning, Josh’s head hurt almost as bad as if he had a hangover. He’d made it to the office just in time for his shift to start, slipping through the back door at the last possible moment. If he got lucky, he’d be able to sneak past Halsey and hide for a while.
When he passed through the door of his lab and finally made it to his desk, he let loose a breath of utter relief. He hadn’t met anyone in the hall, so he hadn’t had to endure the inevitable awkward stares and nosey questions from his co-workers. By now, the whole Sheriff’s Department probably knew about Lucy’s death. Probably didn’t know the details, because Halsey wouldn’t want anyone to know what really happened. Josh would like to assume they were all well meaning in their curiosity, but he knew every one of them better than that.
The whole office was a nest of gossiping vipers, and they were probably all stirred up now that one of their own was gone from among them. Lucy might have been the worst gossip of all. Since he’d had a little time to think about her and what she’d done, he realized that her gossip fests were probably inform
ation-mining expeditions for Cooley. Somehow the man always knew when law enforcement was about to raid one of his meth labs. Abandoned meth labs littered the hills of north Arkansas and every one of them had Cooley’s stamp on them.
To Josh’s dismay or maybe his delight, maybe a nice mix of both emotions, his mess was just were he’d left it. He shuffled through some files on his desk, intending to get caught up on what had happened while he was on leave.
“McCord, it’s about time you showed up.” Halsey’s strident voice booming from the doorway of the lab sent shock waves of stabbing pain through Josh’s head.
He turned in a slow arc to face his boss, something he’d been more than willing to put off for a few days. Even a few hours would have been nice.
“You look like hell.”
“That’s what they all say,” Josh muttered and turned his attention back to the stack of paperwork that had accumulated on his desk.
“What did you do last night? Did you get—”
Josh jerked his head up and the swift action caused another jab of pain to erupt in his forehead. “No, I did not get drunk last night. I haven’t had a drink in six…seven days.”
He paused just long enough to settle the anger that was surging in him. He might as well get the inevitable over with. Halsey was about to lay down some conditions for Josh. Maybe he’d just beat the old man to it.
“You don’t have to say it. I’m going back to AA.”
Halsey grunted and placed his hands on his hips. Spread his feet apart in the typical cop stance. “Well, we’ll see how much good that does you. We’re gonna have to talk about the conditions of your reinstatement, but for right now, you have a crime scene to work. Are you ready to get back on the job?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Halsey’s eyes flashed with irritation. “That attitude isn’t helping you much.”
And Halsey’s wasn’t helping him much.
“You mentioned a crime scene…”
“A hiker found a body near Ashley Ridge. Epps is pretty sure she’s Cherish Duncan.”
Okay, Halsey had his undivided attention.
“Cherish Duncan? How long has she been missing?”
Ashley Ridge (Haunted Hearts Series Book 3) Page 8