Shadows of Old Ghosts

by Stephanie Zayatz

  Then he’d made eye contact with her and felt that weird thrill again, and she’d apparently done a bad job at keeping a neutral face.

  She cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m tired. Long night.”

  He glanced at her. She looked it. She had foregone the usual elaborate braid for a messy bun piled on top of her head. “Oh yeah?”

  “Mm. Terrible dream last night and I never got back to sleep.”

  She realized after a beat that he was still staring at her. She stared back. “What?”

  “Me too. Awful nightmare. I’ve been up since three.”

  There was a long silence.

  “That’s weird,” she said quietly.

  Jirel looked like he wasn’t sure what to say. He finished putting cream in his coffee and offered it to her, but she shook her head.

  “Black coffee and straight whiskey,” he said. “You really don’t fuck around.”

  He gave her a small smile, and she recognized that they were both thinking the same thing, that something weird had just happened. Moira was right, they had stumbled onto something dark, and it potentially had a hold of them too.

  “I’m straight edge as they come,” she murmured quietly.

  Jirel leaned against the counter and pushed his hair back out of his face. “Well—look, you can call me if you ever need anything. I mean I—I know you have a boyfriend.” She was silent for a second, and he misinterpreted her silence for something else. “I mean I just don’t want you or him to think I’m trying to—”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” Aviira said, shaking her head a little. “Is that what people are saying?”

  Jirel took a drink of his coffee to give himself an extra second. “That’s the rumor.”

  She sighed and whispered, “Fucking Jensen.” After shaking her head, she looked at Jirel. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  He nodded as neutrally as he could. “Okay. Well. The offer still stands.”

  She took a drink and stared him down over the rim of the mug. “Yesterday you were telling me that you think it’s better if we just get this case over with and go our separate ways.”

  “Yeah, it occurred to me later that it was kind of a dick thing to say.”

  “Kind of?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Jirel’s phone rang, breaking the awkwardness of the moment. He pulled it from his pocket and considered the number that was flashing under the newly shattered screen.

  “Police department.”

  “Answer it,” she said.

  He did. As he put the phone to his ear and answered, the door opened. Aviira watched his face as he concentrated on two things at the same time, momentarily stuck between the two. He turned away to take the phone call. She glanced back at the person who’d come into the room.

  “Hi,” the blonde said as she went to the coffee pot. “Jayne.” She offered her hand to Aviira.

  “Aviira.”

  “I know.” She poured herself a travel mug of coffee and glanced back at Jirel, nodded at him with her chin. “Nice to meet you. Tell Jirel when he’s done being an asshole trying to ignore me, I’d like to have drinks with you guys.”

  Aviira was a little taken aback by that. She stumbled over a response and finally nodded at her. Jayne flashed her a smile and left the room.

  When she looked back at Jirel, he had put a hand over his ear to hear the person on the phone. His face did not give an encouraging feeling.

  “She did what?”

  ***

  “Drove her car right into Cherry Creek,” Jirel murmured as they approached the scene. His voice had a tone of amazement to it.

  At six that morning, emergency crews found a car nose-down in Cherry Creek, barely five blocks from Aviira and Jirel’s apartment complex. The response crew had pulled the vehicle from the water, along with a woman inside, and identified her with the driver’s license in her purse, found in the vehicle.

  It was Elaine Turner.

  There had been one witness, a homeless man who’d watched the whole thing from under a tree on the curb about fifty feet from where the car had careened off the road, but by the time he’d managed to flag anyone down to call for help, she’d been in the water for nearly ten minutes.

  Aviira looked back to trace the trajectory of the vehicle as it traveled off the road, over the curb, and down into the embankment.

  “Tire marks,” she said. “She swerved and overcompensated.”

  “Probably rules out a suicide,” Jirel said.

  “Though it seemed to me like she had plenty of reason to call it quits,” Aviira said. “Fiancé dead a year ago, just found a couple bodies in her brand new house…”

  “Fuck,” Jirel said as they walked, his tone that of revelation. “I just remembered.”

  “What?”

  “She called me.”

  Aviira stopped to look at him. “Are you serious?”

  He took his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. “She left me a voicemail. Late last night. I must have not heard it ring. I listened to it on my way to headquarters this morning and then—”

  “Jesus, why didn’t you say so?”

  He eyed her for a tense second. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “We were talking about other things at the office, I just sort of forgot.”

  “What’d she say?”

  He put the phone on speaker and played the voicemail. Aviira stepped a little closer to hear better. Elaine’s voice was hesitant.

  “Yes, detective. Ah, it’s Elaine. Elaine Turner. We spoke earlier about the house I own where you found—well, anyway. You said to call you if I had any questions and I know it’s terribly late and you’re probably asleep but if…if you could maybe call me when you get this, I would appreciate it. I’ve just thought of—well, I’ve just remembered something about the house that maybe you might find useful? Anyway. I’d very much appreciate if you could call me. I’m sorry to bother you at such a late hour. All right. Goodbye.”

  The silence hung on for a few seconds before the call ended. Aviira looked up at Jirel and they stared at each other for a long moment as they considered what to do with this information.

  “Well, shit,” Aviira said finally. “I bet whatever that information was would’ve been really useful.”

  “Maybe,” Jirel replied as he put his phone back in his pocket. They kept walking.

  The scene was taped off to keep bystanders from getting too close, but the officer at the barricade let them through when they flashed their badges. The car had been pulled from the river and was sitting on the grass on the other side of the embankment, where it was being picked over by a forensics team. There was no question what was underneath the light blue tarp lying on the grass near the car. Aviira frowned.

  “Been almost three hours,” she commented. “They couldn’t have transported her out of here yet?”

  Jirel shook his head.

  Lieutenant Devaney saw them approaching from the sidewalk where several other officers were gathered and walked toward them. He had a clammy look to him this morning, skin a little paler than normal.

  “Sorry about the early morning, Detectives,” he said as he got closer. His voice was hoarse. “Soon as they identified her I remembered the name and thought you’d like to know.”

  “Appreciate it,” Jirel said. “What happened?”

  Devaney shrugged, turned to cough into his elbow. “Sorry. Coming down with a summer cold, the worst. Far as we can tell she swerved to avoid something in the road and went right off the road. That’s about that.”

  “You said there was a witness…”

  “Yeah, but he’s homeless, so.”

  Aviira’s eyebrows went up. “So what?”

  “So who knows if the story is reliable or not?” He shrugged. “We know she didn’t hit anything with the car, so it’s not likely there was a person in the road or anything like that. No tire tracks coming the other way, so probably not a car. It was four in the morning. Maybe she dozed off,
started to drift, woke up and overcompensated.”

  Jirel could see the look on Aviira’s face that said she wasn’t buying the whole thing at face value.

  “Is the witness still around?”

  Devaney laughed a little, which irritated Aviira even more. “Oh, sure, if you want to talk to him.” He pointed behind them. “He’s one of them over there. In the wheelchair, I think.”

  They glanced in the direction he was pointing. Five or six homeless men had gathered under the bridge about fifty yards away. Aviira turned back and started walking in their direction. Jirel shot a look at Devaney before following her.

  “What’re you thinking?” he asked when he caught up.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “But I’m irritated that he just wrote off an eyewitness statement because he was homeless.”

  “This feel a little coincidental to you?”

  “I don’t really believe in coincidences,” she said.

  His eyebrow went up. “You think someone had her whacked?”

  Aviira shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like she gave us incriminating evidence. But it is a little bit weird that she happens to own a house where some dark magic was apparently going on.”

  “And winds up dead a couple days after we find it.”

  “I thought that went without saying.”

  As they approached the homeless men, a quiet snicker began to chorus through the group. Jirel immediately felt his defenses go up, though he wasn’t sure why. Aviira seemed to be completely unfazed by it, even when one of them whistled. They were mostly older men, in their fifties, and had obviously been on the streets for some time.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” she said as she got close enough. “Which one of you saw the car take a dive this morning?”

  Jirel caught the looks that were turned in her direction. Someone said something crude involving wanting to take a dive into one of Aviira’s body parts, and a laugh circled around the group. She merely cleared her throat and put her hands on her hips, tapped a finger on her holstered gun.

  “Sure, like I haven’t heard that one before,” she said. “Come on, before I take you in for loitering.”

  The laughter died down and their gazes went elsewhere. From the back of the group, an elderly black man missing both legs above the knee wheeled himself forward.

  “I saw it,” he said, voice like gravel.

  “We have a winner,” Aviira said quietly. “The rest of you fuck off.”

  There was hesitation, but the man in the wheelchair looked back at them. “The lady’s packing heat, boys. I don’t think she’s fuckin’ around.”

  Slowly, they shuffled away down the embankment.

  “Sorry about them,” he said when they’d gone. “Turn into a pack of wild animals around a good looking woman.”

  Aviira didn’t acknowledge the comment. “You saw that car go into the river?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You see anything in the road before it went in?”

  The old man nodded with his chin toward the police set up behind them. “Already told those cops what I saw.”

  “Just take us through it again. Where were you when it happened?”

  “I was right here. Could see the road perfectly. I see this car coming up and all the sudden—I swear it—I saw someone in the road.”

  Jirel crossed his arms over his chest. “You saw someone in the road?”

  “Yessir. But I didn’t see nobody coming across the sidewalk or nothing. It was like all the sudden he was just there, in front of the car. And I start to yell cause, maybe he’s drunk or something and don’t see the car coming. And the car just come up on it and hit the brakes and goes swerving all over the road and come across the sidewalk down in the water like that.”

  Aviira swallowed. “And what about the person in the road?”

  “Well, I was watching the car. I come out and see the car in the water and I look up on the road to see if someone isn’t lying in the street but there was nobody there. So whoever was there just took off most like. I never saw nobody else till I flagged down a car.”

  “You said ‘he,’” Jirel said. “Was it a man you saw?”

  The old man shrugged one shoulder. “That’s what I thought. Big. Too tall to be a woman. But too dark to see what they was wearing or nothing. I just saw black. Coulda been a shadow for all I knew.”

  The two of them stared at him in silence for a long moment. Aviira cleared her throat quietly.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “The driver die?”

  “She did,” Jirel said.

  He nodded and leaned back in his seat, looked away. “Too bad.”

  The two of them walked back up the embankment to where Lieutenant Devaney was standing with some of the officers.

  “He said there was someone in the road in front of the car,” Aviira said. “Is that kind of witness statement irrelevant to you because he’s homeless?”

  Devaney shrugged. “Not sure what you’d like me to tell you, Detective. Whether there was a person in the road or not…the car didn’t appear to have hit anyone, and there was no sign of that up on the road either. So even if there was…our problem is still the woman who went into the river.”

  Aviira glanced at Jirel and he shook his head a little bit. It wasn’t worth pursuing with the police.

  “You find anything on those identities down in the shed?” Devaney asked after a moment.

  “No, actually,” Jirel said. “We were going to hand them over to you, see if you could dig up anything for us.”

  He nodded, then turned away to cough into his hand. The motion completely took over his body and he seemed to be in pain when he looked back at them. “You think these cases could be connected in any way?”

  Jirel shrugged. “We’re willing to consider anything at this point.”

  “Right, right. Well. I’m probably going to head home and sleep off this cold for a few hours, but I’ll get forensics to look at those identities for you and call you as soon as they find anything.”

  ***

  Aviira returned to her apartment for lunch and ended up falling asleep on the couch. Her early morning caught up with her and pounced the second she closed her eyes for a few minutes. When her ringing phone woke her a few hours later, the afternoon sun was blazing in through the balcony door and she was sweating. Hazy and disoriented, she reached for her phone and realized what time it was.

  “Sorry,” she said as she answered Jirel’s call. “I fell asleep.”

  “So did I.” He sounded just as half-asleep as she was. “Devaney just called me.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “What’d he say?”

  “He’s at his house, but forensics faxed him the identities on those bodies. Asked us to drop by and grab them. He sounded like shit.”

  “Great.”

  “You want me to go grab them and come meet you?”

  The idea was tempting, because it meant she could probably grab another quick cat-nap. She thought about it for a long moment. “No, I’ll come with you. If we can stop and get coffee on the way.”

  “Already way ahead of you on that one.”

  ***

  Nobody answered the door at Lieutenant Devaney’s house. They rang the bell several times, but there was no response. His car was in the driveway; they knew he had to be home.

  “Maybe he fell asleep again,” Aviira said.

  Jirel tried his cell phone. Nothing.

  She glanced in the front window. “I can see his back door is open,” she said as she held a hand up to shade her eyes. “You said he sounded like shit on the phone, are we sure he’s okay?”

  Jirel shrugged.

  Just out of curiosity, she tried the front door, but it was locked. She considered the back door through the window again. “How much trouble do you think I’d get in if I break into a cop’s house?”

  He frowned like he didn’t think that was a good idea. “He’s probably asleep
again. Left his phone in the other room or something.”

  She started crossing the front yard around the garage.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Jumping the fence.”

  He groaned. “Aviira, don’t.”

  She looked back at him. “Hey, he invited us.”

  “That doesn’t give us the right to just walk into his house.”

  “Stop being a pussy and come with me.”

  He glared, but she ignored him. Finally he sighed and followed her.

  The back yard was enclosed in chain-link, and there was a gate at the front. Aviira held it open for Jirel with a smile.

  “See? It’s not breaking and entering if the gate’s unlocked.”

  “I’m not quite sure that’s the actual law.”

  “Whatever.”

  She climbed up on the deck and knocked on the side of the frame around the screen door, which was wide open.

  “Lieutenant Devaney?”

  After knocking again, she slid the screen open. “Hello?”

  “He’s obviously not here,” Jirel said.

  “His door is wide open and he asked us to come over. What was that, half an hour ago?” Aviira said, looking back at him. “I don’t think a cop is dumb enough to leave his door open if he’s running out to the store for cough medicine. Besides, his car is out front. Frankly I’m a little worried at this point. Maybe he’s really sick or something.”

  Jirel held his hands out. She shrugged at him and stepped into the kitchen. She heard him sigh, but he followed her in anyway.

  “Lieutenant Devaney?”

  His cell phone was on the kitchen counter next to a half-eaten bowl of soup and a glass of water. Next to that, it looked as if someone had coughed up a frightening amount of blood all over the counter.

  “The fuck,” Aviira said. “See, I told you. Something’s wrong.”

  Jirel followed her through the living room and down the hall. The light was on in the bathroom, and when she looked in, she jumped.

  Patrick Devaney was slumped on the floor, pale as death and not moving. There was blood on his face—a lot of blood—like he’d had a sudden, terrible coughing fit. Aviira stepped into the bathroom and pushed him onto his back, put two fingers against his neck. Jirel stared down at the scene in shock.