The Vengeful Dead (17 page)

“He hasn’t been at work?” Now she was beginning to panic.

“He called in for a leave of absence two days ago,” McManus said.

Jackie inched forward, easing into Mrs. Morgan’s personal space. “Please, Beverly, we just want to check out your house to see if he has been there or if he’s left any clue as to his whereabouts. Hopefully it won’t take long. We’ll vouch for your need to leave work if need be.”

“No, no, that’s fine,” she said, shaking her head. “I can take a couple hours off. I’ll meet you there.”

The wide-eyed panic said it all. She knew he was in trouble or worse, knew he was capable of making it.

“Thank you, Beverly,” Jackie said. “Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.”

At the Morgans’ house, Beverly stood on the front steps; it was a brick and wood suburban home in a subdivision where every third house looked like a reversed floor plan of this one, with the same chemically green lawns and perfectly shaped shrubs. Jackie parked on the street, leaving the one Nissan Sentra alone in the driveway. No other cars were parked by the house. Morgan’s absence was immediately confirmed by his wife as they walked up the driveway.

“He’s not here,” she said, “but the door was unlocked, so he must have come by earlier.”

Jackie picked up her pace. “OK. I’d like you to stay by the front door if you can, Mrs. Morgan. We’ll try to be as quick as possible.”

“Stay by the door?” Her hand came up to her mouth. “Sweet Jesus. He is involved in something, isn’t he?”

Jackie laid a hand on her arm. “Mrs. Morgan, we honestly don’t know. Our only goal here is to either confirm or deny some information we’ve received.”

“What information is that?”

“We can’t divulge that at this time,” she said.

She nodded. Thankfully, cops’ spouses understood this. “All right.”

Once inside, they got the layout of the house and Jackie asked McManus to take the upstairs. “See if anything has been used recently, change of clothes, computer, or whatever. I’ll check out down here.”

“Sounds good.” He nodded once and headed up the stairs.

Jackie left Mrs. Morgan standing in the entry worriedly working her hands together as she watched strangers begin to poke through her house. The living room and dining rooms appeared to be in perfect order, immaculate even, magazine quality in their arrangement down to the artfully placed coffee-table books. In the kitchen, Jackie found the first signs of use, a single glass perched on the edge of the sink. While it could have been left from Mrs. Morgan’s morning routine, she had the suspicion that nothing got left out of place in this household. Moving into the kitchen, Jackie picked up an odd sound, a low vibration she felt in her feet.

“Mrs. Morgan,” she called out, “is the washer and dryer in the basement?”

“Yes. The laundry and playroom are down there.”

Washing machine cycles were typically around forty minutes. Could they have missed him by such little time as that? Or possibly he was down there now. Jackie pulled out her Glock and walked over to the basement door in a short hall running between the kitchen and dining room. As quietly as possible, she opened the door and listened. There was no other sound other than the churning rhythm of the washer.

“Detective Morgan?” No sound. She heard McManus come to the landing of the stairs directly above her.

“You got something, Jack?”

“Washing machine is running down here,” she said.

His footsteps thumped in rapid fashion down the stairs.

“Thomas!” Mrs. Morgan called out in a shrill voice.

“Stay right here, Mrs. Morgan,” McManus said to her. A moment later he was with Jackie at the basement door. Seeing her gun, he withdrew his. “Anything?” he asked quietly.

“Just the machine.”

He looked down the stairwell. “Lights are still on.”

“Yeah.”

“Stay here, I’ll take a look,” he said and started down the stairs.

Jackie grabbed his arm. “I’m quite capable—”

“Liaison, Jack. Keep back unless it’s necessary. Don’t want you getting in trouble.”

She let go. “Shit. OK, go.”

McManus went down. She watched him disappear around the corner of the stair. “Detective Morgan?” he called out. “This is Agent Ryan McManus, FBI.” More silence. He came back to the stair and went in the other direction before returning a moment later. “It’s clear, Jack.”

Jackie went down, following the sound of the washing machine. The laundry room was to the right, a squeaky clean, finished room with shelves, a folding table and a long bar to hang clothes on. A hamper sat beneath a shoot leading up into the house. She stepped up to the washer and opened the lid. It was in the spin cycle. The timer said there was ten minutes left on the cycle. “He was here within the last thirty minutes.”

The load inside was only a few items. What caught her attention, however, was the bright smear of blood on the lip of the washer’s bowl. Blood. Fabulous. “McManus, look here.”

“Blood? Well, shit. Look at that.” He peered into the bowl to check out the clothing. “Think we better get the scene guys over here.”

Jackie let out a deep breath. “Yeah, we better. I want to check something first.”
God help me, please be ghost-free.
She flipped her gun around. “Take this.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m going to test the blood sample there for signs of . . . ghost stuff.”

He took the gun, eyes wide, unsure. “Need me to do anything?”

Jackie ran a hand through her hair, staring down at the simple red smear, so full of potentially bad news. “Get behind me and put me in a restraining hold.”

“Seriously? What the hell for?”

“In case I flip out and try to claw your eyes out,” she snapped back, nerves beginning to chew like ravenous wolves through her stomach. “I decked Anderson the last time I did this.”

“Wow, OK. We don’t need that.” He stepped behind her. “Give me an arm.” He turned her right arm up behind her back and wrapped his arm across her chest. Her left arm was only free from the elbow down. “That work?”

She nodded, her eyes still riveted on the blood. Jackie’s mouth had gone dry as bone. She rasped out, “Yeah, good enough.”

Jackie closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. As her mind turned its focus toward the dead, the smear of blood took on substance. It radiated beneath her hand, a faint but discernible presence. She did not have to open her eyes to tell exactly where it was. Her fingers hovered inches above it, quavering with dread anticipation.

“Here goes,” she whispered.

The glow of the doorway to Deadworld sprang to life upon touching the blood, a soft nimbus of pale, gray light enveloping the washer. The biting cold wind of the other side came through, carrying with it a thunderous bolt of anguished rage that flowed up her arm like water down a funnel.

“Jackie!”

Something fierce had a hold of her, clamping her down into submission. She turned and twisted against it, desperate to break free of the thing she knew had intentions to kill.

“Jackie! Jesus Christ! It’s me. Ryan!”

Her eyes fluttered open, staring up at a row of baskets sitting upon a shelf, full of neatly folded clothes. Shirts hung from a rod overhead. The light of Deadworld had vanished. “McManus?”

“You want to get off of me now?”

They were sprawled on the floor and he had her pinned on top of him. Jackie turned and rolled off, getting up on her hands and knees. Her elbow was throbbing from smacking into something, while the bitter cold of Deadworld faded from her bones.

“What happened? What’d I do?”

McManus rubbed at his jaw. “Besides elbowing me in the face and threatening to kill me, not much. What the hell was that, Jack?”

“Thomas!” Beverly Morgan yelled from the top of the stairs.

“He’s not down here, Mrs. Morgan,” Ryan yelled back. “Just a little scare down here. Nothing to worry about.”

Jackie grabbed the washer and pulled herself up and then offered Ryan a hand. “Sorry about that. I haven’t figured out how to stop it yet.”

“And what exactly was that?”

“The rage of the woman who’s got a hold of Morgan,” she said.

Ryan pulled himself up. “That’s one pissed off lady.”

“Look what happened to her. Wouldn’t you be just a little peeved?”

“Yeah, guess I would be ready to kill.”

“We need to get the evidence guys out here for this stuff,” she said. “And I need to get Nick and Shelby out looking for this guy. He’s going to be looking for the next perp.”

“I’ll ring Pernetti and get an APB out on Morgan’s car.”

“Good. Then I want to get back out there and hit up neighborhood hangouts for this gang. Someone has to know who Vasquez’s men are. We just have to hope Morgan doesn’t have too much of a head start.”

Chapter 20

They left a distraught Beverly Morgan sitting on her front step with her head in her hands, hair whipping across her face from a blustery October wind, waiting for the crime-scene crew to arrive. Nick and Shelby were on their way up to the north end of Chicago to look for Detective Morgan, with a clear warning from Nick to avoid direct contact with the suspect. Jackie hoped that would be the case. She had no desire to interact with Morgan if he was filled with what she had felt from Deadworld. McManus was now in his own vehicle.

They needed as many separate bodies on the street as possible, because as it stood now, Morgan was only a person of interest. Jackie was not about to have Pernetti start a manhunt based on her sensing a ghost. They needed some kind of direct, physical evidence. But more importantly, Morgan was working with the advantage of knowing whom he was going after. Their only real hope was that he didn’t know where the next perpetrator was at and they could catch up to him. There was a chance Morgan was doing something entirely different, but Jackie had a gut feeling that was not the case. The ghost of Rosa Sanchez was on a very single-minded mission and would not stop until she was done.

After much internal debate, Jackie decided to call Belgerman. She still had no real idea how all of this supernatural stuff sat with him.

“Belgerman,” he said. “How you doing, Jackie?”

“Following up on a lead from Iroquois,” she said. “We encountered another ghost.”

“What have you got?”

Jackie took a deep breath. “I think that homicide detective, Thomas Morgan, may be possessed by the ghost of Rosa Sanchez.”

There was a slight pause as he took that in. “Damn, Jackie. That’s not going to go over well at all. You have any way to confirm this possibility without turning it into a shit storm?”

“Not 100 percent, sir. We’re close. I found blood at Morgan’s house that, uh . . . indicates the presence of Rosa Sanchez, and that we may be looking for an injured suspect. We missed him by less than thirty minutes.”

“You got Pernetti in on this?”

“Mostly,” Jackie replied. “The crime-scene crew is on its way there. We’ve got an APB out on Morgan’s car, but I haven’t told him we might have a possessed cop on our hands.”

“No other evidence connecting him specifically?”

“Tire and foot tracks at the scene. We’ve got the ballistics, but we need him or his car to confirm. McManus, Anderson, and Fontaine are out with me hoping to track him down.”

“You need more bodies?”

Yes! Just like that. He didn’t even question.
“We do, but I was hesitant to tell Pernetti what we’re doing. This is kind of out there, sir. What we really need is to track down this Vasquez guy ASAP or find some information on his known associates. That’s who Rosa is after.”

“OK. I’ll get more resources on that. I’ll tell Pernetti to get some bodies out looking for Morgan. His actions are suspicious enough to warrant questioning. We need a tighter connection though, Jackie. I’m very hesitant to be chasing down a respected detective without some solid evidence.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m just worried we don’t have time before she finds her next victim.”

“You find him; I don’t want you getting involved, Jackie. You aren’t officially on this case.”

You mean you don’t think I’m prepared to be involved.
“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Jackie, I mean it,” he said. “You’re a liaison on this, not an agent. Confirm your suspicions and get the team on it.”

“Sir, I get it.”

“All right. Good. And be careful, please. This is untested ground you’re covering.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” She hung up and slowed the Durango down to the speed limit. She was in gang country now.

And severely wishing she knew some rudimentary Spanish. McManus would have far more luck than she talking to the locals. Regardless, they were searching on a wing and a prayer. Their only hope lay in the fact that the killings were in the news and whomever else was involved had found a safe place to hide. Rosa would have to do a little digging to find out where they were at and Jackie hoped they could find her doing just that.

She drove up and down several blocks, keeping her eye out until she spotted a bar with a name printed in bright, green lettering. Jackie pulled into an empty space at the curb and was about to get out when her phone chimed. It was Nick.

“Hey,” she said, “any luck?”

“Can you tune into police radio?” he asked.

“Not in the Durango. What’s going on?”

“They’re responding to an assault call at The Raging Bull,” he said. “You know where that is?”

“Shit! McManus and I were there. I think I remember where it is.”

Nick gave her the address. “We’re on our way. Five minutes.”

She called McManus while she wheeled back into the street and then skidded around the next corner. “Ryan, we’ve got a police response to an assault at The Raging Bull. Meet you there.” Jackie clicked off and blared her horn at the traffic to get out of the way. The bar was only a few blocks away.

A pair of Chicago PD cars were pulled up to the curb in front of The Raging Bull. Two uniforms were standing outside on the sidewalk with a Hispanic man seated at the curb between them. He held a bloody white towel to one side of his head and was waving his other vehemently at one of the cops. Jackie came to a lurching stop behind the nearest police car. At the same time, the roar of a motorcycle engine came up from behind and Shelby came sliding to a stop behind the Durango. Even as she was swinging off, Nick’s car slid to a stop on the opposite side of the street.

One of the cops turned to Jackie, anger written all over his face. “This is a crime scene, lady. You’ll have to—”

“FBI,” she said, pulling out her badge. “We need to question the victim here.”

“Whoa! Hold on a sec.” The cop raised his hand. “What’s going on?”

“We believe the perp is a suspect we’re trying to track down. A few questions and we’ll be out of your hair.”

He waved at the bleeding man at his feet. “Have at it. Hope you speak Spanish.”

Yeah, great.
Shelby solved her problem in seconds. She knelt in front of the man, her tight T-shirt hiked up to reveal even more midriff than usual. She pushed her sunglasses up on to her head and gave him that huge, disarming smile that turned most men into slobbering idiots.

Spanish flew out of her mouth and the man snapped back an incensed retort. Her hand reached out, fingertips resting on the man’s knee. Jackie couldn’t follow a word of it. Nick arrived in the middle of their interchange.

“We know what’s going on here?”

The cop shrugged. “Someone barged into the bar and assaulted our compadre here. Still haven’t determined what it was about. These guys don’t tend to be very forthcoming.”

Jackie gave him a hard look. “These guys?”

“The gangbangers. They tend to settle their own disputes. Unless weapons are involved we aren’t going to do much.”

The man on the sidewalk had changed his tone. The anger was gone. He gave Shelby a begrudging smile. She had him pull the towel away to inspect the wound. It was a nasty lump at the hairline on his forehead with a half inch long split that was still seeping blood.

“That’s going to need a couple stitches,” Jackie said.

Shelby patted the man on his knee and kissed the bare side of his forehead. “Hector here was smacked with the butt end of pistol. Says a big, pissed off black guy came in and started grilling him about the whereabouts of ‘Steel-Toe’ Juarez.”

“Did he know who it was?” Jackie asked.

“Never seen the guy before, but he knew poor ol’ Hector here. Sounds like our guy.”

“Did he tell him where this Juarez guy is at?”

“Aunt’s house on Oaktree Lane.”

McManus came running up the sidewalk then, badge in hand. “You guys were quick. What’ve we got?”

Jackie pointed at him. “Call Gang Enforcement. We need an address for ‘Steel-Toe’ Juarez’s aunt on Oaktree Lane. Morgan was just here looking for him.”

He was on the phone before she finished. “Anyone know where Oaktree Lane is?”

One of the cops pointed in the direction behind the bar. “About eight or ten blocks west of here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Nick, Shelby. Head over from the south. Ryan and I will circle over from the north and hopefully the address will be between us. I’ll call you soon as we have it—and let me know if you spot his car, a green ’05 Cadillac.”

She didn’t wait for their reply and ran for her Durango. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. They couldn’t be any farther behind him than that. A little luck and Morgan would be waiting until night time again, but she wasn’t counting on it. Rosa was not acting with patience. The dead didn’t need to wait for a damn thing.

Six blocks later, McManus called in. “Four-sixthree-three Oaktree. That’s north of us I think.”

“Great! Thanks, Ryan. I’ll tell them. You see his car, get on Pernetti right away.”

“Yep. You got it.”

Jackie flipped on her wipers. The wind-whipped clouds were starting to fling hard little pellets through the air, snicking off the Durango like the nails of a hundred tiny claws. She reached Oaktree and had to slam on the brakes to get around the corner. Fortunately the sleet had just started and the streets were still dry or she might have found herself kissing the grill of the Ford F150 that blared at her as she straightened out and gunned it north up Oaktree Lane. McManus was already there, turning a careful circle on the sidewalk.

She put down the passenger window as she approached the unassuming, small brick house and leaned over. “Ryan! I’m parking up at the corner to block the road off. Give me a sec.”

He groaned and looked skyward. “Shit. Should have done that myself. Sorry.”

“Just in case,” she said, and drove half a block up, stopping angled across the road. A person would have to drive over someone’s lawn to get around. Jackie kicked the door open and stood on the runner to jump down, when the she noticed something from her extreme height advantage: a green car parked behind an SUV half a block farther up the street. Suspicious for sure, except when she looked in the immediate vicinity, Jackie caught sight of a man, a tall black man with a limp, walking up the steps to a house, but it was definitely not 4633 Oaktree.

“Fuck!” Jackie hopped down and began to run. She fumbled at her phone, trying to hit McManus’s number again and then managed to drop it. “Motherfu—” Jackie hesitated. Morgan or someone looking very much like him from a distance was on the porch of the house. Stop to pick up the phone and lose what might be precious seconds or yell for McManus and alert Morgan to her presence? Jackie kept running, tiny pellets of sleet stinging her face. Fifty meters.

At forty, the man reached into his coat and rang the doorbell with his other hand. Jackie reached into her own and grabbed a hold of her Glock. “Morgan!” He turned his head in her direction, just enough to see her coming out of the corner of his eye. “FBI, Morgan! You need to stop right there.”

Twenty-five meters and the front door opened. The screen came off, pulled free with one swift yank. The move was so abrupt and absurdly out of the ordinary that Jackie did not realize until too late what the possessed Morgan was doing.

At fifteen meters she dove to her right, down into the grass, but the corner of the door caught her across the back. It felt like a knife had been jabbed into her. There was a scream and Morgan’s voice said something in Spanish.

Jackie sprang to her feet, ten meters away just as Morgan’s gun went off, the steely crack stopping her heart for a brief second. Someone in the doorway fell back into the darkness of the house. “Rosa! Stop!” Jackie yelled. She pulled out her Glock sprinting the last few meters to the front step. The arm pivoted back around and Jackie realized there wouldn’t be time. She fired once, hitting the side of the chest as she turned. Again, dead-on center. And a third in the right shoulder, hopefully disabling the shooting arm.

Three point-blank shots, all in good locations, with enough force to drop a man in his tracks, or certainly to knock him back off his feet. All it did was knock his aim off a few inches.

Morgan’s Glock flared, booming in Jackie’s ears from two meters away. In those life-threatening moments when you see everything with pristine clarity, Jackie swore she could see the bullet coming out of the barrel, a hot, pointed hunk of lead screaming directly at her head. A flare of fire then erupted above her left eye, streaking across the side of her skull, leaving a shallow groove, searing like lava.

Jackie’s momentum carried her into Morgan, her shoulder burying itself in his gut, and they stumbled through the doorway, landing on the contorted, groaning body of whomever he had just shot. Her vision was blurring, stung with blood running into her eye, but she did see Morgan’s hand, raising up his Glock, and rolled onto her side, putting a bullet through his wrist. His gun clattered across the floor and bounced off a wall.

Through the raging fire that seemed to be engulfing her skull, Jackie could hear someone screaming. There was yelling going on somewhere in the house. Morgan had sat up, staring at the ragged hole in his arm. His gray T-shirt had blossomed a dark red stain. Jackie had seen this before, that look of disbelief, that it could not really be happening, that they really were about to die, and for a moment that is what she thought she was seeing in Morgan.

A smile crept across his dark lips, spreading to reveal teeth tinged with the pink of blood. “Agent Rutledge,” he said, this time in heavily accented English.

“Hands on your head, Morgan,” Jackie said, trying vainly to squirm her way out from beneath Morgan’s legs, but the body beneath was making it too difficult. She blinked at the blood flowing into her eye. A minute tops and McManus would be here. He had to have heard the gunshots.

In the space of a blink, Jackie found herself going from pointing a gun at Morgan’s face to being pushed down to her back, gun pinned to the ground with her hand under such force her knuckles were grinding into the hardwood beneath. His eyes looked down at her with the bottomless void of the dead. Jackie continued to struggle, but her head was about to explode from pain and she was feeling the warm rush of lightheadedness.