In the Air Tonight (2 page)

I reached the cross avenue B—those New Bergin founding fathers had been hell on wheels in the street-naming department—and stopped so fast I nearly put my toes through the front of my shoes.

Gawkers milled about, blocking the sidewalk and spilling into the road, but since the police had roped off the avenue they weren’t in danger of becoming chopped suey.

Brad Hunstadt—yeah, that Brad, Jenn’s Brad, make that ex-Brad—stood on the inside of the rope, arms crossed, face stoic. He’d only recently joined the force following the relocation of another officer to Kentucky to be nearer to his grandchildren.

Before that, Brad had been kind of a loser. He might be pretty—like the famous Brad—but he’d never been a candidate for rocket science school. He’d graduated from high school, gone to tech school. I’m not sure for what because he’d never worked for anyone but his father, the local butcher, until now. Jenn and I figured his daddy had paid someone off to get Brad out of his business and into another.

As I approached, my gaze was drawn to the woman standing at the edge of the crowd, staring at the dead body propped against the wall of Breck’s Candy Emporium—home of twenty-five different types of caramel apples. The staring itself was not remarkable. Who wasn’t? What was remarkable was that this woman could be the twin of the one she stared at.

She was a stranger—believe me I knew everyone—in a place where strangers stuck out, even when they weren’t covered in blood and lying dead on the ground.

I’d seen hundreds of ghosts, but each one still made my heart race. They were
dead
. I could see them. It was hard to get used to, and really, I probably shouldn’t.

“Huh.” Jenn had caught up. “I can’t remember the last time we had a murder.”

“Murder?”

She cast me an irritated glance. “Look at her.”

My gaze went to the standing woman, but contrary to most movies about them, ghosts don’t walk around with the wound that killed them evident on their spectral bodies. No gaping brains. No holes in their heads, their chests, or anywhere else there shouldn’t be. Even the massive amounts of blood on the reclining figure was nowhere in evidence upon the spectral one.

Jenn snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Not there.” She pointed slightly to the left of the ghost. “There.” She transferred her pointy nail south until it indicated the dead woman.

One of her arms was missing—that wasn’t easy to do—and her body, from the chest down, was blackened. The scent of charred flesh reached us on a frigid breeze. Weird. When I’d left my apartment, I could have sworn it was Indian summer.

Jenn clapped a palm over her nose and fled, her itty-bitty Barbie feet and short legs moving so fast they appeared to blur. Jenn could move when she wanted to.

Chief Johnson stood next to the body, wringing his hands. He’d been the police chief since the last chief—his father, also Chief Johnson—had keeled over in his lutefisk.

I had to agree with him. I’d rather die than eat it too.

However, as long as the present Chief Johnson had been in charge, there hadn’t been a murder in New Bergin. Had there ever been?

The funeral director was our medical examiner. The extent of our CSI was probably to put up yellow tape and hope for the best. It appeared that Chief Johnson had managed the first and was hip deep in the second.

Though I wanted to stay, I needed to get to school. If I wasn’t in class when the bell rang it wouldn’t be pretty. You think kindergartners are delightful? They are. But I learned not to turn my back on them. Or leave them alone long enough to trash the place.

I planned to cut through the alley between B and C—my shoes would get indescribable gunk on them, but I didn’t have the time to care—and the ghost poured from the air, filling the space right in front of me. Her eyes were solid black. No whites left at all. I’d never seen anything like it before. I never wanted to again.

She had a burn, make that a brand, of a snarling wolf on her neck. I glanced at the body. Sure enough, there was the brand, though it was impossible to tell from here if it was a wolf. I probably wouldn’t have seen it at all, beneath so much blood, unless I’d known where to look.

That I knew confused me. The wounds on the living did not transfer to the dead. Why had that one?

She grabbed my arm. I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Her fingers were fire and ice. Smoke poured from her mouth. In the center of her too-black eyes, a flame flickered. “He will burn us all.”

Then she was gone. If it hadn’t been for the trailing whiff of brimstone, and the blue-black imprint of her fingers just above my wrist, I’d have thought I imagined her.

“What the fuck?” I muttered, earning a glare from Mrs. Knudson, who stood in the doorway of her yarn shop, Knit Wits, contemplating the most excitement to hit New Bergin in a lifetime.

“I certainly hope you don’t speak like that in front of the children.”

“Children!” I resisted the urge to use the F-word again and ran, skidding through Lord knows what in the alley, then bursting out the other side, trailing the mystery muck behind me.

New Orleans Police Department

Detective Bobby Doucet stared at the photos spread across his desk. “Goddamn serial killer.”

“Isn’t that redundant?”

Bobby’s partner, Conner Sullivan, lowered himself into the visitor’s chair. The thing creaked then wobbled beneath his weight. Conner, used to such behavior in furniture, either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

“A serial killer is, by nature, damned. And damned comes from God. Therefore…” Sullivan spread his quarterback-sized hands. “Redundant.”

Bobby had joined the homicide division while Sullivan was on leave. The detective had been unwell, lost time, forgotten things. When he’d returned, no one had wanted to work with him.

Bobby, the new man, the low man, had been elected. He didn’t mind. Though the two of them could not have been any more different in both appearance and background, Bobby had found the Yankee transplant from … Massachusetts? Maine? Maryland? Something with an
M.
It didn’t matter. He’d found Sullivan to be thorough, fair, and an obscenely hard worker. As homicide in New Orleans was a busy, busy business, Bobby appreciated all three.

“’Tis a very Catholic view yer spoutin’, Conner.” Bobby’s use of a thick Irish brogue brought a rare smile to his partner’s face. “But then we are in the city of Saints.”

Which made the man’s annoying habit of rooting for the Patriots even more so. Bobby liked him anyway. They both had secrets in their pasts, shadows in their eyes, and chips on their shoulders.

Sullivan’s was much wider than Bobby’s but only because his shoulders were. The detective stood six five without shoes and ran about two fifty. He possessed sandy blond hair and oddly dark eyes considering the epic paleness of his skin and the potato-famine memories inherent in his last name. His habit of wearing amusing ties with his pristine dark suits—today’s offering featured Fred Flintstone in full “yabba dabba doo” mode—had clued Bobby in to a lighter side of Sullivan that few bothered to uncover.

In contrast, Robert Alan Doucet came from a long line of Creoles—both French and Spanish, with a little Haitian thrown in. He topped out just above six feet and he weighed one seventy only after he’d fallen into the river fully clothed. His hair was black; his eyes were blue, and his skin appeared tan year round.

“Why are you staring at those?” The wave of Sullivan’s huge hand created such a backwash of air that Bobby had to slap his palm atop two of the photos to keep them from sailing off the desk and across the floor. “Keep it up and they’re gonna call you obsessed.”

Sullivan should know. One of the reasons he’d been on leave was a tiny obsession of his own.

With another serial killer.

New Orleans seemed to attract them. Go figure. Large service population that worked on a cash basis meant very few records. The huge tourism industry caused folks to wander in and out hourly. Rampant alcohol—explanation unnecessary.

Costumes. Masks. Voodoo.

Then there was the fact that the city was surrounded on three sides by water, and water was a great place to hide bodies—or at the least make them damn hard to recover evidence from. In truth, Bobby was surprised New Orleans wasn’t the serial-killer capital of the world. Although …

His gaze drifted over the photos on his desk. Maybe it was.

The killer Sullivan had been after had never been caught. Most folks in the department didn’t believe there’d ever been one. The manner of death for each victim had been as different as the victims themselves. Which wasn’t the usual serial killer MO.

Kind of like the case in front of Bobby now. Not only had his killer stopped killing—at least in New Orleans—but when he’d been doing so he’d offed his victims in all manner of ways. However, there was one thing they all had in common.

Bobby lifted the latest photo, a close up of a dead woman, where the brand of a snarling wolf was visible on her neck, despite all the blood. He offered it to Sullivan.

The big man accepted the picture, eyes narrowing on the image. “I never saw this one before.”

“Just came in.”

Sullivan stood. “Why aren’t we at the crime scene?”

“Because it’s in Podunk.”

“Where?”

“Wisconsin.”

“There’s actually a Podunk, Wisconsin?”

“No.” But Bobby thought that there should be. “It’s…” He shuffled through the crap on his desk and found the information. “New Bergin.”

Sullivan spread his hands. “Never heard of it.”

“You are not alone.”

The chair creaked a little closer to the floor when Sullivan sat back down. “When did it happen?”

“This morning.”

“How’d you find out about it so fast?”

“FBI.”

The detective’s lips twisted. When he’d contacted the FBI about his case, they had been less than helpful. They hadn’t been any more helpful when Bobby contacted them. However—

“The agent I spoke with about our cases was conveniently the one that…” Bobby glanced again at his cheat sheet. “Chief Johnson spoke with this morning.”

“How many dead, branded bodies do they have in Podunk?”

“Just the one.”

“Then why would they call the FBI?”

“Place hasn’t had a murder since 1867.”

“Good for them. Still don’t see why they called the feds.”

“They wanted help.”

Sullivan rubbed his forehead. “Murder isn’t a federal offense.”

“This one might be.”

The detective dropped his hand. “How?”

“The woman in that picture is the sister of a U.S. Marshal.”

Understanding blossomed across Sullivan’s face. “And the murder of an immediate family member of a law enforcement official jacks the charge into the big leagues.”

“Retaliatory murder,” Bobby corrected. “And this looks pretty retaliatory to me.”

He tossed the rest of the crime scene photos—which weren’t very good and made Bobby think they’d been taken with someone’s outdated cell phone—to Sullivan. Despite his having seen the same, or worse, before, the man grimaced.

“Missing body parts are usually a good clue,” Sullivan agreed.

Bobby had no idea why but gangsters—both the mob and the gangs—liked to hack people into pieces as a message. Usually they hacked them into more pieces than two, but the missing arm was both weird and worrisome.

“The police chief called the feds,” Bobby continued, “and the feds forwarded his pictures to me to compare the brand on the Wisconsin victim to the brands on ours.”

“And?”

“I think they match, but I want to take a closer look.”

“Me too. When do we leave?”

“
We
don’t.”

“Goddamn budget cuts.”

“Redundant,” Bobby murmured, gathering the photos and information then stuffing them into the file. He had just enough time to pack a bag and catch his plane.

Sullivan shifted his linebacker shoulders. “I’d hoped this guy was gone for good.”

They hadn’t found a body in nearly a year. Bobby’d kind of hoped the guy was gone for good too. In prison. Dead. Lobotomized. He wasn’t picky.

“I think he’s back,” Bobby said.

The spark of worry in his partner’s gaze deepened. “I think you’re right.”

Chapter 2

I reached my classroom only a minute or two after my class did. Still, David had already painted himself turquoise and Susan had picked the lock on the scissors drawer.

I was really going to have to keep my eye on Susan.

Their excuse?

“Stafford told us to.”

As Stafford was laughing his forever five-year-old butt off right behind them I believed it.

I’d hoped that working with children would lessen my exposure to ghosts, and it had, but not completely. Stafford was a case in point. The towheaded, blue-eyed imp was as dead as the scary lady on Avenue B. He liked to whisper naughty suggestions into the ears of my students then laugh and laugh at the chaos he caused.

When I was four, I stopped talking about the people no one saw but me. However, I never stopped seeing them. Most children do—right around the time they start to speak—but not all of them. Some see and hear spirits for a little while longer. These were the ones Stafford haunted.

I’d tried to discover how long the child had been walking through the walls of my school, but, predictably, no adult had ever seen him but me. The previous kindergarten teacher only stared at me blankly when I asked if any of her students had spoken of an invisible friend. Which made me think Stafford was newly dead. Except there was no record of a child of that name dying in New Bergin or anywhere close enough to warrant his presence.

Regardless of how devious my queries or how long I cajoled, he never gave me any information on himself whatsoever. No matter what I said, Stafford would not cross over. He liked causing trouble too much.

Today was no different. The kids behaved as if someone had slipped them chocolate-covered circus peanuts for breakfast. I felt like I was taming lions. When the last bell rang, I ushered them out, hoping for better tomorrows; then I locked my classroom door and had a conversation with Stafford.