Dead Demon Walking

by Linda Welch

  I went on and came to the big, casually furnished great room. This place had barely been touched, one bookcase and a display cabinet emptied and empty cartons waiting on the floor. The French windows were cracked open a few inches, letting in a runnel of sunlight and minor blast of Nevada heat.

  I ran my hand over the back of a big armchair upholstered in butter-soft, caramel-colored leather. I sat here last year, gulping diet soda while Janine told me about Elizabeth Hulme and the expedition to Myanmar.

  The house had the silence peculiar to an uninhabited building, the slightly musty odor of unmoving air and dust. No blood-and-guts smell, thank God. I inhaled deeply and made my shoulders relax. I shouldn’t let this freak me out. My connection to Janine was tenuous; I had no cause to dread seeing her shade.

  “Janine?” I whispered.

  “Hello!” she responded immediately. Then she stood before me.

  Janine wore her straw-colored hair shorter than when we first met, and spiked rather than upswept. At first I thought she wore a shirt in a bright, tropical pattern over her white pedal-pushers. When I saw my mistake, the gorge rose in my throat.

  Janine had been disemboweled.

  I tried not to look, but the horrific wound sucked my gaze down. I’m not one for fainting spells, but I felt a little light-headed.

  Her chin jutted as she peered at me. “Miss Banks? Is that you?”

  Tearing my gaze from her abdomen, I smiled weakly. “Hello, Janine.” Then I couldn’t think what to say next. How are you? What have you been doing with yourself lately? So sorry you’re dead. Duh.

  “You can hear me?” She clapped her palms together at her chest and stepped nearer. “Can you see me?”

  “Both, Janine.”

  “Is this new?”

  “I’ve done it for years.”

  Janine clenched her hands. “This is marvelous!” With rapid steps, she went to the facing love seat and sat. “Please take a seat. I’m sorry I can’t offer you something to drink, but you know how it is.”

  Still the hostess. She sounded quite . . . merry, which eased my attack of nerves. I sank into the soft chair. “How are you coping?”

  “I think I’m doing well under the circumstances.” She twitched her shoulders. “Not being able to talk to Robert is trying, and I will miss him terribly when he has the house cleared out and. . . .” She stared down at her twisted fingers. “I wish I could tell him to stay.”

  I could tell him, but I wouldn’t.

  Janine’s head came up. “I suppose I will live vicariously through the new owners, although considering what happened here, the agent may have difficulty finding a buyer. They have to declare, you know.”

  I squared my shoulders. Enough chitchat, time to get down to business. “Janine, what happened?”

  “Happened?” She pointed her index finger at her stomach. “You mean this?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I have to ask.”

  “This is why you came?”

  “I’m helping the FBI.”

  “I see.” She nodded as she crossed one leg over the other and draped her arm along the chair arm. I gave her a minute to gather her thoughts, hoping they were still cohesive.

  “It was two in the morning,” she began. “I woke and heard sounds from downstairs, drawers opening and closing, so I thought Robert had returned early from France. He was there lecturing. I came down and found a young man in the office. He had a sheaf of papers from my desk in his hand.”

  “Papers? What were they?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then how do you know they were yours?”

  “Oh. I don’t, I suppose. The desk was always a mess: letters, bills, notes, books, you know how it is. I think half were on the floor near the desk. I assumed so were those he held.”

  So the guy searched for something in Janine’s house?

  “What did he look like?”

  “Mid-twenties, very tall. Exceptionally tall, perhaps six-eight. More than his height, I noticed his hair, black and long, and it shone slickly as if oiled.”

  “What nationality or ethnic group?”

  She put one finger on her lip, rubbed it, as if thinking. “Possibly Indochinese.”

  American Indian, Mexican, Columbian and now Indochinese. “Go on. What happened then?”

  She spread her hands. “Nothing. I woke up dead.”

  “You didn’t see him come at you?”

  “The last thing I remember, he stood by the desk, staring at me.”

  He moved too fast for her to see him coming. I leaned over my knees. “Did he speak? Did you?”

  “I was about to.”

  Well drat. This was going nowhere. “Is there anything, anything else you can tell me about him and what happened that night?”

  “I . . . don’t think so, but my memory is not what it was. Perhaps something will come back to me.”

  But I couldn’t wait all day for her fading memory to reboot. “I wish I could stay longer, Janine, but an impatient FBI agent is waiting outside.”

  She rose up, fidgeting with her fingers. “I understand, but before you go I must tell you about my visitor.” She waved one hand. “Not him. It was . . . what month is this?”

  “It’s August.”

  “Then six months ago. I was so excited! I think you will - ”

  I heard a creak behind me and dropped off the chair to my knees, hand fumbling for a weapon, but Royal and I left our pistols locked in his truck’s glove compartment, in Salt Lake City.

  “Hello, Miss Banks,” Agent Solomon Gunn said.

  I went up on my knees to see over the back of the chair. Agent Gunn stood near the French windows. So that’s why they were open.

  He peered at the room. ”You were having quite a conversation.”

  Dumfounded, I grasped the chair arm to pull myself up.

  “You’ve been holding out on us. You do more than receive messages from the dead, you have conversations with them.” He said as he moved into the room.

  I put one hand to my hip and thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t said anything to let Gunn know I met Janine before. “What, your file didn’t tell you exactly how I communicate? And what does it matter, when you don’t believe me anyway?”

  “I’m not sure what I believe.” He sauntered over and faced me with his thumbs hooked in his belt. “But it looked to me you were chatting up a storm with Miss Hulme. I expect you had a nice conversation with the Fenshams too.”

  I gave him a filthy look. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think.”

  Janine said, “Oh, no!” and disappeared.

  “Janine?” I walked across the room. “Janine!”

  Not a whisper. Something scared her away, likely the smug-faced asshole behind me who thought he passed for a human being. I silently cursed Gunn from one end of Vegas to the other. Boy, was I mad.

  I jerked my head at the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Sure you’re done?”

  “Thanks to you, yeah.”

  I spoke loud into the silence. “Maybe I’ll get back this way sometime, just for a chat.”

  Gunn looked a question at me, then his face cleared. “Oh, right, you were speaking to Miss Hulme.”

  I walked away. “No, the Tooth Fairy. Come on.”

  ***

  Eyes a dark, simmering brown, Royal strode up the path as we came out the front door. He spared Gunn a black glare as the agent passed us and went on to join Vanderkamp, who spoke into his cell phone.

  “I came close to flattening an FBI agent,” he said under his breath.

  I clenched my fists. “Shame you didn’t. You knew Gunn was in there?”

  “I sensed someone approaching from the rear after you went inside. Then I recognized Gunn. I guessed it must be an underhand FBI tactic, anything more and nothing would have stopped me coming in. But I was angry, Tiff. What was he up to?”

  I rolled my eyes, hissed through my teeth. “Spying on me. He heard me talking to Janine.” />
  We walked to the curbside, where Gunn and Vanderkamp appeared to have an animated conversation punctuated by arm-waving and finger-pointing.

  “Get in the car,” Vanderkamp barked as we reached the street.

  I opened the rear door. “Fine by me.”

  Royal and I got in back and had to move over when Vanderkamp climbed in with us. Gunn took the front passenger seat.

  Gunn twisted in his seat to look back at us. Vanderkamp said, “So, Miss Banks, what did Miss Hulme tell you?”

  Although I didn’t look directly at Royal, I caught the barely there nod of his chin. “A tall man in his mid-twenties. Long black hair. She thought he could be Indochinese. He was standing near her desk with some papers in his hands when she went in the den.”

  After a silence, Vanderkamp prompted me, “And?”

  “She didn’t see anything else.”

  “He attacked her. Did she see the weapon?”

  “She saw him at the desk, and next thing she knew, she was dead. She didn’t see him come at her, or a weapon.”

  “He had an accomplice.”

  I shook my head. “No, just him.”

  “They kept out of sight.”

  “Nope. She would have seen. The deceased know who killed them. They could have their eyes closed and still see. That’s how it works, Agent.”

  He made a pah noise. Used to disbelief, I shrugged his off. I wasn’t going to waste my breath arguing with him.

  Gunn faced front. “Let’s go,” he told the driver.

  We drove at double the twenty-mile-per-hour speed limit, but not so fast I didn’t see the guy in an older model black Corvette parked just down from Janine’s house.

  “I was just notified of another incident, in Nebraska,” Vanderkamp said. “We would like you to accompany us.”

  It can’t be. I imagined him.

  I didn’t want to contemplate what Rio Borrego’s presence in Janine’s neighborhood could mean. Rio Borrego, Gia Sabato’s lover. I closed my eyes and let my head sag.

  “Nebraska?” Royal asked.

  “Two hours ago. David and Gwen Welsh of North Platte. A neighborhood family went to visit, found them in their basement.”

  I couldn’t concentrate on Nebraska when memories of Gia Sabato crowded my mind, unpleasant memories of when she and her friend Daven Clare came to Banks and Mortensen a year ago. Gia and Daven are Dark Cousins, powerful entities somehow related to Gelpha. They wanted us to find Rio, who had disappeared without a trace. Of course the case was not as simple as that. While I tried to locate Rio, I discovered Royal helped the Cousins with something much direr: Gelpha and Dark Cousins were victims of what appeared to be ritual executions.

  At the same time, a journal belonging to Victorian Elizabeth Hulme arrived in my mailbox. In the journal, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth recorded her expedition to what was then Upper Burma, now Myanmar, with her father Edward and his assistants. Edward, an archeologist, travelled to Burma to investigate Nagka, an ancient ruined city. Elizabeth’s little diary made interesting reading.

  Finding Janine Hulme was nothing more than luck. I gave up trying to locate Edward Hulme’s descendants when I discovered just how many Hulmes are in the USA, but when I made plans to go to Las Vegas to read a book about the expedition by Hans Stadelmann, I thought I’d give it the old college try. I phoned the sole Hulme in Vegas, who happened to be Janine, who happened to be fascinated by her forebear Elizabeth’s history and eventual fate in the Burmese jungle.

  My meeting with Janine pointed us back to Professor Hans Stadelmann, and eventually to the murderer we were seeking: Phillip Vance, aka The Charbroiler. It also led us to Rio, who was near death in a house belonging to Vance. Vance’s men tortured Rio, trying to make him give up Gia’s whereabouts.

  At times I look back and am awed how the case came together. But to solve it we had to work with Gia Sabato and Daven Clare, and I learned enough about Dark Cousins to make me hope I would never see them again. At the same time, the mystery of exactly what Dark Cousins are and of what they are capable became an involuntary, rasping irritation, always there, gnawing at me.

  Now Borrego lurked in Janine’s gated community. Coincidence? Don’t make me laugh.

  “Miss Banks?”

  I opened my eyes to look at Gunn quizzically.

  “North Platte. David and Gwen Welsh,” he reminded me.

  I struggled to get back on topic. “Did the visitors see anything?”

  “The husband saw the bodies, the wife and kids stayed upstairs. None saw another person on the property.”

  “Nevada, Arkansas, Nebraska. . . . What drew the killer to those places? What’s the connection?”

  One corner of Gunn’s scarred mouth twisted up; he shook his head. If he had an answer to my question, he would not give it to me.

  Royal put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a light squeeze which conveyed his sympathy. “I know it’s tough, Tiff, but I think we should.”

  He was right, of course. The Welsh couple could possibly give us valuable information. The dead lose memories over time, so although Janine and the Fenshams told me the truth, they might have forgotten something significant. A kill this fresh, they should remember everything. But, Nebraska? We would either spend interminable hours on planes and in cars, or stay the night in a motel with no change of clothes and travel necessities. I felt dog-tired, frustrated, cranky and very worried.

  I gave Royal a weak, wavering smile. “Yes, we should go.”

  I dropped the smile as I met Vanderkamp’s eyes. “Will we stay the night?”

  “That’s your choice. The Bureau can spring for a motel room if you’d rather take a flight out tomorrow morning.”

  Driving to the airport, my brain felt like a ping-pong ball bouncing in my skull. I thought I would burst before I had the opportunity to speak to Royal in private.

  The SUV left us at the terminal and drove away to wherever black FBI vehicles go while they wait for their next unwilling passenger.

  ***

  I almost changed my mind when I learned we would fly back to Salt Lake City to connect with a flight to Denver International Airport. You would think with the money and resources it has, the FBI could lease a private jet. But no, we had to crawl back and forth across the States, cabin class. I think I’d have been out of there and back in Clarion if the layover had been longer than forty-five minutes.

  From Denver, we rode a Great Lakes Airlines Beechcraft 1900D twin-turboprop to the North Platte Lee Bird Airfield and I thanked every deity I could name the flight took only an hour and seven minutes. We climbed, bumpily, flew bumpily and descended, bumpily. And landed, bumpily. I wished I hadn’t bought that sandwich and eaten both mine and Royal’s pretzels on the flight from Salt Lake to Denver.

  The entire trip from Nevada to Nebraska took four and a half hours. Four and a half hours of desperately needing to talk to Royal.

  Chapter Twelve

  The wrong end of summer in Nebraska brought a hot, strong wind which tried to force dust and chaff between my eyelids. I crossed a verge of dry, brittle grass from the parking lot to the street, expecting to see a black SUV at the curb, but the agents led us to where two men, a North Platte police cruiser and a big silver-gray crew cab pickup waited.

  Tall, mid-thirties, short dark-brown hair, a square rugged face and pale-blue eyes, one guy wore a white long-sleeved shirt tucked in his blue jeans, alligator boots and a brown bullhide cowboy hat. His silver and onyx bolo tie matched his big, chunky belt buckle. His chest and arms filled his shirt nicely and the jeans hugged lean hips and solid thighs as he lounged on the car’s hood. The other man was older by a decade, with a head of thick gingery hair, a pale face and shades protecting his eyes. What could be a mayo stain decorated the lapel of his crumpled dark-gray suit, splotched the edge of his blue tie and slid over on his white shirt.

  Vanderkamp got in front us. “Sergeant Wesson?” he asked as with legs apart and hands on his hips he stopped before the two m
en. They eyed him up and down and from their lack of expression, I don’t think they were impressed by the aggressive stance.

  After a three-second silence, the older guy presented his hand. “Grant Wesson.” He angled his head at his companion. “Detective Sam Gold.”

  Vanderkamp introduced Gunn then swung his hand at me and Royal. “Our profiler Tiffany Banks and her associate Royal Mortensen.”

  Profiler?

  Royal twitched his eyebrows. I bit down on a grin. Profiler. Maybe I should use that in future. It sounded more credible than psychic detective.

  “It’s Tiff Banks,” I told Gold.

  He smiled and nodded. “Miz Banks.” His gaze slid over Royal as if an afterthought, “Mortensen,” then back to me.

  Wesson shook our hands. Vanderkamp opened the rear door of the cop car and gestured. “Miss Banks?”

  “We ride with Gold,” Gunn told Royal.

  This insistence on separating me and Royal pissed me off something terrible, but I got in back of the cruiser as Royal, Gunn and Gold went to the pickup.

  We pulled away from the curb and minutes later merged with the I-80 which bypasses North Platte. Then we took the I-83 and headed for the boonies. I looked through the window at farmland and grassy hillsides, barns, silos and cattle pens. The road narrowed and twisted. We passed a large lake with a campground. Then we hit the dirt roads.

  There must be thousands of miles of dirt roads in Nebraska. It certainly seemed that way. The car’s rear wheels spun an obscuring sheet of dust high in the air. Fences lined the roads, and now and then I spotted small farmhouses, barns and wells amid trees well back from the road. Low hills mounded farmland covered in long grass and crops. We took turn after turn, fork after fork.

  We drove toward the setting sun. A sheriff’s pickup straddled the road on the brow of a low hill ahead. Two officers stood in front, one holding a shotgun pointed at the ground. The other officer hopped in the truck and moved it to the verge when they saw us coming. After we passed, I turned my head to watch the pickup block the road again before the dust raised by our passing hid it.