The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Read online

  Chapter 3

  After both Laura and John had left my office, the first thing I did was turn to the Internet to see what the media had written about Olivia's disappearance.

  There wasn't much, and little beyond what I'd already learned. A late night abduction. Interviews with all the neighbors had turned up nothing. The reporter for the Oregonian did highlight the car accident, Laura's death, and John and Olivia's recent relocation to Portland, putting a sympathetic spin on the article, but there were no leads I saw to pursue. It was sad, really. If she'd turned up dead, it would dominate the front page for days, but an abduction apparently only warranted a couple paragraphs and no real investigative journalism. Had abductions really become that common?

  It was one of the first questions I asked Alesha when she answered her phone, after I explained to her how John had hired me.

  "I don't know if I would use the word common," she replied. I heard her tapping on a keyboard, and the sound of men's laughter in the background. "Just not, you know, as newsworthy with all the stuff happening in the world. Who wants to read about a missing girl when there are girls in Europe getting their legs blown off by suicide bombers?"

  "Yikes," I said. "Nice image. Happy holidays to you, too."

  "Yeah, well, what's happy about it? If you ask me, there's way too much fake happiness going around this time of year. We need to keep it more real."

  "Ah. Let me guess. You're between boyfriends again?"

  "I'm not between anything. I'm taking a break from the dating scene."

  "What happened to Paul?"

  "Paul from Seattle? I haven't seen him in over—"

  "No, Paul the musician. The one you just brought over for Thanksgiving."

  "Oh, that Paul. I kicked him to the curb the next day. He was getting all needy on me."

  "Huh."

  "Huh? What do you mean, huh? Don't get that tone with me, not when you're still shacking up with a teenager."

  "Jak is not a teenager."

  "Yeah, well, you're not quite old enough to be her dad but pretty darn close. Plus your numbers are all wrong."

  "Numbers?"

  "Yeah, I've been learning a lot more about numerology lately. Your numbers aren't right for each other. If I add up the digits of her birthday and the digits of your birthday—"

  "Alesha—"

  "Yeah, yeah, okay. You called about the girl. The other girl. I'm bringing up her file now. You know, if you come back to the force, you could do this stuff yourself."

  I let the comment pass and listened to her clicking the keyboard. We'd been partners once, good ones despite our differences, and she'd been trying to get me to become a detective for the Portland Police Bureau again ever since I'd left. She didn't know about my unique problem. I'd wanted to tell her many times, but I could never find the right time. Or, if I was honest with myself, maybe I didn't really want to tell her. She was one of the last few links to my old life and the old me.

  There was also something else between us, the possibility of something more, maybe something really good, and it was a bridge neither of us had dared to cross even though we'd come close a couple of times.

  "Tim's actually working that case," she said.

  "Tim? Your partner?"

  "He's not my partner anymore. He's with Bud now. Bud Leopold? You remember him. They're on the Missing Persons Unit."

  "Wow," I said, "you're going through all kinds of breakups lately. How many partners have you gone through since I left?"

  "Shut up. Wasn't my call. I was actually starting to like him, in a lost puppy sort of way. He just decided after the Goodbye Killer stuff that he'd rather get off Homicide."

  "Who's your partner now?"

  "Don't have one. Chief Branson says he's fine with me working solo until he figures things out. Anyway, enough of this crap. I can touch bases with Tim, but there's not much in the file yet. It's pretty cold. Surveillance cameras in the area haven't turned up anything. He is looking into John Ray's background. Pretty standard stuff, when a child goes missing. You just talked to the guy, right? You think he might be a suspect?"

  "I don't think so," I said. This was one of those times when it would have been helpful if she knew a little bit about my more spiritual life. It was funny. She was the one into astrology, healing crystals, and séances with psychics, a weird mix with her tough-as-nails macho act, but I was the one who often lived the stuff. I would have liked to tell Alesha that I had a witness who'd watched Olivia get abducted, but explaining who that witness was would have been interesting. I did have to give the police a key piece of information, though, and I didn't know how other than to just do it. "Hey, can you tell Tim and Bud to do a little checking on a green van? I have some information that the person who took her was driving a green van."

  "Where did you hear this?"

  "Can't say. It's a … source."

  "Uh huh."

  "Look, can you just trust me? I have a source who puts a suspicious green van in the area at the time."

  "Make? Model?"

  "I wish I had more details, but that's it."

  She replied with a derisive snort, but I heard her typing something. While I waited, the door to my office opened and a homeless woman entered the room.

  That was my first impression, and it took me a second to recognize that the person inside the mess of blond hair—thick, ice-encrusted strands that hung over her face like Medusa's serpents—was my girlfriend. Even when I saw that it was Jak, it took me a few seconds to process it.

  When she'd left my house that morning, she'd looked like a million bucks in a navy-blue blazer and matching skirt, legs to die for wrapped in shiny black nylons, and a leather satchel tucked under her arm. Now she wore a thick brown coat with a wooly fur collar that might have been handmade in an Eskimo village and baggy camo pants with denim patches on the knees, the whole outfit coated with snowflakes. Underneath, there must have been five or six layers of other clothes, because the petite thing with the knockout figure was lost in a puffy marshmallow body. She made me think of one of those sumo wrestler suits that people put on so they can bang into one another.

  "Hey there, handsome," Jak said. She did a little pirouette, the bulkiness nearly bringing her down, and laughed. "What do you think of my new outfit? Picked it up at Nordies this afternoon."

  Alesha, no longer pecking at the keys, said, "I'm hearing a high-pitched squeak on your side that sounds familiar. That the teenager?"

  Jak raised her eyebrows and nodded toward the phone. "Who's that? Wait, let me guess. Detective Big, Black, and Grumpy?"

  "It is," I said, answering them both. It was easier than objecting to their descriptions of each other.

  "Figures," Alesha said. "Ask her how school was today."

  "Well," Jak said, blowing a kiss in my direction. "Send her my love. That girl needs all the love she can get."

  "I heard that," Alesha said. "Flip her the bird for me. Look, I gotta go. I'll see if we can put out a BOLO on the van, but I'm not sure your anonymous source will be enough."

  "Just let me know if you hear anything," I said.

  She hung up before I'd even finished. Jak slid into one of the chairs, grinning like a fool. I saw that she'd even blackened out a few of her teeth. Patch, who'd picked out Jak as one of the few people he actually liked, stayed put rather than jumping into her lap like usual. I didn't blame him.

  "I assume there's some kind of explanation?" I said.

  "I'm doing a piece on the homeless," she explained. "It's a big issue in Portland."

  "What happened to the story you were doing on women working in the tech industry? You know, sexual harassment, glass ceiling, all that stuff."

  "Backburnered for now. When it snowed, I knew I needed to work on this one. I want to see how the homeless get through bad weather like this. Beauty of my blog. I can turn on a whim and my readers go with me."

  "Ah. Well, kudos for method acting. You even smell the part."

  "Thank you. Ro
lled around in a dumpster behind a grocery store."

  "Yikes."

  "Aww, come on, I was thinking of bottling this fragrance and selling it on Etsy. How's the headache? Still bad?"

  "Even worse."

  "Sorry to hear that. You want me to help you out with that? I know something I can do that will relieve a lot of the stress."

  "Hmm. I hope you're not offended when I say the thought of you touching me with those hands is not all that appealing at the present time."

  "Oh, I wasn't going to use my hands." She flashed those blackened teeth at me again.

  "Yikes again."

  "Okay, not in the mood," she said. "Can't see why, though. What guy doesn't have a fantasy that involves a bag lady? I'll make it up to you later, promise. Why did Alesha call this time?"

  "Actually, I called her."

  I explained about Olivia Ray, how John had hired me, and everything I knew so far—including everything I'd learned from Laura. It was a relief not to have to hold things back, as I did with Alesha. As I did with all other living people. When I'd told Jak about my secret during the Goodbye Killer case, I'd immediately worried I'd made a mistake, that it would put a weight on our relationship that would eventually sink it, but I'd never had cause to regret the decision. I needed somebody to talk to about my crazy life, somebody other than my mother, who was neither among the living nor much of a listener.

  Besides, Mom was away on a cruise in the Caribbean with a bunch of other deceased older women. Apparently it was a popular thing to do when cruises had empty cabins. I wasn't complaining. For once, she wasn't stopping by unexpectedly at the most inopportune times.

  The problem with Jak, as much as I loved her, was that I'd put her hugely at risk simply by being close to me, a risk that had nearly gotten her killed and put her in a catatonic state for months. She had recovered, which she reminded me about every time we argued, but it didn't alleviate the guilt—guilt that had constantly made me feel like she might be better off without me.

  "Poor kid," Jak said, when I'd finished. "I bet she's terrified beyond belief. You going there now?"

  "Shortly, yes."

  "You want me to go with?"

  I raised my eyebrows, looking her up and down. The ice in her hair was already melting, dripping onto her camo pants.

  "Yeah," she said, "probably not in my present condition. I was going to go back out anyway. I can ask around, you know? See if any of the homeless have seen anything."

  "I don't like the idea of you wandering around at night alone, especially in this weather."

  "You don't like the idea of me doing anything alone. But I can handle myself. You know that."

  "I know you think you can handle yourself. You've never lacked for confidence."

  "You know how many scrapes I've gotten into that I've gotten myself out of?"

  "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You have a knack for putting yourself in danger."

  "I never put myself in a situation I can't handle."

  "Uh huh. What if you have another one of your … episodes?"

  She pursed her lips and regarded me the way she might have regarded a turd on the sidewalk. I knew it was punching low, bringing up the PTSD-type freeze-ups she'd suffered since the Goodbye Killer business, but I was worried about her, and she'd refused to seek help. Part of me didn't blame her, of course. I'd never been one to unload my problems on a therapist. What would I even tell them that wouldn't buy me a one-way ticket to psychiatric facility? Been there, done that. Hard to be angry at Jak for being reluctant for the same reason.

  Except it wasn't the only reason and she knew it. What if she froze up at the worst possible time? In the middle of traffic? Walking along a rooftop? When somebody was pointing a gun at her?

  "Really?" she said. "You're going there? I haven't had one of those in weeks."

  "Still," I said.

  "Still what? I can't just sit at home, Myron. I've got to live my life. I've got stuff to do."

  "Somehow I think the homeless problem will be around in a month or two."

  "Okay, now you're just being an asswipe."

  "Jak, come on—"

  "No, no, no. I get it. My work's not really important. It's just a stupid blog, anyway."

  "I never said—"

  "I mean, if I was a badass cop like Alesha, you wouldn't worry at all. It's not like she's ever had an episode, right? Not her. She's too tough for that shit. And her work, it's important."

  "Jak, what are you talking about? What does Alesha have to do with anything?"

  "Oh, I think you know."

  "No, I don't."

  She glared at me a little longer, then shook her head and stood. She headed for the door, stopped halfway there, and turned around to deliver a parting shot.

  "That's the problem with you, Myron," she said. "You have no trouble seeing ghosts, but you have a hell of a time seeing the people right in front of you."

  Chapter 4

  The drive to the Glenfair neighborhood would usually take about fifteen minutes from my office, but in the snow and in the dark, it took more like an hour. The problem wasn't me. I'd had enough advanced driver training in my cop days that I was fine driving in all conditions, even in my little underpowered Prius. The problem was all the other drivers, who not only didn't have special instruction, they also had little experience period driving in the snow. Plus most of them thought they were much better drivers than they were, which made them especially dangerous.

  I'd thought about going after Jak when she left in a huff, but I knew from experience that I'd only make things worse if I didn't let her calm down first.

  By the time I actually made it out of the office, an inch of snow blanketed the roads. It may have only been an inch, but it was the first inch, and the slush caused a couple of fender benders that required me to veer off Burnside onto some side streets. Even more infuriating were the little old ladies white-knuckling it at ten miles an hour, bottlenecking the traffic behind them.

  I didn't see many ghosts on the way, or at least not ones I could recognize. Plenty of the passengers in the cars could have been ghosts, as they often liked to ride along with the living, but the darkness and the fogged-up windows made it tough to make out any details—and it was the details, such as clothing out of fashion, that were often the only way I could even hope to identify them. Except for weird ones, and thankfully I saw only one of those: a tattooed man naked except for pink boxer shorts on a bench near a TriMet stop. That would be weird enough, but it was the axe embedded in the middle of his skull that ruled out the possibility of him being just another crazy Portlander.

  I also thought I spotted a couple of what I'd taken to calling the Ancient Ghosts lurking in the alleys, hunched cave-man types I seldom saw outside of the Cascade Mountains, but it may have just been my eyes trying to make something of the shadows.

  The good news was that after nearly an hour, the throbbing in my skull had faded to a faint tapping, making it possible to at least somewhat function like a normal person. John Ray's apartment complex was a couple blocks from a pawnshop and a strip club. It was U-shaped, two stories, with red doors and wrought iron rails that gave it the look of a prison courtyard. There were maybe twenty units and all the parking spots were filled, so I parked on the street.

  At the little ranch house on the corner, one dwarfed behind the high chain link fence that surrounded it, a black man in a green military-style parka shoveled snow—if the inch of white oatmeal could even be called snow—off the path to his door. The snow didn't change under his shovel or his boots.

  There was my first possible witness. Score one for the snow. It might make my job easier with this case.

  Stuffing my hands in the pockets of my heavy gray trench coat, I walked through the curtain of snowflakes to the chain link fence. Red and green Christmas lights ringed the big bay window. Two crows, perched on a power transformer at the edge of the property, watched me silently. The man ignored me. Already shivering
, I didn't have much patience to wait.

  "Got a second?" I asked.

  He glanced up. He wore a brimmed hat with muffs over the years, and with the porch light behind him and his skin so dark, I couldn't read his expression. His thin shadow sliced across the snow like an arrow. Why did he cast a shadow? Stuff like that bothered me if I thought about it too much, though it always seemed to come back to whether the ghosts themselves saw it, which meant I usually saw it, too.

  "Aw, crap," he said. I knew from the tremor in his voice that this wasn't going to go well. "Aw, man, it's you. The Ghost Detective."

  "Hold on—" I began.

  "Naw, naw, naw," he said, and bolted for the front door of his house.

  "Come on, sir, it's about the little girl who was abducted two days—"

  "I didn't see nothin', man. Leave me alone!"

  He disappeared right through the side of the house, shovel and all. I stood there watching my breath fog in the lamplight and debated whether I should knock on the door. What good would it do when the living owners probably didn't even know the shoveling man was there? When the curtains on the living room window parted a crack and a little girl's face appeared in the glowing red and green light, I took that as my cue to depart.

  What I didn't know was whether his fear had been the normal stuff I seemed to cause among ghosts or if it was something different, something related to Olivia's abduction.

  In my cop days, I visited a lot of apartment complexes, as it was sadly true that most crimes were committed by the most transient, the most destitute, and the most concentrated in one area of town, such as East Portland, and I could usually get a pretty good idea of the type of tenants by the cars in the parking lot alone. While this complex was fairly well maintained, the brown siding and red doors freshly painted, few of the cars were newer than ten years old, and even fewer were without dented fenders, replaced doors, or a duct-taped corner window. I counted three without wheels.

  My guess, based on past experience, was that at least a third of the apartments would have illegal drugs in them.

  The choice of living arrangements said more about John Ray's lack of familiarity with the city than his lack of funds. Regardless of how poor John Ray had been when he moved to Portland, he could have done much better if he'd known even a single person who lived here.