She just felt crazy. And a little scared.
What the hell was Joe going to say? She had called in the ghost hunters to save him.
“Sometimes,” Adam said lightly, “the gift seems to pass from one person to the next. After death,” he added very softly.
Chills shot down her spine.
“Then Joe might have…inherited Leslie’s gift, is that what you’re saying?”
He shrugged and sat down again, looking at her. “Maybe Joe. Maybe you. Maybe both of you. I don’t really know. There are no real rules that I know of, and there’s certainly no manual.”
Another chill shot through her. She shouldn’t have called this man. Everything he said was just upsetting her more, not to mention how upset Joe was going to be with her.
As if he’d read her mind, Adam said, “Don’t worry, please. I really am friendly with Joe Connolly. He’s not going to think it’s all that strange to see me. I’ll have to call in a few more people, though.”
“Ghost hunters?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Don’t worry. Joe is already acquainted with a few my ‘ghost hunters,’ as you call them. He likes Brent and Nikki, and so will you.”
“I met them. He’s Native American, right?”
“Half.” He laughed. “The other half is Irish. He’ll fit right in at O’Malley’s.”
She didn’t know if he was teasing or not. “I don’t think Joe is going to like any of this at all,” she said.
“I hope you’re wrong, but either way, he needs it,” Adam said firmly.
Her stomach had been fluttering, but now, as he looked at her, she was satisfied that she had done the only thing she could have. And that it was the right thing.
“We do have to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
His expression was grave, and she suddenly wondered if she was in any personal danger.
Maybe she should have just stayed the hell out of it.
No. She couldn’t have. She cared too much about Joe for that. But she was afraid, she realized.
She wasn’t a Raven, though, so shouldn’t that mean she was safe, if they were right and the Poe Killer really was going after members of the society, not just trying to cover his tracks? But Lori Star hadn’t been a Raven, either. She had simply been a young woman who had connected herself to the case because she’d experienced something strange and told her story.
Of course, Gen thought, as a shudder rippled through her, much the same could be said of her. She’d chosen to connect herself to the case, too.
There were certainly no obvious similarities between Marie Rogers’ death in the eighteen-forties and the situation Joe found when he reached New Jersey.
He met Raif and Tom first, and they briefed him as they arrived at the mortuary, where the body had already been taken.
“The corpse was dragged out of the river about an hour and a half before I spoke to you,” Raif said.
“She’s been in the water some time,” Tom told him.
“From what I’ve heard, she isn’t very pretty,” Raif said.
“Water really does a number on a body. Even after only a few days,” Tom said.
Joe knew that already. “Cause of death?” he asked.
“Looks like strangulation,” Raif told him. “Though they won’t know for sure until they finish the autopsy. We should be just in time for it to start. They’re rushing it, just in case there’s a connection to the Bigelow case,” he explained.
“Thanks for letting me in on this,” Joe said. “Any trouble with the Jersey boys? Over me, I mean?”
“No. Vic says you’ve worked with him before,” Joe told him.
Vic? It had to be Victor Nelson. He would be about fifty now, and he had apparently moved from Vice to Murder. Years ago, Joe had been hired to find a missing teenager. She’d been living in a crack house in Jersey City. When he’d found the girl, he’d helped the cops—including Victor Nelson—close down the house, and as a bonus, they’d broken up a gun ring that had been based there, too.
Victor Nelson greeted Joe and the others civilly inside one of the autopsy rooms. The doctor on duty was a man named Ben Sears. He nodded in acknowledgment as they came in, then got started.
Lori Star’s skin was mottled, discolored, and her flesh gnawed. Fish and river creatures had already been busy, mostly on her extremities.
“You couldn’t see the bruises on her throat when she was wet,” Victor said. He was a gruff man, a good, steady cop. His looked a little green around the gills, though, and Joe thought it was good to see that, even after all these years, the autopsy of a murder victim still bothered him.
The coroner explained that the bruises had appeared as the skin had dried out.
They were deep blue and black, forming a horrible necklace around the woman’s throat, just like in Joe’s dreams. Except that in his dreams…
They had been around Genevieve’s throat.
He swallowed hard as he felt bile rise in the back of his throat. He’d been to too many autopsies to get sick at one now. But if he were ever going to…