A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder (19 page)

Gilley kept running and screaming, and at last he noticed the door too. He didn't stop; he ran right to it and tried the handle, but it wouldn't budge. He proceeded to pound his fists on the door and tried again and again to turn the handle, but it appeared to be locked. In front of me, Olivera faltered again, and I knew she was considering doubling back and taking
her chances. One glance over her shoulder, however, seemed to shelve that idea. She shrieked, faced forward, and ran straight for Gilley.

I was so fatigued and out of breath that I thought I might pass out. I once fainted on an eighteen-mile run. It'd been a very hot day, and I hadn't taken along nearly enough water. I have no memory of passing out, only waking up in the grass as another female runner attempted to come to my aid. The light-headed woozy feeling I did remember right before losing consciousness was what was happening to me at that moment—just ten yards away from the door. Which wouldn't open. Which Gilley kept pounding on.

With what was left of my ability to think, I sent up a prayer.
Please,
I said in my mind, which, trust me, in that kind of situation is pretty much all you need. With five yards to go the door handled turned and Gilley heaved the door open. He darted inside with Olivera right on his heels. I strained with everything I had and reached the door a second later, careening through it just as Olivera yanked it closed.

As I crashed into Gilley, collapsing into his arms, I heard the click of the dead bolt, followed by a terrible crash that shook the entire room. The demon had hit the door. Hard.

I sucked in as much air as I could, gulping it down in great heaves. Gilley was panting almost as hard, but he was trembling from head to toe too. Other than the sound of our labored breathing, the room was deathly quiet. And then a light came on, and we all
turned to see that a Tiffany lamp, perched on a desk, had magically illuminated the room.

I noted that we were in someone's private office, tastefully decorated with art on the wall, a Turkish rug on the floor, a mahogany desk, and a comfortable leather chair with matching footstool in one corner.

On the desk was a laptop. My gaze was drawn next to my two companions. Gilley had two large welts on his forehead but seemed relatively okay, and Olivera looked frightened beyond reason, but at least she was blinking and looking around. I hoped that we could all collect our wits and our breath without further incident, but that hope was short-lived when the silence was shattered by a tremendous slap at the top of the door and then what I can only describe as a terrible metallic raking sound.

It was the most grating, terrifying noise you can imagine. Think of a velociraptor scraping its talons down the face of a chalkboard and you've got some idea of what it sounded like, and this was taking place mere feet from us on the other side of the door, starting from the top and slowly gouging its way down the length of the door. We all huddled together and cringed while we waited for it to be over, but as soon as the raking reached the bottom of the door, another slap at the top started and the slow slide of talons over steel began again.

Pushing away from Gilley, I staggered to my feet and stumbled forward to the door. Placing my hand on it, I felt the cool touch of metal along with the
vibrations from the talons on the other side. “M.J.!” Gilley said hoarsely. “Get away from there!”

Ignoring him, I dug into my messenger bag and pulled out a spike, which I slammed against the door right at the center of what I hoped was the demon's paw. The beast screeched and the grating sound stopped abruptly. I then reached for another spike and slammed that against the door, then another and another, until I was all out of spikes. I turned and looked at Gilley, and he came forward tentatively to hand me all his spikes too. I added them to the rest, effectively creating a solid barrier against the demon.

As the last spike went on the door, Olivera said in a hushed whisper, “Can it come through the walls?”

Gil and I looked at each other. He shrugged and I had to admit I really didn't know either. “Technically, it probably could,” I said. “But the walls look like they're concrete block, so it'd be tough for the demon to bring it's full form through that kind of density. And once it started to do that, we'd be able to stab the hell out of it with a spike.”

“What does that even mean?” she asked. I noticed that she'd scooted to the farthest corner in the room, well away from the door.

It was Gilley who answered her. “The demon took on as close to a physical form as it could,” he explained. “That requires energy. A lot of energy. It'd take significantly more energy for it to move through a wall, and after giving us chase and getting zapped by our magnets, no way does it have enough juice left to push its way through concrete block quickly. It'd have to
squeeze through slowly, and we'd be able to attack it from this side with all of our spikes.”

I had to hand it to him; he sounded very sure of his conclusion.

“So we're safe in here?” Olivera asked.

“We are,” I told her. I wasn't a hundred percent sure, but I didn't see the sense of worrying her more than she already was.

As it happened, for the next several minutes, we heard nothing from the demon, and not long after that a dim light lit up under the door. I tried the switch next to the door and the overhead lights blazed on. I then looked at my companions in the stark white light and knew that I looked just as freaked-out, exhausted, and shaken as they did. Olivera was the first to speak. “What . . .
the
fuck
was
that
?”

“Oruç's demon,” I said simply. “And now you know, Detective,
exactly
why we have to get that dagger back.”

Olivera stared wide-eyed at me. I knew that her brain was currently attempting to marry the reality she'd always known with the one that'd taken place tonight, and she had to be struggling under the weight of that.

Gilley had a hand to his forehead, as if he had a terrible headache, and he also appeared quite shaken. “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

“No,” he said, his lip quivering. “
Why
did you have to bring me here?”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Honey, I'm so sorry. I really needed you, and I had no idea that demon would show up.”

“It came after us, M.J.!” Gil whined. “I mean, with the amount of magnets we had on, it should've gone in the other direction.”

“That's one powerful demon, Gil,” I reminded him.
“Which is why I've had that dagger locked up in my safe all these years.”

Gil's shoulders slumped with guilt. “I forgot how freaking strong it is,” he whispered. “I really thought that, with enough magnets placed around the dagger, there'd be no way it could get loose.”

“He wouldn't have if someone hadn't sabotaged the exhibit,” I reminded him. “But now the genie is out of the bottle, and we gotta do everything we can to put it back in. And I'm still going to need you on this case, honey. For this one, it's all hands on deck.”

Gil bit his lip and wiped his eyes, but he also nodded a little. “Got any Tylenol?” he asked.

“No. Sorry,” I said with a sigh, moving away from him a few feet to a box set against the wall. Taking a seat on the box, I motioned to the desk and said, “Maybe there's some in there?”

Gil shuffled over to the desk and pulled open a drawer. It stuck a little and he had to tug on it, then root around inside. “Aha!” he said triumphantly when he came up with a small bottle of Excedrin. “Who's got water?”

I shook my head and Olivera did too. That didn't stop Gil from popping back two pills. He gulped audibly and plopped down in the desk chair to sit back and sigh wearily. His gaze then traveled to the computer screen, which was emitting a faint glow against Gil's face. I figured the computer had come to life when he'd jostled the desk looking for some pain-relief medicine. As I watched Gil watching the screen, he suddenly jolted forward in his seat to exclaim, “M.J.!”

“What?”

“Come here!”

With fatigued effort I got up from my box and moved to stand next to him. “There's a camera feed coming into the computer,” Gil said, pointing to the screen. “It's from a camera at the back door.”

I looked at Olivera. “I thought you said that all the security cameras had their feeds sent to a laptop that was stolen.”

“They did and it was,” she said, coming over to the desk to look as well.

“All except this puppy,” Gil said, tapping the screen. “It's the only one that feeds to this laptop.”

“Why?” I asked.

Gil shrugged. “Don't know.” He was about to say something else, but at that moment the camera showed the door to the back opening, and the blurry image of a figure dressed in dark clothes emerged and darted quickly away out of the sight of the camera.

“Who was
that
?” I said.

Gil shook his head. Of course he didn't know.

“How the hell is someone able to exit the museum without tripping the alarm?” Olivera snapped as she leaned forward to peer at the screen. “We're the only ones who have the passcode!”

“Obviously not,” Gilley said. “And even if you guys did erase all the other access codes to put in your own, there's still a master code that could override all attempts to lock it out.”

“What're you talking about?” Olivera asked.

“Well, to every electronic lock, there is always a
master code. It's the one that would allow the person at the top access, even if the recently fired IT guy decided to take his revenge out by locking everyone out of the system. It was created specifically for those types of scenarios, actually.”

“Who would've had that kind of authority?” Olivera asked him.

Gil shrugged. “I can only think of one person, Detective, and he's dead.”

“Sullivan,” she said.

“Aren't we missing the point here?” I said, pointing to the screen again. “That was clearly the murderer and our thief escaping the museum. The only way for Oruç's demon to have shown up here tonight is if the dagger was close by.”

Olivera's eyes widened again. “Shit! You're right!” She raced to the door, intent on giving chase, and Gilley shot out from the chair and reached her just as she was starting to turn the dead bolt.

“Hold on!” he said, wrapping his hand firmly around her wrist. “You can't just go chasing after him!”

“Why not?” she and I said together.

Gilley turned to me and said, “Really, M.J.? I have to explain it to you too? That guy could've just left with Oruç's dagger. The one that houses the demon who tried to play tag with us tonight. You really wanna go chasing down a dark alley after him?”

Olivera stopped trying to pull her wrist free of Gilley's grip. “Good point,” she said.

I squinted again at the computer screen. There appeared to be a steady drizzle coming down. “It's
still raining out,” I said, as if that absolutely decided it. “Gil's right. It's way too dangerous to give chase at this point.”

“So what do we do?” Olivera asked. “I mean, if we can't catch or confront this guy, how the hell are we supposed to get you two the dagger back without encountering the demon?”

Gil let go of her hand and looked to me as if I should know. “We'll have to figure out who the hell the murderer is,” I said. “Then we'll need to approach him armed to the teeth, and in broad daylight. It can't be raining that day either.”

Gilley made a face. “Then we should make plans to go on vacation for a week, because it's supposed to rain for the next several days.”

“What?” I said. “No way!”

Gilley motioned me back over to the computer with him and pulled up a weather map with a giant system currently headed toward the East Coast, as well as another giant system just offshore in the Atlantic, which must've been where all the rain of the past two days had come from. “These two weather systems are supposed to collide sometime around three p.m. today, right over Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and New York City. It's then supposed to park itself there until next Tuesday.”

Tuesday was four days from now. “How did I miss this?” I muttered.

“It's been all over the news,” he said.

I sighed and went back to sit on my box. “Guess I
picked the wrong time to stop watching the news, huh?”

“So what do we do?” Olivera asked again. She seemed close to panic at the revelation that we'd have to wait for a sunny day to confront the person behind all this.

“We identify the killer,” I said again. “And once we do that, we figure out how to proceed.”

Gil pointed to the laptop. “This might help,” he said.

“How so?” I asked.

“It's Sullivan's computer.”

I looked around. “This was his office.”

“Yes,” Olivera confirmed.

“Can we take the computer?” Gil asked.

Olivera bit her lip. “I'd feel more comfortable handing that over to one of our techs,” she said. Gilley and I exchanged a look and I decided to be honest with her. “Detective—,” I began.

She cut me off. “Please call me Chris.”

“Um . . . okay. Chris. Gilley is actually one of the best computer geeks you'll ever meet. If this computer has any kind of information relevant to the case, he'll find it.”

“It's the not-relevant-to-the-case information that I worry about,” she said. “Sullivan could have personal information on that computer that I'm certain his family wouldn't want a stranger digging through.”

To this, Gilley rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. If I really wanted to uncover personal information on Sullivan, not having access to his computer wouldn't stop me.”

Olivera studied him for a minute. “You're a hacker.”

Gil flexed his fingers. “One of the best.”

She sighed. “I'm not just at risk of losing my job here, guys. I'm probably at risk of being arrested for obstruction if I let you take that computer.”

“We'll put it back,” I told her.

She rubbed her forehead, as if she too had a headache. “No,” she said firmly. “Sorry, but it can't leave the scene. I could have to swear in court that the physical chain of custody remained intact, and I'm not going to lie on the stand. See what you can find out between now and when we're ready to get out of here.”

Gil sighed, but he seemed to accept her decision. “Fine,” he said, and then he held up the bottle of Excedrin. He'd noticed her squinty expression and the rubbing of her forehead too. She nodded; he tossed her the bottle, then sat down to start typing on the keyboard.

“Don't leave a trace,” I told him. The last thing we needed was for one of the techs at BPD to figure out that we'd been snooping in Sullivan's computer files.

Gilley made a face but never took his eyes off the screen. “Gurl, pleez,” he said. “Who do you think you're dealing with?”

“Sorry,” I told him. “You know what's odd?” I said next.

“Your fashion sense?”

I glared at Gil. “Funny,” I said flatly. “And no, what's odd is why the killer thought to take the computer that the other cameras fed to, but not this one.”

Gil paused in his typing and looked at Olivera, as
if she might have the answer. “That's easy,” she said. “The office was locked.”

Gil turned to me. “That's true,” he said. “When I first got to this office, it was totally locked.”

“I was meaning to ask you how you managed to get it open,” Olivera said.

Gilley pointed at me. “It was probably someone from her crew.”

Olivera eyed me quizzically. “What's he talking about?”

“The lights that turned on to illuminate our path,” I said. “That was probably one of the spirits that watches over me, and that same spirit likely managed to unlock the door.” I had a very strong sense that Sam had once again come to my rescue, but I didn't want to go into a lot of detail about who he was, et cetera, for Olivera, who would probably only ask me a bunch of irrelevant questions.

“One of the spirits that watches over you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I'm a medium. I work with a lot of souls who've crossed over. Occasionally, one of them does me a solid.”

“Huh,” Olivera said, like I'd just given her the solution to a complicated math problem. “That's either wicked cool or wicked creepy.”

I smiled. “Let's go with cool, lest we offend them.”

“Right,” she said, and eyed the ceiling nervously. Then she moved over to Sullivan's leather recliner and sat down heavily. “Anyway, can we talk about what the hell happened here tonight?”

“What's there to talk about?” I said, knowing I needed to be frank with her. “We came to investigate the scene; the killer found out about it and set Oruç's demon loose to kill us.”

Gilley shuddered and paused his typing. “Jesus, M.J., did you get a
look
at that thing in the light of your flare?”

“I did,” I said. “I got several more looks at it too.”

“How did you even think of bringing a flare?” Gil asked. “That was kind of genius.”

I moved another box that seemed to contain books over to rest my feet on it and leaned back against the wall. “Thanks. It was actually Heath who gave me the idea. He got me a roadside safety kit a few weeks before we went on vacation, and when I saw the flares, I thought they'd be a great backup on a bust should our flashlights ever fail.”

“It was a great idea,” Gil agreed. “I wish I'd thought of it, actually.”

“We should probably retrieve it before someone finds the flare stub,” I said. Both Olivera and Gilley looked at me like I was crazy. “No
way
am I opening that door until morning,” Gilley said.

Olivera stared uneasily at the door too. “You think the demon is still out there?”

Gilley shrugged. “It could be,” he said. “I mean, all the killer would have to do is leave the dagger out in the hallway and wait for us to come out.”

“I highly doubt he'd leave the dagger behind,” I said. “Not after all the trouble he went to to get it in the first place.”

“Do you know that for sure?” Gilley said. “Seriously, M.J., are you willing to bet your life and the life of your baby on it?”

I yawned. Man, I was tired. And I kept thinking about Heath, alone, at home, but I also had to admit that I didn't know if the dagger was still at the museum and taking the chance that it had gone along with Sullivan's murderer wasn't something I was prepared to do. I went over to the phone on the desk and called Heath's cell. It rang four times and he finally answered. “M.J.?”

“Babe, are you okay?” I asked without preamble.

There was a pause, then, “Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay. Where are you?”

It was my turn to pause. If Heath hadn't spied the note yet, then it might be best to go light on the details. The last thing I needed him to do was to come in search of me at the museum. “I'm out, doing a little legwork with Gil and Detective Olivera.”

“What time is it?” he asked. His words were slightly slurred. The effects of the drugs and the fact that I'd woken him up.

“It's early, sweetheart. I just wanted to call and check on you.”

“That was nice,” he said. “Do you need me to come help you?”

“No. No, no. We're wrapping it up here. Why don't you go back to sleep and I'll be home before you know it.”

Heath made a muffled sound of agreement and I
crossed my fingers. “Wake me up when you get in, okay?”