Ghost Key (5 page)

“Okay, let’s assume it’s Florida.” Delaney went through the sketches again and picked up the one that showed the twin columns of smoke. “What’s this?”

“It was something I could see from the pier. But the air was hazy or foggy, so it might be an optical illusion.”

Delaney put a question mark at the top of the page, set it aside, then went over to one of the wall cabinets and brought out a rolled-up map. He smoothed it open on Sanchez’s desk, a huge map of Florida. So damn many islands, Sanchez thought. They ran up and down both coasts, dozens of tourist destinations. And at the foot of the peninsula lay the Florida Keys, with more than 1,700 islands.

“What we have to ask ourselves,” Sanchez said, “is how distant from the cell location would the terrorists haul the bodies?”

“The logical answer is far, far away.”

“Terrorists aren’t necessarily logical.”

“Unless this is how they spread the bacteria or virus.”

“Shit,” Sanchez muttered, and he and Delaney looked at each other. “This could take months.”

“We don’t have months, amigo. For all we know, the virus has contaminated anyone who has come into contact with those bodies and we’ve got an incipient epidemic. Let’s work on it separately tonight, with maps.”

“Dowsing? You’re much better at it than I am.”

“But you’ve got a connection with the redhead now.” With that, Delaney returned to the cabinet, pulled out another map of Florida, and handed it to Sanchez. “I’ve got a folder of photos you can take with you.”

“Photos of…?”

“The bodies. See you back here in the morning.”

*   *   *

Sanchez
had bought his home shortly after he’d been recruited by ISIS. It was supposed to be where he and the love of his life were going to live after they got married. He had carefully refurbished the place, landscaped the acre with fruit trees and flowers, had fixed up the swimming pool, installed a hot tub, screened the patio. The three bedrooms that he’d furnished in rattan and pine now echoed with solitude and loneliness. So as soon as he and Jessie were inside, he popped an Esperanza Spalding CD into the player and cranked up the volume. Now that the rooms rocked, he could think.

He fed Jessie, gobbled down his Chinese takeout, fixed himself a
cortadito
—a Cuban espresso with a dollop of milk—and spread open the map. His eyes roamed from one Florida coast to the other, south to Key West, north again to Ocala and Gainesville. He briefly shut his eyes, conjuring the image of the redhead. “Where are you?” he whispered, and opened his eyes again.

He positioned his left hand about an inch above the map, then moved it slowly eastward, down along the coast, all the way to Miami. Not a single flare of warmth, no tingle, nothing. But as soon as he moved his hand over the Keys, the center of his palm started to itch, then burn.
You’re hot, Nick. Which island?
Even though the map was large, a foot square, the Keys were smaller than the tip of his index finger. He couldn’t get a fix this way. He rose quickly, scanned the lower part of the map, enlarged the Upper Keys, printed it.

When he passed his hand over Key Largo, he felt the itch, the burning again. He circled Key Largo, returned to the regular map, and moved his hand slowly up the west coast of Florida, into the Panhandle, then south again. He felt something around Sanibel Island, a popular tourist destination near Fort Myers, and around Captiva, where writer John D. MacDonald had lived for years. He circled these islands, too.

He opened the folder Delaney had given him, turned it upside down, and the photos of the bodies slipped out. The ghastly pictures had been taken wherever the bodies had been unearthed, and some were clearer and more detailed than others. He’d never really thought about what it meant to
bleed out,
but from the looks of these photos, the victims had bled from every orifice, even from the pores of their skin.

Sanchez taped the photos to the wall until he had a row of seven and another row of six. Each photograph was labeled by gender and approximate age. He stared at the first one, a woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. He placed his index finger inches above Gainesville and kept staring at the picture as he spoke. “I need the path you took from where you died to where you were found.”

The CD finished. As silence settled through the rooms, he could hear the house breathing around him. Jessie had climbed onto the couch in the family room and fallen asleep. The AC clicked on. Minutes ticked by. A lot of minutes. Nothing happened. Frustrated, he gave up in favor of a shower, a short nap.

Sanchez fell asleep in a chair in front of the TV, and dreamed of the twin columns of smoke, of the redhead with her freckles and seductive mouth, of the evil that had
tasted
him. But it was Jessie’s soft growls that woke him. The dog was sitting up on the couch, staring at the French doors that led out onto the porch. The TV was still on, muted, some rerun of Jon Stewart.

“What is it, girl?” he whispered.

She climbed off the couch, the fur along her back standing up, and moved slowly and quietly over to Sanchez’s chair, and sat up against his legs, as if protecting him. Her gaze moved from the French doors to the bookcase, and he suddenly heard the soft sigh of footsteps, his mother’s footsteps. But never had he heard them so clearly. The sound moved away from him toward the room he used as his office, then came back toward him. Jessie’s eyes moved in the direction of the sounds, convincing Sanchez that the dog could see his mother’s ghost.

Jenean didn’t materialize, not in the way Sanchez had grown up believing that ghosts took shape. She seemed to grow out of the books on the shelves, like a fictional character suddenly given life through some strange alchemy. His dead mother, in brilliant color, looked as real and solid as the dog, and not much changed from his childhood memory of her, specifically during that single magnificent year when she hadn’t been drinking.

Her thick, chestnut hair fell in shiny waves to just below her ears. Her hazel eyes smiled, thin lines bracketed her expressive mouth. She wore yoga clothes, black cotton pants and a royal blue tank top that showed off her beautiful shoulders. After so many months of hearing her footsteps, of sensing her presence, Sanchez was freaked that he actually could see her. He had been psychic all his life, but had never seen a ghost. Was there a protocol here? Could she hear him? See him as clearly as he saw her?

“Mom?” His voice ground out of him, as if he’d swallowed gravel.

“Nicole has your answer.”

His sister? How could she have an answer to this? Sanchez finally moved, was able to manipulate his body enough so it sat forward. “You’ve got to be able to see things I can’t, Mom.
You
tell me where this redhead is. What’s going on?”

She turned her head, as if talking to someone Sanchez couldn’t see, nodded, and looked at him again. “Nick, I’m … trying to move on here, where I am. But I can’t do it without … making reparations for what I didn’t do as your mother, for the ways in which I failed you. My friend Charlie says I have to follow certain rules, so that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Charlie? Who the hell was Charlie? “You don’t have to make amends with me, okay? I came to terms with all of it before you died.”

“You did, Nick, but I didn’t. It’s what we carry with us into death that holds us back. The issues, the guilt, the what-ifs…”

Sanchez, on his feet now, stabbed his finger at the air. “You tell this goddamn Charlie to butt out, Mom. It’s between you and me, not you and me and some third party, okay?” He realized he was yelling at his mother’s ghost, that he sounded like a candidate for a padded cell. His arm dropped to his side, his voice broke. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “Jesus, Mom, just give me a hint.”

“Charlie says I’m not allowed to…” She cocked her head to the right, perhaps listening to this Charlie guy again, then made a dismissive gesture, and stepped toward Sanchez. “Nicole has the first piece of the puzzle. The redhead’s name is Maddie. Charlie Livingston is her grandfather. He loves Esperanza Spalding, too, and says you should try some Google combos with all these words and that he’ll probably be kicked out of the chasers because of what I’m saying.”

She laughed then, a quick, almost musical sound, and faded into the bookshelf.

Sanchez collapsed into the chair, every light in the house flared, the CD came back on, by itself, and Esperanza Spalding sang as though her heart were breaking, “I Know You Know.”

Three

Mile after mile, town after town, straight up through central Florida, Wayra pursued Dominica’s scent and that peculiar vibrational frequency unique to her. He felt certain he was closing in on her, that his long, lonely journey was nearing an end. Then, outside of Ocala, he suddenly lost her trail.

It meant she had seized and killed someone in this area. But why here? Ocala struck him as atypical of the places where Dominica usually seized a host. It was too rural, all rolling emerald hills and exclusive horse farms that raised and sold Thoroughbreds. The pool of potential victims seemed too small. Gainesville, thirty-five miles north, impressed him as more her style. Home to the University of Florida, its population numbered over a hundred thousand, most of them students, young and healthy and, most importantly, probably sexually active.

He pulled his old pickup truck to the shoulder of the two-lane county road and got out. He inhaled the chilly air, drawing it deeply into his lungs. The powerful sweetness of pine mingled with the odor of horses from the surrounding farms. He didn’t detect a hint of Dominica. Other aromas reached him, though, textured smells too subtle for his human senses to identify.

Wayra glanced to his right, into a thicket of pines so dense the sunlight barely penetrated. He couldn’t even make out shadows pooled among the trees. Had she seized some hiker in there? He could almost see her, stalking some unsuspecting soul, moving along behind him, as subtle as a shadow, then slamming into him from behind, seizing him so completely he never had a chance to fight.

He moved closer to the edge of the trees and considered shifting. In his other form, his heightened senses might be able to pick up her trail. But it would mean abandoning his truck for a while, probably not a wise idea. Sporadic traffic sped along the road, and if a cop saw the empty truck, it could be impounded. Right now, he needed the vehicle. It moved faster than he could in either of his forms. He would have to find a safer place to shift, he thought, and thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and turned away from the trees.

It wasn’t the first time in all these months that Dominica had eluded him. When she’d fled Esperanza, Ecuador, last October, she’d flown to Miami first, then had driven to Chicago, Santa Fe, Denver, Atlanta, using these large cities to confuse him, lose him, and conceal her activities. In each of these cities, she had killed someone—a victim here, two victims there, never enough of them in one place to prompt the local police to make inquiries in other states, for authorities to connect the dots. Each time she killed, he lost her trail. Then he would have to comb through local Web sites, searching for unexplained deaths in that particular area during the last few weeks or months. In most instances, Dominica’s victims bled out, so that was the search term he used for the unexplained deaths.

But because bleed-outs could occur for a variety of reasons, this process initially had taken him in directions that wasted time. He now knew to discount bleed-outs that occurred in hospitals, since those deaths usually had a natural cause. Besides, Dominica disliked hospitals nearly as much as she did cemeteries; both reminded her of what she was, a hungry ghost desperately in need of a tribe of her own kind. Motels were Dominica’s favorite location—the privacy, the element of the forbidden, the likelihood that the body wouldn’t be found immediately. Her next favorite location was in or around upscale bars and restaurants because they provided her with such a variety of potential victims.

Wayra pulled back onto the road and continued north toward the town. The horse farms gave way to commercial areas—family-owned businesses, then the usual strip malls and small shopping centers. He passed a few bars, redneck hotspots, and several local restaurants that boasted cuisines of smoked ribs, steaks, and home fries. None of these places would interest Dominica. The best he could hope for right now was that a synchronicity would lead him to yet another location where one of her victims had bled out and died. Whenever these synchronicities happened, they told him he was on the right track, searching for her in the right way.

In Santa Fe, he had gone into a taco place for a bite to eat and just happened to pick up a free newspaper that featured a story about a missing man. His photo was included; he could have been Wayra’s twin brother. Right then, he knew the man had been one of Dominica’s victims, that she’d seized him because of the resemblance. In her twisted mind, it was her way of killing Wayra.

He had driven over to the man’s house, picked up his scent, and tracked his body to a spot in the desert, where much of it had been consumed by predators. But there, he had found Dominica’s scent again.

And so it had gone, city after city, state after state, for months.

How many times through the centuries had Dominica seized men who resembled him? Their history extended back so far in time that it horrified Wayra to even consider how many hundreds or thousands of men had been seized and bled out simply because they reminded Dominica of him. At times during this long journey, their mutual history and his lapse in judgment had haunted him. How had he
ever
loved her?

Yet, when they had been lovers in Spain in the fifteenth century, everything had been different. He had already been a shifter for more than two hundred years and she was a beautiful woman who had not yet been corrupted by the evil of hungry ghosts,
brujos.

Before he entered the Ocala city limits, Wayra noticed a landfill where dozens of tractors were clearing trees and moving great mountains of earth and trash. Three state police cars and an ambulance blocked the entrance to the area. Unusual, but as far as he knew, Dominica hadn’t ever killed anyone in a landfill. However, if she had a tribe already and if members of her tribe had seized humans, then a landfill was an ideal spot to get rid of a body. Was it worth a look?