“A little sore, but no real damage done.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, thinking of the printout of our little bean in my messenger bag. I decided to show him that when we were alone. “The doc says the baby is okay, and everything looks good. I’m scheduled for a follow-up in two weeks.” Squeezing his knee, I added, “How’re you feeling?”
He rubbed the side of his head that hadn’t been grazed by the bullet. “I think she knocked some sense into me,” he said with a grin.
“Oh, yeah?” I chuckled. “What kind of sense is that?”
“That we need to get out of the ghostbusting business. It hurts too much.”
I laughed again. “I was just saying that to Gilley a little earlier. What I don’t understand is how the hell these spooks are overcoming our magnets so easily. I mean, the Grim Widow was freakishly strong today, and by rights she shouldn’t have been able to attack us like she did. I mean, she held on to me as we rolled down the stairs, and I was covered in magnets.”
“I spoke with my ancestors about that in my meditation,” Heath said. “Whitefeather told me that the dagger itself had gained a considerable amount of power as a portal. He said that there was something amplifying its energy, but he couldn’t tell what.”
From the kitchen Gilley said, “I think I might know.”
I hadn’t thought he’d been listening. “What, Gil?”
He wiped his hands on a kitchen towel and came around the counter to us. “To magnetize or demagnetize something you need a charge. Electricity. When you demagnetize something, you change the electromagnetic frequency around the object. So, in theory, if our thief stole the dagger and placed an improvised demagnetizer on it with, say, a battery pack to supply the power, you’d be amping up the wattage of whatever spook came through that portal in a big, bad way.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s not good.”
“Nope,” Gil said, turning to go back to the kitchen. “And you know what else isn’t good?”
“What?”
“The fact that I need a little help here and neither one of you has volunteered.”
Heath and I smiled at each other and he began to get up but I pushed him down. “Sit. I’ll help bridezilla.”
“I heard that!” Gil snapped.
Ignoring him, I said to Heath, “You rest and I’ll bring dinner to you.”
With my help, we had a hearty meal ready within the next five minutes, and we’d no sooner settled ourselves comfortably in the living room with full plates balanced on our laps than the doorbell rang.
I think the three of us sighed collectively. “I’ll get it,” I said with a groan.
Setting my plate on the ottoman, I got up and answered the door. Chris Olivera stood there looking nearly as exhausted and worn-out as Heath. “Hi, M.J.,” she said.
“Chris. Good to see you. Please come in.”
She came into the kitchen and immediately stopped in her tracks. “I’m interrupting your dinner,” she said. “I can come back.”
“No, no,” I said. “Would you like to join us? There’s plenty.”
I heard Gilley clear his throat, but I ignored him. I knew I’d be giving away his chance for seconds, but Chris was on our side now, and there was no sense being rude to her.
She licked her lips but held up her hand. “No, that’s really nice of you, but I don’t want to impose.”
I waved her comment off. “Oh, please,” I said. “It’s fish tacos. Gilley made them and I can tell you from experience, they’re amazing. Go sit in the living room and take the plate on the ottoman. I’ll bring you a glass of iced tea, and I’ll fix myself another plate.”
Chris wavered for another moment, so I just got right to making myself another plate, and she took the cue and headed to the living room.
I joined her there with the last of the fish tacos and ignored Gilley’s barely veiled frown. “Oh, my God,” Chris said after she’d taken a bite. “These are amazing!”
Gilley’s frown vanished, and thereafter he was the epitome of the polite host, offering Chris extra helpings of guacamole and pico de gallo.
We ate without discussing anything about the case, which I think was an unspoken agreement among us. It was an unnerving topic, and no sense spoiling a delicious meal with talk of death and mayhem.
Finally, though, we’d finished the meal and Chris politely took each of our plates to the kitchen, then came back and sat down. Folding her hands in her lap, she said, “I looked into Murdock. The elderly woman he lived with was his mother. He had power of attorney over her finances, and when we looked into her bank account, we discovered a pattern almost identical to Sullivan’s. Five grand deposited about two weeks ago, but he got an additional five grand the day after Sullivan was murdered.”
“Do you think he murdered Sullivan?” Gilley asked.
She shook her head and shrugged. “My gut says no.”
“Did you find any link between Rick Lavinia and Murdock?” I asked next.
Chris shook her head. “No. Murdock’s mother wasn’t exactly a fountain of information. She thinks we murdered her son.”
“Yikes,” I said. “Is that going to spell trouble for you, Chris?”
She shrugged again. “I spent a lot of the afternoon going over the incident with Internal Affairs. They don’t like the fact that I chased a suspect into an abandoned building, and, out of my line of sight, he was murdered by an unknown assailant who then got away.”
“Are you still on the case?” Heath asked.
“Yeah. For now,” she said wearily.
He considered her for a few moments before he said, “Your dad was a cop too, right?”
She blinked in surprise. “How’d you know that?”
“You guys share the same first name,” he said without answering her directly. “He’s really proud that you’re carrying on the legacy. He also thinks that the move to the new house in Cambridge was terrific. He’s glad your mom didn’t talk you out of it.”
In an instant, Chris’s eyes glistened with tears. “How are you doing that?” she said breathlessly.
Heath smiled kindly at her. “It’s what I do. Your dad is asking for a favor, Chris. He’d like you to make his mom’s pasta dish. He keeps showing me a bowl of spaghetti and he keeps connecting it to the number twenty-four.”
She barked out a laugh and wiped her cheeks, which were now wet with tears. “His birthday is on the twenty-fourth of this month, and my grandmother’s spaghetti Bolognese was his absolute favorite dish. He used to tell me that I was the only person who could make it like she did.”
“I thought it was something like that,” Heath said. “Anyway, he’s really, really proud of you. And he says that you’re smart to keep yourself in such great shape. He says you learned from his mistakes, and by that I think he means that he didn’t take great care of himself. He died from heart trouble, right?”
Chris’s lower lip trembled and she put her index finger against it to stop the quivers. Unable to speak, she simply nodded. My heart went out to her, because she clearly missed her dad, and I knew exactly what it felt like to lose a parent.
“He’s pulling back now, but the last thing he just told me is that he wants you to take the captain’s exam within the next year or two. He says you’ll pass it and get your own precinct by the time you’re thirty-six. A little before he was able to do it.”
She sucked in a small breath and stared at him wide-eyed. “My dad got his first precinct at thirty-seven,” she said. “He was the youngest in our family to get that far that fast. I come from a long line of cops.”
Heath sat back with a sigh and said, “Sorry for that impromptu reading. Your dad was knocking on my energy from the minute you came in the door.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked him, a look of wonder on her face as
she picked up her iced tea and took a steadying sip.
I answered for Heath. “Sometimes when a deceased person sees a chance to communicate with a loved one, they work really hard to get our attention. We call it knocking, because it sort of feels like that. It’s sort of a tap-tap-tap on our energy; not a sound really, just a sort of pressure tapping at the edge of our personal space.”
“That was amazing,” Chris said. “Like, really, Heath. That was amazing.”
He blushed. “M.J.’s just as good,” he said.
She looked at me, and there was a hint of newfound respect in her eyes. It was immensely satisfying. “Getting back to Murdock,” I said, because I knew we really did need to focus on figuring this case out, “is there anything more you can tell us?”
“Well, I did get a few things out of the mother. Beginning two weeks ago a man came to her house to speak with her son. She said she didn’t like him, but Charlie—that’s Murdock’s first name—told her that he was a friend and he was doing a job for him.
“I showed her a picture of Lavinia, but she said her eyesight is bad, and she couldn’t say for sure that it wasn’t him.”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Is that enough to get a warrant and maybe do a search of Rick’s financials to see if the deposits made to Murdock and Sullivan correlate to any of his accounts?”
The detective shook her head. “No. And because I’m desperate, I even ran it by the lieutenant, and he all but laughed in my face. We need something solid to connect Lavinia with Murdock and Sullivan—something that we don’t need a warrant to prove.”
We all were silent while we thought about how to go about doing that, but without even knowing where Rick Lavinia was, there didn’t seem to be much of a place to start.
Finally, Gil said, “Was there anything else that Murdock’s mom said? Any other clue she gave?”
Chris sighed and set her glass of iced tea aside. “The only other thing she gave me about this mystery man was that he showed up wearing a cape, and she remembers that because it was soaking wet and he refused to take it off, so it dripped on her carpet. I checked a couple of Google images for Lavinia, and he seems to be a T-shirt-and-jeans kind of guy. There’s no image anywhere of him wearing a cape.”
I stared in stunned silence at Chris. She looked back at me, furrowing her brow. “What?” she said.
I turned to look at Gilley, and he stared at me with an equally shocked expression. “No. Way!” he gasped. “No, freaking way!”
And then he jumped up and ran to his backpack to pull out his computer.
“What’s happening?” Chris said as we all continued to stare at one another, shocked to our toes.
“We know who the killer is,” Heath said to her.
“Rick Lavinia?” she guessed.
“Nope!” Gil said, bringing her his laptop. “Count Chocula!”
“Captain Comb-Over,” I added. “He always wears a cape.”
She looked first at Gil, then at me, then at the computer screen, which is when her jaw dropped. “That guy is the killer?”
“Yep,” I said, getting up to go over and look at what I assumed was the image of Bernard Higgins. “In a million years I never would’ve thought him capable of something like this,” I said.
Gilley took his laptop back and sat on the ground to type furiously. “Bernard Higgins,” he said, while his fingers flew over the keyboard before pausing so that his eyes could focus on the screen, “is a world-renowned medium. At least that’s according to his Web site. He’s a medium to the stars, or so it says here.”
“He looks like a joke,” Chris said.
“That’s what we’ve always thought,” I told her. “But apparently, we’ve way underestimated him. A couple of years ago, Heath and I were paired with him and some other woman who looks like Elvira—”
Gilley gave a tiny gasp. “Angelica Demarche!”
I snapped my fingers. “That was her name!”
“She and Bernard were married in twenty-thirteen,” Gil said, his gaze darting back and forth across the screen.
“No way!” I exclaimed. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope, not kidding,” Gil said. “And you know what else, M.J.?”
“What?”
“Bernard—Bradley; Angelica—Angela.”
“Who’s Angela?” Heath asked.
“Bradley’s assistant. The one I spoke to at the studio when I called his business line.”
“She’s a part of this,” I guessed.
“Has to be,” Gil said.
“Okay, I’ll give you that all this is starting to add up for Bernard,” Heath said, “but I mean, Gil, that guy really didn’t seem smart enough to pull something like this off. There was a lot of tech stuff involved here.”
Gilley looked up from the computer long enough to say, “According to Bernard’s bio, he was an electrician until nineteen ninety-five, when an electrical shock gave him the powers to speak to the dead.”
“An electrician could certainly figure out how to demagnetize our equipment,” I reasoned, wondering how I could’ve underestimated Bernard so fully. It must’ve been a bias I formed at our first meeting, when he focused on my cleavage and only my cleavage. Also, he just looked silly parading around in that cape. I hadn’t really considered that there might be a whole lot more substance to the man.
“Plus, he’s from San Francisco,” Heath said, pulling me out of my thoughts on Bernard. “And he was there at the hotel when the dagger first appeared. He definitely could’ve known all about it.”
“He also could’ve followed the Drake murder case,” I said. “He could’ve put two and two together and figured out that Ayden had given us the dagger to keep it safe.”
“And remember,” Gilley said, “he and Angelica were fired from the Haunted Possessions cast. He was pretty steamed about that.”
“So he’s carried a grudge against us all this time?” I said. It never would’ve occurred to me to hold on to something like that for so long.
“M.J.,” Gil said, “from the Haunted Possessions show, you and Heath got your own thirteen-episode cable show; then you got a movie deal. Of course he held a grudge. In his eyes, you probably stole his big break.”
“We probably stole Angelica’s too,” Heath said.
“Plus, as a medium, he’d know all about portals and such.”
“He would,” I agreed.
“So, this Rick Lavinia . . . ,” Chris said. “He had nothing to do with this?”
“Oh, I’m guessing he did, but I’m also guessing he didn’t know he did. Gil, remember that Instagram photo he posted? The caption said that he was sent that image, right?”
“Something to that effect,” Gil said.
“I’m thinking Bernard sent Rick the image in the hopes that Rick would post it and we’d get thrown off Bernard’s trail.”
“It worked,” Gil said.
“It did. That bastard.”
“Okay, so what do we do?” Chris said next. “Should I put out a warrant for him?”
“No!” Gilley and Heath said together.
“He’s got the dagger,” I reminded her. “And I doubt that, if he’s in Boston, he’s staying anywhere under his real name. Plus, this guy’s been dogging us from the beginning. He’s been stalking us and unleashing the demons at us at will. I think we should use that to our advantage.”
“How?” Heath asked.
I bounced my eyebrows because I knew exactly how we’d find them. “By making them come to us, baby.”
Chapter 16
“How exactly are we going bring Bernard and Angelica to us?” Gilley demanded.
“Well,” I began, “if I had to guess, I’d say that Bernie and Angie really want to get noticed, right? Their goal is probably to get on camera and show off their skills by saving the day. But in order to do tha
t, they’d need to be in control of the spooks, because, let’s face it, as mediums, those two suck.”
Gil snorted. “Angelica in particular was just god-awful,” he said.
“She was,” I agreed. “So, if we post something online suggesting that we’re going to be busting a haunted apartment house and filming it to show off our skills to those people who might think we’re big fat fakers, how could Bernard resist showing up with the dagger and unleashing his little demon horde at us? It’s win-win for him, especially if one or all of the demons kill us. He’ll get to make his grand entrance on camera as a gifted medium who felt a disturbance in the force and came to save the day.”
“Wait,” Gilley said, his expression alarmed. “You want him to open up Oruç’s portal?”
“No,” I admitted, feeling a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. “But I don’t see how we can avoid it. Bernard has the dagger. He’s in control of the portal. The only way to get to him is to survive the gauntlet.”
The room was very quiet after that, and I knew that they all saw that I was right. “I don’t like it, Em,” Heath said.
“Me neither, sweetheart, but what other choice do we have? It’s too big of a risk to hope that Bernard doesn’t choose some other crowded event to unleash the dagger so that he can garner some attention.”
“You think he’ll be lured to a concert or a mall or something over our little get-together?” Gil said. “I mean, he’d have a much bigger audience.”
“True,” I said. “But he’d also have a hell of a lot more risk with it. He already tried to orchestrate a big disruption at our event, and that failed miserably.”
Chris took a deep breath and raised her eyes skyward as if she were sending up a prayer. “I’m in.”
“You are?” Gilley asked her. “Sorry,” he added quickly. “I mean . . . you are?”
She grinned. “Yeah. I figure if my dad sees me making captain someday, then I’ll probably survive the night. You guys also need all the help you can get, so tell me how to fight these spooks and I’ll do it.”
I sent her a grateful smile, then turned to Gilley. He rolled his eyes. “If you weren’t pregnant, M.J., no way would I walk into an ambush like that.”