Ghost Maker

by Robin D. Owens

  Sister Julianna Emmanuel had vanished into the gray dimension, leaving to say prayers for the boy who’d died last night, whom she’d aided as a mission of mercy. She’d left mercy behind in the amelioration of Clare’s spectral slash. It felt better, no longer a deep-rooted ache. Like it had been healed, not fully, perhaps not quite half knit together, but the bottom layer of the tear in her etheric body was significantly repaired. Clare lurched back to the bench, fell awkwardly on it, like her torso didn’t quite bend right, might still be reacting to the healing energy applied to it.

  At least it didn’t hurt much, but the apparition of the Sister of Mercy had definitely been a warm ghost.

  “She heal you?” Zach asked.

  “A little,” Clare mumbled.

  Zach nodded, then sat and rubbed his face with his hands. Enzo sniffed around at the mosaic wall of Navajo Spring, perhaps able to sense the nun’s spirit when Clare couldn’t.

  She curved her hand over the nape of Zach’s neck and massaged the tense muscles there. “This is so not good.”

  “No,” he replied, then lifted his head, his expression hard. Glancing around at the few people in the area, the sound of a couple of young children heading for the rides, he said, “We can’t talk here.” Telepathically, he yelled, Enzo, we have to discuss this with you!

  The ghosts that had begun to drift toward them retreated. Clare wondered if she could get any information from them.

  I could not follow the good spirit of the Sister of Mercy last night, Enzo whined, slinking out of the wall.

  “I understand,” Zach said. “Walk and talk.” He got up from the bench fully in cop mode, left hand on his cane like he’d use it as a weapon. He stepped aside from her so his gun hand remained free.

  They walked back to his truck without another word. Clare climbed in and waited for Zach. A subdued Enzo chilled her side as he sat between her and Zach.

  When he got in, he didn’t immediately start up the truck. Instead his stare fixed ahead of him and his fingers flexed time and again on the steering wheel.

  Finally he said, not looking at either her or Enzo, “I haven’t heard of any serial killer in the area. Not a whisper from my sources.” Zach’s expression turned grim. “So this business isn’t known, no children are reported as missing, no bodies have been found.”

  “That’s not good,” Clare repeated weakly.

  “Nope.” Zach checked the street and pulled into traffic. “But I can do some in-person visits today.”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Cop shops are always open,” he pointed out. “That’s the best way for me to gather info, though I’ll do a spin on the computer, too, after live interviews.”

  She believed he ached to be with people who thought and acted the same way as him when confronted with these circumstances, and though that hurt, she couldn’t blame him, or deny him that. Especially if he could find the children.

  “Enzo,” said Zach, “I want you to do your best to find the boys or the killer, find their scent or whatever.”

  I do not think I would be good with that, Zach, Enzo whimpered.

  “Maybe not, but you can try.”

  I can try. And though I see some ghosts that Clare doesn’t, I don’t see that many unless they are unusual. And the boy ghosts don’t linger because Sister Julianna Emmanuel helped free their spirits from their body and go on.

  Clare cleared her throat. “All in all, I’m glad about that. I can try talking to other ghosts here. Not all of them are stuck like the nun’s spirit. I know for sure that some of them promenade from one end of the town to the other. Perhaps they’ve seen or heard or sensed something. Some of them must range up and down the canyons and mountains.”

  Zach growled, then said, “You watch out for them. I don’t want you tearing your wound further.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  His breath came out in a long stream. “Oh-kay. So how do you want to handle this?”

  “You confabulate with your colleagues and I talk to the ghosts.” She tried a smile. “I’m getting better at shields.”

  “Shields?”

  “Mind and body shields that Great-Aunt Sandra talked about.”

  “Huh. You didn’t tell me about those.”

  “We can talk later.”

  “Or I can read her journals.”

  “That, too.”

  “We have to be careful what we do,” Zach said. “We can’t afford to alarm him, let him know we’re looking for him. He could cut his losses.”

  “Cut his losses?” Clare’s voice squeaked out, since she didn’t want to put the terrible ideas crowding her mind into words.

  “Kill the remaining two boys,” Zach said bluntly.

  Clare forced nausea down. “We can’t let him do that.”

  “No. We can’t.” Zach turned his head and met her eyes. “So we’ll be damn careful, won’t we, Clare?”

  “Very,” she replied in a small voice.

  The best thing Zach could think of doing was what he’d always done, contact local law enforcement and walk in for a face-to-face meet so they could get a good idea for themselves of who he was—ex-cop; what his values were—righteous; and when he’d give up on a case—never. Also to know in their guts that he had the time, money, and determination to make sure that “never” became “until he closed the case.” He didn’t have to shuffle cases at all, pushing older ones to a lower priority.

  So he spent a great deal of the morning shooting the breeze with his cohorts—the town cops of Manitou Springs and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office in a couple of locations. He didn’t branch out to colleagues of the Colorado Springs Police Department yet. He told them about Tyler Utzig and the case he worked on, mentioned missing kids from the Denver streets, and got the complacent response that neither the town nor the city had such problems . . . currently . . . but they’d keep an eye out for Tyler. None of them said they’d found an unusual amount of bodies.

  And though he’d been relatively welcomed, he got the standard-for-now notion that his old tribe members were glad to see him limp away. No one liked to think he or she would end up like him, crippled and working in the private sector.

  And no one invited him out to lunch, which he had with Clare in a mom-and-pop place called Deli Delish.

  As she’d planned the day before, Clare had done the self-guided tour of Miramont Castle. She’d reported that it was interesting to see the place, but Sister Julianna Emmanuel hadn’t been alive to make the move from Montcalme Sanatorium to the big house. And though Clare whiffed a couple of ghosts, they’d expired later than the limits of her gift.

  She’d said her bubbles had held while she talked to the ghosts of her time period. She’d acquired several water bottles as she’d strolled from spring to spring, filling them as a cover for talking to ghosts of her time period. She’d gotten nods and smiles from the live locals who’d begun to recognize her, though all the specters had professed to know nothing about any killer and cut any conversation short. Zach got the idea those ghosts had begun to avoid her again.

  After lunch, they went back to the resort and both retired to their desks in the office. Zach dug and dug on any hint of serial killers, and Clare worked with her great-aunt Sandra’s journal and her own stack of notes sitting by her elbow.

  Enzo hadn’t turned up, not in time for lunch, and not now.

  A few minutes into Zach’s frustrating searches, his phone pinged with a text from Jim. Meet me in two hours at bus stop southeast corner, stay near the alley. A slight pause, then he named the intersection in LoDo, lower downtown in Denver.

  Chapter 25

  Zach parked in his handicapped space in the lot under the building Rickman Security and Investigations was housed in, walked to the Sixteenth Street Mall, and took a shuttle to LoDo, where he’d meet his contact.

  He
found the bus stop serving four lines and stayed behind the glass shelter with a meager bench, lingering close to the brick wall next to a shadowed alley.

  He was early, but it looked like his contact was earlier still. He caught a movement several feet back in the dimness of the alley. Yeah, Jim made sure Zach couldn’t get a good look at him. Fine with Zach. For now.

  “What’s the word on Tyler?” he murmured.

  “He’s gone, and recently.” Cigarette smoke and an odor of seriously unwashed human came to him. A hacking cough.

  “Better quit smoking before winter,” Zach commented, barely moving his lips, a skill he’d developed early in his career.

  “If I could, I would. I think the questions scared Tyler.”

  “I only took the case four and a half days ago!”

  “Not your questions, dumbass. PI a coupla weeks ago, trying to work the streets, not being discreet and indirect like you.”

  Zach made a disgusted noise. “Did he hear that his father was dead? That it’s safe to—”

  A harsh laugh. “After a while on the streets, kids don’t believe in ‘safe’ anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Zach agreed. “Street people are wary about those who try to help. Hell. I had no time to establish myself undercover.”

  “Which is why you need me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can tell you this: like we thought, Tyler ain’t the first youngster to up and disappear.”

  Zach’s blood chilled, running cold at the confirmation he hadn’t wanted to hear. “No,” he whispered.

  “Think so. The ever-popular ‘prey on those who can’t fight back.’”

  “People—kids—who won’t be missed if they vanish. No one will really notice.”

  “That’s right.” Jim coughed. “Really hard to judge if people get gone during the summer. We get a lotta transients on the streets, and when fall comes, we get even more turnover. Hard to keep track of folks. People disappear ’cause they’re leaving, heading to where winters are warmer, like New Mexico and Arizona. Or say they’re going to California for beaches or whatever.”

  “I’d imagine.” Plenty of people had moved south from Montana, too.

  They stood in silence for a minute, contemplating the homeless and hopeless. Zach’s guts tightened and wrenched. “I’m not going to get a good ending on this one, am I?”

  More coughing. “We aren’t, no.”

  Trying to ease the strain from tense shoulders, Zach said, “Let me know if more good info comes through. And this isn’t just about Tyler anymore. If you hear of another . . .”

  “Snatch,” the man in the alley supplied.

  “Snatch, kidnapping, abduction, you call, day or night. Any hint. I have the money and time to throw at this.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “It’s a perk of being private.” Still, Zach’s mouth twisted. He hadn’t wanted to go private.

  “I’ll call,” the guy said softly.

  Zach stepped back all the way to the building wall, letting the bus driver slowing on the street know that he wasn’t waiting for that line. Shoulders against the warmth of the red brick in the sun, he angled his body toward the dimness of the alley’s entrance where he sensed his man, and cupped a card wrapped in a twenty in his fingers. “These are my lady’s numbers. You don’t reach me, you call her.”

  Paper rustling, a choked laugh. “An accountant!”

  The better card for a cop than the ghost seer one. Zach said, “She’ll act and she’ll fight and she’ll stick.”

  The sound of a match, the smell of sulfur and new smoke. “Lucky you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you think the kids are dying here?” Zach asked bluntly.

  He felt the stare of the undercover cop. Heard his hesitation in the long, thrumming silence.

  “I trust your instincts,” Zach added.

  “I don’t think here in downtown,” Jim finally said. “Gotta admit I’ve got all sortsa bad feelings about this.”

  “I understand that.”

  Jim cursed. “Shoulda figured it out earlier.”

  Zach shrugged. “Always feel that, no matter what.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Got any idea of time period for me?”

  Jim didn’t say anything for a while.

  “I’m thinking, maybe, seven months.”

  Zach puffed out a breath. “Okay.”

  “Hard to tell though, street kids.”

  “Yeah, thanks a lot.”

  “One last thing, rumor’s cycling among the homeless that the kids are disappearing to the south, toward the Springs.”

  Zach swallowed. “I’m working south.”

  “Know that.”

  “Some sort of coincidence.”

  Another deep-throat-phlegm cough. “Don’tcha know ain’t nothin’ that’s coincidental, dude? It’s all fate.”

  Was it? This particular tangle? The Powers That Be arranging events?

  Only the sense of emptiness as the man faded away as soundless as one of Clare’s ghosts.

  Zach raised his voice. “Quit smoking!”

  A woman who’d walked up to the bus stop and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse gave him a filthy look.

  He smiled back. She slipped the smokes back into her bag.

  * * *

  Zach swung by Clare’s house and picked up more clothes, a couple more of her great-aunt Sandra’s journals.

  And his and Clare’s body armor.

  Then he drove back to the villa. He brooded until he heard the cheerful bark of Enzo, felt the cool breeze of the dog and saw the faint outline of the phantom as he stuck his head through the glass of the passenger window.

  “Hey, Enzo,” Zach said aloud. “Got news?”

  Maybe, but don’t want to talk about that yet.

  Zach’s thought went immediately to his lover. “Anything wrong with Clare?”

  Clare is fine.

  “Good to hear.”

  But you have disturbed thoughts. Thoughts about the greater spirits. I HEARD them.

  “Don’t know whether that’s good or bad for me,” Zach muttered.

  The dog pulled back from the window and turned his head to him. A well-defined head showing muzzle and forehead and ears and those silver-flecked smoky eyes of the minor spirit.

  If the angels are arranging things, it is to make them BETTER, Zach.

  He caught the gist. “Making sure we, who can help, are in place to help?” Still not too comfortable with the thought of angels. Or angels doing things Zach didn’t like.

  To stop bad things and spirits faster, Enzo said.

  Zach sure didn’t like thinking of more lost kids because he—and Clare—and other cops, weren’t around to stop the . . . evil. “And I don’t like thinking that the, uh, greater spirits used Clare’s injury and pain to fulfill their own goals.” He had a bad taste in his mouth.

  Enzo’s shrug rippled down his dog body. Who knows how far back this chain of events was set?

  The image of a battlefield, a chessboard, came to Zach, some great general looking at the lay of the land, seeing what might be. All the way back to when Clare was bitten by an evil ghost.

  Mrs. Flinton had called them in for that particular case. So they could defeat the malevolent spirit and save her great-grandson. And once Clare was wounded, she’d need a healer, a good spirit, and such a phantom lingered in Manitou Springs . . . where other evil lived? An evil he and Clare must discover?

  God, he didn’t know.

  “We gonna have to put up with a lot of manipulation of our lives?” he asked Enzo.

  I don’t know. But the dog sounded serene about the interference.

  Zach didn’t like the idea of being controlled at all, though he supposed he
should be grateful for his gift that might give him a look into the future.

  As if on cue, a huge crow flew across the highway, cawing. And back. Yeah, he saw it, whether real or spirit, he saw it, and knew what it meant. One for sorrow.

  He and Clare and Enzo were in the midst of a whole sea of sorrow.

  * * *

  By the time he drew up in front of the villa, Enzo had vanished again, and Zach could only hope he followed up on a scent trail. Zach didn’t say anything about angels or greater spirits or the Powers That Be to Clare. He’d want to come to his own conclusion about all that before he talked to her about it. She’d look at the thing from a different slant, for sure. Then they might discuss and agree or not.

  They plugged away at their various searches. Zach made some more calls of people he’d talked to before—both that day and earlier. But they found nothing new.

  Until Enzo dragged tail in as they watched the news in the living room before they went to bed.

  I have found them.

  He and Clare surged to their feet.

  “The boys!” she demanded. “Where are they, let’s go get them!” She angled toward Zach. “Should we call the police?” Then directed her next question back to Enzo. “Where are they? Where’s the cave?”

  Enzo sat, drooping, not looking at them. And Zach understood. “You found boys . . . and girls, too, didn’t you? You found the bodies.”

  Yessss. Enzo’s telepathic answer didn’t hiss but moaned.

  Clare hit the sofa again, as if her knees went out on her. She paled, touched her side. Zach wondered if her wound hurt or touching her ribs had become a new bad habit. “Should we call the police?”

  Zach limped into the bedroom and got his braces, his special shoes, and his weapon. “And tell them what? That a young French nun healer ghost told us a serial killer is on the loose and our equally . . . unhuman . . . phantom Labrador found the bodies?” He holstered his gun at the small of his back. “Where did you find the bodies, Enzo?”

  They are up in a tiny flat area surrounded by mountains. I don’t know if you can get there.

  “If the killer can get there, I can. You’ll lead me there?” Zach sat down and put his best brace on his left ankle, donned shoes made especially for people with foot drop.