Her muscles bunched in that way they always did when she met a skeptic a-hole hell-bent on dismissing her, and nothing she said or did could persuade him to the opposite.
Where the heck was Rebecca? Alexandra would have given anything in that moment for his mother to share some information to really freak him out.
“I don’t expect you to understand. I have a question for you now.”
He nodded. “Alright.”
“What does that grim reaper drawing have to do with the woman who was murdered in the cemetery?”
His jaw clenched, but he said nothing.
A series of images flashing in her mind momentarily disoriented her. The grim reaper cartoon she’d already seen this morning. An image of water. A woman’s hand falling into water. Water flowing onto sand.
She blinked when the road came into focus again in front of her. She blew out her breath and glanced toward the back seat. She didn’t see the dead young woman sitting back there, but Alexandra suspected the woman was hitching a ride and feeding her information telepathically.
This young woman must be the victim. That’s why she was drawn to me, but she’s new, still confused, probably scared. Trying to see if she can trust me before she reveals herself in full.
Alexandra returned her attention to the man beside her. “She wasn’t killed in the cemetery, was she? Her body was just placed there after.”
He shifted in his seat. “What?”
“She was killed near water.”
Dylan shook his head and then laughed. “This is Charleston. Water is all around us.”
A-hole.
Alexandra felt a little nauseous—that sometimes happened after such visions—so she placed a hand on her stomach and willed it away. “I can’t begin to explain to you how this works, but when it happens, like it happened this morning when I saw the newspaper, it doesn’t matter what else I have on my plate. I feel such a strong sense of urgency about this case right now. I had to offer my help.”
Because Alexandra knew, deep in her soul, that whoever killed the woman found in the cemetery would kill again.
Soon.
Chapter Three
The sterile, gray-walled hallway was empty except for a handful of people dressed in scrubs, some carrying books or backpacks, as Dylan led Alexandra through a door marked MEDICAL AND FORENSIC AUTOPSY SECTION. She’d remained quiet as he’d pulled into the Medical University of South Carolina’s parking lot, but her curiosity finally got the better of her.
“Is this a school or a hospital?” Alexandra asked.
“Both. It’s a teaching hospital.”
Her throat tightened. “Is this where the coroner’s office is?”
“No.”
An anxious feeling nestled in her chest and refused to leave. “But this is where he performs autopsies?”
Dylan didn’t answer, which told her all she needed to know.
The bastard was bringing her to see the girl’s dead body. Some warning would have been nice. She slowed her steps to a stop, and with a heaving sigh, he finally turned and acknowledged her.
“The staff here handles them and sends their report to our coroner. I don’t have time to wait for it.” He motioned her toward another door. “After you.”
Great. He actually was taking her to the autopsy room. Goosebumps lifted the hairs on her arms at that realization. Alexandra had assisted other police, sure, but none had ever taken her to a morgue before. She wasn’t sure she could handle it, quite frankly.
Dead people, no problem. Dead bodies, hell no.
Her feet wouldn’t move, and she reached out a hand to grab the wall beside her. “I know what you’re doing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re being mean and cruel, and trying to scare me away.”
His eyebrows shot up, even as his shoulders relaxed. “What? You mean you’ve never seen a dead body before?” A smirk played at the edges of his mouth. “In your line of work? Come on. I thought psychics got their information from things like this. You know, touching stuff.”
Touching a dead person in the autopsy room? Was he out of his ever-lovin’ mind?
Oh, she’d seen plenty of dead people in ghost form, and a few times at funerals. She didn’t particularly care to ever see one up close and personal after a medical examiner had cut it open.
The scent of some harsh cleaning chemical nearby assaulted her nostrils and sent her stomach on a gymnastics routine.
“Since what I do is new to you, I’ll cut you some slack. I don’t need to see a body in order to—” Ugh, she still felt nauseous from earlier. This wasn’t helping. She waved a hand. “—to be able to communicate with the person. Spirits, at least young spirits, tend to linger near the person, place or object they valued most in life. Eight times out of ten, it wasn’t their body.”
Dylan’s mouth pulled into a tight line as his eyes seemed to trace her features. Was she turning green? Man, she felt like she might be. “Fine. There’s a chair in the office around the corner. Wait there. I’ll try to make this quick.”
Nodding, she hurried to find that chair before her mind and body conspired to faceplant her right there in the hallway. She found one in a small, empty room and dove for it. Her face grew hot as her vision blurred and the room spun around her.
Oh, man. Not good.
Forcing deep breaths in and out of her lungs, she squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head between her knees. Breathe. Breathe. Okay. Everything’s okay now. She repeated the mantra over and over until the kaleidoscope of color behind her eyelids stopped. She slowly opened her eyes and sat up. This had happened before, most memorably when she’d been visiting a cousin after foot surgery, glanced down at the freshly stitched wound on the swollen limb propped on a pillow, and abruptly lost consciousness.
Given the assortment of strange and unnatural injuries she’d seen among the dead over the years, one might expect her to be blasé about the real ones, too, but nope, she was a first-class wimp when it came to blood and gore. Her mind had always been able to disconnect when a ghost manifested a slit throat or bloody gash, much the way many people did when watching horror films, but put her near a hypodermic needle or flesh wound, and she was horizontal in seconds.
She reached for the lightswitch on the wall above her shoulder and flicked it on. She yelped when she spotted the elderly woman sitting in the chair behind the desk across from her.
“Geez!” She held a hand to cover her racing heart. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you before.”
The woman said nothing.
With cold, void eyes, the grandmotherly type just sat there, staring at Alexandra with absolutely no emotion on her weathered face.
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
The sound of blood rushing through Alexandra’s ears intensified.
Oh no. Please, no.
Swallowing hard, Alexandra grabbed the arms of her chair. She’d met a lot of ghosts in her time and could easily distinguish between the living and the dead. Ghosts emitted sparkly auras, but living people had no auras at all that Alexandra could see.
Neither did this old lady. Alexandra’s heart raced and her stomach did continuous somersaults beneath the ominous, intense stare aimed in her direction. Those eyes were…unnatural.
Ghost?
No, she didn’t think so.
“What are you?” she whispered.
The old woman tilted her head and examined Alexandra even more closely. In a deep, gravelly voice, the woman countered with “What are you?”
Alexandra fingered the gold cross at her throat as she slowly rose from the chair, her gaze unwilling to leave the old woman. She said the silent prayer her grandmother had once taught her—By the power of Saint Michael and all the angels and saints, please keep me safe from harm—as she felt for the doorway behind her.
Hurrying out of the room, she glanced down both directions of the hallway, searching for the entrance she and Dylan had come through. Screw this. She’d wait o
utside by the car.
She spotted the familiar door and hurried toward it, but her feet came to another abrupt halt as figures down the hall turned toward her.
Nervous laughter bubbled through her chest when she saw not one, not two, but three more dead people standing in front of the door marked EXIT. They were all staring back at her.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
This wasn’t right. Dead people shouldn’t be hanging around the hospital-slash-morgue. They should be following their loved ones around or something. Not this.
They all advanced at once, chattering over one another so that Alexandra couldn’t make out the details of what any one was saying.
“Help me! Please help me!” One man began begging as he reached for Alexandra’s arm. His grasp was strong and determined. “My wife? Do you know where she is?”
“Where am I?” A middle-aged woman asked, pushing that man aside to clasp Alexandra’s elbow. “My children. Do you know where they are?”
“Outta the way!” A stern-looking old man in a hospital gown knocked them both aside and pressed Alexandra closer to the wall.
Alexandra mentally exclaimed for everyone to give her some space. At least, she hoped she didn’t yell the words aloud.
The three figures all fell silent and backed away, and that’s when she spotted the fourth figure, standing behind them all.
A gargled, sickening sound was coming from the naked man. His face was mangled and bloody. No features were distinguishable.
He reached out a hand toward Alexandra, and she screamed.
***
“Not that I’m complaining or anything, but you guys almost never come by here when we’re doing this. What gives?” Dr. Jeffrey Watkins removed the bloody gloves he wore and then washed his hands in the sink and flicked water off his fingers.
As one of five professors and medical examiners on the pathology staff at the university, Watkins was the only one Dylan had met, and he sent up a silent prayer of thanks for his one piece of good luck today. It would have sucked if he’d had to explain himself to someone new.
Dylan veered around the medical instruments that always gave him the heebie jeebies and tried not to look at the corpses barely covered on the examining tables a few feet away. The pretty, young autopsy technician Dylan didn’t know gave him a brief smile and left the room.
“My captain wants this case solved, and soon.” He gestured toward the body he was here to investigate. Candice Christopher. Twenty-two, a recent honors college graduate, and too damn young to be lying on that table. “I thought I’d come see if I could get a jump on that report.”
He didn’t mention that he’d hoped to shake the supposed psychic he’d been saddled with too. Guilt tugged at his conscience. Bringing Alexandra here had been a stupid thing to do, but the sooner he got rid of her and put his focus back on solving this crime, the better.
He’d have liked to have gotten to know her a little better, spend some more time in bed maybe, but that plan had been shot to hell and back.
Besides, the idea of someone pretending to be psychic sent his blood pressure up a few millimeters. Psychics made him think too much about his older brother, Zach, who was as dead to him as the bodies in this room.
A clang of metal in the sink snapped his attention back to the medical examiner.
“You’re in luck. Charlie told me this one was a rush job, so we did this one first,” Watkins said, mentioning the coroner both he and the police department dealt with regularly. “I haven’t finalized our report yet.”
“Did you find anything I should know?”
Watkins nodded and moved toward the body, slid the sheet lower and pointed out a small swollen spot on the woman’s arm. “Same as the others. Our guy used a needle to inject about 10 milliliters of chloroform. She was dead of cardiac arrest within minutes. The rest was done to her afterward.”
“So it’s the same suspect?”
Watkins nodded and tugged the sheet back up. “This one was a little different. I found sand under the fingernails on her right hand and salt water in her lungs, but that’s not what killed her.”
“Water?” Dylan blinked in surprise, remembering Alexandra’s words from earlier. “So she wasn’t killed in the cemetery?”
“Hard to say for sure, but I doubt it. She’d been dead about eight hours before she was found.”
What was he supposed to make of that? No way had she been in that cemetery eight hours before someone found her body. Some of the ghost tours trampled through that graveyard up until midnight, and her body had been found around two this morning by a homeless guy looking for a place to sleep.
That was a short window of time for someone to have carried a dead body off the street, positioned it grotesquely and gotten away without being seen. Someone had to have noticed something. Dylan made a mental note to check with the directors of the city’s night tours to find out which one had last been by there and when.
The sound of a scream diverted his attention, and he turned just in time to see Alexandra burst through the double doors to the autopsy room. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide and crazed as she stumbled toward him. His hands reached out to steady her as she fell against him, her fingers clasping his arms with an iron grip. Her hair whipped around her shoulders as she glanced frantically behind her.
What the? Was she being chased?
“Dylan!” she cried, sagging against him. “Oh, thank heaven!”
“What happened?”
She squeezed his middle, but he was too preoccupied with figuring out what the hell was going on to respond. His protective instincts kicked into gear and he tried pushing her away and behind him, but she was stuck to him like a leech.
Watkins hurried to the doors, opened them and glanced both ways down the hallway. The other man’s shoulders relaxed as he turned around, his expression just as puzzled as Dylan’s probably was.
“I don’t see anyone,” Watkins said.
The tension began to seep from Dylan’s muscles. “Sorry. She’s with me.”
Pushing herself away, Alexandra closed her eyes and shook her head, gesturing wildly. She danced around in the same spot, wiggling her fingers in that way little girls did when they were grossed out or had to pee. “No. No, you can’t see them. One guy…his face is all…” she shuddered as she waved a hand in front of her face. “Mangled. He’s dead. They’re all dead. They all want…” She opened her eyes and looked at him. She’d stopped trembling. “Dylan, can we please leave?”
Her nose scrunched. The odor in the room was hard for most to stomach. Her pallor turned an unnatural gray. She looked like she was about to toss some cookies.
“Mangled?” Watkins repeated. He thumbed over his shoulder and started walking toward a second examining table, where a body was covered with a light blue sheet. “Are you here for this guy too?”
Watkins ripped back the sheet, and Dylan felt his stomach lurch. A man—or at least, he assumed it was a man by the width of those broad shoulders—looked like he’d been in one hell of a fight, eyes swollen and bloody, nose either missing or sunk in, and a deep gash in—
Dylan had to look away.
“This guy was in a boating accident. Not a homicide.” Watkins threw the sheet back over the poor schmuck’s face, but it was too late.
Alexandra made a squeaking sound deep in her throat and sagged against him. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body went suddenly limp.
He caught her seconds before she would have hit the ground.
***
“Alexandra? Alexandra, honey, are you okay?”
The echo of a woman’s voice and a warm, gentle touch on her cheek teased at the edges of Alexandra’s consciousness like an annoying alarm radio set on low. She stretched out to hit the snooze button, wanting nothing more than to snuggle deeper into the darkness, but her fingers touched nothing but air.
“Alexandra, it’s me. I’m here.”
She knew that voice. Blinking her eyes open, she
saw Rebecca Collins leaning over her. She sucked in a deep breath and reached out to hug Dylan’s mother. The older woman engulfed her in return, rubbing her back and murmuring, “There. You’re all right. You just had a bit of a scare.”
The fog cleared and Alexandra remembered. The spirits harassing her for help, demanding attention, and Mr. Hamburger Face freaking her the heck out by physically shoving her against the wall when she asked him to leave her alone. He hadn’t realized he was dead, and had gotten violent when she’d tried to coax that truth into him. And then the old woman had appeared behind them all, exuding malice and negativity as thick as cigarette smoke. It was almost as if the woman was controlling the dead people, commanding them to overwhelm Alexandra. Well, it had worked! Alexandra had lost it.
She’d never encountered anything like that old woman before.
She’d never encountered a lot of the things she’d experienced in that hospital. Only old, experienced ghosts could move or touch things with force. Hamburger Face hadn’t even been dead twenty-four hours, but he’d shoved her against a wall.
How?
Pulling back now, she looked around. The cold, sterile medical room was gone. Dylan was gone. The familiar sight of Alexandra’s bedroom surrounded them.
Her muscles sank with relief.
“I’m dreaming.” She lifted a hand to touch her forehead. “This isn’t real. That explains why everything’s been so screwy.”
She could have only been dreaming that she’d traveled to Charleston and found Dylan. Had she found him? She was so disoriented. She had no idea. She could have been having a serious nightmare—minus the erotic bits at the beginning with Mr. Delicious. Those parts of the dream, if she’d been dreaming, she hadn’t minded at all.
“Honey, I need you to listen to me.” Rebecca’s hands felt solid as they cupped Alexandra’s face, confusing her even more. Rebecca hadn’t been dead long enough to master the skill of touch. “We don’t have much time.”
“Where have you been? I think I found your son.” Yes, she knew she had. It was getting easier to recognize this delusion for what it was. The giant stuffed red monkey sitting on her nightstand was a dead giveaway. She didn’t own any such novelty, as cute as it was. And her walls weren’t blue either.
Something Wicked: HarperImpulse Romantic Suspense Page 4
