The Accused and the Damned: Book Three, the Eddie McCloskey Series (The Unearthed 3) (11 page)

But nobody answered.

Eddie consulted the K-II meter. The first light was on, while the second blinked erratically. Nothing to write home about.

There was a rulebook for paranormal investigation. Tim, his brother, had followed it to the letter. Protocol demanded that Eddie be polite, respectful, ask harmless questions, establish a rapport.

But he wasn’t looking to make a friend. He was looking to evoke a noticeable, measurable response.

“Did you kill Alice Ketcher?”

“Mr. McCloskey,” Gracie said, “this is outra—”

The K-II meter lit up like a Christmas tree. Eddie held it out for everybody to see. Changes in local EMFs weren’t proof-positive of anything, but it was a start.

Eddie held the K-II out in front of him. “Can you make this meter light up?”

He waited, but the meter held steady at one light.

This wasn’t an exact science. Ghosts were notoriously inconsistent in their behavior. The spike on the K-II might have been a fluke. There was no guarantee the ghost could influence the meter.

The reading didn’t change. But the hairs on the back of Eddie’s neck stuck out like needles on a cactus. The air around him shifted.

He read the other faces in the room and registered that some had experienced the same sensation.

“Who else felt that?”

Green was quick to raise his hand, but nobody else did.

Gracie’s question came a second too late to be totally convincing. “Feel what?”

Eddie ignored them. The hostile crowd wasn’t going to admit to anything. He needed more objective evidence than a funny feeling on the neck and one flash from the K-II.

“Did you kill Alice Ketcher?”

A chill went down Eddie’s spine, but the K-II didn’t change.

“Did you KILL Alice Ketcher?”

There was no response.

“Eddie, I thought you had an approach more…professional in mind.”

Eddie pushed through the crowd and went to the living room. The couch was still positioned at an awkward angle, the TV missing from the entertainment center, the glass of the sliding door spider-webbed halfway between the handle and the floor.

“I know you’re here. I just felt you. Try to make this meter move.”

Eddie held out the K-II as the group flowed into the room behind him.

“You must have had your reasons,” Eddie said. “I just want to understand why you did it.”

No response.

“Talk to me. I want to understand.”

Eddie had only been working the scene for a few minutes but already he had that sinking feeling. Sometimes you knew right away when you weren’t going to get anything. He’d been on dozens of jobs where nothing had happened and all of them had felt like this. At best you got that itchy feeling that somebody was watching you or your camera might catch a stray orb but at the end of the day all you were left holding was your dick.

Next to him, Green glanced at Eddie. The DA and the detective did too. Gracie was eyeing him up and her team shot him challenging, skeptical looks.

Then the air shifted. Eddie’s skin tingled. He sensed motion, something riding the stagnant air of the Ketcher house.

He followed it to Alice’s studio. The final locus of the crime, hypothetically the most charged room in the house. It was possible that Alice herself was here. It was also most likely that the other ghost, whoever it was, was hovering in a tight radius around this emotionally charged spot. He’d been saving this room for last because he’d been hoping he wouldn’t need it.

The studio felt different. Eddie scanned the room but didn’t see anything. The easel was still on its side. The drop cloth in the middle of the floor was stained merlot with Alice’s blood.

Eddie walked to the end table next to the easel, where Alice had kept art supplies. He stood the digital recorder on the table and walked away from it.

“This is Eddie McCloskey. We’re all in the studio now—”

There was a commotion behind him. He turned and the crowd parted and the DA and Ross stepped away from the wall like it was a dangerous, violent thing.

Fresh, red brush strokes marked the wall. Drip lines dotted the space on the wall under where the paint had been applied.

Gracie tore her eyes away from the wall and whipped her head around. “When did you do this?”

Her voice full of accusation.

Eddie didn’t even look at her. “If it’s a fraud, it’s your people. I’ve had eyes on me since I set foot inside.”

Together, they walked toward the wall. The paint was a messy scrawl approaching handwriting, but it was as unintelligible as a doctor’s note. Eddie and Gracie stopped a foot shy of the wall. He stooped a little and she got on her tiptoes.

“Get your cameras on this,” Eddie said.

Gracie suddenly remembered she was there to debunk him. She snapped her fingers and her team got set up. Green, the DA, and Ross had their phones out and were snapping pictures.

“It says something,” Eddie said.

“It doesn’t say anything,” Gracie said, though her eyes were riveted to the paint. “Your mind is making connections that aren’t there. It’s a psycholo—”

“I know what the hell it is.” He pointed to the middle of the paint. “But that looks like an S.”

Gracie opened her mouth to protest but the words died in her throat. Eddie allowed himself a moment of joy. She was left speechless because he was right.

Somebody—
something
—had tried to leave them a message.

“It must have been someone on…” Gracie’s voice faded into nothing.

Eddie filled in the blank for her. “Someone on your team? I ordered everybody out of here…” Eddie checked the time on his watch. “…an hour ago. This is fresh paint.”

The red paint continued to drip and slide down the wall. Eddie searched the ground for a recently used brush but saw none.

Gracie gathered her wits. “That’s not an S. It could be anything and…” She examined it more closely. “…and it looks like it’s the joining of more than one line. Nobody uses more than one stroke to write an S.”

Eddie said, “Didn’t know you were a handwriting expert too, Gracie.”

She muttered something under her breath.

Eddie smiled at her. He had something and it was a hell of a lot more than nothing. The first seed of reasonable doubt for the jury.

Eddie turned to Gracie’s crew. The tallest one had a digital camera trained on the wall.

Eddie winked at the guy. “Make sure you get this, kid.”

Then Gracie screamed and nearly fell backward but Eddie grabbed her arm. When he turned back to the wall, he jumped too.

Letters began to appear in the wet, red paint as if someone were tracing their finger through it.

Eddie moved out of the way. “Tighten up with the cameras!”

The rest of the group closed, albeit tentatively. They were all intrigued and unnerved. Eddie himself had never seen anything like this except in the late night crap horrorfest movies.

Five letters formed on the wall.

itwas

Eddie perked up. Was he going to get a confession?

“Did you kill Alice Ketcher?”

“Hold on. You don’t even know what this writing is in reference to,” Gracie said. “You’re charging the communication.”

Strictly speaking she was right. But he had asked about the murder in the other room, a few minutes ago. It was the only question he’d asked several times. And if this was the intelligent haunting that Anson claimed, then the ghost knew why they were here. Therefore, if they got a name from the ghost, there was a good chance it was in reference to the murder.

After a five second stretch of eternity, another letter started forming after the others.

n

Green breathed an audible sigh of relief when it was clear the letter wasn’t an A, for Anson.

t

“It wasn’t?” somebody in the back asked.

Eddie hoped the next letter was an A. Maybe the ghost would come out and write that it wasn’t Anson.

But the next letter was m.

itwasnt m

Eddie looked to Green, hoping the lawyer would have a name or person in mind. But two lines formed between Green’s bushy eyebrows and a frown creased his old face. He gave Eddie a quick shake of the head.

The next mark was just a horizontal slash, but then the mark curved up and back to the left, slowly arcing down to meet the slash on the other side. It continued along its circular path under the slash and stopped.

e

Eddie’s face fell. He’d been expecting some kind of confession or, just as good, a name pointing to another suspect. With the latter, the DA would have had to drop the charges while Ross went looking for this other person.

Instead, the words read:

itwasnt me

“Then who did it?” Eddie asked. “Who killed Alice Ketcher?”

Two hours later Eddie left the Ketcher residence with no other evidence. He kept picturing those letters appear in the paint. They were bad news but they reminded him of what Anson had told him about Alice on the night in question. She’d said, in a voice not her own, it wasn’t her.

Puzzled, he pulled off the road a few miles later and called Stan.

Stan sounded like he was in his car. “Eddie, did you wise up and drop that case?”

“Don’t tempt me. I’m in a real jam now and need your advice.”

“Lay it on me.”

Eddie told Stan about his preliminary investigation at the house and the writing on the wall that made his client look guilty as hell.

“Here’s my advice: get as far away from that trial as you can.”

“Not an option.”

“Listen, pal. I’m not kidding. It’s lose-lose. If Anson swings, you look bad. In the unlikely scenario that you get him acquitted, it still won’t look good for you because nobody outside of the jury will buy your story for one second. They’ll just see you as the guy who helped free a murderer.”

“I wish I could let this go.” Eddie watched as a police cruiser zipped past on the road.

“Give me one good reason.”

“You’re right. Anson’s probably guilty. But I’m not sure. I don’t have the whole picture and it pisses me off.”

“You pick the stupidest shit to get pissed off about.”

“You’re not going to talk me out of this, at least not on this phone call, but you can help me in another way.”

“The writing on the wall.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking of the Faces of Belmez and that other one…can’t remember the name.”

“I know what you mean. You sure you want to run tests on the writing? You might end up proving that it’s genuine and then you’re really up the creek.”

“I’m here for the truth, pal. I’m not a hired gun.”

“Remind me never to hire you to be my expert witness if I’m charged with a crime.”

“Can you help me?”

“Maybe the prosecution will test it themselves.”

“Doubt it. They’ll want to have their cake and eat it too. Gracie will argue the writing is probably fake, but even if it’s real, then it supports their case. They’re not going to put any expense into testing it, doesn’t help them.”

“Do I get to put on my resume that I provided expert, technical support to the defense in a high-profile murder case?”

“What resume? You’re never going back to work.”

Stan laughed. “I’ll get back to you.”

“Today, brother. I’m going back there tonight.”

* * * *

The foreman banged on the trailer door. Alan Balston shouted that it was open.

The door swung open. The foreman poked his head in and nodded at Alan and said nothing. Alan nodded back and the foreman disappeared.

Then one mean-looking son of a bitch stepped through the door. He was as tall as the ceiling and wider than the filing cabinets. Alan signaled for him to the shut the door.

The man was pushing six-five, probably three hundred and fifty pounds. Built like a linebacker. He was dressed in black athletic gear and wore sunglasses. His neck was inked with tattoos. His goatee hadn’t been trimmed in months.

Alan took his feet off his desk and tossed his hard hat on the filing cabinet by the window and stood up. He recognized the man from someplace. He carbon-dated his memory and the fuzzy feeling told him he’d met this dude awhile ago, maybe five, six years ago. He looked like muscle from some union.

“I know you,” Goatee said.

“I don’t know you, pal. And let’s keep it that way.” Alan grabbed a manilla folder off the desk. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not really.”

“You see anybody you know as you came in here?”

“No.”

Alan wondered if this was a good idea. Last night the deadly mix of greed and sympathy had gotten the better of reason, and he’d made the offering to Councilman Towson.

Goatee said, “Are we doing business or what?”

Alan nodded. “There’s a guy stirring up trouble but not enough the cops can do anything about it.”

“We don’t like guys like that.”

Alan smiled. “You don’t look like you sing in the church choir, buddy. My question is, do you know how to play it subtle?”

Goatee took his glasses off. A scar bisected one of his eyebrows and his eyes were dark. “I don’t audition for business. Just tell me what you want. I’ll tell if you we can do it.”

Alan hesitated. He’d promised the councilman some extralegal help, but maybe Goatee wasn’t the right man for the job. Maybe there was nobody good for the job. Alan could either renege on his promise, try to find somebody else, or go through with it. Goatee came with glowing recommendations, though, from guys Alan trusted.

He said, “This guy needs to be discouraged from doing something. But it can’t be obvious to the cops that he was discouraged. Can you make that happen?”

“If the price is right, my boys can turn water into wine.”

Alan looked Goatee over for a good twenty seconds before handing over the manilla folder. “This is our guy. The particulars are in the folder. This can’t come back to me. Understood?”

“It won’t even come back to us.”                           

* * * *

Eddie kept to the speed limit and drove to Green’s office in silence. The lawyer met him there. Nobody said anything until they were inside Green’s private office.

“Now we’re fucked.” Green loosened his tie and undid his top button and sat stiffly in his chair. “I told Anson we shouldn’t go down this road. There was no telling what you’d find. Now I wish you hadn’t found anything. I could have put you on that stand and made you sing to the jury and we would have had an outside shot at planting the seeds of reasonable doubt. That was all the chance we ever had. Had. Now it’s worse. Now we’ve got a ghost saying it was Anson that killed her.”

Eddie shook his head. “That’s not what the ghost said. The ghost plead not guilty. It didn’t say Anson was the killer.”

“Who’s the fucking lawyer in here?” Green laughed ruefully. “Nobody else was in that house. We certainly can’t prove there was. Anson doesn’t even say there was. That leaves him, alone with his wife. He blacked out for one or two minutes at most. What are the chances someone else timed it so they could … Maybe the son of a bitch is …”

The lawyer derailed his own train of thought. Last thing he needed was to think his client was guilty.

“Anson and Alice. Nobody else was there.” Green put his double-chin to his chest and thought. He reminded Eddie of Merlin from The Sword in the Stone. All he needed was the long pointy beard. “Now the best I can do is argue that the police screwed up the crime scene and didn’t find evidence of a third party there. That’ll get me about as far as a pogo stick.”

Eddie folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “And you need a motive for somebody else to kill her, which’ll be tough. Alice was a saint.”

“I know what I need to do!” Green snapped, then seemed to remember that Eddie was the only guy on his side.

Green sat forward and put his hands on the desk. “Tell me you’ve thought of something.”

Eddie gave him one shake of the head. “It’s probably nothing, but one thing bothers me. Why did the ghost profess its innocence instead of just saying who did it? It had to be familiar with the Ketchers, so why not just say it was Anson.”

Green considered it. “Keep pulling on that thread.”

Eddie shrugged. “Okay … so the ghost said it wasn’t them because the ghost didn’t know who killed Alice.”

Green growled like a rabid dog. “I can’t put somebody else in the house for the jury. It’s impossible. First they need to believe a ghost was involved or a witness, then they need to believe someone else who had a motive to kill Alice was there, but that Anson didn’t know they were there …”

“Like I said, it’s probably nothing.” Eddie folded his arms. “And I want to follow up on the previous homeowner too.”

Green shrugged. “It can’t get any worse.”

“Time for Anson to consider a plea bargain.”

Green cursed. “The prosecution won’t offer one now.”

“I’ll take another shot at the house tonight. See if I can get anything else out of the ghost. And now I’m going to find the psychic Alice was seeing.”

“She wasn’t seeing anybody.” Green shook his head. “The lack of internet history tells us she wasn’t.”

Eddie thought about that. “Actually, it tells us the opposite.”

“How?”

“I’ll give you a call when I find something.”

* * * *

Eddie drove for seventy-five minutes, the whole way wondering if he was wasting his time. His GPS took him through an unincorporated area and a couple small towns and finally to his destination, a place that felt as empty and wide as where the Ketchers lived.

Eddie slotted the car in the gravel parking lot. The psychic’s business was double-zoned. The front of the two-story had an addition that served as her office. The building sat across the street from an adult video store and a check cashing outfit. If it weren’t for the forest on either side of the road, Eddie would have thought he was downtown and would have looked for a takeout joint offering specials on wings.

Ms. Beverly Magloin. Spiritual Advisor. She was the only soothsayer in the phone book in this area. Eddie didn’t see the usual gaudy neon lights in the windows, just a somewhat-respectable looking sign with the Madam’s name and bulleted service offerings: palmistry, tarot readings, medium, psychic readings, past-life regressions. The only graphic on the sign a wide-open eye.

Earlier, Eddie had figured that if Alice Ketcher was going to seek the counsel of a psychic, she would have picked the one farther from town to keep it on the down-low. If it got out she was consulting a psychic, it would reflect poorly on her in the church community and it would damage her father’s political career.

The search of their computer’s internet history hadn’t produced anything. Either Alice had outwitted an IT nerd or she hadn’t used the computer to research psychics. But then how had she found out about CIARA, if she hadn’t used a computer?

Eddie sat in his car a moment and watched the road in his rear-view. It was a matter of habit now, ever since Sean McKenna had tracked him down and tried to kill him on his last big job. He tended to attract the wrong kind of attention, make the wrong kind of enemies, and local law enforcement had a personal stake in the outcome of this investigation. Nobody, except Green and Giles, wanted Anson to walk.

One minute, no traffic.

Eddie double-checked the interior of his car to make sure he’d hidden all personal items in his glove box. He left the Packers jersey in the backseat and the Red Sox baseball cap sitting up against the rear windshield. He’d stopped a few minutes ago to switch out his Pennsylvania plates for his old, retired New Jersey plates.

Inside, the twenty-something receptionist sat behind a wall-to-wall counter and wore a cheery smile and trendy coat over a halter top. “Hi there, I’m Stacy. Are you here to make an appointment?”

“Hi, Stacy. I’m kind of in a jam. I have an urgent problem and would like to see the Madam—I mean, Ms. Magloin—right away if I can.”

“Ohhhh, I see. Let me check her calendar.” Stacy showed genuine concern and made a big show of flipping through an appointment book then double-checking the Madam’s calendar on her computer. Eddie smiled. There were no other cars in the lot, so unless somebody had walked to the office, Ms. Magloin wasn’t busy at the moment. Stacy was just stalling.

Incense caught in Eddie’s nose and he took one of the psychic’s business cards while he waited.

Stacy looked up. “Okay, just let me double-check with Ms. Magloin.”

“Thank you kindly.”

Stacy stood and smoothed her painted-on, knee-length skirt and strutted to a doorway covered by two heavy damask curtains. She slipped through and disappeared into the back.

Eddie did a quick scan of the waiting area. The casual glance didn’t reveal any hidden cams or mikes so the psychic had at least a minimum degree of competence. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book. Very often, clients came in groups. The elderly often required a driver. While in the lobby, they’d discuss the very problems they’d come to see the psychic about. These dialogs would be picked up by hidden cams or mikes, thus arming the Madam with everything she needed to put on the show.

Eddie didn’t see the equipment in the usual places, but as they say, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

He read the Madam’s business card. She belonged to the Association of Independent Readers, which made for an odd acronym. Her business slogan was too long-winded for the  attention span of today’s Twitterverse: Coping with the Past and Present, Preparing for the Future.

He wondered if the Madam could get group health insurance coverage through the AIR.

The damask curtains parted and Stacy came out. She gave him a smile that almost knocked him on his ass.

“Ms. Magloin would like to help you and is available now.” She came back to her desk and leaned across the counter at him. “The fee is $50 per half hour.”