Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (15 page)

“I’m not totally against it, but it’s not my favorite idea, either,” I told him.

Paul coughed, which had to be an attention-getting device, since it was pretty much impossible for him to get sick. “About those
other things
you’ve been looking into…” he began.

“I’m working on it,” I insisted.

“So am I,” Tony said. He walked over to the pull-down stairs in question, and started gingerly down them. “I’ll be in touch.” He waved in a direction completely opposite from Paul’s hovering position. “Bye, Paul,” Tony said.

Paul actually waved back.

“Are you sure you don’t want any help finding Julia?” he asked after Tony’s steps could no longer be heard on the stairs.

“I’m doing this myself,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”

Paul made sure he had my gaze, and said quietly, “It’s important to me, Alison. I need to know if she’s all right.”

“I know it’s important to you,” I told him. “That’s why I need to do it myself.”

Paul nodded significantly. I headed for the stairs down to the second floor. And as I walked, I wondered if I really did want to find Julia MacKenzie.

I was halfway down the stairs when my cell phone buzzed. Now, if someone is calling me, my cell phone rings. If someone is sending me a text message, it buzzes. This is the system set up by Melissa, because I am incapable of figuring out how to make technology do things. I hand it to my ten-year-old daughter, and she takes care of it in less than a minute. It’s efficient, but infuriating.

I realize it’s stupid, but I always get a little jolt when the phone buzzes. I never get text messages, and the sound makes me think an emergency has arisen. So I gasped a little at the buzz, then calmed myself and looked for the incoming caller’s name.

There wasn’t one. It was from a number I’d never seen before.
Great. Someone’s texting me nuisance sales calls now. The march of technology—new ways to annoy people
. But on the off chance it was something necessary, I clicked through to the message.

It read, “Big Bob is dead. Stop asking questions, or it can happen to you.”

Thirteen

I recall something about a frantic call to Lieutenant McElone, who asked for the incoming number, punched up some buttons on her computer (I could hear the clacking) and told me the message had come from a prepaid disposable cell phone and couldn’t be traced to an owner, but the good news was that “if you get another one from that number, we might be able to GPS it to whoever’s using it.”

“That’s the good news?” I asked. “What’s the bad news?”

“He’s probably thrown it out and gotten a new one by now.”

I’d been threatened on cases before (okay, one case, when I was investigating Paul’s and Maxie’s murders) and had not developed an immunity to abject terror in the process. So I ran back upstairs and told the ghosts what had happened.

Paul, at first, insisted I quit the Big Bob case immediately. “It’s not worth it,” he said. “We’ve agreed you wouldn’t take a case that involved this kind of risk.”

Maxie lifted a broom to swing at him, but Paul simply vanished and reappeared across the room.

“This happened the day after you met with the bikers at the Sprocket,” Paul pointed out, not missing a beat. “It can’t be a coincidence that the threat came so soon after you showed up last night asking questions about Maxie and Big Bob. I’m guessing it was someone in the bar.”

“I’m guessing I don’t want to live in terror,” I countered. “I’m not interested in dying—no offense.”

“None taken,” Paul said politely.

“So you understand why I think I should drop it.”

“Drop it?” Maxie glared at me. “You promised me!” Melissa had given up that tactic when she was eight.

“Well,” Paul said after a pause, “it might not be necessary to stop asking questions. I’d give it time before I decided.”

“Hold on just a second,” I said, “Are you the same dead guy who said I should give it up a minute ago? What changed your mind?”

“Look. Don’t do anything on the Big Bob case today. Just go see the police in Seaside Heights and tell them what you know. Then leave. That’s not asking questions, and it shouldn’t get you in trouble. But it
will
get the information to the police there, and maybe that will mean a better level of protection for you.”

Not doing anything—other than passing along information—was definitely my easiest choice, so I took Paul’s advice and decided to call the cops in Seaside Heights. A Detective Ferry deigned to see me later that day. I told the ghosts not to mention the threatening text to Melissa or Mom under any circumstances, and moved on to the investigation that wasn’t currently threatening my life.

The address for Julia MacKenzie I’d gotten from my pal Megan Sharp at Monmouth University was a charming little two-family Colonial in Gilford Park. It sat on the most nondescript street in town, about four blocks from the beach, with the obligatory porch—all the houses down here have one—and an adult man’s bicycle leaning against the side wall.

The problem was, neither of the mailboxes bore the name “MacKenzie,” and although she could have gotten married in the past two years, the prospect of Paul’s ex-love being here was less than optimal. But Paul always said that you follow up on every lead if you want to be a good investigator, so that was precisely what I intended to do.

I rang the bell marked “E. Francisco” first, but got no answer. The one marked “Lamont” was for the upstairs apartment, and when I rang the bell, instead of a person coming to the door, I heard someone call out from above my head, “Somebody there?”

I had to step back from the door to look up, and used my hand to shield my eyes from the sun, which was directly behind the house. There was a woman standing on a parapet, a deck surrounding the upper apartment, and she was calling down to me.

“Hi,” I called up. “I’m looking for a Julia MacKenzie.”
Do you have one
?

The woman shook her head. “Don’t know anyone by that name here,” she said. “You sure you have the right address?”

Before I could answer, I heard a child shout, “Ma!” behind the woman, and she turned.

“I’ll be right there!” she yelled. “Take off your bathing suit and get in the shower!”

“I think she used to live here,” I shouted up to the woman. “Do you mind if I come up?”

I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but the woman upstairs moaned when I asked. “I really can’t come down to unlock the door right now,” she said. “My four-year-old’s in the shower.” She turned away again and shouted, “And use soap this time!”

Although I certainly understood her plight, screaming up at her wasn’t getting me anywhere. I tried one more time. “How long have you been living here?” I asked.

“We’re just renting for the week,” the woman replied. “Vacation. We’re out of here tomorrow night.” She sounded more exhausted than any person on vacation I had ever heard.

“Who’s the owner of the house?” I tried. “Maybe they’d have some records of the person I’m looking for.”

“The guy downstairs owns the place,” she answered. “Esteban Francisco. But he doesn’t come back until around five.”

I nodded. “Okay, thanks. Have a nice rest of your vacation,” I called as I turned to walk back to the car.

“Uh-huh,” I heard the woman say as she headed inside. “Shampoo, Jason! Shampoo!” Parenting—it’s not just a job; it’s an adventure.

I wrote out a note with my contact information and my question about Julia MacKenzie for Mr. Francisco on a pad of paper I keep in the glove compartment of the Volvo. I also folded a business card—“Kerby Investigations”—into the note. Then I walked back to the house, slipped it under his door (amid youthful cries of “It wasn’t me!” from above), and got back into my pizza oven of a car to ride to Seaside Heights.

It was less than a ten-minute drive, but I had a little time to think. Since Julia MacKenzie apparently no longer lived in the Gilford Park house, where could I look next? The Monmouth University records had only given that address, and there was no telephone number listed. As with most such problems involving any investigation I found myself roped into, I asked myself the key question:

What would Paul do?

I knew from studying that, ordinarily, the key in a missing-persons investigation like this one, where the only contact was the university, would be to hang around there and ask people if they knew Julia MacKenzie: Sooner or later, you hoped, the law of averages would play in your favor. But Julia had been taking classes mostly at night and online, Paul had said. That meant fewer contacts with other people. Still, the records I’d copied had showed a few of the classes she’d taken, and maybe talking to the professors would make a difference. Even the online ones would know, at least, how well she’d done on her course work. That wouldn’t tell me where she was, but it might lead to some better understanding of her personality and her mindset, which
could
lead me to her. Maybe.

The other place to go was CableCom, in Freehold, Julia’s last-known employer. That was a longer drive, but maybe an initial inquiry on the phone would be useful. If I could find her supervisor or some coworkers, I might get more information. I’d ask Paul if they’d had any mutual friends; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to do that yet.

And after living with the idea of the scary text message for a few hours, I decided not to be intimidated by some unseen jerk whose only demonstrable talent so far was that he could type with his thumbs. I was made of sterner stuff than this! I’d press on with the plan, and then cower in my bedroom under the covers tonight. That seemed reasonable.

By the time my thought process had gotten that far, I’d already reached Seaside Heights and was pulling into the parking lot at the municipal complex. Which gives you a general idea of how short that drive really was.

Once inside, it was not a difficult task to find Detective Martin Ferry, who had been assigned (or as the cops put it, “caught”) the investigation into Big Bob Benicio’s death. Getting Detective Ferry to talk, on the other hand, was not going to be as simple as falling off a log, assuming one was silly enough to climb onto a log in the first place.

“I don’t care if you’re Philip Marlowe; I don’t have to talk to you about an ongoing investigation if I don’t want to,” the charming detective said after twenty minutes of negotiation over whether I could actually enter his office and speak to him. “There’s no law that says I have to give out information to private detectives.”

“There’s no law that says Dunkin’ Donuts has to sell bagels, and yet they all do,” I pointed out. “What’s it going to hurt if I try to help your investigation along?” It wasn’t just that Ferry, an average-height man with a prodigious stomach, intimidated me. It was more that I’d called ahead and made an appointment, and
still
he was acting like I’d barged in unannounced and insisted I was a better detective than he was. On the contrary, I was convinced that I wasn’t a better detective than
anybody
.

“I’ll tell you what it’s going to hurt,” he said, sitting down in a squeaky chair behind his desk and half sneering at me. “You’re going to bother witnesses I need to talk to, and that will make them less willing to talk to me. You’re going to expect things like ME reports and filed police documents that you have no right to see. You’re going to muddy the waters with suspects and drop pieces of information that I don’t want dropped. I’ve worked with PIs before, and I’ve been burned too many times. Go away.”

I stared at him a moment. “It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it?”

Ferry heaved a sigh and put his head in his hands. “No, it’s not because you’re a woman,” he said. “I have no problem with women. My old partner was a woman, and we got along just fine. My problem is that you’re not a cop, and anybody who’s not a cop is just going to get in the way on this kind of investigation.”

It’s the standard police argument—nobody but a cop knows anything about asking people questions or examining a crime scene. And in my case, of course, he had a point. But I’d promised Maxie I’d do what I could, and Luther was an actual client, so I couldn’t let it go at the standard police argument. Although the text from my secret tormentor was a compelling argument to do so. I decided to press on.

“Detective, I understand your position,” I began. “But I can tread very lightly. I’ll only speak to witnesses you’ve already interviewed, if you like. I have insight from another angle, a more personal one, than you do, so I can look into who Big Bob was and why he might have ended up with a heavy object coming down hard on his head. Why not give me a chance to help you? I’ll be happy to share whatever information I find out, and you can take it from there. I’m not interested in making the bust; in fact, I prefer that you do it. But if you let me, maybe I can make a difference that helps you. What do you say?”

“Big Bob?” Ferry asked. “The victim was known as Big Bob? He wasn’t that big.”

Oy. He didn’t even know that? Wasn’t that one of the most basic pieces of information in this case, other than the fact that a male human had died of a cranial injury?