Ghost of a Chance

3 The Trail of the Ghost

Half an hour later, Lieutenant Frank Callahan’s car pulled up in front of a tidy Inner-Ring house just outside the Core. Unlike the Atwood mansion, this house was a tasteful Victorian, complete with a veranda. The only thing off-putting about the house was the number of police cars clogging the street in front of it. The coroner’s van was parked in the driveway, and half a dozen officers milled about outside. Alex could only imagine the mess they had already made of the crime scene.

“Okay,” Alex said, taking in the scene. “We’re here; are you going to tell me what this is about?”

He turned to Callahan and found the big man lighting a cigarette. He seemed cagey, like he didn’t actually want to tell Alex why he’d dragged him across the city after dark. Callahan was the quintessential police detective, big, square-jawed, and good at his job. Like most cops, he also actively disliked private detectives, so the fact that he came to Alex at all meant something important was going on.

“This is the home of David and Anne Watson,” Callahan said at last. “Earlier tonight, Anne called the police because her husband had locked himself in his study and wouldn’t answer her when she went to get him for dinner. When the responding officers got here, Anne had crawled through the vent duct from an adjoining room and found David dead.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “Two stab wounds to the chest?”

Callahan looked surprised and then a mask of disgust covered his face. “Does everybody read that rag?” he muttered. “Don’t tell me you believe it was a ghost?”

Alex laughed at that.

“Of course not, Lieutenant,” he said. “Everyone knows that ghosts strangle their victims.”

Callahan blinked as if he didn’t know whether or not to believe Alex, then Alex smiled.

“Funny,” he said without any trace of humor in his voice. “The guys who caught this case think it’s a copycat,” he went on. “They think the wife killed her husband and tried to pass it off as the ghost.”

“Any servants?” Alex asked, his mind shifting into gear.

“Just a maid,” Callahan said, “but she had the night off.” He puffed on his cigarette.

“Can I have one of those?” Alex asked.

The lieutenant rolled his eyes and held out his pack so Alex could extract one.

“You need a real job, Lockerby,” he said, flipping open his lighter. “I know you could pass the detective exam in your sleep; why don’t you come work for me?”

Alex lit his cigarette and sat back. He was about to say something sarcastic, but he stopped himself. Callahan hated private dicks and he didn’t much care for Alex personally, but the fact that he’d offered Alex a job was a sign of his respect for Alex’s skills.

It was flattering, and Alex resisted the urge to make a smart remark. He owed Callahan that.

“You wouldn’t want me working for you, Callahan,” he said at last. “I break too many rules. Besides, the official policy of the department is that magic doesn’t have any practical application in law enforcement.”

“We both know that’s crap,” Callahan said.

Alex nodded at that and took another drag on his cigarette. He’d been economizing so long that two in one day felt like luxury.

“So the wife was alone in the house,” Alex said, getting back to the murder. “Why do you think she killed her husband?”

“Not me,” Callahan said with a sour look. “It’s not my case. Third division caught it.”

Alex had never been too clear about how the police department allocated their resources. He knew that all the detectives for Manhattan worked out of the Central Office of Police near the park, but there were six different divisions. Callahan was the lieutenant over division five.

“It’s not your case,” Alex said, a light finally going off in his head. “That’s why we’re sitting here in your car instead of going inside.”

Callahan grimaced and nodded.

“But you think the wife is innocent and that’s why I’m here,” Ales went on. “So is she an old girlfriend or something?”

The lieutenant’s gaze narrowed.

“Current girlfriend?” Alex pressed with a raised eyebrow.

“You’re right,” Callahan said. “I wouldn’t like you working for me. I don’t know Mrs. Watson at all.”

“Then why do you care?”

“Listen, Lockerby,” Callahan said, jabbing his finger at Alex and sending ash flying from his cigarette. “Someone is killing people. This makes four and we’ve got nothing to go on. Nothing. That’s why you’re here. Maybe you can find something we missed. Maybe whoever is doing this is using magic to kill these people. Either way, that’s why we need you.”

Alex nodded, feeling a bit embarrassed. He tended to have the same opinion of cops that they had of him and he regularly forgot that some of them were just as driven and dedicated as he was.

“So the wife is my in,” Alex said. “Has she been arrested yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Callahan said, tossing the stub of his cigarette out the window. “They were still questioning her when I left to get you.”

As if on cue, someone stepped up to Alex’s side of the car.

“One of my boys said they saw you parked out here, Callahan,” the newcomer said. He was short and stocky with thinning hair and a crooked nose. “What are you doing back?”

“You still think the wife did this?” Callahan said, without answering the question.

“You bet,” the man said. “She obviously read that article in the Sun and used it as cover to kill her husband.”

“Why do you say that?” Alex asked.

The man turned his gaze to Alex. He had a round face and a crooked smile to match his nose. He wasn’t large, but he had an imposing sort of air about him.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.

“Lieutenant Detweiler,” Callahan said. “This is Alex Lockerby. Alex, Lieutenant James Detweiler, Third Division.”

“I’ve seen you around the Central Office,” Detweiler said. “You’re a friend of Callahan’s boy, Danny.”

Alex nodded.

“You’ve got a good eye, Lieutenant. So, what makes you think the wife did it?”

Detweiler clearly wasn’t used to being put on the spot. He held Alex’s gaze for a long moment as if considering whether or not he could safely reveal his thought processes.

“Simple,” he said. “There’s a copy of today’s Midnight Sun in the kitchen trash,” he ticked that off on his finger. “Second, the wife is almost fifteen years younger than her husband.”

“So?” Alex asked.

“She obviously married him for his money.”

“But why kill him?”

“He was only sixty,” Detweiler said. “He might have lived another twenty years. She obviously got tired of waiting.”

“Does she have a man on the side?” Alex asked.

“Who cares?” Detweiler said.

“Well, Lieutenant,” Alex said with a smile. “If there’s no boyfriend then why bump off the husband? Was he blowing through their money? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he threaten to cut her out of the will?”

Detweiler glared at Alex.

“Let me clarify,” he said. “When I said, who cares, what I meant was, why do you care?”

Alex pulled one of his business cards out of his shirt pocket hand handed it over. Detweiler’s face soured when he read it.

“Mrs. Watson asked the Lieutenant here to find her someone to investigate her husband’s death,” Alex said with the biggest smile he could manage. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to see my client now.”

Detweiler threw the card back in Alex’s lap and stormed away. Callahan chuckled as he and Alex both got out of the car.

“You’re right, Lockerby,” he said. “Right now I’m really glad you don’t work for me.”

Anne Watson sat at her kitchen table rubbing her hands together absently. She was in her mid-thirties but looked even younger with high cheekbones, a perky nose, and full lips. Chestnut brown hair flowed down over her shoulders and framed her face perfectly. Alex thought she would have looked quite pretty had her makeup not run down her face from crying — and if her shirt weren’t stained with blood.

In addition to the blood, her clothes were grimy and dirty. Alex remembered Callahan saying she’d crawled through a vent to get into the locked room where her husband’s body had been found.

“Mrs. Watson?” Alex said, sitting down at the table opposite her. “My name is Alex Lockerby.”

“I’ve answered your questions,” she said, her voice ragged and weary. “I want to call my lawyer now.”

“I’m not a policeman,” Alex said, handing her his card. “You asked a Lieutenant Callahan to find someone to help you find out who killed your husband. He sent me.”

Her hands stated trembling as Alex spoke. She was holding in so much and Alex represented a lifeline. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her face.

“Can you really help me, Mr. Lockerby?” she asked, struggling to stay in control.

Alex put on his most reassuring smile and nodded.

“Call me Alex, and I do this kind of thing all the time,” he said. “But I’m going to need something from you first.”

“Of course,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ll get my handbag.”

“No,” Alex said with a genuine smile this time. “Let me look around first, and make sure I can help.”

She looked confused then sat back down. “What do you need from me then?”

“Permission,” Alex said. “The police are pretty much done, but they won’t let me look around unless you insist.”

She met his eyes, searching them for signs of deception. Alex recognized the look: she wanted to believe him, to believe in him, but so much had happened in the last few hours she simply didn’t know what to believe.

“Let me look around, Mrs. Watson,” Alex began.

“Anne,” she said.

“Let me look around, Anne,” he amended. “If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you and you’ll owe me nothing. If I think I can help, I’ll tell you what the next step is, and we can go from there.”

She closed her eyes and after a minute, she nodded. Alex pulled out his notebook and pen and passed them across the table.

“Write a note that says I can look around as much as I want,” he said.

She flipped to a blank page and began writing.

“What do I do if they arrest me?” she asked, clearly getting to the topic she’d been avoiding.

“Don’t worry about that,” Alex said. “Do you have a lawyer?”

She passed the book and pen back.

“I’ve never needed one,” she said, “but James did.”

“Call him,” Alex said. “Tell him to get over here right away. He’ll make sure you’re okay if the cops decide to arrest you.”

At the word ‘arrest’ Anne’s hands started shaking again, but she nodded.

“It’s going to be all right,” Alex said, putting his hand on hers. “I’ll go look around; you sit tight.”

David Watson’s body had already been taken away by the time the police let Alex into the room where he’d been killed. It was a study that would have made Iggy proud. Shelves lined one wall, filled with books of every description. A glass cabinet on the opposite wall held curios and knick-knacks of all kinds. A polished oak desk stood in front of a large window, loaded down with papers and files, and a green carpet covered the wood floor. In the center of the carpet an oddly shaped red stain showed where the dead man’s body had laid.

A brass vent cover about a foot high and two feet wide lay on the carpet as well. Callahan said that Anne claimed to have gotten into the room by crawling through a vent. A smear of dirt on the wood floor under the glass case revealed the opening. Alex knelt down and looked through the small duct. It ran to the next room, under the glass case, and was about three feet long.

Alex set down his kit, a leather doctor’s valise, and opened it. Inside were his tools for investigation and the various special papers and pens he might need to make runes. Reaching in, he withdrew an egg-shaped, brass lantern with glass lenses on each of its four sides. Three of the lenses were covered with a leather cap, blocking them off.

Alex set down the lantern and withdrew a round oil reservoir with a cotton wick sticking out of the top from his kit. This one had the word Ghostlight stamped into a metal plate on its curved side. Inside was a special mixture of alchemical oils and some ingredients Alex had made magical with runes. He opened the lantern, revealing runes etched into the metal on each side. The burner clipped into a round slot in the bottom of the lamp and Alex fixed it in place.

Reaching into his kit again, Alex took out what looked like an oversized leather eye patch with a short telescope mounted into it. The telescope had several dials, like the focus adjustments on a camera lens, and four colored lenses could be moved into the field of view. Once in place over his eye, the oculus would allow him to see things revealed in the lantern’s light. With the ghostlight burner in place, the lantern would reveal magical residue. If anything magical happened in David Watson’s study, the ghostlight would show it.

Alex took a paper matchbook from his pocket to light the lamp.

“What did she say?” Callahan’s voice interrupted him.

Alex turned to find the lieutenant leaning against the door frame.

“She’s scared,” Alex said, closing up his kit bag.

“I know that,” Callahan said. “What did she say about her husband?”

“I didn’t ask,” Alex replied. Iggy taught him never to question a suspect until he’d first looked at the scene.

People lie, he’d say. Evidence never does.

“You didn’t ask her if she killed him?”

Alex chuckled at that. As if Anne would have admitted it if she had murdered her husband.

“I didn’t need to ask her,” Alex said. “She didn’t do it.”

Callahan laughed at that.

“How do you figure?” he asked. “The husband didn’t have any defensive wounds on his body, just the two stab wounds, one on either side of his chest.”

“You’re saying he knew his attacker,” Alex said. “But that doesn’t mean it was the wife.”

“It damn well makes her a suspect,’ he said. “What makes you think she’s innocent?”

“Did you see the blood on her clothes?”

Callahan nodded.

“Yes, what about it?”

“According to her story she crawled in through there and found her husband already dead,” Alex said, pointing to the open vent.

“She could have killed him first,” Callahan pointed out, “Then gone around and crawled in to make her story look believable.”

“You’re right,” Alex admitted. “She could have done that, but if she did, the blood on her clothes would be under the dirt from the vent. It wasn’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“Some of the grime scraped off her shirt when she was sitting at the table,” Alex said. “The shirt beneath didn’t have bloodstains.”

Callahan looked as if he wanted to protest, but stopped and nodded.

“If she’d killed him first, she’d have gotten blood somewhere,” he sighed. “Stabbing someone is messy.”

“You seem disappointed,” Alex said. “I was under the impression you didn’t think she did it.”

“I asked her and she said she didn’t kill him,” Callahan said. “I believed her but it’s always nice to have it confirmed.”

“You probably ought to tell Detweiler,” Alex said. “I’ve got work to do here.”

“Right,” the lieutenant said, turning to go. “It’s not like he’ll believe me, but I’ll tell him anyway.”

Alex waited until Callahan’s footsteps faded away, then took a matchbook from his pocket and lit his lamp. A greenish light began to emanate from the uncovered lens, glowing brighter as the wick began to siphon oil from the little reservoir.

Strapping the oculus over his right eye, Alex closed his left and began shining the lantern around the room. Several of the objects in the glass case had magical residue, signs that at one time they had been enchanted. None of them glowed brightly though, so whether they had been made magical by a sorcerer or with a spent rune, none of the magic was recent.

Behind the desk was a small liquor cabinet. Several of the bottles glowed, but they were brands which Alex knew contained alchemical ingredients. Other than that, there wasn’t any magic in the room.

Satisfied that Mr. Watson hadn’t been killed by magic, Alex blew out the ghostlight burner and returned it to his kit, replacing it with one labeled Silverlight.

This time when he lit the lamp, a purplish-white light shone out from it. Alex took the caps off the other lenses in the lantern and placed it on the desk. The light shone all around the room and everywhere it touched, things began to glow. Fingerprints stood out on the shelves and the glass of the cases. Ink stains covered the top of the desk where it had been spilled or splashed over the years. A stain on the carpet revealed where a drink must have been spilled and the dark stain of Mr. Watson’s blood was clearly visible.

Alex spent the next hour examining every glowing site in the room, but came away with nothing. Every fingerprint and stain seemed to have a reason for being where it was.

Defeated, he put out the light and returned his lantern and oculus to his kit. He was sure that Watson hadn’t killed himself but if anyone else had been in the room with him, Alex couldn’t find any evidence of it.

“Done?” Callahan’s voice cut through the static in Alex’s mind. He was sitting in a chair in the hall and Alex found it disturbing that he had no idea how long the big Lieutenant had been there.

Alex nodded.

“Find anything?”

“Just that Mr. Watson made his money in land,” Alex said, pointing to one of the glass cases with a display of surveying equipment, land maps, and pictures of enormous, beautiful homes.

“So, nothing?” Callahan said, coming into the room.

“Not nothing,” Alex insisted, packing up his kit. “You said it yourself, he had no defensive wounds, so Watson clearly knew his attacker.”

“Or someone surprised him,” Callahan countered.

“And the wife didn’t hear anything?” Alex said. “She was in the house the whole time.”

Callahan thought about that for a moment, but didn’t seem willing to concede the point.

“Speaking of Anne,” Alex said. “I should probably let her know what I’ve found.”

“Her lawyer got here about an hour ago,” Callahan said. “He had her go to a hotel for the night.”

“So Detweiler didn’t have her arrested?”

“No,” Detweiler’s voice came from beyond the door. A moment later he sidled around and into the room. “Her lawyer is a real son-of-a-bitch. Said if I arrested her on such thin evidence, she’d sue for police harassment.”

“He’s right,” Alex said. “Didn’t you check out the blood on her clothes?”

“Yeah,” Detweiler sneered. “Callahan told me about your little theory. What if she stabbed her husband, then crawled through the vent, then held her husband’s body as a show for the officers?”

Alex shrugged, admitting that Detweiler’s theory was possible.

“Did you take her blouse as evidence?” he asked.

“Of course we did,” Detweiler said, irritation in his voice. “You seem to think we’re idiots.”

“Did you turn the shirt inside out and check it?” Alex asked.

Detweiler’s irritation shifted to confusion.

“Why?”

“Because,” Callahan interjected. “If she got any blood on the blouse before it got dirty, it would have soaked through to the inside.”

Detweiler thought about that and shrugged.

“We’ll look into it,” he said. “Since you don’t like the wife for this, Lockerby, why don’t you tell me who you think did kill Mr. Watson.”

Alex glanced at Callahan but the Lieutenant just shrugged.

“I think a ghost killed David Watson,” Alex said with a grin.

Detweiler’s face screwed up in anger but before he could explode, Alex hurried on.

“One from his past.”

Callahan hid a smile behind his hand and Detweiler growled.

“Consider the way he was killed,” Alex explained. “Stabbing is an up close and personal way to kill. Intimate even. Whoever did this wanted Watson to know who it was that killed him, to look into his eyes.”

“That could be anybody,” Detweiler said.

“Not really,” Alex said. “How many people have genuine enemies? Ones who want them dead badly enough to do something about it? Mr. Watson is the fourth victim of this killer; whoever is doing it is trying to make a point.”

“What point?” Detweiler asked.

“No idea,” Alex admitted. “But I suspect if you dig into James Watson’s life, and the lives of the ghost’s other victims, you’ll find a connection. That will give you your killer.”

“Gee,” Detweiler said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We detectives never would have thought of that. Thanks, Lockerby.”

“You’re welcome, Lieutenant,” Alex said as sincerely as he could. “Glad I could help. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“You wait by your phone, Lockerby,” Detweiler said with a sneer. “We’ll be sure to call you.”

He turned and left the room. Alex looked at Callahan and the big lieutenant was shaking his head and chuckling to himself.

“What?” Alex asked.

“Nothing,” he said innocently. “I’m just really glad you don’t work for me.”