Laying Ghosts (Dolly Games)

by Derek Murphy

  Carl picked up the paper place-mat in front of him and laid it out in the middle of the table. The place-mat had one of those cheesy, area maps of the city and its surrounding area printed on it and his finger stabbed a spot on the map.

  “This is the marina. See how close it is to Harborview Heights? A few surveillance cameras with a decent signal-booster could transmit their feed to the marina. And Nelson’s credit card was used to pay for a bunch of those fancy, remote switches like you found at Webster’s place.”

  Nodding, Ike said, “Yeah, okay, but they were bought through an internet sale, Carl. All we know for certain is that someone used his card to buy them. We don’t know that it was him. The cops will require that information before they act on this.”

  “Yeah, but we aren’t cops, Ike. We can go as far with this line of investigation as we need to.”

  “The house is off-limits, Carl. We’ll have to work closer to the principals of the case. It could get dangerous. Look what he did to Webster’s wife.”

  Shaking his head, Carl said, “I’m pretty sure it was a woman that did that.”

  Fixing his partner with his eyes, Ike asked, “Nelson’s wife?”

  “Doesn’t make sense. She’s the one who put us onto his track. Why would she do that if she’s involved?”

  “Double-cross?”

  Julie’s query brought both their heads around to face her.

  Carl asked, “What would she have to gain from it? If she implicates her partner, they both go down for the rape; her as the perpetrator, him as the accomplice. Both of them would at least be charged with whatever charges the cops can come up with regarding the engineered haunting.”

  Ike said, “Wait a minute, Carl. I think Julie’s got a point. If it comes to light, Nelson would be convicted, but his wife might not be. Think about it. The descendant of Silas Morgan, pretty, the premier debutante when she was a teenager; this town loves their ‘old money’ families.”

  Warming to his subject, Carl said, “Yeah, but what does she gain? Whatever they were trying to accomplish would be ruined when it all came out. She’d have months, or even years in court trying to beat the charges…”

  Pausing as he sank into thought, the others waited for him to complete the process he had obviously begun.

  Carl snapped his fingers, nearly as loud as a gunshot which brought the conversations around them to a halt. As people stared at him for a few moments, he waited for them to lose interest before continuing.

  “I think that’s it. She would have months or years in the public eye during the trial. Like you said, she probably wouldn’t be convicted and then she could shop the story around to Hollywood. Even if she didn’t get a big payday from it, her family wouldn’t let her starve. Her trust fund might be almost gone, but the Morgan family is still one of the wealthiest in the state.”

  Julie asked, “How does Nelson’s mother fit into all this? She seemed too interested in getting the case dropped. Does she know what Chip and Erica have been up to? She’d go down as an accomplice, too.”

  Ike shuffled the papers in the file around until he came to the picture Carl had printed from the internet and held it up to the light in the dimly lit bar and grill.

  “She’s a good-lookin’ woman, Carl. Younger than the old man. You read all this?”

  Carl nodded. “I skimmed it. She worked at the company as an intern during college and continued in the Engineering Department after she graduated. A smart woman.”

  “You didn’t read the part about how she is part-owner of the patent behind those funny switches? The guy she worked with on them in college is dead, leaving her in control of their licensing. They had an agreement to the effect that whichever one died first, the other got control of the patent and the proceeds of its use would be shared equally between the surviving partner and the other one’s family.”

  “Okay, so what does that do for us?”

  “We dig into that relationship. Like, how did the guy die? Was it at all suspicious? Was Ginny Marshall involved? I mean, she came out of it with a pretty fair income.”

  Carl took the picture from Ike’s hand and placed it back in the file, closing the cover. He handed it to Julie.

  “Since you and I are joined at the hip till this case is solved, you and I’ll do the online grunt-work while Ike does the active investigating.”

  Sourly, she accepted the file, saying, “Thanks, too much, Carl. Sitting at a desk is going to make my butt bigger.”

  The plea in her eyes was obvious. “Can’t I do something that gets me out of the office?”

  He shook his head. “Not without me. You were already a target once.”

  She flicked a finger toward Ike. “So was Ike.”

  “Ike’s a big boy. He can take care of himself. That was a fluke. He wouldn’t get taken by surprise again. Not since we’ve been warned.”

  The expression on her face showed her disgust at being effectively sidelined but she asked, “So, where do we start?”

  Carl and Ike exchanged glances and Carl said, “We combine the cases and work them as one.”

  Chapter Ten

  The morning sun was just beginning to slant in the windows of the office as they entered and Carl went to his office. Julie stopped in the little kitchenette and started a pot of coffee before continuing on to the reception desk to start work. She liked the office she shared with Ike, but her desk was placed so that the morning sun hit the screen of her monitor, washing out the images. As she sat down, she saw the light on the phone console blinking and settled into the chair with her fingers already activating the message function.

  Picking up the receiver, she waited through the reference cue for the first message. It seemed that Mr. Corwell was getting impatient for them to start on his case. He believed that his business partner was embezzling funds from the store and wanted to catch him at it before the cash reserves were gone.

  Julie thought, “Sorry, Mr. Corwell. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  She would have to call him back and put him off for just a little while longer.

  The second message began with hisses and clicks, followed by heavy breathing and she rolled her eyes, thinking that some creep had gotten their number and thought that because of their company name, they might be a phone sex outfit. She was about to delete the message when a hushed voice came on the line.

  “Carl? They almost caught me! I’ve got to dodge them for a bit longer, then I’ll come to you. Not much longer.”

  There was a muted click as of the connection being ended, followed by more hisses and pops, then the message ended and she sat at the desk staring at the phone. Julie had worked very hard to eradicate her own Texas hill-country accent when she arrived in Hollywood and had become fairly astute at recognizing the nuances, tones and idiosyncrasies of speech. Though she had heard Marta speak only a little during the Dolly Dagger case, this was her voice. If not a recording used as an elaborate form of torture against Carl, then the woman was alive. In the space of a few seconds, she agonized over what to do about it before making up her mind.

  She moved her finger to the ‘delete’ button on the phone and calmly pressed it. With the enforced, prolonged contact with Carl, she had come to realize that she had a golden opportunity right here in her hands. Being in his apartment every night, if she played her cards right, she could end up in his bed and in his heart. She was almost sure that if he only came to understand just how much he meant to her, he would know that they were fated to be together. Had been destined to love each other since that day two years before when he had taken her stalking case.

  Turning from the phone, she ‘booted-up’ the pc on the desk and began working at digging up information on Mrs. Marshall-Nelson. As she did, Carl worked at de-encrypting the files on the ‘snooper’. Before she knew it, the time had flown by and it was nearly noon. Her stomach growled at her, letting her know that her toast and coffee for breakfast had been five hours earlier and long since been processed. She lean
ed forward in her chair, putting her hands behind her to press against her back as she stretched it to work out the kinks from hours of sitting at the desk.

  Carl stepped out of his office, a frown on his face. “Getting hungry?”

  “Yeah. A salad would be good right about now.”

  The corner of his mouth ticked up on one side as he said, “I’d rather not leave the office. Let’s get something from the ‘roach-coach’.”

  Her lips formed an unconscious sneer as she said, “They use iceberg lettuce in their salads, Carl.”

  He shrugged. “They’re big, though. And they’ve got that stinky vinaigrette you like. Besides, I like their pastrami on rye. I’ve still got a lot of work on these files ahead of me and if we go somewhere for lunch, we’ll lose an hour.”

  Irritated at being balked, she jerked her head to one side to swing the fall of blonde hair away from her face as she said, “Okay. I’ll get some money out of petty-cash and catch them when I hear the cart go down the hall.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll do it. Can’t take a chance on you getting stunned again. Or worse.”

  Resigning herself to being ‘carried around on a chip’, Julie settled back into her chair and turned back to ferreting out all the information she could get on the Nelson woman as Carl opened the drawer beside her for the cash-box. From the hallway, they heard the jingle of the bells strung from the front of the lunch-cart and Carl disappeared through the door into the hallway. In just a few minutes, he was back with a huge bowl of salad, a massive, wrapped sandwich and a bag of odds and ends to accompany their meal. Placing her food on the desk beside her, he moved on into his office and she heard the rustle of the paper wrapped around his sandwich.

  Julie dug into her salad, delighted to find that there was ham, pepperoni, cheese, onions, sweet peppers, ripe olives and capers atop of the lettuce, shredded carrot, tomato and spinach. With a liberal dose of the ‘stinky vinaigrette’, as Carl called it, she was almost in heaven. She loved eating salads, something that had puzzled her parents back home in Texas. Firm believers in ‘beef ‘n’ taters’ for every meal, they had wondered if she would grow up to be a hot-house flower. They needn’t have worried; she was a sleek and muscular 5’7” and 125 lbs and had enjoyed life in California the four years she had been there. Besides swimming and surfing, she had learned to enjoy rock-climbing and sky-diving and sometimes missed the activities. The water of the bay, with all its little inlets and coves, was too cold to swim in much of the year and there wasn’t a decent beach to be found anywhere nearby. Climbing around here was very different owing to the heavy forest cover and she found that she didn’t enjoy it as much. She liked hot and dry climates for rock-climbing and this just wasn’t it. There was rain every second or third day and the breeze from the ocean was always cool. She still indulged in sky-diving but had found no one to go with her and such activities were always more fun when you were with someone.

  She turned from the salad, patting her lips with the paper napkin provided and initiated another search for information. Finding a newspaper article regarding the patent that Ginny Marshall-Nelson had worked on, she quickly read it and found the name of her partner. George Pappageorgean. Wondering why the name was familiar, she read quickly, finding that Pappageorgean had a sister and that their parents had died while the girl was only a child. Separated by nearly twenty years, Pappageorgean had been in college when their parents died and he had raised the girl by himself. Since he and his partner, Ginny, had been close, she had helped to care for the girl. Julie supposed that meant that she had provided a feminine influence when needed and that the partnership had prospered because of the close association.

  There was an addendum stating that the girl, Natalia S. Pappageorgean, had gotten a business degree and gone to work for Nelson Aerospace. There was that connection again. Everything came back to Webster and Nelson Aerospace. Was the girl involved with all of this? She would be about thirty-one now. Not that it made any difference.

  Julie quickly accessed the Nelson Aerospace website and checked the employee directory. No Natalia Pappageorgean. The name was so familiar. It teased and taunted her, hovering at the edge of awareness until she wanted to scream. Frustrated, she stared at the things she had found and printed off for the file. Whatever was at the bottom of this, whoever was at the bottom of this, was right here in front of her. She hoped Carl was having better luck with the files he had stripped from the ‘snooper’.

  * * *

  Frustrated, Carl frowned at the monitor. The files he had harvested from the ‘snooper’ were mostly the kind of thing that one would expect to find on a spoiled, rich-boy’s pc. A little porn, a little shopping, a little vacation planning; but there was a huge file of camera footage that was proving to be stubborn. It was scrambled, like the porn that people used to find on cable TV in the seventies and eighties. Just enough clear image to be tantalizing, but not enough to really get anything from it. The thing that made it really important was that he recognized some of the footage as having come from hidden cameras in Webster’s house. The library was there, as well as the bedroom, the sunroom and at least one bathroom. There were other rooms but he wasn’t familiar enough with the setup of the house to recognize them. Each of them was different enough from the others that he was pretty sure that every room of the house had been bugged. The scrambled pictures made it frustrating viewing, but if he watched each sequence long enough, the distortion evened out enough to recognize features of the various rooms.

  Carl had taken a break long enough to purchase and download a program that would de-scramble the footage, but it was very slow. Only a fraction of the footage had been rendered useable, but the program wouldn’t allow him to view it until it had gone through every bit of the material. One scrambled image he had seen before starting the process had been galvanizing. It had showed the image of two black-clad figures restraining a third in the bedroom. The third had struggled mightily but been overpowered in the end. That was the point at which he had decided to buy the expensive program; his own talents being less than equal to the challenge.

  He looked over at the coffeepot and wondered if his stomach would tolerate another cup. Deciding that it wouldn’t, he rose and walked to the kitchenette. Opening the fridge, he called to Julie.

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  She had been engrossed in her work as he passed through the outer office and he leaned toward the door to look at her. At the motion, she looked up and smiled a little.

  “Water.”

  Opening his soft drink, he found and filled the steel bottle Julie usually drank out of before carrying it to her. Thanking him, she tilted the bottle up and drank deeply. Smacking her lips, she smiled at him again.

  “Are you having any luck with the files?”

  Nodding, unsure how much to tell her, he said, “Yeah, it’s taking a while. I had to spend a lot of money to get a program.”

  Shrugging, she replied, “That’s between you and DeeDee. She’s been pinching every penny until Lincoln squeals. I’m sure the checkbook can take it.”

  Jerking his chin at the pile of stuff she had printed, he asked, “You making progress?”

  She frowned at the pile of papers and said, “Yeah, but I don’t know what any of it means.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “That’s just it. I don’t know what I mean. There are connections here, but I don’t see how the two cases are connected. I mean, other than either Nelson, his mother or his wife is spying on Webster. What’s the motive?”

  “We keep digging until we find the motive. Then we’ll see how it’s all connected. Something we find may not seem to mean anything at all, but in the right context, it can make all the difference in the world.”

  She leaned forward, putting her head in her hands.

  “Oh-h, no. Don’t tell me this is going to be as complicated as the Dolly Dagger case!”

  Silent for a beat as the knife was jabbed into h
is heart, Carl said, “It might be. There are two of them involved, Julie.”

  Her head jerked up to look at him.

  “You did find something in those files!”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Something. I have to wait for the program I bought to finish before I’ll know what it is for sure.”

  She pushed herself from her chair, bouncing on her toes, anxious to see something besides files that made no sense.

  “I want to see!”

  Stoically, he said, “It’s not finished yet.”

  “Come on, Carl! I’m going crazy digging up stuff that doesn’t mean anything! I’ve got to have something fresh to energize my mind!”

  Sighing, he thought about the way she had stuck with the grinding work all day without complaint and finally nodded his head.

  “Okay. Come on.”

  Bouncing across the floor, she beat him into his office and by the time he had reached his desk, she was standing stock-still in front of the monitor, her hands over her mouth. There was a separate window for each room’s camera on the monitor’s screen, presenting an array of views of the house. He glanced at the images on the screen and winced as he realized that the program had finished de-scrambling the images and started over from its beginning. He had set it to skip past the footage with no movement in the frames and the first prolonged action it had come across was the attack on Mrs. Webster; the very same footage, he realized that had been so compelling, even in its scrambled state.

  Two figures, obviously female, attired in skin-tight, black body-suits with thick, black nylons covering their heads and faces, were wrestling the woman to the surface of her bed. The gown and peignoir she wore were already ripped and bloodied, testifying to the fact that the attack had already gone on for some time. The injured and fatigued woman was barely able to make an effort to fight off her attackers and while one of them sat on the middle of her back, pinning her to the bed, the other was occupied with manacling her to the bedposts by wrist and ankle. As the two moved on to using some hellish, medieval-looking device on the woman’s genitals, Julie turned away, her hands still over her mouth.