The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (22 page)

I really thought I was going to die.

I barely registered the screaming coming from the other side of that pane of glass. But the initial shock wore off and I got used to the fact I was looking into the barrel of a handgun, and I made sense of the woman’s voice yelling at me.

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?”

Behind the gun I could barely see her. I caught a glimpse of the blond hair and one fearful blue eye. That was it, though.

I had to force myself to breath. “I’m Eddie McCloskey. I left you a couple messages. I spoke to Veronica earlier.”

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

“Federal agents!” Manetti was at my side, holding her badge out. “Put the gun down so we can talk.”

“WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?”

The gun was still aimed squarely at my forehead. I got an itch where I imagined it was sighted, between my eyes and a couple inches north. I wanted to jump out of the way but with that sixth sense we sometimes have, I got a feeling I was safer if I
didn’t
jump out of the way.

Steady. Steady.

“Agent Agnes Manetti and Eddie McCloskey. We spoke to your roommate, Veronica Carmichael, twenty minutes ago. Please put the gun down so we can talk.”

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

I found my voice. “Call Veronica. She’ll tell you why we’re here. Now we’re going to move away from the door.”

Mia was a long time answering. “DON’T MOVE! I KNOW HOW TO USE THIS!”

We didn’t move. I kept my hands out in front of me so Mia could see them. Manetti, on the other hand, kept her hand low, on her hip so she could draw if it came to it.

A few minutes later, we heard the thump of the helicopter. Probably looking for somewhere to land. I felt better now that the tack unit was here. Finally, the front door opened and a cute blond appeared.

“Come in.”

***

We told her why we were there and what we needed. She assured us she was the only person in the house, at least as far as she knew. She’d been out all day, trying to figure things out. It was easy to tell how broken up she was about her tiff with Veronica. She mentioned five times in thirty seconds how much she wanted to make this up to her.

Manetti assured her we could talk this through later, for now we had to clear the house and make sure nobody was lurking. This naturally freaked Mia out. We went room-to-room through the ground floor in twenty seconds then set our sights on the second floor.

Manetti stopped in front of the stairs and looked back at me. “You’re not armed. You can stay down here.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I don’t know where this courage comes from. It’s probably stupidity. If I had stopped to think about the situation, I might have listened to her.

But instead I stuck to her six as we rushed upstairs. It was a small house. Once we were up the stairs, we could basically see all three rooms. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. The bathroom was closest, Manetti took care of that while I hung back in the tiny hallway. I fully expected Tyler to jump out at us any second, like some slasher flick. My pulse pumped in my ear.

Manetti came out of the bathroom and we pushed into the nearest bedroom. This must have been Veronica’s. She’d described it perfectly: piles and piles of clothes, closet doors that were open perpetually, an easel with sketches. We checked the closet all the same and under the bed. There was so much crap in there, though, that nobody could have hidden.

That left Mia’s room.

As quietly as possible, we stepped back into the hallway. A couple suitcases were up against the wall. Mia must have been packing. Of course the door was shut. Manetti took two big steps to get in front of it and I stayed right behind her.

She turned her head to whisper. “I’ll go right, you go left.”

I nodded.

We got into position, literally no space between the door and her and between her and me. She paused for two seconds, probably to listen, and then she burst into the room.

“Federal agents!”

***

There was nobody in there.

“What the hell…” Manetti said.

Mia’s stuff was back in the room. Piles and piles of clothes, stuffed animals, rolled up posters. It looked very different from the bare room Veronica had described on the phone. We checked the closet and under the bed to be sure, but there was nobody in there.

Back downstairs, Mia was looking at us strangely. “I told you nobody was here.”

“Veronica said you were moving out,” I said. I was getting a hollow feeling in my chest as the truth fully hit me.

This
wasn’t
the house we were looking for.

“I was,” Mia said, a bit defensively. “But I changed my mind. She’s my best friend and I can’t throw that away. A few years ago, I helped her out when she made a bad mistake, I’m hoping she can do the same for me. We can’t let that asshole come between us.”

Manetti asked her more questions but I didn’t really pay attention. I wandered through the house in vain, hoping to find something. Anything. But I
knew.
This wasn’t the house. Tyler could come back for them later, maybe even give them some trouble, but that wasn’t what Alison had dreamed about.

Manetti thanked Mia and told her to call the police if Tyler came back uninvited. Mia assured us she would. “I’m done with that asshole…I don’t know why I…I’m done with him.”

We stepped onto the front porch. The tack unit was waiting outside. I just shook my head at them. The driver was still parked in front of the house. I headed for the car, the rain hammering me, and slid into the backseat.

Back to the drawing board, and now we had even less time. That bad feeling hit me. Somehow I knew the rape was going to happen this afternoon, or tonight. I just knew it.

Manetti got back in the car. “We can cross her off the list.”

“Yeah.” I shook my head. “I feel like we’re chasing a bunch of dead-ends. There’s something we aren’t thinking of.”

She nodded. “I know.”

We sat in silence while the driver waited for his instructions. Then Manetti’s phone rang.

She brought it up to her ear.

“Manetti.”

As she listened the expression on her face changed from neutral to incredulous. Her eyebrows knitted together and looked at me and in that despairing look, I knew what had happened.

We were too late.

We arrived at the crime scene an hour later. Two cruisers and an unmarked were parked outside of the house. The rain hadn’t let up. In fact, it had only gotten worse. The wind was howling now. That storm was coming and it felt like it was going to land right on top of us.

Manetti badged the officer standing in the doorway.

“You’re Manetti?”

She nodded.

We stayed put in the foyer while he went somewhere else. I could hear a woman talking in another room, her voice flat like what she described had happened to somebody else. The uniformed cop came back with a detective in a suit and overcoat. He nodded at us.

“I’m Villanueva,” he said. “Come with me.”

We followed him upstairs. Villanueva had dark skin and a mustache that actually looked good. When we were far enough away from the staircase, he stopped and spoke in a hushed tone.

“It happened early this morning,” he said. “The guy stayed, had his way with her for awhile. He took off before sunup. She was in shock, didn’t call it in for a couple hours. We got the call late this morning. My captain was looped in to your thing and put two and two together.”

I was numb. “Did she know the guy?”

The cop shook his head no. “Do you want to see the bedroom?”

“Yes,” Manetti said.

But Villanueva didn’t budge. “Explain to me how you got a tip on this.”

I let Manetti field that one. “We can’t. All I can tell you is we received pictures of the bedroom yesterday and we’ve been trying to identify it ever since.”

He didn’t like that answer. “Maybe if you guys had worked with us more closely—”

“Actually, we sent all local LE the images. We turned over everything we had as soon as we got it for you guys to run it down.”

Villaneuva looked at her like he didn’t believe her. “All you got were images?”

Manetti nodded. “Like I said.”

He shook his head. “How?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

For a moment they stared at each other, then the cop turned to let us pass. “Last door on the right.”

***

It was the bedroom we’d been looking for. Bare. Nothing on the walls. Just a bed, night stand, and bureau. The floor was spotless, actually looked like it had been vacuumed recently.

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah,” Manetti said.

“So what do we know about Melanie Crawford?” I asked.

Manetti shook her head. “Not much. She’s thirty-three, hasn’t worked anywhere more than six months since she was eighteen, was married, is divorced, that’s how she ended up in this house, and has no obvious connection to Alison.”

I studied the room. The bed, the night stand, the bureau…it was all right there in front of me. But still, I took out the tablet to compare it to the image from the dream. I pulled up the video and tapped the screen and stood from about where I thought the vantage point in the dream had been.

The video began to play. I compared it to the room in front of me and froze.

“The night stand is on the wrong side,” I said.

“What?” Manetti said.

“Look.”

I held out the tablet for her to see.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Simplest answer is she just dreamed it wrong.”

“She dreamed it wrong, but only one time.”

“What?”

I nodded as I pulled up Alison’s dream of reading email and opening one of the attachments. In that image the room was arranged correctly.

Manetti had been watching too. “What does that mean?”

I had no idea.

The detective poked his head into the room. “Melanie is leaving in a few. If you have questions for her, now is the time. But make it fast. She’s been through the ringer.”

Manetti crossed the room. “Rape kit?”

He nodded. “No DNA from the perp. He didn’t kiss her and he used a rubber.”

“The rape kit backed up her story?” Manetti said.

“You have reason to think otherwise?”

She shook her head no. “Old habits die hard. One of the first things I learned was to compare the evidence to the witness statements and see what didn’t line up.”

Villanueva gave her a begrudging nod. “She was roughed up.”

“But?”

“But nothing.” The cop put his arms akimbo. “Let’s go.”

***

They introduced us to Melanie Crawford. Manetti talked. I listened and paid close attention to Melanie’s answers and body language.

She couldn’t sit still. While she told her story, eyes downcast like she was ashamed of herself, her leg bounced and her hands fidgeted. She was so jumpy, she looked like she’d just quit smoking.

“No, I didn’t recognize him,” Melanie said. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

Melanie Crawford was tall and blonde and pretty. She had just turned thirty. I’d never gone to college, but to me she looked like that prototypical blonde I imagined populated campuses across the country. She wore threadbare, formless jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, both garments looked like they’d been trapped at the bottom of her closet for a decade. An even older fleece jacket over the sweatshirt. The outfit served one purpose: to hide her body. She sat on the edge of the sofa, one leg folded over the other, hugging herself.

“Do you know a teenaged girl named Alison Smith?” Manetti said.

Melanie stopped bouncing her leg and fidgeting her hands. “Who?”

“Alison Smith.” Manetti spelled the last name for her. “She’s fourteen years old.”

Melanie shook her head. “Don’t know her. Why are you asking?”

“How about her parents, Ted and Karen, same last name?”

“Ted and Karen Smith.” Melanie thought about it. “No, don’t know them.”

“You’re sure.”

Villanueva cut in, “She already answered.”

Manetti had been at it for ten minutes. Behind Melanie, Detective Villanueva stopped pacing and folded his arms. The look he gave Manetti was unmistakable: no more questions. She turned to me and I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask the poor woman.

“Thank you for your time, Melanie,” Manetti said.

“Why did you press the detective?” I asked.

“To see if he was doing his job.”

“Was he?”

“Probably.” Manetti looked out the window. Five o’clock and it was dark outside. For rush hour, there weren’t too many cars on the roads because the weather was getting really bad now. We passed a row of houses that had lost power.

“Probably?”

Manetti was still looking out the window. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Eddie, but men aren’t the best investigators when it comes to sexual assault.”

“How so?”

“Most people think men try to redirect blame at the woman, but the opposite is true just as often. The overprotective instinct kicks in and the man ends up believing everything the woman tells him.”

“You think she was lying?”

Manetti looked back at me. “No. But I was looking for an angle we could use.”

I nodded. “We have to talk to Alison.”

“I believed Melanie. She doesn’t know them.”

“Yeah, me too. But maybe Alison knows
her
somehow. Or her parents.”

“Eddie, I hate to say this, but the ship has sailed. We can’t stop the assault.”

“If Alison is connected to Melanie or, shit, to the rapist, then we can help the cops solve the case.”

“It’s worth a shot.”

She retreated back into herself while outside the storm continued to gather. The wind rocked the car, almost pushing us into the adjacent lane. The driver fought it and kept his foot on the gas. As strong as the storm already was, it was only going to get worse. We passed a gas station where there were at least ten vehicles waiting to fill up, and then a strip mall with a grocery store, the entrance to the parking lot choked and overflowing into the street.

I kept going back and trying to understand the import of the pattern and the divergence from it. Almost all of Alison’s dreams were exclusively in color, except two: the rape and the sequence where Manetti and I stood off in the middle of a storm.

What the hell did that mean?

I couldn’t help but think if I figured
that
out, then the rest of the puzzle would easily come together.

I was getting a headache thinking about this and that and what if and telling myself the entire time I wouldn’t shoot Manetti.
Couldn’t
shoot Manetti. I had no reason to. The same went for her. There was nothing hanging over us in the current investigation that would drive us to murder each other, and there was nothing out of the past slowly poisoning our dynamic. Sure, we had kissed in that abandoned skating rink but there had been nothing behind it. I was pretty certain I was going to die, and die horribly, that night and fairly sure she was too. I saw no harm in a kiss, one last kiss, one final embrace with the fairer sex as I prepared to face certain death. That we had both come out of that ordeal in Oregon was close to being a miracle. But after, there had been nothing between us. No spark, no lingering look, no passing thought that we could make something work.

At least I’d thought so.

Had there been something for her? Was she secretly harboring resentment that I’d taken a Pasadena on her and had she grown jealousy toward Sumiko from afar? Did she feel spited enough to overcome that unflappable professionalism I’d seen in Oregon and here and let her emotions rule her? I couldn’t think of any other reason why she would want to harm me.

Nope. It just didn’t make sense.

Manetti didn’t have feelings for me. I had pretty good radar for that sort of thing. She just didn’t. There was no vibe, no awkward moments between us hailing from sudden silences. No strange gaps in conversation, no discordant looks, nothing like that at all…

I kept telling myself the dream was just a dream. Alison had seen us together and she’d been dreaming about this storm, and she wasn’t in the best frame of mind right now, with death quickly catching up to her. Her worldview was pessimistic, maybe nihilistic, and that mindset surely influenced her dreams. She could see nothing good coming for her, and thus nothing good coming for anybody else. There was only death and violence and disappointment, heartache and resentment and a sense of meaninglessness for her.

The storm was just a familiar setting for her. She’d populated that with two people she didn’t much care for, a couple of people who had approached her as if she didn’t have the sight.

This last thought flared and lit up my mind. I felt like there was something in there…

But I couldn’t get to it.

We were about ten minutes from the research facility. Manetti got on her phone to grease the skids with Dr. Zane. He had made it pretty clear we weren’t welcome there in light of Alison’s dream of me killing Manetti, and we were about to ignore his wishes. We had to talk to Alison. Had to.

While Manetti was on the phone, I figured it was a good time for me to make a call. I didn’t know when I’d get a chance tonight to call Sumiko.

“Hey, Eddie.”

“Hey there.” I smiled at the sound of her voice, but couldn’t help thinking about our argument from earlier. “You sound tired.”

“I should be used to being tired by now.”

“I don’t think that’s something anybody can get used to.”

She said nothing to that. My mind went blank. I wanted to address our argument from earlier but at the same time just wanted to have a normal conversation with her.

Ten seconds passed before either of us spoke. I blinked first.

“Okay, what’s up?”

She sighed. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Me too.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being in danger.”

“Now you know what it feels like.” I tried to put some humor into my voice but the words came out flat. “You’re a cop, though, so I’m going to have to get used to it.”

“I don’t think that’s something anybody can get used to,” she said, repeating my words.

“I’m willing to try and I’ll be okay if I fail at it.”

“Yeah.”

A heavy, somber note filled her usual warm voice. It was unlike her.

“Oh boy,” I said, trying to keep the mood light. The conversation was drifting into a bad place. The last time I’d gotten a vibe like this had been ten years ago. Only one woman had ever broken up with me. Moira. These days she’s married to my best friend, Stan. Right now all the same alarms were going off in my head.

“I’ll never have a normal life,” Sumiko said. “As long as I’m a cop.”

“And you thought I had a normal life?” I asked. “Sumiko, we met on a murder investigation because a ghost was killing people.”

She sighed again. “I know. I know, Eddie.”

Another silence that stretched…and stretched. In my mind I scrambled for the right thing to say, but I couldn’t figure out what that was. And then that horrible feeling crystallized in my mind.

Was she about to call the engagement off?

Sumiko’s voice was very soft. “Eddie, I just never thought I’d have to worry about my husband—”

“The way he would have to worry about you?”

“Eddie…”

“How does that work?” My anger was rising. She was having doubts because I didn’t lead a normal life, even though she spent her time investigating murders, sexual assaults, and armed robbery? “It’s okay if I lose sleep over your job, but it’s not okay if—”

“I know it doesn’t make sense!” she snapped. “But I thought I could be honest with you.”

I took a deep breath. It didn’t help. “Don’t turn this around into something it’s not. You know you can tell me anything. That doesn’t mean I can’t be angry.”

“You’re angry that I hate worrying?”

This was only going to get worse. I was acutely aware of Manetti sitting next to me. She’d finished her conversation with Dr. Zane and so now all her ears had by way of entertainment was Sumiko and me yelling at each other.

But I was too fired up to care.

“Of course I’m not angry because you’re worried—”

She cut me off. “Eddie, I need time to think.”

How the hell had we gotten to this point? I felt helpless and that know-it-all part of me said,
See? This is why you don’t get involved in anything serious. You’re meant to be alone, Eddie. You know that. You’ve always known that.

“Okay, Sumiko.”

“You just left at the drop of a hat, you know?”

“This is what I do.”

“I know you’re a ghost hunter. I
like
that about you. But this is different. You got a call and an hour later you were in deep, working with the feds on something that requires security clearance.”

“Sumiko—”

“And now you’re just
gone.
I have no idea when you’ll be done, when you’re coming home, when I’ll see you again.”

“You should know better than anybody that emergencies don’t stop for us to call timeout.”

“I have to go, Eddie.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“Be careful. Please.”

“Sumiko.”

“Goodbye.”