Living with the Dead

FINN



AFTER SQUASHING THE JUNKIE-COLLEGE-KID LEAD, Finn’s day had continued its pattern of failure.

There had indeed been a boy at Robyn Peltier’s door. Confirming that hadn’t been simple. First, Finn had to be careful explaining how he knew there’d been a boy there. He’d claimed it was an anonymous tip from a neighbor who’d taken his card.

The officer admitted to questioning the kid, but he hadn’t bothered getting a name because the story checked out and the kid lived in the building. Well, no, he hadn’t confirmed that . . . He’d been going to, then an elderly resident had cornered him and started complaining about crime rates and you know how that goes . . .

Finn asked the officers currently on stakeout duty to follow up. Twenty minutes later, one called back to report that there were no kids in apartment 304. The super didn’t recognize the description and he swore he knew every boy in his building, because you had to keep an eye on kids that age . . .

So Finn had one teenage boy, nicely dressed, well mannered and well spoken, skilled in lying and picking locks. An odd combination. What did it have to do with his case? An unrelated crime of opportunity? Stealing Portia Kane memorabilia to sell on eBay?

Next came what seemed a bit of luck. The lab had managed to raise the serial number on that gun. It was registered to a private citizen—an eighty-six-year-old great grandmother, who’d reported it stolen two months ago. The gun had likely passed through several hands before killing Kane, the silencer added by one of them. Some one would follow up, but Finn suspected another dead end.

The Philly police had also struck out with Peltier’s parents. They were outraged that their daughter was wanted for questioning in a murder. These folks also knew the law. They refused a search without a warrant, and they phoned their lawyer. Though they didn’t have the right to insist she be present for questioning, they stalled until she arrived.

Regarding their daughter, they hadn’t spoken to her in four days. The police were welcome to review their home and cell phone records. They also provided her address in L.A., her home and cell number, though they must have known the L.A. cops already had all this—trying to look helpful while not revealing anything that was.

As for the friend Finn was seeking, their daughter was twenty-eight years old. They no longer monitored her friends and didn’t know most of them. One detective had taken advantage of a bathroom break to scout the main rooms. In the living room, he’d found a hanging photo of two teenage girls. One matched the description Finn had been given. The other was Robyn Peltier.

When confronted, Peltier’s mother claimed it was a friend from Robyn’s teen years and she couldn’t recall the girl’s name. The father, though, blew up at the intrusion, ended the questioning and sent the detectives on their way.

They were lying about the friend.

Finn knew there was an easy way to get his answer. He had a source who was certain to know exactly who Robyn Peltier’s friend was. But that source had slipped away the moment Finn got on the phone with the Philly detectives.

Finn still hadn’t decided what to do about Damon. The cop in him said to cut the guy loose. No matter what special skills Damon could bring to the investigation, the husband of the main suspect was not partner material. But Finn couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d gotten this case, the one detective who could speak to the dead.

Finn believed in God. His mother would have nailed his hide to the back shed if he hadn’t. In his family, faith was never a question. What was faith in God if not the belief that the soul existed beyond this life, which his family knew with certainty to be true?

There were those who thought such powers came from the devil. His family dismissed that nonsense the way philosophers scoffed at those who saw an eclipse as a sign the world was being devoured by dragons. God granted some people the skills to become doctors to help the living. God had given their family the power to help the dead. It wasn’t always conducive to a peaceful life, but no worse than a family doctor, called out on an emergency at 3 a.m.

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 suspected, 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 Opinión.”

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.”