Chapter 17

It was hard to concentrate on searching obituary columns after Briar left. It may have been the fact my pulse was still irregular from having a crossbow thrust in my face not once, but twice, getting accused of murder, learning that Nekros had ghouls, or the fact I had attracted the attention of an MCIB agent.

I jumped at the sound of my phone, my heart leaping to my throat. Rianna, it’s just Rianna. But despite the fact I knew it was her—she was the only person set to Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl”—I couldn’t stop my hand from trembling as I dug the phone from my purse.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound natural. I failed. My voice came out raw, hoarse, as if I’d been screaming.

If Rianna noticed, she didn’t mention it. “So get this,” she said over the background sound of a crowd. “The bartender remembers James Kingly. Apparently he’d once been a regular at Delaney’s, but hadn’t been around much of late. The bartender said that two weeks ago, Tuesday night was slow and since Kingly was sitting at the bar, they’d had more than just a passing conversation. Well, about an hour after he arrived, Kingly stopped midsentence and without explanation—or paying—excused himself. The bartender assumed he was headed to the john, until Kingly walked out the front door. The bartender followed, intending to make Kingly pay for the beers. When he got outside, he found Kingly pointing his key fob at each car he passed, as if he had no idea which was his.”

Well, that was certainly odd. “Did the bartender mention how many drinks he’d served Kingly?”

“Yeah, Kingly was in the middle of his second when this happened.”

Which was exactly when his memory loss hit.

“Did the bartender say anything else?”

“Yeah, he said Kingly called the beer rat piss. He also wanted to know if I was going to pay for the drinks. We don’t have an expense account, do we?”

Right now we barely had next month’s rent, but I couldn’t expect her to pay for case expenses out of her own pocket, and we could always bill Mrs. Kingly—though if she demanded an itemized invoice, a charge for two beers wouldn’t look good.

“He already gave you the information you need, so unless you think he’s holding something back, forget the drinks. If he wants to collect on Kingly’s debt, he can contact Nina,” I said, but the question did bring into focus the fact that building a petty cash reserve was another thing on my list of things to do for the business—it was getting to be a pretty long list.

“Agreed,” Rianna said. “But now I’m not sure where to go from here. If we were super spies we’d just hack the city’s traffic cameras…” Rianna’s grin was all but audible, and I shook my head. Not that the smallest smile didn’t crawl to my own lips.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s on our résumé,” I said as I woke my computer. What did we know that could help us? What similarities were there between Kingly and Kirkwood? The suicides, of course. And the memory and weight loss. But what else?

It hit me. Their stomach contents. They’d both eaten very expensive cuisine shortly before death.

“Look for fancy restaurants in the area,” I said, and filled her in on my reasoning.

“Not a bad idea,” she said. The background noise dimmed, as if she’d stepped out of the pub. “So how are things going with your searches?”

“Actually—” I was about to tell her about Briar’s visit when my eyes stumbled over the very name I’d been searching for but had apparently been too preoccupied to notice.

Daniel Walters, age eighteen, was described as an all-star high school football champ who left this world too early. It mentioned the names of his parents and younger sister, and—most important for my purposes—mentioned the date and time of the graveside service to be held at Green Hill cemetery.

Pay dirt. The service had long passed, but now I knew exactly where to find the body.

“Al? Alex, you there?” Rianna called from the other side of the phone. I hadn’t been paying attention.

“Yeah, I’m here. But I’m going to close the firm early today—I’ll leave a note on the door with our numbers.”

“You found something?”

Yeah, I’d found the next link in the chain of suicides. Now to see if Daniel Walters started it or was another victim.

“You don’t remember jumping in front of a bus?” I asked the shade, my eyes fixed firmly on the marker where his headstone would be placed when it arrived. I’d made the mistake of looking at him when I’d first called the shade. Just thinking about the mangled body made me shiver. I’d never realized exactly how much damage being hit by a bus could do. No wonder the family opted for a graveside service, there certainly couldn’t have been a viewing. I’d seen morticians do some amazing work, especially when they added a couple complexion charms to the mix, but more than half this boy would have had to have been rebuilt, like Humpty Dumpty.

“I remember the tire inches from my face and then—” He stopped as the memory ended.

It was the answer I expected, but I’d had to ask anyway.

“What is the last thing you remember before seeing the tire?”

“Feeling like I’d caught the flu. I called Allison to cancel our study date. Then I went to bed early.”

“And what day was that?”

“Tuesday.”

I nodded. Kirkwood had seen him jump in front of the bus on Friday. Three days again. That fit with both Kirkwood and Kingly’s cases.

“Daniel, did you see anyone die on Tuesday?”

“No, not that day.”

I frowned. “You saw someone die another day? When?”

“Monday.”

That didn’t fit the pattern. Both Kingly and Kirkwood had seen a suicide on the day their memories stopped. Why did it take an extra day to affect Walters? Unless the timeline between suicide and memory loss was shortening with each case. I hadn’t thought about it before, but Kingly witnessed Kirkwood flambé himself only an hour or two before his memories stopped and he’d undergone a personality change. But Kirkwood had seen Walters play chicken with the bus during his lunch hour. It wasn’t until that night, sometime after he’d gone to bed, that his memories stopped. There was another thing too, Kirkwood had also mentioned feeling ill.

“Daniel, the death you witnessed, how did it happen?”

“A man walked onto the football field. He had a shotgun and coach yelled for us to go to the locker room, but the man turned the gun on himself, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

Another suicide.

I expected it, but I still cringed at the apathetic delivery from the shade. The other suicides: jumping in front of a bus, diving off a building, and even the incineration, could be suicides of opportunity, the public aspect coincidental. But a man walking onto a crowded field with a shotgun sounded like he’d gone out of his way to make sure there were witnesses.

So I had a witnessed suicide, lost time, a shade that regained awareness only in the last seconds, possibly after mortal death if the initial collision with the bus killed him before he was sucked into the wheel well. I’d have liked to know his stomach contents at time of death, but he wouldn’t know what he’d eaten during the time he had no memory. Which left only one important question left to prove a pattern and not just a coincidental fluke in two of the victims.

“Daniel, how much did you weigh?”

“Two ten,” the shade said without hesitation.

And now for the hard part—at least for my stomach, because now I had to try to guess the death weight of a kid who’d been rearranged by a bus.

The shade’s left arm was fairly intact, so I focused on that. A skinny forearm led down to a knobby wrist and hands with insubstantial skin that sank in hollow valleys between thin bones. His sticklike fingers were so thin they looked too long for his body. Yeah, no way had he weighed anywhere near two hundred pounds at the time of his death.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I shrill female voice yelled.

I whirled around in time to see a pretty girl of no more than eighteen drop her backpack and dash across the cemetery lawn.

Oh crap. I didn’t know if she was the sister mentioned in the obit or just a friend, but she didn’t need to see Daniel this way.

“Rest now,” I told the shade, pulling back my power, and shoving the thing too crushed and broken to look human back into its grave.

But not fast enough.

The girl’s scream cut through the stillness and she collapsed to her knees just outside my circle.

“That was…Was it…It was, wasn’t it? Oh my god. I knew, but—” Her words broke off, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

The shade was gone now, but she stared at the place he’d been as if his image was seared into that spot. I reclaimed what I could of my heat and released my hold on the grave, but I didn’t push back the different planes of reality—this was the second shade I’d raised today and I was going to pay for it. Wandering around blind wasn’t at the top of my priority list right now. Especially with a near hysterical girl just yards away.

“You were a friend?” I asked, kneeling down to her level. My circle still separated us, throwing a haze of blue between us that made the brilliant yellow of her soul look slightly green.

The girl nodded. “We were, I mean, I thought…” She scrubbed at the tears on her checks with the back of her hand. “Did you ask him why?”

I knew which “why” she wanted. She wanted to know why he’d killed himself. Suicides had always been my least favorite cases to work because whatever answer the shade gave was never enough for those who’d been left behind. This time though, this was even worse. Do I tell her it was murder? That he didn’t make the choice? I didn’t know. And I still hadn’t proven to the cops that they had a killer on the loose, so I avoided the question.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

She scrubbed at more tears. “Allison.”

“Okay, Allison, can I ask you a few questions?” I didn’t wait for her to answer before going on. “When was the last time you saw Daniel?”

“Wednesday morning.”

Wednesday? That was during the shade’s memory loss. A twinge of excitement ran through me. This girl might know something, even if she didn’t realize she did. But I couldn’t let that excitement show while I squatted beside her friend’s grave.

“I need you to think back to Wednesday. Did Daniel act strange? Did he do or say anything strange or out of the ordinary?”

The girl looked at the ground, but that didn’t stop me from seeing the flush that lit her face. “He’d had a bad couple of days. Something happened at football practice, and then he started feeling ill. I’d talked to him the night before, when he’d canceled our study session—I was tutoring him in math. He said he had to cancel because he was coming down with the flu. He sounded awful, actually sick. Not like the times he claimed he was and then went to a party. So I picked up breakfast at the cafeteria for him and took it to his dorm room. I felt bad for him, you know? Until I got there and discovered he definitely wasn’t sick. He’d blown me off. Again. Not completely surprising, I mean, he was a football player and I’m a math nerd.” Her ears turned the color of strawberries and I could almost see the heat coming off her flushed face. “But then he invited me in and I, uh, missed all my morning classes. I’ve never skipped classes before but…”

By the depth of her blush, I guessed they hadn’t made up the lost tutoring time. “You had sex?” I asked, and when she cringed, I inwardly cursed myself for my bluntness. Tact wasn’t my strongest trait.

She pushed off the ground and ran a hand through her dark hair so that it fell into her face. “I have to go.” She turned all but running for her dropped backpack.

“Wait,” I yelled, after her. She didn’t stop. Damn it. I broke my circle and rushed after the girl. The planes were still overlaying my vision and I tripped over a bouquet of flowers that had been so withered in my vision I hadn’t noticed them.

I didn’t catch up with Allison until the cemetery gate. “Wait,” I said again, catching her arm.

She jumped, chill bumps shooting across her bared skin. “Damn, lady, you’re cold.”

In more ways than one. Because I was about to grill her about her dead crush. “When you were…with Daniel on Wednesday, did he seem odd. Different?”

“Yeah, he picked me instead of one of the coeds who would have loved to jump into his bed. That odd enough for you? Clearly sleeping with me was a sign of severe mental stress.”

Her lips quivered and she made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob—was probably both. Angry tears made her long hair stick to her cheeks, and her shoulders trembled, even though she didn’t make a sound. I guessed it wasn’t just the first time she’d slept with Daniel, it was the first time she’d slept with anyone.

When Allison wasn’t hiding behind her hair—or blotchy from crying—I bet she was a very pretty girl. A girl who deserved better than a football player that used her to keep his GPA high enough to play. I wanted to hug the girl, to tell her it would be all right. That she’d find someone better. But even though only seven or so years separated our ages, she was still more teenager than young adult, and I knew she wouldn’t believe me—I wouldn’t have at her age. Hell, with the state of my love life, I wasn’t in any position to offer advice.

But I could give her one thing. “He really was ill Tuesday night. He said he went to bed early and shades can’t lie.”

She looked up, blinking at me. “Really?”

I nodded, giving her my best sympathetic smile, because I was about to push her again. “Allison, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but when you were with Daniel, did he seem confused?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She turned down the sidewalk.

I kept pace with her. “Did he use your name?”

Her head shot up and she rounded on me. “Of course he—” She stopped. Her mouth opened slightly as her jaw went slack, and her shoulders shook as a new tear slid down her cheek. “No. Not once. And after…after he asked if I knew where he parked his car.” Lines of frowns creased her forehead. “He didn’t have a car. I thought he was hinting that he wanted to borrow mine. I gave him the keys and told him which garage it was in. That was the last time I saw him.”

Her eyes were too wide as she looked up at me. “There was something wrong with him when we…” She trailed off. Her lips, her nose, her chin, and just about every muscle in her face quivered. She hugged herself, tucking her hands in her armpits.

I wished I could have lied. Could have told her that his shade said he’d wanted her for a long time or that it was the happiest morning in his life. But his shade didn’t even know that morning existed. And I couldn’t lie. So I remained silent.

She stared at me for several more seconds, and then turning on her heels, she all but ran away.

A hard knot of guilt twisted my stomach as I watched her go. I’d just taken what was probably a bittersweet memory of the last bit of time she spent with someone she cared about and torn it to shreds. But I’d needed to know if Daniel was himself, or if he was someone else entirely.

It sounded a hell of a lot like the latter.