“You might not be responsible for the prime ghoul, but there is something weird going on with you, and as soon as I deal with the immediate threat, rest assured that I intend to find out what.” Then she stalked out of my office.

Chapter 17

It was hard to concentrate on searching obituary columns after Briar left. It may have been the fact my pulse was still irregular from having a crossbow thrust in my face not once, but twice, getting accused of murder, learning that Nekros had ghouls, or the fact I had attracted the attention of an MCIB agent.

I jumped at the sound of my phone, my heart leaping to my throat. Rianna, it’s just Rianna. But despite the fact I knew it was her—she was the only person set to Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl”—I couldn’t stop my hand from trembling as I dug the phone from my purse.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound natural. I failed. My voice came out raw, hoarse, as if I’d been screaming.

If Rianna noticed, she didn’t mention it. “So get this,” she said over the background sound of a crowd. “The bartender remembers James Kingly. Apparently he’d once been a regular at Delaney’s, but hadn’t been around much of late. The bartender said that two weeks ago, Tuesday night was slow and since Kingly was sitting at the bar, they’d had more than just a passing conversation. Well, about an hour after he arrived, Kingly stopped midsentence and without explanation—or paying—excused himself. The bartender assumed he was headed to the john, until Kingly walked out the front door. The bartender followed, intending to make Kingly pay for the beers. When he got outside, he found Kingly pointing his key fob at each car he passed, as if he had no idea which was his.”

Well, that was certainly odd. “Did the bartender mention how many drinks he’d served Kingly?”

“Yeah, Kingly was in the middle of his second when this happened.”

Which was exactly when his memory loss hit.

“Did the bartender say anything else?”

“Yeah, he said Kingly called the beer rat piss. He also wanted to know if I was going to pay for the drinks. We don’t have an expense account, do we?”

Right now we barely had next month’s rent, but I couldn’t expect her to pay for case expenses out of her own pocket, and we could always bill Mrs. Kingly—though if she demanded an itemized invoice, a charge for two beers wouldn’t look good.

“He already gave you the information you need, so unless you think he’s holding something back, forget the drinks. If he wants to collect on Kingly’s debt, he can contact Nina,” I said, but the question did bring into focus the fact that building a petty cash reserve was another thing on my list of things to do for the business—it was getting to be a pretty long list.

“Agreed,” Rianna said. “But now I’m not sure where to go from here. If we were super spies we’d just hack the city’s traffic cameras…” Rianna’s grin was all but audible, and I shook my head. Not that the smallest smile didn’t crawl to my own lips.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s on our résumé,” I said as I woke my computer. What did we know that could help us? What similarities were there between Kingly and Kirkwood? The suicides, of course. And the memory and weight loss. But what else?

It hit me. Their stomach contents. They’d both eaten very expensive cuisine shortly before death.

“Look for fancy restaurants in the area,” I said, and filled her in on my reasoning.

“Not a bad idea,” she said. The background noise dimmed, as if she’d stepped out of the pub. “So how are things going with your searches?”

“Actually—” I was about to tell her about Briar’s visit when my eyes stumbled over the very name I’d been searching for but had apparently been too preoccupied to notice.

Daniel Walters, age eighteen, was described as an all-star high school football champ who left this world too early. It mentioned the names of his parents and younger sister, and—most important for my purposes—mentioned the date and time of the graveside service to be held at Green Hill cemetery.

Pay dirt. The service had long passed, but now I knew exactly where to find the body.

“Al? Alex, you there?” Rianna called from the other side of the phone. I hadn’t been paying attention.

“Yeah, I’m here. But I’m going to close the firm early today—I’ll leave a note on the door with our numbers.”

“You found something?”

Yeah, I’d found the next link in the chain of suicides. Now to see if Daniel Walters started it or was another victim.

“You don’t remember jumping in front of a bus?” I asked the shade, my eyes fixed firmly on the marker where his headstone would be placed when it arrived. I’d made the mistake of looking at him when I’d first called the shade. Just thinking about the mangled body made me shiver. I’d never realized exactly how much damage being hit by a bus could do. No wonder the family opted for a graveside service, there certainly couldn’t have been a viewing. I’d seen morticians do some amazing work, especially when they added a couple complexion charms to the mix, but more than half this boy would have had to have been rebuilt, like Humpty Dumpty.

“I remember the tire inches from my face and then—” He stopped as the memory ended.

It was the answer I expected, but I’d had to ask anyway.

“What is the last thing you remember before seeing the tire?”

“Feeling like I’d caught the flu. I called Allison to cancel our study date. Then I went to bed early.”

“And what day was that?”

“Tuesday.”

I nodded. Kirkwood had seen him jump in front of the bus on Friday. Three days again. That fit with both Kirkwood and Kingly’s cases.

“Daniel, did you see anyone die on Tuesday?”

“No, not that day.”

I frowned. “You saw someone die another day? When?”

“Monday.”

That didn’t fit the pattern. Both Kingly and Kirkwood had seen a suicide on the day their memories stopped. Why did it take an extra day to affect Walters? Unless the timeline between suicide and memory loss was shortening with each case. I hadn’t thought about it before, but Kingly witnessed Kirkwood flambé himself only an hour or two before his memories stopped and he’d undergone a personality change. But Kirkwood had seen Walters play chicken with the bus during his lunch hour. It wasn’t until that night, sometime after he’d gone to bed, that his memories stopped. There was another thing too, Kirkwood had also mentioned feeling ill.

“Daniel, the death you witnessed, how did it happen?”

“A man walked onto the football field. He had a shotgun and coach yelled for us to go to the locker room, but the man turned the gun on himself, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

Another suicide.

I expected it, but I still cringed at the apathetic delivery from the shade. The other suicides: jumping in front of a bus, diving off a building, and even the incineration, could be suicides of opportunity, the public aspect coincidental. But a man walking onto a crowded field with a shotgun sounded like he’d gone out of his way to make sure there were witnesses.

So I had a witnessed suicide, lost time, a shade that regained awareness only in the last seconds, possibly after mortal death if the initial collision with the bus killed him before he was sucked into the wheel well. I’d have liked to know his stomach contents at time of death, but he wouldn’t know what he’d eaten during the time he had no memory. Which left only one important question left to prove a pattern and not just a coincidental fluke in two of the victims.

“Daniel, how much did you weigh?”

“Two ten,” the shade said without hesitation.

And now for the hard part—at least for my stomach, because now I had to try to guess the death weight of a kid who’d been rearranged by a bus.

The shade’s left arm was fairly intact, so I focused on that. A skinny forearm led down to a knobby wrist and hands with insubstantial skin that sank in hollow valleys between thin bones. His sticklike fingers were so thin they looked too long for his body. Yeah, no way had he weighed anywhere near two hundred pounds at the time of his death.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I shrill female voice yelled.

I whirled around in time to see a pretty girl of no more than eighteen drop her backpack and dash across the cemetery lawn.

Oh crap. I didn’t know if she was the sister mentioned in the obit or just a friend, but she didn’t need to see Daniel this way.

“Rest now,” I told the shade, pulling back my power, and shoving the thing too crushed and broken to look human back into its grave.

But not fast enough.

The girl’s scream cut through the stillness and she collapsed to her knees just outside my circle.

“That was…Was it…It was, wasn’t it? Oh my god. I knew, but—” Her words broke off, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

The shade was gone now, but she stared at the place he’d been as if his image was seared into that spot. I reclaimed what I could of my heat and released my hold on the grave, but I didn’t push back the different planes of reality—this was the second shade I’d raised today and I was going to pay for it. Wandering around blind wasn’t at the top of my priority list right now. Especially with a near hysterical girl just yards away.

“You were a friend?” I asked, kneeling down to her level. My circle still separated us, throwing a haze of blue between us that made the brilliant yellow of her soul look slightly green.

The girl nodded. “We were, I mean, I thought…” She scrubbed at the tears on her checks with the back of her hand. “Did you ask him why?”

I knew which “why” she wanted. She wanted to know why he’d killed himself. Suicides had always been my least favorite cases to work because whatever answer the shade gave was never enough for those who’d been left behind. This time though, this was even worse. Do I tell her it was murder? That he didn’t make the choice? I didn’t know. And I still hadn’t proven to the cops that they had a killer on the loose, so I avoided the question.