Meanwhile, the surfer boys in the next booth were complaining about how cold it was in here. Little did they know.
After the waitress left, Amanda Lee opened the file, and I craned over for a gander.
A color copy of a photo stared back at me, and for a sec, I thought that there was no way the guy in the picture could’ve been a person of interest in my killing. He looked like he was in his thirties, with wavy, dark blond professor hair and a wiry, nonthreatening body. He was standing in a manicured yard, holding a hose and watering the lawn. It was like a neighbor had shot a photo of him while he hadn’t been aware. It even seemed like he’d looked up at the last minute, and . . .
I reared back when I focused on his eyes. Blue. The kind of blue that stood out from behind a wrinkled, shudder-inducing old hag’s mask?
“Meet Franklin Anson Bruckner,” Ruben said, nodding at the picture. “This was from Bruckner’s boss, an apartment-complex landlord who took a candid photo of his maintenance guy one day.”
“What is his background?” Amanda Lee said, touching the picture. I doubted she’d get any vibes from it, though, seeing as the guy had most likely never come into contact with the paper.
“My friend from Texas told me that Franklin was a person of interest because he showed up to volunteer at a community gathering to comb the area and find his neighbor, Tammy Harlow, the missing girl I told you about. The authorities were filming the crowd, keeping tabs on people, looking into everyone who showed up.”
“Because killers are often drawn to searches like this or make themselves useful in an investigation?”
“True, but they weren’t sure they were looking for a killer at that point. They still aren’t sure what happened to Tammy, but they were trying every avenue possible to get leads.”
I kept watching that image of Franklin Anson Bruckner. It seemed weird that he had a name. Killers like him weren’t real enough to need one.
Had this been the freak that’d chased me down and ended my life, then had gone on to ax fifteen more blond girls, like the dark spirit had bragged to me about?
I couldn’t help it—something a little insane made me reach out and harden my ghost hand, making it into a rake so I could brutally scratch the picture, just like I was erasing this son of a bitch’s face.
Amanda Lee guessed my intentions right away, and she shut the top of the folder over the photo, leaning her arms on it. Damn.
Twyla piped up. “I would’ve given the fucker a nail facial, too, Jen.”
Marg only sighed, creating a strange, airy sound above us. Ruben looked up, and Twyla shushed her. Marg shrugged an I’m sorry. She hadn’t dropped those human habits yet.
“What else do you know about this man?” Amanda Lee asked Ruben, her voice low, even a little disgusted.
“I know a fair amount. My Texas friend had a chat with him during the search party all those years ago. Just a casual talk, but he took good notes about it afterward, because he had that gut cop instinct about him. Tex also asked around town about Bruckner, and I took the liberty of doing some Internet surfing during my cheating-husband vigil today, too. Not that I got much on my end so far.”
“Does he match the profile of an organized, thrill-seeking killer?” Amanda Lee asked. “The type who would’ve murdered Jensen Murphy?”
I was still staring at that folder, wanting Amanda Lee to open it up again. It was like going to the snake house at the zoo: I hated the creatures, but whenever I’d seen them, I couldn’t tear myself away from staring. But this Bruckner thing was worse than a snake.
“Based on what you said about your latest vision, his profile is looking good so far,” Ruben said. Amanda Lee had told him that the information I’d gotten from my killer when he’d attacked me was from her own psychic vibes. She’d successfully helped him out on a case or two in the past, so even though he was a healthy skeptic about the supernatural, he always kept an open mind about her input.
“From what my friend Tex thinks,” he said, “Bruckner was a loner. He didn’t stay in one place long and worked at low-profile, menial jobs as he traveled across the states. There’s a possibility he even worked for money under the table, so he wouldn’t be documented everywhere he went.”
Amanda Lee sat up. “Please tell me he can be placed at some of the areas where other blondes like Jensen went missing.”
“I’ll be working on that angle, but I know Bruckner spent some time here in San Diego County, back when Jensen disappeared.”
A ragged jolt flew through me. I glanced up at Twyla and Marg. They were just as wide-eyed as I was.
Ruben kept going. “Tex said that he found out Bruckner was an ‘author.’ Wrote these loco pulp crime novels that he would share with coworkers. Lots of gore. Lots of women dying. When people didn’t exactly give him the Pulitzer for them, he’d let them know that they just didn’t understand his craft.”
“A misunderstood artist,” Amanda Lee said.
I interjected. “Right. They didn’t appreciate his smarts. Sounds like one mark of a psychopath.”
Amanda Lee went on. “What else, Ruben?”
“Tex got some information about Bruckner’s school days. He had the typical bad grades of a punk who refused to apply himself and was also aggressive with the other students. He’d get in trouble for ditching school, but he never did get arrested while he was an adult.”
“Maybe he knew enough to stay under the radar when he got older,” Amanda Lee said. “That’s a sign of an organized killer. Does he have a family?”
“Sounds like he was estranged from them. His parents are dead now, and his brothers couldn’t care less about him. From what Tex said about his younger life, there was an older brother acting as head of household, because the dad had a drug problem and the mom was MIA at the time. They had a couple cousins living with them, too, and the school counselor suspected that there might’ve been some sexual abuse when he was younger from one of those cousins. An older girl in her early twenties.”
I froze. “A blonde?”
Amanda Lee didn’t say anything at first. I could hear her heartbeat hitting the air. Then she asked Ruben the big question.
“Blond?”
“I’m not sure what color her hair was,” he said, “but that occurred to me, too. I’ll be looking into it.”
The waitress came by to refresh Ruben’s coffee, then told the humans their order would be right up.
He continued. “Are you ready for the most disturbing piece of news about him?”
“Always ready.”
Damned straight.
Ruben nudged back his ball cap. “Once, Bruckner was suspended because he was caught in the restroom during class, masturbating.”
Why did it always seem like places went quiet at exactly the wrong time? That’s what happened when Ruben had said masturbating, and the word echoed in the air. The surfers in the booth next door snickered.
Ruben didn’t give much of a crap, but he lowered his voice, anyway. “He was using a magazine to . . . um . . . aid him. But it wasn’t your average . . .” He searched for a way to say it.
Amanda Lee to the rescue. “Stimulant?”
“Yes, thanks.” Ruben pulled his hat bill back down and coughed. “He’d been tearing up pictures of blond women and piecing them back together.”
Shit. Major, hellfire, what-did-I-just-hear shit. I mean, didn’t it make perfect sense that Franklin Anson Bruckner grew up to ax women to death?
Amanda Lee sat back in her seat, taking it all in.
I talked to her, my form panic-flickering. “If that got him off, does that mean he did . . . things . . . to my body after I died and he cut me up? He didn’t tell me he raped me or the others, Amanda Lee. Wouldn’t the dark spirit have bragged about desecrating us like that, just to see my reaction?”
Marg’s voice traveled down to me. “D
o you really want to know that, Jensen?”
I wasn’t sure. What I really wanted was to throw up, but my damned form wouldn’t release any bile.
“Here’s the biggest thing, though,” Ruben said. “When Bruckner was a senior, there was a girl at his high school who went missing.”
“A blonde,” all of us ghosts said, just as Ruben did, too.
He looked around, but Amanda Lee pushed the file folder to him, attracting his attention.
“He sounds like a good candidate to me,” she said, back to being utterly calm. “Is there anything I can do to help? Any items he left behind that Tex has possession of? I can do a touch-read. And I’ll travel out there if I need to.”
“I’m afraid not. But here’s the good news, if you want to call it that. He was found hanged in his shithole of a Kansas City apartment in 1987, so if he’s our guy, then the disappearances and killings would’ve stopped then. Looks like he would’ve put an end to his murderous rampage all on his own.”
Wait. He’d killed himself?
“That can’t be right,” I said. “The dark spirit I’ve been talking to wasn’t depressed enough to end his life. He’s too full of himself, confident. And he told me that he was killed.”
Amanda Lee picked up on my despair. “Was there any evidence of someone hanging him, Ruben?”
“No. It was ruled a suicide. He even left a note, and it didn’t say anything about murdering women. He got fired from his last job, and it seems he couldn’t take any more rejection. But I’ll look into that, too. Otherwise, he fits our bill, and I’m not going to give up just because of one roadblock.”
The waitress brought the food, and the conversation tapered off.
My sense of violation didn’t, though. The dark spirit had told me that I’d been one of his first girls, and I almost felt responsible for the rest of them. What if I’d been strong and smart enough to escape his attack and hurt him back? How many blondes would still be alive?
I could imagine just how it’d gone with his other victims—him watching, hiding in a secret place with his mask on, his breath humid against the rubber. He would’ve held his ax the whole time, waiting for the perfect moment, when each of us inevitably went off by ourselves, never knowing it was a terrible idea.
After that, he erased us, disposed of us in a pile of limbs and lye, just like we were torn pictures from a magazine that could be thrown away.
I shivered and glanced out the diner’s window, like something was there, just waiting and watching. But I saw only parked cars and a morning that was gathering more summer clouds.
Soon, Ruben announced that he needed to wrap up yet another case before he started full throttle on our new leads tonight, and we said good-bye.
After we got to the car, Amanda Lee didn’t start the engine right away. She just sat, staring out the windshield. “Ruben’s going to find us answers,” she said. “I can feel it.”
I wanted to hold on to her optimism, but depression nagged at me. We sort of had answers, but mostly we didn’t. Would we ever?
Marg spoke. “Don’t lose hope, Jensen. Maybe we can even find this Franklin Anson Buckner in Boo World to question him ourselves.”
Twyla glanced at her, then looked out the car window.
Fat chance of finding Bruckner in this plane. I’d tried to track down other ghosts before, and it never panned out. The place was as big as the real world, and a reaper might’ve already moved him on from this dimension, anyway.
Amanda Lee started the engine, the Bentley purring as she backed out of the parking space. Something caught my eye.
A little girl in a pink-flowered sundress, like I used to have when I was ten, sitting on the curb, her head down, her long hair blowing in the wind. She reminded me of myself when I was little, before all this junk had started.
I looked at her for a few seconds, smiling, wishing life—or death—could be that innocent again, with my hair blowing in a wind, my only worries having to do with whether I’d play kickball that night or watch a rerun of Gilligan’s Island.
Then I realized that there hadn’t been any wind outside. And the girl’s hair . . .
Blond.
When she jerked up her head, a skeleton face leered at me, crazy-eyed and hysterical, mouth opening in a wide screech.
Twyla and Marg screeched in the backseat, too, especially when the little girl rushed to my window, plastering herself to it, pink ooze running down the glass as she gnawed at it with her toothless gums, trying to get to me.
I was beyond scared. So beyond that I could do only one thing.
Laugh.
Then laugh harder.
And I was still wildly laughing at her when Amanda Lee put pedal to the metal and sped away, leaving only phantom trails of pink on the glass, like macabre rips in time that were never, ever going away.
11
Amanda Lee took charge right away, driving crazily as Twyla freaked out in the backseat, her essence fritzing as she glued herself to the roof.
“What the freakin’ frak was that! What, what, what?”
I was still just laughing and laughing, and I couldn’t stop because I knew what’d been outside: another haunting by my killer. And he wasn’t going to stop doing it. Not until I laughed myself into a place where I wouldn’t care what laughter sounded like anymore.
It was one thing to see a phantom scalp herself in Suze’s parking lot, like last night’s haunting, but this had been a kid. A little girl who’d reminded me of myself when I’d been all innocent. It was almost like the dark spirit was attacking my good, pure memories now, trying to violate a time in my life that had no touch of evil to it.
He was taking everything away from me, little by little.
“Jensen?” Amanda Lee asked. We were on the freeway by now. “You’re pale.”
Marg’s voice rammed into Amanda Lee’s. “The car battery, Jensen. Use it! Don’t crack up on us like you did when you heard your killer on that recording!”
Car battery. Floor.
Right.
I managed to slide down until I was against it, hugging it, hiding my face. I couldn’t get the image of that little girl out of my head: her desiccated skin, her gums eating at the window in a slimy, pink mess. This was never going to be over. Not as long as he was still out there somewhere.
Twyla was still cussing and fussing, until Marg raised her voice.
“Stop this right now! What’s gotten into you, Twyla? You’ve seen all sorts of ghosts before.”
Teacher voice. And Twyla shut right up, probably because she was thinking the same thing I was: Marg wasn’t scared. Was it because of that big X on her chest?
I guessed nothing would scare you if you knew you were damned.
Amanda Lee just kept putting her foot to the pedal, the floor shuddering underneath me. I wasn’t sure where she could take me that mattered—even the happy house. He was here, there, everywhere . . .
Twyla was giggling in the backseat now, and it was getting me angry.
“Would you stop!” I yelled.
Silence.
Then Marg’s voice, a shredded whisper. “Oh God.”
Amanda Lee lifted her foot off the pedal for a sec, like she was shocked at Marg’s tone, but then she sped on.
Marg continued. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Do you know what’s happening here? Just listen to you two with your bad tempers and how you fly off the handle. The dark spirit got to you.”
Of course he had. Over and over and over again, with scalped women, death-bitch little girls . . .
“Last night,” Marg said, “when he appeared as Randy and changed into a misty form and then brushed against you, he found a way into your emotions. That’s why your tempers have been so foul—because of him. I was on the other side of the room, so he didn’t touch me, but . . .”
/> “Then if he’s in us, get him out of us!” Twyla bellowed.
Amanda Lee put a hand up to her ear, like Twyla’s staticky voice had gone to a higher frequency.
“Calm down,” Marg said. “If you don’t, then I’m going to get you out. And I mean straight out of this car.”
Twyla clammed up again, but I almost wanted the noise, the distraction. The more Twyla raved, the less I might have to think about the hauntings.
But those were nothing next to what Marg was telling us. My killer had found a way into me and Twyla? Was that why I’d been feeling extra crabby and impulsive ever since my murderer had reappeared—because he’d affected me?
Was that why I hadn’t been able to stop myself from going into Gavin’s dream, even though I’d known damned well it was a bad idea and a slap in the face to Suze?
Marg had more to say. “It’s all starting to make sense. The dark spirit didn’t take your essence last night because he found a new game to play with you, Jensen. And he keeps finding new games because he needs more fuel to keep going. He needs to keep upping the ante so he can fill up all the emptiness inside him.” She paused, then said, “That’s what he did—upping the ante—when he coached my killer on how to kill me.”
I felt the car taking a turn and, for no good reason at all, I wanted to start laughing again. Laughing like a crazy ghost in an attic.
Twyla’s voice was softer now. “So, what should Jen and I do about this?”
“Embrace the crazy,” I whispered, holding back another laugh. Little blond girl in a sundress, skeleton, gums, a dark mist that’s inside of me . . .
Amanda Lee spoke. “What we do is find a way to catch him. Or, at least, I do.”
I didn’t know what the hell they talked about the rest of the way—I was too busy dealing with a late rush of shivers and holding on to the battery, trying not to fall to pieces again. And I was too busy worrying about what my killer was going to throw at me next.
He’d gone after a memory of myself. Was he going to go after other precious recollections, like the ones I had of my mom and dad? All I had of them were memories.
Every Breath You Take Page 14
