A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder (20 page)

“Promise,” I said. He told me he loved me and clicked off, and I breathed a small sigh of relief. “He's fine.” I looked up at my companions. Gilley's fingers were flying over the keyboard. Olivera was reclined in the leather chair, and exhaustion apparently had taken over, because her eyes were closed and her breathing was deep and rhythmic.

Gil paused his typing to glance at her; then he reached down to his backpack, fished around for a second, and pulled up a flash drive. With a finger to his lips at me, he inserted the drive into the USB port and began to download the contents of Sullivan's computer. I smiled and offered him a thumbs-up.

I then leaned back against the wall and closed my own eyes. I really wanted to sleep, but I didn't feel like I could just yet. I wanted to figure out what the hell was going on. So far we'd been stalked and attacked and our homes had been broken into. This wasn't just Oruç and his demon getting revenge. This had taken careful planning by someone living. Someone who had it in for us. But who?

“Gil?” I said.

“Yeah?” he replied distractedly. He was very
focused on his task of rooting through Sullivan's computer.

“The thing with the magnets. Not a lot of people know about how magnets affect a spook.”

“What's your point?” he asked.

“My point is, someone went to a lot of trouble to ensure that, once they set the demon free, it could cause maximum harm. Here. At the museum.”

Gil paused to look at me. “Whoa,” he said. “Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“I'm saying that I think whoever our thief was knew enough about our ghostbusting techniques to neutralize any attempt we might have made to stop Oruç's demon from appearing. I'm also saying that I think the killer had something big planned for opening day at the exhibit, but when Heath and I showed up with our gear from the closet in my office—the gear that was still fully magnetized—we might've thwarted that plan.”

Gilley sat with that for a moment. “I'll bet you're right, M.J.,” he said.

“And you know what else keeps going around in my head?” I asked him.

“What?”

“It's to your earlier point about the fact that not a lot of people know about the effect magnets have on a spook. Sure, we've highlighted that in a show or two, but the dagger isn't just a haunted relic—it's a portal, Gil. A gateway, and one of the things that's intriguing about the theft of the dagger is that the body count isn't higher.”

“One dead isn't enough for you?” Gil said drolly.

I ignored that and went on with making my point. “Oruç hated women. He lusted for killing them, and yet, the only person dead is a man, who wasn't even killed with the dagger. That suggests to me that someone knows how to control the portal and is opening and closing the gateway at will.”

Gil's jaw dropped. “Ohmigod,” he said. “You're
right
!”

“Only someone with a hell of a lot of experience would know how to keep Oruç under wraps like that. Someone's clearly keeping Oruç under tight control but allowing the demon to run free, and that could only be done by someone with hands-on experience. Handling demons is no joke, you'd be safer trying to handle a rabid lion, so whoever did this is orchestrating things on a level of a fellow ghostbuster. Somebody who knows a lot about electromagnetic frequencies and how they can affect, specifically, a portal, and also, how to handle a demon well enough to put the genie back in the bottle when necessary.”

Gilley studied me in a way that suggested he hadn't really thought of all that. “Shit,” he swore. “You think it's one of our competitors?”

“Who else could it be?”

Gil wiped his face with his hand. “That's certainly one way to narrow the pool of suspects,” he said. “Okay, let me try searching Sullivan's computer for any sign of someone in our industry. Maybe there'll be an e-mail or a reference to a name I recognize.”

And then that thing that'd been bugging me since
this all began surfaced in my mind again and I said, “Gil, can you look for a connection between Sullivan and that producer, Bradley Rosenberg?”

Gil's fingers paused on the keyboard. “Why?”

“Because I just don't trust this whole setup,” I said. “I mean, we've been advertising the fact that we'd have an exhibit here at the museum for a couple of months now, and we all spoke about what we'd contribute to it on the fan site, but then all of the sudden, just when Gopher, me, and Heath are out of the country and unreachable,
you
get a phone call from some mysterious producer we've never heard of, telling you that Gopher—someone we trust—supposedly told him about Oruç's dagger and how it'd be the
perfect
thing to add to the exhibit. This Rosenberg guy never tried to call me or Heath about it . . . just you. And he offered you a lot of money, right?”

“Twenty thousand,” Gilley said meekly.

I whistled. “Twenty grand to pony up an old dagger? I mean, when you really think about it, it's absurd, right? Bradley represents an industry literally
built
on props, but suddenly he's got to have you bring the real thing here to the museum? And,” I added, “as of today, you haven't received said check, correct?”

“He said it was in the mail,” Gil said, even more meekly.

“Of course it is,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “And even if it were, Gil, think about it; you haven't heard back from good ol' Bradley after leaving him a voice mail telling him that the dagger he paid
twenty thousand dollars for has just been stolen. Don't you think that's a
little
suspicious?”

“But, M.J.,” he protested, “like I told you, I've called his business line. Several times. I've spoken to his assistant. He's legitimately
from
the studio!”

I crossed my arms, tapping my finger to my biceps. “Call the office number he gave you now,” I said. “I'd like to hear his legitimate assistant's voice mail.”

Gil glared at me and lifted his phone from his backpack. After several attempts to turn it on, he muttered in irritation, dug again through his backpack, and came up with a charger. Plugging his phone in, he waited a moment for it to charge enough so he could access his contacts and, with a triumphant tap, placed the call and turned on the speaker function.

It rang twice before the error message broadcast through the phone. “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”

Gilley made a barely audible squeaky noise, and he stared unblinking at his phone.

“Yep,” I said. “That's what I thought.”

But Gil wasn't giving up. “It's gotta be a mistake,” he said, thumbing through his contacts again. “I'm calling Bradley's cell again.” He left the speaker function on when he made that call too, and sure enough, another error message came on suggesting that the voice mailbox for the person he was trying to call was full.

Gilley's eyes misted with tears. “No,” he whispered.

“Sorry, Gil. You were set up,” I said. I had very little satisfaction in the revelation. I hated that he'd been duped, and hated even more that the end result was that one man had already died, and the dagger was now in the possession of some lunatic willing to commit murder just to get noticed.

“Oh, God, M.J.! What've I done?!” Gilley moaned.

“What's going on?” Olivera asked groggily. We'd woken her up.

“Nothing, Chris. We're just putting pieces together.”

“Wanna fill me in?” she asked.

I took a few minutes to do that and she eyed poor Gilley with a measure of sympathy. “I see smart people get played all the time,” she said. “Don't take it so hard.”

“I have to take it hard,” Gilley said miserably. “Because of me, the dagger is loose and some asshole is opening up the gateway at will for every spook we've ever sent to the lower realms to have another crack at us. M.J., what if the demon from Heath's pueblo in Santa Fe comes after us? Or the one from Ireland? Or”—he gulped before he said the next name—“the Sandman. I mean, what if they all come after us at once? No
way
can we survive that!”

I got up and went over to lay a gentle hand on Gil's shoulder. “You're right,” I said to him—there was no sense lying. “But we're not gonna let that happen, Gil. We're gonna put a stop to this before it gets that far. We'll track down the sons of a bitches responsible for this mess, and take back that dagger. You have my word on that.”

“But how?” he said pitifully. “I mean, we've got nothing to go on! Bradley could've been anybody, and his admin also could've been anyone.”

“True, but if we start putting together enough of what we
do
know, maybe the trail will lead back to one or both of them.” I then eyed Sullivan's computer pointedly.

Gil followed my gaze and squared his shoulders. “Got it,” he said. “Gimme a few hours.”

Only half an hour into his hacking, Gilley had gained access to Sullivan's bank account. “Why people do their personal banking on a work computer is beyond me,” he said. “Okay, here we go. Five thousand dollars was wired into his account the day after Bradley got me to agree to display the dagger.”

“Does it show the source?”

“Someone named Todd Tolliver.”

“That sounds like a made-up name,” I said. “And five grand doesn't sound like a big enough bribe to let in someone looking to sabotage an exhibit at the risk of losing his job.”

“It was probably only the down payment,” Olivera said, making sure to frown at the fact that Gilley was rooting around in Sullivan's bank accounts. “A show of good faith. He was likely promised that he'd get the rest after the dagger had been stolen.”

“Gil and I were talking while you were sleeping, Chris, and we think that the dagger being stolen was only part of it. We think that whoever set all this up was planning something big at the exhibit's opening day, but then Heath and I showed up with gear that had been at our office and was still fully magnetized, and we thwarted his plans. I believe that this guy then came back to get the dagger after hours, not knowing that Sullivan was here in his office working, and when he tripped the alarm, Sullivan surprised him, and maybe he and the killer got into it, which is how Sullivan ended up dead.”

Olivera nodded. “Sounds like a reasonable scenario,” she said. “What big thing do you think the killer was planning?”

“Well,” I said, “unleashing a demon like we saw tonight into a crowd of innocent bystanders makes for a pretty big statement, don't you think?”

Chris's expression turned grim. “To what end, though?” she said. “I mean, this guy is obviously smart. He's careful. And he's plotted this whole thing out expertly. What would he have to gain by doing something like that?”

Gilley and I exchanged a look, and it was Gilley who answered. “We think, given his knowledge of how magnets affect a portal, and his knowledge of the dagger and its history, that he's a fellow ghostbuster. Someone who's had extensive experience working with spooks, and even demons.”

“Huh,” she said. “Okay, so who in your line of work could pull off something like that?”

Again I looked at Gilley. “Nobody named Todd Tolliver; that's for sure,” he said. “But there is one guy who comes to mind.”

“Rick Lavinia,” I said, and Gilley nodded as if he'd been thinking the very same thing.

“Who's Rick Lavinia?”

Gilley scoffed as if he couldn't believe she'd never heard of him. “He's a ghostbuster with his own cable show too. He started about two years before we did, and he was haunted TV's most popular ghostbuster until Heath came along.” My brow furrowed indignantly and Gilley shrugged and added, “You're super cute and all, M.J., but most people tune in to watch that hottie you're married to. I know that's why I watch the show.”

“Can we get back to the point here?” Chris said.

“Yes,” I said firmly, with another irritated look at Gil. “Rick has, on a few occasions, publicly dogged our show. He's the guy who likes to stomp around haunted locations and yell at the spooks, daring them to come out and show themselves. He got hurt pretty bad a year ago when one such spook picked his ass up and tossed him down the cellar stairs.”

“It was epic!” Gilley said with a giggle.

“Which is exactly what Gilley tweeted right after the episode aired. He tagged Rick in the tweet, which wasn't his smartest move . . .”

Gilley rolled his eyes. “That douche bag had it coming.”

“. . . and Rick went off on a tirade about our show
and how fake it was and how lame we were. It was kind of embarrassing to watch.”

“So you two are competitors,” Olivera said.

“We are,” I said. “But it's one-sided, more so from his perspective than ours.”

“Why's that?”

Gil and I exchanged a knowing look. “We got the movie deal,” he said simply. “And all the fame and fortune that follows that. They'll be airing reruns of our show till the cows come home and we'll get royalties from the show and the movie for a long time to come.”

“Meanwhile,” I said, “we heard through the grapevine that Rick's show is on the bubble.”

“On the bubble?”

“Likely to get canceled,” Gilley told her.

“But what would stealing Oruç's dagger get him?”

“Ratings,” I said. “Rick likes to call himself the demon slayer. He learned from us that magnets can bring down even the nastiest spooks, and he's actually locked up one or two of the nastier ones. If he unleashed Oruç's demon here and caused a panic, he could swoop in and be the big hero. Especially if he had possession of the dagger itself.”

Olivera nodded. “Okay, so we've got motive. What about opportunity? Where's Rick Lavinia based?”

Gilley smiled. “Right here in Boston, baby.”

“Is he in town right now?” she pressed.

Gilley began typing on Sullivan's computer, and we waited for him to say something, but after a few moments all he did was drop his jaw. “No. Way.”

“What?” I asked.

Gil swiveled the screen around. “There's no mention of where Rick is right now,” he said. “But his Instagram posted
this
from him yesterday morning.”

I moved over to look closely at the photo. My heart began to thud in my chest when I saw that it was a photo taken from fairly far away of a building we'd been in the day before and knew intimately. The caption read, “Got notice that this abandoned apartment house is crazy haunted. Might have to check it out soon.”

“Ashworth Commons,” I said, honestly shocked that Rick would be so brazen.

Olivera had stepped forward to look at the photo too. “Now,
that's
interesting,” she said. “But also odd, don't you think? I mean, he says that he got some sort of notice about it. That place
is
crazy haunted. Could someone have tipped him off about it?”

I shrugged. “It's possible, but isn't it sort of too big of a coincidence? I mean, Rick has means, motive, and now we know he's had opportunity. What more do we need?”

“A smoking dagger would be nice,” Olivera said. “Okay, I'll dig into his background a little in the morning, see if I can't find out where he is at the moment at least.”

Turning back to Gilley, I said, “Is there anything on Sullivan's computer connecting him to Rick?”

“None that I could find,” he said. “He had his personal e-mail on here as well as his corporate one, but
nothing looks suspicious, and I sifted through his deleted e-mails too.”

“Then do you think everything was arranged by phone?” I asked, hoping maybe Olivera could get Sullivan's phone records.

“It looks like . . . ,” Gilley began, before his voice trailed off and he stared off into space for a moment. “Hold on,” he said. Typing furiously again, he said, “Well, would you look at that!”

“What?” I said, moving toward the desk to peer at the screen he'd just swiveled around to me. “It's a draft of an e-mail.”

Gilley nodded. “Yes! But
read
it, M.J.!”

I did—out loud so that Olivera could hear it. “Come at midnight. You'll have the place until five a.m. I've turned off the motion sensors. Use the back door. My code is seven-two-one-four.” I cocked my head after reading it. “That's it for the message, but I'm not sure how this points us to the perp. Sullivan never sent the e-mail.”

“He didn't have to,” Gilley said. “The draft was last saved a week ago. All the killer had to do was log into this e-mail account and look up the draft. Sullivan could've easily edited the draft later to something totally innocuous and no one would've ever been the wiser.”

I squinted at the screen again. “There's an address in the ‘To' field. Two-kittens-and-a-canary at gmail dot com.”

“That's Sullivan's mother's e-mail address,” Gil told me. “Again, the museum director was really careful.
If anybody peeked into this file on his personal e-mail account, they would've thought it was just some random message to his mom, or, if they were suspicious, he could've claimed he'd been drafting an e-mail to his mom which got interrupted and he never sent it out.”

“Wow,” I said. “Gil, do you think Sullivan would've thought this up on his own?”

“I doubt it,” Gilley said. “His computer skills weren't the greatest. I think it's more likely that someone told him how to set it up. And Rick Lavinia is fairly savvy on the computer. He's got all the social media accounts up and humming, and he monitors and posts them himself. I also think that, at one point in his past before he started ghostbusting, he was a graphic designer, so this communicating through a draft on an e-mail wouldn't be a big leap for him.”

“Is there any way to back-trace exactly who logged in to Sullivan's e-mail remotely?”

“I can try to trace it through the IP address,” Gil said. “It could work.”

“Cool.” Leaning my head back against the wall and closing my eyes, I thought I'd just get a few minutes of sleep.

“M.J.?” Gilley suddenly said.

“Yeah?” I said, jolting awake again.

“Come here and look at this!”

I got up and moved to the desk, and Olivera did too. Gil had pulled up the draft of the e-mail again, and the former message was gone. The one there now was being typed out even while we watched.

I will destroy you. I will destroy everything you love. Everything you hold dear. Everything you are. Everything you wanted to become. You will all die and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

And then the cursor on the page moved to the top of the e-mail and clicked the delete button, and the draft was gone.

•   •   •

Hours later I crept through the door to my condo on tiptoe. Gilley was doing his koala thing again, his hand planted squarely on my back as I unlocked the door with my new key. He'd refused to go home to his condo, insisting on staying with me until we got the dagger back. Truth be told, I was a little happy he was sticking so close. It was one less person I had to worry about if they were out of my sight.

Heath stirred as we came through the door. “Em?” he said groggily as I walked over to the sofa where he lay.

“I'm here,” I said, sitting on the floor next to the sofa to drink in the sight of him. Banged up though he was, he was still the most gorgeous man I'd ever seen.

“What time is it?”

“It's early.”

Heath sat up and cupped the side of his head with his hand. “Ow,” he said, then blinked in the light that Gilley had just turned on. “Hey,” he said to Gil. Then, “Those are some mean-looking welts on your forehead, buddy. What happened to you?”

Gil shook his head. I'd told him to let me do the talking.

Heath's brow furrowed and then he turned to look at the clock on the cable box. It read five a.m. He then focused on me. “Em?” he said, smoothing a lock of my hair. “You look like you had a rough night too. How about you don't spare me any of the details?”

I laid my head on the sofa cushion. I'd gotten maybe half an hour of sleep. I was so tired I didn't think I could force out a paragraph, much less a long story with all the details. “Can I tell you in a few hours?”

Heath stroked my hair. He didn't say anything and I had a feeling he was looking at Gilley like he needed to start talking.

“She needs some rest,” Gil said. “And so do I, but I can give you the highlights after M.J. goes to bed.”

I picked my head up. Letting Gilley tell Heath about the night we had was super risky. He tended to overexaggerate the scary parts, and I didn't want Heath to freak out that we'd come so close to getting ourselves filleted alive by a nine-foot-tall demon. “It's better if I tell you,” I said wearily.

Heath stared at me for a good minute. “Which demon came at you tonight?”

“Oruç's.”

“Shit, Em!” Heath said, sitting straight up and looking like he was ready to take on the demon all by his lonesome. “Where?”

“The museum,” Gil said. “Olivera took us there to check out the crime scene.”

The muscles along Heath's jawline bunched and he
visibly looked like he was trying to control his anger. “You guys went there without me?”

I sighed. “It's not like you could've contributed anything, babe. I mean, you
did
get shot in the head and all.”

“You couldn't have waited?” he asked me. His tone wasn't accusing; it was more . . . disappointed.

“No,” I said. “We couldn't. We had to check it out, and honestly, I'm glad we did, because now we know what we're dealing with.”

“What?” Heath said.

“Someone who wants to hurt us really, really bad.”

“We didn't know that before?”

“Oh, we did, we just didn't know the lengths he was willing to go. Anyway, we're okay, we learned a lot, and we'll fill you in just as soon as I've had three hours to sleep.”

With that I pushed myself to my feet and shuffled to the bedroom. I wasn't surprised that Heath followed right behind me. I shrugged out of my jeans and my sweater and crawled under the covers in the shirt I'd worn to the museum. Screw it. I was too tired to get into my pj's.

Heath went around the bed and got in on the other side, scooting over to wrap me in his arms. I fell asleep in seconds.

The next thing I knew it was eleven a.m. I jolted awake, took one look at the clock on the nightstand, and groaned. Then I looked around the bedroom for my husband. Heath wasn't there, but I heard hushed voices coming from the kitchen. “Dammit!” I swore. I
just knew that Gilley was flapping his gums, freaking out my husband and making himself look like the hero.