Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,6

questions. Not about a read, not about my family, not about me. Capisce?”

He glanced my way for a moment, clearly reassessing me. “Okay. So what about your parents?”

I sighed and sank into the seat. “They died when I was three. I only remember them as ghosts.”

“And your aunt Diantha solved their murder.” He stated it as a fact, not a question.

“Well, mostly she nagged the police until they searched Farley Driscoll’s vacation house for evidence that he tampered with my parents’ car.” Driscoll had been my father’s business partner, and none of his high-priced lawyers could keep him out of jail once the evidence started mounting up. You do not mess with the Goodnights.

“So your whole family is psychic?” Taylor asked.

“Yep. Well, psychic or magic.”

“Huh,” he said in a noncommittal way.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in seventeen and three-quarters years as a Goodnight and a psychic: One, people can rationalize a helluva lot when it comes to explaining the inexplicable. And two, there’s not a hard line between believers and skeptics. People tend to pick and choose what they’ll swallow.

For whatever reason, Agent Taylor had only ever questioned why and how, never if. And after a few successes, he’d started bringing me in on more cases, and reopening cold ones, until we both started making a name for ourselves.

Which, I suppose, might be another reason that Agent Gerard, for all his bitching, had never refused to work with us.

It was the sight of Agent Gerard standing in the middle of all the girliness of Alexis’s room that brought me back to the present. He was frowning at a bulletin board filled with party pics and ticket stubs, and behind him was a window overlooking the little lake.

“I wonder why the killer didn’t drag Bruiser’s body the rest of the way to the lake and throw him in,” I said. “It would have delayed discovery of the murder and washed away trace evidence.”

Taylor followed my gaze and my train of thought. “Maybe that was the plan, but he was interrupted and had to make do with the bushes.”

That made sense. I imagined grabbing a girl from in front of her dorm meant time constraints.

No one had said “kidnapped” yet, but it was what everyone was thinking. I didn’t need to read minds to know that. I just had to look around her room.

Her dorm was about twice the size of mine, and she had it all to herself. Most of it was standard issue—desk, chair, bed, bookcases, worn carpet, and industrial beige paint. Some of it was upgrade—a minifridge and a microwave and a pair of retro beanbag chairs.

The mess was not standard. The police had found it ransacked—books thrown from their shelves, drawers turned out of the desk and bureau, heaps of clothes and papers under snowdrifts of polystyrene from the gutted chairs.

I risked a cerebral explosion by bending over to pick up a textbook from beside my foot. It was literally Greek to me.

“What is Alexis studying?” I asked, turning the book right side up. It didn’t make a difference, except for the pictures.

I’d asked it loud enough to get the attention of Gerard and the detectives across the room. Chief Logan answered. “Classical languages, I think.”

I would have raised my eyebrows, but my head hurt too bad. “You mean, like Greek and Latin? That kind of classical? How’s that going to be useful in a crime family?”

“How did you know—” Gerard began, then cut himself off with an unvoiced curse. Taylor coughed to cover a laugh, and I was very careful not to look smug.

“Bruiser didn’t look like he made a living driving Miss Daisy,” I said. Putting the heavy book on the desk, I saw something else. “Her laptop is missing.”

“We noticed that, too,” said the chief. Then he indicated the mess with a tilt of his head. “Can your, um, sight or whatever tell why someone trashed the place? The computer would have been easy to find, so that wasn’t what they were looking for.”

I shook my head carefully. “I only read remnants of the dead. All I can tell you is they weren’t zombies.” Chief Logan, a sober, trim man in his forties, gave a start of alarm, and I allowed myself a weak smile. “There’s no such thing,” I assured him. “The inside might hang around sometimes, but the outside is just dust.”

As for my limitations—which I was feeling keenly just then—I knew that Alexis was alive because of what I didn’t feel. I sat