The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (16 page)

Christie gave Eddie the look.

Eddie stepped forward. “We don’t think it is. I believe the ghost is linked to this man, whoever he is. Where he goes, the ghost can travel.”

“Hold on.” Knotts sat up in his chair. “That means this guy is aiding and abetting a ghost killer.”

Eddie said, “It’s the most likely scenario. Ghosts link to people or places. This ghost has visited many different people, seemingly unconnected people. It can’t be linked to all these different places. It’s piggybacking off somebody.”

Knotts shook his head. “This is thin.”

Christie didn’t disagree. Harney was trying not to smile.

Knotts folded his hands and looked back at Christie. “We need something more tangible than this. Let’s talk about real world leads.”

Christie nodded. “We’ve begun exploring two of the other three angles. First, let me start with Perks. His ex-girlfriend, Star, is currently missing.”

“She’s been reported missing?” the chief asked.

Christie shook her head. Earlier the lead had seemed much stronger, but now she wasn’t so sure. “She frequently runs off, according to her current husband. The last time she flew the coop with a friend named Sandy. Star’s husband suspected she went off with Sandy again, but she didn’t. Sandy is finishing up her shift soon and we’re going to talk to her.”

The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you think Perks is the ghost and Star is helping him? That’s even thinner.”

Christie nodded. “It is now, but remember we just got word from Stahl’s neighbor that it was a man lurking outside of Stahl’s house.”

“And it’s possible,” Eddie jumped in, “that man was a ghost. The boy didn’t get a good look at him.”

The chief regarded Eddie. “Thank you for your opinion, Eddie. But at this time I would like to talk to the detectives alone.”

***

Christie emerged from the chief’s office fifteen minutes later, much less perky than when she’d gone in. Harney followed her out but made a right instead of a left and headed in the opposite direction.

Eddie was about to ask her a question, but she gestured for him to follow. They went into the conference room. She shut the door.

“The chief is right. We’re all over the place,” she said.

“We’ve only been at this for a day.”

“For three days, actually.” She shook her head. “The clock started ticking as soon as we found Stahl dead.”

“Okay, three days.” He sat down at the conference table. She was giving off an annoyed vibe. He wasn’t sure if she was frustrated with the situation or if she was displeased with his help. “What does the chief want us to do?”

“Get this investigation back on the ground.” She went to the whiteboard. “And now’s a good time to start.”

They went to work. Eddie added Felicity, Alicia, and Engel to the board. He made a column for Engel next to Stahl. It reminded him they both worked in healthcare, and that reminded him of what Daria had shared earlier.

“Stahl never worked for Engel, right?” he said.

“According to Engel.”

“Do you have Stahl’s employment history?”

“We do.” She went to the table and opened her laptop. It took her a few minutes to track down her notes. “Stahl has been at the hospital for the last eight years. Before that, he was with a physician practice, led by a doctor named O’Donnell. Stahl and Engel never worked together.”

Eddie nodded.

Christie said, “Why do you ask?”

“I know you wanted to keep this grounded, but Daria got a few hits earlier at Stahl’s. The entity said Stahl and the man outside his house that night worked together, that money was involved between them.”

They kept working. They added details to all the people on the whiteboard and challenged each other’s recall of the day’s conversations. The whiteboard quickly filled up.

“The hauntings are similar, except for Engel’s.” Christie leaned back in her chair. “Do you believe him?”

“Why would he lie?”

“People always have a reason to lie. Even honest people.”

“Cynical.”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes people lie for good reasons. I’ve seen it.”

“I don’t know enough about him, but what he described was a classic haunting.”

She frowned. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“I agree.” Eddie stood and stretched. “But I’m not going back to the motel on that note.”

“We have three people who could be the ghost: Schubert, Engel, and Perks. Perks still makes the most sense.”

Eddie nodded. She was right. “Schubert was apparently a saint, so it’s unlikely she would turn into a killer as a ghost. Engel is alive, if we believe her husband, so she’s out. Perks is the most likely.”

“The man outside of Stahl’s house would have to be working with him,” she said. “And Meade is out of the picture.”

“Why?” Eddie asked.

“Remember—he has a strong alibi for Tuesday night.”

“So somebody else we haven’t thought of.”

“Somebody else.”

They sat quietly, absorbed by their own thoughts. The more Eddie pondered it, the more he agreed with the chief. They’d done a lot, but accomplished little.

“We’ve gotta start ruling people out,” he said.

Christie put her elbows on the desk and rubbed the back of her neck. He wished it were his hands massaging her.

She said, “Perks doesn’t make sense either.”

“Why?”

“I can argue that Fellov fits Perks’s MO. Felicity and Alicia would too. But not Stahl and not Engel.”

“Engel is being haunted by a different ghost from the sound of it.”

“Okay, but Stahl doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ll take your word for it. That’s one case file I don’t need to review.” Eddie didn’t care to get to know Perks, the serial stalker and rapist, any better than he already had. “I have enough bad dreams.”

“Going by our logic, Perks is linked to someone. There’s a man spotted at Stahl’s. But you and I are thinking that Star, Perks’s ex-girlfriend is helping. Strike one there, just based on the gender discrepancy. But that’s not all. Remember that Star dumped Perks. Why is she helping him now if that’s the case?”

Eddie folded his hands. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I’m taking my ego out of this and looking at the facts.”

Eddie said, “Fair enough. But a continuous haunting can drive people crazy. Make them do anything to get it to stop. Perks could be tormenting Star into helping him. And that’s a damned good reason why Star might have run away and not told anybody.”

Christie nodded. “Makes a little bit of sense.”

“Makes a lot of sense.” Eddie stood. “Let’s say Perks intimidates her and forces her to go Stahl’s. She doesn’t know why, or maybe she just thinks Perks is going to scare the guy. Instead Stahl turns up dead. And now she thinks she’s responsible. After Fellov dies, she sees no alternative but to run. She can’t tell the police what happened because she could get into trouble. So she flees.”

Christie was nodding more vigorously. “Okay, I can see that. But there weren’t any visitors in Felicity and Alicia’s building two nights ago. Star didn’t get inside.”

“Jug missed her, or forgot to write her name down.”

Christie didn’t hesitate. “Not a chance. Jug was on duty.”

“Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not Jug. He puts on an act but nothing gets by him. Believe me.”

“Doesn’t have to be his fault.” Eddie didn’t want to push her too hard on Jug’s mental faculties. “Maybe she got in the building by looking like she was with somebody else. You know, ghosted in? Or tipped somebody to pretend like she was with them.”

“
Ghosted in
?”

He smirked. “Pun intended.”

“I remember what one of my English teachers said in college. Pun is defined as a saying the speaker thinks is witty, but the audience thinks is stupid.”

Christie sharing an anecdote? This was definite progress. Now if he could just get her to open up a little more.

He smiled cheerfully. “I’m crushed.”

Christie said, “Okay, so I’m willing to say Star is a possibility then, but that only works if the man Devlin saw outside of Stahl’s house was Perks.”

“I’m having trouble keeping these names straight,” Eddie joked.

Christie nodded. “You get used to it after awhile. So that leaves us with Schubert.”

Eddie shook his head. “We can’t rule Engel out yet.”

“His wife is alive.”

“That’s what he told us. Do we take his word at face value?”

Christie stopped rubbing her neck. “Normally, no. But this is an admission against self-interest so that makes it reliable. Now that he’s told us that, he knows that could reopen the investigation into her disappearance and insurance fraud. That’s the last thing he wants, while he’s trying to sell the company.”

Eddie turned and put his feet up on the next chair. “Good point. That is incredibly stupid of him to share.”

Christie got up and leaned back against the wall. “Exactly, so it’s likely true.”

Eddie held up his pointer and middle finger. “I’ll give you two reasons why we can’t rule him out though.”

“Okay.”

Eddie dropped his middle finger. “The living are capable of haunting.”

She was about to respond, but then her expression changed as she realized what he was referring to: Eddie’s first big case and last investigation with his brother. A thirteen-year-old boy had gone to live with his uncle after his parents and brother murdered each other. Though he was alive, the boy somehow managed to project his mind into his old house and essentially haunt it.

Eddie dropped his pointer. “And like you said, even honest people have good reasons to lie.”

“So her husband is helping her.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because he loves her.”

“He loves her so much he helps her to kill random people?”

“When you put it like that.”

Christie said, “You buckled pretty easily there.”

“No, you raised a good point. He seemed like he still loved his wife but didn’t seem like the obsessive type. He seemed more…”

“Resigned.”

“Exactly, like he’d come to accept she was gone and not coming back.”

Christie rested the back of her head against the wall and looked up at the ceiling.

Eddie checked the whiteboard, then went over their conversation with Engel in his head quickly. “Engel doesn’t have a great alibi for Stahl and Fellov.”

Christie nodded. “Like I said, we haven’t ruled him or his wife out yet.”

Round and round they went for another thirty minutes. Then Christie called a timeout. She said it’d be good for them to take a mental break before they went to see Sandy. Eddie agreed. He felt like they were just grinding their gears.

He stepped outside. The night air was frigid. Taking out his phone, he steeled himself for the call he’d wanted to make all day.

It rang for awhile. He didn’t think Stan was going to answer, and he was right.

Moira did.

“Eddie.”

Moira had been Eddie’s first love. He had a crush on her in high school then they had briefly dated in their twenties, until he’d blown it. She’d caught him with some hard drugs and wisely told him to get lost. After that a lot of things had happened. Eddie’s brother had been murdered, Moira and Stan had become a couple, and Eddie had gone away. Over the next five years, Eddie was in and out of prison and living off the grid, while Stan and Moira had wed and started their own family. Their lives had followed very different paths.

“Hey, Moira. How are you?”

“He’s pissed off, Eddie.” Her voice was colder than the night air. “And so am I.”

“I know. I was calling to apologize. He’s right.”

“I warned him,” she said.

“I come with a warning?”

He felt his anger rising. Sure, he’d been a screw-up in his twenties but he’d seriously pulled it together. If he’d been a mediocre friend in the last two years, it was because he was busy trying to do all that while starting a business.

“He’s been so good to you, Eddie. I told him you would take advantage, but he didn’t believe me. I guess I was right.”

“Don’t talk about ancient history,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Us. You and me. I made a lot of mistakes, but that was ten years ago. I’m not that guy anymore.”

Moira was close to tears. “I think you’ve just traded one addiction for another. You’re still an absentee friend.”

“Moira, I’m calling to apologize for God’s sake.”

“How could you be so bad to him? When he was the only one left for you?”

“Alright, I said I’m sorry but let’s not blow this out of all fucking proportion. I’m not Hitler because I didn’t call him often enough.”

“Goodbye, Eddie.”

Her goodbye sounded way too final for him. He cursed and put his phone away. In the history of his apologies, that certainly wasn’t his best.

***

Sandy worked at a dive bar not too far from the police station that promised the area’s best wings. Eddie didn’t hold out much hope.

The inside was dark. A bar to one side. The bartender looked like he doubled as the bouncer. Tattoos decorated his bald head. The rest of the place was an open floor with tables and a handful of booths. The one TV in the place was broken, its monitor smashed. There was an ancient pool table pushed against the back wall.

They waited by the bar for Sandy. The restaurant was slowing down but the bar was just getting started. The bartender asked if they wanted anything and they both asked for waters.

Eddie watched the guy to make sure he didn’t spit in their drinks.

“Nice place,” he said.

Christie rolled her eyes.

A few minutes later, a woman wearing a skimpy top and a pair of low-rider jeans approached them. She was dressed ten years too young for her age.

“Sandy?” Christie asked.

The woman nodded. “Can we talk outside?”

***

Sandy grabbed a jacket on her way out and put it on. Eddie got a better look at her in the parking lot. She’d dyed her hair awhile ago, he could see all the roots coming up. She was thin, but her face looked bloated. His addict radar was lighting up.

Christie was taking the lead here. “We’re trying to find your friend, Star.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“But she’s your friend.”

“I don’t know where she is.” Sandy fished through her purse and found a cigarette. She lit it and took a drag.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did she say?”

Sandy took a couple of drags and wouldn’t meet their eyes.

Christie leaned in. “Sandy, what did she say?”

“She was scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of what King was going to do to her.”

“Why would King do something to her?”

Sandy suddenly broke into a smoker’s coughing fit. When she was done, though, she went right back to the cigarette.

“She’d met a guy.”

Christie said, “Who?”

“I don’t know. I never met him.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she leave with him?” Christie asked.

Sandy shrugged.

Christie nodded. “Okay, Sandy. What else did she tell you when she was here?”

Sandy couldn’t hold Christie’s stare. She was taking short, nervous drags on her smoke.

Eddie decided to interject, just to shake things up. “Was it Perks?”

It took Sandy a moment to make sense of what he said. “Perks is dead.”

Eddie said nothing.

Christie said, “I know you’re on the needle. Normally I don’t care what people do on their own time, as long as they aren’t hurting anybody else.”

Sandy wouldn’t look at her.

Christie continued. “But I’m beginning to develop an interest in your otherwise personal life because you’re not telling us everything.”

Sandy finished her cigarette and started looking for another.

“Sandy.” Christie waited for Sandy to meet her eyes. “I will bust you for something unless you start leveling with us.”

Sandy stopped searching for another cigarette and threw her purse over her shoulder. “Okay. Fine. What do you want?”

“What else did Star tell you?”

“She was running away with this guy. She met him last month. He promised to help her get cleaned up.”

“Why did they have to run away for that?”

“I don’t know, it was just another one of Star’s crazy ideas.”

“What else did she say?”

“She didn’t know when she’d be coming back. She didn’t want King finding out.”

Eddie laughed. “King will be happy if she doesn’t come back.”

Sandy shot him a look. “You believe that piece of shit? He’s manipulative and he abuses women.”

“Did he abuse her?”

“She is a woman, isn’t she?”

Christie said, “We need to talk to her.”

Sandy said nothing.

Christie said, “If you don’t help us, the only other person we can talk to is King. Would Star want that?”

“You fucking cops.” Sandy spit the words out. “All you ever do is squeeze people.”

Christie said nothing, just kept her eyes on Sandy. It was obvious Sandy was speaking from personal experience.

Finally Sandy unzipped her purse and reached in again. When her hand came back out, it was holding her cell phone.

“I’ll give you the number.”

Christie shook her head. “Sandy, I’m not stupid. Star isn’t going to answer a number she doesn’t recognize. You’re going to call her.”

Sandy cursed.

***

“Was that her?” Eddie said.

Christie nodded. “I’m pretty sure. Star has a difficult voice to forget. And she laid all the same racial slurs on me.”

“Something about an egg roll?”

“Something like that.”

Eddie moved the passenger seat back so he could stretch his legs out. “Okay then.”

“That doesn’t rule Perks out. It just rules Star out as his helper.”

“Meade?”

She nodded again. “We’ll go back first thing tomorrow.”

Eddie fell silent. The more he examined the case, the more he agreed with the chief. There were so many holes in their theory, it collapsed any time they tried to add all the facts to it. He wasn’t looking at it the right way. There was something crucial he was missing. Or, he was just plain wrong about ghosts and their mobility.

There were so many possibilities.

Perhaps it was many ghosts.

There could be something about this town causing the multiple hauntings. Maybe he needed to look at the global picture. Was this area a hot spot for paranormal activity?

It was a possibility and the simplest answer to all the facts.

“I should have asked you this already,” Eddie said. “Has anybody ever reported hauntings before?”

“I asked around the station. Nobody remembers hearing anything.”

“Daria will know.”

“What are you thinking?”

Eddie told her. She listened without interrupting as he explained many experts believed in hot spots, where general, global paranormal activity was more likely to occur.

“What do you think?”

“I still think it’s one ghost,” he said.

“But?”

“But we have to keep an open mind.”

“Why would Meade help Perks?” she said.

“I don’t know. Why would anybody?”

“What does he get out of helping?”

“Maybe he helped Perks before.”

“Maybe.”

Eddie wondered what kind of man would do that: take pictures of his friend while the guy raped women. Was Meade capable of something like that? He hadn’t given off a creepy vibe. He seemed more like a guy who’d made bad choices in life and had ended up with nothing, drinking his sorrows away at the bar, commiserating with the other losers, or anybody who would listen.

But then again, you never really knew a person. Not completely. Meade might have had dead bodies in his fridge for all Eddie knew.

All the same, he was beginning to think Perks wasn’t their ghost. He got off on stalking and raping women. He had no connections to Stahl. As disgusting as Perks was, he wasn’t a killer.

Christie consulted her GPS and they drove in silence till she pulled into a development. She made a few more turns and eventually parked on the corner of a quiet little street. The houses were fifty or sixty years old but well-maintained. A cruiser was parked on the other side of the street.

They got out and walked to Fellov’s house.

***

“Same deal as before,” Eddie said. “You manage the recorder and follow my lead. Okay?”

“You got it.”

Christie had a sidebar with the patrolman, asking him if he’d seen anything unusual and what he’d learned from the neighbors. Eddie half-listened as he took out his phone to call Daria.

“Oh-my-God, Eddie,” Daria answered.

Eddie got very excited, thinking Daria had found something at Stahl’s. He was hoping she had because he felt he and Christie were drowning.

“What is it?”

She hesitated. “What?”

“You just said oh-my-God like something had happened.”

“I did? Sorry.”

Eddie cursed under his breath. “Has anything happened at Stahl’s?”

“Not a thing for two hours now. Even the ghost box is quiet.”

“Can you stick with it a little longer?”

“Of course. I’m here to help.”

“Daria, there’s something I wanted to ask.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Have there ever been reports of paranormal activity in this town before?”

“Oh-my-God, yes.”

Eddie saw that Christie had finished catching up with the patrolman and was waiting for him. He held up his pointer.

“Like what, Daria?”

“Oh, I’ve caught a few residuals in my day and maybe two poltergeists. Another woman could astrally project and somebody was starting fires, but the police think that was a teenager, not a ghost. I’m still not sure.”

Eddie tried to process the seemingly random information.

“Any particular times of the year these things happened?”

“I already thought of that. I went through my journal last night and didn’t see any patterns. Nothing else has happened, that I know of, on or around St. Patrick’s Day. Are you thinking we’ve got a cluster?”

“It’s an idea we have to explore.”

“Oh-my-God why didn’t I think of that?”

“Things are moving fast,” Eddie said.

“When I get home tonight I can do some research if you’d like.”

Eddie smiled ruefully. Stan usually helped with research, and he was damned good at it. But Eddie had burned that bridge. Hopefully he could repair it but in the interim Daria was all he had for help.

“Daria, that would be great.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.”

“Cast as wide a net as you can. Look at the county to see if they’ve had any clusters.”

“You got it, Eddie.”

“And Daria?”