A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder

  Olivera nodded. “Sounds like a reasonable scenario,” she said. “What big thing do you think the killer was planning?”

  “Well,” I said, “unleashing a demon like we saw tonight into a crowd of innocent bystanders makes for a pretty big statement, don’t you think?”

  Chris’s expression turned grim. “To what end, though?” she said. “I mean, this guy is obviously smart. He’s careful. And he’s plotted this whole thing out expertly. What would he have to gain by doing something like that?”

  Gilley and I exchanged a look, and it was Gilley who answered. “We think, given his knowledge of how magnets affect a portal, and his knowledge of the dagger and its history, that he’s a fellow ghostbuster. Someone who’s had extensive experience working with spooks, and even demons.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Okay, so who in your line of work could pull off something like that?”

  Again I looked at Gilley. “Nobody named Todd Tolliver; that’s for sure,” he said. “But there is one guy who comes to mind.”

  “Rick Lavinia,” I said, and Gilley nodded as if he’d been thinking the very same thing.

  “Who’s Rick Lavinia?”

  Gilley scoffed as if he couldn’t believe she’d never heard of him. “He’s a ghostbuster with his own cable show too. He started about two years before we did, and he was haunted TV’s most popular ghostbuster until Heath came along.” My brow furrowed indignantly and Gilley shrugged and added, “You’re super cute and all, M.J., but most people tune in to watch that hottie you’re married to. I know that’s why I watch the show.”

  “Can we get back to the point here?” Chris said.

  “Yes,” I said firmly, with another irritated look at Gil. “Rick has, on a few occasions, publicly dogged our show. He’s the guy who likes to stomp around haunted locations and yell at the spooks, daring them to come out and show themselves. He got hurt pretty bad a year ago when one such spook picked his ass up and tossed him down the cellar stairs.”

  “It was epic!” Gilley said with a giggle.

  “Which is exactly what Gilley tweeted right after the episode aired. He tagged Rick in the tweet, which wasn’t his smartest move . . .”

  Gilley rolled his eyes. “That douche bag had it coming.”

  “. . . and Rick went off on a tirade about our show and how fake it was and how lame we were. It was kind of embarrassing to watch.”

  “So you two are competitors,” Olivera said.

  “We are,” I said. “But it’s one-sided, more so from his perspective than ours.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Gil and I exchanged a knowing look. “We got the movie deal,” he said simply. “And all the fame and fortune that follows that. They’ll be airing reruns of our show till the cows come home and we’ll get royalties from the show and the movie for a long time to come.”

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “we heard through the grapevine that Rick’s show is on the bubble.”

  “On the bubble?”

  “Likely to get canceled,” Gilley told her.

  “But what would stealing Oruç’s dagger get him?”

  “Ratings,” I said. “Rick likes to call himself the demon slayer. He learned from us that magnets can bring down even the nastiest spooks, and he’s actually locked up one or two of the nastier ones. If he unleashed Oruç’s demon here and caused a panic, he could swoop in and be the big hero. Especially if he had possession of the dagger itself.”

  Olivera nodded. “Okay, so we’ve got motive. What about opportunity? Where’s Rick Lavinia based?”

  Gilley smiled. “Right here in Boston, baby.”

  “Is he in town right now?” she pressed.

  Gilley began typing on Sullivan’s computer, and we waited for him to say something, but after a few moments all he did was drop his jaw. “No. Way.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Gil swiveled the screen around. “There’s no mention of where Rick is right now,” he said. “But his Instagram posted this from him yesterday morning.”

  I moved over to look closely at the photo. My heart began to thud in my chest when I saw that it was a photo taken from fairly far away of a building we’d been in the day before and knew intimately. The caption read, “Got notice that this abandoned apartment house is crazy haunted. Might have to check it out soon.”

  “Ashworth Commons,” I said, honestly shocked that Rick would be so brazen.

  Olivera had stepped forward to look at the photo too. “Now, that’s interesting,” she said. “But also odd, don’t you think? I mean, he says that he got some sort of notice about it. That place is crazy haunted. Could someone have tipped him off about it?”

  I shrugged. “It’s possible, but isn’t it sort of too big of a coincidence? I mean, Rick has means, motive, and now we know he’s had opportunity. What more do we need?”

  “A smoking dagger would be nice,” Olivera said. “Okay, I’ll dig into his background a little in the morning, see if I can’t find out where he is at the moment at least.”

  Turning back to Gilley, I said, “Is there anything on Sullivan’s computer connecting him to Rick?”

  “None that I could find,” he said. “He had his personal e-mail on here as well as his corporate one, but nothing looks suspicious, and I sifted through his deleted e-mails too.”

  “Then do you think everything was arranged by phone?” I asked, hoping maybe Olivera could get Sullivan’s phone records.

  “It looks like . . . ,” Gilley began, before his voice trailed off and he stared off into space for a moment. “Hold on,” he said. Typing furiously again, he said, “Well, would you look at that!”

  “What?” I said, moving toward the desk to peer at the screen he’d just swiveled around to me. “It’s a draft of an e-mail.”

  Gilley nodded. “Yes! But read it, M.J.!”

  I did—out loud so that Olivera could hear it. “Come at midnight. You’ll have the place until five a.m. I’ve turned off the motion sensors. Use the back door. My code is seven-two-one-four.” I cocked my head after reading it. “That’s it for the message, but I’m not sure how this points us to the perp. Sullivan never sent the e-mail.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Gilley said. “The draft was last saved a week ago. All the killer had to do was log into this e-mail account and look up the draft. Sullivan could’ve easily edited the draft later to something totally innocuous and no one would’ve ever been the wiser.”

  I squinted at the screen again. “There’s an address in the ‘To’ field. Two-kittens-and-a-canary at gmail dot com.”

  “That’s Sullivan’s mother’s e-mail address,” Gil told me. “Again, the museum director was really careful. If anybody peeked into this file on his personal e-mail account, they would’ve thought it was just some random message to his mom, or, if they were suspicious, he could’ve claimed he’d been drafting an e-mail to his mom which got interrupted and he never sent it out.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Gil, do you think Sullivan would’ve thought this up on his own?”

  “I doubt it,” Gilley said. “His computer skills weren’t the greatest. I think it’s more likely that someone told him how to set it up. And Rick Lavinia is fairly savvy on the computer. He’s got all the social media accounts up and humming, and he monitors and posts them himself. I also think that, at one point in his past before he started ghostbusting, he was a graphic designer, so this communicating through a draft on an e-mail wouldn’t be a big leap for him.”

  “Is there any way to back-trace exactly who logged in to Sullivan’s e-mail remotely?”

  “I can try to trace it through the IP address,” Gil said. “It could work.”

  “Cool.” Leaning my head back against the wall and closing my eyes, I thought I’d just get a few minutes of sleep.

  “M.J.?” Gilley suddenly said.

&nbs
p; “Yeah?” I said, jolting awake again.

  “Come here and look at this!”

  I got up and moved to the desk, and Olivera did too. Gil had pulled up the draft of the e-mail again, and the former message was gone. The one there now was being typed out even while we watched.

  I will destroy you. I will destroy everything you love. Everything you hold dear. Everything you are. Everything you wanted to become. You will all die and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

  And then the cursor on the page moved to the top of the e-mail and clicked the delete button, and the draft was gone.

  • • •

  Hours later I crept through the door to my condo on tiptoe. Gilley was doing his koala thing again, his hand planted squarely on my back as I unlocked the door with my new key. He’d refused to go home to his condo, insisting on staying with me until we got the dagger back. Truth be told, I was a little happy he was sticking so close. It was one less person I had to worry about if they were out of my sight.

  Heath stirred as we came through the door. “Em?” he said groggily as I walked over to the sofa where he lay.

  “I’m here,” I said, sitting on the floor next to the sofa to drink in the sight of him. Banged up though he was, he was still the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s early.”

  Heath sat up and cupped the side of his head with his hand. “Ow,” he said, then blinked in the light that Gilley had just turned on. “Hey,” he said to Gil. Then, “Those are some mean-looking welts on your forehead, buddy. What happened to you?”

  Gil shook his head. I’d told him to let me do the talking.

  Heath’s brow furrowed and then he turned to look at the clock on the cable box. It read five a.m. He then focused on me. “Em?” he said, smoothing a lock of my hair. “You look like you had a rough night too. How about you don’t spare me any of the details?”

  I laid my head on the sofa cushion. I’d gotten maybe half an hour of sleep. I was so tired I didn’t think I could force out a paragraph, much less a long story with all the details. “Can I tell you in a few hours?”

  Heath stroked my hair. He didn’t say anything and I had a feeling he was looking at Gilley like he needed to start talking.

  “She needs some rest,” Gil said. “And so do I, but I can give you the highlights after M.J. goes to bed.”

  I picked my head up. Letting Gilley tell Heath about the night we had was super risky. He tended to overexaggerate the scary parts, and I didn’t want Heath to freak out that we’d come so close to getting ourselves filleted alive by a nine-foot-tall demon. “It’s better if I tell you,” I said wearily.

  Heath stared at me for a good minute. “Which demon came at you tonight?”

  “Oruç’s.”

  “Shit, Em!” Heath said, sitting straight up and looking like he was ready to take on the demon all by his lonesome. “Where?”

  “The museum,” Gil said. “Olivera took us there to check out the crime scene.”

  The muscles along Heath’s jawline bunched and he visibly looked like he was trying to control his anger. “You guys went there without me?”

  I sighed. “It’s not like you could’ve contributed anything, babe. I mean, you did get shot in the head and all.”

  “You couldn’t have waited?” he asked me. His tone wasn’t accusing; it was more . . . disappointed.

  “No,” I said. “We couldn’t. We had to check it out, and honestly, I’m glad we did, because now we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “What?” Heath said.

  “Someone who wants to hurt us really, really bad.”

  “We didn’t know that before?”

  “Oh, we did, we just didn’t know the lengths he was willing to go. Anyway, we’re okay, we learned a lot, and we’ll fill you in just as soon as I’ve had three hours to sleep.”

  With that I pushed myself to my feet and shuffled to the bedroom. I wasn’t surprised that Heath followed right behind me. I shrugged out of my jeans and my sweater and crawled under the covers in the shirt I’d worn to the museum. Screw it. I was too tired to get into my pj’s.

  Heath went around the bed and got in on the other side, scooting over to wrap me in his arms. I fell asleep in seconds.

  The next thing I knew it was eleven a.m. I jolted awake, took one look at the clock on the nightstand, and groaned. Then I looked around the bedroom for my husband. Heath wasn’t there, but I heard hushed voices coming from the kitchen. “Dammit!” I swore. I just knew that Gilley was flapping his gums, freaking out my husband and making himself look like the hero.

  Quickly I got into a pair of sweats and rushed out to the kitchen. Gilley stood at the counter, serving Heath a huge omelet complete with hash browns and toast. My stomach grumbled. “Traitor,” I said looking down at it. Where was a good bout of morning sickness when I needed it?

  “Hey!” Gilley said, spying me in the doorway. “You’re finally up.”

  I shuffled over to the kitchen and reached for a coffee cup. “Ah-ah,” Gil said. “No caffeine for you! I brought up some of Michel’s green tea from downstairs. You can have a cup of that.”

  I glared at Gilley. Hard. “Why’re you so chipper?”

  He held up his coffee mug and smiled meanly. “I’ve had my coffee.”

  I was tired and cranky enough to kick him in the “coffee cups” but settled for snatching up the green tea and moving to the sink with my mug.

  “Gil told me what happened,” Heath said. I felt the tension in my shoulders ratchet up another degree.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “I didn’t embellish,” Gil said. “I just gave him a few highlights. Like, I told him that the demon appeared while we were in the exhibit, but that we were packing so many magnets that it shrank back from us and we chased it all the way across the museum with our spikes before we saw it vanish, and then we saw a guy we couldn’t identify leave the building out the back door. That’s when we found the door to Sullivan’s office and let ourselves in.”

  My grumpy mood lessened, and I offered Gilley a grateful smile. “Thanks for filling him in,” I said.

  “Yeah, like I believe Gilley’s version,” Heath scoffed.

  I cleared my throat. “For once, Heath, Gil did not embellish.”

  Heath considered me skeptically, and I knew he thought I was hiding something, but I wasn’t about to elaborate. “Is that as far as you got in the telling of what happened last night, Gil?”

  “No, I told him all the rest too.”

  “Ah,” I said a little disappointed. “So, we’re all up to speed.”

  “Unless there’s anything you want to elaborate on,” Heath said.

  I took my brewed cup of green tea out of the microwave. “No. I think we’re good.”

  Gilley set a plate down at the counter and pointed to it. “Eat,” he ordered. “I made you a salmon, spinach, feta cheese omelet—all great pregnancy foods.”

  I sat down next to Heath, ready to tuck into my omelet, but the smell of it hit me and in a moment I was running for the bathroom. As soon as I was done having my little bout of morning sickness, I wandered back to the counter, where both Gil and Heath were staring at me in alarm. “You okay, babe?” Heath asked.

  “I am now,” I said, tucking into the omelet with gusto. I’d gone from totally nauseous to totally famished in about six seconds. Flat.

  I ate with relish, consuming the entire two-egg omelet almost without pause. When I was done I sighed contentedly and pushed my plate away, only to find Heath and Gilley once again staring wide-eyed at me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Heath said, averting his eyes to focus on his coffee.

  Gilley inched forward and slowly removed my plate. “Thanks for leaving the china,” he snickered.

  “I was hungr
y!” I snapped. Then I realized I’d spoken rather harshly. Lord, was I really going to turn into one of those pregnancy clichés? Feeling bad, I tried to form an apology, but my gaze landed on the remains of Heath’s breakfast still on his plate. “You gonna finish that?”

  He scooted the plate over to me with a chuckle. “Have at it, darlin’.”

  I polished off Heath’s breakfast, then had Gilley make me a smoothie. While I sipped at it, we discussed the case. “Are we really considering Rick Lavinia for this?” Heath asked me.

  He had none of the same animosity for Rick that Gilley and I held. I’d thought Rick was a pompous jerk and disliked his “techniques,” and Gilley of course had gotten into it with him in their online feud, but Heath had always had a note of sympathy for Rick. Maybe it was a “bro” thing. “I honestly wasn’t sold on him as the killer until I saw the photo on his Instagram of the Ashworth Commons,” I said. “That’s just too big a coincidence for me. And, it’d be just like Rick to taunt us with something like that.”

  “Did you see him at the exhibit the night of the premiere?” Heath asked.

  “No,” I said. “But we were a little distracted, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Heath said. “But if he was there, don’t you think one of the fans would’ve noticed him? Rick’s pretty recognizable.”

  Rick was a good-looking guy, and he had very distinctive hair, black roots with white tips, and he wore it spiky. “He could’ve been wearing a hat or some kind of a disguise,” Gilley said. “I mean, our fans went to the exhibit looking for stuff related to us, and when you two showed up, they only had eyes for you. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for him to blend in and go unnoticed if he put on glasses and a hat.”

  “Plus,” I added, “Rick would know how to impersonate a Hollywood producer well enough not to raise Gilley’s suspicions.”

  Gil nodded enthusiastically. Using air quotes he said, “‘Bradley’ really sold it with the name-dropping and studio-speak. He sounded legit.”

  “Is Rick even in town, Gil?” Heath asked, obviously still skeptical.

  “Olivera is going to check into it,” Gil said.