A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder

  “Sorry,” I told her.

  She shook her head and held up one palm. “No, it’s okay. He’s right. I deserved that. How’s your husband?”

  I moved to the door and turned the handle. “Recovering. Please come in, Detective. We’ve got another development that I think you should know about.”

  I walked us inside and breathed a little easier when I found Heath snoring softly on the couch, my boot held to his chest.

  Olivera stared at the boot cuddled in my husband’s arms, but she didn’t comment. I liked that she was learning at least. Gilley ignored Olivera and went right over to the pile of stakes in the center of my living room floor, and began the somewhat slow process of charging them one by one with a magnetic field. By the third spike, the tension in my shoulders had eased.

  “What’s this new development?” Olivera asked as I pointed to one of the counter chairs.

  I told her what we’d discovered about the spikes and our gear being demagnetized, and about Gilley’s keys being stolen from his gym.

  “When was this?” she asked.

  “A few days after we left on vacation, which would’ve made it about three days before Gil agreed to loan the dagger to the museum.”

  “This was planned out in advance.”

  “Or it’s a huge coincidence.”

  “You believe in coincidences?” she asked me.

  “Not really.”

  “Good. Me neither. So who knew about the dagger?”

  I shrugged. “Any one of a number of people,” I said. “There were people on that set in San Francisco who knew that the dagger was possessed and that some sort of demon was released. There was also the guy who used the dagger to commit murder. Maybe a few hotel guests. Ayden MacDonald, the detective on the case. Maybe one or two of the other detectives at his station . . .”

  “So lots of people.”

  “A lot more than I’m comfortable with,” I admitted.

  “Okay, who knew that you had the dagger?”

  “Only Ayden and us and our director, Peter Gopher. Peter supposedly told one of the producers about the dagger, and that’s who called Gilley to talk him into displaying it, which means we don’t know how many other people Peter might’ve told.”

  “Can’t you call him and ask?” Olivera said.

  “He’s in the Himalayas, filming a documentary. He’s unreachable.”

  “That’s convenient,” she said drily.

  “It is,” I agreed. “And even more of a coincidence that the one person who could help us identify the thief isn’t available for us to talk to.”

  “You think maybe he’s got something to do with it?”

  Gilley snorted from his place on the floor amid all the spikes. “No way. Gopher’s one of the good guys.”

  “You sure?” she asked me.

  “We’re positive,” I told her.

  “Okay. Is there another way to come up with a list of suspects?”

  Gilley looked up from his task and said, “We need to go back to the museum, Detective. Besides trying to figure out how the thief overcame the alarms—which could yield us a clue—there might be some residual energy from him that M.J. could maybe pick up on.”

  Olivera looked at me and I looked in turn at Gilley. Was he serious? I wasn’t a psychic detective. “M.J.,” Gil said reasonably. “If Sullivan was murdered there, maybe he didn’t cross over. Maybe he’s wandering around the museum, and if you could talk to him, maybe he could point you in the direction of the killer.”

  I had to admit that was actually worth a shot. “Gil’s right,” I said. “We need to go back to the exhibit where Sullivan was murdered.”

  “You want me to let you sniff around the crime scene?” Olivera said.

  “Yes,” Gil and I said together.

  She sighed, looking uneasy. “It hasn’t been released yet. Bringing in outsiders could jeopardize the integrity of the case.”

  “You guys have had that scene for twenty-four hours. Why haven’t you released it?”

  “Because we still haven’t been able to figure out how the perp got around the exterior alarm or the motion detectors inside. Until we have a clue how he did that, we’re keeping the museum locked up.”

  “We had a theory about the motion detectors,” I said.

  “Which is?”

  “We think that Sullivan hadn’t turned them on yet because he was working late. He probably flipped the switch right as he was about to leave, which happened to be after the thief had already gotten inside and was upstairs in the exhibit about to steal the dagger.”

  “Huh,” Olivera said. “That makes sense. But it still doesn’t tell us how he bypassed the central alarm. We know that was on because it works on a timer, automatically turning on at eight p.m.”

  “Another reason we want to go back to the museum,” I told her. “Gilley’s a tech wizard. I bet he could figure it out.”

  I glanced at Gil and he smiled at Olivera and nodded. “She’s right, Detective. I could.”

  But Olivera still seemed hesitant. “I’d get my butt assigned to desk duty if anybody found out I let you guys on the scene.”

  “I take it there was no fallout from today’s events?” I asked, not so subtly.

  Color tinged her cheeks. “None,” she admitted. Then her gaze traveled to Heath. “Is he really okay?”

  “He’ll have a good scar,” I said. “But no concussion. The bullet skimmed his skull for three and a half inches. A few millimeters to the right and it would’ve been a completely different story.”

  She then locked eyes with me. “I want to tell you how sorry I am,” she said. “By rights you two should’ve had my badge.”

  I softened a little in my attitude toward her. She seemed very genuine in her apology. “I know you’re sorry,” I said. “But it’s not enough. Gilley and I need to get a look at that exhibit. Something’s not right here, and we’re all in serious danger until we can figure out who’s behind this and take back the dagger.” For emphasis I removed the scarf from around my neck and laid it on the counter. She stared at my neck, then over her shoulder again at Heath.

  “Fine,” she said grudgingly. “But we’ll have to wait for an hour or two. I know the beat cop who works that street, and I don’t want to risk him seeing us. His shift ends at midnight.”

  We spent the next two hours helping Gilley remagnetize all the spikes and plates. Heath slept through all of it, which was both a relief and a worry to me. We’d be walking into that museum without the best ghostbuster I’d ever worked with, and in doing that, we’d also be leaving him here in my condo, alone and vulnerable. That in itself was a bit nerve-racking, but there was no way around it. I wasn’t waking him up and forcing him to come with us after all he’d been through that day.

  I did, however, call an emergency locksmith, and for three hundred bucks we got my locks changed and Gilley’s too, in just under two hours. I left Heath his new key and a note to let him know where we’d gone and what we were doing just in case he woke up, but he seemed so deeply asleep that I doubted he’d stir until late morning.

  I took the extra time to improvise some protective gear for Olivera too. She was taller and broader in the shoulders than me, so I let her wear Heath’s vest. It was a little big on her, but at least she’d be protected. “How am I supposed to get to my gun if I wear this?” she asked, showing me her shoulder holster.

  “You’re not,” I said, and leveled a gaze at her. “You can’t kill a ghost with a bullet. They’re already dead.”

  “Then why do you carry spikes?” she asked, pointing to my belt.

  “Because the spikes carry a wallop of a blow to a spook. And, when driven into their portal, it can shut them down permanently. Until we find the dagger, however, all we can do is deflect their attacks.”

  Olivera shuddered. I wondered if
she wasn’t starting to really appreciate how little she knew about what we did, and how great our efforts were to keep the more dangerous spooks from doing major damage to innocents. “All this is so new to me,” she said. “This morning I woke up and was absolutely convinced you guys were full of shit. Ghosts were like unicorns—fictional. Tonight it’s like I just swallowed the blue pill.”

  “Red,” Gil said, shrugging into his own bedazzled vest. “In The Matrix, Neo swallows the red pill.”

  “I thought it was blue,” she said.

  “Nope. Most people like blue over red, so they always pick their favored color when referring to the scene.”

  Olivera looked back to me. “Something else I learned today.”

  “The fun never stops,” I said. Then I glanced at my watch. It was about ten minutes to midnight. “We should go.”

  When we opened the door to the condo parking lot, we received a nasty surprise. “Crap,” Gil said, looking up at the steady rain that was coming down. Pulling out his phone from his backpack, he clicked on a weather app and turned his screen toward me.

  I groaned. “We can’t catch a break lately, can we?”

  “What?” Olivera said, pulling up her coat against the rain.

  “Rain is a bad thing,” Gil told her.

  Her brow furrowed. “Why?”

  I pulled my own collar up. “It makes it easier for the spooks to reveal themselves.”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  I let Gilley answer. I was tired of the twenty questions. “No one is exactly sure, but it’s thought that rain enhances the electromagnetic field that most spooks put out. It allows their field to become more solid, and it also allows them to move with relative ease.”

  Olivera stiffened. “Wait, you think we’re going to encounter more ghosts at the museum?”

  “There’s no way of knowing,” I told her honestly. Then I pointed to her vest. “You’re protected, regardless. Not much is going to mess with you as long as you wear that.”

  “How many times has a ghost messed with you while you were wearing this stuff?” she asked me pointedly.

  I could’ve lied to her, but I had a feeling her bullshit-detection meter was pretty well calibrated. “A couple of times,” I admitted. “But they always paid the price.”

  She wavered in the doorway, and while I couldn’t exactly blame her, I really wanted to get to the museum to check out the crime scene, then back home to Heath. “We need to go, Detective,” I said firmly. With or without her, I was determined to go to the museum and take a look at that exhibit room. And now that Gil had put the idea into my head, I really wanted to check for Sullivan’s spirit too.

  At last, Olivera nodded, took a breath, and followed us to the car.

  Gilley drove, which was made easier by the fact that he’d finally changed out of his reception dress and into some jeans, a sweater, and enough magnets to bring down the ghost of Godzilla. He’d also brought along a few extras, like a metal ball which was completely magnetized and which he called a ghoul grenade, and one or two of the longest spikes I’d ever seen. Gil had told me that they could be pounded into concrete if the need arose. “One thing is still really bothering me,” Gil said.

  “Only one thing?” I asked, tucking my phone into the glove box. It’d be useless if a spook showed up, and I was sick of charging it.

  “One thing more than all the others.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The dagger,” he said. “M.J., when we tucked that thing into the office safe, it had enough magnets on it to lock Oruç and his demon down, but it also had enough magnets attached directly to it that, over time, it also should’ve become magnetized. The steel it was made from had a heavy content of iron ore.”

  I considered Gilley’s theory and couldn’t solve the puzzle. “So, you’re saying that someone had to demagnetize the dagger the day the exhibit opened to allow Oruç or his demon to zap the lights and drain all the phones?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And that would’ve been super tricky given the fact that the place was full of witnesses and the dagger itself was sealed in the display case, surrounded by tons and tons of other magnets. Even if someone was able to demagnetize all the other magnets I installed, how the hell could they get into a locked museum case to demagnetize the dagger with everybody watching?”

  “Would they have to get in the case?” I asked. “I mean, what if you just held a gizmo up to the glass? Would that do the trick?”

  “No way,” he said. “You’d have to be within an inch or two for that to work, and with the glass and the position of the dagger within the case, there were at least eight inches of air between the top of the glass and the dagger at all times.”

  “What if someone constructed a more powerful demagnetizer?” Olivera said from the backseat.

  Gil pursed his lips. “It’s possible, but something that big definitely would’ve been noticed coming into the building. I can’t imagine a security guard letting something like that through.”

  “What about before the dagger went into the case?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nope. I was the only one that handled the dagger. And if it hadn’t been so much money that the studio was willing to fork over to have me do it, I would’ve left it in the safe.”

  “You realize that once this is over, you owe me and Heath half that money,” I said.

  Gil pretended to ignore me. “As I was saying, the dagger was never out of my sight from the time it left your safe to the time I personally sealed it inside the case.”

  “What’d you wear while you were handling the dagger?” I asked.

  Gil grinned. “I found these gloves online made of chain mail—oyster fishermen use them to cut open the oysters and they’re heavy as all get-out, but I was able to magnetize them and handle the dagger without an issue.”

  “So how the hell did Oruç’s ghost get out of that dagger and cause that scene the night of the exhibit?”

  Olivera sat forward. “I’m still not clear on this whole demon-in-the-dagger thing. How could a demon be inside a dagger?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Like I explained to you and your lieutenant yesterday, the dagger is a portal. I’d say that ninety-nine percent of all portals are fixed into large immovable objects, like walls or trees, or the sides of cliffs, castles, houses, and the like. Oruç’s dagger was the first portable portal we ever encountered. It’s truly unique.”

  “So wherever the dagger goes, so can the demon?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Which is what makes it so dangerous.”

  Olivera was silent and I chanced a glance at her over my shoulder. She seemed rattled. “What?” I asked her.

  “Since all this started, did you guys ever ask yourselves why somebody went to all that trouble to get the dagger?”

  Gil and I exchanged a look. “Uh . . . no,” I said. “I mean, we’re currently assuming that it’s got something to do with us. Somebody out there could have it in for us.”

  Olivera frowned. “But what if it’s something bigger than just getting at you guys? What if it’s to unleash hell in a public place and take out a bunch of innocent people?”

  “Why would anybody do that?” Gil said.

  “The same reason any lunatic commits a mass murder: to get noticed,” Olivera said.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, feeling the color drain from my face. “If that’s the case . . .

  “Then we’re all in serious trouble,” Gilley said, finishing my thought.

  Chapter 10

  We got to the museum and circled the block, Olivera peering out both the front and side windows to make sure her friend the beat cop wasn’t around. She needn’t have worried; the area around the museum was all but deserted.

  Still, we parked several blocks down and to the rear of the museum. That wasn’t exactly on purpose—it’s hel
l trying to find a parking space in downtown Boston at midnight. All the best spots are taken. And my SUV isn’t on the small side either.

  The three of us walked with purpose to the rear of the museum, and I wondered how Olivera was going to get us inside. She surprised me by punching in a code at the back door—which was locked by a techy-looking keypad—and voilà, just like that, we were inside.

  I pointed to the keypad before passing Olivera on the way in as she held open the door. She said, “They reprogramed all the entrances to a code only BPD would have. That way we know that our crime scene won’t be messed with, which is especially important if this was an inside job.”

  I wondered at her last words—what if this was an inside job? Maybe some disgruntled museum employee who didn’t think he or she was being paid enough had seen an opportunity to steal a valuable dagger from an exhibit, only to discover that the dagger would control him or her in the end.

  I quickly discarded that theory, however, because it wouldn’t explain why Gilley’s keys were stolen and then used to demagnetize our gear. A disgruntled museum employee wouldn’t know that we’d be bringing the dagger to the museum ahead of time, and Gil’s keys were stolen several days before he delivered the dagger. No, someone had done some careful planning with that, and that was the piece of the puzzle that I was most concerned about. Someone had it in for us, but who, and why?

  Olivera led us into the interior of the museum, which was dimly lit by about every third light in the place. It was a sort of moody lighting, which allowed us to travel the hallways and rooms easily but lengthened the shadows and made the details of the science displays a bit muddled.

  We moved in silence all the way to a large maintenance elevator, which Olivera paused in front of to press the button, but I stopped her. “Let’s take the stairs,” I whispered. “I’m not getting in anything that requires electricity to move.”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, and then I pointed to her phone and she seemed to understand. No way did any of us want to get stuck for the rest of the night in a maintenance elevator after some spook had shorted out the control panel. “The stairs are at the front of the building,” Olivera said. “This way.”