“Mama, can we trouble you for some hot cocoa instead of coffee?” I asked. I was worried that Heath might be suffering a mild form of shock, and as he’d pretty much skipped breakfast, save for a few handfuls of cereal, I thought the sugar might be what he needed.
“Of course!” she said, already turning to fetch us the order.
I guided Heath to a cozy corner where we weren’t likely to be overheard and sat down across from him without saying a word. He sat there numbly, his eyes troubled and his hands still shaking slightly. I waited until Mama had delivered our cocoa and biscuits. I had to encourage Heath to take up the cup and sip his drink, but after a few swallows he seemed better still. “What did you see?” I asked him after he’d set his cup back down.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Her name was Amy. She was sweet, you know? I had the sense that she was pretty naive and innocent, just out for a walk in the warm night when out of nowhere she was grabbed from behind and stabbed. I could feel her shock and her pain. It’d been quick, but not quick enough. Her throat was slashed too, but it wasn’t deep enough to kill her quickly. It took a few minutes. . . .”
Heath’s voice trailed off as he put his fingers up to his neck again and swallowed hard. I winced and reached out to squeeze his free hand.
“Did she know who grabbed her?” I asked when it looked like he could talk again.
Heath shook his head. “No. She just kept saying ‘Why?’ to me. She knew she was dying. She knew she was being murdered, but she didn’t understand why. It felt so random.”
“Did you get her to cross over?” I asked, knowing that if Amy was still grounded, as I suspected she was, Heath would’ve worked telepathically to talk her into crossing to the other side.
He leaned forward in his seat and rubbed his hands together as if they’d gone cold again. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to her beyond what’d happened during her murder, Em. Something else came into the ether.”
My brow furrowed. I hadn’t sensed anything else. “Something else?”
He nodded but stared at the ground while he tried to explain. “I was trying to help Amy, waiting for her to settle down a little, when something sort of entered my energy.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” I said to him, thoroughly puzzled. I’d felt the violence surrounding us, and a hint of the girl Heath was connecting with, but nothing more.
“I know,” Heath said, finally looking up at me. “It’s hard to explain, but I felt this energy try to connect directly to me and only me. For a few seconds it seemed to enter my thoughts and try to take them over. And it let me see what it was about, and it was bad. Like evil bad.”
“What did it show you?”
Heath shut his eyes again. “Blood. Whatever it was, it lusted for blood. The smell, the taste, the texture of it. Like . . . a blood addict, and I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what it felt like.”
I remembered the overwhelming scent of blood that’d wafted under my nose while I stood next to Heath on the sidewalk. “I felt a tinge of that,” I admitted.
“You felt it?” he asked me.
“Sort of. While I thought you were communicating with Amy, I smelled this overpowering scent of blood just under my nose. It was so potent I nearly gagged.”
Heath nodded like he understood perfectly. “The thing of it is, Em, that I didn’t get the sense that all that blood filling my thoughts came only from Amy. It felt like there were others.”
“Others?” I asked.
Heath nodded.
I shook my head. “That could be bad.”
“Yep.”
“What else did you get from this energy?” I asked.
“It’s hard to describe,” Heath said. “I don’t even know if it was human, Em.”
“You said that it tried to take over your thoughts. What’d you mean by that?”
Heath lifted the cup of cocoa and held it between his hands. “For a few seconds after I became aware of this thing, it crept into my mind and I couldn’t think straight. I mean, Em, I couldn’t even remember my name for a tick or two.”
“How long did it last?” I tried to hide the alarm I felt because I’d never seen any hint of an assault on Heath’s energy the whole time I’d been standing next to him.
“A few seconds,” he said. “I heard you call my name, but I didn’t make the connection until you touched my face and I could focus on you. And even after that, I had a hard time thinking straight. I know you drove me here, but I don’t remember much beyond you leading me back across the street.”
I stared at Heath for several seconds. I wondered worriedly if perhaps there was something to Luke’s story after all. There was a spook I couldn’t sense that had tried to take over Heath, and I’d been oblivious other than smelling blood. “Did it say anything while it was trying to take you over, honey?” I desperately wanted to figure this thing out.
“No. But . . .” Heath’s voice trailed off and he seemed to be struggling with what he wanted to say next. “There was a moment, Em, just a second really, when I felt like killing somebody. Like . . . I was thirsty for it.”
I shuddered and sat back in my chair. “Whoa.”
Heath nodded. “We’ve been under assault from spooks before where they’ve taken us over, but this was different. This was so fast and without any warning. One minute I’m trying to help Amy and the next my mind’s being taken over by something made of pure evil.”
Heath and I stared at each other for the next several seconds without saying a word. We didn’t need to. At last I said, “I hate this case.”
“Me too. Wanna quit?”
“Yes. But I know we won’t.”
Heath broke into a lopsided grin. “Sucks being a woman of your word, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “Some days it sucks more than others.”
Heath got up and pulled out his wallet. After leaving a twenty underneath his coffee cup, he reached for my hand. “Come on, beautiful. Let’s go find Gil and tell him we made contact with the murdered girl. Maybe we can find a different place to connect to her energy, away from that thing, whatever it was.”
• • •
We found Gil hunched over his old laptop in my condo. Doc was sitting on his shoulder, preening himself and fluffing his feathers. Doc has a serious crush on Gilley, and every time Gil is nearby, my sweet birdie makes a point of getting himself to look as pretty as possible. The scene was doubly sweet because I noticed that Doc would periodically tilt his head to the side and make kissing noises in Gil’s ear. Gil would respond absently by making the same kissing noises back. It was a lovefest.
“Hey,” Gil said when he finally looked up at us. “How’d it go?”
“It went,” I told him, heading straight to the couch. Heath sat down next to me and I let him take the lead. “We made contact with the victim.”
Gil paused his typing to lower the lid of the laptop. “Was it rough?” he asked, probably taking note of Heath’s reserved countenance.
“It was, actually. Her name was Amy, and I got the initial M attached to her last name. She felt young too. In my mind she was in her late teens, but maybe she was just immature. I got a sense of light hair color too—blond, I think—and the night she died, she’d been wearing a new white dress. She made a point of telling me that; I think because she was preoccupied with it when she was attacked. Another detail she gave me was that she’s related to an Ellen or a Helen. Might be a sister or a mother figure. She asked me to find them for her because she was having a hard time getting to them. On the night she was murdered, she was stabbed multiple times and her throat was cut, but it took her a little while to die. Whoever killed her came from behind and she never saw his face. Hard to tell if it was Luke or not because I don’t think she knows.”
As Heath spoke, my attention went between him and Gilley, but it quickly settled on
Gil, because he was wearing the most confused look on his face. After Heath had finished talking, Gil said, “Buddy, I have no idea who you made contact with, but whoever this Amy person is, she wasn’t last night’s victim.”
I sat forward. “Wait . . . what?”
Gil opened his laptop and peered down at the screen. “The woman murdered last night was named Brook Astor. She was twenty-nine. A pretty brunette who didn’t die slow. She was stabbed a dozen times, three times directly into the heart before her throat was cut. The coroner says Brook was dead before she even hit the ground. Oh, and one more little tidbit. Brook was eight weeks pregnant when she was murdered.”
I sucked in a breath. “She was pregnant and stabbed twelve times?” I was repulsed by the idea.
“Yes. The coroner’s report with photos was released to the cops this morning. I obtained a copy through back channels.”
By back channels, Gilley meant he’d hacked into the PD’s computer network, but I wasn’t about to call him on it. Besides, I was way more concerned with the fact that Heath had apparently bumped into a completely different murdered woman on the same street. “So who did we make contact with?” I asked out loud.
“Got me,” Gil said.
Heath shifted in his seat, and I could see him mentally going over the information he’d gotten from Amy. I could tell he might be doubting himself, but I knew better. “That could explain the scent of blood,” I told him, trying to put the pieces together.
Heath nodded absently. “Two woman stabbed to death on the same street, though?”
“It’s Boston,” I told him. “Not the safest city in the world. Besides, there’s no telling how long poor Amy has been haunting that spot. Her ghost could be a hundred years old.”
Heath ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t get that feeling, though, Em. I mean, maybe her ghost could’ve been a few decades old, but you know how spooks from centuries past feel different?”
I did know. It’s tough to put into words, but a ghost from the eighteen hundreds feels very different from a ghost from the late nineteen hundreds. It’s sort of in the way they communicate. The older the ghosts, the more formal and reserved they tend to be.
“Are you sure you got the name right?” Gil asked. “Maybe it was Brook and you just missed the name and the age.” I knew he was trying to be helpful, but he came across as a little too doubtful for my taste.
“I know what she told me, Gil,” Heath said, his voice a bit hard.
“Sorry,” Gil said quickly.
Heath sighed. “It’s cool, dude. What can I say? I only tuned in to one dead girl today, and it wasn’t the murdered girl from last night.”
Gil began typing on his laptop as if he had a sudden thought. A moment later he said, “Whoa!”
I leaned forward. “What’s ‘whoa’?”
“I put a search into the Boston Globe, and guess what I pulled up.”
“Do we have to guess?” I asked wearily. “Or can you just tell us?”
Gil made a face and swiveled the laptop around so that we could see the screen. Heath and I both squinted at a headline that read, MURDER ON COMM AVE. The tagline underneath read, Young woman’s throat slit in brutal stabbing attack.
“When was that?” I asked. I couldn’t quite make out the date.
Gil swiveled the laptop back around. “April sixteenth, nineteen seventy-five.”
My brow shot up and Heath looked equally surprised. “I knew I wasn’t wrong,” he said.
“The victim’s name was Amy?” I asked Gil, who appeared to be skimming the article.
He nodded absently. “Amy Montgomery. She was eighteen. According to her roommate, she went out for a late-night walk because she couldn’t sleep. When she didn’t come home, the roommate went looking for her and found her body a few doors down.”
“Did they catch the killer?” Heath asked.
Gil typed something and skimmed more of the screen before he answered. “Yes. The brother of her best friend was charged six years later and convicted. He got life.”
I turned to Heath. “Think whoever tried to get into your head was Amy’s killer?”
Heath shrugged. “Don’t know. Could’ve been.”
“I’m lost,” Gil said.
Turning to him, I explained that a spook had tried to take Heath over while he was communicating with Amy. “If Amy’s killer is dead, then his ghost could’ve come back to the scene of the crime and tried to get inside Heath’s mind.”
Gil frowned and typed some more on his computer. “Couldn’t have been the same guy,” he said after a bit.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because Amy’s killer—Guy Walker—is still alive. At least he was alive as of six months ago. He gave an interview to the Globe last November and you’re not gonna believe what he says happened on the day he killed Amy.”
“Try us,” Heath said to hurry Gil along.
“He claims that a demon made him do it.”
I shuddered, but then I wondered how common that excuse was. Certainly that was a common theme with schizophrenic sociopaths. “Any hint in Walker’s record of schizophrenia?”
Gil scanned his computer screen. “None that I can find, but I think most people would read the article and think it a foregone conclusion.”
I lay back against the cushions, thinking about the creepy coincidence of Guy Walker murdering a woman on Comm Ave in exactly the same manner that Brook Astor had been murdered. And this whole “demon made me do it” excuse was a bit too close to home to ignore.
“Think Walker’s demon could be connected to Luke’s demon?” Heath asked me.
I nodded. “It’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. What do you think?”
Heath raised his arm toward me as if to show it to me, and when I looked, I saw that it was covered in goose bumps. “The goose bumps never lie,” he said. “There’s a link.”
I reached out and gripped his hand, rubbing away the goose bumps. “What do you want to do?” I said to him. I was ready to quit this gig. It felt creepy and dangerous on a level that we’d experienced too often before, and had been frustratingly helpless to quit. But this time was different. We could walk away without fear of getting sued into the ground by a network hungry for ratings. The worst that would happen to us if we walked this time was that we might be accused of being accomplices in a murder, but I had faith in Mack as my attorney, and also the solid alibi that the recordings gave us. I also considered that if we walked, we’d feel pretty guilty about it, but I was willing to shoulder that if Heath wanted out.
So it was with some surprise when he replied, “I think we need to stick with this case for now. This could be bigger than we originally thought. More lives could be at stake if we don’t keep digging.”
I nodded, knowing what I had to do next. “I have to go back to Comm Ave.”
Heath’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
“One of us has to try and make contact with the girl who was murdered yesterday, sweetie. And after what happened to you today, I don’t think it’s safe for you. That leaves me to try.”
Heath gave me a look that clearly said he was not about to be left behind. “We’re going together,” he said firmly.
“Okay.” I relented. “But you’re wearing magnets. And I want you to wait on the other side of the street.”
“No.”
“Heath . . . ,” I said with a sigh.
“I’ll wear the vest, but I’m not going to be that far away from you, Em. If you get in trouble, it’ll come on fast and furious.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told him. “Whatever this spook is, it apparently likes to haunt men, not women.”
Heath scowled. “Yeah, it doesn’t like to haunt women. It likes to kill them. I’m going with you. I’m wearing a vest. And I will be on the same side of the street.”
“Okay,” I said, giving in with another weary sigh. “How about we get some subs and map out a plan?”
Heath’s hard expression softened. “I could eat.”
“Me too!” Gil said enthusiastically. Of course, Gil could always eat.
I stood up, stretching. “I’ll go this time,” I told them. “It’s my turn anyway. Write down your orders, boys.”
Gil reached for his phone and tapped at the screen. A few seconds later I had an incoming text from him. “Turkey BLT on wheat,” I read.
Heath followed Gil’s order by texting it to me, and after kissing him on the lips, I grabbed the keys from the dish on the counter and headed out. As I got into the car, I smiled wickedly. That’d been a little too easy.
I drove straight to Comm Ave and had to circle the block twice before I found a parking spot. Getting out of the car, I turned my phone to silent and jogged down toward Courtney’s place. I slowed when I was in sight of the door. I then walked on the outside edge of the sidewalk, wary of the spot where Heath had encountered Amy. Hastening my pace, I continued down the sidewalk to the second door marked with the big yellow X. Once I was there, I paused to take a few deep breaths. The stairs leading up to the door were crisscrossed with more yellow tape, and the stains on the steps indicated why. There were rust-colored blotches that turned my stomach. Backing up slightly so that I stood on the very edge of the curb, I eyed the sidewalk up and down the block. A makeshift memorial had been set up at the base of the steps and two bouquets of wilting flowers leaned against the stone column to the side of the stairs. Briefly I wondered whom they might have been from, but I knew I couldn’t spend time speculating. I stood still and closed my eyes, reaching out with my sixth sense. A series of sensations assaulted me. I felt the dramatic violence of the area. I felt the fear and panic of the victim, and then I also felt her pain. Involuntarily, I put a hand over my chest. It wasn’t quite like I could feel the knife going into the poor woman, but it was close to that sensation. She’d felt many of those stab wounds before one had pierced her heart to end her life and I shuddered against the sensation of that coup de grâce, because it felt the most pronounced. I could also smell that familiar scent of blood wafting under my nose, and I had to fight hard against the ensuing nausea it caused. And through this sort of chaos of sensations I attempted to find and talk to the spirit of the murdered woman, but it was like flailing around in a smoke-filled room. She didn’t seem to be within easy reach of me.
The Ghoul Next Door: A Ghost Hunter Mystery Page 13
