Spirit and Dust

3


“REALLY,” I TOLD Taylor for the fiftieth time, “I’m fine.”

I admit, I might have been more convincing if I weren’t sitting in Alexis Maguire’s desk chair with my head between my knees.

On the plus side, I’d known as soon as I stepped into her dorm room that she wasn’t dead. I was less certain I wasn’t dying a slow death by migraine.

Taylor twisted the top off a bottle of Coke and handed it to me. “It’s not usually this bad.”

I finished half the soda in three long gulps, then held the cold plastic to my pounding temple. It was my second bottle. He’d had the first waiting for me as soon as he’d picked me up from the mud behind the dorm.

“It’s not usually this hard.” I didn’t mind admitting that to Taylor, since Agent Gerard was on the other side of the room with Chief Logan and his two detectives. The older officers had their heads together, maybe debating whether to take my word that Alexis was still alive, maybe debating whether to take me to the funny farm.

My cousin Amy swears there is some Goodnight charm that protects us from men in white coats, so I wasn’t worried about the second possibility. But I would be monumentally pissed if I’d gotten this headache just to have the police dismiss the few clues I could give them.

Goodnights and law enforcement go way back. Supposedly, one of my ancestors consulted on the Jack the Ripper case, though maybe that’s not a ringing endorsement. My track record for solving cases was a lot better.

Not that you’d know it, from the way Gerard bitched about working with a psychic. When he came to San Antonio he got Taylor as a partner, which meant he got me. Until this trip, he’d talked to me as little as possible.

Of course, back when Agent Taylor and I first met, he hadn’t known what to make of me, either. He was straight out of the academy, and he’d inherited me from his predecessor. I’d inherited the gig from my late aunt Diantha, and though I’d done a good bit of work for the local and state police, I was still earning my cred with the FBI.

Our very first case together, Taylor and I were stuck in the car on a ride to a crime scene in the Rio Grande valley. That was nearly a year ago, back when Aunt Pet still rode along with us. She’d been my legal guardian until a judge awarded me emancipation at seventeen so that I could do my civic duty without her having to take off from her job every time someone died or disappeared in the South Texas desert.

“So … forgive me if this is a rude question,” Taylor had begun. There was no radio reception and the only sound in the car was the click of Aunt Pet’s laptop keys as she worked in the backseat.

“Born this way,” I answered. I didn’t need to read minds—which I can’t do—to know what rude question he wanted to ask. I’d only been surprised it had taken him so long.

“Just born psychic?” he’d asked. “Not hit by lightning or something?”

“Nope.” I leaned forward to search for a radio station. Any radio station. “No brain fever, no head trauma, no near-death experience.”

“No traumatic death of a loved one?”

I sat back and gave him the stink eye. He had to know about my parents. There was no way the details of their murder hadn’t been passed along in office gossip.

“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to work together, let’s get a few things straight. I won’t do any of that TV-psychic flimflammery and you won’t ask me trick questions. Not about a read, not about my family, not about me. Capisce?”

He glanced my way for a moment, clearly reassessing me. “Okay. So what about your parents?”

I sighed and sank into the seat. “They died when I was three. I only remember them as ghosts.”

“And your aunt Diantha solved their murder.” He stated it as a fact, not a question.

“Well, mostly she nagged the police until they searched Farley Driscoll’s vacation house for evidence that he tampered with my parents’ car.” Driscoll had been my father’s business partner, and none of his high-priced lawyers could keep him out of jail once the evidence started mounting up. You do not mess with the Goodnights.

“So your whole family is psychic?” Taylor asked.

“Yep. Well, psychic or magic.”

“Huh,” he said in a noncommittal way.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in seventeen and three-quarters years as a Goodnight and a psychic: One, people can rationalize a helluva lot when it comes to explaining the inexplicable. And two, there’s not a hard line between believers and skeptics. People tend to pick and choose what they’ll swallow.

For whatever reason, Agent Taylor had only ever questioned why and how, never if. And after a few successes, he’d started bringing me in on more cases, and reopening cold ones, until we both started making a name for ourselves.

Which, I suppose, might be another reason that Agent Gerard, for all his bitching, had never refused to work with us.

It was the sight of Agent Gerard standing in the middle of all the girliness of Alexis’s room that brought me back to the present. He was frowning at a bulletin board filled with party pics and ticket stubs, and behind him was a window overlooking the little lake.

“I wonder why the killer didn’t drag Bruiser’s body the rest of the way to the lake and throw him in,” I said. “It would have delayed discovery of the murder and washed away trace evidence.”

Taylor followed my gaze and my train of thought. “Maybe that was the plan, but he was interrupted and had to make do with the bushes.”

That made sense. I imagined grabbing a girl from in front of her dorm meant time constraints.

No one had said “kidnapped” yet, but it was what everyone was thinking. I didn’t need to read minds to know that. I just had to look around her room.

Her dorm was about twice the size of mine, and she had it all to herself. Most of it was standard issue—desk, chair, bed, bookcases, worn carpet, and industrial beige paint. Some of it was upgrade—a minifridge and a microwave and a pair of retro beanbag chairs.

The mess was not standard. The police had found it ransacked—books thrown from their shelves, drawers turned out of the desk and bureau, heaps of clothes and papers under snowdrifts of polystyrene from the gutted chairs.

I risked a cerebral explosion by bending over to pick up a textbook from beside my foot. It was literally Greek to me.

“What is Alexis studying?” I asked, turning the book right side up. It didn’t make a difference, except for the pictures.

I’d asked it loud enough to get the attention of Gerard and the detectives across the room. Chief Logan answered. “Classical languages, I think.”

I would have raised my eyebrows, but my head hurt too bad. “You mean, like Greek and Latin? That kind of classical? How’s that going to be useful in a crime family?”

“How did you know—” Gerard began, then cut himself off with an unvoiced curse. Taylor coughed to cover a laugh, and I was very careful not to look smug.

“Bruiser didn’t look like he made a living driving Miss Daisy,” I said. Putting the heavy book on the desk, I saw something else. “Her laptop is missing.”

“We noticed that, too,” said the chief. Then he indicated the mess with a tilt of his head. “Can your, um, sight or whatever tell why someone trashed the place? The computer would have been easy to find, so that wasn’t what they were looking for.”

I shook my head carefully. “I only read remnants of the dead. All I can tell you is they weren’t zombies.” Chief Logan, a sober, trim man in his forties, gave a start of alarm, and I allowed myself a weak smile. “There’s no such thing,” I assured him. “The inside might hang around sometimes, but the outside is just dust.”

As for my limitations—which I was feeling keenly just then—I knew that Alexis was alive because of what I didn’t feel. I sat at her desk and rifled through her stuff without a whiff of reaction from the spirit world. Remnants really don’t like you messing with their stuff.

And someone had definitely messed with Alexis’s things. Too bad the dorm didn’t have a resident ghost, like the houses at Hogwarts. Then I could just ask it what the thieves were after.

Taylor voiced another question I’d been contemplating. “So, still no word on a ransom demand?”

Logan glanced at one of his detectives, who shook his head. “Her father says there hasn’t been any call.”

“Maybe he’s lying,” I offered. “You know, like they do in the movies, when the kidnapper says, ‘Don’t call the cops.’ ”

“This isn’t a movie, Peanut,” said Gerard, not bothering to hide his scorn. “It’s a serious criminal investigation. Why don’t you sit quietly until we have something else for you to Ouija or whatever it is you do?”

I didn’t think it was possible for my head to hurt any worse, but a hot pulse of humiliated anger proved me wrong. “I don’t Ouija things, Agent Gerard. I read the remnants of energy that linger after death. Especially violent and unexpected death.”

“Not that it was any help here,” he said. “What was all that black dog business? Was she kidnapped to be raised by wolves?”

“Spirits get confused. You might be confused, too, if your brains got scrambled by a bullet.”

“That’s enough, you two,” snapped Taylor, and as awful as it was to have Gerard dismiss me like a kid, it was ten times worse having Taylor scold me like one.

“Daisy brought up a valid point,” Taylor continued, not that I still didn’t want to crawl into the deflated remains of the beanbag chair and die. “If anyone would think he could handle this solo, it’s Devlin Maguire. He has reason not to want the police poking into his business.”

“Maybe he knows the person behind this,” said Gerard. “Criminal roads from all over the country run back to him, but no one has been able to sew up the connection. Maybe the girl’s kidnapping is our chance.”

An awkward silence rocked everyone back on their heels a moment. Then Taylor, with soft-voiced intensity, said, “There’s a girl’s life at stake. The important thing is finding her.”

He did not say “It’s not about your career, a*shole.” At least, not aloud. I’m not sure I’d have had that kind of willpower.

“Of course,” said Gerard, with cover-my-ass bluster. He turned to Logan. “We’ll leave your office to finish the investigation on the murder here, and Taylor and I will hook up with the Minneapolis field office on this kidnapping. Even if Maguire won’t cooperate, we can talk to him, put a tap on his phone.…”

Taylor listened with his jaw twitching, but didn’t contradict his partner, just added, “I think they’ve already requested a warrant for that.”

“Then we should get a move on,” said Gerard.

Finally, we agreed on something.

The clock was ticking, and not just for Alexis. My window of usefulness was closing. Sugar and caffeine had pushed back the nausea and the crimson haze of my headache, but I figured I had thirty, maybe forty minutes of coherence before the migraine stomped me flat.