Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,2
lake. There was crime-scene tape there, too, but the area must have been searched for trace evidence already, since no one stopped me from crossing it.
“Why are we headed back here?” asked Taylor, a logical question. I’d just said that I wanted to talk to the victim’s shade, and usually I did that where someone died, or while holding something of theirs.
“Because he’s not there,” I said, jabbing a thumb back to where Bruiser had met his end. “There’s the imprint of his death, but not enough of his spirit for me to talk to. The remnant must be where his body was hidden.”
Only it wasn’t. Which was weird. And when I say something is weird, it is seriously weird.
I stopped in the middle of the lawn between the dorm and the little lake. I could picture coeds sunning themselves there on a much warmer day. I didn’t have to picture Bruiser’s body, poorly hidden by a clump of bushes, because I could See him there with my extra senses. But with a death this new, I expected Bruiser’s remnant to be standing there like something out of the Haunted Mansion, or at least a mist or shade I could draw out for a chat.
He couldn’t have moved on already, because there were still shreds and tatters of his spirit wisping around the site.
Taylor had nearly run me over when I’d halted so quickly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You’re not going Basingstoke on me, are you?”
That was our code for “batten down the hatches,” and it shook me out of my befuddlement.
“I haven’t even done anything yet,” I said, because Gerard and Logan hadn’t caught up. “I’m not that big a wimp.”
He glanced toward the older men and lowered his voice. “Well, I don’t know what you’re Seeing. It’s not … You don’t See her, do you?”
Then I felt like a total heel, because when he’d asked me if I was going Basingstoke, he must have been imagining the worst. I mean, he’d been in that Texas desert, too.
There was no sign of a murdered college girl, but before I let either of us be relieved about that, I said, “Give me a second so I can be sure.”
With my eyes closed, the spirit traces of Bruiser were bright, vile yellow scraps of fog, eddying closer to me. I ignored them for the moment, ignored Gerard and Logan coming up to us, ignored the damp and cold seeping through my sneakers.
I perceive the spirit world through the five senses already wired into my brain, plus the emotions we all have. I’ve learned to dial the volume up or down on the psychic impressions—the visit to the Alamo taught me the importance of that skill—but mostly it’s like seeing in color. I just do it.
Harder to describe is how I interact with that layer of reality. I pictured my psychic self as a sort of ghost me living in my skin, part force field, part sensory array. When I sought out spirits, remnant traces of human souls, I imagined my psyche rushing with my blood out into the smallest capillaries of my skin to my pores, where it could mesh with the energies around me.
That was what I did in the wet grass behind the girls’ dorm in Elk Butt, Minnesota, searching for any sign of a murdered girl.
Nothing. A relief, but not in any way an end to my worry.
I opened my eyes and looked at Taylor. Gerard and Logan had joined us. “What’s the girl’s name again?” I asked.
“Alexis Maguire,” said Taylor. “She’s a senior, in her last year.”
“I don’t get any hint that she was killed here,” I told them. “But if you give me something of hers, I can tell you for sure if she’s still alive.”
Chief Logan nodded slowly. I didn’t know what he really thought of the psychic stuff, but he seemed to like my professionalism. Which was why I worked so hard at it. “We can do that.”
Then I gestured to the image half hidden in the bushes, even though they couldn’t see it. “You said Bruiser over there is the driver for the missing girl? Is that some kind of code for ‘bodyguard’? Because this guy looks more like a WWF wrestler than a chauffeur.”
“Driver and bodyguard,” said Logan. “Her father is a rich, powerful man.”
Money and enemies. So, the girl came from a political or crime family. And going by my sense of Bruiser, I was thinking crime. I was thinking enforcer.