Chapter 2

I CAN’T pinpoint when, exactly, I’d begun to see ghosts, but I’d certainly seen my fair share. I generally did a good job of ignoring them, but in terms of annoying me to death, the one in Graycie’s office was an unexpected front-runner.

He was standing by the window, staring out. His clothes seemed dated, maybe even a little old-fashioned—suspenders holding up a pair of midnight trousers. He had pushed his glasses up on his forehead, which seemed about right. The jumpers never wanted to see the end. He looked sad. Regretful. I’d regret taking a header out of a sixth story window too.

It didn’t seem like a good time to tell Graycie there was a ghost at his window. Instead I watched Graycie turn a page of his newspaper with one hand and absently stir the cream in his coffee with the other. As head chief of the BAU-3 unit, he was good at making people squirm.

To the casual observer, he appeared relaxed. Not a care in the world. I knew him a little better than that. Graycie was pissed. He didn’t suffer fuckups lightly, and at that moment, I was first-draft pick for the Ultimate Fuckup League.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me this morning.” Graycie flipped a page of his newspaper. “I’m not going to beat around the bush.”

Well, good. Bushes are full of all kinds of nasty critters. “Sir?”

“I spoke with Mr. and Mrs. Paul. They had quite a bit to say about you.”

“All good, I hope.” Probably not a good idea to get smart with him. But I’m pretty sure I’m 70 percent blueberries and blackberries, because sarcasm is my jam.

He took off his glasses, laid them on the desk, and rubbed temples rife with silver. It wasn’t a bad look. He was about twenty pounds and a haircut from true silver-fox material, Sean Connery–style. His salt-and-pepper hair was still thick, and the lines around his eyes only added character to an already interesting mélange of features. Right then, those features were pulled downward as he sighed heavily.

“Christiansen, you’re a damn good agent, but I’m having a real problem with this. I’m still trying to understand why, on God’s green earth, you would give them a message from their dead daughter.”

Because her ghost wouldn’t fucking leave me alone, that’s why.

“I didn’t give them a message,” I said. “I simply told them that she was at peace. I was just… trying to give them a bit of closure.”

Sometimes I thought Graycie’s eyes were pretty. When he chose to pin me down with an unblinking stare? Not so much. Then those round light green orbs were a bit unnerving—like being stared to death by a pair of hostile seedless grapes.

“Shawna Paul’s abduction is still an open investigation. We haven’t located a body.” Graycie spoke carefully. Slowly. “We don’t, in fact, know if she’s dead. So how would you know if she’s at peace or not?”

“Look, what do you want from me?” I asked tiredly. “I felt bad. Okay? Mr. Paul has kept on a porch light for seven years, just so his daughter can find her way home in the dark. They won’t even sell the house in case Shawna comes back, so she’ll know where to find them. They can’t move on.”

“So you made up a story about their daughter being dead?”

“I didn’t make—”

I stopped short. There was no need to make things worse. That wasn’t the time to admit that, not only had I seen her spirit, but she’d been kind of chatty as well. It’d probably go much better for me if I were a liar, rather than certifiable.

I rubbed my eyes. Frankly I was tired of the whole mess. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“You think?” Graycie looked like he wanted to deck me. “If you weren’t the agent you are, I wouldn’t hesitate to can your ass. You do know that, don’t you?”

I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“You are that,” he snapped. “If I hear of you going within fifty feet of even the Pauls’ flea-bitten beagle, I’ll make you into one of those ghosts you love so much.”

“Got it,” I said through gritted teeth. “Can I go?”

“No. That’s not why I called you down here.” Graycie pulled out a thick manila folder from the stack of crap on his desk. “I’ve reviewed the report from the departmental psychiatrist.”

“Oh yeah?” The mild words couldn’t quite begin to cover what I felt about that. Embarrassed about my two-month administrative leave. Nervous about what Ryder, the departmental psychiatrist from hell, had concluded about my mental state. As far as I knew, the man never answered a question unless it was with another question. And how does that make you feel?

Angry. Really fucking angry.

“Most of it seems to be in order.”

Most? I nodded and wondered about the one emotion that remained absent. Relief. I felt no relief. I would’ve felt the same if he’d said I couldn’t come back. Nothing. Flatline. I frowned at my thoughts. I’d worked hard to get where I was. I wasn’t about to give it all up because I suddenly had the emotional range of a tomato.

I cleared my throat. “I’m ready to get back to work.”

“Are you?”

“You have the report,” I said defensively. “Where is everyone? Fox? Scout? Angela?”

“I’m already sending the rest of the BAU-3 to Texas. They have a series of abducted children there.”

“I can be ready in an hour.”

“They left two hours ago.”

“Then I can meet them in Texas,” I gritted out. His silence spoke volumes, and I scowled. “You don’t think I’m ready.”

“No,” he agreed, and his simple agreement sent my brows sky high. He wasn’t even going to bullshit me? Must be serious.

“Several members of the team have expressed… concern. And you know how much we have to depend on one another in this job.”

It was true. Sometimes we spent more time with one another than with our families. Holidays, birthdays. Hell, when we traveled, even breakfast and dinner. It was a demanding job and one that required that you trusted everyone on your team. Apparently that was no longer the case. I was trying not to be bitter, but I’m genetically wired that way. It’s in my DNA, right next to punctuality and a love of chocolate.

“If you’re going to fire me, you could’ve done it over the phone. I was getting a good deal on some blood oranges.”

“I’m not firing anyone,” Graycie said, clearly exasperated. “But I do have something different in mind for you.”

“Yeah? I have no desire to fold shirts at the Gap.”

He ignored my flippancy with effort, but the left corner of one eye did twitch. “I want you to work on one of these outstanding cold cases. We’ve had requests from all of these departments, some dating back several years. You know our department is stretched paper-thin, so cases like these don’t really get the attention they deserve.”

Graycie picked up a stack of yellow color-coded files and held them out. After a moment of hesitation, I took them.

“What’re these?”

“Options. Ryan Markisson from Brighton, Michigan. He went missing from a basketball court. Tavis Ward, a six-year-old from Charleston.” Another yellow folder joined the stack. “Found dead in the woods behind his home. Carly Woodward. Sixteen-year-old from Chicago. They found her car in a parking lot behind her high school. From the amount of blood in her trunk, it doesn’t look good.”

It was times like these that the nature of the job really struck home. Each one of those yellow folders—some thin, some thick—represented someone’s life. Someone who was missing, maybe dead, possibly murdered. It was sobering. And it might not be the high-profile serial murders in Texas that the rest of the team was working on, but it was important. I picked up one of the yellow folders. They were important.

“I like the Tavis Ward case,” Ethan said near my ear. I barely caught my groan. I’d been so intent on the folders that I hadn’t even heard him come in. “I’ve never been to Charleston, you know.”

You should go. Like right now. I tried to project the message with a glare toward the nosy ghost, but Ethan only took a seat in the chair next to me.

“I’m going to need a moment to review the files,” I said.

“Take all the time you need.” Graycie’s phone vibrated on the desk, and he picked it up. I watched his thumbs awkwardly paw at the screen. He looked like a museum display as he searched for the next letter, brow furrowed. Cro-Magnon Man Meets Samsung Galaxy.

I bit my lip. That was my cue. I should probably get up and leave and let Graycie respond to whatever text had just winged in from God knows where. Probably from one of his nonfuckup agents telling him that he or she’d helped close the murder case of the century.

Instead I thumbed through the files and familiarized myself with the cases. I flipped open the Tavis Ward case file and began reading. It wasn’t long before I shook my head. “1965? The first forty-eight is usually in reference to hours, not years.”

“They recently found a witness who remembers seeing him in an ice cream shop. He’d been crying and carrying on, but she just thought he was giving his father a hard time.”

“What made her come forward now?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? What makes any of them come forward? Sometimes those kinds of people only care when it becomes personal for them. Maybe she suffered a recent loss in the family. With the new information, they’re filming a special for them on that missing people show? The Forgotten?”

“I haven’t heard of it.”

“You haven’t heard of anything on television, Christiansen.”

I shrugged. No, I wasn’t an expert on pop culture, but I had a TV. Apparently when you flubbed one game of charades, you were blackballed for life. “We lost fair and square, Grace.”

“We had that game in the bag.” Graycie sighed and shook his head at the misery of it all. “It was Harry freaking Potter. How do you miss something like that?”

“You drew a flower pot with hair on it.”

“And what would you have liked me to draw?” he snapped.

“How about a wizard hat? And, I dunno, a book?”

He scowled at me. “The next file is a missing girl from Brickell Bay. Amy Greene. They’re not sure if she took off on her own or if she had some help.”

I flipped open the folder and her picture smiled up at me. Reddish brown waves of hair surrounded her heart-shaped face and fell to her slender shoulders. She looked exactly like what she was—a happy, healthy teenager. Except the eyes. Those brown eyes looked… knowing, somehow, incongruous with the braced, cheery smile.

I sighed, closed the file, and tapped it against my leg. Graycie had gone back to his phone already, as though I weren’t there. “And if I don’t choose one of these?”

“Where is the fricking number sign?” He didn’t look up.

“Alford.”

“I’m not deaf, Christiansen. No matter what, you can’t be here,” he said. “Not while I’m fixing this Shawna Paul disaster. You should be thanking me.”

“Thanking you? You gotta be—”

“They wanted you fired.”

Oh. Well, there was that. I swallowed. “Thank you.”

He sent me a meaningful look. “Mmhmm. You’re not working with the team until you get your head together. And before you return to full duty, you’ll have to sit down with the departmental psychologist and get cleared.”

“I already did that,” I protested. “You read the report.”

“Yeah.” Graycie finally looked up from his phone, those mossy green eyes serious and soft. So unlike him. “I did.”

I blew out a breath. Fucking Ryder. I probably shouldn’t have been quite so honest with the shrink.

Graycie looked back down at his phone again, and whatever look I had seen was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “This one is a gimme, Christiansen. You poke around one of these cold, and I do mean ice-fucking-cold cases. You go down, investigate, make nice with local PD, and make no waves. Make it look good. You solve the case? Even better.”

Yeah, well. Brickell Bay was also located right on the outskirts of my hometown. That also meant I would have to see my sister and have dinner with my parents at least once. That should certainly qualify me for some hazard pay, right?

He pointed at the folder I still gripped in my hands. “Is that your case?”

“Yeah. Amy Greene.”

He nodded, satisfied. “I’ll email you all the details for when you meet with the Brickell Bay Police Department. They’ll have an escort waiting for you at the airport.”

“Escort?” My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “So I don’t escape? Am I going to Brickell Bay or Alcatraz?”

“Common courtesy.”

I groaned inwardly as I stood and shrugged into my coat and gloves. I had to play nice with some stooge from the ancient history squad all the way back to Brickell Bay. That did it. I was officially going to have to pad my expense reports.

“Let’s get this over with,” I sighed. “When is my flight?”

“The red-eye tonight at DCA.”

“No agency jet,” I said mournfully.

“No, but I’ll book you two seats in economy.” Graycie smirked. “So you’ll have elbow room.”

“Smug bastard. You ever heard of business class?” I stood and slung my scarf around my neck, but didn’t bother to secure it. I’d be in my car soon enough. That’s what God made heated seats for, after all. That and keeping takeout warm on the way home.

“Oh, and Christiansen?”

I looked back to find Graycie staring at me. Hard. “Yeah?”

“Don’t fuck up.”

The word again hung in the air, unspoken, and my mouth tightened before I headed out the door.

Thanks for the vote of confidence.