“You look like shit.” He was being handled, he just realized. They were all distracting him while the room was being...whatever they did when the police came into a scene they were on. His mind wasn’t working properly, and he held onto Vinnie as she stood there with him. When she lifted his arm to her mouth, he watched as she licked along the wound while keeping her eyes focused on his. Then when she moaned, it was all he could do not to pull her to his body and kiss her. Someone said his name behind him and he turned just enough to see the police officer standing there. He didn’t want to see the room again.
“Did you touch anything, Mr. Riley?” He had to think a minute before he could answer the officer. He was decidedly pale too, Mitch realized. “The body, did you touch it at any time? Or any of the...the other things, like the blades?”
“No. I did touch that...I’m not sure what it was, but I think a table? I was falling over and I might have grabbed it to keep from hitting the floor.” The officer nodded and wrote something in his books. “And I fell to my knees there, as you can see. There were no living people in here when I arrived either. If that was your next question.”
“Right. Can you tell us how you got in here?” He started to tell him about the ghost, but looked at Ray, who was standing right behind the officer. His short shake of his head had him telling the man he just found the door and came in. “But you shouldn’t have been able to see the doorway to get in here. Not unless someone showed you.”
Alarms went off in his head, and when his hand was gripped tighter by Vinnie, he knew she could feel his nervousness as well. When she moved closer to him, Mitch looked over at Drew and spoke directly to him, hoping that he’d understand.
“There was a door if you knew just where to look, as you just said.” The officer said something, but Drew was watching them both now. The officer’s anger was apparent, his knowledge scary. Mitch thought to make him madder, hoping he’d say something more that would prove what his mind already knew. This was the killer. “I mean, any moron could tell there wasn’t any kind of secret to the way it was set up. This place was a piece of cake to find, really.”
“No, it was not.” Drew took a step back and then moved out of the room as the officer stiffened. Drew was going for the police, the real ones this time. Relief was profound, and the man in front of him was going to be in a world of serious hurt if he tried anything with them all standing there. At least, that’s what Mitch was hoping anyway. “You been spying on me, ain’t you? Think you got it all worked out, don’t you, city boy? Well, you ain’t even scratched the surface of my plans.”
“You’re responsible for all of this?” The officer, or whatever he was, just smiled. “Whoever did this is an amateur, if you want to know the truth of it. I’ve seen worse. I mean, even last month we had a woman...Steele? You remember that mess we had to go to in Indiana, right?”
If Steele was confused, he didn’t show it. Instead, he just nodded and started going on about the worst scene that they’d been on and how a woman had done it. The officer turned to him now, and Mitch tried to push Vinnie back. But she either didn’t get that this was the killer or she didn’t care. As the noise in the other room got louder, so did Steele and the officer. He knew Steele was masking the sounds of the cops coming to help.
Mitch tried to think around his fear of Vinnie getting hurt, but he was tired still. His body and mind didn’t want to work the way he was used to. He’d had no idea that having someone take you that way could be so draining. He looked at Vinnie, and she smiled at him. A thought, nothing to do with what was going on, popped into his head.
“What is Vinnie short for?” She flushed brightly, and he smiled. “Now I have to know. There has to be a story about it as well.”
“My name is Victoria, Victoria Alexandra Millicent Graham.” He started to ask about the other Millicent, but she continued before he could. “My mother and father were into another one of their separations at that time, and my aunt, my dad’s sister, was staying with us. I’m not really sure why because mom and Aunt Millicent rarely get along under normal circumstances. But she was there, and the story goes that had she not been, my mother might have lost me. So mom, in a fit of what she calls pure stupidity, named me after her. I think she regrets it more than I do. And to get my father pissy, Mom started calling me Vinnie. I have no idea why, as she won’t tell me.”
He might have said something, but both of them were shoved back when the police, the real ones this time, arrived in the room. It was over, the murderer being killed almost as soon as it began.
The fake officer, Jimmy Bob Madison, turned and fired even as the first officer came through the opening. Jimmy Bob, known to the people he killed as Bob Bobby for some reason, joined those in the afterlife, and they gave him the same treatment he had given them. Mitch was glad when they took his ghost with them when they left the building. His screams were going through his already befuddled mind.