Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  Amanda Lee finally said something. “Enlighten us, Ruben.”

  He wiped at his nose with a bandanna and opened the cover of his computer pad, waking up the screen by pushing a button at the top of the device. “I heard from yet another online contact shortly after we left the diner this morning, and I spent the afternoon ignoring my other cases to follow up on what he offered. Not that I mind so much. Background checks aren’t the spice of my life.”

  After he touched a tiny, colorful app square on the screen, the computer lit to a blinding-white page that looked like it showed e-mails. After inspecting it and obviously not finding what he was searching for, he went to another page, and waited for it to load.

  “Anyways,” he said, “about this new person of interest . . . Brace yourself—it’s not your typical sort of suspect.”

  My patience was already wearing thin, but before I lost my temper again, he glanced at his Buck Rogers computer, where a picture had come up on the screen. And from what I could see . . .

  This person of interest definitely wasn’t anyone like Franklin Anson Bruckner.

  Ruben handed the pad to Amanda Lee, and she sucked in a breath. So did Marg before she glanced at me, her eyes wide.

  Because on that screen was the face of a woman who looked like she was in her late twenties.

  If I’d been shuddering a lot these past couple of days, that was nothing compared to what tumbled through me now—a lightning roll of freezing horror.

  A woman.

  What the hell?

  Amanda Lee pushed back the gray streaks at the front of her hair. “This must be a joke. Women don’t run through the forest with axes. They don’t kill other women one right after another.”

  “’Fraid you might be wrong,” Ruben said. “My new online contact matched her presence to five of the locations where the missing blondes have disappeared—including one here in Southern California when Jensen died. This woman was one of those hippies who never outgrew the seventies, roaming around in a van with whoever caught her fancy. She had the means to travel far and wide, and she got tossed in the clink once for pulling a blade on another female in a convenience store. It was around the time a blonde disappeared near Portland.”

  I went over to get a better look at this twist in my murder case, taking care not to get so close to the electronic device that I affected it.

  The computer showed an old Polaroid—you could even see the edges. The person of interest had matted, steel-wool hair that defied a colorful description . . . or maybe clumpy mud would’ve worked. A beaded headband was tied around her forehead, and a gap-toothed smile went along with freckles, a scar that swiped down one of her cheeks, and . . . yup . . . blue eyes. She was toasting the camera with a half bottle of whiskey, flipping off whoever was taking the picture.

  Why did the term latent Charles Manson castoff enter my mind?

  “Her name was Heather Widden,” Ruben said, then wiped his bandanna under his nose. “She died seven years ago while living a peaceful existence as an artist less than an hour east of here in Alpine. According to some background research my contact did before reaching out to me, she was a scrapper. Got into fights mainly at bars with other women she suspected of hitting on her boyfriends. Seems she didn’t like blondes in particular.”

  When Marg spoke up, Ruben didn’t hear. “So that’s why she put on a granny mask and chased Jensen through the woods one night? That doesn’t make sense.”

  I would’ve agreed, but I was speechless. Heather Widden was a woman. My killer had seemed guyish, running and swinging that ax like a male. . . . But, then again, whoever murdered me had been wearing that face-covering hag’s mask, so how would I know?

  Amanda Lee said, “Are you sure she fits our murder scenario?”

  “Possibly.” Ruben rested his arms on his thighs. “And if you’re thinking that females aren’t usually serial killers, you’re right. But there’re some on record, especially after the women’s movement in the seventies, after females felt more empowerment. That’s what some studies say, anyway.”

  Amanda Lee raised her chin, like she was ready for some of Ruben’s machismo to come out, but she shouldn’t have worried. He was all pro.

  “Female psychopathy isn’t studied as much as male,” he said, “so there’s a lot we still don’t know about it. But we do know that males have been trained by society to act out, to not keep their anger inside, and that’s the opposite for females. That’s why it’s harder for us to accept the thought of a violent woman who’s a serial killer. We’re not conditioned to do it.”

  Amanda Lee snuck a glance at me. Both of us had no problems accepting a woman as a regular killer. Elizabeth Dalton’s murderer, Farah, had made us believers.

  But Marg had a ways to go. She talked over Ruben as he went on to tell Amanda Lee how easy it was for women killers to fly under the radar, how they often killed children or husbands with “softer” ways, like poison.

  “He’s got to be wrong,” Marg said to me.

  I spouted out some of the serial-killer trivia I’d learned online when we’d been dealing with a previous case. “You ever hear of Aileen Wuornos? Or going back even farther, Elizabeth Báthory? She was supposed to have killed maybe six hundred and fifty girls way back when.” I wasn’t sure of the date, but there’d been castles and Vlad the Impaler around her time. “Most of the girls were lured to the castle by the promise of being her servants, and she’d kill them because she thought their blood made her younger.”

  Marg closed her eyes and nodded. Yup, she’d studied her history and was just now reconciling it with this ugly possibility, right here in our own backyard.

  For a second, her emotion made all my doubts about her and her X fly away.

  For a second.

  “But your killer used an ax,” she said opening her eyes. “It seems so . . .”

  “Brutal?” I asked. “And nonfeminine?”

  “Come to think of it, I’m wrong about that, too,” she said. “Lizzie Borden supposedly used an ax. But she always seemed like an exception to a rule.”

  Ruben was saying something to Amanda Lee that snagged my attention right back to him. “But there’s one thing in particular that doesn’t make sense to me about matching this Widden woman up with Jensen’s murder. Your psychic visions showed you that Jensen was cut up by that ax after she was killed.”

  “That’s right.” Amanda Lee went along with the lie. She hadn’t had visions—just dead old me to tell her my story.

  “Mostly, women don’t mutilate corpses. That’s a male trait.”

  Oh. Good to know?

  “So where does this leave us?” Amanda Lee asked.

  “Scattered. And this puts a lot more on my plate, because I’m still in the process of looking up the relatives of the missing blondes to interview them.” Over the months, he’d been trying to get leads this way, but nothing had panned out so far. “And today I also tracked down . . .” He stopped, took a breath, reached for his bandanna, then sneezed. After he shook it off, he finished. “One of Franklin Anson Bruckner’s brothers, who lives in Orange County. I thought it’d be worth my time and yours to visit, since Franklin might’ve seen his bro around the time Jensen was murdered.”

  Amanda Lee handed the computer back to Ruben. “You go ahead and try to make contact with the brother, and I can talk to him. I’ll be working on that Spirit Stalkers consulting job tonight, but I’d be ready to take a drive up there tomorrow, anytime.”

  “I’d still like to go with you—”

  A dinging sound came from his computer pad, and he flicked his fingertips over his screen, going back to that e-mail page. He read the incoming message. After a minute, he looked up at Amanda Lee, then glanced at the screen again and shook his head.

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Another e-
mail from another contact.”

  I floated to the ground, kneeling just over the concrete. Seriously? Another lead? Even Amanda Lee and Marg looked bowled over.

  “This contact says that he has good reason to think that an older man named Harold Reedman could be our guy, and—”

  Another ding from the computer. Ruben accessed that one, too.

  When he didn’t say anything to us, Amanda Lee sighed.

  “One more?” she asked.

  Another ding, then another. When the computer started going nuts with ding-ding-dings, Ruben shut the cover, but that didn’t stop the dinging. “This is loco!”

  Anger started to fizzle at me, and I rose into the air. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” I said to Amanda Lee and Marg as the hail of messages pelted the air.

  Ding-ding-ding-ding . . .

  I nailed Marg with a real hard look. She furrowed her eyebrows, but I didn’t let that throw me off.

  “The dark spirit is close enough to be manipulating Ruben’s computer,” I said. “My killer is planting these leads.”

  Just another way of haunting. Another way of screwing with me.

  Well, I wasn’t going to give him or her any fear—not tonight—and I kept boring a look into Marg, just in case that X of hers was a portal that allowed my killer to be here and not be here at the same time.

  Crazy idea? Maybe not.

  Suddenly, the dinging stopped, and it wasn’t because Ruben had shut off the computer. He was just in the process of doing that, and his hand hovered over the screen. He glanced at Amanda Lee with a bewildered expression.

  The haunting had come to a halt. Was it because I wasn’t taking the bait this time?

  My fingers were clawed as Marg scanned me, her expression changing as she realized that I’d been accusing her of aiding the dark spirit.

  “Jensen . . .” she said.

  But Amanda Lee shot her own fire-hot look at me, shutting me up. Then she focused on Ruben, who was rubbing at his temples with one hand.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, someone’s playing games on the forums. I’ll get their asses kicked off soon enough . . . when I have time to breathe.”

  “Someone certainly is playing games.” She leaned forward in her chair. “Ruben, have you ever felt that something . . . odd . . . was going on with Jensen’s case?”

  Holy crap, she was about to tell him about us ghosts. Even though I was still side-eyeing Marg, I watched the show.

  Ruben wiped his hand down his face. “I don’t know what you mean, Amanda Lee.”

  “I mean that there’s evil at work here.”

  He sat up straight, even though she was easing him into this; it only made sense for a man who’d based his life on facts and evidence until Amanda Lee had started helping him with cases. He was like Old Seth, I guessed, opening his mind little by little.

  “Evil’s a loaded word,” he said.

  “But a very real concept.”

  Amanda Lee lowered her tone like she was an alarmingly old and leathery Robert Redford in a movie I’d seen on TV where he whispered kind words to reluctant wild horses.

  “Haven’t you noticed the inexplicable happening?” she asked.

  “Like what?” Now he had a wary expression, his machismo at full force.

  “Like the strange sounds around you every time we meet.”

  I knew just what she needed from me, and I sighed, making my breath materialize into a soft cry of wind that ruffled over the bushes. On the fence, Elliot and Angel had taken proper seats, balancing while watching, totally entertained by the scene.

  “Or,” Amanda Lee said, “a chill in the air that you weren’t expecting?”

  This time Marg drifted over to Ruben, barely brushing against him. I kept watching her while he shivered.

  He stared at Amanda Lee, and I thought he was about to say the magic word.

  Spirits.

  But then he laughed, belly deep. It ended with a sneeze and a cough and him reaching for his bandanna again.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “Psychics can do all kinds of tricks, and you just proved it.”

  “Actually, I’m not telekinetic—”

  “And,” he said, not stopping to hear her out, “I think you need to save your arsenal for someone who’s in the mood for tricks. I believe you can read the future and the past, my friend, but as far as the rest of this spooky-ooky stuff goes, leave it for Halloween.”

  He stood, not even asking why Amanda Lee would mess around with dumb tricks to scare him. But I knew from the look on his face that he was on the edge of believing. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Maybe next time, I thought. If we were lucky enough to have one.

  He sneezed again, and Amanda Lee pointed a resigned finger toward her main house. “I’ve got cold medicine inside.”

  “I forgot to take mine today. Fogs the mind. But I don’t think I have a choice now. Also, I have to hit the head—I mean, the gentleman’s room—anyway. Would you mind if I . . . ?”

  “You know where the guest bathroom is. There’s a stocked medicine cabinet in there.”

  “Gracias.” He saluted her, moving away with an obvious limp that he’d gotten from his time on the San Diego Police force.

  Was it me, or did he take a creeped-out look around as he left the pool area?

  I didn’t dwell on it, because I was already locked onto Marg again.

  It was my turn to reveal.

  “So, what do you guys think?” I asked. “Was there a ghost in his machine just now?”

  “Jensen . . . ” Amanda Lee said, vibing exactly where I was going with this.

  I went on. “What do you think, Marg? Was there?”

  Marg stood by Amanda Lee, just as unruffled. Peas in a pod.

  “Amanda Lee already told me what you think about my X and how it might be an opening for the dark spirit to get inside me,” she said. “What can I do to convince you that no such thing has happened?”

  Good question. My dark, misty side was raring to have it answered. It was thudding at me more than usual.

  So much that I actually took a look around me. Could it be that the dark spirit itself had been here, cloaked from our perception, and this had nothing to do with Marg at all?

  Amanda Lee came toward me, her hand outstretched. Wasn’t she touchy-feely nowadays? She was making friends all over the place with Ruben, Marg . . . everyone.

  “Jensen,” she said. “I have to get going to Elfin Forest to meet the ghost team, and until they finish poking around tonight, I’ll be staying with them. They’ve stirred up more trouble than they’re worth so far.”

  Marg added, “The dark spirit had to have been attracted by their interest in Jensen.”

  “You’re going with Amanda Lee?” I asked. Typical.

  Amanda Lee answered for her. “I’d like an escort, yes. Is that okay with you?”

  Her tone made me feel like such a Betty. It made me realize that I was getting sick of my moodiness, too. Hell, I was getting sick of myself.

  “Yes, it’s okay,” I said softly.

  “Good.” Amanda Lee seemed satisfied. “Because I was going to ask you to go to Wendy’s. She and Eileen have been putting their heads together there, and I’d like you to check in with them and perhaps do some brainstorming in . . . well, in person about banishing our murderous nuisance.”

  She flashed a disgusted glance around, and I liked the idea that I wasn’t the only one who’d wondered if the dark spirit was still here. Paranoia, my foot.

  Behind Amanda Lee, lookiloo Elliot was raising his hand. Naturally, Marg the teacher saw him first and acknowledged him.

  He placed his fingers on the brim of his straw hat in salutation. “Ms. Minter, ma’am. Angel and I are wonde
rin’ if . . .”

  “No,” she said.

  “But, ma’am? Miss? How did you know what I . . . ?”

  “You’re going to ask if you can come with us, and I said no.” Amanda Lee was already walking toward the gate at a determined clip. “I appreciate the thought, but it seems that Jensen trusts you enough to have you guard the house while we’re away. And that’s good enough for me.”

  As she left the pool area with Marg, I shrugged at the boys. Elliot was pursing his lips in thought, just like the clever boardwalk con man he’d told me he’d been in real life. Next to him, Angel was vegged out, sitting on top of the fence again, cool with being on duty here. Sometimes ghosts just liked having a purpose.

  “Seriously, guys,” I said, conjuring my travel tunnel, “watch out for that dark spirit. He’s a nasty one.”

  “Nasty’s my middle name,” Elliot said, holding on to the lapels of his pale suit.

  Giving him a thumbs-up, I hopped into my arterial tunnel, winding through it, then finally blasting out of it in the courtyard of Wendy’s condo, spinning until I righted myself near the wall.

  Only to come face-to-face with a blade that was slicing through the air and heading straight for my neck.

  15

  Before I could scream, I whirled away from the blade’s edge, barely escaping as it whooshed an inch from my essence.

  Dark spirit! Get him!

  My mind was a blur as I hardened my arms, feeling them randomly turn into whirring saws. I raised them, ready to go for it, while something in the back of my head asked, Where’s Wendy? Scott? Gavin?

  “Stop!”

  A human, female voice coming from downstairs in the condo. Wendy?

  Whoever had attacked me had already retreated, so I backed off, too, even though my blades were still spinning as everything came into focus around me.