Living With the Dead Read online

  Since moving to Los Angeles, though, Finn had stopped attending church. He didn't much see the point. Where he came from, the church was the heart of the community. Here, if there was a community, he hadn't found it. Not one he fit into, anyway.

  And, Finn had to admit, his faith wasn't what it used to be - he'd seen too much here, spent too many nights sitting up alone wondering what he was doing so far from home, whether it was making any difference, why he'd given himself over to this empty life if he wasn't sure it did make a difference...

  And when he had been questioning that faith, Damon showed up. The first ghost who'd ever come back, let alone stuck around. And he needed Finn's help. Maybe it was coincidence, but Finn couldn't bring himself to tell Damon to get lost. And when he had a way to test him - demand to know the name of his wife's friend - he couldn't bring himself to do that either. Trust didn't come from forcing a man's hand. Damon had to earn it and, if he didn't, Finn had to let him go.

  Two hours later, Finn was outside Peltier's apartment door. The super was supposed to follow him up, but had been waylaid by a tenant.

  "What are you hoping to find?" Damon kept his voice neutral, but Finn could tell it was a struggle. He wanted to tell Finn he was wasting his time, that he should be looking for real suspects.

  "I need to find her," Finn said. "That's the easiest way to clear her - "

  A door clicked down the hall. A woman stepped out. Noticing Finn, she glanced behind him, as if trying to see who he'd been talking to. Finn returned his cell phone to his pocket. She nodded and smiled as she passed.

  "Smart move," Damon said. "You're getting better at this."

  The elevator doors opened and off stepped the super, with an irate tenant in tow.

  "That drain isn't going to fix itself," the bearded man bellowed.

  "I will fix it. But first I need to let this policeman into an apartment."

  The tenant peered at Finn, nose wrinkling as if he'd caught a whiff of sulfur water. He wheeled on the super, who was unlocking the door. "You'd better not be letting anyone into our apartments without a warrant - "

  Finn held up the warrant. The man snatched it.

  "An investigation into the death of that Portia Kane?" he said, voice rising. "She was murdered, wasn't she?" He jabbed a bony finger at the super. "If there's been a murder, you'd damned well better tell us."

  Finn plucked the warrant from his fingers, pushed open the door and sidestepped through. The super's hand shot up, telling Finn to wait.

  "I know my way around." Finn pushed past the super's outstretched hand. "You take care of this."

  He slid in before the super could stop him. Damon walked to the win dow and looked out. Finn started to search. The voices in the hall faded, presumably as the super gave in and went to check the drain.

  "I don't know where she is," Damon said after a minute, still looking out the window. "I know that's what you're wondering and I wish I did know, because you're right. She needs to come forward and get this cleared up."

  Finn nodded and resumed searching. When he went into the bedroom, he knew something had changed. The closet door was open - it had been closed when he'd been here - every door and drawer shut, bed made, not an item out of place. He checked it out, but couldn't see anything.

  He returned to the living room and found Damon still standing at the window.

  Finn cleared his throat. "This morning you were going to tell me your story. How you came back."

  "I never left." Damon turned around. "After I died, I was standing on the road, looking down at my body, thinking 'Ah, shit, so much for being home in an hour.' That's what you think, you know. Not 'Holy crap, my life is over.' Anyway, there I am, thinking of her, and then there's this..."

  "Light?"

  "Sorry. No light. Just a... pull. Like when you're deep asleep on a Monday morning and the alarm goes off and you can just barely hear it. I guess I wasn't ready. So I hit the cosmic snooze button."

  "So that's it? You want to stay, you stay?"

  "It's a little more complicated. I dug in my heels, though. I needed to stay a little while, make sure Bobby was okay."

  "Bobby?"

  "Robyn. That's what I called her, because - " He shook his head. "Anyway, I stayed to make sure she was okay, only she wasn't."

  Damon was quiet a moment before continuing. "The thing about Robyn? She's always in control. Day before our wedding, the bakery calls to say they're overbooked. So what's she do? First she demands a refund and negotiates a free cake for my parents' thirtieth anniversary. Then she calmly reschedules her manicure so she'll have time to bake our wedding cake." His smile faded as fast as it came. "Point is, whatever you throw at her, she can handle it. But this? This was too much. Too sudden. Too senseless. When she couldn't make sense of it, she just... shut down."

  "So you've been following her. What did you see that night? At Bane?"

  "I haven't seen Bobby since she got to L.A. It sounded like a great plan, sticking around, making sure she was okay, but it didn't take long to see some serious flaws in the logic. What if she's not okay? What the hell can I do about it? I can't talk to her, can't touch her. I can only watch her suffer."

  He addressed the window again. "Whatever grand power let me stay also ran out of patience. When Bobby came to L.A., I lost her. Eventually I found out she'd taken a job with Portia Kane and, when I got over the shock of that, I figured finding Bobby would be simple - Portia Kane isn't exactly a recluse. But whenever I get close to her, something blocks me. If they can't make me cross over, they're going to take away my reason for staying."

  "That doesn't seem to be working out too well."

  A flash of white teeth. "Yeah, I'm stubborn. I know Bobby will get better; I just need to see it. So I - "

  The super hurried in, breathing hard. "So sorry. He is always complaining. Not like Miz Peltier."

  "I think I'm done here. Just one question. The bedroom closet door. It wasn't open when I came through here last night."

  "Oh, yes, that was the girl. Miz Kane's cousin."

  "Cousin?"

  The super explained that Portia Kane's cousin had come by earlier to pick up a shirt Peltier had dry-cleaned for Kane.

  "She talked to the other officers. They said it was okay."

  The officers hadn't mentioned it to Finn when he'd stopped by their car. An oversight? He doubted it.

  "So what did she take?"

  "A blouse. A very nice blouse."

  "From this closet?"

  The super nodded.

  "Was it in a wrapper from the cleaners?"

  "No. Miz Peltier must have taken it off."

  Finn could believe Portia Kane would make her PR rep pick up her dry cleaning. And he could believe Kane's family would send someone to retrieve it after her death, worried their daughter's employee might "forget" to return a valuable item. But for Peltier to put it into her closet with her own clothing after removing the dry-cleaning wrapper?

  Finn took out his notebook. "Could I get a description of Ms. Kane's cousin?"

  The super looked alarmed. "She asked the officers. They said it was okay. And she was a very nice girl - "

  "I'm sure she was and I'm sure she did speak to them. But I need to make a record of it, and you probably got a better look at her than they did."

  He jotted down the information. Why would anyone lie to get into Peltier's apartment? If Peltier was holed up with a friend, Finn could imagine that friend sneaking in to get her some clothing. But a single shirt? Or was it something about the shirt? He tried to recall what witnesses said Peltier had been wearing that night. A dress, the one found at Judd Archer's.

  He told the super he'd check with the officers and get their details, and ask them not to let anyone else in without an escort. The super got the message: don't open this apartment door again.

  Finn's "Persons Of Interest" list for the Portia Kane case was starting to look like a roster of ghosts. Phantoms, at least.

  As he sus
pected, no young woman had asked the stakeout officers for access, so he had one more nameless description to add to his list, along with Peltier's Indo American friend, her boyfriend and the red-haired teenage boy. Not to mention the most elusive ghost of all - Peltier herself.

  Next the team met for another update so Finn could report to brass. When the meeting finished, Finn gathered his papers and headed for the coffee room. It was more of a closet than a room, barely big enough for the tiny table with the coffeemaker. Someone had made good use of the space, though, covering the walls in the safety posters the department was required to post.

  He laid the pages on the table, facedown, and reached for a Styrofoam cup. Beside the stack, the ancient drip machine hissed. The quarter-filled pot was so stained it looked as if they'd misread the "auto-stop" feature as "auto-clean," and hadn't so much as rinsed it since buying it.

  Finn lifted the pot and swirled the contents.

  "Please tell me you aren't going to drink that," Damon said.

  Finn sniffed the opening, judging the degree of burning by both the smell and the quantity of floating flakes. He filled his cup halfway.

  "Oh, man. Please. There's got to be a coffee shop around."

  "Block away. Two bucks a cup." He added creamer. Sniffed. Added more. "Got two hits for Peltier's friend."

  Damon stopped eyeing the coffee cup and went very still.

  "The one she was at Bane with Thursday night," Finn continued. "I called a buddy at the Times. He came up with two journalists matching the description." Finn picked up his pages and showed the top one to Damon. "One's a photojournalist with the Times. The other's a copyeditor at La Opinion."

  Finn waited. It took almost a minute.

  "Neither of those is the woman you're looking for," Damon said finally. "Her name is Hope Adams. She's a reporter with True News."

  * * *

  ROBYN

  Like any couple, Damon and Robyn each had interests the other hadn't shared. Damon loved detective shows; Robyn couldn't see the attraction, but had watched them with him anyway. If someone had asked her whether she'd learned anything from them, she would have laughed and said she barely paid any attention, usually using the time to mentally plan her week's schedule. In the last couple of days, though, she discovered that even if she hadn't been actively watching, obviously she'd learned something.

  Today's lesson? Stalking 101.

  For three blocks she'd been following the man who'd stopped at her motel door and she'd come to a matching number of conclusions.

  One, he wasn't red haired. What she'd seen through the distorted image in the peephole had been a dark red baseball cap.

  Two, he wasn't from around here. The fact that he'd walked four blocks in car-obsessed L.A. suggested it. His constant stopping and looking around, as if getting his bearings, confirmed it.

  Three, if he was a private investigator, he wasn't very good at his job. Despite all his looking around, he never once glanced backward to see whether anyone was following him. He just strolled along, confident and unhurried.

  Robyn did look over her shoulder. Repeatedly. She could be following the guy who'd killed Judd and planned to do the same to her. Shut her up permanently.

  She bit back a giggle. There was a classic bad movie line. As silly as it sounded, though, to dismiss the idea would be sillier still. She'd seen two people die and even if common sense told her this was more likely a private investigator than an assassin, she wasn't taking any chances.

  So she wasn't doing anything as stupid as following this guy down an alley. But there weren't any alleys here. The motel was in some part of L.A.'s endless suburban sprawl. Which part, she didn't know, and blasted herself for not paying better attention yesterday when Karl had driven her in. Around here, though, it was difficult to be on the edge of anything for long and, as Karl had said, it had taken only a short walk before she found herself in a warren of strip malls, three-story walkups and offices. A neighborhood in serious need of a planner.

  As a place to follow someone, though, it was perfect. She could dart from hiding place to hiding place, keeping her target in sight while never leaving populated areas. It got even easier when the young man bought himself a snack at an ice cream stand and settled in at one of the umbrella tables out front.

  He didn't seem to be in any rush to report that he'd found her. She hadn't even seen him pull out a cell phone. Did that mean he wasn't working for anyone else? Or that he wasn't looking for her at all? Maybe he'd been meeting someone at the motel, arrived early and headed out to pass the time.

  That was one problem with having watched all those mysteries: she saw too many possibilities. One thing was for certain. The guy looked like he'd be here awhile, having bought a massive banana split and soda. That meant, as much fun as she was having playing detective, it was time to notify Hope and Karl.

  As she headed for a pay phone across the lot, she passed a convenience store advertising prepaid cells. Robyn fingered the emergency money Hope had brought from her apartment. Over two hundred. Should she pick up one of those for later? A cheap, untraceable phone?

  Untraceable phone? For what? Her new career as a PI?

  But as she continued on, watching her target through dark sunglasses, safely disguised in her oversized sweats and baseball cap, she couldn't deny her pulse was pounding, and that her quickening breath didn't come from walking faster.

  Maybe it was exhilaration. Maybe it was plain old fear. But she felt something, and that was more than she'd done in months. She imagined what Damon would say.

  See, Bobby, that's all you needed - to become a fugitive, a murder suspect and a possible assassination target.

  A snorted laugh made an elderly woman warily glance her way.

  Robyn reached the phone, put in her money, dialed the number and pulled the cord as far as it would reach, so she could keep an eye on her target without looking too suspicious.

  Robyn Peltier, supersleuth. All she needed was the decoder ring.

  Hope's phone rang twice before she answered with a tentative hello.

  "It's Robyn."

  A relieved laugh. "Thank God. I saw a pay phone number and thought the local cranks with alien abduction stories had tracked me down already. It usually takes them - " She stopped. "Why are you calling from a pay phone? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. Well, nothing I can't handle." Oh yeah, one hour on the job and she was bragging already. "There was a guy hanging around our motel room - "

  "What?" The alarm in Hope's voice rose. "Did he knock? Try to break in?"

  "No, no, he just skulked around." Skulked? She was picking up a new vocabulary, too. "At first I thought it might be the kid you saw last night." Smooth. She thought it was a harmless kid, no need to mention Judd's killer... "So I wanted to see where he went."

  "You followed him?"

  "Carefully."

  Ooh, you sound ticked off, Bobby. How dare she question your skulking competence.

  She shushed Damon's voice and hurried on assuring Hope that she'd been very careful, staying in public, populated areas.

  "Don't worry," she said. "I remember my stranger danger classes." There was a lightness in her voice she hadn't felt in a long time.

  As if surprised by Robyn's tone, Hope gave a soft laugh. "Okay, then. Remember, though, just because he hasn't given any sign that he knows you're following him doesn't mean he doesn't."

  "I doubt this guy is that good. He keeps looking around, but hasn't so much as glanced over his shoulder."

  A pause. "Not once?"

  "Never. I bet it hasn't even occurred to him that I could be following. A total amateur. But I promise if he decides to stroll into any abandoned warehouses, I won't follow."

  Another small laugh, but this one tight. "This guy, can you describe him?"

  "Well, let me tell you, he looks like one dangerous dude." Had she really said dude? "He's maybe five nine, early twenties, skinny, though he's not going to stay that way if he keeps scarfing d
own mega banana splits."

  "What?"

  "Banana split. That's what he's eating right now. A totally dangerous guy. He broke off pacing outside my door to go grab some ice cream."

  A moment of silence. "Did you notice whether he drove to the motel?"

  "I didn't see him until he got to the door. But I doubt it. He just walked four blocks for this ice cream. Maybe we have a PI who lost his driver's license."

  Hope didn't answer. Karl said something in the background, too low for Robyn to hear.

  "I know," Hope said, voice distant, as if she'd pulled the phone from her mouth. She came back to Robyn. "Stay there, okay?"

  "That's what I planned. Like I said, no long walks into abandoned buildings."

  "No, seriously. Stay right where you are. If he leaves, abandoned building or not, don't follow him. Don't go back to the motel. Stay put. Do you have an address?"

  She gave Hope the name of the nearest store and the street number.

  "We'll find it. Now, stay right there."

  "In this phone booth?" Robyn tried to sound light, but could hear the edge in her voice.

  "No, find..."

  A murmur from Karl.

  "Are you sure?" Hope's voice was muffled, as if covering the receiver. Karl said something else. Then Hope returned. "Karl says if you're comfortable watching him, keep doing that. Just don't - "

  "Follow him anywhere. Got it."

  "We'll be there in fifteen minutes."

  * * *

  ROBYN

  Maybe it was the ice-water splash of Hope's concern, making Robyn feel foolish for her PI fantasies, but the stakeout quickly lost its appeal. She watched the young man eat and drink and eat and drink...

  Every now and then he'd break the routine to lift his head, not looking around, just tilting his face up, as if checking the weather. Then, while he was scraping the bottom of the banana boat, he stopped, spoon raised. He scanned one way, then the other, chin lifted. It looked like he was... sniffing. As if he'd picked up a strange smell and was trying to locate the source.