Ghost Hunter

Chapter 34

ORMOND RIPLEY FROZE THE VIDEO FRAME. "RECOGNIZE him?"

"His name is Palmer Frazier." Cooper studied the image on the screen. "This just turned into an even bigger problem than I thought it was."

Ripley set the video in motion again.

The recording showed Frazier walking swiftly down a hallway in a back-of-the-house section of the nightclub. He was dressed in the black-and-white uniforms worn by the members of the food-and-beverage staff. One of his pockets was stuffed with what appeared to be small cocktail napkins. A cluster of plastic swizzle sticks stuck out of another pocket.

"I found one of those swizzle sticks at the scene," Cooper said. "He must have dropped it and never realized it."

"Probably got pretty excited when he started rezzing blue light," Ripley said.

Frazier was obviously in a hurry. When he reached the door of the janitorial storage room, he opened it quickly and disappeared inside.

"I've been through this video from start to finish," Ripley said. "At no point does Frazier come back out of that storage room. And there is no video of him leaving the casino through the front entrance that night. He just disappears."

Cooper rechecked the date stamp on the video. "That was the night he tried to kill Bertha Newell. He must have been here at the casino when he somehow learned that Newell had become a problem that had to be dealt with immediately. Maybe Griggs called him. In any event, he probably knew that he was going to have to kill someone."

"Realizing there was an outside chance that he might someday need an alibi, he slipped out through my little hole-in-the-wall down in the basement." Ripley lounged back in his executive chair and steepled his fingers. "He no doubt planned to return the same way. If anyone questioned him later, he could say he was here at work the whole time."

"But he wasn't able to return because he melted amber creating the massive blue ghost vortex that he used to trap Newell in the catacombs."

"He would have plunged into a bad afterburn," Ripley concluded. "There would have been no time to come back here and act normal for a couple of hours. He had to go somewhere to crash."

"But first he would have wanted a woman," Cooper said softly.

Ripley tapped his fingertips together. "He would have wanted one very, very badly."

"The hooker who was found dead three blocks from Ruin Lane the next morning." Cooper walked slowly across the room, thinking. "The papers said it was a chant overdose. But the woman's roommate told the reporters that it looked like her friend had been roughed up by her last client. She called it murder."

"She may have been right." Ripley leaned forward and checked a printout. "According to my human resources department, Palmer Frazier, aka Jake Monroe, was hired three months ago. Been a model employee."

"Got a hunch he'd been planning to set you up for that raid for a long time," Cooper said.

"Question is, why?"

"He's a hunter who can work blue ghost light." Cooper shrugged. "They tend to be long-range planners."

"Yeah, I've heard that. The plan seems to have gone along very smoothly until you arrived on the scene. You have screwed things up for him since you hit town."

"Not me." Cooper headed for the door. "I think he was setting me up, too, which is kind of embarrassing for a Guild boss to have to admit."

"If you weren't the one messing with his plan, who was?"

Cooper paused, his hand on the doorknob. "My fiancée." He smiled slightly. "He made the mistake of underestimating her right from the start."

"Fiancée? Didn't know you were still engaged. Thought the wedding had been called off."

"Just postponed."

"Yeah? Well, when you set a new date, be sure to send me an invitation."

"I'll do that."