Midnight Rain

by Kate Aeon

  She glanced over at him, puzzled. “What was?”

  “How you found your keys there.”

  “I have them clipped to the inside of the backpack. I don’t take any chance of not being able to find them when I’m in the parking lot or unlocking my door. It’s a safety measure. The faster I can get behind the door and lock it — whichever door it might be — the better off I am.”

  “I ran a check on you,” Brig said as they were walking to her front door. “I found out you have a carry-concealed license.”

  Alan was startled. Phoebe nodded.

  “You have a gun with you right now?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In here.” She opened the front flap of that backpack — the flap her hand had rested on all night while she was sitting in the ER in her wheelchair — and Alan saw a flash of wood and dark metal. “Also my permit if you need to see it.”

  “Browning,” Brig said, glancing in.

  “Mark III. It’s a good gun.”

  “It is. You keep up with practice?”

  “Twice a week at the shooting range since I was able to stand up. I have a problem with stability because of the bad leg, so I don’t dare let myself get rusty.”

  “This was because of your ex.”

  “Yes.”

  Alan said, “But you put him into a coma. You did this knowing that he was in a coma? You went to all this trouble?”

  Phoebe glanced at him. “I did it because no one could promise me that he wouldn’t come out of the coma.”

  “But even so.”

  “I knew that if he ever came out of the coma and was able to get around, he would come after me again. I knew it. And now it looks like even without coming out of the coma, he’s still coming after me.”

  Alan sighed. “Phoebe, the FBI called you yesterday and told you he’s dead. That they’ve closed his case.”

  “And yet someone with a tremendous amount of money to spend on spying on me is calling me threatening to kill me, and he sounds exactly like Michael, and he knows things that only Michael knew, and you and...” She paused, and Alan realized that she’d almost mentioned Chick, whose presence was something that Alan wasn’t ready to confess to Brig just yet. “You’ve been threatened, too — and warned,” she said, and that was about as careful as Alan guessed she could be.

  Brig looked from one of them to the other. “You received notice that your ex is dead?”

  Phoebe unlocked her door, opened it, and let Brig go in first. “I did. And just after the FBI called to tell me that Michael was dead, Michael called to tell me it was time for me, and you, and Alan, to join him.”

  “Join him... in being dead?”

  “That was the feeling I got from the call.”

  “So. He threatened me in this phone call as well?”

  “Yes.”

  Brig turned to Alan. “You were there for this call?”

  “No.”

  He turned back to Phoebe. “You have no other witnesses, then.”

  “No,” Phoebe said.

  “And these calls aren’t traceable by *69.”

  “No. Not so far.”

  “And your answering machine hasn’t caught any of them?”

  Phoebe sighed. “I had voice mail and caller ID. Yesterday I discovered that I haven’t had either since... well, probably a bit before this started. Ah… I have a bit of a problem with my bill.” She shook her head. Alan could see her struggling to decide whether she ought to say something or not. “At the moment, I have seventy-one dollars and change in my bank account. A check due from Psychic Sisters hasn’t gotten here yet, but it’s going to be smaller than usual. And two more weeks to make rent and cover the electric bill and water. I have no room in the budget for frills. None at all.”

  Alan leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Why didn’t you say something? I could have helped you out with that.”

  And she stared into his eyes and murmured, “I didn’t want you to think of me as a gold-digger.”

  Brig, oblivious to that last interchange, sighed. “We’re going to set up an answering machine and caller ID for you. We’ll be recording calls. Besides, you need to have some idea when the stalker is calling. Give yourself a chance to prepare for the call.” He looked down at her and smiled a little. “Threatening me would be a different crime we could pin on this bastard whenever we find him. Something else to pile onto the charges. But I think he’s already got enough to put him away for a while.”

  Phoebe was staring at her dining room table, Alan realized. Staring at it like it was poison.

  He moved past Brig to see what she was looking at. And saw the mug that had so upset her the day before. And dead roses scattered all around it.

  “I’m guessing this was not here when you left, Ms. Rain,” Brig said.

  “It wasn’t. And please call me Phoebe.” Alan heard a tremor in her voice.

  “Dead roses.”

  “He told me they were flowers for my funeral,” Phoebe said.

  Brig turned to look at her. “During the phone call, he mentioned the flowers?”

  “No. That was... I fell asleep on the couch yesterday while it was still sunny out. Maybe one o’clock, maybe a little later than that. And I slept until almost midnight, when I had a nightmare that woke me up. I dreamed that Michael was here and that he was telling me that he was coming to kill me and that he was giving me flowers for my funeral. And I had a hard time waking up, and when I did, the rose was there.”

  Brig frowned. “You often have nightmares?”

  “Recently I’ve had some bad ones. I sometimes had nightmares about the shooting at school — a lot after it happened, and less over the last year. But the nightmares about Michael have only been in the last few weeks.”

  “I saw the aftereffects of one,” Alan said. “I thought she’d been doing drugs — she had a very sluggish pupillary response, dry mouth, some paranoia, rapid bounding pulse, rapid respirations. But there wasn’t anything in the house, and she didn’t have the opportunity to hide anything.”

  “You checked me for drugs?” Phoebe said, and she looked at him like he’d just kicked her. Maybe in her bad knee.

  “I thought you might have taken too much pain medicine for your knee. So I looked for pain meds. I didn’t find out until later that you didn’t have anything in the house but aspirin and Tylenol.” It embarrassed the hell out of him that he’d thought she might be a druggie, and now it doubly embarrassed him that she knew he’d thought it. “When I came over, you looked very unstable. I was afraid I might have to take you to the emergency room, and I wanted to see if I could figure out what was causing your symptoms.”

  “You figure her response was just the nightmares?” Brig asked him.

  “I couldn’t find any other explanation. But I’ve never in my life seen anyone react so badly to nightmares. I couldn’t have sworn, in those first few minutes after I got there, that you weren’t going to pass out,” he said, turning back to Phoebe.

  “Did she call you?” Brig asked him, and Alan shook his head.

  “I heard her screaming. I tried to break her door down or find some other way into her place. It sounded like someone was killing her.” He didn’t mention Chick’s warning. He should, he thought; he should let Brig know that Phoebe wasn’t the only potentially crazy person in this scenario. But he just couldn’t. Telling about Chick would somehow make her less real. He couldn’t do that.

  “And how did you get in?”

  “Eventually she came to the door and opened it. By then, I thought she was dead, but when I saw her— ” He remembered again how panicked Phoebe had looked, and at the same time how completely out of it.

  “We’re going to do a substance check, too, Ms. Rain,” Brig said.

  “I don’t do drugs.”

  “I understand that. But you’re describing strange sleep patterns and nightmares and other things that don’t make sense. Have you considered the possibility t
hat someone might be drugging you?”

  “No.”

  Alan hadn’t considered that either.

  “Do you have anything you drink out of regularly?”

  “The mug with the roses around it,” she said. “My teakettle. That’s about it.” She frowned. “I have loose-leaf green tea. I suppose someone might mix something in that, but— ” She stood, head tilted, looking around her room as strangers crawled over it, taking her phones apart, bagging the roses and the mug and taking samples of the water in her teakettle, and she frowned. “It didn’t happen every time I drank my tea, but there have been a few times when I drank it and felt very soothed afterward. And then fell asleep even though I didn’t mean to. I didn’t really think anything of it.”

  Brig said, “We’ll look into it.” He sighed. “Now I need to ask you — who aside from your ex-husband would have reason to want to hurt or kill you? Who would want to take such elaborate measures rather than just finding you away from your home and killing you? Because the method here is odd. Much of what is being done here is geared to frighten you without actually harming you.”

  “I suppose Michael’s family would have reason to want to hurt me. He has brothers. And one sister. I know that Ben Margolies at Moonstruck has my phone numbers and knows that I work at the psychic service. He got me the job, actually. And — I think he likes me, but...” She shrugged. “I’ve made mistakes about people before.”

  “Margolies. Moonstruck,” Brig wrote. “That the New Age store on University in Tamarac?”

  Phoebe nodded.

  “Margolies the owner or an employee?”

  “Owner.”

  “Right. I’ll get to him today. Anyone else?”

  “Maybe the parents of the two children who were killed in the shooting.” She looked bewildered, completely at sea, and Alan ached for her. He couldn’t think of anyone who had reason to want him dead. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to kill a person as gentle and kind as Phoebe.

  But people were strange. This was something that years in the ER had ground into him. They did weird, horrible things to each other, things that not even they could explain rationally when they were questioned later.

  Brig settled Phoebe on the couch and started asking her a lot of questions — where people she had named might be, how she’d come to know them, why she was so sure that Michael was still behind what was happening.

  Alan tuned out. He walked back to where one of the techs was checking for fingerprints and the other one had both of the phones apart and the pieces spread out on the table, and he tried to figure out why Chick had involved him in this. She’d told him — through Phoebe — that if they didn’t help each other, one of them was going to die.

  But if she had not appeared to either of them, he would never have gotten to know Phoebe.

  And he would have come home from work some morning and found crime scene tape around her front door and guys taking pictures of a blood-spattered corpse in the front room. And he would never have known what he missed. He would never have suspected the thrill her body offered, her passionate responses and sheer exuberance at his touches. He would never have known how strongly he could want to be with a woman he didn’t even really know. He would never have dared to hope that somewhere his daughter still existed — that she still thought about him, that he still mattered to her.

  He would have lost so much.

  But he wouldn’t have been in any danger.

  Why was this happening to him, then?

  And why was it happening to Phoebe? Which lunatic in her life was bent on destroying her? How was he doing what he was doing to her? And why was he doing it?

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Yo. Brig. Her phones aren’t bugged, but both of them are tapped.”

  Phoebe turned to look over the back of the couch, and there was Hooter Duffy, holding up a little monitor with a light that actually glowed green. “They’re tapped?” she asked.

  Hooter nodded. “I’d guess your stalker has a listening post close to here that lets him hear everything you say on the phones. And, for that matter, if he’s technically proficient, he could set up a way to make your phone ring before he talked to you on either line so that you would think you were answering real calls. Calls made through a tap from a listening post wouldn’t show up in a *69 search, either.”

  Brig was on his feet and across the room in just a couple of steps, looking at what Hooter was showing him.

  “That’s how he’s doing it?” Phoebe gasped. “That’s the way he’s been reaching me? Oh, my God.” And then she felt herself get light-headed. “Oh, my God. Then that means that he’s been inside my house. Touched my phones. Was actually in the house when he left the rose on me.”

  She realized Brig was staring at her with a strange expression on his face. “What exactly did you think was happening?”

  “I thought... I don’t know. That Michael’s spirit was doing it.” She felt her face go hot and her hands flew over her mouth. “I know it’s stupid. Or gullible. But I didn’t want to believe that he had actually been in here. Because as bad as a ghost would be, a real live person is worse.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” Brig said. “We’re going to have to have someone watch your place, Phoebe. And have a couple of detectives go door to door and see if they can find out where your stalker has his watch post. Someone has to have seen something.”

  Phoebe closed her eyes.

  The techs were moving into the downstairs bedroom to see if they could find any evidence of the stalker in there. Brig headed for the door.

  Phoebe just stood there, while the truth that someone had been in her house — with her there — settled in.

  She overheard Brig tell Alan, “You two look beat. Why don’t you take her over to your place for a couple of days — if you wouldn’t mind having her there. Looking at the two of you, I’m guessing you wouldn’t. Just until we have a chance to get this all sorted out. The guys are likely to be here all night, and if you’re here you’re going to be in the way.”

  Alan said, “Sounds like a good idea. I’ll help her pack up a bag and get going.”

  “I have to go, too, but they’ll call me if they find anything more,” Brig said. “And I’ll call you.”

  Phoebe started to protest that she wasn’t really ready to be pulled out of her house, and then she thought of Michael standing over her while she slept and putting a rose on her chest — and she thought of the nightmare in which he was touching her and she couldn’t wake up. And she shuddered. “I’ll go pack right now,” she said.

  She hurried into her room and shoved a couple of pairs of jeans, shirts, and underwear into a brown paper bag. Gathered her toothbrush from the bathroom, along with a hairbrush and some shampoo. Packing took her about three minutes.

  “I’m ready,” she said, and Brig and the techs and Alan all turned to stare at her.

  Brig said, “You’re kidding.”

  “I live light.”

  She grabbed her tarot decks in their silk-and-wool bags and dropped them into the brown paper bag.

  “What are those?” Brig asked her.

  “Tarot decks.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t want to leave them behind. I don’t want Michael touching them.”

  And Brig said, as gently as a man could who was showing clear signs of annoyance, “Michael Schaeffer is dead, Phoebe. Dead. We don’t know who is doing this to you, but we know who isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “The man who calls just sounds like Michael.” She let it drop, but she was still sure that somehow, somehow, it really was Michael coming after her.

  Alan and Brig exchanged glances, and Phoebe felt a little twinge of uneasiness. They thought she was crazy. Or unbalanced. Or something.

  But Alan came over to her and put an arm around her and said, “The techs have all the stuff they need right now, and you have a little stuff. We can just head over to my place for a while. A cou
ple of days, probably, and they’ll find out where this lunatic is hiding, and they’ll put him in a cell, and then you can get your life back.”

  Phoebe couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her laugh.

  He didn’t say anything as they walked from her place to his. He just held her hand.

  At Alan’s she started to put her things in his guest bedroom. “I don’t want to crowd you,” she said, but he smiled at her.

  “You aren’t crowding me. You’re the best thing that has happened in my life in longer than I can remember.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. For an instant he looked like he was hurting. Phoebe suspected that he was remembering his lost daughter.

  “Hey,” she said, “think good thoughts.”

  He smiled at her. “Better thoughts, anyway.” Then he sighed and shoved his hair back from his forehead in a worried gesture. “Could you let me talk to Chick again? Find out some more details about what she’s been trying to tell us, maybe?”

  Phoebe shook her head slowly. “I’m not a medium. I have only heard spirits, I guess twice in my life. Once was when I heard my grandmother telling me to run, in the few days before Michael caught up with me. And I didn’t listen then. The second time has been with Chick, who has gone to a lot more effort to force me to pay attention. I can’t call her, though, Alan. Mediums say that they can see the spirits of the dead surrounding the living. I can’t do that. I look at you and all I see is you. I read cards. I’m pretty good at that, and sometimes I get very specific answers by reading cards. I could do a reading about Chick if you want. But I can’t bring her here. I can’t even promise I’ll hear her the next time she talks to me. I don’t know how she does what she’s doing, and if she doesn’t do it again, we won’t hear from her again.”

  He looked down at his feet then away from her. “I figured it was something like that.”

  “I’ll read for you,” Phoebe said. “Maybe I can get something useful about Chick that way—”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I was serious when I told you up in my office that I don’t think I could stand to hear any more about Chick, or my future. It’s too strange.” And then he said, “But since you have your cards, could you do a reading about Brig? He’s — should I tell you what’s going on with him?”