A Murder of Crows (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery #7) (8 page)

Brad leaned in to press the fast forward button. 
The timestamp in the corner of the screen advanced, and the two men sat at the bar well past closing.  At four in the morning, they left together.

“I took him home,” Brad explained.  “
We walked.  Half an hour later, I left him at his apartment steps.”

Darcy stared at the screen.  “Jon, how could this be?  Officer Phillips said that Riley left with Marla.”

“Maybe he misspoke,” Jon suggested.  “And maybe Marla was killed after four thirty.  I didn’t think to ask what the time of death was.”

“I’m telling you that Riley had nothing to do with it.”  Brad’s voice had gotten angry.  “Find the guy she
actually left with.  Find that man, and you’ll find her killer, I’d bet.”

“So how do we know,” Jon said, “that you didn’t kill her yourself?  If the time of death is after four thirty, you don’t exactly have an alibi yourself, do you?”

“Are you insane?” Brad practically yelled.  “Why in God’s name would I kill the woman?  I didn’t even know her.”

“You know she turned your friend down,” Jon
reasoned.  “Maybe you saw her back here at the bar when you came back.  Or when you were leaving, for that matter.  Maybe there was an argument and things got out of hand?”

Brad slammed a hand down on the desk holding the computer equipment.  “And maybe you should just leave my bar!”

Jon smiled in that way he had when he knew he had the upper hand with a suspect.  “Well, we could always continue this down at the police station, I suppose.”

“Hold on,” Darcy interrupted.  “This isn’t helping anything.  I might have a way to clear him as a suspect right here and right now, Jon.  It would save everyone a lot of time.”

Both men looked at her with questions in their eyes.  “How?” Jon asked.

Darcy smiled.  “My aunt showed
me a way.”

“This is stupid,” Brad said.

Darcy and Brad sat in chairs, still in the back room of the bar, facing each other.  She held his hands in hers.  Jon didn’t look happy about any of this, but he stood back, watching.

“Just trust me,” Darcy said to Brad.  “I know what I’m doing.”

“So, you’re what?  Some kind of psychic?”

“Something
like that.”  She tried to remember the instructions that she had read in her aunt’s book.  Breathing was key, along with physical contact like they were doing now.  The other part of it was strictly an effort of reaching out with her life force, similar to what she did during a communication to contact the dead but different at the same time.

“She consults with the police all the time,” Jon put in, trying to make what they were doing seem rational.  “She’s helped me solve several cases.”

“By holding men’s hands?” Brad quipped.  “Must get a lot of dates that way.”

Jon’s face darkened, and Darcy figured now was a good time to start.

Which was when she saw Jeff.

She tried to ignore him, but he leaned his ghostly face down in
between her and Brad, screaming words at her that were muted and distorted.  No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make the words come through.  She knew how frustrating it was for ghosts who weren’t able to get their message across.  Darcy felt almost sorry for him.

Almost.
  She still wasn’t over the sting of seeing him with Marla.

She closed her eyes, trying to ignore him, but the whispery sho
uting continued.  Even in death he was annoying.

Breathing in and out and in again, she held her breath and focused on the feel of Brad’s hands in hers.  Then in and out and in again, and push out with her life force.

She felt it, just like Millie had explained in her book.  The humming heat spread out from her hands and across Brad’s and she could feel the way it—

Jeff screamed in her ear and she winced, turning and slapping at the air with her hand.  His visage smeared like smoke before he backed away from her
, angry and surprised.  “Go away!” she shouted at him.

Brad looked over at Jon, his eyes wide.  “Uh, don’t worry,” Jon said to him.  “There was a fly on her neck. 
Big one.”

“Look, man,” Brad said to him, “I don’t care if she’s full on crazy.  If you believe her when she says I didn’t do this, that’s all that matters to me.”

Sighing, eyeing Jeff warily before closing her eyes again, Darcy settled her thoughts and went back into her breathing techniques.  In and out and in again, hold it.  In and out and in again, hold it.

She concentrated on his hands and fe
lt that same heat seeping out from her, covering his skin.  He must have felt it, too, because his fingers twitched.  Four times she repeated that process, then she opened her eyes on the exhale.

Nothing.
  There was nothing there.

If there had been murder on Brad’s conscience, if he had killed Marla or anyone else,
she would be able to see bloodstains on his hands.  That’s what her aunt’s book had said in one of the more advanced techniques for those with the gift.  The book was a little fuzzy as to whether the psychic stains would be visible to anyone else, but they were supposed to be plain as day to her.  She’d never done this before, of course, but she knew that she’d done it the right way.  It had worked just like it should have.

Which meant Brad was not the killer.

“He’s clean,” she said to Jon, letting go of Brad’s hands.  He took them back, staring at them in front of his face.

“What did you do?” he asked her.  “That was…intense.”

“Calm down, big boy,” Jon said to him.  “The point is, she says you didn’t kill Marla.  That’s good enough for me.”

Jeff tried getting Darcy’s attention again now that she was finished with
her psychic investigation.  She waved her hand through him again as he got too close, making his specter gasp and clutch at his chest as if she’d physically hurt him, which was absurd, but leave it to Jeff to be melodramatic even in death.

“What about the rest of it?
” Brad asked them.  “What about my friend leaving the bar with me around four, and going straight home?  Hard for him to kill anyone if he was home.”

“Assuming he stayed home,” Jon pointed out.  Brad glared at him.

Darcy was having a hard time watching Brad and Jon.  Jeff kept getting in the way.  “Jon, can we go now, please?  We’ve learned everything we can here, I think.  Plus, I need some fresh air,” she added, glaring at Jeff.  He managed to look offended and started shouting at her again, the sound of it like someone trying to scream underwater.

***

Out on the sidewalk, Jon turned them up the street and away from the bar, waiting until they were gone until he said anything.  “Jeff followed us in there, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Darcy admitted.  “I’m sorry. 
I’ve told him to leave us alone.  I just can’t get rid of him.”

“You can’t, like, point him toward the light or something?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”  Although at this point she really, really wished it did.  “I need to find out what’s bothering him so much and that’s the only way he can be free to leave this realm for the next.”

Jon snorted.  “I would have thought his secret affair with Marla would
have been a bad secret enough for anyone.  With that cat out of the bag maybe he should just go find his door and stop pestering us.”

Jeff floated up in front of Jon, screaming at him in jibberish.  Jon kept walking, perfectly oblivious to Jeff’s anger.

Darcy couldn’t help but giggle.

“What’s funny?” Jon asked.  At the same time, Jeff turned to her and mouthed the same words.

Darcy laughed again, covering her mouth with a hand.  “Sorry.  I’m sorry.  Jeff is really overreacting.  About something.”

“And that’s funny?”  Jon was upset at her. 
She could tell.  He shook his head and looked up the street again.  “Look, never mind.  Why didn’t you use that little trick back there when we were at the police station?  If you could tell Brad wasn’t the killer couldn’t you do the same for Riley Mason?”

“We didn’t really need it
at the time.  You were sure Riley wasn’t the killer.  That was good enough for me.  Plus, I wasn’t invited into the interview.  How do you think the Ryansburg Police would feel about me using paranormal abilities to identify a murderer?”

“Good point,” he said.  They walked on in silence after that, Jeff included.  Then, a few streets over he said, “Listen, Darcy, about this whole Jeff thing.”

She cringed, waiting for whatever was coming next.

“I really don’t know what to say.  I know he was your husband.  I know
he treated you badly, and now we both know it was worse than you thought.  But it seems like you’ve changed.  You’re still you, but something’s different.  I think all of this has maybe soured you on marriage in general.  You just need to know.  I’m not him.”

“I know you’re not Jeff
,” she said immediately.  Still, she thought he might have hit the point closer than she wanted to admit.  No matter what her feelings for Jon, she had taken a while to even agree to them moving in together.  Now, she was shying away from the very thought of marrying him.  And it had nothing to do with anything Jon had done.

“Then don’t choose Jeff over me, now that he’s back for you,” he said to her.

“Jon, it isn’t like that.  I have to admit that seeing him now has dragged up a lot of feelings.  I’m…confused, sure.”

“So,” he said, “this would be a bad time to ask you to marry me?”

She nearly tripped over her own two feet.  Her mouth dropped open and she gaped at him, trying to figure out something, anything, to say.

He saved her from trying.
  “Don’t worry about it.  Come on, let’s get back to the police station and talk to Phillips again.  He needs to know what that video shows.”

She walked along with him, knowing in her heart there was so much more
she should tell him, so much she should say, and not able to breathe a single word of it.

***

They were led through the police station by a different junior officer, a kid really, with pimply skin and a scrawny neck.  He brought them to Officer Phillips’ desk then disappeared quickly.

Jeff, angry screaming ghost,
followed them the whole way.  Her aunt had never shown her any techniques for blocking a ghostly presence.  Their focus had always been on reaching out to trapped souls and helping them.  But Jeff was really starting to make her wish she had the equivalent of ghost-be-gone.

Mark Phillips looked up from a variety of forms spread out across his desk.  “Oh, hi guys.  Sorry, I’m trying to write up the arrest sheets on our friend Riley Mason.”

Darcy wasn’t sure she’d understood him correctly.  “You’re arresting Riley?”

“Well, yes.  That’s what we do to murderers.”

“When did you prove he murdered Marla?” Jon asked.  “The last I knew there were still some serious questions.”

“I can’t say there aren’t still some loose ends, but that’s always the way of it, right?  We’ve got plenty enough for probable cause.  I’m sure he did it.
  The District Attorney can worry about the rest.”

Jon sat down in a chair on this side of Phillips’ desk.  “
Mark, we saw the security video from the bar.  Riley never left with Marla.  She left with some other guy.  Then he stayed at the bar until four in the morning.  It proves what he said to us in the interview.”

Jeff stopped screaming and started pacing back and forth instead, shaking his head.  Darcy watched him, trying not to make it obvious to the other officers in the room that she was
keeping an eye on a ghost.

Officer Phillips nodded along with everything Jon
had said.  “Right, right.  I know he didn’t leave with her.  But the window for the time of death is sketchy.  I figure Riley found Marla again after he left the bar.  He probably wanted to continue their flirting, and she didn’t, so they argued and he killed her.”

“What about his friend Brad’s statement?” Jon pressed.

“What statement?  That they left the bar together?”  Phillips sighed, his eyes level on Jon.  Then he sat back from his desk and unbuttoned the cuffs of his sleeves, rolling them up.  “You need to remember this isn’t your case, Jon.  I appreciate the help you’ve given me, but we’re working this, and we’ve got it in hand.  Now, I know Marla was a friend to the both of you, and I understand why you’re taking such an interest.  But don’t try to tell me how to do my job.”

Jon started to say more.  Darcy
stepped close and put her hand on his shoulder.  She squeezed to get his attention.

On Officer Phillips’ right forearm was a tattoo. 
A tattoo of a crow.

Jon saw it, too.  He knew what Darcy was trying to tell him. 
“All right,” he said.  “I understand.  Wouldn’t want someone from out of town getting into my cases either.  We’ll head back to the hotel and wait to hear from you.  Okay?”

“Actually you might want to just go home,” he said, taking both of them in with a meaningful glance.  “There’s nothing more you can do here.”