Ghost Story

Chapter Nineteen

I stood there for several minutes, doing nothing. Not even breathing.

Doing nothing is difficult. Once you aren’t busy, your head starts chewing things over. Dark, bleak thoughts appear. You start to think about what your life means. If you’re a ghost, you start to think about what your death means.

Murphy was being slowly devoured from within by a guilty conscience. I had known her a long time. I knew how she thought. I knew what she held dear. I knew what it looked like when she was in pain. I had no doubt that I made the right call on that one.

But I also knew that she was a woman who wouldn’t kill another human, even if he were over-the-hill-and-around-the-bend crazy, unless it was absolutely necessary. No killing is easy for anyone of conscience—but Murphy had been facing that demon for a long time. Granted, she’d been hurt by my death (and let me tell you how furiously frustrated it made me that I was powerless to have changed that). But why would her conscience start catching up to her now? Why develop a sudden case of the damsels when I’d asked her to get more information from her exhusband? Brick walls didn’t stop the woman when she had a mind to walk somewhere.

I noticed something, too, when we had been talking about the shot that had killed me and the shooter’s location, and gathering more information about potential assassins. Murphy hadn’t said much—but she’d not said a whole hell of a lot more.

She had never, not once, mentioned Kincaid.

Kincaid was a partially inhuman mercenary who worked for the scariest little girl on God’s green earth. He was centuries old and he was a phenomenon in a fight. He had somehow overcome the negative aspects of the human nervous system, at least as it applied to firing a weapon under pressure. I’d never seen him miss. Not once.

And it was he who had told me that if he wanted to kill me, he’d do it from at least half a mile away, with a heavy-duty rifle round.

Murphy knew as well as I did that the opinion of an assassin with centuries of experience would be invaluable in the investigation. Initially, I hadn’t suggested it, because Murph had kinda been dating the guy for a while, and seemed to care for him. So it seemed more appropriate to let her bring it up.

But she hadn’t.

She’d never mentioned him at all.

She’d run the meeting too rapidly, and was ready to fight with me over something, anything. The entire argument about Fitz and his crew had been a smoke screen.

The only question was for whose benefit it had been. Mine, so that a possibly crazy ghost wouldn’t go storming off for vengeance of some kind? Or had it been a veil of fog for her own benefit, because she couldn’t reconcile her view of Kincaid with that of the faceless person who had killed me?

That felt right. That she knew it in her heart and, without realizing it, was frantically scrambling to find a less painful truth with her head.

My reasoning was based on my knowledge of human nature and of Murphy’s personality, and on my intuition—but I’d spent a lifetime trusting my instincts.

I thought they were probably right.

I played through the possibilities in my head. I imagined Murphy, distraught and falling to pieces on the inside, in the days after my murder. We never got to find out if we’d be anything together. We’d missed it by moments. I knew that when there had been enough time for her rage to abate, the sorrow would begin to pile up. I imagined her in the next month or so, no longer a cop, her world in shambles.

Word of my death would have gotten around fast—not only among the wizards of the White Council, but among the remaining vampire Court, over the Paranet, and from there to the rest of the supernatural world.

Kincaid probably heard about it within a day or two. As soon as someone filed a report about me, the Archive, the supernatural recorder of all written knowledge that dwelled within a child named Ivy, would have known. And I was probably one of the only people in the world she thought of as a friend. She was what? Twelve? Thirteen?

News of my death would shatter Ivy.

Kincaid would, I think, have gone to Murphy to offer what comfort he could. Not the hot-chocolate-and-fluffy-robe brand of comfort. He was more likely to bring bottles of whiskey and a sex-music CD.

Especially if he was already right here in town, a dark, nasty part of me whispered in my head.

I imagined Murphy taking shelter where she could and bidding him farewell when he left—and then, over the next few weeks, slowly lining up facts and reaching conclusions, all the while repeating to herself that she was probably wrong. That it couldn’t be what it looked like.

Frustration. Pain. Denial. Yeah, that would be enough to draw rage out of anybody. Rage she would be carrying with her like a slowly growing tumor, becoming more and more of a burden. It was the sort of thing that might push someone to kill another person, even when maybe it wasn’t necessary.

That death would cause more guilt, more frustration, which would cause more rage, which would cause more violence, which would add to guilt again; a literal vicious cycle.

Murphy didn’t want to get shots from airport and train-station security cameras because she didn’t want to find out that the man she’d been sleeping with had killed one of her friends. When drawn close to that plausibility, she reacted in anger, pushing away the source of illumination about to fall on what she didn’t want to see.

She probably wasn’t even aware of the clash of needs in her head. When you’re grief-stricken, all kinds of irrational stuff flies around in there.

Detective work isn’t always about logic—not when you’re dealing with people. People are likely to do the most ridiculously illogical things for the most incomprehensible of reasons. I had no logic to aim at Kincaid. But the theory fit a whole lot of pieces together. If it was correct, it explained a lot.

It was only a theory. But it was enough to make me want to start digging for more evidence where I might not otherwise have looked.

But how? How was I going to start digging into Jared Kincaid, the Hellhound, the closest thing to a father Ivy had ever had—and do it without Murphy’s help? For that matter, I’d have to find some way to do it without her knowledge, and that seemed like something that would be more than a little slimy to do to a friend. Augh. Better, maybe, to focus on the immediate problems first.

I had to find Morty, whose plight had clearly been low on Murph’s priority list.

I had to help Fitz and the rest of his clueless, teenage pals.

And for all of it, I needed the help of someone I could trust.

I took a deep breath and nodded.

Then I walked until I had passed through an exterior wall of the Bright Future house, and set off to find my apprentice before the night got any deeper.