Inspector Specter (28 page)

The ghost looked flabbergasted. Her mouth moved, but no sound reached me. That happens sometimes, and it's incredibly annoying. But I could more or less lip-read her question: “You can see me?”

“I can, but I can't hear you,” I said. “I'm looking for a friend, and I'm afraid that she might be here. Do you know of a woman being held here?”

She nodded.

Jackpot. Sort of. “Please,” I said. “Show me.” My heart was already starting to beat faster. This was no longer the danger-free environment I had thought it was. Should I go back and find Dad? No. He was keeping the bad guy away.

The colonial ghost headed for the back room, the kitchen. I followed. She went through the wall; I favored the door, which was of the swinging variety, with one of those porthole windows, impossibly grimy, right at eye level.

Once inside, it was harder to see. There weren't as many holes in the roof back here, which meant not as much light. It took my eyes about ten seconds to adjust. The ghost was hovering to my left and up toward the ceiling, talking and pointing. But it was too dim for me to read her lips in this light, especially now that she seemed to be speaking faster and in more complex sentences. “What?” I asked.

I couldn't see McElone anywhere in this room. There were tables and sinks, but absolutely no female police lieutenant being held against her will. I'm not that great a detective, but I know when there's no one in the room.

My stomach tightened a bit, though, when I saw where the ghost was hovering. It was next to a door that could only lead to one place: the pizzeria's basement.

Now, I wanted to find McElone and help her come home to her husband and children. I wanted to find out who had killed Martin Ferry, and I wanted, more than anything else, to be done with this case so that I could go back to just being a Jersey Shore innkeeper again. But going down into a basement that was most definitely without light, in a hurricane-ravaged former pizza joint, was definitely not at the top of my to-do list. I looked up at the ghost. “She's down there?” Maybe I should wait until Dad came back.

The ghost nodded and pointed more urgently.
Dammit!
She was serious about moving
now
.

I took my cell phone out of my pocket and hit the flashlight app. Blowing out some air, I opened the basement door and looked inside. The door went right through the ghost, but she moved downward immediately afterward, and the darkness in the stairwell made seeing her that much harder.

I concentrated on the stairs themselves, making sure I didn't fall down into the basement. My phone wasn't fully charged. If the battery died, I would have no source of light down here at all.

Except I found that wasn't entirely true. There were dirty windows up near the ceiling, in the foundation of the building, but only two. They shed some light inside, but not what you'd call reading intensity. It was enough that I could see shapes and, with the phone/flashlight in my hand, a little bit more. The beam didn't travel all that far. I had to get close to things to see them.

What I could see was that there was a furnace in the far corner, with the usual plumbing pipes and heating pipes and electrical tubing running up around the studs in the ceiling, up to the higher floors. There were decrepit stacks of pizza boxes down here, and large gallon cans, some of which still bore the labels of tomato sauce companies.

There was also a closet, to my left and at the far end of the space. Perhaps
closet
is a little too grand a term for what it was. The small area had been separated from the rest of the basement, just framed out and then finished with plywood. No wallboard or plaster. Just wood. It looked like what it was: a really big box. Next to a pegboard on the wall on which some tools were hung, the box looked both imposing and sort of comical, like it had been slapped together by children. But the front panel was hinged on the left side and had a large padlock run through a rung on the right side. What could a pizzeria possibly have in its basement that needed to be locked up? Imported mozzarella?

Well, it was the most logical place to look if you thought someone was being held against her will down here. Besides, the ghost was moving toward the large box and pointing wildly at it, her hand going inside and disappearing when she'd point. You don't have to hit me over the head. More than once.

“Hello?” I called. Maybe if I had some confirmation that someone—presumably McElone—was inside, I'd have the added incentive I needed to find a way past that lock. Maybe I should go back upstairs and find Dad. Except—and I know this is crazy—I didn't want to disappoint the Revolutionary War–era ghost, who was clearly frantic.

So I asked the version of Dad I'd had in my head for the five years he wasn't around (it's a long story). And what he told me was logical:
Get inside and see what's there. Then you'll know what to do.
How to get inside? The tools on the pegboard (a back saw, a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers and a pair of pliers) were all a little rusted out and not going to stand up to much. I doubted I could break the lock with them; it was a pretty thick one and, I noted, not nearly as rusty.

But Dad had taught me about doors and locks before. If this had been a keyed lock, I might have been able to pick it (I don't like to brag, but I'm not bad with locks). Unfortunately, this was a combination lock, and not being a professional safecracker, I had no idea how to deal with such a thing.

So I decided not to worry about the lock—it was easier to deal with the hinges.

I knew that with the screwdriver and the hammer, I could push the pins of the hinges up and take them off the outside of the workroom door. This was designed to keep someone in, not out. It was less than a minute before I had gotten the hinges open on the left side of the box and pushed the plywood away so I could see inside.

Inside the box was a metal locker, like the ones high schools have in their hallways. And there was some banging coming through the metal walls.

Someone was in there.

This lock was harder to deal with. The hinges on the door were inside, so I couldn't pull the same trick. And there was another padlock through the handle of the locker door. The screwdriver and the hammer weren't going to do me much good now. I hung them back up. You always put your tools away because you want to know where they are the next time you need them.

Reluctantly, I took the saw down from the pegboard. Ideally, you'd want a hacksaw for cutting through metal, but I didn't have a selection handy. I attacked what I saw as the thinnest part of the lock with the saw and persisted, back and forth, for quite some time. The banging inside the locker stopped. Had the air run out in there? No. The locker had air vents in it; high schools know about bullies. The person inside—assuming it was a person and not some scary animal I would certainly regret awakening—understood I was working on a way out. I kept sawing, telling whoever—or whatever—was inside that it was okay, I'd have them out in a minute.

Truthfully, I knew there was no chance I'd be able to saw all the way through that lock with a back saw. But eventually I had made enough of a wound to the lock that it was vulnerable to attack. I got the hammer again and swung it, hard, at the lock. Once. Twice. Eighteen times.

Success: The lock gave way, and I could unhook it from the handle. Then I pushed the handle up and opened the locker door.

Inside stood Lieutenant Anita McElone, her hands bound behind her, a little bent at the knee because she is a tall woman. I helped her out of the locker—her legs had not been bound—and out of the wooden closet. There was duct tape across her mouth, which I removed, trying to be very gentle about it. It came off, but probably stung pretty badly.

“Oh for crying out loud,” she said as soon as the tape was off. “All the people who could have gotten me out, and it's you?”

“Try not to be too gushy,” I answered. “I don't respond well to hero worship.”

“Untie my hands.” McElone had no time for appreciation. “Use the saw if you have to.”

I quickly cut through her bonds, made of a relatively thin rope, with the help of my Swiss Army knife. “What the heck is this all about?” I asked, knowing not to wait for effusive thanks. “Who killed Detective Ferry?”

“I still don't know,” McElone answered, rubbing her wrists to get the feeling back. “Let's get out of here before she gets back.”

“Who?”

“Lenore Mancini,” she said, starting toward the stairs, behind the flickering beam from my cell phone. I followed her, holding the phone higher over her shoulder so the light wouldn't simply bounce off her back.

“Lay-Z's mother?” How did that add up?

“Yeah. She seems to think I'm trying to destroy her boy, and the only way to save him is to take care of me.”

Just as her foot hit the first step, the battery on my phone gave out and we were plunged into almost total darkness. McElone turned around and looked at me.

I couldn't see the look on her face, but I could picture it. “Remember I busted you out,” I said.

McElone started slowly up the stairs. “Buster Hockney told her I was going to get him put away or killed, and he sent her to my bungalow. She caught me flatfooted, okay?”

I didn't know why, but she was keeping her voice very low. It occurred to me that she preferred to keep Lenore, if she were to come back, from knowing where we were, but the creaking of the stairs under our feet would certainly give our position away.

“Why didn't Buster come himself?” I asked.

“I've only seen him once, at my bungalow when they knocked me out and took me. Didn't get a chance to ask him.”

Despite going up really slowly because we couldn't see, it wasn't a really long staircase, so we were almost already at the landing. “What's Buster got against you?”

“Lenore says he wants some information from me.” She pushed hard on the door to the upper floor, and it opened. “Lenore says Buster tried to send Lay-Z, but she intercepted the call. Won't let her son get caught, and she knows he can't handle himself. The kid has all the survival skills of a deer in the headlights.”

As we made it into the light of the pizzeria's kitchen, McElone testing her weight very tentatively on the floor to see if the creak was too loud, she froze in her steps and held her right hand up at a ninety-degree angle, ordering me to stop. I halted without another step.

“Lenore?” I whispered.

McElone turned toward me with a look of great irritation. I held up my hands and mimed zipping my lips closed, which is something you actually shouldn't do outside a Bugs Bunny cartoon. McElone rolled her eyes and turned her attention back toward the dining room door.

The footsteps were coming closer. McElone, stuck in the middle of the kitchen, looked for a weapon to use, but the knives, pots and pans were long gone. Flinging an empty pizza box wasn't going to be terrifically effective.

The door swung open, and in walked the disheveled older woman I had met in front of Luigi's, still in the ill-fitting cotton dress and still looking like she was maybe one bad day away from being homeless. I exhaled in relief that it wasn't McElone's imprisoner.

But McElone stopped me with her right hand, pushing on my shoulder.

It was just about then I realized the woman I'd met only a few minutes ago was grinning at us. And leveling a gun right at McElone.

“Lenore,” the lieutenant said.

Alas, this was not the first time I'd been held at bay by someone with a gun. It wasn't even the first time today, thanks to Vinnie. But it was the first time I'd ever seen Anita McElone look unnerved.

“I thought she would go away,” Lenore Mancini said to McElone, gesturing at me with the gun-free hand. “Then since you wouldn't talk to
me
, I thought if she got the impression that something was up, she'd find you and then you'd spill your guts to your pal.”

McElone glared at Lenore with something resembling fury. “My
pal
?” she sneered. “The crazy ghost lady? You thought I'd bare my soul to
her
?”

“Hey,” I said. “I'm right here in the room.”

“This is very distressing,” Lenore answered. “I'm really starting to get the impression that I'm not going to get an answer to Buster's question from you.”

“You're not. I'm not giving you Martin Ferry's files.”

“That's not helping,” I murmured.

McElone didn't respond. But she did seem to be trying to turn her back to me. “Don't stand in front of her,” Lenore ordered, circling around to keep McElone and me stymied and without a clear path to the exit. “Stand right by her side.” She held the gun closely on McElone. McElone moved to my right side but did her best to create distance between us. Personally, I was not only terrified of dying but starting to feel a little insulted.

And that's when I remembered that I had Vinnie's gun in my pocket. Funny how something you put out of sight vanishes from your mind as well.

I've never shot a gun at anyone, and I don't imagine I ever will. But I was standing next to a trained police officer who, I'd been told, was among the best in marksmanship in her department. I had no qualms about letting
her
shoot somebody if doing so would remove the danger to my own life.

Morals are stretchy things.

The cargo shorts I was wearing had side pockets, and the gun was on the right side. But there simply wasn't a casual, nondescript way of reaching down for the pistol; I had to bend my knee to meet my arm or lean over to reach into the pocket.

“See, now I have a problem,” Lenore told the lieutenant. “Buster says I have to keep you alive until I find out how to get into those files. But you tell me there's absolutely nothing I can do that will convince you to tell me what I need to know. Personally, I think you're wrong: There are a lot of things I could do, including threatening your children, but I don't have time for that sort of thing; it takes planning. So I'm stuck with the question of whether it might not be easier for me to just shoot you.”

I wanted to vote for “keep trying,” but my focus right now was on not being noticed, so I took the rare opportunity to stay silent.

Meanwhile, I developed an imaginary itch on my right calf. Yeah, it was corny, but hey; there was a gun pointed at me and I needed to get to my right pocket. But as soon as I reached down, Lenore caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned a bit toward me. I saw McElone tighten up a bit, but she couldn't lunge forward.

“What are you doing?” Lenore demanded.

“I'm scratching my leg; I have a mosquito bite. What's your problem?” I could definitely take the offensive when necessary. Besides, I was starting to convince myself that my leg really
did
itch.

“Straighten up,” she said. Then her face brightened, as if she'd gotten an idea. She looked at McElone. “Suppose I was going to shoot this one first,” she said. “You'd want to prevent that, right?”

McElone looked me up and down as if deciding whether she wanted to purchase me. She was rapidly dropping on my list of favorite police officers, and until now, she'd been the only one on the list. Ferry, after all, was dead and therefore officially retired.

“I'm not going to tell you anything about those files,” McElone said slowly. “So shooting her or anyone else won't do you any good.”

It wasn't what I considered a ringing endorsement.

“Whether it does me any good is my business,” Lenore answered. “Whether you can live with yourself after I kill her is yours.” That was
definitely
not what I wanted to hear.

“The way you talk, I won't have to live with myself very long,” McElone told her. Immediately, Ferry leapfrogged her on that favorite-cop list.

“Have it your way,” Lenore said, and she turned to face me directly. Anticipating her move, I decided I was having a massive itching fit and bent over to get the gun. I'd barely put my fingers on it before I yelled, “Here!” Then I grabbed the gun by the handle and flicked it toward McElone.

The lieutenant looked absolutely baffled as the gun flew through the air. I saw her flinch at the movement, heard her say, “What the—” and decided that my downward movement should continue, so I rolled onto the floor. I heard something fly over my head; I was guessing it was a bullet.

My head was turned in just the right direction to see the gun I'd tossed hit the floor; it fired but was pointed at one of the old pizza ovens, which didn't do much good to anybody. I rolled, sure the next bullet was on its way.

“Alison, stay down!” McElone called. Since my plans had not included getting up, I was happy to comply. The center island offered plenty of protection. I hid behind it, could hear some scuffling, but couldn't make out what was going on. There was another shot, then silence.

I couldn't stand the wait; I crawled to the edge of the island and very slowly peeked around the corner.

McElone had Lenore pinned back. She was holding Vinnie's gun, and she was the very picture of serious attention. “Hands behind your head! Now!”

“No! You can't get my son killed!” Lenore was crying. But she wasn't moving.

“Nobody's going to do that if you cooperate. Now.”

McElone didn't have handcuffs or zip strips, but we had the cord with which she'd been tied. McElone held the gun—thank goodness—and instructed me to tie Lenore. So I got behind her and reached for her wrist. That's when I saw the razor blade concealed in her right hand, but not soon enough.

Before she could move, though, my father flew through the dining room wall wearing a long hooded robe I'd only seen him in once before. It went all the way to his feet and was shrugged off before he was in the room a second, and it turned out he'd been concealing inside—

A shovel! Which hit Lenore in the back of the head, hard. She looked unbelievably stunned, then dropped to the floor.

McElone gaped at the sight and turned to me. “Was that . . . ?”

I nodded. “My father.”

Dad floated over. “Sorry it took me so long,” he said to me. “I chased that kid for five blocks before I realized he was just trying out some new binoculars.”

“How long do you think she'll stay out?” I asked the lieutenant.

“I can't say. I've never seen a woman hit with a shovel by a ghost before.” McElone started looking around the room.

She was checking the ceiling, but Dad said, “Let me,” and began wrapping the cord around Lenore's hands. That caught her eye.

The lieutenant shook her head in disbelief. “Maybe I'm still in the locker and I'm hallucinating,” she said.

*   *   *

“I was trying to make it look like I didn't care about you at all,” Lieutenant McElone said.

“It worked,” I told her. “I was totally convinced.”

McElone looked impatient. “I was trying to save your life. No need to thank me.”

“I got you out of a locker. Don't fall all over yourself paying me back. By the way, you dropped your handcuffs in the toilet?”

McElone grimaced, probably trying to figure who'd ratted her out, and remained silent.

We were in my car heading toward Martin Ferry's apartment building. I had plugged my cell phone into the car outlet, so McElone had been able to let Thomas know she was all right (“mostly,” she added for me when the call was completed) and I had called Melissa, who informed me that Jeannie and Tony had taken Oliver home after he'd walked three more times, and that she was currently out back-to-school shopping with her grandmother. Eleven-year-old girls don't like to think about summer vacation ending, but shopping for clothes softens the blow a bit.

Before this, McElone had also called the police department in Harbor Haven, and Lenore Mancini, nursing a massive headache, was carted off for arrest, but not before the lieutenant had a word with her alone, and Lenore made a phone call.

McElone said we had to get to Ferry's place right away because she'd had Lenore tell Buster's “receptionist” (whom I was guessing was Vinnie) that the data everyone was looking for had been in Ferry's apartment the whole time.

“Who's after this data? What the heck is on that thumb drive?” I asked her.

“Actually, there's not much of anything,” McElone answered. “Martin had some files about Buster, Harry ‘the Fish' Monroe and Lay-Z, but nothing everybody didn't already know. It's mostly just redundancies.”

“Then how come everybody's all hot and bothered about finding it?”

“Because they don't know that.”

“But wait a second. Buster knew where you were, but Vinnie didn't. Vinnie was running around trying to find out so he could tell Buster, who already knew. What am I missing?”

McElone just shook her head slightly. “Buster being Buster. Selective information for selective people. That's why it was driving him so nuts to find out what was on the thumb drive.”

“And you were willing to stay in a locker and endanger my life to protect not much of anything?” I made an effort to keep my eyes on the road.

“What's your question?”

I drove in silence for a while (I was going in case we needed to talk to Ferry), pondering the concept that I'd been protecting something relatively unimportant with my life simply because some fairly stupid bad guys had thought there was some value to it. “You could have called me back,” I said to McElone.

“Yeah. I'm sorry about that. I probably should have. But I didn't know Vinnie was in touch with you.”

“You would have known if you'd called me back. You have to trust me a little bit more.”

“I trust you. I just don't have any confidence in you as a detective.”

That wasn't much better. “I found you, didn't I?”

She nodded. “You make a good point.”

“Did Lenore kill Detective Ferry, too?” I asked.

I couldn't look because I was driving, but Dad, from the backseat, said, “She's shaking her head. And stop being so sensitive. She's being a good cop.”

“We don't know Lenore killed anybody,” McElone said. “She took me hostage because she didn't want her son to do it. That was days after the two murders. And I'm not convinced Harry the Fish's wife didn't put out the hit on him.”

“I take it Harry was getting around.”

“And around and around, if you believe the gossip,” she answered. “So his wife decided to forgo divorce and take the quick way?”

“That is what Vinnie told me, but I just assumed he was lying.”

“A decent assumption, when it comes to Vinnie.”

“Who else had access to the detective's apartment and his desk?” I asked.

“We'll find out.”

It wasn't a terribly long drive to Ferry's apartment, but with the “air conditioner” in the Volvo at full blast, we were relieved to pull up. Ferry was not on his front stoop, but it didn't matter. McElone, not expecting to see him, bounded up the stairs and into the building.

We felt for the key behind the molding at the apartment door, but before McElone could insert it into the keyhole or Dad could slip through it, the door swung open and a young woman, looking very startled, stood in the doorway, dressed for the beach. Like in the south of France. Her whole bathing suit would cover my left instep. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I'm sorry,” McElone said. She reached into a pocket where her badge had no doubt been, but Lenore had taken all her possessions when she locked the lieutenant up, and McElone hadn't taken the time to go back to her station. “I'm Lieutenant Anita McElone of the Harbor Haven Police Department, and this is—” She turned and looked at me. “May we come in for a moment?”

Ferry came down through the ceiling and looked at us. “Anita!” he shouted. “You're okay!” He smiled broadly.

“What's this about?” the young woman asked McElone. She sounded nervous.

“It's not about you at all,” the lieutenant answered. “But we think there might be something the previous tenant left in the apartment that could be evidence in a criminal case. Is this your apartment?”

The girl, who didn't present as a Phi Beta Kappa member, stood and stared at McElone for a moment. The lieutenant, who was accustomed to people treating her like a police officer, held up a hand. “You're not in any trouble,” she said. “We just want to come in and look.”