Poe (22 page)

Suddenly Jessica opens the door; a slice of light pours into the dark closet. “Time’s up,” she says firmly. I can tell from her tone that she’s not kidding about calling security. That might not be a bad idea, considering who’s on the loose.

“Right,” I mutter absently, not even looking her way as I race for the elevator doors.

“You’ve completely lost your mind, haven’t you?” she calls after me.

What little I had left.

Time is important—I can feel it slipping by me,
through
me, the precise click of each and every second. The air is electric, like when the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky, but the barometric pressure has dropped. Like a big storm is coming.

I gun my car through the red lights, getting a few honks and causing a couple of near accidents. I call 411, which gives me the wrong number for Crosslands—twice—so when it actually rings through and Lisa picks up, I’m almost rear-ended by the car behind me when I jam on the breaks.

“Is anyone
there
?” she asks in a bored tone. I fondly remember boredom.

“Hey, it’s, uh, me. Got a minute?” An Oldsmobile lurches out of a parking space in front of me; I press the heel of my palm against the horn. The elderly driver flips me the bird.

“Sure, Mr. Stevenson, I always have a moment to talk to family. How can I help you?”

A part of me wants to tell her everything I’ve just found out, but then this probably isn’t the kind of news one should blurt over the phone to someone at work. And she’s fine as long as she’s there; Crosslands keeps all the doors locked to keep the residents with dementia from wandering away.

“Your supervisor behind you?”

“Yes,” says Lisa in a bright professional voice. “You’re correct about that.”

Okay.
Definitely
not the time to break the news. “Do me a favor. Don’t take the bus. I’ll come pick you up at four.”

She must hear a note of my constrained panic. “Is there a particular reason—”

“Yes. No. I mean, I’ll explain when I come get you. But wait for me inside, okay?”

There is a pause.

“Just—just
promise
me. Okay?”

She sighs, completely exasperated. God she’s sexy when she sighs. “

Okay
,” she finally says. A giddy wave of relief rushes through me. “You better be on time though,” she adds in a lower voice.

“Me? On time? I’m always on time.”

Lisa starts to snort derisively but has to catch herself. “Oh, that’s really funny, Mr. Stevenson.”

“In fact, I’m on my way now. I’ll be waiting outside.”

“You’re going to spend the next four hours in your car?” she whispers quickly. “What’s
wrong
, Dimitri?”

“Oh nothing,” I say as innocently as possible. “More rats in the wall. I can’t be there while they fumigate.”

“
Right
,” says Lisa. “You’re a bad liar, you know that.”

“Oh, and keep an eye on Delia. No unexplained visitors.”

Her voice suddenly goes all formal—her supervisor must be back within earshot. “May I ask why?”

Because after my dream I think there’s probably some connection between Delia, my female ghost stalker, and the murders? Yeah, that wouldn’t make me sound like her crazy brother at all. “I’m not sure. Let’s call it a hunch.”

“Do people still actually use that word?”

“What can I say, I’m hooked on
Columbo
reruns.”

“That explains a lot,” says Lisa dryly. “Is there
anything
else I can help you with, Mr. Stevenson?”

“What are the chances of getting some smokin’ sex tonight?”

Click. Can’t blame a guy for trying. And I really am on my way to Crosslands (considering my scoop on the autopsy photos, I think Mac will forgive me if I’m late) when an unmarked, very governmental beige sedan speeds by with two serious-looking men in front wearing sunglasses (in winter). They might as well have a bumper sticker that says “Kick Me, I’m FBI.” The sedan screeches right on Harrison Street, which means they must be on their way to The Hurry Back Inn.

The light in front of me turns green. I should turn left, toward Crosslands.

But for some inexplicable reason I find myself sitting in the car letting the engine idle, strangely transfixed by the crosswalk light on the corner of Main and Ocean that’s blinking a red palm, next to it the digital countdown 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. In the last few seconds, a skinny, blond, teenage girl, looking cold and lonely, trots across the street, pulling the collar of her jacket up against the wind. A car honks its horn behind me.

Lisa will be more than okay for the next few hours; heck, she’s in the safest place she could be, a veritable fortress. All I’m going to do is take a quick drive by, maybe add a little flavor to my article. At least this is what I tell myself as the light turns red.

And I turn right.

There is, as one might expect, a whole block full of squad cars outside the old motel. It’s as if every policeman or policewoman in the county, tired of writing speeding tickets, wanted to take full advantage of this rare opportunity to see an actual crime scene. I immediately recognize the reporter with the whipping hair on the opposite side of the street; she stands next to her white news van, leaning against the hood and sipping a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.

I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something in the apartment I’m supposed to find. Unfortunately it’s crammed with people carrying live ammunition.

“Now what?” I whisper.

I pull my Mustang over to the sidewalk and sit for a moment, taking in the scene. The parking lot has been completely cordoned off with police tape, and there are two officers standing in front of the entrance. Several others are just standing around blowing on their hands and chatting idly. An empty plastic bag, caught by the wind, takes sail and drifts down the street.

And then I see her—Poe. Or at least I think it’s her; all I catch is a brief glimmer of her pale reflection in the news van’s rearview mirror. Maybe ghost girl isn’t the housebound sort of spirit. Either that or I
have
lost my mind. Quite the toss-up.

But if it
is
Poe, then she’s obviously leading me to the reporter. On the one hand, I hate to let a possible hallucination take the lead, but on the other, I haven’t a clue what to do next, so what the hell.

I jump out of my car, put my hands in my pockets, and briskly trot over to the reporter, who is shivering miserably.

“Hot enough for you?” I say cheerfully.

She regards me with an icy stare. “Let me guess, local paper.”

I shrug. “I saw you on TV this morning. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says coolly. “You
might
say.”

I grin at her, undeterred. If there’s one thing I’m an expert at, it’s being shot down by the
ladies
. “You know anything you can’t say officially?”

She gives me a hard look. “Of all the lazy-assed questions—”

“Hey, we’re just the
local
paper. Basically a fifty-cent mat for house-training puppies and pushing coupons. I’m Dimitri, by the way. D. Peters is my byline, which you’d know if you read the obituaries, though no one under sixty-five does.”

She steps back, and her eyes squint a bit. “I’ve seen you before. Morgue guy!”

I hold up my hands. “Guilty as charged.”

“I’m Jennifer. Was that for real?” She leans closer. “I didn’t see a lawsuit. Did you settle out of court?”

“I can’t remember,” I say, looking to the sky as if the answer lies there. “Maybe if I knew more about this homicide I might come up with something.”

“An interview?”

Damn she’s gotten eager and pushy all of a sudden. “
Maybe
,” I say. “What you got?”

She looks around, as if Brian Williams might actually be within earshot. “Well, they
are
connected. The murders. Probably some teenagers who’ve been rolling E and listening to Marilyn Manson. Everyone’s pretty much decided Celia was really the first victim, but there’s very little physical evidence that’s the same. Besides the removal of the spleens.”

“And the numbers,” I add. “And the bite marks.”

“What?” I can see her calculating the potential value of an information trade. She must decide that the risk of a local newspaper printing the story the next morning—
after
she’s reported it live on the evening news—is worth it, because she pulls me to the rear of the van. I notice she wears soft, expensive-looking leather gloves that, given her blue lips, are probably useless in actual cold. “Okay, talk.”

The rear door of the van is open, and I see a pudgy, bald cameraman—a forty-year-old version of Charlie Brown—eating a sandwich in the back, eyes glued to a football game playing across four video screens. Around his neck is a professional black digital camera with an
impressive lens. I catch a flash of movement in the glass, like a shadow. Suddenly the signal on the video is lost and it all goes to snow.

He swears under his breath and roughly knocks the screens a couple of times. “Fuckin’ backwater Hicksville…” he mutters with a thick Boston accent.

“Have we lost our feed
again
?” asks Jennifer in a tight voice. “Mike, you know CNN is scouting.”

Mike grudgingly drops his sandwich onto the control board, wiping the crumbs off his pants. “No need to get all hysterical again; just have to adjust the dish—”

But Jennifer is already a couple notches past hysterical. “Because I swear to
God
if I’m not on at exactly
five
tonight…”

Mike pulls the camera off from around his neck and hands it me. His cheeks are ruddy with cold. “Hold this for me, kid.” The camera feels oddly heavy, and a chill spreads through my fingers and up my arms. With a surprising agility given his thick stomach, Mike climbs up an attached ladder to the roof of the van.

“… I swear I will make your life a living
hell
,” continues Jennifer.

“Already is,” mutters Mike.

I feel something brush against my ankle and look down to see the plastic bag tumbling by—and then something else—
impossible
. Footprints in the snow, but not of shoes or boots. These are delicate barefoot prints that even Columbo would recognize as a perfect match for the strangely ethereal prints left in my bedroom.

Poe again.

The prints lead away from the van down the sidewalk. An obvious trail to follow.

For the first time it occurs to me that this might be a really,
really
bad idea. The kind of bad idea that causes teenagers in a spooky cabin in the woods to decide to split up to investigate a strange sound, or that assumes a land war in the Middle East will be short. What
am
I doing here? Who, or what, is Poe after all? For all I know, she’s the reason Daniel went insane.

“I’m not Daniel,” I whisper.

Wonderful. Talking to myself now.

But I know I don’t have a choice. I
have
to find out whether this is all random or it’s connected to my father, even if I lose my mind in the process. And I know what I’m going to do next. It’s really not even a question, it’s more a perverse exercise to ease the inadequately small amount of guilt I feel about doing something Lisa would rightly call idiotic.

The wind blows coldly as I sling the camera over my shoulder and follow Poe’s footprints.