The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (8 page)

“I’m divorced. Getting your name changed is a process.”

“I’ll bet.” Eddie stretched out in the passenger seat. He was exhausted after a night of so little sleep. In his twenties, a few hours of shut-eye would have been enough. But these days it knocked him on his ass.

“By the way, I wanted to see Daria first thing too.”

She glanced over at him.

He winked. “Great minds.”

Eddie liked Christie’s driving.

She stuck to the speed limit and accelerated evenly and moved confidently through traffic. He’d seen her in action now and she had shown competence in every situation. He liked her. A lot.

It didn’t hurt that she was very easy on the eyes.

“Alright, now you can tell me,” he said.

She consulted the GPS and took the next turn.

“You want to know why we thought Perks might be working with somebody.”

“Yes.”

“Pictures.”

“You found pictures?”

She nodded. “In his apartment. He’d carved out a hollow on the floor of his closet.”

“Jesus.” Eddie grimaced.

“Yes. He had pictures taken of himself with the women.”

“And you thought somebody took them?”

Christie nodded. “I did. The chief was at least willing to consider it, unlike some of the other guys.”

“Knotts likes you.”

“Yes. As a woman on the police force, that means a lot.”

“Old boys’ club?”

“Yes and no. Most men don’t even realize how they are.”

“And how are we?” He smiled.

“You can be pretty dismissive when a female point of view is being offered.”

“Is that what you think of me?”

He was laying it on thick again. Christie, as always, remained professional and pretended not to pick up on his undertones.

“I think you know what you’re doing. That’s all that matters right now.”

Eddie liked that answer. “So back to the pictures. Couldn’t he have just set up a camera himself?”

“The shots changed.”

Eddie went quiet.

“The angles changed significantly. So he would have had to stop what he was doing and move the camera.”

“Not impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible,” she said. “I asked the women if he had a habit of stopping during the act and only one remembered him doing that.”

Eddie hated the mental pictures forming in his mind, that of a masked man forcing himself on women he’d tied to beds. The photographs took it to a whole new level.

Christie said, “The other women didn’t have great recall.”

“Not surprising. Their brains probably shut down so they could endure.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Christie said. “But at the end of the day, we couldn’t tie anybody else to the crime scenes, couldn’t question Perks, and it was unlikely he was working with anybody.”

“Long odds,” Eddie said.

“Yes.”

Eddie watched her. He could tell this loose end had been bothering her ever since the close of the investigation.

***

Daria Snow’s house could only be described as a bungalow. Eddie thought it looked pretty cool, but it was horribly out of place in the Pennsylvania woods.

Christie parked on the street.

Eddie said, “How solid were her alibis?”

“Harney ran them down this morning. She’s in the clear.”

“How about the three people I mentioned this morning. Perks, Schubert, and Engel. Any connections?”

Christie nodded. “That’s what I’m going to ask. I’ll leave the paranormal stuff to you.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

They got out of the car. It started to drizzle as they walked the flagstones that led to Daria’s front door. Christie got there first and knocked.

“I hope you don’t mind that I brought a gun,” Eddie said.

Her eyes went wide. The first time he’d seen her surprised and outwardly pissed off. “You’re kidding.”

He smiled at her. “I left it in my bag.”

This time, her remarkable calm did not return. “No guns.”

“I’ve got a permit.”

“I don’t care.” She leveled her eyes on him.

“Ever since Oregon, I promised myself I’d always carry.”

“Tell you what, Eddie. If we’re in the shit and I go down, you can take one of my guns. I carry one on my hip and have a backup piece on my ankle. But until then—”

The door opened and Daria Snow stood in the doorway. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this morning, but these too bugged her eyes. She had on a pair of ripped jeans and a tie-dye t-shirt that had been through the washer a million times.

“Oh-my-God if I knew you were coming, I would have cleaned up!” She seemed more embarrassed than nervous. She addressed Eddie like Christie wasn’t even there.

Christie said, “Ms. Snow, do you mind if we come inside and ask you a few questions?”

“Questions?” she said, as if she didn’t know the word.

“Yes,” Christie said.

Daria’s eyes shifted from the detective to Eddie. “Sure.”

***

Daria introduced her significant other. He was approaching sixty and was bald on top but still rocking the ponytail. Classic case of the skullet. Eddie hadn’t seen one in years and oddly enough, it made him feel nostalgic.

“I’m Charles, but everybody calls me the Big C.”

“Like cancer!” Daria chortled. “That’s because he survived testicular cancer!”

Of course Eddie immediately had a mental picture he didn’t want. He smiled politely.

Daria and C walked hand-in-hand to a living room with a low sectional and a high coffee table. The setup looked uncomfortable as hell. Eddie tried sitting down, but there was no sitting on the couch. He had to lounge or slouch. Christie watched him struggle to find a position and decided to remain standing.

Christie told C they needed a few minutes alone with Daria. He eyed them both suspiciously, looked ready to force the issue, but Christie’s eyes just bored into him. C finally relented and announced he was going to the garage, no doubt to listen to the police scanner that wasn’t actually illegal.

Eddie noticed that Christie angled herself in the living room so she had line of sight down the hallway where C had just headed. She didn’t want anybody sneaking up on her.

“You know, Eddie, I was thinking I could help you,” Daria said.

Eddie said nothing.

“Nobody knows this area better than me. I’ve developed relationships with many of the entities around here. I can get you information.”

Eddie smiled. “Thanks, Daria. We’ll think about it.”

She beamed, not realizing he was brushing her off. “Wonderful!”

Christie said, “Did you know Adrian Perks?”

“Oh-my-God yes. I mean, no. I mean, not in the way you would think.”

“I don’t think any way,” Christie said. “Could you explain what you mean?”

“I never met him. But during the investigation, he visited me in dreams. He was a truly tortured soul.”

That deserved to die
, Eddie thought. Or, better yet, they should have chopped his dick off and let him be raped repeatedly in prison for the rest of his life.

Daria pinned her snow white hair back behind her ears. “He came to me in my dreams. I called the police and spoke to a detective about it, but…he didn’t take me seriously.”

Christie shot Eddie a quick look. “Who did you talk to?”

“Oh-my-God, this was some time ago. Harm? Harmon? Harmony?”

Christie’s face remained neutral, though Eddie figured she was boiling inside.

“Harney?” she said.

“That’s it! He was kind of rude, actually. I was just trying to help.”

Christie said, “I apologize for that.”

“You maybe could have caught Perks before he…got to the rest.”

Christie’s lips formed a thin line. He wondered what she was thinking. There was no love lost between her and her partner. But at the same time, she likely would have treated Snow’s claims with a healthy dose of skepticism just like Harney.

Just like he would have. Only one out of every thousand psychics had any real ability.

“Also, C knew him.”

Christie said, “How?”

“They played in a bocce league together. Perks was on his team, believe it or not.”

“C knew Perks well enough to play on the same team?”

“Perks joined late and didn’t have a team. C let him play as a sub when one of his guys couldn’t make it.”

“Were they close?”

Daria shook her head no. “The team grabbed beers after the games, but that was it.”

Christie asked Daria about the two women also: Schubert and Engel.

“Schubert was that poor woman whose boyfriend killed her and later burned his mother’s house down?”

Christie nodded. “Did you know her?”

“Of her. I tried to use my sight to find her but couldn’t. I wanted to help.”

“Engel?” Eddie prompted.

“Engel…is that the lady who owns the home health agency?”

“Yes.”

Daria nodded. “Before Tiffany disappeared, my mom was on home health. I think she went through that group.”

Eddie was amazed. Daria Snow, for better or worse, seemed to be tied in some convoluted way to almost every aspect of their case.

Christie turned to him and he took it as his cue.

“Daria, did you record last night?”

“Oh-my-God yes. That’s protocol! What did you think the Mid-Atlantic Ghost Hunters Society was? A bunch of hack idiots?”

Daria laughed. She wasn’t offended. Eddie didn’t point out that the MAGHS had only one member.

“No, I didn’t think that. I just wanted to see what you said, and how the entities responded through the ghost box.”

“You don’t need to listen. I have a transcript.”

“You do?”

“C created this amazing software that interfaces with the digital recorder and ghost box. All I have to do is plug the digital recorder into the computer and it spits out a transcript.”

“Would you mind emailing it to the detective and me?” Eddie asked.

“I’ll do it right now.”

Daria left the room. Christie signaled for him to follow her to the other side of the living room where they could speak in private.

“What is a ghost box?”

Eddie chuckled. “The single most unreliable paranormal equipment on the market. It’s bullshit.”

“That doesn’t help me.”

“It’s a box that allegedly translates ghost energy into words.”

“What?”

“Yes. The box spits out words. There was a big expose last year about one brand. Some guy with an IT background took it apart and discovered the programming. The box just generates random, interrelated words.”

“People pay for this equipment?”

“Some pay lots of money.”

“Do you?”

“Do I look like I have a lot of money?”

Daria came back to the living room. “Okay, I sent it.”

Christie and Eddie took out their phones and accessed their email. Eddie saw two emails from Daria in his Inbox.

The first had no subject and no attachment. He looked up from his phone and, when Christie wasn’t looking, Daria signaled him.

He opened the first email and read:

I think the ghost is working with the police but don’t want to share that with the detective. Can I trust you?

Eddie hit REPLY and typed
:
Ye
s
.

So far, Eddie had no reason to believe Daria truly had sight. She was kooky and he planned to take everything she told him with a grain of salt. Then he opened the next email with the transcript from Daria’s night at Stahl’s. He scanned through it. She asked all the right questions. All one million of them.

Finally he reached the section where she’d activated the ghost box.

Daria: How was Stahl feeling?

Ghost box: Scared.

Daria: Why?

Ghost box: Scared.

Daria: Was he frightened by a presence in the house?

Ghost box: I think so but am not sure.

Daria: Do you know the presence?

Ghost box: She is angry.

Daria: The presence is a she?

Ghost box: He is scared.

And on and on. The ghost box identified, sort of, the ghost as a she. It wasn’t a whole lot to go on. He read through to the end and was about to close out the email when he read the last part of the exchange.

Daria: Can you describe the presence for me?

Ghost box: She is gone.

Daria: What do you mean, gone?

Ghost box: For a long time.

He looked up. Christie had gotten through it more quickly than him and was waiting for him to take the lead.

Daria sat on her couch with an expectant look on her face. He realized she was seeking his approval.

“Daria, you did a great job here. Nice work.”

“Thank you!” She practically floated off the couch.