Ghost Talker (15 page)

Rickman led the way to the main corridor and went left, wended through another couple of hallways. Finally he stopped at a nondescript door and blocked Zach's view of the numeric keypad he used to open the door. The action irritated Zach a little.
He
was the ex-cop here. He could be trusted. He'd bet his substantial disability pension that Rickman and his special-ops guys had broken into more than one vault.

So he stopped just within arm's reach of the man and offered him the bag by its handles, smiling. “Go ahead and stow it. I'll let you know when we need it back.”

Obviously Rickman didn't like the idea that he'd have to retrieve the thing. They stood a solid minute staring at each other. “You're new to my company and still in your probationary period.”

“Yep.”

“Christ.” Running a hand through his hair, Rickman took the bag and slid silently into the vault. The hallway immediately felt better to Zach. Still had a faint smell of machines and a trace of gym, but felt fine.

When Rickman came back, Zach noted the slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. Interesting that the portrait had physically affected Rickman. Before the door slid shut, Zach began walking to the gym.

Rickman caught up with him easily, of course.

They were back at the elevator bay before Zach said, “Psychometry, the ability to learn facts about an object, or the people who owned the item, by sensing vibrations or whatever from the object. You could be useful.”

“That's what the government thought, though my commanding officers never referred to any little skill I might have.” Teeth clenched and jaw angled up, Rickman stared straight ahead and not at Zach. He took a couple of paces toward the door to the parking garage.

A while back Zach had realized his old tribe of police officers only welcomed him as one who'd lost the good fight, but that he could make a new place for himself in Rickman's small tribe of operatives. An honored place, since he had more investigative skills and training than all of the others put together. He hesitated, but if he wanted that tribe, he had to act, and now.

So much for a workout; talking with Rickman was more important. So Zach went to the glass doors of the garage where the man stood. “I don't think I've told you about the crows,” he said.

Rickman stopped, pivoted to face him.

Zach continued. “I don't think your wife, Desiree, knows about the crows either. I don't believe Clare would have told her.”

Rickman jerked his head at the camera mounted near the ceiling, one that might also be recording the conversation—Zach didn't know. And he didn't know if it was Rickman's camera or the building's. “Let's talk about this outside,” Zach's
boss said.

“Sure.” Zach tried his best to amble casually, but all walking, strides, and foot movement had to be relearned or shown more in the attitude of his body than locomotion.

Stopping beside the passenger side of Zach's truck, Rickman waited for him. Zach unlocked the doors and they both swung in. He glanced at the shadows and realized no garage camera would be able to read their lips.

“What crows?” Rickman pressed.

Zach thrummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Not looking at his boss, he said, “I have a touch of the sight.”

A few heartbeats of silence, Rickman cleared his throat. “What kind of sight?”

“Foresight. I can sometimes get . . . omens.”

Rickman sucked spit through his teeth in a commiserating sound. After another thirty seconds or so of quiet, the man said, “That might explain a few instances of luck for you lately.”

Zach grunted, then said, “Yes.”

“Crows?” Rickman queried.

“My Scots grandmother taught me an old, old rhyme.” Him and his brother, but he wasn't going to speak to Rickman about Jim. And Zach sure wasn't going to reveal that his childhood “gift” of being able to locate loved ones had died when Jim had. Zach's foresight was relatively new—since he'd been shot during that stupid mistake he'd made. “It's a crow-counting rhyme, you know, for how many crows you see:
one for sorrow, two for luck
, like that.”

Angling his head, Rickman said, “How does that work?” He paused, and what he said next was not quite an order. “Exactly?”

Now Zach stared straight ahead at the uninspiring concrete pillars of the garage. “I see crows. If I see, say, three . . .
three for a wedding
 . . . I know something like that's upcoming.” Then he mumbled, “
Four for death.
”

Rickman pounced. “Four for death. You've seen that and it's come true.”

Zach's fingers tightened and released around the steering wheel. He didn't remember gripping it. “Oh, yeah. I saw them. Death happened. Mostly last week.”

“Tough,” Rickman said.

“Yeah.”

“That it?”

Zach cleared his throat. “Apparently it's only me who can see the crows. Clare's been with me sometimes and I've, uh, tried to point them out, and she doesn't see them.”

Only their breathing broke the quiet.

“You're my kind of man, Zach,” Rickman said. His phone rang, a romantic, lilting song Zach would never have thought Rickman would like. He glanced at Zach, raising his brows as if asking whether he should answer.

Zach shrugged.

Rickman opened the call, and immediately the high voice of Desiree Rickman came, speaking rapidly.

Zach heard, “Clare's here, bring Zach and come,” and his whole body tightened in alarm.

“Where?” Zach asked.

“The Denver Parapsychological and Psychic Association's meeting. Maurice Poche is there. With a TV crew.”

*   *   *

Mr. Welliam drove them to a large, square one-story brick building that had once been a warehouse in lower downtown Denver. The place itself was well lit, along with an attached parking lot. Unlike at Lookout Mountain, few stars could be seen even though the moon had set.

The couple rushed Clare in, past a woman with a clipboard asking for signatures, and Clare already stood by the puny refreshments table of store-bought cookies and lemonade before she realized that the main cluster of people surrounded Maurice Poche.

And a couple of cameramen she recognized filmed the room, too. They wore the bright fuchsia T-shirt of the television channel. So that had been a waiver? Perhaps, and Clare was glad she hadn't signed.

“You never know what will happen here,” Mr. Welliam burbled, and Clare bit her lip to keep from alienating the cheerful man and client.
She'd
made the poor decision to come, so now she'd have to deal with the consequences of her own actions.

What she did notice was that Maurice Poche's eyes narrowed as one of his most wealthy clients—perhaps the client Maurice had soaked for the most money—Kurtus Welliam—stayed beside Mrs. Barbara Flinton. A woman who could probably buy and sell everyone in the room. A woman who looked at him with slightly flared nostrils and lifted lip, indicating disdain.

Those two proceeded regally, meeting and greeting others drawn to their charm, toward where Clare stood.

The charlatan sent her a probing, scathing look and she understood he'd decided that she had filched his best client from him. Oh, yes, he seethed with fury.

An awful feeling enveloped Clare. The situation of the poltergeist on Lookout Mountain messing with Buffalo Bill's grave had been a golden opportunity for Maurice Poche to further gild an already golden career as Denver's premier psychic. And as he'd poised to strike at the right time for the best publicity, an impatient Mr. Welliam had rushed into action. Then came the advent of Clare onto the scene, along with Zach Slade and the Denver Police Department presence of Officer Janice Schultz. Now Poche's career, his very persona, was threatened.

He understood this, and that realization burst upon Clare.

The doors closed behind the last stragglers to the meeting, and Maurice Poche went on the attack. Surging toward her, moving faster than Mrs. Flinton on her walker, and Mr. Welliam, his hand in the crook of Mrs. Flinton's elbow, Poche stopped a pace in front of Clare and announced loudly, “If it isn't the fake medium, using her great-aunt's reputation to social climb and pretend to talents she doesn't have.”

Clare's mouth dropped open and she snapped it shut.

Everyone turned to stare at her, eyes harsh or weighing or avid. Barbara Flinton and Kurtus Welliam stopped in place.

Several people around her faded back, leaving her facing the large man, an adversary challenging her.

She flushed with heated humiliation and time seemed to freeze as her mind whizzed through options.

She could ignore the man, stalk out. This area of town was busy enough that she could walk to the light rail, a bus stop, a cab stand. Or call and wait for a car service. Or request Barbara and Mr. Welliam take her home, to hide. But she didn't want to wait, to stand here and suffer embarrassment. She wanted to leave, or to act.

The door flew open and it looked like slow motion. So did Desiree Rickman moving through it straight toward Clare, holding a cell phone, and Clare just knew she'd called her husband or Zach, or both.

Clare didn't need Desiree to defend her. Or Tony Rickman to bodyguard her. Or Zach to protect her. She could take care of everything on her own. So this wasn't the career she wanted, the way she wished to reveal her historic ghost communication and transitioning business. All those considerations were moot.

She hadn't been a coward in her previous accounting career. She'd been honorable and kept her word, both personally and professionally. That couldn't be allowed to change.

So she took a discreet, deep breath before she spoke. How ironic, forced to publicly defend a psychic gift that all she'd wanted to do was to keep private.

“I am not a false medium.” Her words fell into a thick silence. “I am a ghost seer and communicator—”

“My partner,” wailed a woman, tears in her voice, weaving toward them. “Can you tell me of my partner? Poche has given me no relief. He didn't even know George was female.”

Poche flinched.

Turning toward the woman, Clare held out her hands, grasped the woman's cold ones. “I'm sorry, I can't. My gift doesn't work that way.” And how had Great-Aunt Sandra's? Clare thought of the all-too-true words Barbara Flinton had engraved on her cards. “I can only communicate with ghosts of the Old West.”

“So she says.” More sneering from Poche, who also showed heightened color. “And what good is
that
?”

Clare stood straight, squeezed the openly weeping woman's hands. “I'm sorry.”

“You
aren't
very useful, are you?” some other woman in the crowd asked.

“I never claimed to be a medium. In fact, I have never had any clients nor charged any fee to communicate with spirits recently dead.”

“Dennis Laurentine, the billionaire, paid you a substantial sum.” Poche's hard voice cut through the room now buzzing with talk, small groups turning to one another, discussing, judging. Three other women and a man led away the grief-stricken lady who'd beseeched Clare for help.

“Dennis Laurentine is a public figure,” Clare said, and he wasn't a billionaire but a multimillionaire, a distinction only she seemed to think mattered. “Who has Dennis Laurentine lost recently who's been in the news? But he
does
have a ghost town on his ranch in South Park and paid me to help the ghost of a prospector cross over.”

“Lies.” Poche opened his hands, shrugged his shoulders, his slick manner once again enveloping. “She's nothing but a lying fake. Ms. Cermak made representations to
me
about her prowess as a medium. False representations.” Poche shook his head, his face set in sorrowful lines, though his gaze meeting Clare's own seemed as cold and pitiless as a shark's. “I'm afraid I cannot recommend you and I would have given you the benefit of professional courtesy had you not come here to drum up business. I cannot allow you to deceive others with your fraudulent claims,” he ended piously.

Then Mrs. Flinton, flanked by Kurtus Welliam and Desiree Rickman, marched up to Clare with her walker, gaze intent.

Clare nodded to her. “Mrs. Flinton.”

The older woman lifted her hands from her walker and pushed Clare hard.

Clare swayed off balance . . . and into the freezing body of a woman, a specter from Clare's time period. She gasped, felt her lungs crisping with ice, her blood and heart slowing. She caught herself, stepped away from the woman, and turned to face her.

From her dress—or the lack of clothes—Clare deduced the woman had been a soiled dove, a woman who had to sell her body for money.

“So, Clare, dear,” Barbara Flinton said gently, “tell us about the spirit you see.”

“A lady—” Clare began.

“Lady?” Poche snorted.

“I have respect for women,” Clare said. “A lady who worked as a soiled dove.”

“A whore.” Poche's lip curled. Some of his female coterie withdrew a step or two from him, observing him more coolly. “Cermak's heard the story, is all.” He made a cutting gesture.

“No, she hasn't.” Mrs. Flinton smiled. “I have, but Clare is new to her gift, as I know, since she's only been my protégée for a month.”

“Twenty-six days,” Clare corrected.

Poche's eyes flashed fury, then cooled. “Lies.”

I was a lady
, the specter said in a soft voice with a southern accent.
My name is Evie Harve and I ran a bordello once at this location.
Her smile appeared distant and sad.
I specialized in young Chinese girls and one of them cursed me.

“Evie Harve had a bordello here,” Clare said. Quiet spread. “She says one of her Chinese girls cursed her.”

I cannot go on until a waning gibbous moon does not rise during the day and hides its face in the night. This must occur in the Chinese year of the sheep
. Her smile warmed and gave her face a hint of beauty, and her fog-like gray eyes trickled silver tears down her face.
You have come to help me leave this hideous flat existence.

“Prove you speak to the whore,” Poche said.

Clare met his eyes, met the stares of others. “I am who I am, and I do what I do. Accept me and my gift or not.”

“You can afford to say that; you're rich.”

“I inherited my great-aunt's gift and the fortune she made from her own mediumship. I don't charge.”

“My husband, Tony Rickman, has hired Clare on as a consultant,” Desiree stated. “He believes in her, and so do I, and Barbara Flinton, and”—Desiree sent a gorgeous smile to Mr. Welliam—“
your
erstwhile client, Mr. Kurtus Welliam.”

But the woman in the thin gown with the sheen of satin spoke at the same time and Clare paid attention to her.
I have a scar.
She held up her right palm that showed a long dark vertical line.
And I hid my golden locket before I died.
She paused, sighed.
I remember being angry and sad and vindictive and resentful, but I have drifted in this gray nothingness and no emotions come to me now, bad or good.
She moved to Clare and took her hand, and the world colored to the browns and blacks and beiges of sepia around her. She walked with Evie, noting the woman's rotating hip stroll, through a doorway in a wall no longer present. Nor was the warehouse. Instead a house longer than wide occupied the space.

Evie sashayed to a wall, once a corner but now the middle of the warehouse. There she drew away from Clare, counted from the bottom and over several bricks. Tapped a brick.
Tell those who doubt you that I hid the locket here, and it remains here.
Clare did, and told them about the scar.

Mr. Welliam and Desiree Rickman went to work on the wall, along with others. Evie turned to Clare, held out her hands, her body bowed with weeping.

Help me. Help me move on. I no longer fear the judgment I may face as long as I can escape this gray existence!

“Of course,” Clare said, and sucked in a breath, took Evie's hands, and stepped into her. Memories of the woman's life flashed through her, and since Clare initiated the contact, she suffered the worst cold, moving from her fingers along her arms. She needed to help Evie before the frigidity encased Clare's heart and froze it.