A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder

  Which reminded me of something. “Were you able to trace the IP address for the person who logged into Sullivan’s e-mail account?” I asked Gil.

  He nodded. “Yes. It routed to an address here in Boston. I sent a text to Olivera to call me as soon as she got up, but she hasn’t yet.”

  That made me a little nervous. “We sent her home with plenty of magnets, right?”

  “We did,” Gil assured me. “She’s probably still sleeping, M.J. Don’t worry. She’ll call.”

  I’d worry until she called, but I didn’t say it. “What about Ayden?” I asked. “Have we been able to get in touch with him to see how he’s doing?”

  Gilley eyed his watch. “It’s eight forty-five his time,” he said. “Think that’s too early to call his hospital room?”

  “Nah,” I said. “No one can sleep well in a hospital. Let’s call.”

  “Right,” Gil said, and pulled out his cell. After placing the call, he laid the smartphone on the counter and hit the speaker function.

  “Hello?” a gravelly voice sounded after the third ring.

  “Ayden?” I said. “It’s M.J.”

  “Hey, lady,” Ayden said. “You okay?”

  “I’m better than you, apparently,” I told him, wishing he were closer so that we could visit him.

  “Yeah, somebody got the drop on me,” he said. “The son of a bitch.”

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

  “Great,” he deadpanned. “Never better.”

  “We heard you had some cracked ribs and a punctured lung,” Gil said.

  “Hey, Gilley,” Ayden said. “Yeah. The lung was just a small puncture. Doesn’t even hurt anymore, but the son of a bitch really did a number on my ankle. It got twisted up pretty good. They think I tore a ligament and they’ve been talking surgery all morning.”

  I winced. As a runner, I knew that tearing a ligament was sometimes worse than breaking a bone. “Sorry to hear that, buddy,” Heath said.

  “Is that Heath?”

  “It is,” he said. “We’re all here.”

  “Wish I was there with you,” he said. “What’s the word on the dagger?”

  “It’s still out there,” I said. “And someone has unleashed the kraken.”

  “Oh, man,” he said. “I was afraid of that. Anybody hurt?”

  Heath, Gilley, and I exchanged a pensive look. Finally I said, “No. Still only the one dead.”

  “And you’re all okay?”

  “We are,” I said.

  “Barely,” Gilley muttered.

  “So Oruç’s demon came after you,” Ayden said. He’d heard Gilley.

  I shot Gil a stern look and said, “It did, but we handled it. The bigger problem we’re dealing with right now, Ayden, is that Oruç has apparently opened up a portal big enough to let through at least some of the other spooks we’ve managed to shut down into the lower realms over the past few years. We’ve had encounters with three other nasties in just the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Which ones?” Ayden asked. I’d forgotten that he’d been following our cable show for years.

  “The Grim Widow, Hatchet Jack, and I’m fairly certain another spook named Sy the Slayer paid me a visit two nights ago.”

  “Plus Oruç’s demon?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ayden sighed. “What a time to get mugged,” he said. “You guys need me and I’m stuck in this hospital bed.”

  “I’m not sure what you could do here,” Gilley told him. “Except run for your life, and with that bum ankle . . .”

  I shot Gilley another stern look.

  “What?” he said.

  I made a dismissive motion with my hand. “Anyway, Ayden, we think someone planned this whole thing starting about three weeks ago. It looks like the producer who called Gilley to arrange for the display of the dagger was an impostor. It also looks like there was at least some cooperation between the killer and the victim. We think we’ve found evidence of a five-thousand-dollar payoff in exchange for access to the exhibit hall to swap out all of Gilley’s magnets, and that led to the killer having access to the alarm code that would let him come back to steal the dagger.”

  “Were you able to trace where the payoff came from?”

  “Yeah,” Gil said. “Some guy named Todd Tolliver. We’re convinced it’s an alias.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Ayden said, “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Heath and I said together.

  “Just a little over three weeks ago I took a case investigating a hit-and-run for a couple of parents who lost their nineteen-year-old son on his way home from Stanford. His name was Todd Tolliver.”

  I blinked. We all did, taking that in for a second. “Did anybody know about the case you were working?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Ayden said. “Probably lots of people. I was able to track down the car and the person responsible, and the news did a story on it.”

  “So if this guy knew about the case you were working on, Ayden, then maybe you weren’t mugged at random. Maybe someone wanted to cause you permanent harm.”

  “That’s what I was just thinking, Heath,” Ayden said.

  “He’s playing with us,” I said. “Taunting us. He’s letting us know that he’s one step ahead of us at every turn. If we start digging, all we’ll find are the many ways he’s already outmaneuvered us.” I then explained to Ayden our theory about the killer and thief being Rick Lavinia.

  “You know he called me not long after your show started, right?” Ayden said.

  “Wait, what?” I said. “He’s spoken to you?”

  “Yeah. You two were credited with helping to solve the murders at the Drake Hotel, and I think Rick was looking for some dirt on you. He wanted to expose you as a couple of frauds, but he got nothing from me but high praise.”

  “That’s how he knew about the dagger!” Gilley said. “He was researching the Drake murders and figured it out!”

  Heath caught my eye. He offered me a look that suggested he apologized for being skeptical of Rick Lavinia as the primary suspect. “He probably wanted you out of the way, Ayden, because you would’ve remembered that phone call and probably pointed us right to him as a suspect.”

  “Still,” Ayden said, “it doesn’t explain how Rick stole the dagger, murdered Sullivan, then made it all the way to San Francisco to get the jump on me.”

  “He had help,” I said. Then I turned to Gilley. “Hey, didn’t you say that you spoke with Bradley’s assistant a couple of times? Maybe he’s part of this too.”

  “The assistant was a woman, M.J.,” Gilley said.

  “Ah,” I said. “Any chance the person who attacked you was a woman?”

  “Maybe a woman gorilla,” Ayden said with a chuckle. “All I remember is getting hit by someone big.”

  “Doesn’t mean that Lavinia doesn’t have more than one accomplice,” Heath pointed out.

  “True,” Ayden said. “Still, that kind of thing takes money. Does he have the cash to support all this?”

  I glanced at Heath and Gilley. They both shrugged. “We don’t know, Ayden. Maybe?”

  “It’d be worth checking out his financials, but you’d need a warrant to dig into them, and for that you’d need some pretty compelling evidence that Lavinia is your guy. Right now, I don’t think you have enough,” Ayden said. It sounded like he was about to say more, but at that moment there was the sound of other voices in the background. “Crap,” he said. “Listen, the doctor’s here to talk about my ankle. I gotta go for now, but call me if anything new develops, okay?”

  We promised we would and said our good-byes.

  “I seriously think we should ditch this whole thing and go on an extended vacation,” Gil said into the stunned silence that followed.

  Heath
eyed him seriously. “If I thought that alone would keep us safe, Gil, I’d be the one buying our plane tickets.”

  Gil’s phone rang and I thought it might be Ayden again, but it turned out to be Olivera. “Did you have a chance to check out Rick Lavinia?” I asked her.

  “I did,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of info. He’s got one arrest on his record for a drunk and disorderly. He got that in Georgia last year, probably while filming for his show. I can’t find an address for him in Boston; his last known here was three years ago, and there’s someone else living in the apartment he once rented. If he owns property, it could be in a trust and I’d be unable to locate it unless I had the name of the trust, or, if he lives with someone, then the house could be in their name. His driver’s license still lists the old address, though. The only point of contact for him is his agent, and when I reached out to him, all he’d tell me was that Rick was in town on an investigation which is supposedly a tightly guarded secret, and he was unwilling to share the address with me unless I had a subpoena or a warrant.”

  “Wow,” I said. “The agent’s a little touchy.”

  “He is but it might be for good reason. His agent said that a few of Rick’s fans have tried to crash his locations before by posing as the police,” she said. “He said he wouldn’t tell me anything over the phone but he would relay a message if I wanted to leave one.”

  “Did you?” Heath asked.

  “Nope. I figured it’d be better not to tip our hand that we’re looking for him.”

  I drummed my fingers on the counter. “Don’t you think the agent will call Rick anyway and tell him that you called?”

  “He might, but maybe not. He made it sound like Rick was totally unavailable to anyone for the next forty-eight hours.”

  “That’s more than long enough to unleash hell on us,” Gil moaned.

  “It’s also more than enough time to track his ass down and get the dagger back,” I countered.

  “Anyway,” Olivera said, to get us back on track, “Gil, I can’t find the paper that I wrote down the residence on for the IP address you gave me. Can you give it to me again?”

  “Sure,” Gil said, lifting the phone to consult it. After a moment he said, “Four-ten Forrest Street.”

  “Great,” she said, “I’ll check it out. You guys stay put.”

  She hung up abruptly, and once again we were all left to stare at one another. “She’s crazy if she thinks we’re not going to meet her there, right?” I said.

  “What?!” Gil exclaimed. “No way, M.J.! Rick might be there, lying in wait!”

  I nodded. “Yes, Gil . . . with the dagger!”

  “Oh, shit,” Heath said, sliding off his chair and moving around to the kitchen. “We gotta go!”

  Gilley stood there with his mouth open, as if he couldn’t believe we were dashing off to meet Olivera. “Are you people crazy?”

  I shoved his magnet-lined vest into his chest. “Get dressed or stay here and take your chances with whatever might show up, Gil.”

  He paled. “I’m moving you to the table at the back of the reception hall with Michel’s crazy uncle Max and his flighty sister!”

  I flashed him a toothy smile. “Promises, promises.”

  Heath tapped my shoulder as Gilley and I glared at each other, and I got busy getting ready. Gil could come or he could stay, but Heath and I had to get to Olivera before she went all guns-a-blazing again.

  As I was pushing my foot into my boot, I saw Gilley angrily duck into his vest. He was muttering pretty good under his breath too. “Maybe you should drive,” Heath said to me.

  I grabbed the keys from the dish by the sink. “Good call, honey.”

  We arrived at the address that Gilley had tracked to the IP address from Sullivan’s computer and I was surprised to find a nice, fairly well-kept house with yellow siding, freshly painted shutters, and a wreath on the front door. “This the place?” I asked Gil as I pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the house.

  “Yep,” he replied. “At least, according to the address I got from Sullivan’s computer.”

  I looked around for Olivera, but there was no sign of her. The driveway did have a car parked in it, though.

  We stared at the residence for a little while, waiting and watching in silence as my windshield wipers swiped back and forth against the steady rain that’d be with us for the next couple of days. “Think someone’s home?” I said.

  Gil pointed over my shoulder. “There’s a light on in the front. And a car parked in the drive. Odds are pretty good that someone’s home.”

  The door to the house suddenly opened, and an elderly woman with a hunched back, blue hair, a housecoat, and brown slippers stepped out. Opening up an umbrella, she proceeded to walk down the front steps. As she shuffled along, she eyed us a little suspiciously before heading to her mailbox to retrieve the mail.

  “Wow,” Heath said drily. “Rick looks taller on TV.”

  “Ha!” Gil chuckled. “And younger. The miracles they work with stage makeup.”

  I frowned. “Seriously, you guys, will you quit it?” We needed to keep our focus, because even though this old woman had come out of the house, it didn’t mean someone else wasn’t inside with Oruç’s dagger. “Gil,” I said, thinking of a possible connection between the old woman and our prime suspect. “Did Rick ever mention his mom?”

  “Not that I know of. But I never watched past the third season, which, frankly, was beyond boring after Rick got his ass tossed down the stairs.” Gilley chuckled again at the memory. “So epic!”

  “Shhh!” I told him, staring at the woman. Her body language seemed off to me, but that could’ve been because we were parked across the street from her house, engine running and watching her every move.

  Before heading back inside, the old woman made a point to pause and frown at us.

  “Come on,” I told the boys as I got out of the car to trot over to her. “Excuse me,” I said, holding my arm up over my head to block the rain. “Do you live here?”

  “I do,” she said, clutching the handle of her umbrella.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for someone. Does anybody else live with you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know that?” she asked me. I realized that I probably should’ve introduced myself before asking about who lived in the house with her.

  “Sorry. I’m Mary Jane Whitefeather, and that’s my husband,” I said, turning to point to Heath, who was coming up behind me. “And that’s my best friend, Gilley, in the car.”

  She shrank a little away from me. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “And I don’t know why you’re asking about who lives here.”

  I tried to think of a quick explanation as to why we needed to know but couldn’t readily think of one. “A friend of ours is in trouble, and he gave us this address to pick him up, but I don’t see him anywhere around.”

  “He gave you my address?” she said, utterly confused.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think he was just trying to text me an approximate location. He must’ve seen your house number and used that to let us know where he is.”

  “I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  “Maybe someone else in your home saw him?” I said. “I mean, if you’d like to go in and ask the other members of your household if they’ve seen a guy, about five-ten, with brown hair, walking around . . .”

  The old woman backed even farther away from me. I’d spooked her.

  In desperation I said, “Does Rick Lavinia live here?”

  “I think you should go,” she said, pointing to my car. “This is private property and you’re trespassing.”

  “Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “I’m really sorry to have disturbed you. Thank you, ma’am.”

  With that, I turned and grabbed He
ath’s hand. He hadn’t heard most of the conversation, thank God, because I’d really botched it. “Does she live alone?” he asked me as we headed back to the car.

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “And now I’ve spooked her.”

  “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “We head back to the car and wait to hear or spot Olivera.”

  As we were just about to get into my SUV, another car pulled around us and into the driveway. I glanced at it, wondering if it was Olivera, but the person who got out of the car wasn’t her; it was a man in his midforties or thereabouts, with thin brown hair and a mustache.

  For two seconds I wondered if we were wrong about Rick, and this was the guy who’d been behind the theft and the murder, but then something else about him caught my attention. I knew him.

  Heath motioned with his chin toward the man. “Isn’t that . . . ?”

  “Murdock,” I whispered. “The security guy from the museum!”

  At the same moment we recognized him, he must’ve recognized us, because he paused as he was walking toward the house, did a double take, then quickly fumbled his keys, which fell to the ground.

  “Yo!” I said, as I thought about what he’d done, the danger he’d put innocent lives in, and especially the danger his actions represented to my unborn child. “Murdock! Where’s the dagger?”

  Murdock hastened to bend over and retrieve his keys, but they slipped again from his grasp, and all of a sudden he just left them there and bolted. Heath took off after him like a rocket, and I gave chase too.

  The three of us tore down the street, getting pelted by the rain, which made it tough to see. Murdock had a good lead on us, but Heath runs like he was born to it. I watched him pull away from me, his stride so smooth it looked effortless. His arms pumped steadily, his legs moved so fast they were a blur, and he quickly closed the distance between him and Murdock. A few more strides and he’d tackle him, I was sure, but the security guard had a trick up his sleeve neither one of us saw coming. He wheeled to the side, grabbed an empty garbage can that was left at the curbside, and hurled it at Heath.

  My husband must’ve been focused only on closing the distance between him and Murdock, because he was slow to react, and the garbage can struck him in the shins. With a grunt of pain, he went down. I cried out because Heath had hit the pavement hard, but he rolled to the side, grabbed his knee for a moment, then struggled to his feet. I reached him just as he took one limping stride forward. “Ohmigod! Are you okay?” I asked, coming up next to him.